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Found this cool song about dwarves. Figured I'd share it here for you guys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm96Cqu4Ils
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Feb 23, 2023 14:43
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Tulip posted:I honestly really like how magic works in Wicked Ones, which is actually pretty close to "magic can do anything." But kind of similar to what Leperflesh was saying, magic in total has that ability, but no one magic caster can do all possible things that magic allows,
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Feb 23, 2023 16:39
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Splicer posted:In the "You're a necromancer, you can't shoot fireballs" way or the "you can only learn X spells but there's no limit on which X"? It's a FITD which is to say a PBTA game which is to say that spells aren't quite so discrete. The limits would be more like "pyromancy cannot affect things that aren't already flammable" and "enchantment can only affect things with minds." In theory Necromancy would let you do something more or less equivalent to throwing a fireball but you'd need to have your hands on a big pile of bones to do something similar. To give a little more context, in WO there's 9 actions, one of which is "Invoke" which is the magic stat. Casting tier 0 or 1 spells with Invoke is not actually unique abilities: you are using Invoke as a way of doing something another action could do. Like throwing a fireball at somebody would be using your Invoke for the same way that somebody would use Smash to throw a rock or axe at somebody, just using a different die pool. Except that you'd need something flammable on hand, and (this is where the system is frustratingly fuzzy) likely some additional possible limits/costs (e.g. you can't really throw a fireball AND maintain cover of darkness, or maybe you'd risk lighting stuff on fire around you either on a miss or just in general). If you wanted to throw a BIG fireball like the DnD 3.5 spell named 'fireball,' that'd be a higher tier spell (there's 0, 1, 2, 3) which would incur more costs and risks (notably, Tier 2 spells reduce your die pool by 1 and T3 reduce it by 2, which is a lot in a FITD game, going from a die pool of 3 to a die pool of 1 is going from a 12.5% chance of failure to a 50% chance of failure). DnD 3.5 Fireball would probably be Tier 2, which would mean spending a stress (the main resource for PCs) and taking a -1 dice penalty (which basically doubles your chance of failure) and would require that you fit it within the limitations of your school of magic. There are schools of magic where I can easily imagine doing a fireball esque effect (Pyromancy obviously, Stormstrike would be a wind or lightning version of that, necromancy is actually not too hard I can imagine a corpse explosion or bone-pipe-bomb), and there are ones where I genuinely do not know that there's anyway you could really get the effect of "Use Smash but against like 5 guys at the same time" (Illusion, Soothsaying).
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Feb 23, 2023 17:59
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KingKalamari posted:This is maybe a hot take, but I've always found the needlessly detailed planar lore of D&D to be really boring in almost all of its incarnations, and a sort of sterling example of the game's love of endlessly expounding on the backstory of elements while overlooking actually incorporating those elements into the game in meaningful way. The elemental planes specifically just feel like they were created solely as an explanation for where the monster made of fire the players are going to fight in a dungeon came from, and then the developers got so wrapped up in detailing the logistics of how all of these planes fit together that they forgot that in all likelihood most parties are going to spend maybe a few at most a few sessions in The Plane Where Everything is Fire. Counterpoint: Planescape is good.
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Feb 23, 2023 18:05
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I like the idea of Planescape, but LOL at running it in the actual 2e rules with modifiers for e.g. casting this type of spell in this type of aligned plane. I actually like the idea of planes of ooze and salt and mist and gravity and whatever, but if I have to choose between running the Great Wheel by the 2e book or running the Elemental Chaos in 4e, I'm obviously going to spare myself that pain and go with Le Chaos.
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Feb 23, 2023 18:07
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Tulip posted:
You reveal a dark and traumatic secret that even the subject didn't know before getting hit with the spell. Like those memories that "come back" under hypnosis, but not bullshit. It's just a room full of mooks holding their heads and going, "gently caress, wait, is Uncle Kevin my real dad?!?!"
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Feb 23, 2023 18:24
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Uncle Kevin was gay, so it's extremely unlikely that he was my real dad.
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Feb 23, 2023 18:33
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trapstar posted:Found this cool song about dwarves. Figured I'd share it here for you guys. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xm96Cqu4Ils I know I've posted this before, but if we are swapping dwarven songs here is one I really enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pISzxdEgDCU
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Feb 23, 2023 18:44
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Halloween Jack posted:Uncle Kevin was gay, so it's extremely unlikely that he was my real dad. ...the last thing holding my grip on reality together was my knowledge that Uncle Kevin was gay Xiahou Dun posted:You reveal a dark and traumatic secret that even the subject didn't know before getting hit with the spell. Like those memories that "come back" under hypnosis, but not bullshit. WO is a cool game, I played a pretty good Mimic with just the basic rules for how thieves work.
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Feb 23, 2023 19:21
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Helical Nightmares posted:I know I've posted this before, but if we are swapping dwarven songs here is one I really enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pISzxdEgDCU Nice!
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Feb 23, 2023 21:51
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I've had Clamavi de Profundis's version of The Song of Durin and The Song of Earendil stuck in my head for literally years at this point: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxfoa23skHg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ybSi5EcZ3M
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Feb 23, 2023 21:57
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Wish these guys would do more together: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0U9WgDNPvA
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Feb 23, 2023 22:03
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well if we're talking songs about Dwarves; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TdQKlnY1f0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N88MUdWxyQ and of course the classic; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytWz0qVvBZ0
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Feb 23, 2023 22:36
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In my opinion out of all the fantasy races, dwarves have the best music written about/for them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QjZ1B897Tuk
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Feb 23, 2023 23:31
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trapstar posted:In my opinion out of all the fantasy races, dwarves have the best music written about/for them. Look, it's not the Elves' fault that everyone interprets their musical skills as just sounding sorta like Yanni
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Feb 24, 2023 00:30
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Blind Guardian wrote some decent tunes about elves.
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Feb 24, 2023 00:38
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Halloween Jack posted:I like the idea of Planescape, but LOL at running it in the actual 2e rules with modifiers for e.g. casting this type of spell in this type of aligned plane. I actually like the idea of planes of ooze and salt and mist and gravity and whatever, but if I have to choose between running the Great Wheel by the 2e book or running the Elemental Chaos in 4e, I'm obviously going to spare myself that pain and go with Le Chaos. So don't use 2e rules.
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Feb 24, 2023 00:46
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Megazver posted:Blind Guardian wrote some decent tunes about elves.  Mirror, Mirror loving rules and I don’t even particularly care for metal.
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Feb 24, 2023 00:57
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The Elemental Chaos does contain desolate wastelands of salt and seas of churning ooze and so on. It's an endless maelstrom of elemental chaos, you'll find any combination of material and lack thereof in there!
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Feb 24, 2023 01:40
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I think 90% of Planescape’s appeal comes from DiTerlizzi’s art and the Exocet font
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Feb 24, 2023 01:51
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There was also the very good video game associated with the setting. It helps that goofy stuff from the setting didn't make it into Planescape: Torment, like how most of the Lawful factions are Lawful Stupid, or how you gotta recalculate your magic weapon's bonuses based on its plane of origin and what plane you are on now.
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Feb 24, 2023 01:56
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Whirling posted:There was also the very good video game associated with the setting. It helps that goofy stuff from the setting didn't make it into Planescape: Torment, like how most of the Lawful factions are Lawful Stupid, or how you gotta recalculate your magic weapon's bonuses based on its plane of origin and what plane you are on now. I tried playing Planescape Torment and it was just walls and walls of text and I noped out fast.
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Feb 24, 2023 02:20
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PS:T is mostly interactive fiction with a thin coating of CRPG on the top
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Feb 24, 2023 02:28
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whydirt posted:I think 90% of Planescape’s appeal comes from DiTerlizzi’s art and the Exocet font I'd say it's 90% Sigil + the aesthetic, yes. Especially after Torment. CitizenKeen posted:I tried playing Planescape Torment and it was just walls and walls of text and I noped out fast. You're missing out on some very good walls of text.
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Feb 24, 2023 02:28
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Honestly i find freeform magic to be.. not very interesting. It sort of ends up feeling like a weird skill that subs in for everything.
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Feb 24, 2023 02:43
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Panzeh posted:Honestly i find freeform magic to be.. not very interesting. It sort of ends up feeling like a weird skill that subs in for everything. I like skills that let the team exchange TPKs for long term consequences, magic monkey's paws fill that niche nicely. Oh yeah you summon Draco to help you beat the elite goblins but now you need to go into danger to fetch him some cursed baubles in repayment.
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Feb 24, 2023 02:53
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Asterite34 posted:Look, it's not the Elves' fault that everyone interprets their musical skills as just sounding sorta like Yanni Elves in my games have always been really into bluegrass : obviously they'd like highly technical jazz-influenced woods music, and whenever they go visit the Forests of [Cat walks on keyboard] I can just grab a Chris Thile album or something.
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Feb 24, 2023 02:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:Elves in my games have always been really into bluegrass : obviously they'd like highly technical jazz-influenced woods music, and whenever they go visit the Forests of [Cat walks on keyboard] I can just grab a Chris Thile album or something. This is a great idea. Panzeh posted:Honestly i find freeform magic to be.. not very interesting. It sort of ends up feeling like a weird skill that subs in for everything. I get that. I feel like there's a lot of different ways to skin the cat of "what is magic" and the ones that to me at least feel the most like "magic" are the ones that focus on some very specific way, like how basically all magic in Blades is "Ghosts." Like the most freeform magic setting, Glorantha, magic works great as far as I'm concerned but it very much isn't like, magical-feeling unto itself, its just part and parcel of selling you that the world at a basic level is fundamentally alien and ways of thinking that IRL are just utter crank poo poo are totally justified in the fiction. Kestral posted:
Blind Guardian understands that Tolkien Elves, at least in the First Age, are basically semi-immortal iron age germanic heroes.
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Feb 24, 2023 04:17
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Tulip posted:I get that. I feel like there's a lot of different ways to skin the cat of "what is magic" and the ones that to me at least feel the most like "magic" are the ones that focus on some very specific way, like how basically all magic in Blades is "Ghosts." Yeah, that's fair- for example, my general preferred magic system in GURPS is Sorcery, because it's simple to operate and everything you can do with it is right there on the sheet(except the thing you do at high levels to improvise, but that's not that important). But, it very much is a list of capabilities that's antithetical to any notion of 'unknown'. It's a concession to the game aspect, and yeah doesn't fit fiction too too well but it works fine for the kind of games i want to run. A totally mysterious vision of magic, i tend not to give players access to, at least in anything on their sheet. Though talking about GURPS and magic, there's like 12 different magic systems in it, about five of which actually are developed. GURPS Magic, the basic version is the most common and used in dungeon fantasy and just has each spell be a skill keying off of Magic+IQ with a bunch of prerequisites, which works okay, though i think it has some problems, particularly with how bad the missile spells are.
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Feb 24, 2023 11:28
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I've heard good things about GURPS Ritual Path Magic as a good freeform magic system. Has anyone used it?
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Feb 24, 2023 12:26
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Megazver posted:I've heard good things about GURPS Ritual Path Magic as a good freeform magic system. Has anyone used it? The thing about RPM is that there's a lot of adjucation in actually making the spell effects and you kinda have to do it on the fly. It works fine if you're good with each magic cast being an Event, but there's a lot of 'mother may i' involved. There are some variations on RPM to make it more.. manageable or closer to Vancian. I will say this, I think it works better than default magic for not-low tech settings. It's one of those sorts of mechanics where you can't put all that much of it on the character sheet, so you should expect the player to really understand the system to want to play an RPM adept. Then it comes to you as the GM to sanity check the kind of spells they're trying to cast. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 14:02 on Feb 24, 2023 |
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Feb 24, 2023 13:34
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It seems the optimal way to do a "mysterious" magic system that still has some sense of mechanical rigor and codified rules would be to have elements of it randomized. Like there's a d100 table of magic words, and at the start of the campaign the DM rolls to secretly determine which words do what, thus turning the act of learning magic into an exercise in inscrutable trial and error both in and out of universe.
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Feb 24, 2023 13:56
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Asterite34 posted:It seems the optimal way to do a "mysterious" magic system that still has some sense of mechanical rigor and codified rules would be to have elements of it randomized. Like there's a d100 table of magic words, and at the start of the campaign the DM rolls to secretly determine which words do what, thus turning the act of learning magic into an exercise in inscrutable trial and error both in and out of universe. There's a big difference between known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns. I've had "random table magic" appear at my sessions since I was in middle school, and the result is less "mysterious" and more "slapstick," plus canny players know how to do some dice math and it feels a lot less like "mystery" than "calculated risk," esp since it is again easy to calculate. Panzeh posted:The thing about RPM is that there's a lot of adjucation in actually making the spell effects and you kinda have to do it on the fly. It works fine if you're good with each magic cast being an Event, but there's a lot of 'mother may i' involved. There are some variations on RPM to make it more.. manageable or closer to Vancian. I'm kind of curious about this phrasing, since it sounds kind of derogatory but I don't know in what way it would be distinct from "communicating like adults." Is there something about RPM that's particularly frustrating to discuss? And yeah I think a lot of this just kind of circles that the things that make a system manageable for players are kind of things that tear away at mystery. Which I think is an intrinsic element of tabletop design: a lot of why tabletop games are compelling, at least to me, is that you have to know what's under the hood, because its up to the people at the table to actually enforce the rules. This has a lot of advantages, but it also means that things are never, really, "out of your control."
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Feb 24, 2023 17:10
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The thing about "mother may I" situations is that you only ever need to ask the question once per broad effect. Once you've established that your magic can do X, you can freely do X whenever the mechanics permit it, and you can confidently proclaim the use of X to make similar things happen based on precedent. If you're overstepping the GM can call you on it. The Mage games work well enough on this principle that they've gotten reprints again and again, and have a fanatical core following that makes even Vampire look tame. Ars Magica, same deal. Part of the appeal of systems like that - whether they be for magic, technology, vehicles, whatever - is that you can get more nuance out of your character's Thing than when you're picking from a list. That said, picking from a list can be good and cool when the list's entries are really evocative, or when it imposes interesting constraints on how magic works in this setting. The Conan RPG mentioned upthread seems like a good example of this.
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Feb 24, 2023 19:48
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Kestral posted:Part of the appeal of systems like that - whether they be for magic, technology, vehicles, whatever - is that you can get more nuance out of your character's Thing than when you're picking from a list. That said, picking from a list can be good and cool when the list's entries are really evocative, or when it imposes interesting constraints on how magic works in this setting. The Conan RPG mentioned upthread seems like a good example of this. Yes. The Conan system gives the GM an excellent way to answer "mother may I" questions with "yes, and" rather than "no", because it's a push-your-luck system where the GM can always compensate for some PC overreach (or let's call it "ambition" instead) by ramping up the difficulty of the check and/or by adding some tokens to the doom pool. And the "base spell does this, here's some Momentum spends that modify it" is open-ended, it's a structure that is just asking to be added on to with new Momentum spends you invent at the table. I find this easier to hack than, say, the classic Grease spell negotiations over the exact nature of the grease, how many BTUs of heat it produces when burned, can you inject it through a keyhole, etc. etc. where you mostly just have a chunk of description to work from as soon as you're not using it in the exact way the mechanic elements of the spell description anticipated. In D&D, your player is pointing out that since sodium is a metal, Heat Metal should be able to be used to heat the salt inside an enemy's body or the free sodium ions in salt water and you either say yes and hope that's not gonna be a problem for the next ten sessions, or you say no and that's stifling creativity and disappointing. In Conan, your player is using Form of a Beast and since it has a +1 spend to let you swim like a fish or fly like a bird, can they turn into a harbor seal and hold their breath for up to 30 minutes? And you can just say yes, that's a +1 Momentum spend, or if it seems really bullshit maybe it's a +2. So it's not just the discrete magic system that sets a game up to give you magic flexibility, limitation, or both. IMO systems designed for "yes, and" structures like fail-forward, success-with-consequences, fate points, that sort of thing all can make a magic (or superheroic powers, which are nearly the same thing) system of this type much easier to implement.
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Feb 24, 2023 20:16
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To me, "Mother May I" connotes an "everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden" style of design and GMing.
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Feb 24, 2023 20:23
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Halloween Jack posted:To me, "Mother May I" connotes an "everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden" style of design and GMing. The same here. Mother may I and magic is Magic doesn't work if the effect is too outside the views of what a GM thinks is currently permissible. It doesn't even need to go to deep into the magic system for a mother may I. You have a magic ray that can blast through anything, but wouldn't you know it, no two interesting things to blast are ever properly lined up.
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Feb 24, 2023 20:59
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Tulip posted:There's a big difference between known-unknowns and unknown-unknowns. I've had "random table magic" appear at my sessions since I was in middle school, and the result is less "mysterious" and more "slapstick," plus canny players know how to do some dice math and it feels a lot less like "mystery" than "calculated risk," esp since it is again easy to calculate. So, with RPM, you have to do some interpretation with respect to the paths and what spells do- there's guidelines for how much energy some effects will require, but if you're going outside the list provided in RPM, you're making custom spells. The DM has to be careful about what's allowed in because there's absolutely some busted rear end things you can do with certain combos. I mean, in a lot of situations in GURPS you want the DM to sanity-check everything you do, particularly with chargen(Just because it's in the Basic Book doesn't mean you have to allow it for every single game), it's just, with RPM you have to do it in the middle of play to figure out if the effect they want is kosher. I do, just as a preference, prefer magic to have a list of things you CAN do out of the gate and then it's on the player to figure out how to get that to do what they want. The need to curate what goes in and what doesn't is why I don't tend to allow Gadgeteer, and prefer players who want to do that just make someone who's brainy and got the skills to just do it in a more realistic way. If I ever ran a superhero game, i would probably reconsider that. I don't mind its much lower-powered cousin, gizmo, because the allowed items are just mundane crap like lockpicks or door wedges or whatever. Panzeh fucked around with this message at 21:05 on Feb 24, 2023 |
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Feb 24, 2023 21:01
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Halloween Jack posted:To me, "Mother May I" connotes an "everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden" style of design and GMing. ninjoatse.cx posted:The same here. This sounds like a bad GM problem, tbh.
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Feb 24, 2023 21:10
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Halloween Jack posted:To me, "Mother May I" connotes an "everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden" style of design and GMing. To me, it denotes a game system where the GM is expected to constantly make judgement calls over what the PCs are able to do, without having clear unequivocal rules to reference or structures to fall back on to make those decisions. Some degree of this is necessary to have a flexible role playing game, but I prefer games that give me as a GM straightforward tools for making these calls in a way that the players can plainly see as less than totally arbitrary. If they are regularly engaging with the mechanics that generate momentum for themselves and their fellow PCs, and generate doom tokens the GM is using to ramp up the danger, asking "may I do this" and getting an answer of "yes, add 1 doom" or "yes, but that's a more daunting challenge, you need 4 successes" is IMO more satisfying than getting a few "yes"es and a few "nos" in a session and not really having much insight into why sometimes it was yes and sometimes it was no. D&D has places where it does this: setting the difficulty of a skill test for example, where the GM can answer "can I climb that" with "yes, it's very very hard though, DC30" instead of just saying "no, it's too hard." D&D mostly doesn't do this with magic. There's a few places where it does; defenses, resistances, saving throws, when you're using magic directly against another character or foe. It mostly doesn't do this for utility/noncombat spell usage. So for these spells, "mother may I" is basically just requiring the GM to decide how much flexibility is good and fun and where to draw a line where it's making some utility spell too powerful or erasing other player's chances to use the skills their characters have or setting up some precedent that can be exploited later in an overpowered way. In 2d20 the GM is also doing making judgement calls by declaring how much momentum or how many doom points or what DC is needed, but there is a higher granularity, and every spell has a set of examples to help refer to when making these judgements. I think "everything not explicitly permitted is forbidden" is the worst-case scenario of a GM invoking "mother may I" to crush creativity and that style of play is probably bad under any RPG system.
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Feb 24, 2023 21:23
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