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For players and normal NPCs I think that a few keywords are better for defining who they are. It gives you much more nuance and clarity without being any more complex. Erratic and Selfish is a much better descriptor than "Chaotic Evil" Pragmatic and Loyal is much better than "Neutral Good" I do like the alignment system for the cosmic level of a campaign world. The eternal fight between Order and Chaos or Good and Evil and every immortal being aligned with one or the other is very appropriate.
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Apr 26, 2023 19:55
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poo poo, now I can't remember what I was looking at that used mercury as a lubricant.
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Apr 26, 2023 19:55
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:Speak of the devil, got a couple more today, collection is coming along! Having played a lot of SR3, I have no idea how those books are in that good of condition. Those softbacks were not nearly a hearty as the old green V:TM books.
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Apr 26, 2023 20:06
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goatface posted:poo poo, now I can't remember what I was looking at that used mercury as a lubricant. Lighthouse lenses?
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Apr 26, 2023 20:37
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evenworse username posted:The only thing I think alignment is useful for is in published adventures or sourcebooks as a shorthand way of telling a GM how to play a particular NPC. Like, if you say the sheriff is Lawful Good or Lawful Evil that streamlines understanding how to play them to one line. It's not the only way to do it (GDW's playing card NPC motivation system was rad) but I can see a use for it. I'd argue there are better ways to achieve this: For instance I think using a freeform "Motivation" or "personality" keyword system for NPCs in these sorts of materials does the job much better than assigning them 1 of 9 very nebulously defined spots on a grid. Honestly the entire concept of alignment only really made sense when it was first introduced as a means to emulate the eternal war between Law and Chaos in Michael Moorcock's work. Once they introduced the Good and Evil axis into the mix it just completely broke the system in a way we've been feeling the repercussions of ever since. Bucnasti posted:
See, I actually think that this use of alignment works better without having a second axis on the chart. The distinction between "Lawful Good", "Lawful Evil" or "Chaotic Good" doesn't really work so well for representing a cosmic conflict because it too granularly factionalizes things without really giving much appreciable distinction between those factions. A lot of words have been spent over this but "Neutral Good" and "Neutral Evil" might as well not exist in the setting in terms of a cosmic conflict. I think for the Cosmic forces approach a better solution is either to focus on a conflict between binary oposing forces with a second axis (ie law vs chaos, nature vs civilization, Planescape's Blood War, East Coast vs West Coast, etc.) or use something more akin to a faction system where there are a bunch of different forces affecting the universe that players can align themselves with. KingKalamari fucked around with this message at 21:02 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 20:54
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:Speak of the devil, got a couple more today, collection is coming along! Queen Euphoria! We played that one as a one-shot in high school, and it was great, even if a lot of what we were doing was peak Dumb Shadowrun Stuff. I think I was playing a drone rigger who spent the entire run sitting in his van eating a sandwich while drone-piloting? Extremely good dumb times.
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Apr 26, 2023 20:59
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KingKalamari posted:I'd argue there are better ways to achieve this: For instance I think using a freeform "Motivation" or "personality" keyword system for NPCs in these sorts of materials does the job much better than assigning them 1 of 9 very nebulously defined spots on a grid. But also, minor flavor mechanics don't need to be perfect, they just need to be good enough to inspire players to think about what their characters are like. And alignment has decades of being part of the Traditional D&D Feel, so it has some weight because of that. Is Alignment good? No, not really. But as long as the designers understand that alignment only exists to be a minor flavor thing and don't attach any mechanics to it it's fine. And if it's something that only exists to be part of one page about RPing characters and half a line on your character sheet, fine is good enough.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:44
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Ablative posted:Lighthouse lenses? I think it was a telescope. It was definitely something to do with smoothly rotating things that weighed a hundred tons or more.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:47
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goatface posted:I think it was a telescope. It was definitely something to do with smoothly rotating things that weighed a hundred tons or more. You may be thinking of the telescope made of rotating mercury.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:49
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Lurks With Wolves posted:But also, minor flavor mechanics don't need to be perfect, they just need to be good enough to inspire players to think about what their characters are like. And alignment has decades of being part of the Traditional D&D Feel, so it has some weight because of that. You can replace it with something that accomplishes the same thing without the baggage.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:53
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King of Solomon posted:You can replace it with something that accomplishes the same thing without the baggage. Yes, but a lot of people want the baggage. Because making dumb alignment jokes is an established part of D&D culture and making dumb personality trait jokes isn't. I can't emphasize enough that "because it feels like D&D" is both the only reason to use D&D alignment and enough of a reason if you make it a minor enough element of your game.
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Apr 26, 2023 21:59
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alignment memes are great though. if everyone forgot about alignment charts overnight we'd lose the landerig joke and the sandwich categories. unforgivable
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Apr 26, 2023 22:26
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Mister Olympus posted:alignment memes are great though. if everyone forgot about alignment charts overnight we'd lose the landerig joke and the sandwich categories. unforgivable No, the correct solution is to replace the Lawful-Chaotic/Good-Evil chart with the Edgy-Depressed-Dumbass/Bitch-Thot-Bastard chart.
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Apr 26, 2023 22:30
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The Good-Neutral-Evil axis of alignment as generally used in 3e/4e/5e is fine because it's pretty easy to set up consistent and exclusive standards that place characters in only one of those three categories. It's kind of weird to then make spells, items, and features key off alignments universally, but not necessarily weird in a bad way; maybe if you're an inveterate murderer you really can't cross a magic circle against evil! What does that tell you, eh? Spooky! The Law-Neutrality-Chaos axis as positioned orthogonally to the Good-Neutral-Evil axis, though, is completely meaningless nonsense and it's not even a moderately difficult feat of rhetoric to convincingly argue that any particular character or action counts as either extreme, both extremes at once, or neither extreme at all on the basis of which particular prestige class you're currently trying to qualify for. This is broadly because L/C tends to swing on why your character is doing something or how they feel about it rather than the actual results of their actions. You can see this bear out in many places, such as the way that you can freely flip any of the Batman memes horizontally and result in an equally legible result. Back in the old days when it was just Law vs. Chaos the axis worked fine, but it's because it actually measured how white a person or institution was. Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:56 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 22:52
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KingKalamari posted:I'd argue there are better ways to achieve this: For instance I think using a freeform "Motivation" or "personality" keyword system for NPCs in these sorts of materials does the job much better than assigning them 1 of 9 very nebulously defined spots on a grid. I agree, I probably should have been more clear in saying the conflict between Good vs Evil OR the conflict between Order and Chaos. The second axis muddies the waters unless you clarify it in some ways. In the campaign I'm currently running there is an eternal battle between order and chaos as each side tries to prevent the other from plunging the universe into Entropy. Good/Evil is irrelevant to the conflict, but I use it as a shorthand to describe an entities methods in the fight.
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Apr 26, 2023 23:08
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:Speak of the devil, got a couple more today, collection is coming along! Get Awakenings to read some good magic fluff. Later editions poo poo all over it, but it was great when it came out.
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Apr 26, 2023 23:51
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Ominous Jazz posted:This was brought up in the TG industry thread and I don't want to detract from the protracted posters war against wizards of the coast, but I don't get why people love alignment in games. Alignment is fine. Just don’t think too hard about. Most PCs will be chaotic money, or somewhere between aberrant and moral sewer.
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Apr 26, 2023 23:53
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Lurks With Wolves posted:But also, minor flavor mechanics don't need to be perfect, they just need to be good enough to inspire players to think about what their characters are like.
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Apr 27, 2023 00:04
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Alignment is fine until you build mechanics around it.
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Apr 27, 2023 00:16
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There's a game I think a lot of people in tg would enjoy, but I don't see much discussion surrounding it. I'm not sure if this is because it's unknown, the consensus is that it's bad and I haven't heard, etc. Last time I mentioned it seemed like it might be the former, so I started a fatal and friends about Mythras and promptly never continued because real life sidetracked me pretty hard. It used to be called Runequest 6 before a licensing issue changed that. However, I currently have a 5e campaign and constantly find myself thinking how much more I like the design of Mythras as a game. would continuing the fatal & friends be the best way to drum up discussion about it? otherwise, has anyone happened to have read or even played it? Just curious. I haven't actually played it in years, as I try to introduce new players via D&D and have never had the chance to segue into a Mythras game (it was still RQ6 last time I played). However, I want to start slowly developing a campaign and familiarizing myself with the rules again, so I'm thinking of continuing my F&F anyway as an excuse to get a firm grasp on how the systems work.
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Apr 27, 2023 00:20
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Tosk posted:However, I currently have a 5e campaign and constantly find myself thinking how much more I like the design of Mythras as a game. would continuing the fatal & friends be the best way to drum up discussion about it? otherwise, has anyone happened to have read or even played it? Just curious. Not sure if it would be the best way, but it would definitely be a good way, would give you a chance to showcase all the mechanics and setting elements you feel are particularly well done.
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Apr 27, 2023 01:11
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I lobby for an alignment chart that has the Prep-Punk axis and a Cool Guy-Total Prick axis
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Apr 27, 2023 01:47
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Magnetic North posted:Having played a lot of SR3, I have no idea how those books are in that good of condition. Those softbacks were not nearly a hearty as the old green V:TM books. The Germany book is the only one of my original group's books to survive to the present day (as far as I know)- the copy of SR2 I bought to kick off my lifelong rpg obsession was the most motley accretion of various types of tape I'd ever seen by the time we had moved on to SR3. I have no idea how I was able to snap up such a pristine copy off ebay. Bucnasti posted:Shadowrun is my favorite IP, I haven't played it in years, but at one point I had every gamebook and every novel. drat Buc, that is a righteous collection. As an aside, my MOTW group had enough people bail for last month's game night that we tried something different- one of my players wanted to try GMing So77, and it was a blast (and I got to be a player IRL for the first time in decades). Vulpes Vulpes fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Apr 27, 2023 |
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Apr 27, 2023 03:16
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goatface posted:I think it was a telescope. It was definitely something to do with smoothly rotating things that weighed a hundred tons or more. Hey! My mother's never been smooth a day in her life.
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Apr 27, 2023 04:01
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alignment just seems to me like it's used as a shorthand for something else, and in those cases you should be using that something else
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Apr 27, 2023 05:30
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gradenko_2000 posted:alignment just seems to me like it's used as a shorthand for something else, and in those cases you should be using that something else But having that common shorthand is nice so you can generally go “okay LG people follow LG gods and live in mostly LG societies and have LG philosophies.” Again, you can get a similar effect out of saying Camarilla or Chaos (in the Warhammer sense), alignment’s just the D&D organizing term.
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Apr 27, 2023 13:10
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:The Germany book is the only one of my original group's books to survive to the present day (as far as I know)- the copy of SR2 I bought to kick off my lifelong rpg obsession was the most motley accretion of various types of tape I'd ever seen by the time we had moved on to SR3. I have no idea how I was able to snap up such a pristine copy off ebay. Oh man, that's awesome to hear. Love hearing that people have fun with SO77.
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Apr 27, 2023 14:08
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Alignment does nothing that can't be done in other ways that don't contribute to The Orc Problem.
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Apr 27, 2023 16:00
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is anyone familiar with Tinyd6? I see that there's a big bundle of it in Bundle of Holding and I'd be interested in someone selling (or unselling) me on it
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Apr 27, 2023 16:12
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This is more or less it: https://www.gallantknightgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/TD2e-Cheat-Sheet-Printer-Friendly.pdf It's very simple.
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Apr 27, 2023 16:44
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Can anyone recommend a good tutorial for how to make PbtA-style class playbooks/templates? I’m not looking to publish professionally, but I’d like to take my home brew stuff and make it look decent for new players. I’ve rigged stuff up in Word/Google Docs before but I’m sure I’m not doing things optimally.
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Apr 27, 2023 18:28
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whydirt posted:Can anyone recommend a good tutorial for how to make PbtA-style class playbooks/templates? That's going to depend a whole lot on the particular game you're creating for and what level of experience you already have for this kind of stuff. Ideally you can extract the template elements from the existing sheets and then put your text in using Photoshop/Paint/Illustrator/InDesign/Inkscape/Affinity/whatever you're inclined to use. Can you give a little more detail on what you need help with? It's not super hard but it can certainly seem daunting at the start.
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Apr 27, 2023 21:16
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Additionally, it might be worth chasing up the original authors to ask them about some playbook design blanks.
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Apr 28, 2023 03:21
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Ego Trip posted:Alignment does nothing that can't be done in other ways that don't contribute to The Orc Problem. Oh, the Orc Problem, you say?  Mind telling us what solution you have for that?
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Apr 28, 2023 05:19
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Getting rid of mechanics that enshrine it seems like a good start.
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Apr 28, 2023 06:28
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Arivia posted:And there's a copy of Robertson Davies' "Murther and Walking Spirits" hiding underneath I think. TRIPLE GOOD. Was going back to look for a different reply, but holy moly that's a good eye.
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Apr 28, 2023 06:49
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So D&D 5E has already essentially gotten rid of alignment. It's really weird in that you have to pick one during character creation and every creature has one but it does gently caress all. At most there are a couple of magical items that interact with it in completely ignorable ways. There aren't even any spells that use it (Detect Evil and Good doesn't even key off of alignment, just creature type) and Paladins don't even have alignment aura vision or anything. Obviously that's good and they should go all the way with it. But it also makes it laughable that they're patting themselves on the back for putting out a new book that reprints a lot of monsters essentially identically but with "always evil" replaced with "usually evil." Yeah that's great. Can you get this book or even digital copies of the updated creatures on D&D Beyond if you own the old ones? No of course not, hand over cash please. And if you try to add the monster to a battle using Avrae, it asks you to specify "do you mean Orc (Legacy) or Orc (Whoever The gently caress's Dumb Book of Recycled poo poo You Already Have)???" Better type in the right number or it tells you you don't own that content and you have to start over again. Great thanks. BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Apr 28, 2023 |
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Apr 28, 2023 07:20
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Tosk posted:However, I currently have a 5e campaign and constantly find myself thinking how much more I like the design of Mythras as a game. would continuing the fatal & friends be the best way to drum up discussion about it? otherwise, has anyone happened to have read or even played it? Just curious. RQ 2e was better than any D&D version available in 1979, and the gap hasn't closed since. :post:
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Apr 28, 2023 07:52
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What are some games where the PCs are explicitly designed to be criminals Besides Blades in the Dark
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Apr 28, 2023 08:14
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Ego Trip posted:Alignment does nothing that can't be done in other ways that don't contribute to The Orc Problem.
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Apr 28, 2023 08:18
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