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Halloween Jack posted:Yknow, I'm starting to think that PBTA isn't the answer to everything. Not even if you tack on D&Disms for doubleplusgood tummyfeels. DIE isn't anything like pbta except that each class's sheet has all its rules laid out clearly. The dice mechanic is closer to world of darkness dicepools.
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May 13, 2022 00:42
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Splicer posted:Any GM who thinks that the downside to the NEO is not finding any fair gold shouldn't go anywhere near this game. Um, I don't quite get that at all. There's scenes where working out how to get enough or making sacrifices because of the amount available are key?
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May 13, 2022 02:58
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The whole point of fair gold is it always has a cost. It’s always there, but the price is always terrible. The GM should probably never say “Nope, you can’t find any.”
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May 13, 2022 03:11
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Yeah, NEOs are gold addicts. One coin makes them able to function at all, the rest is about balancing the stash you have because it only lasts a day.
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May 13, 2022 03:20
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Hey everyone, I was working the last couple years on a video game project with Gamemaker and I'm trying to get as many people to take a look at it as possible. Sorceress is a top-down fantasy shooter for Mac and Windows, where you play a wizard in a dungeon fighting monsters and trying to find your way to the lair of an evil demon. Done in a very retro arcade style. It's free, it's short, and I'd appreciate any feedback anyone has.
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May 13, 2022 04:25
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As my current game is coming to the end of the story, I'm thinking about how to go forward. Two players can only play every 4-6 weeks, and the rest of us wouldn't mind playing more frequently. I think we'd all rather do "one game" as opposed to running separate games or systems for the small and expanded group. So I think ideally we'd play regularly with a core team of 4 players, and every other or sometimes third session two more would join us. From experience, stories that span more than one session are difficult to run for us this way, and using any system where resources get tracked over the "adventuring day" D&D style throws off expectations. Does any system immediately spring to mind that actively facilitates this sort of setup?
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May 13, 2022 09:41
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A West Marches-style game is what I often see suggested for groups with inconsistent attendance. The basic premise being that PCs are all members of some broader organisation tasked with exploring/looting/"civilising" a frontier area. Each session involves the players present striking out to discover or progress something on the map and then returning to a home base at the end. The supplements Perilous Wilds and Freebooters On The Frontier for Dungeon World are great for this, and the classes in Freebooters fix some problems with the DW base classes. Forged in the Dark games have mechanical support for characters dropping in and out. They generally all have a group meta-character (the gang, the ship, the company etc), so even if you miss a session a shared resource of the group is gaining in power, lessening that sense of getting left behind. There's also usually an expectation that individual characters will either permanently retire or go away for an extended time (the Heat mechanism in Blades can result in people going to prison) so it's designed with fluctuating group composition in mind.
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May 13, 2022 10:07
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My Lovely Horse posted:As my current game is coming to the end of the story, I'm thinking about how to go forward. Two players can only play every 4-6 weeks, and the rest of us wouldn't mind playing more frequently. I think we'd all rather do "one game" as opposed to running separate games or systems for the small and expanded group. So I think ideally we'd play regularly with a core team of 4 players, and every other or sometimes third session two more would join us. From experience, stories that span more than one session are difficult to run for us this way, and using any system where resources get tracked over the "adventuring day" D&D style throws off expectations. Does any system immediately spring to mind that actively facilitates this sort of setup? Something with a troupe mechanic could work where there's a pool of characters who are kind of "around" but not necessarily present could be a good fit. STA does this and the progression system is kind of hard to describe but might fit your setup. Splicer fucked around with this message at 10:47 on May 13, 2022 |
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May 13, 2022 10:42
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DIE Handouts posted:Energy Blade: You have a searing energy blade, Luke Skywalker. You may use Dexterity for its dice pool instead of Strength.
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May 13, 2022 15:38
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People seem to enjoy the comics he writes, but all I remember is that very bad review of Darwinia he wrote back in 2005.
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May 13, 2022 16:20
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Oh no, Die is a great comic. You know it's great because it's just like this other cool thing that you know. (Seriously Die is very good though I haven't finished it yet)
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May 13, 2022 16:31
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I'm a fan of DIE (the comic). I don't think it quite sticks the landing, but the premise of "what if being an Isekai really hosed you up" was well executed, and having the realm be an RPG setting designed for the protagonists makes it a nice touch, but I'm not super familiar with looking glass / Isekai fiction. The WWII hobbits were fantastic, though.
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May 13, 2022 16:42
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Halloween Jack posted:I guess people like this? I presume that a) those trademarked references will be gone in the commercial release; b) they're back reference to the Neo being the one girl who showed up to a fantasy game and insisted on being a cyberpunk. (I bet it was a ninja in the first draft and he changed it because it was more interesting  )
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May 13, 2022 17:01
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Tarnop posted:No worries! Okay, so watching through this, the first session they're talking about was D&D after all. The Blades campaign came later.
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May 13, 2022 19:50
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Got a Ravenloft question. Does anyone remember the Ravenloft supplement or maybe core book where there was a generator for a village/tiny Domains in the mist? As I recall there was a description for placing a church and a graveyard in the generator and I think other important features of a village. I remember having the Ravenloft Red Box (AD&D) but when I checked that core book, I couldn't find the village generator. At least that I remember.
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May 13, 2022 20:45
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Dammit, binged the DIE comic after I checked it out initially and liked and even related to it, then got Gainaxed. Thanks a bunch. I guess if a good story had to have a good ending there’d be no good stories in the hobby.
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May 13, 2022 21:02
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DoubleDonut posted:Can anyone recommend recommend actual play stuff for Blades in the Dark (or other Forged in the Dark stuff) and for a PbtA game (specifically Fellowship or MotW would be great, but anything is fine)? I'm gonna be running one of those fairly soon and I've never actually had the chance to play in them, so I'd like to see how they actually work in practice. I don't need a huge amount, just enough to get a decent feel for it. Also wanted to chime in and give you a Blades in the Dark recommendation. Our own Ross Payton of Roleplaying Public Radio has a 24-episode Blades campaign completed about the Blind Eyes gang. It is very good, atmospheric and displays good use of the Blades mechanics. I particularly liked the heist they had to do to crash a wedding and smuggle in a curious carriage artifact. http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/blades-in-the-dark-the-blind-eyes/
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May 13, 2022 21:28
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Helical Nightmares posted:Got a Ravenloft question. Didn't the 'Curse of Strahd' have a bunch of tables like that?
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May 13, 2022 23:51
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Okay, so watching through this, the first session they're talking about was D&D after all. The Blades campaign came later. Ah OK, is that on YouTube? Apologies for the misinformation! hyphz posted:Dammit, binged the DIE comic after I checked it out initially and liked and even related to it, then got Gainaxed. Thanks a bunch. I guess if a good story had to have a good ending there’d be no good stories in the hobby. Gainax ending good ending
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May 14, 2022 01:53
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Tarnop posted:Ah OK, is that on YouTube? Yeah, it's right here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I95gYU25qcM No worries! I just remembered they were discussing moving from a D&D setting to Blades, and that this was the reasoning behind changing a few of the names (calling it Volisport instead of Doskvol, for one), albeit that all that long ago when I actually watched the start.
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May 14, 2022 01:55
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Anyway, the latest Bundle of Holding is a collection of book for Nobilis and Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine, which includes Nobilis Third Edition, which is finally available for purchase again with new art and an all-new layout based on the second edition, after Eos Press' malfeasance led to its disappearance for a decade. The Bundle is apparently a very effective way for authors to make actual money, so please consider purchasing and passing the link around to all your friends in order to support one of the most supportable authors in the industry.
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May 14, 2022 04:36
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No idea about Chuubo but Nobilis had my interest for some time now. But I have no idea what do you actually do in game. It kinda makes me think of kult with all the edge removed
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May 14, 2022 07:43
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Covermeinsunshine posted:No idea about Chuubo but Nobilis had my interest for some time now. But I have no idea what do you actually do in game. It kinda makes me think of kult with all the edge removed Nobilis has a lot of potential play styles depending on the group. Rand Brittain can probably pitch it better, but of the two campaigns (in 2E) I played in, one emphasized the subtle war with the Excrucians over contested pieces of reality, while another dealt mostly in the politics of Heaven and Hell and the consequences of the Windflower Law and its prohibition against love. It's one of those games where you really want everyone to make characters as a group, probably around a central pitch like, "This is campaign is going to be about the fallout from an event with similar vibes to Lucifer giving away the key to Hell in Sandman, plan accordingly." Then, when you have characters with Estates of reality to protect, Anchors in the mortal world that can be threatened, and various other buttons to push, the stories pretty much write themselves.
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May 14, 2022 08:27
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Agreed. Nobilis has a reputation for being impenetrable, but that's in my opinion there's two main reasons for that. One, the games are just kind of dense and impenetrable. Two, Jenna Moran's writing style means the expected play style trends towards weird cosmic-scale slice of life, which isn't really a genre the RPG community has a lot of experience working with. They're good games overall, they just take a bit of work to wrap your head around.
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May 14, 2022 16:20
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nobilis has a reputation for being impenetrable because everyone gravitates towards 2E, which is a beautiful toilet reading book, an okay game, and a terrible instruction manual, and not to 3E, which is a brilliant game only slightly held back by a superfluous optional lifepath system -- but oh god no it has cute cartoon artwork to save on budget, the horror, the horror Glitch is even better about layout, clarity, and explaining how mechanics and narrative hang together and also imo just has a more compelling premise for play in the same setting, but 3E is a good start
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May 14, 2022 16:38
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:nobilis has a reputation for being impenetrable because everyone gravitates towards 2E, which is a beautiful toilet reading book, an okay game, and a terrible instruction manual, and not to 3E, which is a brilliant game only slightly held back by a superfluous optional lifepath system -- but oh god no it has cute cartoon artwork to save on budget, the horror, the horror Good thing I got the bundle with both editions.
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May 14, 2022 16:43
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Nobilis is very slick, but I wish that your miraculous action's base "strength" for the purpose of overcoming opposition wasn't also how flexible the trait generating the action could be. In a weird repetition of, like, classic White Wolf dot-based chargen, starting with 4/0 or 0/4 is just much more appealing than starting with 2/2 because in either case you're going to have the same sized menu of options to apply to narrative situations, but in the former case your action is much more likely to win out in a conflict than the latter. I want Nobilis 3E but it's got, like, something sliiightly more rigorous than "flurries" for adjudicating how often a given action takes effect/a given character can affect things, and a flatter or totally flat power curve such that a properly-worded Domain 1 miracle can and will stalemate with a Domain 5 miracle until and unless one character buys more Strike than the other.
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May 14, 2022 17:01
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:but oh god no it has cute cartoon artwork to save on budget, the horror, the horror Well, it doesn't any longer. The thing about Nobilis is that it doesn't really have a "thing you do in this game"; it does pretty much whatever you want, with the caveat that the people involved are incredibly-important and metaphysically fraught.* Or, more simply, "it does Sandman, okay? It does whatever Sandman could do", and, of course, Sandman did pretty much everything at some point. *or, as Glitch would put it, "the characters in this game are numinous and fell, but being numinous and fell is distracting and emotionally-difficult."
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May 14, 2022 17:05
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:nobilis has a reputation for being impenetrable because everyone gravitates towards 2E, which is a beautiful toilet reading book, an okay game, and a terrible instruction manual, and not to 3E, which is a brilliant game only slightly held back by a superfluous optional lifepath system -- but oh god no it has cute cartoon artwork to save on budget, the horror, the horror I actually have the opposite take, that 2nd has a whole lot of GM advice and worked examples of play that 3rd almost completely lacks. I like most of the changes 3rd made to the system but I found them less intuitive and more poorly explained in the book proper. Like, I had to read WTF before I really understood what was happening with the mortal-scale action rules. I also prefer 2nd Ed’s more rigorous rules about what kinds of miracles trump others to the squishier “yes, but” methodology of 3rd, but that’s more an issue of my tastes than a knock on 3. Haven’t read Glitch yet, but I’m looking forward to N4! … has it really been ten years already? Yikes.
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May 15, 2022 06:19
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My Lovely Horse posted:Does any system immediately spring to mind that actively facilitates this sort of setup? It only does an extremely specific type of game, but Pendragon is good for this. The game is paced so that each session is a year, where the PCs go out and have a single Adventure. This helps keep sessions self-contained and allows some variation in the group on a session-by-session basis. Also, XP disparity isn't much of an issue, since most advancement is automatic by year, so the less-frequent players can just decide how they developed their stats over the sessions they missed. I was part of a Pendragon game that had a player that would drop in every few weeks, and it worked absolutely fine. Alternatively, a lot of the Japanese systems I've seen tend to have a big focus on single-session story arcs and more 'complete' characters, but they also don't tend to do long campaign arcs the way D&D-descended games do. It depends a lot on what you want out of your game.
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May 15, 2022 07:53
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Parkreiner posted:I also prefer 2nd Ed’s more rigorous rules about what kinds of miracles trump others to the squishier “yes, but” methodology of 3rd, but that’s more an issue of my tastes than a knock on 3. Haven’t read Glitch yet, but I’m looking forward to N4! Yeah, I can't even imagine trying to reconcile a game with Nobilis's scope and degree of player power with rules that function on an ironclad basis, despite the latter normally being my preference as well. The best thing about Jenna Moran's work in my opinion is that rather than relying as much on, let's say "the authorial voice" to control the narrative direction of her games, she includes uncertainty by design and then gives you extra-diegetic, contextual instructions on how to resolve it: "if your players care about it, it exists," instead of "if this is what would happen in a detective novel, that's what happens" etc. Nobilis 3E is where that kind of advice first starts cropping up (e: in her work, not saying this is some ground-shaking innovation among TTRPGs) in a slightly haphazard but still-useful form, and then Glitch, I think, is an entire game built around it from first principles. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 17:51 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 15, 2022 17:28
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i'm honestly struggling to articulate what i mean and none of the attempts i write out are satisfying me lol like D&D is: my character wants to survive and get rich -> i play my character as well as possible, to "win" the pre-determined assumptions of the game as both a mechanical artifact and as a narrative dictate how the player approaches it and there's little distinction in goals between character and player; there's plenty of room for embellishments but very little is asked of you in terms of creativity if you aren't feeling it Blades in the Dark is: i want interesting things to happen to my character -> my character makes bad but narratively consistent decisions the player and the character have very different goals, often even opposed ones, and while the setting and mechanics are designed to smooth this process over with incentives and feedback, responsibility is ultimately on the player to determine what "needs" to happen to be interesting Glitch is: i made a dadjoke about an NPC we just met, everyone cracked up -> i earn XP and the joke becomes true in the narrative literally the core assumption of the game's metaphysics is that things aren't real until you notice them, the tone is deliberately at war with itself and can shift in emphasis as-needed, if anything you do is factually interesting to your table, retrospectively, there are mechanical rewards and consequences for it Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 17:45 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 15, 2022 17:39
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well poo poo looks like Blades won't work for my crowd after all, they're deathly allergic to that on the other hand, we've always played D&D like Glitch apparently.
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May 15, 2022 17:45
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OSR D&D maybe, but modern D&D is kind of “that for combat but the second style for everything else”. Some of the recent 5e modules don’t even support the OSR style and break if played that way. People complain that they give detail about exactly the wrong things and I can see that. Unless they’re made for podcasters..
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May 15, 2022 18:43
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hyphz posted:OSR D&D maybe, but modern D&D is kind of “that for combat but the second style for everything else”. Do you have any links for people complaining about them? I'm interested to see what people see as useful and not useful details, just from an educational point of view.
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May 15, 2022 18:52
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hyphz posted:OSR D&D maybe, but modern D&D is kind of “that for combat but the second style for everything else”. i mean older versions of D&D were the only ones that really strongly formalized non-combat play at all, the more modular and self-contained combat itself became the more flexibility the game gives you to handle the other stuff how you want, since all you're really given is a core resolution system and maybe something like skill challenges or a difficulty rating table figuring out what roleplay is "supposed" to look like in any version of D&D is mostly a matter of squinting at negative space -- what feats say "you need this to tie your shoes correctly" implicitly meaning nobody else can tie their shoes, what spells say "hey GM, you'd better be tracking how deep the walls are in feet because this spells turns exactly X feet of walls into mud" so you're not totally free to do it however you want, but you can staple narrative-first GMing tips onto D&D and it'll work right up until it runs into a specific rule that breaks it Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 18:55 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 15, 2022 18:52
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Yeah, I can't even imagine trying to reconcile a game with Nobilis's scope and degree of player power with rules that function on an ironclad basis, despite the latter normally being my preference as well. The best thing about Jenna Moran's work in my opinion is that rather than relying as much on, let's say "the authorial voice" to control the narrative direction of her games, she includes uncertainty by design and then gives you extra-diegetic, contextual instructions on how to resolve it: "if your players care about it, it exists," instead of "if this is what would happen in a detective novel, that's what happens" etc. I usually prefer a “squishy” resolution mechanic myself, but for a game like Nobilis where genuinely anything can literally happen, I feel like having that kind of mechanical absolutism is useful to the GM so we can quickly determine what happens when the unstoppable force meets the immovable object and then move on to the next crazy thing instead of getting bogged down in narrative haggling. And I do enjoy a good narrative haggle! I enjoy freeform resolution mechanics because they empower players and open up the possibility space during play. But Nobilis empowers the players and characters so much by default that I think it’s better served by the rules putting on some bounds. I also think maybe part of it is enjoying the “fiat lux” part of the fantasy of divinity, where you just get to proclaim a thing and it definitely happens (or is outright parried by another god) as opposed to the lese majeste N3’s partial or mixed successes bring in. There really wasn’t anything else quite like Nobilis 2, maybe not even Nobilis 3. It’s me, I’m the Nobilis grognard… except I don’t think I can go back without hacking in Estate Properties, Bonds/Afflictions, and maybe Treasure, and I also kind of don’t want to do the work. Tuxedo Catfish posted:
A tiny explosive went off in my brain the day I realized an “experience point” in Chuubo’s literally marks the point at which you experienced a thing. Parkreiner fucked around with this message at 20:25 on May 15, 2022 |
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May 15, 2022 19:27
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Nickoten posted:Do you have any links for people complaining about them? I'm interested to see what people see as useful and not useful details, just from an educational point of view. They're mostly random forum posts, and I presume people don't want links to grognard rants by folks like pundit. I mean, for a personal example - I actually read through Wild Beyond The Witchlight because it came out around the time of Under Hollow Hills and I liked the theme. The first chapter of Wild Beyond the Witchlight (spoilers for like, the first 10 pages) has the following plot: the PCs visit a feywild-themed circus following up on one of a couple of given hooks. In the circus, they hear rumors of people disappearing and potentially actually see (or save) someone getting Pied Pipered through a magic mirror into another world into which they cannot follow. After they meet the circus owners, Mr Witch and Mr Light (and also "Thaco the Clown", a grumpy old man who hangs out complaining about everything and smoking a bubble pipe, which is apparently a reference), a senior hand tells them that they think Mrrs. Witch and Light are too nice to be behind the disappearences themselves, but keep quiet about them and he suspects they're being blackmailed. He suggests the PCs steal one of the powerful artefacts they carry that keep the circus' magic together in order to use it for leverage to push them to spill what's happening. So, cool, a heist taking place in a circus! Sounds great! Except.. there's no detail on how to do the heist. There's a description of what skill check to do to try and steal one of the artifacts from the owners, and that's it. Everything else is just random scenes that the PCs might encounter while exploring the circus innocently, which is all fine, but almost nothing that would help the GM run the process of stealing the artefact. I mean, yes, the GM has to improvise, sure, but surely improvising the regular run of the circus would be easier than improvising the heist? That's without the old adventure problem of "why do we trust this guy?" (And if the PCs actually do the heist. the secret the owners have to give away in exchange for the return of the artefact is the password for the magic mirror. Sure, go jump through the magic portal that kidnaps people at the request of the potentially-dodgy guy you just directly pissed off and stole from, no way that could go wrong) The reason I thought "podcast" was because it did seem like a podcast episodes' flow. Quite a few of the more professional podcasts tend to like having an interesting setting to explore but the bulk of the entertainment comes from the PCs riffing off each other and the setting, then a story twist that's resolved relatively quickly to set up the next episode - which this seems to match almost exactly. It might be great if the players are into it but I get the feeling quite a few aren't. A similar one I saw was a complaint about Strixhaven. I haven't read this one, I only saw this in a review, but it had a random event table including things like "a mysterious acidic ooze gets into the school basement". But if the PCs decide to investigate this ooze or how it got there or who put it there, there's nothing to give the GM any guidance.
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May 15, 2022 20:10
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Is there a backgammon thread? I feel like I'm constantly getting by last two pieces stuck in their original position, but every time I try and move them they get hit. I'd love to think more about when to move them, but am not sure where to look for advice.
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May 16, 2022 07:52
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Carillon posted:Is there a backgammon thread? I feel like I'm constantly getting by last two pieces stuck in their original position, but every time I try and move them they get hit. I'd love to think more about when to move them, but am not sure where to look for advice. No ides re: thread, but prioritize getting pieces out of the enemy home. If you have two pieces left behind enemy lines, if you can't cover them both, either try and do a run with one, or re-arrange your home for a faster clear. Always try to hit the opponent if you can (assuming your home is pretty closed up) It is possible to win a backgammon (i.e. attacking the enemy once they've started clearing their home - if your home is all blocked they can't start clearing again until you open space) but iirc the odds of it working are about one in three. Angrymog fucked around with this message at 08:16 on May 16, 2022 |
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May 16, 2022 08:13
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