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There's a discussion in the D&D5E thread which reminds me of something I'm curious about: is there a game that does a good job of having spells that are written down and you have to gather and possibly protect in your spellbook? The D&D system of spellbooks that the mage/magic user/wizard needs to consult to retain/regain se of spells, with limited capacity, costs to copying spells over, scrolls that you have to decide whether to copy over or just use and lose, seems on the surface to have some potential, but generations of DMs have glossed over all those aspects to the point where it's barely more than flavor, and most importantly, that's what people expect. Does Ars Magica do it well, for example?
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Dec 27, 2021 22:48
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Iron Heart posted:I think you might be confusing 4e and 3.5e. The 3rd edition rules and their revision are more or less identical, with minor exceptions aside, and give a speed of "30 feet" for humans, unlike 4e, which gives a speed of 6 squares. 3.5 PHB Combat section, very first heading posted:The Battle Grid Later on same chapter posted:ATTACK OF OPPORTUNITY  Spaceman-meme-its-all-squares-always-has-been.png Splicer fucked around with this message at 23:27 on Dec 27, 2021 |
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Dec 27, 2021 23:12
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Iron Heart posted:I think you might be confusing 4e and 3.5e. The 3rd edition rules and their revision are more or less identical, with minor exceptions aside, and give a speed of "30 feet" for humans, unlike 4e, which gives a speed of 6 squares. It has quirks like the spell called darkness setting the light level to dim light regardless of prior conditions (bright light or total darkness) to remain distinct from the higher-level deeper darkness spell, but the rules underlying light and dark mostly work intuitively. Looking at the SRD, 3.5e gave ranges in feet and squares, rather than just feet as with 3e. Also, it was widely considered that "darkness" was changed to dim light not because of a higher level spell, but because an area where PCs cannot see what is going on is difficult to represent on a miniatures grid.
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Dec 27, 2021 23:20
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Absurd Alhazred posted:There's a discussion in the D&D5E thread which reminds me of something I'm curious about : is there a game that does a good job of having spells that are written down and you have to gather and possibly protect in your spellbook? The D&D system of spellbooks that the mage/magic user/wizard needs to consult to retain/regain se of spells, with limited capacity, costs to copying spells over, scrolls that you have to decide whether to copy over or just use and lose, seems on the surface to have some potential, but generations of DMs have glossed over all those aspects to the point where it's barely more than flavor, and most importantly, that's what people expect. Does Ars Magica do it well, for example? Magi in Ars Magica generally permanently memorize or improvise their spells and don't need to lug around a spellbook like D&D wizards. That being said, obtaining and using books to learn spells and improve your magical skills is an extremely important part of a Magus's life, and the books represent a significant portion of their wealth.
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Dec 27, 2021 23:29
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Absurd Alhazred posted:There's a discussion in the D&D5E thread which reminds me of something I'm curious about : is there a game that does a good job of having spells that are written down and you have to gather and possibly protect in your spellbook? The D&D system of spellbooks that the mage/magic user/wizard needs to consult to retain/regain se of spells, with limited capacity, costs to copying spells over, scrolls that you have to decide whether to copy over or just use and lose, seems on the surface to have some potential, but generations of DMs have glossed over all those aspects to the point where it's barely more than flavor, and most importantly, that's what people expect. Does Ars Magica do it well, for example? I think part of it is also that in D&D there's usually a pretty limited set of spells that mages will actually bother to use. Some direct damage, a few utility spells, some save-or-dies, and then about 70% of the selection of spells are either hyper-situational OR the sort of thing that're only useful to a villain when used against a player character that will exist for years, not for a player character to use against an enemy that will cease being relevant at the end of the session. So like... you're almost never going to bump against that upper limit. It's also why D&D Sorcerers tend to be strictly better than Wizards, because on the surface "less variety" is a weakness but in practice it just formalizes the fact that wizards will largely memorize a few all-rounder spells anyway and now you just get more of them.
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Dec 27, 2021 23:34
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Absurd Alhazred posted:There's a discussion in the D&D5E thread which reminds me of something I'm curious about : is there a game that does a good job of having spells that are written down and you have to gather and possibly protect in your spellbook? The D&D system of spellbooks that the mage/magic user/wizard needs to consult to retain/regain se of spells, with limited capacity, costs to copying spells over, scrolls that you have to decide whether to copy over or just use and lose, seems on the surface to have some potential, but generations of DMs have glossed over all those aspects to the point where it's barely more than flavor, and most importantly, that's what people expect. Does Ars Magica do it well, for example? I can’t think of a game that does it off-hand, but I know the gameplay loop exists cause a reskin of Pokemon is already most of the way there. It’s an interesting idea.
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Dec 28, 2021 00:08
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Absurd Alhazred posted:There's a discussion in the D&D5E thread which reminds me of something I'm curious about : is there a game that does a good job of having spells that are written down and you have to gather and possibly protect in your spellbook? The D&D system of spellbooks that the mage/magic user/wizard needs to consult to retain/regain se of spells, with limited capacity, costs to copying spells over, scrolls that you have to decide whether to copy over or just use and lose, seems on the surface to have some potential, but generations of DMs have glossed over all those aspects to the point where it's barely more than flavor, and most importantly, that's what people expect. Does Ars Magica do it well, for example?
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Dec 28, 2021 00:16
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D&D but every time the Wizard casts a spell they first have to play through a Matrix dungeon.
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Dec 28, 2021 02:08
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Splicer posted:I think it would have to be a game where everyone's a wizard or wizard variant because otherwise you've got this super in depth minigame only one person is playing. Which is why it just gets glossed over in D&D because there's 3 to 5 other people at the table with 0 interest in spending half the session watching Jim play wizard librarian. Just play Shadowrun. You can play with each individual player separately for hours and still advance the story. Might actually be better that way.
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Dec 28, 2021 02:28
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Splicer posted:I think it would have to be a game where everyone's a wizard or wizard variant because otherwise you've got this super in depth minigame only one person is playing. Which is why it just gets glossed over in D&D because there's 3 to 5 other people at the table with 0 interest in spending half the session watching Jim play wizard librarian. I feel like if it didn't have all that aspect loaded into one aspect of the game it might work better? Like if it spread into downtime, and other character types had other types of maintenance to do? Otherwise, yeah, maybe in a whatever this type of magic is called-focused game, that's why I brought up Ars Magica.
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Dec 28, 2021 02:32
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Lemon-Lime posted:D&D but every time the Wizard casts a spell they first have to play through a Matrix dungeon. People are always happy to make martials jump through out-of-character hoops for their abilities, so I’d be totally fine with grabbing some problem sets off of my exams the next time someone casts a spell. Sure you can cast Fly, but first you gotta correctly tree-diagram “A view that seemed to want to be seen was shown in the window,” with all the correct traces and θ roles.
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Dec 28, 2021 02:39
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Ok that's an athletics check to jump on the table, an acrobatic check to grab the chandelier, test use rope to swing the correct distance, then another acrobatics check to stick the landing. Meanwhile, the mage can unerringly grab the correct components - blindly - from a pouch and recite a seven line poem, all while correctly making the proper arcane mystic passes. While under pressure and injured. There's no chance of failure because that's just what his class does. Sure, that's also what rogues do in the previous swashbuckling example. But uh, verisimilitude.
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Dec 28, 2021 02:51
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moths posted:Ok that's an athletics check to jump on the table, an acrobatic check to grab the chandelier, test use rope to swing the correct distance, then another acrobatics check to stick the landing. Like, you don't need to convince me that the whole thing is poorly handled in D&D, I'm literally asking about games where it is actually handled well, not to rehash the magic supremacy argument in D&D. I think the spell components also have potential, which, again, has been squandered in D&D because it was never handled well and now it's essentially flavor unless there are specific expensive components, like a gp3M diamond that needs to be used/expended by the process of casting the spell or something.
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Dec 28, 2021 02:56
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I was talking more to XD's point, but it seems like it would be perfectly consistent to do some kind of check to see how effective a spellcast is. The biggest problem is that in a game defined by its uncertainty, only some players have access to an ultra-reliable mechanic Either make everything uncertain or bring eveything up to that level of reliability. They did that in 4e and players hated that "everybody is magic now!" which kind of betrays the amount of indoctrination D&D causes when that's their only vocabulary. moths fucked around with this message at 03:18 on Dec 28, 2021 |
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Dec 28, 2021 03:15
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I had always thought that the diamond thing caused the diamond to crumble into dust but i think it's funnier if just now nobody will buy the diamond. Like obfuscate from WOD but instead of people not noticing it they just supernaturally are like "nahhh I don't want it." Breaking it down to its mechanics, the question is about instances where players' main power is bound up in a contingent element that can be temporarily taken from the player. This is often considered just feel-bad design so its often just kind of not engaged with even when its an option. The best I've personally experienced was in Firebrands, where a PC lost their mech very early on and engaged with the rest of the session on foot - fortunately Firebrands has a lot of talk heavy options. I think it might work a bit in LANCER because while the VAST majority of your power is in your mech, the pilot still has some options. COD games are kind of about this in a deeper way but I think you're asking it a little more binary. COD games are largely about resources, and any supernatural can run out of their primary supernatural pretty fast (e.g. it's pretty easy to burn through your vitae as a vampire), and when you're out you're pretty loving tapped, but that's not so much a single item that you have or don't have.
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Dec 28, 2021 03:23
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Iron Heart posted:I think you might be confusing 4e and 3.5e. The 3rd edition rules and their revision are more or less identical, with minor exceptions aside, and give a speed of "30 feet" for humans, unlike 4e, which gives a speed of 6 squares. It has quirks like the spell called darkness setting the light level to dim light regardless of prior conditions (bright light or total darkness) to remain distinct from the higher-level deeper darkness spell, but the rules underlying light and dark mostly work intuitively.
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Dec 28, 2021 03:53
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Lemon-Lime posted:D&D but every time the Wizard casts a spell they first have to play through a Matrix dungeon. That's actually in Reve De Dragon. There's a dreamscape the wizard players move their avatar around which gives them different power levels in different spells based on where they are on it.
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Dec 28, 2021 04:43
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A game I helped edit about five years ago while the creator was in hospice has now finally emerged to see the light of day. GRIT is a horror game based on the Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine rules where characters in the time of the Roman Empire explore an endless labyrinth of interconnected tombs. I'm interested to see what people make of a highly-focused Chuubo variant.
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Dec 28, 2021 19:55
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Does it require prior knowledge of Chuubo’s or is it roughly standalone?
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Dec 28, 2021 20:22
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Xiahou Dun posted:Does it require prior knowledge of Chuubo’s or is it roughly standalone? It's completely standalone.
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Dec 28, 2021 20:27
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The 2022 New Years Resolutions Thread is up!
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Dec 29, 2021 03:13
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Incidentally, random fact I learned recently: Glitch has a higher wordcount than Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine even though the book is about half the size.
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Dec 29, 2021 07:52
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What exactly is the game drive of glitch? I played nobilis, so I’m familiar with the setting, but i don’t see what you’d do that was different than playing a power.
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Dec 29, 2021 08:09
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ninjoatse.cx posted:What exactly is the game drive of glitch? I played nobilis, so I’m familiar with the setting, but i don’t see what you’d do that was different than playing a power. Glitch is highly-driven by the fact that Strategists are constantly, eternally dying, and how retired Strategists have to figure out how they're going to live their lives because even though they've stopped trying to kill the world, the world is still killing them. It has a lot of elements that resonate with themes of chronic illness, depression, self-destructive behavior, and various LBGT stuff. Mechanically speaking, it revolves around attention – things are literally more important if the players are paying attention to them, and sometimes things will just fail to materialize if the players ignore them (like the time a group I was playing in monologued for twenty minutes before noticing that their nemesis was literally in the room, because nobody bothered to look). Nobilis, at least as fourth edition is shaping up, is more about power and trauma, and is a kind of brightly-colored take on how you shape yourself to fit the impossible circumstances you find yourself in. Glitch is "every interaction with my dad is scraping off a tiny bit of my soul and being a wizard doesn't help", and Nobilis is "when I crash my Ferarri, Dad buys me another one without asking questions, but he doesn't understand why I don't like the job he lined up for me as Mitch McConnell's intern."
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Dec 29, 2021 08:38
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Thanks for the write up! What about chuubo’s? Is it much more light hearted? The descriptions mention ghibli movies and i’m trying to picture kiki’s delivery service married to the world of Nobilis.
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Dec 29, 2021 08:46
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Thanks for the write up! Chuubo's honestly does a lot of things, which is one reason why it's so big (although the main reason is the layout and all the cards). It has eight different genre modes, each of which can sustain its own game (Glitch runs in Chuubo's red Immersive Fantasy mode, while Nobilis is the blue Epic Fantasy mode.). The most prominent genre is the purple Pastoral genre, which I would generally describe as the mode where what would normally be the A-plot is secondary, and the actual important moments are the bits in-between where you talk about your feelings or just kind of vibe with each other while doing chores. Ghibli is definitely one of the best inspirations. Mechanically speaking, Chuubo is primarily about picking out a set of quest cards which form a logical arc for your character, which you'll do in advance, and then filling out those quest cards with the right set of emotional beats as the appropriate moment for them to happen arrives in play.
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Dec 29, 2021 08:54
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Is it more of a collaborative story telling thing? What role does the GM play?
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Dec 29, 2021 09:17
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I got a pdf for a game about playing with your cat and translating their real world actions into game actions.         
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Dec 29, 2021 09:48
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so I’ve been helping parents clean out over the holidays, found a case of various warhammer pieces from ~20 years ago - would anyone be able to suggest a good way to get rid of them (and ideally a price point I should be asking for the lot)? I’ve got some photos that I’ll upload in a bit, but content is an awfully painted land raider, a bunch of spruce pieces, then a vast selection of assorted metal things - demon prince, bunch of chaos marines and terminators, and then some eldar painted by a pervert (very carefully painted nipples)
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Dec 29, 2021 13:11
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VileLL posted:so I’ve been helping parents clean out over the holidays, found a case of various warhammer pieces from ~20 years ago - would anyone be able to suggest a good way to get rid of them (and ideally a price point I should be asking for the lot)?
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Dec 29, 2021 13:43
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Without pictures it's really hard to tell. Most of the older plastic 40k stuff has been replaced with more popular lines. Metal daemons (and metal anything but dark eldar) are kind of classic though, and some people will pay modern prices for them.
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Dec 29, 2021 13:57
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Shouldn't you ask your dad permission before selling his Sexy 40k minis
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Dec 29, 2021 14:21
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VileLL Senior posted:Hahaha where did they come from hahaha must have been there when we moved in hahaha
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Dec 29, 2021 14:40
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FirstAidKite posted:I got a pdf for a game about playing with your cat and translating their real world actions into game actions. incredible
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Dec 29, 2021 16:13
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I don't browse this subforum as much as I should, but I was wondering if there any particular threads, discussions or effort posts about pre-session prep or even DMing in general that anyone cares to link me to? (or, failing that, maybe we can talk about it here) I'm working to bring back a 5e campaign that I've had on hiatus since the end of 2020, basically a heavily reworked version of Descent into Avernus, taking a lot of cues from here on ways to modify the campaign book to make everything more generally coherent. I usually like to DM low fantasy systems, in particular Mythras/RQ6, so I found this necessary to ground the game and soften some of the more 'cartoony' vibes of the campaign. That site has a few other articles of the blogger's thoughts on what I'm talking about, like this one on what they call the three clue rule, which I've found useful in my games.
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Dec 29, 2021 16:24
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Tulip posted:incredible The pdf also included a coupon code for their line of "gaming scents" to really set the mood of any tabletop game night. quote:Adventure Scents are scent special effects that add immersion to role-playing games, books, TV shows, computer games, or cosplay.  
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Dec 29, 2021 16:28
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Tosk posted:I don't browse this subforum as much as I should, but I was wondering if there any particular threads, discussions or effort posts about pre-session prep or even DMing in general that anyone cares to link me to? (or, failing that, maybe we can talk about it here) https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3150535
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Dec 29, 2021 16:45
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Thanks, sorry I didn't catch that before I posted!
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Dec 29, 2021 16:48
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Is it more of a collaborative story telling thing? What role does the GM play? The GM plays pretty much the same role as usual, running "the world" and helping players figure out the rules.
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Dec 29, 2021 16:55
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FirstAidKite posted:The pdf also included a coupon code for their line of "gaming scents" to really set the mood of any tabletop game night. This has obvious logistical problems like not gaming in public spaces and being highly dependent on players possibly having allergies, but assuming that stuff can be ignored, it’s a really cute idea. Not sure if it’s a good idea, of course, but maybe it is and I gotta give them points just for thinking of it.
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Dec 29, 2021 17:18
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