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Grim posted:I always try to make a big deal about people speaking the right languages in Forgotten Realms games, but I think amongst my gaming group I'm the only one who gives a poo poo In all the fantasy games I've been in knowing the right language has only ever cropped up in regards to things like "the ancient language of demons" or being able to understand really weird poo poo like mind flayers or similarly alien outsider types. Not once have I ever seen a GM go "the dwarf king only knows how to speak dwarven, do any of you know how to speak that?" Conversely, it seems like language barriers are more likely to come up in modern/near-future games. Every Shadowrun game I've ever been in has made some sort of importance out of knowing the right language (though it helps that with the right cyberware you can pop a chip in your head that lets you at least get by).
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Oct 1, 2014 05:51
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Yeah, I don't think language barriers should never come up but there ought to be a reason behind it rather than throwing it in there just because. Especially baffling to me are games where player-characters might come from different geographical regions, none of which share a language, and ostensibly characters are required to either buy each others' language to communicate or constantly be rolling dice to understand what the other person is saying. While I can imagine games where interparty language barriers could be entertaining I utterly fail to see how that sort of thing would be anything other than quickly insufferable in your typical fantasy RPG where that was rigorously enforced.
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Oct 1, 2014 06:29
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OtspIII posted:I've been trying to find a way to make languages interesting, and I can't really do it (outside of maybe very specific encounters, but that's more of a session design thing than a system design one). You really need to justify every bit of complexity you put in your system, and languages have a hard time being anything but an extra piece of complexity that primarily works to prevent interesting social interactions from happening. Yeah, that's sort of it in a nutshell...RPGs are a collaborative, cooperative endeavor where dialogue is the primary means of moving things forward. Language barriers, outside of occasional puzzles or challenges, are a straight-up impediment to that.
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Oct 1, 2014 08:17
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Doodmons posted:Sadly, none of the other languages are detailed as much as Ob-lob. There's a shout out to the Imperial language for having the only sensible system of writing on the planet (still no spaces, punctuation or capital letters but way better than everyone else's) and a shout out to the Dindavaran written language for being so retarded that even they rarely use it (words are written according to pronunciation. To-may-to and to-mah-to would be written completely differently) In one of the supplements, I can't remember which but I think it's one of the earlier ones, there's some detail tucked away in a chapter of new advantages/qualities about a tiny little kingdom tucked away somewhere that's the only place in Reign's setting that understands the concepts of word spacing, punctuation, and how to read silently without vocalizing the words as you go. It's a secret they guard jealously the same way that Dindavara guards the secret of their Hanzo steel, and you can actually be from that country (or have been secretly taught by someone from that country) and buy the secrets of advanced literacy as a character advantage.
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Oct 1, 2014 18:17
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gradenko_2000 posted:Is it just me or is there a lot of TTRPG groups / discussions in Google+ specifically. Is there a particular reason for that? Drive to host PDFs, Hangouts for gaming and general nerdery for Google? The ability to curate who can and can't post in your discussion group.
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Oct 1, 2014 22:06
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The bit where Riddick kills a guy with a teacup ruins my verisimilitude because it's clearly a consequence of the game system not adequately differentiating between various types of improvised weapons and the player abusing that loophole to do something ridiculous. Any GM worth his dicebag would have had the player automatically fail and granted the enemy an automatic reaction attack in response, furthermore
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Oct 5, 2014 08:45
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Nowhere in any of the movies does Riddick "serious up" and get a minigun or whatever, the whole point of Riddick is that he's always using weapons that a "normal" person (for whatever value of normal you care to assign to the average member of bounty-hunter-alien-necromancer world) would consider grossly inferior to the task at hand. He kills a variety of gun-wielding mercenaries, alien monsters, and space necromancers using nothing more than a knife or, if he's feeling fancy, two. "Riddick would be more dangerous with a gun" is a really weird argument because how, exactly? There's never a point where he tries shanking someone and uh-oh, it turns out he needed to bring a better weapon to kill that guy. Riddick kills everyone he needs to kill using just a shiv, using a gun or a magic +5 knife isn't going to make him more lethaler than he already is. Yes, using inferior weaponry all the time is to demonstrate that Riddick is an ultimate badass, but there are ways to frame that in a tabletop RPG context that don't boil down to comparing stats to penalties and don't result in some hyperbolic strawman universe where teacups are equal in killing power to miniguns in everyone's hands. Watching this entire argument unfold has been genuinely bizarre.
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Oct 6, 2014 01:52
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It turns out that when you're playing a game, being able to take more than one turn at a time is really handy.
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Oct 30, 2014 01:21
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mllaneza posted:I'll just mention that I hate, hate, hate games where initiative uses exploding dice. If yours don't, it's your turn to make a snack run. I'm trying to think of games I've played that do this and I'm coming up blank. Like, I've played plenty of games where initiative and multiple actions were all kinds of hosed but I can't think of anything that use exploding dice on initiative specifically.
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Oct 30, 2014 07:33
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Wait, hang on...are you talking about Brave New World, that superheroes game that Pinnacle put out? Did that actually have exploding initiative? I mean, it's a pretty bad game all over so it wouldn't surprise me if it did.
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Oct 30, 2014 08:01
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I actually owned a copy of Brave New World but never played it, so I guess that's why I don't remember that particular system quirk. Yeah, that's incredibly stupid, even other games that use exploding dice for various reasons virtually never let initiative dice explode. BNW was a hot mess of a game top to bottom though. There's nothing inherently wrong with someone trying to make a class-based supers game, most supers RPGs that let you build your own character using a pointbuy menu have a tendency for chargen to become a gate to actually playing the game, but BNW's classes ran the gamut from "about on par with one of the X-Men" to "not as interesting as any of the X-Men," the setting was some really weird alternate history with JFK as tyrannical President for Life and no-poo poo old west style gunslinging duels being in vogue, and of course being a Pinnacle game published in the 90's it naturally had a metaplot to boot. It had a few interesting ideas but, yeah.
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Oct 30, 2014 09:00
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Night10194 posted:I never got what people saw in Deadlands. The setting always sounded kinda like a pile whenever my friends would describe it to me. Deadlands, if you pare away all the unfortunate bits, is basically Army of Darkness: Old West Edition. I mean I dunno, maybe that's not your cup of tea, but I can absolutely see the appeal in that. (Of course there's also the officially licensed Army of Darkness RPG by Eden Studios which supposedly wasn't half bad, so I guess you could use that, but Deadlands predates that by a number of years.)
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Oct 31, 2014 05:25
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