|
It would work really well if the players were companions and The Doctor was a player-controlled NPC with as much narrative control as the DM. Narrating The Doctor would be a limited shared resource, but you could get something very satisfyingly close to the flow of the show.
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 19:03
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 07:22 |
|
|
homullus posted:re: character advancement: What games have put advancement pacing significantly or entirely in the hands of the PCs as a group? Not just "electing to play to the character as-written gives XP", but "we've solved the problems of this town; let's move to the next tier so we can tackle the problems of the kingdom" or even "that was a tough fight, let's all level up." It sounds crazy at first and at second, but ... maybe not?. Consensus would be important, so that the campaign organically stays longer at arcs and tiers the players find satisfying. I think it might nudge leveling to right before the "boss fight" (or other big narrative moment) rather than after...but maybe that's ok? Shorter campaigns, but they actually reach the end? hmm.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 19:06
|
|
|
homullus posted:Roll d% on this table for character generation. You are a: The only published adventure is the one where earth votes on whether or not they should give the moon an abortion.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 21:01
|
|
|
So, RPGnet has apparently banned all discussion of Matt McFarland, Beast: the Primordial, and Chill, and will not be explaining why they did this. It is really hard to come up with a reason for such a highly-specific ban, given that McFarland has his name on half of White Wolf's output, other than "we would really, really like for all discussion of our part in this to vanish."
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 21:39
|
|
|
Someone would inevitably try to defend him, so they're ultimately sparing that would-be defender the embarrassment.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 21:43
|
|
|
That's a bit of a shame. I hesitated to review Chill 3e because I didn't want to give the McFarlands publicity, but AFAIK they no longer have any claim on it nor derive any profit from it. I believe the brand is now owned by a Canadian part-time horror host who just really likes Chill. I love how every time I visit those forums there's another header explaining another issue that they're taking a stance on.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 21:46
|
|
|
I think the only RPG system I've played that really scales well from beginning to end is Burning Wheel. It's such a character-driven system, and stats and skills level so granularly, that it really does work well everywhere from a one-shot to a years-long campaign. It also scales excellently to player counts from one (plus GM) on up and doesn't screw over players who can't make every session. Now if only the author wasn't so up his own rear end... I'm sure there are other systems that work well across a wide range too, I'm not trying to say otherwise. I've hardly played even 1% of the RPG systems in existence. Just wanted to give Burning Wheel some praise where it deserves it.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 22:02
|
|
|
Rand Brittain posted:So, RPGnet has apparently banned all discussion of Matt McFarland, Beast: the Primordial, and Chill, and will not be explaining why they did this. I could totally see it as the RPG.net way of reconciling their mandatory positivity towards all industry professionals with McFarland being an industry professional who should be spoken of negatively: simply don't talk about him at all! That or some kind of legal threat, maybe.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 22:15
|
|
|
What's the perk of having high-level play that you cant get in low level play you can domains/politics, movers and shakers of a region, fight cool rear end encounters all at low levels. I'd say level 5 you're good enough.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 22:25
|
|
|
Dexo posted:hmm, wonder if you could get away with a game where the GM is the doctor, and the players are like companions or allies in that episode/arc. I think that was broadly the idea behind TSR's old Indiana Jones game, except that Indy was a role the players took turns playing while the rest of the group did various sidekicks.
|
|
#
?
Dec 15, 2023 23:48
|
|
|
BeastChat is second only to MageChat in terms of WoD discussions that take up pages but end up going nowhere. They banned discussion about FATAL for largely the same reasons; there are a million things to talk about as far as the ways in which it's problematic, but they all boil down to "it's bad, don't play it".
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 00:45
|
|
|
LatwPIAT posted:That or some kind of legal threat, maybe. This is why they banned mention or discussion of ACKS - Macris threatened to sue the site over something someone had posted (IIRC) and the owners determined that a complete topic blackout was better than walking on eggshells.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 00:59
|
|
|
TheDiceMustRoll posted:What's the perk of having high-level play that you cant get in low level play rolling a shitload of dice for everything. Dropping a dark side point to roll 118d6 as the emperor in WEG Star Wars is sublime.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 02:32
|
|
|
Dexo posted:hmm, wonder if you could get away with a game where the GM is the doctor, and the players are like companions or allies in that episode/arc. We had a Doctor Who game with three players and the GM, and how we handled it was we'd run an episode/serial with one of the players was a Time Lord named "The Barrister" with the other two as their Companions. When we finished the episode, another player would play another regeneration of the Barrister with the other players playing different Companions, and so on for the third player. It was fun because everyone got to be a Time Lord who wasn't the Doctor, plus we didn't know what "order" the regenerations were in when we started the game, it developed naturally over the course of fifteen episodes (five each) plus a Christmas special with two players played the Barrister with the third as a new Companion and of course the multi-Barrister finale against our archrival Time Lord, the Patron.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 04:21
|
|
|
The Barrister is making me think Doctor Who Ace Attorney, and boy that sounds like some extra layers of shenanigans.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 04:28
|
|
|
TheDiceMustRoll posted:What's the perk of having high-level play that you cant get in low level play Not in a DnD sense but I would say that in general the domain of fantasy RPGs, including heartbreakers, is underserved by games representing the 'JRPG protagonist' tier in a way that doesn't suck or get Exalted-level crunchy. Fabula Ultima is cool and does it, but imagine someone watching Arcane and saying "I want to play a game where I'm Jayce or Vi, and I don't want just some narrative system like Fate". Bonus: what I think every time I see the end of that scene bewilderment fucked around with this message at 13:38 on Dec 16, 2023 |
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 13:32
|
|
|
Midjack posted:rolling a shitload of dice for everything. Dropping a dark side point to roll 118d6 as the emperor in WEG Star Wars is sublime. Level 1 DCC lets you spellburn and do similar effects though and thats level 1. bewilderment posted:Not in a DnD sense but I would say that in general the domain of fantasy RPGs, including heartbreakers, is underserved by games representing the 'JRPG protagonist' tier in a way that doesn't suck or get Exalted-level crunchy. I'm just very confused as to why you need high-level play for this, it seems you'd be better served playing a game like 4e that allows cool team-work and pulling off combat combos and shnit together which you're expected to do by level 1.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 14:25
|
|
|
Ghost Leviathan posted:The Barrister is making me think Doctor Who Ace Attorney, and boy that sounds like some extra layers of shenanigans. This has sold me in the Doctor Who game more than any actual marketing for it, so... There's that, I guess.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 15:15
|
|
|
TheDiceMustRoll posted:Level 1 DCC lets you spellburn and do similar effects though and thats level 1. To be fair, I feel like the point is less that you need high-level play to do JRPG protagonist things and more that JRPGs are long and you want a long advancement curve if you're going to do the amount of stuff you do in the average Dragon Quest without either slowing advancement down too much or running out halfway through. EDIT: That and "I started this campaign doing high level politics, and now I'm doing moon politics with ancient spyrits" is still a pretty JRPG thing to do. You don't necessarily need to lock that kind of gameplay behind high levels to do this. Also I literally just realized your example is 4e, why are you using a game with 30 levels as an example of how you don't need a long advancement curve? It's literally an example of what I'm suggesting, where you don't really need high-level play but you want it so you can play a campaign with an absurd length and feel like you're advancing properly the entire time. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 15:58 on Dec 16, 2023 |
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 15:51
|
|
|
Dexo posted:Turning it into a microtransaction game is comically overstated and false. At least more than it already sorta is one anyway.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 16:30
|
|
|
yeah literally every tcg is just a physical lootbox/gacha lol
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 16:50
|
|
|
Magic is not a lootbox in the same way that wolves aren't dogs.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 17:05
|
|
|
TheDiceMustRoll posted:What's the perk of having high-level play that you cant get in low level play Being able to play a long campaign with the same character from start to finish without characters stagnating mechanically.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 17:15
|
|
|
CobiWann posted:We had a Doctor Who game with three players and the GM, and how we handled it was we'd run an episode/serial with one of the players was a Time Lord named "The Barrister" with the other two as their Companions. When we finished the episode, another player would play another regeneration of the Barrister with the other players playing different Companions, and so on for the third player. See, this post? This is the kind of post you make if you actually want to convince people ITT to try a different game system (though which Doctor Who system? There's so many.) over 5E. Calling out Hasbro for being a lovely corporation is always seasonable and welcome. I'm unsure about WotC: is Crawford actually wielding any meaningful power, or is the D&D line controlled entirely by executives who know nothing about RPGs but are focused on brand loyalty, production values supported by cheap subcontracting, and market share? Do we know? But during the periodic "poo poo on 5E" upsurge ITT, things get weird. Like, "you are objectively having fun wrong" kinds of weird. Tell me that and you have a 0% chance of changing my behavior. Show me how I can have more fun in a better system by focusing on that better system, maybe without even referencing 5E, and you're going to be a lot more persuasive. Otherwise, things remain "5E is a poorly designed system that sucks all the oxygen out of the room, and we're going to prove it by constantly making GBS threads on 5E instead of talking about anything else; that'll show 'em." The OGL thing is rightly still a topic of conversation, I don't think anyone would defend that disaster, but nobody's posting anything about all the neat third party publications that have come out of Paizo setting up their own version of the OGL for Pathfinder. Is that because it's been a wet fart thus far, or are people just sharing that news in the Pathfinder 2E thread and never here? "Here are systems that do X better than 5E" is still talking about 5E. Please give me more "here's a system that does X really well" posts and actually bring some oxygen back into the room. If 5E is a terrible RPG but more people want to talk about it than all the exciting innovations and great systems elsewhere, why in the world would anyone who never heard of those innovations and systems bother to switch? And that's true about industry news, too. Has there been more positive news about work conditions at Paizo following the unionization? If all anyone discusses is the bad stuff, it just invites everyone who is posting here presumably because they like TGs to conclude "the TG world is poo poo, why am I wasting my life?" If the many great RPGs being neglected aren't good enough for people to positive post about them here except as part of an argument that 5E sucks, why would I ever think they're worth trying out? The TG industry seems either very vulture corporate or "two guys running a company who are either toxic or exploiting contractors or paying family members (thanks, FryxGames) to do all the work when they aren't using AI. I want more posts like those promoting Kaiju Table Battles/Hollandspiele. Those posts made me discover a great TG designer I'd otherwise not have heard of. If I can work out which games might be a hit with my regular TG group, they'll even lead to me purchasing something!
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 17:16
|
|
|
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 17:24
|
|
|
imweasel09 posted:I don't have a dog in this race with d and d but as a long time magic player that poo poo is absolutely a lootbox game, especially arena. We have entire game modes about opening packs. That was kinda my point. Narsham posted:
On the business side, It's been pure business people making decisions at WotC ever since Hasbro's reorg a while ago. But yeah Perkins and Crawford are still like the lead creatives/designers when it comes to the product of Dungeons and Dragons 5th edition/OneDnD.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 17:40
|
|
|
homullus posted:A Doctor Who game that mechanically represents the show would likely not be fun! One player constantly hogging the spotlight, GM fiat everywhere -- so so so many narrative obstacles in both the historical and modern runs of the show are resolved with convenient coincidences and deus ex machina. Remarkably few episodes are resolved with actual time travel, and (anecdotally) "timey-wimey" is used to explain why something already happened or couldn't happen. It solves problems for the writers, not the characters. It does depend on whether it's Classic Who vs. Modern Who and each seems to have an RPG that represents that. Classic Who has the FASA one and from what I've glanced at, Gallifreyans (including the Doctor) are generated the same way as humans with no mechanical advantages or disadvantages. As a result, even if a story might focus on the Doctor player, they don't roll any better than a human character with the same stats though the GM might adjust difficulties because of who's doing it. Anyone can take a look at the books here: https://archive.org/details/doctorwhofasa/Player%27s%20Manual/page/45/mode/2up For Modern Who, there's the one published by Cubicle 7 called Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. As far as mechanical solutions go, the game is a point buy system so being a Time Lord (and a bunch of the stuff that comes along with it) costs some points as well as Story Points which allows players to modify rolls up a success level. It also heavily asks that a player playing a Time Lord pick up a bunch of negative traits too, but otherwise they're also generated like any other character. It does suggest if everyone wants to play the Doctor to rotate it between players either every session or every regeneration. How it works in play? Idk.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 17:40
|
|
|
I was flipping through "Into the Black" (an OSR-ish sci-fi RPG) today, and went to look up Pink Hack SRD and related materials, and it looks like Monkey Paw Games has entirely removed their online presence aside from a physical shipping website for other games. Any idea what happened?
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 18:45
|
|
|
Narsham posted:See, this post? This is the kind of post you make if you actually want to convince people ITT to try a different game system (though which Doctor Who system? There's so many.) over 5E. Cubicle 7's system, the First Edition that came out around the end of Tenant's run in 2009. Two versions of the Barrister were in the classic series (so shoddy sets and hammy overacting) and the other one was in the new series (so bad CGI and hammy overacting). The system had graded successes (you get past the guards, but they're suspicious and report it to their superiors, or you get past the guards and they assume you're on an inspection tour and keep it quiet) and grade failures along with Story Points you earned for good roleplay, or in this case playing in character (being smart, being a fish out of water, getting captured on purpose) or good meta gaming (a Story Point for coming up with a quick cliffhanger when the DM calls the session or if you come up with a good cliffhanger that the DM calls the session). It's one of the things I don't like about 5e inspiration - yeah, the percentage of success goes up, but there's no flavor to actually spending it unless the DM comes up with some. Stuff like Story Points or WGE's Wild Die always appealed to me more. CobiWann fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Dec 16, 2023 |
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 18:47
|
|
|
Burnt_toastist posted:I was flipping through "Into the Black" (an OSR-ish sci-fi RPG) today, and went to look up Pink Hack SRD and related materials, and it looks like Monkey Paw Games has entirely removed their online presence aside from a physical shipping website for other games. Any idea what happened? Monkey’s Paw put out Unconquered, which was recently exposed as having plagiarized pretty extensively from Ultraviolet Grasslands. When called on it, they nuked pretty much everything.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 18:50
|
|
|
Xelkelvos posted:It does depend on whether it's Classic Who vs. Modern Who and each seems to have an RPG that represents that. Classic Who has the FASA one and from what I've glanced at, Gallifreyans (including the Doctor) are generated the same way as humans with no mechanical advantages or disadvantages. As a result, even if a story might focus on the Doctor player, they don't roll any better than a human character with the same stats though the GM might adjust difficulties because of who's doing it. Anyone can take a look at the books here: https://archive.org/details/doctorwhofasa/Player%27s%20Manual/page/45/mode/2up And for Wilderness Years Who there's Time Lord, the RPG put out by Virgin at around the same time as the New Adventures novels were starting up and didn't have much of a character generation system but did have stat sheets for all seven classic Doctors plus almost all the canonical companions up to that point...
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 19:32
|
|
|
CobiWann posted:It's one of the things I don't like about 5e inspiration - yeah, the percentage of success goes up, but there's no flavor to actually spending it unless the DM comes up with some. in our 5e campaign you couldn’t spend inspiration without some narration about how the advantage was created, and more than one time a player got inspiration for coming up with a great way for someone else to use inspiration
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 19:58
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:To be fair, I feel like the point is less that you need high-level play to do JRPG protagonist things and more that JRPGs are long and you want a long advancement curve if you're going to do the amount of stuff you do in the average Dragon Quest without either slowing advancement down too much or running out halfway through. 4e’s got the issue where high-level play works almost exactly like low-level play. You’re still doing the same basic stuff - wandering adventures, dungeon crawling with big combat set pieces - at level 30 as in level 1. The numbers are higher (and prone to slow things down) and the monsters more impressive (go from “fighting goblins in a cave” to “fighting the host of the Goblin God in a cave within the Elemental Chaos”), but it’s the exact same loop.There’s no rules or expectation of domain play, or any suggestion that PCs gain any more agency beyond the ability to fight tougher monsters as a party unit. On the flipside, I’ve seen few games, D&D or otherwise, that actually pull off domain play in a satisfying way. Best I’ve found is Godbound. It has the excellent idea of abstracting the transactions done in domain play through Dominion points that PCs cash in to create resources or affect political change on a scale from local to global. It’s also flexible enough that PCs have the option of large Dominion spends to instantly expand their domain, or smaller spends to create change more directly, ex. building up an army so you can wage war against as nation. It helps that the Godbound mass combat rules are easy and intuitive; a necessary requirement for good domain play and something that no edition of D&D has really had beyond “buy Chainmail (tm)!”
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 21:13
|
|
|
That reminds me how sad I am that I’ll never get to play a Reign campaign.
|
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 22:07
|
|
|
Gatto Grigio posted:4e’s got the issue where high-level play works almost exactly like low-level play. You’re still doing the same basic stuff - wandering adventures, dungeon crawling with big combat set pieces - at level 30 as in level 1. The numbers are higher (and prone to slow things down) and the monsters more impressive (go from “fighting goblins in a cave” to “fighting the host of the Goblin God in a cave within the Elemental Chaos”), but it’s the exact same loop.There’s no rules or expectation of domain play, or any suggestion that PCs gain any more agency beyond the ability to fight tougher monsters as a party unit. Just make your own proprietary combat system. If you can "fix" dnd, you can "fix" warhammer as well! Literally just make your own stls. You have it in you to make your own 3D printer, resin mixes, etc TheDiceMustRoll fucked around with this message at 22:17 on Dec 16, 2023 |
|
#
?
Dec 16, 2023 22:07
|
|
|
Gatto Grigio posted:4e’s got the issue where high-level play works almost exactly like low-level play.
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2023 01:31
|
|
|
Bar Crow posted:4e is good because it admits it is D&D and doesn't pretend it turns into a different, poorly supported game at high levels. If you want a domain management game then you should just start with one. We don’t need more people gatekeeping what they think D&D is “supposed to be.” Eventual domain play has been a part of the game since its beginning. It’s a sensible narrative arc (if you’re getting rich off of treasure, why wouldn’t you invest in letting people do the dangerous dungeon crawling for you? What good is looting gold if you can’t actually spend it on anything?) and some people like a game that evolves into a different process. I could easily turn the tables on you and say that if you want a skirmish wargame with minis, you should go play Warhammer. Gatto Grigio fucked around with this message at 02:37 on Dec 17, 2023 |
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2023 02:23
|
|
|
It says it's been part of the game. It just hasn't in any meaningful way (Birthright excluded) beyond someone writing "You get a tower or any army."
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2023 04:02
|
|
|
4e doesn't try to pretend it's something it's not, and that a lot of grogs will never forgive it for.TheDiceMustRoll posted:Level 1 DCC lets you spellburn and do similar effects though and thats level 1. 4e really isn't far off at all from a JRPG style system, is it? Just explicitly add some limit breaks and combo moves. (of course, JRPGs were based on D&D-style games in the first place)
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2023 04:05
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 26, 2024 07:22 |
|
|
4e is really more of a trpg than a jrpg.
|
|
#
?
Dec 17, 2023 04:12
|
|
