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There's a Star Trek Adventures Humble Bundle out right now, if anyone wants to get a bunch of the pdfs for cheap. Looks like the Gamma & Delta Quadrant supplements aren't included but most of the rest is there, including adventures.
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Dec 20, 2021 23:51
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Eyeballing it, I think the the only stuff it's missing are Gamma, Delta, the second adventure compendium, and the Shackleton campaign guide. It's a hell of a deal.
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Dec 21, 2021 08:52
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I picked up as an xmas present to myself, thank you very much for the alert! Note also that at the $25 level you get a coupon for half off a print copy of the core rulebook ordered direct from Modiphius, which is a $31 value: but also the core rulebook is currently sold out.
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Dec 24, 2021 23:02
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Leperflesh posted:but also the core rulebook is currently sold out. https://modiphius.us/collections/star-trek-adventures-tabletop-rpg/products/star-trek-adventures-core-rulebook Seems in stock for the US version
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Dec 26, 2021 06:22
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Looks like they re-upped stock since I posted! Nice.
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Dec 26, 2021 07:59
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If anyone is interested, Mors Rattus is reviewing/describing Modiphius’s Infinity 2D20 RPG in the Fatal & Friends thread. This link should be the first post in the thread, but I’m on mobile so hopefully it’ll work right. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3898332&perpage=40&noseen=1&userid=126443&pagenumber=24#post520232509
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Dec 30, 2021 00:06
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It does! Thanks, I am thousands of posts behind in that thread, but I do want to read that review now, for sure.
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Dec 30, 2021 00:59
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Leperflesh posted:It does! Thanks, I am thousands of posts behind in that thread, but I do want to read that review now, for sure. This is exactly the situation I am in. Excited to read it, it is definitely the Modiphius game I have been most interested in getting to the table
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Dec 30, 2021 19:31
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Conan question: What's the purpose of non-lethal damage? I can't find any indication in the rules that you can actually accomplish anything at all with it. If you'd take a wound you get a daze instead, but there doesn't seem to be an "actually defeat the enemy" clause Is there a knockout rule here someplace I'm missing?
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Jan 2, 2022 22:15
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Azhais posted:Conan question: What's the purpose of non-lethal damage? I can't find any indication in the rules that you can actually accomplish anything at all with it. If you'd take a wound you get a daze instead, but there doesn't seem to be an "actually defeat the enemy" clause Once you're all out of Stress (Vigor or Resolve), every hit that causes damage causes at least one Harm (Wound or Trauma). In case you missed the rule: if you take 5 or more points of Stress damage from a single attack, you take a Harm even if you're not out of Vigor or Resolve (whichever applies) yet. You also take a Harm if you take any damage while being entirely out of the applicable Stress, or if it is taken to 0 by that attack. These two stack! So if a single hit of 6 Stress on a character with 4 points left in the applicable defense will cause two Wounds: one for being 5+, and one for taking the character down to 0. Note that this should give players and GMs some ideas about how to best use Momentum... a very good one is to roll some extra dice when you're pretty sure an opponent is low on the Stress stat you're attacking, for example, because it can push a hit up from 3-4 damage to 5+ and maybe do multiple wounds. Wounds actually affect characters' abilities, by adding Difficulty to all tests taken for skills under the applicable character attributes. So Stress is basically your "recover after every scene" damage that you can afford to lose, before you wind up in serious poo poo. Stress is also what Soak soaks up, so it gives armor, cover, and morale something to do. The idea here is that your Conan characters are pretty tough, and can handle some combat hits before they wind up in serious trouble... but very heavy hits can still break through their defenses and cause Harms even before they've used up all their Stress. As for your other question: some weapons and display types have activatable attributes like Stun, that you can use on enemies when you roll Effects on your damage dice. You can also inflict the Dazed, Staggered, and Hindered conditions, which reduce combat effectiveness. A character that has suffered 4 Harms is incapacitated (see Core page 119). I think that's the "knockout rule" you're actually looking for; but keep in mind that the shittiest enemies (Minions) go down after a single Wound and the typical enemies (Toughened) go down after 2. I like to sometimes flavor that as being knocked out, or having their morale ruined, when it's convenient to do so or it seems like the attack probably wouldn't have killed that enemy.
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Jan 3, 2022 02:39
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But non lethal specifically says that it can't cause a harm, which is where my confusion comes in. Does that only apply to doing 5+ in a single hit?
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Jan 3, 2022 05:06
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Ohhhh The Non-Lethal quality is a weapon quality and it also appears on some sorcerous powders and stuff. quote:Non-lethal So you straight up can't inflict Harms with this attack, even if the rules would otherwise say so (such as by inflicting Stress 5+ damage, or taking onf of a character's Stress values to zero)... but it can still inflict conditions, and if the other qualities don't impose a condition (say, Stunned or Knockdown or something) then it falls back to Dazed. How do you defeat an enemy with it? I suppose that'd be on the GM to decide that an enemy surrenders rather than fighting to the death. Or, you could take advantage of them being Dazed to try to tie them up or something. I notice that the only weapon in Core that has non-lethal is the Net, which has Grapple, Non-lethal, Parrying, and Thrown. Grappled enemies can't take an action other than an attempt to escape... and Dazed enemies take all tests at one higher difficulty. So if you hit an enemy with a Net and roll at least one Effect, they're confused and grappled and can't fight. Taking an enemy out of a fight with a ranged attack, even temporarily, is pretty good... you could use that opportunity to fight someone else, or maybe just run up and stab them. In the Sorcery section, Blinding Powders (P 164) also have the Nonlethal quality (note the lack of a hyphen... the game uses "nonlethal" and "non-lethal" interchangeably, which is why I didn't immediately find all the rules lol); they generally apply a Stun, a couple are Blinding, and one is Fearsome. Blinding (p. 152) is another Quality that converts any Harms inflicted into the Blind condition instead: this would be an "alternate harm" referenced by the Non-lethal quality, so a powder that is both Blinding and Non-lethal will either Dazed condition, OR, if a Quality is activated (by rolling an Effect), it Blinds instead per the Blinding rules. What isn't clear is whether the Dazed condition is only inflicted if the attack would have caused a Harm, or if it's inflicted whenever the attack even hits. I suspect the intention is that it should Daze whenever it hits at all, since that's a minor penalty and I'm not sure it makes sense otherwise. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 07:24 on Jan 3, 2022 |
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Jan 3, 2022 06:57
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Been reading DUNE 2d20 from Modiphius. The physical book/pdf is gorgeous. First 80 pages or so are backstory to the DUNE universe from the first 6 Frank Herbert Dune books up to the events where the Atreides take over Arrakis. Its a great supplement to the movie and goes over how the Atreides gained the critical eye of the Emperor, and the anti-thinking machine and robot crusade (Butlerian Jihad) that occurred centuries ago. Then it goes into creating a Noble House from which you create your characters. The management of said Noble House is coming in future supplements. But the thrust is that this is communal worldbuilding so all players work together and create characters that do so. Really solid so far. I have yet to get to the mechanics.
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Jan 16, 2022 02:46
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There's some of that communal faction-building in Conan the King, I wonder if they're re-using some of those rules for Dune.
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Jan 16, 2022 02:59
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Helical Nightmares posted:The physical book/pdf is gorgeous. First 80 pages or so are backstory to the DUNE universe from the first 6 Frank Herbert Dune books up to the events where the Atreides take over Arrakis. Its a great supplement to the movie and goes over how the Atreides gained the critical eye of the Emperor, and the anti-thinking machine and robot crusade (Butlerian Jihad) that occurred centuries ago.
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Jan 16, 2022 04:57
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mellonbread posted:The bulk of the lore in the Dune 2D20 is taken from the Brian Herbert prequels rather than the original six novels. The biggest offender is the interpretation of the Great Revolt as a war against killer robot terminators (called "Cymeks" in the prequels) rather than a struggle against humans with machines and the "machine attitude" from Frank Herbert's work. Interesting. I haven't read Brian Herber's works so I was not able to make the connection of how much lore was taken from his books. You are correct. If I had perused the Dune wiki about Cymeks I would have found this: "Cymeks are never mentioned by Frank Herbert in his original Dune novels. They are the creation of Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, and feature prominently in their Legends of Dune and Great Schools of Dune trilogies of novels." https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Cymek So the wiki may be useful in supplementing my (old) memories of Frank Herbert's books. Leperflesh posted:There's some of that communal faction-building in Conan the King, I wonder if they're re-using some of those rules for Dune. What book has these rules? I'd love to know because I'm updating a list I made with Something Awful traditional game's help about base building, domain management, or organization building rules in RPGs. The full list is long and here: https://nightmarethoughts6.blogspot.com/2022/01/base-building-domain-management-or.html The Noble House building rules are in Chapter 3 (I'm not finished totally with reading the book keep in mind). The House construction rules consist of choosing: your House type (nascent, minor, major or great), your House's Domain (a specialty in an area of business or produce that is important to the Imperium), your Homeworld's description, House banner and arms, and House traits. House traits are interesting because "If a player spends 1 Momentum, they may apply one of the House traits to their character for the remainder of the scene. They may do this as often as they wish to spend Momentum, for as many of the House traits as they like." mellonbread has a writeup example of House creation but I can't seem to find the link at the moment.
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Jan 21, 2022 20:56
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Helical Nightmares posted:What book has these rules? I'd love to know because I'm updating a list I made with Something Awful traditional game's help about base building, domain management, or organization building rules in RPGs. https://www.modiphius.net/en-us/products/conan-the-king Conan the King is a supplement for the Conan game. I have not actually used the rules in it, so I can't comment on whether they actually function as-written; but the intent is pretty clear. This sourcebook has material on one region of the world, some new character archetypes, NPCs, magic, etc. all focused on Aquilonia and playing nobles, which isn't directly relevant. The stuff you're talking about is mostly contained in Chapter 8 (The Road of Kings), which is really about nobility not just kings & queens; it has guidelines for courtly-themed adventures and campaigns, scheming and plotting, some specific rules for some of the kingdoms on the Hyborian Age map, Kingdom management, etc. The Kingdom Management section has topics on factions, and a bunch of stuff to do during the "carousing" phase (a formalized play phase that takes place between each adventure) including three required skill tests: one each for Control, Order, and Justice. Every kingdom has several Factions, the ruler always pits their own Power against the power of other Factions and usually the ruler has more than any one of them but less than all of the others put together, which means they can't rule with total impunity. You gain (or lose) support of other factions through roleplay. You can crush a rival faction through conflict (or even war), use politics to subdue a faction (reducing its power) by spending money and succeeding at Society tests, or you can spend more money and effort trying to convince a rival faction to ally with you instead. Factions always include one for the Ruler and (at least one) faction of Nobility, but then typically several more, and it looks like their Power is supposed to be between 0 (dormant) and not much higher than 2, although there's no specific limit stated. There's also an annual big deal challenge that represents a more significant event, could be a natural disaster or an assassination at court or the revelation of a dangerous cult, etc. There's a Kingdom worksheet you use to manage all the formal mechanical elements, a table of factions you can roll on (although the GM is encouraged to make up more). Each faction has a Power level, and if the ruler fails a Control roll, a new faction forms at power level 1. Failing an Order test allows one existing faction to gain a power level, and failing a Justice roll a "serious grievance" against you is created, which prevents the ruler from gaining Legitimacy in the short term. In each of these cases, these are also roleplay prompts. If a ruler passes all three tests, they get to roll a Persuade test to try and increase their Legitimacy (which starts at 2). It costs money, and the difficulty is higher the higher your Legitimacy already is; and even on a success, the GM can spend Doom to create a new faction or increase the Power of an existing faction. I would not say that these rules are extensive or complex; there's a few moving pieces, mostly coming down to the normal skill rolls for Conan, but there's enough flavor built in to hang a lot of worldbuilding & RP off of. The actual faction-building part is not very crunchy, you just... make up a faction or roll for one. Most of the factions on the table are just descriptions. For example: quote:4 Family or quote:9 Merchants but there's one that has some random generation to it: quote:18 Cabal So this one is a small group of people who come from some other entry on the list, working together in a conspiracy. Does any of this stuff pique your interest? Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jan 21, 2022 |
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Jan 21, 2022 21:30
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Modiphius marketing email posted:
quote:Star Trek Adventures PDFs
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Jan 28, 2022 21:35
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Leperflesh posted:https://www.modiphius.net/en-us/products/conan-the-king Yes, definitely. I really appreciate the detailed writeup. Even though you said these rules are not extensive or complex, I think they are more than sufficient for "rules light" people looking for Kingdom Management and Factional struggles guidance.
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Feb 3, 2022 20:14
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There's an official Modiphius Discord channel now: https://discord.gg/vqTpBhyvVc They say this is a soft launch, so there will be more channels in the not-too-distant future. On another note, does anyone find that players coming from D&D can't help but approach every drat thing as though they're still in that game? I have a guy who's trying to make a melee sorcerer in Conan as though he's playing a Paladin or something. He couldn't figure out why all his attempts have come out crappy, and I told him he's maxing out the two attributes with the fewest number of skills (Brawn and Willpower) while his Personality and Awareness are both 6, so of course the character is going to be lackluster, but I haven't been able to break him out of this mindset...
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Feb 3, 2022 20:32
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Admiral Snackbar posted:On another note, does anyone find that players coming from D&D can't help but approach every drat thing as though they're still in that game? Yes, in my experience this is pretty common. I sure some else would have a better solution for you than just time for the player and growing familiarity with the system.
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Feb 3, 2022 20:41
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I think that's fairly common of D&D players going to any other system, honestly. Fortunately, the game still functions reasonably with a suboptimal character in a full party, if the rest of the players are OK with the lousy character using most of the spare momentum from the shared pool to juice their rolls enough to compensate for low success values. For your combat sorcerer, have you delved into some direct one-on-one RP to do with their patron? I think flavor is really important here, and "just being a sorcerer is a terrible idea, you are doomed, every time you use these powers you're messing with horrible poo poo that will definitely destroy you eventually" is a theme that is built into the rules. It sounds like that player is also not really aware of how the math works out for this game, and you can't really try to min/max a character if you don't understand the math, so that may be another issue there.
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Feb 9, 2022 02:21
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I had another long conversation with him, including pointing out that the group's current fightiest character has been super successful even with only having a Brawn of 9. I also really stressed how important using Momentum and Doom are to increasing success. For example, he had upped his Brawn to 11 to gain additional damage dice, and I showed him how he would be guaranteed to add damage by spending Momentum, as opposed to gaining damage dice which only gives you an extra chance at damage. Fortunately, the fighter player ended up joining the conversation and reinforced many of my points. The sorcerer has respecced his guy to be much less min-maxy, and I think he'll have fun with what he has put together now. The major disconnect I see between 2d20 games and D&D is that 2d20 really prioritizes narrative over simulation, as far as I've seen anyway. It seems like D&D players are constantly looking for the optimal solution to any given situation, whereas Conan really encourages you to try doing ridiculous stuff for the sake of narrative awesomeness and still be consistently successful.
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Feb 9, 2022 20:47
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In fairness to the player it's not absurd to assume "strong guy who's extremely good at fighting" is an appropriate character build for a game based on the Conan franchise, regardless of your RPG background experience. Conan's emphasis on clever plans and unexpected moves over sheer brute strength is something that only becomes apparent if you dig into the source texts, which I doubt most people do for an RPG.
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Feb 9, 2022 21:52
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I jumped from Paladin in a Waterdeep campaign to Sorcerer in a Conan game and went through similar growing pains. Once we had a handle on the mechanics, it definitely played into my character, though may not into your player’s, to call out my party members at the meta level as my “Momentum Engines.” Meaning, if you want me to melt people into the floor and astral project at the cost of my sanity and humanity, I am absolutely willing and able to do so, if you make sure I have the juice.
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Feb 9, 2022 22:12
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Here's an oddball question: does anyone know if the Mutant Chronicles 3e Venusian Apocalypse Campaign was actually made into a physical book or only ever made it to PDF/POD through DriveThru? There are no extant examples on eBay and none in the previously sold section, and the Modiphius site only offers it in PDF. I'd be willing to pay a premium for the excellent offset prints put out by Modiphius, but I think I'm chasing a phantom.
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Feb 26, 2022 21:19
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https://rpggeek.com/rpgitem/204727/venusian-apocalypse-campaign-book Looks like there was pod was released 2015, and pdf released 2016 with no record of a print book option edit: and a mutant chronicles movie in 2008 
best bale fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Feb 26, 2022 |
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Feb 26, 2022 23:22
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Finished the first session of Dune 2D20. The House creation minigame is bare bones, but has enough flavor that the group can still create something exciting. We made a House Major, a House Minor, the planet they're from, and the same again for their rival Houses. I suspect a lot of it comes down to a group's familiarity with Dune, and their ability to create something that fits with the world. I don't think the massive lore filibuster at the beginning of the book is a good way to introduce players to the universe, but hopefully people interested in a Dune RPG will arrive with at least a surface level understanding of the themes and aesthetic already. The House creation system is no help creating notable NPCs, like Dukes and warmasters and mentat assassins. You get a list of roles that need to be filled, and you're on your own. The system is overall pretty fun. The metacurrency is not as much of a pain to track as I feared, and the players quickly picked up how spending points worked. The main challenge was calling for enough die rolls to actually let them build threat/momentum and use their special abilities. I don't normally make player characters roll for lots of things in RPGs, but in 2D20 you need explicit mechanical challenges to keep the economy going, without going so far overboard that you gate everything behind a skill check. Half the group elected to do creation in play, and the other half prebuilt their characters before the first session. The advancement system seems a little skewed toward combat - you get a point every time you fail a DC 3 skill test, and if you're fighting that can happen every turn if you're attacking a hard target or increasing task difficulties by keeping the initiative. The combat system is fun. Using the "gain information" move in battle is powerful because it grants immediate momentum, and if your character has the right skill focus you can build up a lot very quickly. I like it because it's a tight thematic fit with the combats we see in the Dune books, where carefully observing the enemy's fighting style is the key to survival. It's also not as broken as it sounds, because it costs your action to do it, meaning there's a significant opportunity cost that can only be offset by spending momentum and increasing your task difficulties to keep the initiative. The whole thing seems like it could bog down in combats with multiple fighters per side, especially since each attack has to be opposed by an active defense roll from the target. One rules quirk we ran into was having to pay twice for friendy NPCs. In the rules, a friendly NPC can be an asset (mechanical tool that you use in conflicts and skill tests) and a supporting character (statted NPC that you bring with you on your adventures, and even play as). One of the players picked a mentat as a starting asset, then wanted to bring him with them on the adventure. But starting with an NPC as an asset doesn't mechanically entitle you to have that NPC as a supporting character, so the player paid the cost and added four points of threat to bring him on as a permanent member of the cast. Maybe there's a rule we missed about this, or maybe that's working as intended. It does bring up a hypothetical scenario where a player has an asset like a mentat or a courtier or whatever, but doesn't pay the cost to bring them onboard as a supporting character. So they're with you the entire time, but only as a playing piece that enables skill checks. Good game overall. Looking forward to next session.
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Feb 27, 2022 23:44
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mellonbread posted:The main challenge was calling for enough die rolls to actually let them build threat/momentum and use their special abilities. I don't normally make player characters roll for lots of things in RPGs, but in 2D20 you need explicit mechanical challenges to keep the economy going, without going so far overboard that you gate everything behind a skill check. Splicer fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Feb 28, 2022 |
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Feb 28, 2022 16:29
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mellonbread posted:In the rules, a friendly NPC can be an asset (mechanical tool that you use in conflicts and skill tests) and a supporting character (statted NPC that you bring with you on your adventures, and even play as). I feel like this is probably because the player shouldn't have used both an Asset and a Supporting Character slot on the same NPC, or they misunderstood the difference. It's gonna be one or the other. Also, Supporting Character in STA is basically just a stand-in for a player character that can't be in a scene for a particular reason. It's been a good while since I've read through the Dune rules but I assume it works similarly there -- the character should probably be one or the other: an off-screen asset or occasional NPC guest in scenes involving the main character, or a supporting character that is a member of the party but that doesn't necessarily get tapped into for conflicts/skill test bonuses in the way that an asset would. Or, I mean, it's probably perfectly valid to say that the character can be both if the player explicitly wants that to be the case, in which case it's not really a hindrance since it's in service of the narrative.
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Feb 28, 2022 19:13
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Splicer posted:STA handles this with difficulty 0 checks. The players can choose to just succeed at a d0 check or voluntarily roll to build momentum (with the accompanying risk of a complication). Drone posted:I feel like this is probably because the player shouldn't have used both an Asset and a Supporting Character slot on the same NPC, or they misunderstood the difference. It's gonna be one or the other. Drone posted:Also, Supporting Character in STA is basically just a stand-in for a player character that can't be in a scene for a particular reason. It's been a good while since I've read through the Dune rules but I assume it works similarly there -- the character should probably be one or the other: an off-screen asset or occasional NPC guest in scenes involving the main character, or a supporting character that is a member of the party but that doesn't necessarily get tapped into for conflicts/skill test bonuses in the way that an asset would. I suspect they ported the supporting character rules over from Star Trek or some other 2D20 and developed the Dune asset system separately, without fully resolving the overlap it created. If this issue is actually addressed somewhere in the rules then someone please let me know.
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Feb 28, 2022 20:15
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After wrapping up our last campaign, my group was looking to play some sci fi and decided on Infinity after reviewing a handful of options. I have done a game with Infinity 2d20 before and ended up with mixed impressions of the system. I have made a few tweaks to smooth out the previous friction points but character creation is a complete mess and I think it deserves a ground-up rework. Besides actively resisting the player's attempt to implement a specific character concept, the resource used to guide decisions is valued extremely inconsistently. For instance, a life point to pick a youth event which probably has zero mechanical effect can also be used to buy an additional career which comes with 5 skill-ups and a handful of gear. One player rolled the "Chinese Curse" career event twice for the same career (1/3600 chance) which meant they had to roll a total of 6 times on the career events table for a single career, after which they were so tired of the process they didn't want to bother spending life points on additional careers and associated bookkeeping. I also ended up doing an on-the-fly handwaving of the special "faction career" requirements after multiple players protested that they wanted them in their character backgrounds but didn't want to pay a premium for a nominal mechanical benefit. Anyway, every player survived (one character died) that process and we are all looking forward to starting the game itself next time. Do the other 2d20s use a randomized character generation process or is that just Infinity?
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Feb 28, 2022 22:06
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Star Trek Adventures uses d20 and d6 rolls on tables; there's three tables alone for playable species (because the intent was you could play in the ENT era, TOS era, or TNG era). You are, of course, free to choose which species, environment, upbringing, and Starfleet Academy branch you attended, as well as two career-defining events your character experienced before the game, but I made my players roll on that last table. (One player rolled two natural 1s on the Career Events table. I told him "Nah, reroll one of those. Nobody had two starships shot out from under them. Nobody's that unlucky.") John Carter of Mars doesn't have any random rolls; species, archetype, and descriptor are all player-determined.
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Feb 28, 2022 22:47
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Dune doesn't have random chargen. There's an "in play" system where you can run the first session before your character is complete, and lock in the remaining stats, assets and special powers when they become relevant.
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Feb 28, 2022 22:51
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Conan has options for how random you want chargen to be. You can see them presented up front in the online character generator: https://conan.modiphiusapps.hostinguk.org/index.html  "Normal" gives you options at every step, e.g. you can opt to roll or you can just pick:  "Play the hand you are dealt" forces mostly random rolls, with just a couple of direct choices that affect your numbers. Even here, in many cases you're picking from options: there's a roll for a couple of traits that affect your base stats, but then you pick from among the options for best and worst. For example:  If you opt to roll Archetype, you still get to pick one of three skills as your elective skill for a bonus, and then the generator randomly picks your second from among the remaining two for that Archetype. This happens again with Nature, and also you pick from a shortlist of Talents that come up based on previous picks, and so on. "Random" autogenerates almost everything, but still lets you swap any of your dice rolls around to customize: you can play with this a lot, although if you want to actually know what all these different results do, you need to xref them with the rulebook while you do it.  This approach still gives you the best/worst attribute picks and the elective skill/talent picks like "Play the hand you are dealt". So, tl;dr, there's no totally-random chargen option, and there's a completely-nonrandom option too. That said: if you play with more than one or two supplements, the randomness goes way overboard. You can wind up with really mismatched stuff and characters that aren't coherent. I recommend using one of the semirandom options with just the base game, or maybe base + 1 specific supplement, for newbie players who don't know the system... and I recommend the fully manual process with experienced players who are less likely to hit analysis paralysis or spend ages looking up every option in order to try to optimize. The game in general does not require tons of charopt. Everyone can compensate for weaknesses by using momentum. On the other hand, watch out for overpowered characters who have optimized one or two aspects, especially if you allow attributes above 12 (you can restrict to 12 with the Shadows of the Past rule). Characters with a 14 in a stat (ancient bloodline) can completely dominate an area of the game to the point that they just always succeed and also spew loads of momentum into the pool for their buddies.
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Feb 28, 2022 23:11
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Red Shoe posted:After wrapping up our last campaign, my group was looking to play some sci fi and decided on Infinity after reviewing a handful of options. I have done a game with Infinity 2d20 before and ended up with mixed impressions of the system. I have made a few tweaks to smooth out the previous friction points but character creation is a complete mess and I think it deserves a ground-up rework. Besides actively resisting the player's attempt to implement a specific character concept, the resource used to guide decisions is valued extremely inconsistently. For instance, a life point to pick a youth event which probably has zero mechanical effect can also be used to buy an additional career which comes with 5 skill-ups and a handful of gear. One player rolled the "Chinese Curse" career event twice for the same career (1/3600 chance) which meant they had to roll a total of 6 times on the career events table for a single career, after which they were so tired of the process they didn't want to bother spending life points on additional careers and associated bookkeeping. The random character process is great fun, and works pretty well for the regular group conceit the game uses (you are all people from wildly different nations working together for the Space UN black ops, and possibly working at cross purposes), but if you're wanting to run a single nation game, or some other tight theme, some fiddling will be necessary. Mutant Chronicles and Conan also have random character gen.
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Feb 28, 2022 23:13
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Thank you for all the context for other 2d20s, everyone. mellonbread posted:Dune doesn't have random chargen. There's an "in play" system where you can run the first session before your character is complete, and lock in the remaining stats, assets and special powers when they become relevant. This sounds amazing and I wish more RPGs had a built in way to defer some decisions until after your test drive.
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Mar 1, 2022 02:03
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Wrapped up session two of Dune. The book doesn't say whether threat carries over from session to session. It says that it refreshes at the beginning of every "adventure" based on the number of players present and the size of the House the players work for, but the text never defines whether an adventure is a single session, a full campaign, or something in between. I suspect this is something explained better in earlier 2D20s, and ported into Dune without the accompanying clarification.
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Mar 6, 2022 21:35
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In Conan, there's an explicit, structured "Carousing" segment that happens between each adventure, so it's clear to everyone where an adventure ends.
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Mar 7, 2022 05:11
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Leperflesh posted:In Conan, there's an explicit, structured "Carousing" segment that happens between each adventure, so it's clear to everyone where an adventure ends. I've never played Conan but that is perfect for a between adventure interstitial. You could add that mechanic to star trek by having a holodeck session either together or separately. Or hang out in the ship's bar might work better.
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Mar 9, 2022 18:32
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