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I saw this on the front page of drivethrurpg https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/418555/Vampiric-Pirates-of-the-Rainbow-Star-RULES-PRIMER Vampiric Pirates of the Rainbow Star  quote:The Rainbow Star is the Gothic Gay Realms’ most notorious pirate ship . . . and you are a crew member. The ship’s goal? To hunt down and rob any rogue ships from enemy nations who seek to invade, overthrow, rule over, and oppress the Gothic Gay Realms—and dissolve the Rainbow Court. Rival nations of men hate this female/queer-ruled kingdom that values love and equality for its people above all else. Those aboard the Rainbow Star have a personal vendetta against these wicked men and the oppressive nations they hail from. It led me down a rabbit hole showing this person has been putting out lots of little solitaire rpgs all taking place in "the gay realms" or variations of it like the "gothic gay realms" or the "galactic gay realms."  quote:Micro RPG It is a one-man indie small press publisher of solitaire role-playing games! My name is Noah Patterson and I am a queer and autistic designer who specializes in solitaire and cooperative tabletop role-playing games. My goal is to create simple and accessible tabletop games that can be played solo, co-op, or even in a traditional manner with a Game Master. As a genderqueer and autistic person, I try to make all of my games welcoming and inclusive for everyone. Some of the covers made me chuckle because they look relatively plain, ordinary, or like white bread, but then there's a part of the title that just throws in that it's a gay adventure or there's a tiny logo saying it's part of the gay realms. It make me interested in knowing more.    Have any of you heard of the gay realms? Can you tell me more about the gay realms?
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Dec 3, 2022 18:32
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FirstAidKite posted:Can you tell me more about the gay realms? "Dare you enter my fabulous realm?" :whizzard: As a gay dude who is really into solo games though I'm really tempted to pick one of these up on a lark.
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Dec 3, 2022 21:34
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If you do, be sure to do a trip report. Wonderful Gaiety aside, I'm always interested in hearing about solo RPGs.
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Dec 3, 2022 21:38
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FirstAidKite posted:Have any of you heard of the gay realms? Forgotten (gay) realms
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Dec 3, 2022 21:39
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I think the City of Mist guy is still doing a game about LGBT superheroes.. whose only cause is that they are LGBT. The sampler set was a bit problematic to begin with..
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Dec 3, 2022 22:08
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Gloomhaven card-based RPG confirmed. Is there a different thread where that's being discussed?
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Dec 3, 2022 22:22
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CitizenKeen posted:Gloomhaven card-based RPG confirmed. Is there a different thread where that's being discussed? I want to know more.
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Dec 3, 2022 22:38
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CitizenKeen posted:Gloomhaven card-based RPG confirmed. Is there a different thread where that's being discussed? MonsieurChoc posted:I want to know more. I got permission from the playtest coordinator to try and get some goons together for a GHRPG playtest group because of our forum's impeccable taste in RPGs. I am already in a group for this, and I am myself stretched pretty thin, but I would love to have more goon feedback and involvement in the project since it's so up our community's collective alley. Basically I could onboard you after you're all NDA'd up, but then you'd kinda be on your own (with a community of other playtesters and the authors/devs/etc, but like, I won't personally be running the game for you.) I definitely can't take everyone - but if there's a few folks who want to join in, you'd need to fit the following criteria: (1) Owning/willing to buy TTS for an online game or a ton of patience with printing out and cutting up constantly-changing cards for a non-TTS game. (If TTS - Familiarity with GH on TTS is a plus but not necessary) (2) Able to get a few people together for a playtest like once a week or so. These can be a home group OR (ideally, but harder to organize) several of you /tg folks who all decide to play together. Like 3-4 players + a GM is perfect. (3) Not a total turd, able to communicate without slurs or excessive gooniness, willing to sign and abide by the Cephalofair NDA for the project, comfortable with voice chat in a shared language, and won't ruin my good reputation for recommending you  I don't want my PMs totally wrecked, so please make sure you have an idea of a prospective group who knows they'll have the time for this before dropping me a line. No guarantees at all, of course, because I absolutely won't be able to take everyone. This isn't a race, and it's not first come first served, and if there's a few groups, I will end up picking what to recommend. Thanks  e: Oh, I expect the main Gloomhaven thread will work for now for discussion. It may need to break off later, but there's minimal news about it now other than the announcement. dwarf74 fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Dec 4, 2022 |
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Dec 4, 2022 01:50
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hyphz posted:I think the City of Mist guy is still doing a game about LGBT superheroes.. whose only cause is that they are LGBT. The sampler set was a bit problematic to begin with.. City of Mist was already a game with a strong core concept and mechanics whose actual writing made the setting smaller and worse. I can definitely see their next project also being really awkwardly hamhanded.
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Dec 4, 2022 06:29
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 Entering the gothic gay realms, brb
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Dec 4, 2022 07:09
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DalaranJ posted:Forgotten (gay) realms the ForGayMen Realms is just one of many popular settings in the iconic fantasy role-playing game Dungeons & Drag
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Dec 4, 2022 08:30
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Well, given that the Rainbow Court is willing to fund an entire ship of anthropophagic murderers to harass their shipping lanes, maybe the rival nations of men have a point here.
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Dec 4, 2022 14:53
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Ratoslov posted:Well, given that the Rainbow Court is willing to fund an entire ship of anthropophagic murderers to harass their shipping lanes, maybe the rival nations of men have a point here. Nah mate they're just doing what all countries and nations did during the age of exploration and trade. Give letters of marque to allow pirates to engage in "legal" piracy so long as they aren't attacking the government that gave them the letter. Privateering's a lucrative trade and the straights are not okay. 
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Dec 4, 2022 18:03
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With the Essence20 release for Transformer not exactly setting the world on fire, what are the best games for Transformers? There is Cartoon Action Hour Season 3, as a possibility, if you wanted to do G1. Speaking of which, is there any equivalent for CAH for 90s cartoons? There is a pretty okay Genesys hack I saw once. An argument can also be made for Cortex. Other than that, I'm stumped. My favorite Transformers series are the IDW 2005 series (mainly Phase 2 onwards), Beast Wars, Transformers Animated, Transformers Armada, and Transformers Prime. I want a series that handles the themes and gimmicks of Transformers. The episodic stories that bleed well into a background, serialized plot. Mechanics to handle the utility of the Transformations. The "buy new toys" element modeled as a way of handling new characters coming and going. Less emphasis on tactical combat and more on narrative combat. In essence, I don't just want a game that is just like "here is some simulationist rules, have fun." I want something that tries to ape the tone and feel of the franchise. Any suggestions?
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Dec 6, 2022 04:23
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Gobbeldygook posted:No. I just copy/pasted my prompt in again and got a "I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that" answer, so I pressed the try again button and it spit out a character sheet like it did before. Looks like the AI sometimes wanders down paths that get it to a populated sheet and sometimes you get a blank sheet and sometimes it just can't do it. I'm getting partials for a Paranoia sheet, sometimes, but it built me a dwarf rat-catcher in WFRPG the first try. I'm not sure if these are actually valid characters, mind you. I suspect it may be grabbing a bunch of sheets people have put online and then trying to fill them out based on randomly-selected values for the various attributes. It built me a (Human Scout) Traveler 5 character on the second try, but I'm very skeptical that it actually went through the chargen process...
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Dec 6, 2022 07:24
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Covok posted:Any suggestions? There's a couple out there like Commandroids from Nerdy City but most of the games out there I've come across try to replicate the 80's style more than anything else, which is kind of a shame. I'd love something more along the lines of the MTMTE stuff as well. Also an RPG for Gargoyles.
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Dec 6, 2022 15:00
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Leperflesh posted:Looks like the AI sometimes wanders down paths that get it to a populated sheet and sometimes you get a blank sheet and sometimes it just can't do it. I'm getting partials for a Paranoia sheet, sometimes, but it built me a dwarf rat-catcher in WFRPG the first try.
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Dec 6, 2022 15:57
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Covok posted:Any suggestions? https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/63037/Origin-of-the-Species-Transmechs-Revised 
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Dec 6, 2022 16:36
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When someone is making a zine or just any kind of small scale rpg, how do they usually go about developing the rules? Like, is it more common to just copy and heavily edit a different ruleset or do they just fill in rules and mechanics as they need them? I'm having trouble getting past "ideas for game mechanics and gameplay and concepts" to "actual documented rules and explanations."
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Dec 6, 2022 18:41
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I don't know about other people but Vincent "The Other Apocalypse World Author" Baker wrote an eight-part series on it: https://lumpley.games/2019/12/30/powered-by-the-apocalypse-part-1/ Tl;dr: Put down some ideas and playtest and repeat.
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Dec 6, 2022 18:47
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FirstAidKite posted:When someone is making a zine or just any kind of small scale rpg, how do they usually go about developing the rules? Like, is it more common to just copy and heavily edit a different ruleset or do they just fill in rules and mechanics as they need them? I'm having trouble getting past "ideas for game mechanics and gameplay and concepts" to "actual documented rules and explanations." The first path is probably why many of the zines made today are OSR derived, as it supplies an existing rules framework that handles getting trimmed down to even rather extreme degrees quite well
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Dec 6, 2022 19:00
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Nessus posted:Are these mostly from older rules systems? There were a ton of pre-web-2.0 fan sites and chat sheet write ups. Hell I don't know. The AI is trained on a huge data set and that data set definitely includes (maybe mostly or entirely is) just loads and loads of websites.
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Dec 6, 2022 19:46
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drrockso20 posted:The first path is probably why many of the zines made today are OSR derived, as it supplies an existing rules framework that handles getting trimmed down to even rather extreme degrees quite well
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Dec 6, 2022 19:57
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Siivola posted:Can you elaborate? I'm sitting here trying to imagine what a stripped down OSR game looks like and it's just an attack roll followed by a damage roll and I guess yeah that... functions, assuming a monster. Don't even need an attack roll, Into the Odd skips it and still has a decent combat system.
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Dec 6, 2022 19:58
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SkyeAuroline posted:Don't even need an attack roll, Into the Odd skips it and still has a decent combat system.
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Dec 6, 2022 20:00
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dwarf74 posted:Gloomhaven RPG Speaking of, I'm involved in that too (vaguely, not as much as dwarf), so feel free to shoot me a PM. I'm waiting on stuff to work through logistical pipes (e.g. the rules), but eventually I was gonna organize some kind of game and I'm not opposed to it being a goon game.
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Dec 6, 2022 20:01
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Siivola posted:Well obviously, that's strictly better than rolling twice to resolve an attack. I wish all devs had to write an essay on why they insist on keeping both in in tyool 2023. Some players consider rolling dice to be gameplay. They are not happy if the DM tells them their character was competent enough to succeed at a task without rolling, because they were robbed of a chance to "actually play". I strongly suspect most game designers are not interested in designing systems. They want to do as little work as possible on the mechanical side to get something that supports the setting and content they are much more interested in creating. That means grabbing the game system that's closest to what they want and modifying it to fit their premise. Most of these don't have auto hit, and adding it would mean painstaking redesign of legacy systems built on the aforementioned mechanical tradeoff between accuracy and power, evasion and armor. I recall that Nightmares Underneath has a good implementation, where the fightman class automatically deals damage on an attack action, but still rolls to hit in order to obtain a bonus if they defeat the target's AC. This is a nice way to make the fighter less lovely to play (roll a D20, miss and waste your turn, wait five minutes before you get to do it again) without having to toss the entire attack roll versus AC system that makes it compatible with other games in the genre.
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Dec 6, 2022 20:44
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Okay. So why roll for damage then?
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Dec 6, 2022 20:54
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Siivola posted:Okay. At it's simplest: if you are rolling to attack, but not rolling for damage, you have less flexibility in creating a particular damage output curve. To compare two examples: System A: I roll 2d10. I hit on X or higher. At X, I do minimum damage, but for higher values I do more damage, to a maximum applied on a roll of natural 20 (or to a maximum of X+n, depending on how we structure this). System B: I roll 2d10. I hit on X or higher. Then I roll 3d4 for damage. In both systems, X is a variable, not an absolutely fixed number. In System A, it's difficult to create a bell-curve-shaped damage output. Misses do no damage, but depending on how hard it was to hit, you may be capping damage; or, you may be forced to implement a very linear damage output (damage = die result + Y?) In system B, you automatically have a flexible hit/miss roll without interfering with your smooth bell curve of damage outputs. Neither of these systems is inherently "better" on the face of it; but depending on what you are trying to do with your combat system, the second can offer a very straightforward answer. Lastly, nothing is stopping players from rolling both attack and damage dice at the same time in System B, so it doesn't have to take more time; it's just more complicated, perhaps. Or perhaps not, depending on how much complexity is attached to System A to make it fit for purpose.
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Dec 6, 2022 21:01
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mellonbread posted:I strongly suspect most game designers are not interested in designing systems. They want to do as little work as possible on the mechanical side to get something that supports the setting and content they are much more interested in creating. That means grabbing the game system that's closest to what they want and modifying it to fit their premise. Most of these don't have auto hit, and adding it would mean painstaking redesign of legacy systems built on the aforementioned mechanical tradeoff between accuracy and power, evasion and armor. Even being interested in the design… where are you going to learn how to do it? Where are you going to learn what can and cannot and should and should not be done, what pulling the various levers on design actually does? It’s not like there’s a big and easily accessibly body of knowledge that can tell you that. There’s no book of best practices, and if there is, you can’t be sure whether it was written by someone competent or an idiot: worse yet, you probably couldn’t tell the difference. The TTRPG design hobby is woefully poor at retaining any kind of wisdom or knowledge, leaving each prospective design to rediscover every lesson at their own pace.
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Dec 6, 2022 21:01
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Leperflesh posted:At it's simplest: if you are rolling to attack, but not rolling for damage, you have less flexibility in creating a particular damage output curve. But yeah all this is valid design, even if I personally find it completely pointless. I just want the actual devs to stand up and say "I'm just doing this to make you touch dice". Unironical shoutouts to Kevin Crawford for admitting he builds everything on an OSR framework to avoid having to do so much playtesting. Leperflesh posted:Lastly, nothing is stopping players from rolling both attack and damage dice at the same time in System B, so it doesn't have to take more time; it's just more complicated, perhaps. Or perhaps not, depending on how much complexity is attached to System A to make it fit for purpose.
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Dec 6, 2022 21:24
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Siivola posted:Okay. Fixed damage: I feel like I'm seeing this more often in games as an alternative to two rolls. The new Rivers of London RPG is built on a simplified BRP that uses this, with modifiers based on exceptional die results. You could convert almost any game that uses variable damage to fixed damage by just giving every weapon the average output of its dice. I think D&D already provides this option this with monster stat blocks, giving average damage output for attacks that use a lot of dice. This is an easy change to make but I never hear about people actually playing this way, so it doesn't sound like there's a lot of demand for it. Attack roll determines damage: works great if HP and damage scaling are roughly pegged to the die you're using. IE in Unknown Armies your damage is usually the sum of the two dice in your d100 roll-to-hit, so you're talking about 11 average damage versus a base HP of 50. The FFG Star Wars and FFG 40K RPGs use a combination of margin of success on roll to hit, character stats, and weapon specific damage values to produce a total. In my experience with these games, the downside is that converting margin-of-success into bonus damage according to whatever formula the the weapon uses occupies more table time than just rolling a separate damage die would. I don't feel that a single person rolling two dice to resolve one attack is actually that much of a problem. When I used to do PFS most players would just roll their to-hit and damage dice in the same handful.
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Dec 6, 2022 21:26
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mellonbread posted:
I'd build on this and say that a lot of game design is not trying to make new games but modifying existing games. I've spent very little time trying to make novel games, I've spent a lot of time trying to beat WOD into playability. And TBH I think this is not surprising or exceptional: in video games people put A Lot of uncompensated time into making free mods for existing games.
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Dec 6, 2022 21:30
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Siivola posted:Can you elaborate? I'm sitting here trying to imagine what a stripped down OSR game looks like and it's just an attack roll followed by a damage roll and I guess yeah that... functions, assuming a monster. Look up Knave and Cairn for two good examples of this sort of thing, though honestly much of the time when it comes to OSR zines they instead tend to work off the assumption that the person using the zine will already have an OSR system of their preference to use it with and will then instead focus their page count on specific content rather than cramming a whole condensed system into their pages, and it generally works since OSR systems are generally all broadly compatible with each other(and even the less compatible "cousins" like Dungeon Crawl Classics and Mork Borg have enough broad similarities to the OSR standard that converting isn't that huge of an issue)
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Dec 6, 2022 22:31
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Siivola posted:I’m sure you can guess my next question: Why does this hypothetical game need a damage curve? You don’t have to answer, I'll just keep repeating "but why". OK I can see where this is going, so I'll get to the root of a lot of my design thinking. IMO games at the mechanical level are about making meaningful choices. Having separated attack and damage gives the designer the opportunity to give players meaningful choices on multiple axes that relate to and affect each other. For example, choices that affect ability to land a hit, and different choices that affect how much damage a hit can do, and perhaps also choices about adding defense vs. attacks and defense vs. damage. At its simplest and most reductive, all combat encounters could be reduced to a single die roll. That is fine if that's the game the designer wants. If the designer wants more choices to be made, more interactions, more "strategy" for want of a better word, giving players more levers to pull and dials to turn can help with that. A caveat is that meaningful choices are different than just "choices." If there's one obviously best choice, that's not meaningful; and if the results of choices are arbitrary, the choice wasn't actually meaningful either. A good design with multiple factors needs to have more than one locus of optimization, not just rely on hidden information to obscure what that locus might be. If it's always best to power attack with a greatsword, or best often enough that this is the optimal character design, then having two rolls for attack and damage is just creating variance without giving players "game" to engage with. You can increase the variance of drawing from a deck of cards by having more cards in the deck, but that doesn't make randomly drawing cards from a deck more fun or interesting. So in conclusion: rolling separately for attack and for damage is using two mechanisms instead of one, which may or may not serve a design purpose that revolves around a principle of offering meaningful choices in a game, of the right amount and nature to serve design goals.
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Dec 6, 2022 22:33
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FirstAidKite posted:When someone is making a zine or just any kind of small scale rpg, how do they usually go about developing the rules? Like, is it more common to just copy and heavily edit a different ruleset or do they just fill in rules and mechanics as they need them? I'm having trouble getting past "ideas for game mechanics and gameplay and concepts" to "actual documented rules and explanations." The design discussion is interesting, but I'm guessing the much more usual process is to just guess and not care, since the majority of buyers will only read the book anyway, and even flawed designs are forgiven once someone's committed - witness the Troika love in spite of the horribly broken initiative system.
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Dec 6, 2022 23:18
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Most RPG books will never be played, they'll be read once and put on a shelf because they look cool. Zines and pamphlet games are a more efficient execution of the same concept, delivering aesthetic perfection without a big expensive book. Mork Borg, Mothership, Electric Bastionland... Award winning works of art whose actual mechanics top out at "okay".
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Dec 7, 2022 00:09
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On that subject, has anyone here played Into the Odd? I got the new edition off KS, having heard good things, and I can't get a read on it. It seems kind of minimalist about everything, in a way I wasn't expecting for the fluff given how heavily hyped the flavor was. I guess it's evocative?
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Dec 7, 2022 00:12
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Anyone know a good way of streaming rpg-like music into discord during sessions? Apparently google killed off a bunch of discord music bots
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Dec 7, 2022 01:07
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mila kunis posted:Anyone know a good way of streaming rpg-like music into discord during sessions? Apparently google killed off a bunch of discord music bots discord added a "watch together" feature, you can put on a youtube playlist with music and just have everyone join that to simulwatch/listen. you can access it by clicking the little rocket ship icon ("start an activity"): 
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Dec 7, 2022 01:11
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