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DocBubonic posted:Reckoners are the reason for ghost rock. It sure isn't naturally occurring in the Deadlands universe. Ghost rock and Mad science helped to keep the U.S. from defeating the C.S.A. The whole reason for ghost rock was to a) keep people fighting over resources and b) release damned souls into the world. The Reckoners' long-term plot was to accelerate human technological advancement to the point where we developed ghost-rock-nukes that didn't rely on Mad Science and could be mass produced, because they were the tools needed to turn the world into one big Deadland. It's also why the manitous stopped helping mad scientists once the bomb was developed: their work here was done, and overnight mad science just stopped working.
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Dec 1, 2014 22:28
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Fuego Fish posted:I will have no truck with any setting that doesn't allow for mad science Oh, Hell On Earth still allows for mad science, it's just that instead of hoping a demon will whisper the technological secrets into your ear and fill in the physics gaps with spiritual energy, you trap the demon in a special spirit battery and drain the energy out of it until it evaporates.
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Dec 2, 2014 00:05
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Alien Rope Burn posted:There just seems to be a point where certain AEG settings (Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, Shadowforce Archer) forgot their mission statement of providing a genre experience and instead started meandering into other genres without much rhyme or reason other than "gotcha!". What was the "gotcha" on Shadowforce Archer?
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Dec 5, 2014 15:42
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Tendales posted:I've been flipping through Outbreak, and so far... well. The layout is awful. Text bleeds into the margin art. Character creation is completely nonsense. Honestly, this book is reading like a collection of someone's design notes, arranged vaguely into categories. Sometimes those categories are labelled wrong. Almost all of the gamemaster section's pages are labelled 'the turn' for some reason. That'll be an interesting conversation when that guy comes back into the store, then.
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Dec 7, 2014 07:14
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Ratpick posted:So it's basically an uglier version of Tabletop Simulator. It's also incredibly impractical.
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Dec 7, 2014 19:30
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Babylon Astronaut posted:My curiosity got the best of me and I watched this. Holy gently caress. It is the dumbest poo poo I have ever heard. "to stay true to history, role playing games came before D&D" "Ok, I'll accept that premise." They just stake out random positions on pointless poo poo, and refuse to budge in the face of reality. "A roleplaying game has no fluff." Every sentence is wrong. I'm coming to think that "RPG designer" is a step below idiot making GBS threads their pants and smearing it on their face like warpaint. There are plenty of designers who aren't jackasses, but as is often the case you don't know it because they don't do stuff like make videos about how awesome they are.
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Dec 7, 2014 19:57
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I doubt it; as it is there's not a lot of real "reviewing" of RPGs outside of RPGNet or the stuff on DriveThru.
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Dec 8, 2014 18:34
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I like my bubble. All my stuff is in here.
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Dec 9, 2014 19:02
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Libertad! posted:The other pertinent question is, how many dots in History (Japan) do you get from watching 10 years' worth of anime? None. You actually owe the game three dots.
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Dec 9, 2014 21:21
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I was in a pokemon one-shot that used FAE, and it worked really well. The 'mons type and nature were just aspects, and they fought using the trainer's approaches.
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Dec 11, 2014 17:15
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ProfessorCirno posted:I'm reminded of a guy elsewhere who really hated Eberron because it was too focused on giving him plot hooks. It had too many mysteries! Too many fine details left unsaid! How am I supposed to get into the world as a DM if I don't know what caused the Mourning? How am I supposed to run a game if all I have to give players is adventure? That sounds like Gaming Den thinkin'.
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Dec 15, 2014 01:27
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Jimbozig posted:Honestly, using that list of dramatic situations to come up with ideas is great. But using it as a random table seems pretty poo poo, yep. Put down the dice and just pick the most interesting situation. It always bears repeating: there's nothing wrong with using random roll tables and such for inspiration. It's when they start dictating things that's the problem.
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Dec 15, 2014 06:13
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FMguru posted:There was a guy quoted in a previous grognards.txt whose long-running D&D campaign was so simulation-minded that it was literally impossible for adventurers to do anything because if there was anything to do, someone (probably higher level) would have already done it. Like, your party will never hear of a haunted tomb full of treasure outside of town because the likelihood of you being the first to hear about it were roughly zero, so some other party of adventurers would have already cleaned it out by the time you got there, and so on. Being the first group of people to be handed a map by a grizzled old man in a tavern was an obviously unrealistic dramatic contrivance, and the DM was having none of that. It was literally a world without plot hooks. FMguru posted:IIRC the players had to bust their rear end to find (or created) a profitable yet unfilled niche to exploit (why, yes, the DM also built insanely detailed and "realistic" trade and currency tables) and work to hold onto it. It was less a game of heroic monsterbashing adventure and more a game of "you guys are ambitious would-be criminals just arrived in a city where powerful mafias have already divided up all the territory and rackets and don't like outsiders, what do you do?". I think the answer was the party got involved in hijacking and reselling shipments of kegs of mustard seed. Which I guess could be fun if you wanted to play Dope Wars 1100AD and not Dungeons & Dragons, but man what a weird way to play. I can't help but wonder what the players must have been like if they wound up in other people's games. Did they revel in their freedom, or were they upset that they had stuff to do?
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Dec 15, 2014 17:40
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Rockopolis posted:Isn't building a giant-rear end castle basically the endgame for original D&D? Yes, but it wasn't the endgame in the sense of that being the end of your character. There were like 20+ levels after that point to slog through.
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Dec 16, 2014 02:25
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KittyEmpress posted:I've had people make this argument before, and it always seems to come from the same people who think that the fighter shouldn't be capable of leading anyone because he doesn't have high charisma. People who think that the Fighter should get to become a lord and have all the benefits of that to level the playing field inevitably want to be like 'well her ability scores don't support it so she can't actually', oh but look their sorcerer has 26 charisma so everyone will follow them so they have spells and minions obviously. quote:I'd never heard of Birthright or Reign before.
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Dec 16, 2014 02:48
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People tend to complain about the size of Core compared to FAE, but a lot of the book is how-to stuff about how to run and hack the game.
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Dec 18, 2014 22:39
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Covok posted:I don't get why people think it's a commercial failure. You can infer a lot from its D&D Insider subscriber count in regards to how much income just peripheral of it generated. Right, but that was another shooting-themselves-in-the-foot situation. A lot of people realized that the contents from the $30+ books was being included in your $10 a month subscription that you could share with everyone. So from a customer standpoint it wasn't cost-effective to buy the books after a while.
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Dec 20, 2014 06:06
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There's one company that's put out a whole line of Fate shovelware. They basically take the OGL, staple 10 to 15 pages of half-assed setting onto it, then charges $15 for the drat thing. This is the beginning of every one of their games. This is page 3, after page 1 being the cover and page 2 being the TOC/credits. This is from "Steampunk Powered By Fate" but every opening is pretty much this with the genre tags swapped out: quote:CHARACTER CREATION I don't think I've ever seen a phrase that gets you into the designers' mindset better than "Combining two names with a meaning can provide an interesting name, such as Darkraven, from dark and raven." They've got a dozen or so of these products, which isn't surprising since they probably took about half an hour each to write.
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Dec 22, 2014 20:54
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Davin Valkri posted:If Fate has an OGL, and Fate Accelerated is free, then how are they still in business? That all sounds very...generic. They were released about the same time the Fate Core KS ended, and people were grabbing everything with Fate on it. They're the very definition of cash-in-cash-grab products.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:41
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Parkreiner posted:To be pedantic (the best kind of correct!), I'm pretty sure Green Ronin's first product was a supplement for Feng Shui, that Chris Pramas published himself because Daedalus was such a shitshow. It was that and a supplement for Whispering Vault. But d20 put them over the top because they had the first d20 adventure available at the GenCon where 3e was released. So people were buying the first new D&D in however long it was, then GR was there going "hey, you want to start playing right away? Here's a module with pregens!"
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Dec 22, 2014 21:43
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Green Ronin was one of the better d20 supplement publishers. That's not to say their stuff is really good in a modern context, but was pretty solid when you compared it to most of the d20 output at the time - it was probably the closest you'd get to a low-budget version of WotC's releases outside of Malhavoc. There's a reason Freeport is one of the few settings that originated in d20 that's still being published to this day in various forms. They were also smart enough to expand Freeport to other systems. They have a generic citybook that has all the needed fluff, then they have system-specific books for 4E, Pathfinder, Savage Worlds, and Fate that have detailed stats and new rules and such. I still say Pirate's Guide to Freeport is one of the best citybooks out there. They understand that if you're going to list major locations or people, they need to be interesting and/or have cool hooks.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:57
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Asymmetrikon posted:Given that the existence of magic and wizards has essentially no impact on the functioning of society in RPGs, hoping for darkvision to affect worldbuilding is perhaps a bit optimistic. I have a whole rant about how D&D-land can't be Standard Pseudo-Medieval Europe if Continual Light spells exist. But yes, one of the things that makes Eberron so great is that it actually acknowledges that when you have magic, that will actually affect the culture at large.
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Dec 24, 2014 06:13
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Merry Christmas you goddamn nerds. And Gygax bless us, every one.
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Dec 25, 2014 18:35
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unseenlibrarian posted:From what I can tell, the "It's not going to be balanced/compatible with IKRPG" is a Privateer press forum interpretation of them saying "We're not going to balance the games assuming that PCs from one game will be in parties with from PCs from the other" at Gencon and then everyone going full Chicken little on interpreting that. Well, that worked so well for White Wolf...
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Dec 30, 2014 01:39
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