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"Why doesn't God just show himself" seems especially wild, like I was under the impression that you're playing in a world where God definitely, objectively exists and you prove it every time you cast a magic prayer spell.
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May 11, 2023 21:28
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theironjef posted:The game also has two origins for the world you play in based on what book you're reading (They're both in the box set, I am not describing editions here), one clearly written as a hasty afterthought to the other. Originally, the story was that the world you play on is God's sanctioned dumping ground for the universe's sinful idiot species. People from all over the galaxy bring their unrepentant here. You also live here, but you're good kids from bible school, and it's morally correct to head outside and kill these orcs and stuff. They cannot be redeemed. In a later book, it's been changed to the monsters being soulless (yet still sentient and thoughtful) creations of stick and mud, so you can kill them without actually taking a life. There's other humans out in the world too, the dragonslaves, and while you're not supposed to kill them, one of the earliest prayer spells you learn is a "Whoops I killed dragonslaves today, can I get a mulligan on that" deal, to prevent XP loss. This is one of those game design/worldbuilding decisions that is just so utterly baffling in its implementation specifically because I, a secular moron on the internet, can think up an alternative off the top of my head that would have worked way better while still keeping to the game's particular brand of "D&D for Christian kids!": Just make the villains evil goober demons that get inside the unfaithful and make them do sins and you and your party of God-squaders have to hit them with your magic weapons to knock the demons out of them (Said magic weapons are just for getting rid of demons and do not hurt regular people). This seems like such an easy and obvious solution to me, I don't know how the nonsense that they actually printed was what they went with?
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May 11, 2023 21:37
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KingKalamari posted:This is one of those game design/worldbuilding decisions that is just so utterly baffling in its implementation specifically because I, a secular moron on the internet, can think up an alternative off the top of my head that would have worked way better while still keeping to the game's particular brand of "D&D for Christian kids!": Just make the villains evil goober demons that get inside the unfaithful and make them do sins and you and your party of God-squaders have to hit them with your magic weapons to knock the demons out of them (Said magic weapons are just for getting rid of demons and do not hurt regular people). This seems like such an easy and obvious solution to me, I don't know how the nonsense that they actually printed was what they went with? Well, I mean, you have an imagination.
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May 11, 2023 21:45
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theironjef posted:Originally, the story was that the world you play on is God's sanctioned dumping ground for the universe's sinful idiot species. People from all over the galaxy bring their unrepentant here. You also live here, but you're good kids from bible school, and it's morally correct to head outside and kill these orcs and stuff. They cannot be redeemed. In a later book, it's been changed to the monsters being soulless (yet still sentient and thoughtful) creations of stick and mud, so you can kill them without actually taking a life.
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May 11, 2023 21:48
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KingKalamari posted:This is one of those game design/worldbuilding decisions that is just so utterly baffling in its implementation specifically because I, a secular moron on the internet, can think up an alternative off the top of my head that would have worked way better while still keeping to the game's particular brand of "D&D for Christian kids!": Just make the villains evil goober demons that get inside the unfaithful and make them do sins and you and your party of God-squaders have to hit them with your magic weapons to knock the demons out of them (Said magic weapons are just for getting rid of demons and do not hurt regular people). This seems like such an easy and obvious solution to me, I don't know how the nonsense that they actually printed was what they went with? I think largely they didn't want that kind of easy solution. For example one of the printed adventures is this little story I'll sum up: The party is traversing up a mountain to rescue someone or retrieve something at the top. Along the one path up they encounter a giant, who is sitting around with a big barrel of booze. He sees the party and waves happily, inviting them to sit with him. At this point, the book makes an aside that it's expected the party will rush and kill the giant immediately because he is a giant, but if they don't, the story continues. The giant says "Isn't it great that a local magistrate is providing food and education to the folks in the nearby village? I think that's so good and important! The party is supposed to be aware that the magistrate is a dragonslave with draconic sin enchantments, so any good he does is actually bad. The giant asks if the party would like to have a drink with him. There's not really a drinking age on fantasy planet, and drinking isn't sinful, unless it's to excess, but it's still understood that this is bad, largely, I believe, because you're drinking with a giant. If anyone says yes, they get sin enchanted and pass out alongside the drunk giant, needing to be carried on and yelled at later in real life by everyone. If everyone says no, the giant becomes obstinant and insists he'll block the path or fight. They either fight or drink. If they come up with some other idea, he'll just be waiting again with the same deal on the way down. Basically the game doesn't even want the monsters and stuff to be monsters. Literally just not the same religion as you. You're supposed to come away from this feeling righteous about killing this guy and mad that the people in the town nearby are getting food and education.
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May 11, 2023 21:49
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Fundamentalists are kinda infamous for making their explanations of the world much more convoluted than they have to be. I remember some other Dragonraid adventure where a troll or goblin or whatever invites you to a party with free drugs. You are of course supposed to say no. Incredibly simple "say no to drugs" moral tests seem to be the game's stock-in-trade. I can't remember if they give a suggested age range, but it seems to be 5-10. It feels like it's set up for a grown-up to pick on a kid for taking the piss out of an idiotic fable, or maybe that's my personal experience in Sunday school talking. The current producers have another game called "Starlots." They seem genuinely oblivious to the way it reads like a pun on "harlot." That's the level of sophistication we're dealing with here.
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May 11, 2023 21:58
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Starlot is also the dragonraid word for dice. I sorta figured it was an attempt to hold the gambling connotation away from themselves with obfuscatory tweezers. They're supposed to be called that because, well okay so players use D10s and bad guys use D8s. The D10s are translucent orange, the D8s solid gray. This is diegetic as the tools of the enemy are corrupted and degraded of value. When you hold a D10 up to a light along the center axis you can see a star in the middle of it.
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May 11, 2023 22:05
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Thinking hard about the theological implications of an omnipotent, omniscient benevolent god loving up some of his creations so badly he has to send them to Crap Planet and then enlist children to murder them, like your mom telling you to take the trash out because something smells funny in there
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May 11, 2023 22:34
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Antivehicular posted:Thinking hard about the theological implications of an omnipotent, omniscient benevolent god loving up some of his creations so badly he has to send them to Crap Planet and then enlist children to murder them, like your mom telling you to take the trash out because something smells funny in there This pitch sounds so much cooler.
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May 11, 2023 22:59
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Antivehicular posted:Thinking hard about the theological implications of an omnipotent, omniscient benevolent god loving up some of his creations so badly he has to send them to Crap Planet and then enlist children to murder them, like your mom telling you to take the trash out because something smells funny in there
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May 11, 2023 23:06
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Halloween Jack posted:"Why doesn't God just show himself" seems especially wild, like I was under the impression that you're playing in a world where God definitely, objectively exists and you prove it every time you cast a magic prayer spell. If I recall you’re actually working for Jesus under some weird other title - something like “the Overlord of Many Names?” But it’s amazing. It’s literally the RPG you’d write if you read Dark Dungeons, think that’s what real RPGs are like and are supposed to be like, then tried to write a Christian one on that basis. hyphz fucked around with this message at 23:17 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 23:13
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Hostile V posted:A hack of 3:16 but it's about paladins. This is so brilliant and so obvious that I can't believe no one has come up with it before, but I'd try playing it. GM as middle management paladin: "OK, maggots, your job is to go into the *rolls dice* ...'Shadow...Fens'... and execute a ...sweep and clear mission... against the ...blasphemous unbelievers... who live there." Paladin corporal, fondling his Holy Sword of Multidismemberment: "How do we identify the blasphemous unbelievers?" Grizzled paladin sergeant: "They'll be the ones too dumb or evil to run when they see us coming."
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May 11, 2023 23:59
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Admiralty Flag posted:This is so brilliant and so obvious that I can't believe no one has come up with it before, but I'd try playing it. Looking it up there were two additional versions of 3:16 planned(as well as a supplement for the original that would have focused on psychic stuff); Carnage Amongst the Tribes a fantasy version and AD 316 which would have been a historical version set in the Roman Empire but as far as I can tell the author kind of just gave up on the project and then didn't really do much of anything till he reappeared as one of the writers for the a|state RPG
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May 12, 2023 00:33
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Yeesh, that was a step down. And They Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead People Who Offered To Share Their Food With Us
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May 12, 2023 00:44
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Figure I'll post this here (Already posted in GM Advice Thread) I got a succubus commissioned in both forms (Human and Demon) and figured if anyone needed something specific like that as a resource I'd share it for them. 
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May 12, 2023 02:00
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She must be cold in those outfits.
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May 12, 2023 03:03
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Subjunctive posted:She must be cold in those outfits. Haha, well in the first one she is in hell so I doubt it would be that cold there. :P
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May 12, 2023 03:21
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Subjunctive posted:She must be cold in those outfits. Looks pretty hot to me 
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May 12, 2023 04:58
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Antivehicular posted:I've never heard of Dragonraid in my life, and boy, even that carefully-phrased Wikipedia article is unnerving There was a full F&F of it, but not sure if it's archived on Inklesspen's site or if you'll have to search for it 
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May 12, 2023 07:40
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It was also episode 170 of my show, which is why I know anything about it at all.
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May 12, 2023 14:14
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Why not have a game set in actual Bible Times? Granted you'd want to make it pretty G-rated for the audience but you could be a literal pack of Christians going out to found a new church in some location with pre-written challenges and such, which may or may not include slaying orcs or Midianites. Hell, an RPG built around the idea of the player group being "the people setting out to found a new community" is so obvious (if, uh, fraught) that I'm surprised I can't think of a game that has that as an explicit premise.
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May 12, 2023 21:48
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i think the "set in biblical times" RPG supplement set the thread title for a while: "if the players bring about Jesus's death, great!"
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May 12, 2023 22:01
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Nessus posted:Why not have a game set in actual Bible Times? Granted you'd want to make it pretty G-rated for the audience but you could be a literal pack of Christians going out to found a new church in some location with pre-written challenges and such, which may or may not include slaying orcs or Midianites. I'm on the app so I can't search, but the Fatal & Friends thread had a review in the last few months of a D&D supplement that takes place in the time of Christ, where the characters are all evangelists (in the original sense) or the like. It seemed to be a fairly solid sourcebook and not up its own rear end with Dark Dungeons-type bullshit. (From its author's forum -- Q: "Are you telling me that D&D can model Samson killing 3000 men with the jawbone of an rear end?" A: "A club, improvised or not, does d4 damage, and that plus Samson's considerable STR modifier should be sufficient to take care of a commoner.") As to founding a community, there's so much digging of trenches and cutting of sod for roofs or whatever and stacking stones and tilling fields and establishing a government to determine who has rights to get water from the stream on alternating Thursdays that it seems like a difficult proposition to make interesting. Unless, of course, the valley where the settlers want to put down stakes is right in the middle of goblin cave-ridden hills, but then we're just back to D&D with a slightly different motivation for kicking rear end and taking names. There are a lot of games that chart the growth/evolution of a settlement as a key adjunct to gameplay. But just because I can't think of how founding one could be an interesting RPG exercise doesn't mean it can't be one.
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May 12, 2023 22:09
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Nessus posted:Why not have a game set in actual Bible Times? Granted you'd want to make it pretty G-rated for the audience but you could be a literal pack of Christians going out to found a new church in some location with pre-written challenges and such, which may or may not include slaying orcs or Midianites. So far I've read two and they were both really bad. Turns out game authors tend to have some really unpleasant ideas about what players want to do if they're in bible times.
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May 12, 2023 22:14
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I would assume the same thing as any other D&D party; murder, loot, and carousing. Certain aspects of the hobby are still trapped in 1974 and I wouldn't expect bible thumpers to be up on almost 50 years of game design.
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May 12, 2023 22:25
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Which bible times are we talking about anyway? There's a lot of difference between adam & eve, noah, moses, christ, or the first centuries of the cult of jesus christ AD.
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May 12, 2023 22:31
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Leperflesh posted:Which bible times are we talking about anyway? There's a lot of difference between adam & eve, noah, moses, christ, or the first centuries of the cult of jesus christ AD. Admiralty Flag posted:As to founding a community, there's so much digging of trenches and cutting of sod for roofs or whatever and stacking stones and tilling fields and establishing a government to determine who has rights to get water from the stream on alternating Thursdays that it seems like a difficult proposition to make interesting. Unless, of course, the valley where the settlers want to put down stakes is right in the middle of goblin cave-ridden hills, but then we're just back to D&D with a slightly different motivation for kicking rear end and taking names. I figure the PCs or the magi-equivalent PCs in a troupe would be the big wheel opinion makers and trend setters, like Brigham Young or Paul the apostle or Master Blaster.
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May 12, 2023 22:55
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I read one set in Sodom right before the events and one set where you could play as a Nephilim.
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May 12, 2023 22:59
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Yeah I still got my copy of Testament, lol It's sure... Something.
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May 12, 2023 23:43
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Now I want to just go binge some midrash and synthesize the weirdest stuff into a game
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May 12, 2023 23:49
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Admiralty Flag posted:I'm on the app so I can't search, but the Fatal & Friends thread had a review in the last few months of a D&D supplement that takes place in the time of Christ, where the characters are all evangelists (in the original sense) or the like. It seemed to be a fairly solid sourcebook and not up its own rear end with Dark Dungeons-type bullshit. (From its author's forum -- Q: "Are you telling me that D&D can model Samson killing 3000 men with the jawbone of an rear end?" A: "A club, improvised or not, does d4 damage, and that plus Samson's considerable STR modifier should be sufficient to take care of a commoner.")
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May 12, 2023 23:55
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If one is going Biblical in setting probably best to have it be set prior to the Flood, go maximum weird with a world full of dinosaurs and Nephilim
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May 13, 2023 00:00
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Nessus posted:"Bible Times" are generally referring to the era covered by the Bible's narrative read as a book, which is mostly during the founding of Israel and (more popularly) the Roman Empire around -10 BC to 10 AD. For some reason they turn the calendar over at that point. :v So it's basically a regional sourcebook for the Roman empire, but one with a lot of importance to a lot of people, so there is gonna be a shitload of research material. And you can play it in church! In theory. But like, isn't that a span from ~1300BC (exodus) through to 10AD? A hell of a lot changed in a thousand years. There's a good thousand years pre-roman there. I figured you'd have to at least exclude basically the entire old testament and just focus on approximately the time of Jesus, or, exclude the whole new testament and focus on e.g. ancient egypt, mesopotamia, the foundation of israel, and even just getting up to babylon conquering israel is like 800 years later (587 BCE) and you've got like, etruscans? Rise of persia, there's a lot of history more or less elided from the bible in there not to nitpick or whatever it's just a sort of confusing thing to me to try to set a game in "bible times" as if that's a specific era.
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May 13, 2023 00:21
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Blades in the Dark with crew/territory management but as a group of underground early Christians in Rome instead of violent, possibly occult criminals and weirdos. Though everyone else probably thinks you are already, so... I like BitD's territory management for the idea of doing a small community trying to get its poo poo together, mostly because the claims you make to expand your territory often come with rewards that feed directly back into the main things your characters do in adventures. It's abstract but it's not particularly detached from the PCs, a problem to which organization systems seem really prone. Like as I recall, Reign's company rules touted that they could be ported with minimal effort over to other systems, but that also unfortunately indicated that they had few actual points of mechanical connection directly into character mechanics. A tight loop of community growth directly improving PCs seems like a good way to incentivize that kind of gameplay, though you also probably need equally deep non-combat rules to make it fun to engage in community-building efforts that aren't just killing your new neighbors.
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May 13, 2023 00:37
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Antivehicular posted:Now I want to just go binge some midrash and synthesize the weirdest stuff into a game My favorite midrash is the idea that the Plague of Frogs was actually a single gigantic frog, which may or may not have summoned smaller frogs later, depending on who you ask. This is because the Torah initially uses the singular for frog, so the only logical conclusion is that God sent Frogzilla to plague Egypt.  From "The Little Midrash Says". This is the perfect setup for an RPG scenario. SimonChris fucked around with this message at 08:50 on May 13, 2023 |
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May 13, 2023 08:43
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SimonChris posted:My favorite midrash is the idea that the Plague of Frogs was actually a single gigantic frog, which may or may not have summoned smaller frogs later, depending on who you ask. This is because the Torah initially uses the singular for frog, so the only logical conclusion is that God sent Frogzilla to plague Egypt.
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May 13, 2023 09:30
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SimonChris posted:My favorite midrash is the idea that the Plague of Frogs was actually a single gigantic frog, which may or may not have summoned smaller frogs later, depending on who you ask. This is because the Torah initially uses the singular for frog, so the only logical conclusion is that God sent Frogzilla to plague Egypt. The "yo, what the gently caress"s of Egypt
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May 13, 2023 09:42
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A game in Bible Age with Jesus around can't be very different functionally from playing Forgotten Realms
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May 13, 2023 17:34
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is there a GURPS thread? I can't seem to find one.
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May 13, 2023 18:18
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samcarsten posted:is there a GURPS thread? I can't seem to find one. Just use GURPS to simulate one, it can handle all settings, eras and situations.
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May 13, 2023 18:24
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