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Mr.Booger posted:So my group of friends have been expanding our rpg experience and we are on a bit if an OSR/Indie run after I ran a couple years of Starfinder and two failed attempts at a 5e game (the GM running it wanted to use hot springs island because of the cool handbook and hexcrawl style, but wanted to run 5e...which was a terrible combo) Mausritter is on my shelf but I haven't played it yet. I am a big fan of Into the Odd and other assorted hacks thereof, though. I was skeptical about the auto-hit at first, too, but honestly now I don't know how I'm expected to just go back to having to-hit rolls. You might not find it quite as lethal as you expect, but your murder hobo might be in for an awakening after their first failed Critical Damage save. e: One tip for boosting survival chances: don't forget, like I did in the first fight when my group played ITO hack Cairn, that monsters also have to make the Strength save to stay conscious/fighting/alive if their HP runs out and they take Strength damage. Johnny Landmine fucked around with this message at 17:11 on Jun 29, 2022 |
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Jun 29, 2022 12:14
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Yeah, I would caution that Mausritter has the potential to be very lethal very quickly like most OSR games. Just something to keep in mind if they start getting attached to their characters. You can mitigate this a little by allowing them to retreat, not having fights be to the death on either side, creating/encouraging alternative solutions to a situation besides violence, and so on. Alternatively, embrace it and have a stable of premade back up characters, and introduce players back into the game immediately after they die. The automatic mouse generator is great for that. Edit: although honestly I don't think Mausritter is much more lethal than Mork Borg, so your group is probably fine.
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Jun 29, 2022 14:38
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My Mork Borg character lost a hand, a leg, an eye, his lower jaw, and wore a mask of hair he sewed teeth into as he thought it was magic and could protect him (it wasn't), but we only had two actual "never come back" deaths in the campaign, felt about right for our group.
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Jun 29, 2022 16:12
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Mr.Booger posted:My Mork Borg character lost a hand, a leg, an eye, his lower jaw, and wore a mask of hair he sewed teeth into as he thought it was magic and could protect him (it wasn't), but we only had two actual "never come back" deaths in the campaign, felt about right for our group. I critically failed a test to not slip on oil and the dm made me take 1d6 points of damage, rolling enough to kill me outright. We were 30 minutes into a 4 hour game and he wouldn't let me roll a new character to join back in.
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Jun 29, 2022 16:20
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Verisimilidude posted:I critically failed a test to not slip on oil and the dm made me take 1d6 points of damage, rolling enough to kill me outright. We were 30 minutes into a 4 hour game and he wouldn't let me roll a new character to join back in. Ugh, I would have some words with that GM, the whole point of dangerous/deadly games in that you can jump right back in with a new character. Hell most these games have one-click character generators for that express purpose.
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Jun 29, 2022 16:29
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Verisimilidude posted:I critically failed a test to not slip on oil and the dm made me take 1d6 points of damage, rolling enough to kill me outright. We were 30 minutes into a 4 hour game and he wouldn't let me roll a new character to join back in. So you got to hang out and play the monsters at least, right? Or was it literally 'thanks for playing'??
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Jun 29, 2022 16:53
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That sucks rear end for any game, but especially Mork Borg, where character creation is very fast and rerolling means he gets to kill you horribly again. It should be win-win
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Jun 29, 2022 17:07
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A Strange Aeon posted:So you got to hang out and play the monsters at least, right? Or was it literally 'thanks for playing'?? the second one. I even asked if I could jump back in since we use that random character generator online, but nope 
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Jun 29, 2022 18:19
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Verisimilidude posted:the second one. I even asked if I could jump back in since we use that random character generator online, but nope That is really poo poo.
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Jun 29, 2022 18:47
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Man, I'm so thankful I've never been in a situation like that. That's some total poo poo, I hope you can find a better GM.
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Jun 29, 2022 18:59
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Verisimilidude posted:the second one. I even asked if I could jump back in since we use that random character generator online, but nope That's messed up, confiscate their DMing card and report them
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Jun 29, 2022 19:24
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Should have rolled a new dude and then kept Kramering your way into scenes regardless of what the DM said.
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Jun 29, 2022 20:32
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Yeah, I was once in a 4e game that had people saying someone should throw a flag on the field and stop that guy from DMing. This is the OSR equivalent of that. The whole point of going back to high-lethality old school games is to pair it with rules where you can just sub in a new pc.
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Jun 29, 2022 20:40
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critical failure or not, how do you take 1d6 damage from a 0-foot fall? was your character an 80-year-old man?
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Jun 29, 2022 21:29
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Elephant Parade posted:critical failure or not, how do you take 1d6 damage from a 0-foot fall? was your character an 80-year-old man?
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Jun 29, 2022 21:40
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It's weird how as a kid or early teenager you maybe think that is acceptable. Like, you don't know how to run the game so you just take the bad with the good, even though the bad is so bad.
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Jun 29, 2022 21:53
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some other middle-school kid described to my longtime gaming buddy and me an RPG where you roll to see how much your hair and fingernails grow bc that affects the game. he was talking about Rolemaster, which the aforementioned friend ended up GMing for us later, and while that kid wasn't right, he wasn't wrong. every time I go down my steep back steps I think about the fact that if I were a RM PC I'd have approximately a 3% chance of dying on those stairs every time I use them.
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Jun 29, 2022 22:27
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I feel like at a certain point you realize you don't have to use dumb rules if you don't want to. Every RPG book says this but you don't really take it to heart when you're younger, even though I doubt two tables playing the same system in the history of the hobby ever actually played with the same exact rules.
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Jun 29, 2022 23:09
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Empty Sandwich posted:some other middle-school kid described to my longtime gaming buddy and me an RPG where you roll to see how much your hair and fingernails grow bc that affects the game.  rolemaster owns actuallythis table is a game system in an a4 page:  to walk down the stairs you roll percentile on the routine column, assuming you're averagely skilled you probably need to roll a 20 or higher to get 100 (or, all the way down! well done). If you roll an 01-05 you "open-end" down though! oh no, you slipped! keep rolling. If you then roll a 96-00, you open-end again! keep rolling! oh poo poo you hosed up i warned you about stairs. That starts you at ~-100, (which still means you made it a third of the way down) but you have to roll again, and assuming you get like 50 you still make it a little way down (10% of the way). So overall that's a 0.2% chance, since you have to roll a 5 in 100 chance twice in a row. However if your third roll is 96-00 again, you might end up at -200, in which case you just fail to act at all, paralyzed by the horror of your back stairs. Only if you break -201, which is (5%x5%x5%=0.001%) unlikely will you hurt yourself and that's only 3 hit points. conversely it's possible to walk down the stairs so well you actually heal yourself, which is very 4e.
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Jun 29, 2022 23:22
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that said, it's easy to have a terrible time playing it with a bad dm, like if they rule that walking down your back stairs is a medium maneuver bones start snapping around the second open-end lol I just feel compelled to stand up for it because it's a really tight game engine at its core, and the way it accommodates super unlikely events is really fun in practice.
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Jun 29, 2022 23:26
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sebmojo posted:
Thank you I now better understand what Hackmaster was mocking. If you love these charts the best system is Dungeon Crawl Classics. The charts have so much flavor you don't even need to come up with a story. Just have someone try to cast a spell and a story will emerge!
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Jun 29, 2022 23:30
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Rutibex posted:Thank you I now better understand what Hackmaster was mocking. quick wizard, cast the charm spell! (rolls a 1 on a d20) (1-4 nearby creatures randomly fall in love with each other) (wizard's head turns into a fish)
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Jun 29, 2022 23:44
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Wanna run a Rolemaster game except instead of a dungeon it’s a trip to the grocery store or night at the movies. Going to release a module called “Black Friday” as this setting’s tomb of horrors.
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Jun 29, 2022 23:53
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IIRC the primary purpose of that table is for exceeding your default movement rate in melee combat, so it's supposed to be a character trying to reach some square on the battlefield as if their life depended on it. It's an interesting way of handling tactical movement, by letting players push their luck for a bonus.
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Jun 30, 2022 00:51
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LatwPIAT posted:IIRC the primary purpose of that table is for exceeding your default movement rate in melee combat, so it's supposed to be a character trying to reach some square on the battlefield as if their life depended on it. It's an interesting way of handling tactical movement, by letting players push their luck for a bonus. we used it for everything, but yeah. while we are on OG tables, i was looking at warhammer 2e criticals and they are just incredibly brutal 
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Jun 30, 2022 01:56
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Lol the whole chart is "instant death" and you are rolling to see the brutality the mortal kombat fatality description
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Jun 30, 2022 03:41
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sebmojo posted:while we are on OG tables, i was looking at warhammer 2e criticals and they are just incredibly brutal WHFRP's criticals are a very interesting game design element because they're basically a save-vs-death when you hit at 0 HP, and the more hit points you lose the harder the save. It creates this interesting space where once hit points run out, things get extremely dangerous and you're playing as someone living on borrowed time.
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Jun 30, 2022 03:48
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Paladin posted:Wanna run a Rolemaster game except instead of a dungeon it’s a trip to the grocery store or night at the movies. You have been drinking for 12 hours straight and now need to go and get a burger.
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Jun 30, 2022 04:27
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Mode 7 posted:You have been drinking for 12 hours straight and now need to go and get a burger. 
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Jun 30, 2022 06:17
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LatwPIAT posted:WHFRP's criticals are a very interesting game design element because they're basically a save-vs-death when you hit at 0 HP, and the more hit points you lose the harder the save. It creates this interesting space where once hit points run out, things get extremely dangerous and you're playing as someone living on borrowed time.
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Jun 30, 2022 14:22
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sebmojo posted:
I only have 2 hitponts you loving philistine I think we actually played more RM than D&D. the guy who ran it for us is an accountant these days, which just makes sense. I thought I was only slightly exaggerating the math, but I'm glad I was off by a couple orders of magnitude. we did have the occasional mishap on something that in retrospect shouldn't have been a roll. the one that sticks with me isn't one of those but a critical fumble where I was so impressed with the smooth moves of a stationary golem that hadn't been activated that I was sidelined for two rounds.
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Jun 30, 2022 21:42
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sebmojo posted:that said, it's easy to have a terrible time playing it with a bad dm, like if they rule that walking down your back stairs is a medium maneuver bones start snapping around the second open-end lol Rolemaster is a solid game at its core, but there's a reason why it's often called "Rollmaster" or "Rulesmaster".
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Jun 30, 2022 22:18
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Yeah, and there's a reason why i never extol the character creation process, where you roll three sets of 10d% for actual, derived and potential stats, then each level roll for each of the 10 stats to see if it moves towards or away from your potential final stat. Or how you have to buy hit points as a skill, and spell ranks just give you a chance of learning spells, or how you are supposed to record every hp of damage given or taken, and crit given or received for experience as well as every mile traveled and a bunch of other bullshit. Combat and skill use is slick, fast and extremely flavoursome though, roll a number, add a number, look up the result. I've used it with a bunch of other systems (d&d, mage, bushido, eclipse phase) and it is always more fun than the original resolution system.
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Jun 30, 2022 22:44
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sebmojo posted:Yeah, and there's a reason why i never extol the character creation process, where you roll three sets of 10d% for actual, derived and potential stats, then each level roll for each of the 10 stats to see if it moves towards or away from your potential final stat. Or how you have to buy hit points as a skill, and spell ranks just give you a chance of learning spells, or how you are supposed to record every hp of damage given or taken, and crit given or received for experience as well as every mile traveled and a bunch of other bullshit. That reminds me of GURPS' strengths and weaknesses(as a game), honestly.
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Jul 1, 2022 00:14
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Panzeh posted:That reminds me of GURPS' strengths and weaknesses(as a game), honestly. yep. if you grew up with gurps and can see the simplicity behind the numbers it's probably amazing, if you didn't it's not. so i do get why people look at this and shudder nervously lol 
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Jul 1, 2022 01:23
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This is getting far afield but keeping track of every point of damage taken reminded me of Aces and Eights, where unless you had some medical training you couldn't tell how injured your character was, so if you got shot, it wasn't immediately obvious if it was life threatening or not a big deal. That always intrigued me but I don't know how it would actually play at table.
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Jul 1, 2022 01:31
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Unknown Armies is supposed to be run that way, with the players never seeing damage rolls directed at them. In practice it doesn't work out like that because
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Jul 1, 2022 01:51
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In OSE, variable weapon damage is an optional rule - the ‘basic’ rule is that everything dealt 1d6. Since that’s off Basic/Expert I would assume that there were very specific kinds of people who would die on the hill that a long sword had the same damage variance as a punch or a dagger. As DCC put it, rolling dice is fun, and an excuse to roll weird shaped dice, though potentially cumbersome, is also fun.
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Jul 1, 2022 04:51
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aldantefax posted:In OSE, variable weapon damage is an optional rule - the ‘basic’ rule is that everything dealt 1d6. Since that’s off Basic/Expert I would assume that there were very specific kinds of people who would die on the hill that a long sword had the same damage variance as a punch or a dagger. As DCC put it, rolling dice is fun, and an excuse to roll weird shaped dice, though potentially cumbersome, is also fun. The Black Pudding zine's house rules that weapon dice 'explode' (i.e if you roll the highest possible roll on the dice, you roll the dice again and add to the total, and roll again if you rolled maximum again, etc) best imitate to a point that, yeah, a long sword can gently caress you up but someone with a dagger who gets close enough can really gently caress you up. You get to roll the weird shaped dice AND acknowledge that a dagger isn't necessarily 'weaker' than a long sword without going into overly complicated 'sneak attack' nonsense. The house rules may be in full in the new GOZR book they've just ended the Kickstarter campaign for. sebmojo posted:quick wizard, cast the charm spell! The Dagon Dating Agency is now open!
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Jul 1, 2022 14:53
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LashLightning posted:The Black Pudding zine's house rules that weapon dice 'explode' (i.e if you roll the highest possible roll on the dice, you roll the dice again and add to the total, and roll again if you rolled maximum again, etc) best imitate to a point that, yeah, a long sword can gently caress you up but someone with a dagger who gets close enough can really gently caress you up. You get to roll the weird shaped dice AND acknowledge that a dagger isn't necessarily 'weaker' than a long sword without going into overly complicated 'sneak attack' nonsense. We tried this in a AD&D game with just weapon damage dice. Not dice from special abilities and not spell damage. Made things a little more tense and balanced stuff out with spell casters some. It was interesting, but the game didn’t last that long and was many many years ago. I would try it again. Thanks for reminding me about that. Also, I’m the Rolemaster GMing accountant mentioned above. The randomness was sometimes stupid, but also gave us many memorable stories. most of the stupid stuff was rolling for things we probably shouldn’t have, or setting a difficulty way to high or low. I used a lot of random encounters too and that led to stuff like level 2 characters having to negotiate with or evade things like dragons. I’m not anti encounter balance. But it is fun to have NPCs and monsters that the characters just can’t defeat in combat sometimes and seeing what can be done with it.
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Jul 1, 2022 15:24
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