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Kwyndig posted:Or hang out in the ship's bar might work better. "You need to pay 3 extra energy credits due to damage sustained to 10 forward"
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Mar 9, 2022 21:11
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Azhais posted:"You need to pay 3 extra energy credits due to damage sustained to 10 forward" "10 Forward is now only accessible through EVA"
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Mar 9, 2022 21:13
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Yeah despite its name, the Carousing segment is really important and not just about spending all your gold on ale and whores. But you could totally have an analogue for e.g. star trek, when the ship puts in at space dock for a month of retrofits and shore leave and crew have the opportunity to go home and visit family, get involved in drama, have their social standing elevated or radically cut, restock on personal and mission supplies, visit with their sorcery demonic patron to receive severe punishment for failing to burn the still-warm heart of an innocent child upon their altar as demanded, have a costly tryst, be featured in the Space News and have their Renown increased, attend a local festival, get promoted, or get some new borg implants. To be slightly more clear: after each adventure, upkeep is paid, which is higher for higher standing but lower for higher renown; xp is spent (for example to advance ranks in a talent); ammo, food, and basic items replenished; and then characters can spend any extra gold they have on carousing activities, which includes shopping for new items, gambling, gathering rumors, recovering wounds and traumas, cultivating renown, or receiving a title. Then, regardless of which of these things the characters did, every character rolls on the carousing table, which ranges from really good stuff if you roll low, to really bad stuff if you roll high. Al lot of the "stuff" on the table includes some mechanical benefit or drawback, but all of them also have a prompt that can amount to a little off-screen adventure... nothing the player/gm have to really play out, but often the player needs to make a choice, and often a thread is left open to become part of the next or a future adventure if desired.
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Mar 10, 2022 01:49
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Leperflesh posted:visit with their sorcery demonic patron to receive severe punishment for failing to burn the still-warm heart of an innocent child upon their altar as demanded Hey now, what happens on Risa stays on Risa.
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Mar 10, 2022 02:15
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CitizenKeen posted:Hey now, what happens on Risa stays on Risa. Is that why Picard didn't want to do Jamharon with that lady?
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Mar 10, 2022 03:06
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Three sessions into Dune 2d20, I can say the skirmish battle rules (any combat with more than two participants) are much weaker than the ones for one on one duels. You still get the varied movement types, trait creation minigame, and the momentum system, but it's all layered over a combat engine that plays like every other RPG battle system you've ever played. You move into contact with the enemy, roll to hit, and the target maybe gets a defensive roll to negate the damage. You don't have HP, except you actually do, because defeating you in combat requires the enemy to accumulate successful hits equal to your most relevant skill. One of the players articulated quite well why it doesn't fit in with the rest of the game. Normally in Dune 2d20 a single die roll is a big deal. You negotiate which drive and skill to use, which traits might be in play, whether any of your special powers enter the equation, and how much metacurrency to spend. The inputs and outputs of the die roll have narrative weight. Meanwhile in the skirmish battle mode, you have a full table of players and a stable of NPCs making a sequence of very similar die rolls in a round robin. It feels less like 2d20 and more like, well, d20. Like a standard fantasy brawler with lots of rolling to hit and chipping away at HP. It's an interesting reversal of the usual RPG paradigm. In so many other games, the combat rules are the most functional and interesting part of the system, with everything else as an afterthought. Whereas Dune has quite good rules for bargaining with NPCs, blackmailing people, "locking in" bargains with ironclad mechanical guarantees, introducing interesting narrative twists using the point economy... I'm interested to see how well the "mass battle" rules hold up. I can already see some problems with keeping all the players engaged in an exercise that essentially boils down to moving pieces around on a board. It isn't like Star Trek where you can put one character on weapons, another on steering, a third on communications or shields, etc. One solution could be to have each player command a unit of troops, with the assumption that any relevant skills or powers they have could buff the performance of the soldiers. This means writing my own mechanics, since the corebook doesn't have much to say about the possibility of player characters directly intervening in a force on force battle. But I've already resigned myself to adjudicating situations the corebook doesn't cover, like the aforementioned overlap between NPCs as assets vs NPCs as supporting characters, or the nebulously defined "adventure" that determines the rate at which Threat decays and refreshes. The publisher has released a ton of physical peripherals for Dune 2d20. GM and player notebooks, special edition dice, multiple collector's editions of the rules and adventure books. One thing that would help a lot is a set of cards or tokens to represent assets. Whether in a hand to hand fight, multi character brawl, intrigue battle, espionage or all out war, Dune's conflict system is driven by the positioning of assets in zones. A set of cards that you could toss on your chessex grid to quickly show where the crysknife or the double agent was located, along with image files for those cards that could be loaded into a VTT, would be a massive value add. E: I was browsing the store page and they do actually have asset cards in the upcoming beginner box. I just missed it because their main Dune page doesn't list all the upcoming products. I'm really looking forward to the House management splat that Nightmares mentioned. I realize that adventures on Arrakis are the thing most people who play a game with Dune in the name are interested in, but I find House creation and Wars of Assassins much more stimulating. Take a look at the glossary in the back of the first Dune book and you'll find implications of a much broader world than ever got explored in the following novels, even books 5 and 6 which finally got away from Arrakis as the center of all the action. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Apr 4, 2022 |
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Apr 4, 2022 22:44
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Finished up the fourth session of Dune 2d20. This transition definitely qualifies as the end of the "adventure" although mechanically all this means is that threat resets to the default for the Noble House and number of players. We didn't get much use out of the rules for espionage/intrigue "conflicts" because those activities already fit naturally into the flow of play. Breaking out a separate subsystem and using different mechanics would just break the flow and make it harder to involve all the players once the focus shifted to moving assets around the board. If any of the players had invested character generation resources in feats that functioned in these specific minigames we aren't using, this could be a real issue. Since nobody seems to have built their character on that assumption, it's just an interesting side note. If you want your NPCs to be a danger to the players in conflicts, they need threat to spend. Their default two dice are unlikely to penetrate the players' defenses, especially given that most characters in Dune are walking around with defensive assets that increase the target number on the opposed roll. Easiest way to build up threat if the tank is empty is put an "officer" or "cheerleader" character on the back line, who does difficulty 0 actions every turn and converts the successes to threat that the other enemies can spend. If you're feeling really nasty you can give that guy the "Direct" feat that lets him immediately give another character an action after acting himself, so that one of the NPCs can spend that threat doing something nasty. This type of back line buffer is a priority target for the player characters, which in-turn makes the movement and zone rules more relevant. The trait/asset creation/destruction minigame gets more important the more moving parts you introduce to a conflict, giving the characters reason to do things besides just attack the target every round. One thing I'm not clear on is whether task difficulty is meant to be public information, or kept vague/hidden from the players. I find that revealing it publicly makes the players more likely to spend metacurrency/increase threat in order to succeed on higher difficulty rolls. Though hypothetically it could have the opposite effect, with players knowing a task is trivial and declining to spend resources on it.
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Apr 11, 2022 06:28
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One more thing we have to talk about is the use of lasguns. In the world of Dune, if you shoot a personal shield with a lasgun, it causes a nuclear explosion that kills both the firer and target. This is an extremely cheap and easy way to annihilate terrain and forces, by simply smuggling an ersatz nuke near the target. You could put a clockwork timer on it (an allowable technology according to the glossary at the end of the first novel) and leave it somewhere, or you could send a suicide bomber to use it. Dune has no shortage of suicide troops - the Atreides send men on a suicide raid to destroy the Baron's spice reserves on Giedi Prime, the Baron leaves suicide troops in Arrakeen to mess with the Atreides, the Sardaukar are described as suicidally brave in battle, and the Fremen give no fucks about dying for the dream of Liet. The 2d20 book addresses this by telling the GM and players that causing a lasgun shield explosion is an instant game over. If they aren't incinerated by the blast, the players will be hunted down by the Landsraad and their Noble House dismantled. They lose the game, out of character. There are a couple problems with this approach. First, there are many people in the Imperium who aren't members of a Noble House. The most obvious are the Fremen, which the book includes as a playable character template. To that we can add criminals, slave rebellions, and other people with "nothing to lose". These people have zero reason to care about the ban on Lasguns since the Empire is already hunting them anyway. Even if the players don't fit this description, the game world is full of people who do. Second, even if the players have no intention of causing a nuclear blast, they (and everyone else) have the ability to threaten such an explosion if they're ever cornered. Just spend a couple momentum to pull out a hidden laspistol and swear to God you'll do it. Sure, your House will be dismantled if you actually go through with the threat. But that will be someone else's problem, because you and everyone in earshot of the threat will be a smear of radioactive glass. This is a fun narrative device the first time it happens. Both sides establish that they can instantly nuke everyone in the room, so they have to resolve their dispute through negotiation rather than battle. I can't imagine it'll be fun if it keeps happening, since Dune is a setting where we expect swordfights and various other types of combat besides mutual nuclear annihilation. The obvious solution is to make lasguns a lot rarer. The 2d20 book calls them the most common ranged weapon in the Imperium, which is absolutely not true. The first novel makes it quite clear that they're reserved for specially trained and unquestionably loyal elite troops, who can be trusted not to blow everyone up. Lasguns don't become ubiquitous until the time of Leto's Peace, when the Tyrant bans shields across the Empire, allowing him to equip the Fish Speakers with large numbers of lasguns without fear.
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Apr 11, 2022 18:24
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I think that's the sort of thing I'd have a serious OOC discussion with my players about, with the goal of either retconning the setting so that easy cheap suicide nukes just aren't an option, or establishing ground rules for in-play threats and use intended to prevent it from becoming a recurring theme. Because, frankly, it's a dumb mechanism and it was an error on Herbert's part to begin with. Real world experience tells us that human beings at a governmental level might be able to resist mutually-assured destruction (the jury is still out on that one), but humans at a personal level definitely don't. Unless you postualte a psychological shift in human nature - which you could, as part of that OOC discussion - it's going to feel "unrealistic" how every desperate person with a lasgun decides to be coolly-rational instead of, well... you know. Human. It also beggars belief that the makers of personal shield technology would not either solve the whole nuclear bomb issue (they've had centuries to do so, right?), or abandon the technology. I have no qualms about correcting Howard's errors in Conan whenever I come across them, and I think it's a thing any of us should do when working within pre-established settings.
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Apr 11, 2022 18:33
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The other part of the problem is who's to say which side pulled the trigger when all you've got left is a crater
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Apr 11, 2022 19:08
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To be clear too according to the book a lasgun hitting a shield might cause an explosion, but it also might just do nothing or kill the shooter.
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Apr 11, 2022 19:25
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The minimum shield-lasgun interaction described in the books annihilates both the shooter and the shield-user. The maximum is kerblammo. As far as I recall, nobody ever actually shoots a shield with a lasgun in the Frank Herbert books. The threat it represents is apparently enough of a deterrent.
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Apr 11, 2022 22:16
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Mirage posted:The minimum shield-lasgun interaction described in the books annihilates both the shooter and the shield-user. The maximum is kerblammo. neaden posted:To be clear too according to the book a lasgun hitting a shield might cause an explosion, but it also might just do nothing or kill the shooter. In Chapterhouse Dune, the lasgun shield explosion is treated as a guaranteed nuclear blast. Miles Teg uses shielded decoys to nuke the lasgun armed forces of the approaching Honored Matres. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Apr 12, 2022 |
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Apr 11, 2022 22:51
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Has anybody got Achtung! Cthulhu to the table? Thoughts? The only thing I like less than WWII is the Lovecraft mythos, but I picked it up and it may be the best version of the 2d20 system I’ve seen yet.
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Apr 16, 2022 03:17
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Ok it gets even better. The lore section of the book says that a lasgun shield interaction is an instant game over for the players, even if they don't die in the blast. But the description of the lasgun in the asset listing says that threatening to cause a nuclear explosion is a completely valid use of the weapon. They tried to write a Dune game and accidentally wrote Iron Sunrise instead.
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Apr 20, 2022 21:38
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https://www.polygon.com/tabletop-games/23036437/cohors-cthulhu-tabletop-rpg-wargame-modiphius-announcement-release-date-price I’m pretty over the Mythos, but a new line is a new line. In other news: I’m looking over the Modiphius sale on the discontinued Mutant Chronicles. Any books worth picking up to grab for mechanics for other 2d20 games? I don’t care about the setting but would love to rob any crunchy bits.
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Apr 25, 2022 02:52
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Newsletter from Modiphius says SRD, DriveThru sales, and ability to sell through some of their licenses/IPs is coming.
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Apr 25, 2022 23:19
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CitizenKeen posted:https://www.polygon.com/tabletop-games/23036437/cohors-cthulhu-tabletop-rpg-wargame-modiphius-announcement-release-date-price There is a lot going on in the Cohors Cthulhu announcement and in my view Modiphius buried the lead. https://www.modiphius.net/pages/cohors-cthulhu At the very bottom before the teaser video it says... quote:-A cinematic RPG driven by the 2d20 system also seen in Modiphius’ Dune, Star Trek Adventures, Dishonored, and Fallout roleplaying games. This is based on the Achtung! Cthulhu edition of 2d20 and will feature systems to help you get playing the moment you open the book. Now if there is going to be a wargame, narrative or not, I wonder how much of the "personal horror" that other Mythos derived lines focus on will be lost. Maybe the 2d20 system will be built around cosmic horror, maybe it will be more pulp adventure. Given the Modiphius blurb says "A cinematic RPG" and basing it on the Achtung! Cthulhu 2d20 chassis I think it will be more of a pulp adventure game than a gripping story of personal/cosmic horror. But there is ample space in the roleplaying ecosystem for that.
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May 1, 2022 05:05
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I can’t imagine COHORS Cthulhu being anything other than pulp horror.
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May 1, 2022 05:19
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Conan havers: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/u/0/d/1r5-cMpFL7YrLmcaJ5nrx4xqH89_9BO5QTuvAl6FmMgA/htmlview Someone has a big spreadsheet that indexes where to find every talent, spell, archetype, foe, weapon, and armor in all the books
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May 5, 2022 21:33
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Fantastic! I partially built something like that by doing it for every character in a recent game, but it was a huge pain in the rear end. Especially annoying that the online character builder itself doesn't tell you which source each talent etc. came from.
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May 5, 2022 21:37
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Wrapped up the last session of Dune 2d20. We'd been hemorrhaging players for a month and I decided to rip the bandaid off rather than kick the can down the road. The two remaining players were the ones least experienced with the system, and they really struggled for the first hour or so. If you don't know how to manipulate the game's economy you can get stuck in a downward spiral, unable to achieve the successes necessary to generate the momentum to succeed on further tests. Indie Game Club's Band of Blades Postmortem had a good discussion on the challenges of reminding players what all their mechanical choices in a given situation are, without outright quarterbacking them through the whole game. What helped in the end was being very explicit about why the NPCs were making the choices they were. Eg "He's going to take an observe action and get some free Threat with a DC 0 test", or "This guy knows he can't beat you head on, so he'll try a DC 2 test to create a trait that lowers the difficulty". Since NPCs largely use threat the same way the players use momentum, those examples helped them understand the options available to them. I was correct in foreseeing a couple issues with the "warfare" version of the game's conflict rules. Moving squads around the battlefield is basically a one player affair for whoever has the highest battle skill, with the other players offering advice where they can. I don't think this is a huge deal, the duel minigame is similarly a one player affair. But it leads directly into my second problem. The game has no rules for what happens when player characters take to the battlefield - other than providing a small buff to the move actions of the unit they are attached to. This is a glaring omission in a setting where lone badasses with superhuman abilities (The Voice, Ginaz Swordmastery, Honored Matre Martial Arts, the list goes on) regularly take on a dozen combatants and win. We ended up declaring that individual characters could not attack and damage units of soldiers, unless they had a trait or asset that let them fight a whole roomful of people. They could use special powers, like buffing units and distributing bonus actions, and could otherwise do everything a character could do My overall impression of Dune 2d20 is that if you want to run a Dune RPG, it's worth using this game rather than hacking another system. I could say a lot of nice things about it, and I'd have to counterbalance them all with things that were poorly thought out, or poorly explained, or still don't make sense after running half a dozen sessions.
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May 22, 2022 23:16
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mellonbread posted:I could say a lot of nice things about it, and I'd have to counterbalance them all with things that were poorly thought out, or poorly explained, or still don't make sense after running half a dozen sessions. I feel this is accurate for every 2d20 setting I've read so far
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May 22, 2022 23:29
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Azhais posted:I feel this is accurate for every 2d20 setting I've read so far The best example I can think of is trait creation. In most circumstances, creating a trait is a straightforward 2 momentum spend. In the conflict minigame, it's a difficulty 2 skill test. But if you are trying to force that trait onto a hostile character in the conflict minigame, it's an opposed test, with a DC determined by whatever your opponent rolls on their skill check. That last mechanic is not explained anywhere in the book, it appears in the example of conflict the devs posted on the Dune 2d20 blog. I am suspicious that the rules author did not explain this special case because it was obvious to them from their experience with prior 2d20 games.
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May 22, 2022 23:51
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2d20 Day, with SRD and sale, next week. https://www.modiphius.net/pages/2d20
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Jul 13, 2022 22:16
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SRD is up. https://www.modiphius.net/pages/2d20
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Jul 20, 2022 15:01
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Yup and a 20% off sale.
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Jul 21, 2022 00:59
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Anybody else in the COHORS Cthulhu playtest? I really like what I see so far.
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Aug 10, 2022 20:39
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CitizenKeen posted:Anybody else in the COHORS Cthulhu playtest? I really like what I see so far. What are you seeing that you like, that you can talk about? I'm already halfway down to purchasing it sight unseen because it is Cthulhu vs the Ancient World peoples rpg with supposedly a wargame on the way and STL files for both sides if I am remembering right.
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Aug 11, 2022 00:04
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Maybe this is why the 2d20 Homeworld book was a little light on fleet style stuff, perhaps they want to say "If you want to do these types of battles, see our Miniatures Game.. CROWDFUNDING NOVEMBER 2022 HOMEWORLD: FLEET COMMAND - BRINGING EPIC GALACTIC BATTLES TO THE TABLETOP! Announcing Homeworld: Fleet Command, a new tabletop miniatures boardgame set in Gearbox Entertainment’s Homeworld Universe! Homeworld: Fleet Command puts would-be admirals in charge of Kushan or Taiidan fleets fighting it out in epic 1-4 player galactic battles where it’s victory or death! Inspired by the mechanics of the Airfix Battles Introductory Wargame, Homeworld Fleet Command promises simple fast gameplay showcasing huge battles between squadrons of fighters, corvettes, frigates, destroyers, and fleet-busting capital ships. We're planning to launch a crowdfunding campaign in November 2022 where backers can expect to get the base game and expansion that offers new ship models, campaign play, ship upgrades, new game mechanics, and much more. Homeworld: Fleet Command is an incredibly intense head to head battle of strategy that includes: A 10-part campaign that will take players from the first fighter skirmish to epic battles such as Return to Kharak, Supernova Station, and Tenhauser Gate. Step-by-step scenarios that make it easy to jump right into the shoes of an Admiral and gradually learn the core game mechanics as the size of your fleet increases. 101 plastic ships in the base game including the iconic Mothership, 48 fighters, 24 Corvettes, 24 Frigates, 2 Carriers, and 2 Destroyers and 1 mothership. The expansion adds another 100 ships to grow your fleet. Solo rules that let one person play either side against a determined opponent or up to four players can share the command.
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Aug 24, 2022 22:55
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Check your email: their new sci-fi IP is in playtest.
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Aug 26, 2022 01:15
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Does the Fallout 2d20 have any guidance for taking a city/region and developing a post apocalyptic version of it? I want to check out the game but I don't have any interest in the Fallout 4 setting.
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Sep 28, 2022 19:58
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mellonbread posted:Does the Fallout 2d20 have any guidance for taking a city/region and developing a post apocalyptic version of it? I want to check out the game but I don't have any interest in the Fallout 4 setting. I can't speak to Fallout 2d20 having any ideas for making your own post apocalypse, because I haven't read it. However, Modiphius' other post apocalyptic offering Mutant Year Zero has chapters 11-15 devoted to ideas and tables for populating your own post apocalyptic Zone map.
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Sep 29, 2022 23:39
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https://www.modiphius.net/blogs/news/conan-license-update Modiphius loses Conan license. Monolith is going to make a new RPG?
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Dec 2, 2022 17:49
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Yeah, I'm trying to decide how important it is for me to have the last few Conan books I don't own. Do I grab them at full price before the year ends, or do I look for them on the secondary market in the coming years?
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Dec 2, 2022 17:51
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If it's gonna anything like the splats for FFG Star Wars, if you have a single completionism bone in your body, get them now. I mean with those fortunately we're getting the Edge Studios reprints at great length, but still.
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Dec 2, 2022 18:00
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I still think backing the all PDFs version of the Conan rpg is kickstarter is one of my better gaming purchases ever.
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Dec 2, 2022 22:28
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Same. I basically got drat near everything they made for it, for an insanely low price. I also have the Monolith board game, and while it has a lot of stuff I like, the first adventure is so difficult that my game group never beat it so we kind of burned on the game which is a big shame since I spent hundreds of dollars on it. Plus it had a damsel in distress as the focus of that scenario who is literally an item you carry around, instead of an actual character, and that was a big turn-off. I feel like Modiphius was much more sensitive to the need to update Conan to excise the massively sexist & racist bits, as best they could while still having some faithfulness to the original Howard stories and setting. Maybe Monolith plans to just do a 2.0 to the rules somehow. If they did that, I'd be pretty happy. I don't know if they'd be allowed to re-use 2d20 since it's Modiphius' iconic RPG mechanic though. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Dec 2, 2022 |
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Dec 2, 2022 22:43
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I do appreciate the sidebar in the beginning of the Africa source book that is basically "Hey guys, we did what we could"
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Dec 2, 2022 23:21
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Wonder if they'll do what they did with mutant chronicles and firesale the pdfs?
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Dec 3, 2022 19:13
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