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dwarf74 posted:Oh man. Yeah I backed that too. It was a more innocent time. Speaking of which, Land of 1,000 Nations shipped this week, wrapping up 7th Sea 2nd Ed. I think we can meme about the “transmedia” projects though. Skarka says they’re still coming.
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Sep 8, 2023 20:24
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Blades in the Dark is still, technically, in progress as a Kickstarter and around the 8.5 year old mark. Last update was in 2020 though.
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Sep 8, 2023 22:36
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Splicer posted:Is there such a thing as a preconstructed deck builder? Where you build a card pool before the game and then buy them into your deck as you play? Nightfall does something like this, you draft public and private supply piles before the game proper.
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Sep 8, 2023 22:58
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BlackIronHeart posted:Blades in the Dark is still, technically, in progress as a Kickstarter and around the 8.5 year old mark. Last update was in 2020 though. Don't get me wrong - I'd love my Vlad Taltos rpg.
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Sep 8, 2023 23:04
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BlackIronHeart posted:Blades in the Dark is still, technically, in progress as a Kickstarter and around the 8.5 year old mark. Last update was in 2020 though. 
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Sep 8, 2023 23:05
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dwarf74 posted:I hold project creators much less responsible for guest written stretch goals than for the main products. Maybe it's for the best. HopperUK posted:Do I recall Steven Brust turning out to be an rear end in a top hat of some kind? Annoying. Kesper North posted:Yes, he is a sex pest who was banned from the 4th Street writers group for stalking a friend of mine.
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Sep 8, 2023 23:22
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Absurd Alhazred posted:Maybe it's for the best. TIL That sucks!
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Sep 8, 2023 23:50
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Man — I wouldn’t be surprised to hear it of Brust because he’s an author who was active in fandom and that wasn’t a healthy world. Also there are a couple of reports of his name on whisper networks. But that sounds awfully close to a mangled version of this incident and I’m not sure there is a 4th Street writers group other than the 4th Street Fantasy convention.
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Sep 8, 2023 23:58
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Splicer posted:Is there such a thing as a preconstructed deck builder? Where you build a card pool before the game and then buy them into your deck as you play? Oh man, I'm actually working on a game like that (set in my own fantasy world inspired by Dune, but with lizardfolk), though I'm having a hell of a time with balancing it, it's either way too slow, or if I reduce the price of cards way too fast and there's no reason to ever buy resource cards.
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Sep 9, 2023 00:41
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Foolster41 posted:Oh man, I'm actually working on a game like that (set in my own fantasy world inspired by Dune, but with lizardfolk), though I'm having a hell of a time with balancing it, it's either way too slow, or if I reduce the price of cards way too fast and there's no reason to ever buy resource cards. E: or make them all resource +thing, or add alternate uses for the resource E2: do you have many burn mechanics? Stripping out the cruft is half the deck build process and what speeds up the mid/late game Splicer fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 00:47
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BlackIronHeart posted:Blades in the Dark is still, technically, in progress as a Kickstarter and around the 8.5 year old mark. Last update was in 2020 though. This one still ticks me off. I backed specifically because of a few of the 40k adjacent stretchgoal settings. And all we ever got were 3 pages of untested notes. And then told not to complain because he didn’t even pay the writers. And that was supposed to be okay?
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Sep 9, 2023 01:05
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dwarf74 posted:I hold project creators much less responsible for guest written stretch goals than for the main products. On top of everything else, we got a very short playset for crimin' in Adrilankha. So it technically happened.
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Sep 9, 2023 01:28
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It is still one of the great tragedies of modern RPG design that we’ve never gotten a full-fledged literary cyberpunk game Forged the Dark, made under Harper’s supervision and thus up to his standards. How we ended up with just Hack the Planet and Neon Black, I will never know. It’s such a slam-dunk perfect fit, but it apparently isn’t a genre that interests the people who could do it justice.
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Sep 9, 2023 01:54
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I'm just happy Blades in the Dark is a take on Dishonored (and to a lesser extent Thief). I loved those games, and it baffles me that their TTRPG spiritual successor is so good.
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Sep 9, 2023 04:30
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I wanna check out Blades in the Dark, I've heard good things.
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Sep 9, 2023 04:36
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Kestral posted:It is still one of the great tragedies of modern RPG design that we’ve never gotten a full-fledged literary cyberpunk game Forged the Dark, made under Harper’s supervision and thus up to his standards. How we ended up with just Hack the Planet and Neon Black, I will never know. It’s such a slam-dunk perfect fit, but it apparently isn’t a genre that interests the people who could do it justice. I’ve been reading a|state and am liking it so far but I just got to the part where you create your Corner of The City, which is the shared group character in the game. I may be overly into that concept because when I ran Cyberpunk RED I did a Microscope session 0 to build out where the team all lived and my players loved it. So far it seems like a pretty good Cyberpunk skin. I think I like it better than Hack the Planet but I want to run both someday. I think I’d prefer either to RED’s crunch especially away from a VTT that handles the math for everyone.
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Sep 9, 2023 04:41
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trapstar posted:I wanna check out Blades in the Dark, I've heard good things. It's really great but I think OG Blades doesn't explain the core mechanics very well. It's a bit scattered across the book. Scum & Villainy, the not-Star Wars implementation and one of the actually completed stretch goals that went above and beyond, is better at grounding you in the main system I think, plus it's a good game in its own right. They're both really affordable too, and high quality print products (as with most Evil Hat publications) that are probably still available at Evil Hat or IPR.
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Sep 9, 2023 04:50
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Splicer posted:So take out the resource cards I appreciate the suggestions. I guess one of my main inspirations was Dominion and the mechanical skill of knowing when to stop building up resources/engine and going for the win, so I feel like removing resources all together would too drastically change how the game works. There is one extra use for resources. In the game the resource is water, and when you send units out to attack, you have to spend resources or they start to take damage, but even with that mechanic it feels like you can get by alright without purchasing more resources. Maybe I just need to turn up the cost/penalty for. It's one thing that makes this game pretty unique and I really like it. There are a few burn/exile cards. I should check out how the star wars deckbuilding game and the others mentioned here works. The main problem i have is in dominion the VP you gain is all at once, but an attacking unit the VP gain is effectively cumulative, you can attack face/enemies every turn, so valuing a 1/1 unit at 1 cost seems a bit low, so I probably just undercosted my units maybe. I'd been a bit discouraged (and also working on other games), but I should pick this up again. Blades in the dark looks really cool, I'd been enjoying the adventure zone campaign using BitD set in an amusement park city.
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Sep 9, 2023 04:57
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That Old Tree posted:It's really great but I think OG Blades doesn't explain the core mechanics very well. It's a bit scattered across the book. Scum & Villainy, the not-Star Wars implementation and one of the actually completed stretch goals that went above and beyond, is better at grounding you in the main system I think, plus it's a good game in its own right. They're both really affordable too, and high quality print products (as with most Evil Hat publications) that are probably still available at Evil Hat or IPR. I thought it did a good job but I'd already played a fair amount of Apocalypse World using advice from John Harper's blog that definitely also shaped the design of Blades, so I wasn't exactly coming to it fresh. Actually teaching it though, I always find the devil's bargain one rule too many so I just end up holding that one back until someone has to roll and looks sad about how few dice they have Kestral posted:It is still one of the great tragedies of modern RPG design that we’ve never gotten a full-fledged literary cyberpunk game Forged the Dark, made under Harper’s supervision and thus up to his standards. How we ended up with just Hack the Planet and Neon Black, I will never know. It’s such a slam-dunk perfect fit, but it apparently isn’t a genre that interests the people who could do it justice. I played his two page game Ghost Echo and it seemed really cool but we struggled to come up with a setting that felt substantial. Now you've got me thinking about smushing that together with the city generation stuff in Cities Without Number. Faction clocks always sort of felt like a rules light version of the faction turn in SWN anyway Tarnop fucked around with this message at 06:00 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 05:57
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trapstar posted:I wanna check out Blades in the Dark, I've heard good things. Yeah it's a blast
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Sep 9, 2023 06:24
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It's draining to run in my experience.
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Sep 9, 2023 06:25
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My players just could not get a handle on the clock concept and half of them hated the idea of playbooks. It's a fantastic game, but not for everybody.
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Sep 9, 2023 06:53
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:My players just could not get a handle on the clock concept and half of them hated the idea of playbooks. It's a fantastic game, but not for everybody. I can't imagine not getting clocks, they're literally just progress bars. They're circles because drawing a circle and two lines to make a 4-clock is easier than drawing a 4-segment progress bar. Hit points in DnD are clocks. The rules around clocks basically boil down to: Sometimes you can measure the progress of things narratively with a progress bar. Sometimes you can do it mechanically too. If the GM thinks something should take more than one roll to resolve they'll make a progress bar about it. A standard success fills up two notches, great effect fills up three, limited effect fills up one.
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Sep 9, 2023 07:33
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That Old Tree posted:It's really great but I think OG Blades doesn't explain the core mechanics very well. It's a bit scattered across the book. Scum & Villainy, the not-Star Wars implementation and one of the actually completed stretch goals that went above and beyond, is better at grounding you in the main system I think, plus it's a good game in its own right. They're both really affordable too, and high quality print products (as with most Evil Hat publications) that are probably still available at Evil Hat or IPR. https://bladesinthedark.com/basics I think the SRD on the website does a much better job of organizing and presenting the rules than the book itself.
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Sep 9, 2023 07:49
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:My players just could not get a handle on the clock concept and half of them hated the idea of playbooks. It's a fantastic game, but not for everybody. I, too, hate character classes.
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Sep 9, 2023 08:32
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The lack of nearly any non narrative structure could be a bit challenging. Like my dudes fight someone, it's basically over when I say it is so it requires a lot of gm trust In practice it just kind of works though
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Sep 9, 2023 09:44
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My biggest problem with Blades was Downtime and the split of Heist/Non-Heist narration. It seems like you're either Heisting or in Downtime with no other options and everyone would plan out their Downtime activities to be ready for the next Heist. This is all well and good but it felt like it was pushing out all other non-Heist/non-Downtime activities. When can my character, like, visit a contact or a loved one? Does that have to be a Downtime activity? Do I really need to start a clock to see if my wife is buying my cover story still? It became this thing of 'I want to RP but the system isn't making it easy for me to do so' and that rubbed me the wrong way, made the world feel kind of empty.
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Sep 9, 2023 10:00
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BlackIronHeart posted:My biggest problem with Blades was Downtime and the split of Heist/Non-Heist narration. It seems like you're either Heisting or in Downtime with no other options and everyone would plan out their Downtime activities to be ready for the next Heist. This is all well and good but it felt like it was pushing out all other non-Heist/non-Downtime activities. When can my character, like, visit a contact or a loved one? Does that have to be a Downtime activity? Do I really need to start a clock to see if my wife is buying my cover story still? It became this thing of 'I want to RP but the system isn't making it easy for me to do so' and that rubbed me the wrong way, made the world feel kind of empty. There is an entire third phase you've forgotten about, which is explicitly where people freely roleplay character scenes:  Downtime is generally a handful of rolls that shouldn't take much more than 20-30 minutes to resolve, and Freeplay should generally be the post-Score phase that takes the longest because it's where you'll spend all your time breathing life into the city and your scoundrels' lives. As with everything else in fiction-first, Freeplay scenes change the narrative and will have whatever effect on or interaction with the mechanical bits which everyone agrees they should logically have for the narrative to stay consistent and coherent. e; people missing the importance of Freeplay is not new or rare; the book really spends most of its page count on the other two phases because those are conceptually new and mechanically complex, and as a result ends up giving much less book space to Freeplay (since hey, you know how roleplaying works, right?) and giving people the impression it's the shortest and least important phase, which leads to people making horrible mistakes and ending up with very flat, mechanical games. Band of Blades has the same issue. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 10:19 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 10:10
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Foolster41 posted:I appreciate the suggestions. I guess one of my main inspirations was Dominion and the mechanical skill of knowing when to stop building up resources/engine and going for the win, so I feel like removing resources all together would too drastically change how the game works. The main thing that encourages resource buying is thresholds. If you have a 5 card hand size and the base resource cards are worth 1 then you're unlikely to draw what's needed for a cost 4 or 5 card and you flat out cannot afford a cost 6. Buying a single resource (2) card massively boosts your ability to buy the game winners, and that's assuming the base deck even has 5 resource cards. And yeah with what you've described I wouldn't make anything attacky cost 1 (assuming you mean the "buy into your deck" cost) except for cards where "cost 1" is their gimmick. Being stuck with a single res point is a big driver to stop relying on the single res cards. If there's ongoing costs to having units in the field then you could make the base res cards one-shots (only resources for that turn before going back to the deck) while many of the buyables persist in play providing passive resources. A player could still do stuff turn 1 and 2 but they'd need some big generators by their second shuffle unless they're exclusively running weenies. You could also do things like combat units gaining bonuses for having the right categories of resource generators in play. Splicer fucked around with this message at 10:57 on Sep 9, 2023 |
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Sep 9, 2023 10:52
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ninjoatse.cx posted:I, too, hate character classes. The effect of your 'class' in BitD is entirely just your starting gear, your choice of ability, and (the only lingering thing) one of your XP sources. You can literally take your pick of cross class abilities with zero penalty.
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Sep 9, 2023 12:16
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bewilderment posted:The effect of your 'class' in BitD is entirely just your starting gear, your choice of ability, and (the only lingering thing) one of your XP sources. I was pointing out it was kind of a silly thing to hate, since pretty much every TTRPG of note where you play as a single character has them (yes, shadowrun does too)
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Sep 9, 2023 13:38
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Lemon-Lime posted:There is an entire third phase you've forgotten about, which is explicitly where people freely roleplay character scenes: The trick is that there are presumably things you can’t do in free play, only because they are on the list of things that are listed for downtime. That then has to be worked around in fiction.
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Sep 9, 2023 15:19
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hyphz posted:The trick is that there are presumably things you can’t do in free play, only because they are on the list of things that are listed for downtime. That then has to be worked around in fiction. No. Like the game that inspired it, Apocalypse World, mechanics are both prescriptive and descriptive. If I make a clock that says it takes 6 segments to do a thing and you approach it the way I envisioned when I drew the clock then it takes 3 partial successes or two full successes to complete. If you come up with a clever way that I hadn't thought of to get 5/6 of the way there, then I mark 5 segments. A good example is vices. Satisfying your vice is a downtime activity. This does not mean that your booze-seeking scoundrel can't plan a heist to boost a crate of gutrot from the local distillery
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Sep 9, 2023 15:30
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I'm not the biggest fan of fiction-first games in general, but I like the structure of actual PBTA games a great deal better than BitD. Good PBTA games give you incredibly explicit structure on when and how to act as a GM. Blades felt like it was leaving absolutely everything up to your discretion, which was even weirder to me because the game has a lot of resource management and strategic decision-making on the player side. For that management to mean anything, it needs to be measured against some consistent standard, but the game doesn't give you any tools to do that except your own best judgment.
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Sep 9, 2023 16:25
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That Old Tree posted:It's really great but I think OG Blades doesn't explain the core mechanics very well. It's a bit scattered across the book. Scum & Villainy, the not-Star Wars implementation and one of the actually completed stretch goals that went above and beyond, is better at grounding you in the main system I think, plus it's a good game in its own right. They're both really affordable too, and high quality print products (as with most Evil Hat publications) that are probably still available at Evil Hat or IPR. That's not to say S&V isn't great, and I think you might be right about it explaining the mechanics better. But though they're basically the same game mechanically, they're very different in feel and setting, and unless your players really want to play Firefly/the Mandalorian/you rebel scum, S&V isn't easily adaptable to other sorts of sci-fi. (Then again, BitD has a very specific milieu and would be a terrible system as presented for running, e.g., Oceans Five or whatever -- a whole new setting would have to be developed to meet the rules unless it were a one-shot that didn't care about repercussions.) Agree on the high quality for both print versions as well as the quality of online resources (primarily the SRD) that another poster mentioned for BitD. One more thing that I liked about S&V was that it was easy to find Stras' streamed play sessions that, while not perfect and I think used a 0.8 version of the rules IIRC, we're instrumental to being able to jump into effective GMing from session zero. I couldn't find good BitD plays online at the time (2020). This may have changed.
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Sep 9, 2023 16:50
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Admiralty Flag posted:I've run S&V but not BitD, but only because buy-in would be easier from my group for the former. Mechanically, they're mostly the same game (though gambits really do add a lot of pulp feel for their low rules weight, especially with a scoundrel in the group), yet atmospherically (no pun intended) they're quite different: you don't have to play common criminals in S&V (while bounty hunters ride the edge, rebels are something different altogether), the Friends at the Table did a pretty good play-through of a slightly earlier than release version of the rules, that’s how I got into it. Also pretty surprised people had problems running it. I found it really easy because the players have so much agency. Never hosed with the default setting though. We were either making our own, or just stealing from a book or something we all read that had similar enough themes. (e.g. it does stuff in Mieville’s Bas Lag setting really easily)
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Sep 9, 2023 17:03
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Believe it or not, there are players out there who really don't like having a large amount of narrative agency. They like hard rails for many parts of a game, and that's fine.
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Sep 9, 2023 17:38
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I found Blades to be pretty adaptable to both kinds of player. If you know exactly which faction you want to target for a heist and what you're trying to steal, the game has you covered. If you prefer to be given quests by an NPC, there are a whole bunch of factions more powerful than your gang that have explicit goals and a system to manage their progress towards those goals, who will pay you to do jobs for them
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Sep 9, 2023 17:58
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https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/452473/Far-West?src=hottest Hey, guys, you aren't going to believe what just happened. This game was a meme about never releasing poo poo.
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Sep 9, 2023 18:46
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Admiralty Flag posted:I couldn't find good BitD plays online at the time (2020). This may have changed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Lwxp-5QxR0 I like the Oxventure series. They do very brisk, well-run scores.
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Sep 9, 2023 18:54
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