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So it's doing to be December 1st very soon, so I figured I'd make a new chat thread! What stuff do you want to talk about? Eager to score a new collection of goodies on Cyber Monday? Setting up your Christmas Wish List of elf-games? To kick discussion off, I like Deadlands. I hate Neo-Confederate apologia. How should I go about fixing this in games I run? I'm currently wondering whether to have the Confederacy as an expansionist, tyrannical government which ended up scoring a bunch of ghost rock in the Lousiana swamps to help give them the technological edge against the North. Even though the country's hurting after the result of the Civil War, they do plan on expanding into the Western territories as well as Cuba and Nicaragua. So the Confederacy would be kind of like the Empire in Star Wars: the PCs are far from their center of power, but their presence can be felt even out in the deserts and plains of the Old West. I'm just as interested in finding out a plausible explanation for how the Confederacy can still stand, much less fend off the Union successfully. Even with zombies and monsters and poo poo roaming about. Alternatively, I could try for an alt-history where the Civil War is over, but the South lost the war. This would take quite a bit more work, as it fundamentally shakes the setting's foundations. Thoughts? Libertad! fucked around with this message at 06:14 on Dec 1, 2014 |
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Dec 1, 2014 06:12
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Plague of Hats posted:Are your players invested? Because I don't think you need to do that much legwork to make the whole Civil War thing shake out like it did in real life, but now there are also zombie cowboys. We're still playing Pathfinder, but I have a soft spot for Deadlands so it might be one of several planned games once we're done with our current campaign. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:The Confederacy would have probably been very expansionist if it didn't become a Actually the Confederate Constitution removed more states' rights than it created or protected. The whole States' Rights thing didn't come up until after the war was over and Southerners realized that they'd go down in history as bad guys defending slavery. The Confederacy would still have a problem with states wanting to do their own thing, but I can see the Confederate military going all totalitarian post-war and cracking down on local insurrections with newly-developed ghost-rock technology. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Dec 1, 2014 |
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Dec 1, 2014 06:44
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Plague of Hats posted:Well, I meant specifically, are they invested in the setting details? Or would they be cool with "everything is like real history up to 1880 except Cali collapsed and ghosts came out"? I don't think any of them played Deadlands, so it will be a new thing to them. They'll probably be fine with the latter. I just want to have a good, short way of keeping as much of the things I like about the setting while changing the bad stuff. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 06:55 on Dec 1, 2014 |
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Dec 1, 2014 06:51
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I'd have 2 dots in some bureaucratic file management skill, so I'd argue with the GM that this can easily apply to in-game effects on post-apocalyptic resource management. The other pertinent question is, how many dots in History (Japan) do you get from watching 10 years' worth of anime?
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Dec 9, 2014 21:11
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Is there any particular reason why my thread title's different? Regarding the Planescape planes, a lot of the boring ones could be fixed mostly by dropping cool cities and adventures into them, also places with living conditions for extraplanar travelers. Sadly a lot of material doesn't give much in this way, leaving several planes (elemental planes in particular) rather bereft of cool features in some sourcebooks. For example in my homebrew Planar Revision Project, I decided that the Elemental Plane of Air would be home to a lot of airship travel, for there's a lot of floating islands with unclaimed resources. There are also Cloudscapes, which are basically giant cloud dungeons which can be reshaped and moved by a pilot in the center who controls a magical orb made of frozen water. My Elemental Plane of Air had glorious djinn cities as hubs of civilization, airship pirates and prospectors, and warlords riding in giant cloud dungeons. Another good idea is to focus on the colonizing aspect of extraplanar travel. Planes might be weird and hostile, but they're home to unique natural resources highly prized by outsiders. The Elemental Plane of Earth is an endless sea of minerals and gems. The Elemental Plane of Water would be home to many old sahuagin/merfolk/etc races who opened portals there. Religious people who prize fire as a destructive purifying force make pilgrimages to the Holy Shrine of the Fire Lords in the Elemental Plane of Fire, and those who can pass the trials can gain great prestige among the faithful. The Positive Energy Plane is home to the city of Morning's Gaze which is entirely animated by a colony of ravids: shifting streets lurch about in random directions, stoves spit out pots and pans at intruders, and local landmarks walk about the place to meet and greet each other. TL;DR what I'm saying is that more sourcebooks need to treat the planes as cool, varied places with cool, varied adventures beyond "hey, this place is full of fire and poo poo." Libertad! fucked around with this message at 20:44 on Dec 14, 2014 |
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Dec 14, 2014 20:31
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Evil Mastermind posted:That sounds like Gaming Den thinkin'. No no no, the Gaming Den argues that before the adventure for the PCs takes place the GM rolls attacks, skill checks, and saving throws for his NPCs before the adventure starts. So if that evil sorcerer rolls a Natural 1 on his casting roll in his plot to kidnap the princess and gets killed by the city guard, then the adventure doesn't happen. Yes, I legitimately saw this argued there once. ANYWAY In regards to magic planes and campaign backstory, you should treat things like a Saturday Morning Cartoon special: you bake up a new plot between weeks, toss it down, it has always existed in the game. Hey, you never heard about this Forlorn Path of evil magic poo poo of a forgotten civilization, but now you find it while traveling the Elemental Plane of Earth. Or maybe your PCs don't travel to the Elemental planes, and the Forlorn Path instead shows up in the Underdark or something. I find it easy to not add to my game world until said things come up, like a Bioware Codex entry. Only until the PCs hear about it or interact with it does it go onto the list. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 03:26
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A lot of those hardcore simulationist gamers probably don't have Asperger's, but rather a boner for making a living, breathing campaign by doing things all the wrong way. Not to mention the overall nerd obsession with "realism" which is a misuse of the phrase "consistent." Using "sperg" as a pejorative towards them is a bad idea people shouldn't do. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Dec 15, 2014 |
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Dec 15, 2014 23:13
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Kemper Boyd posted:One of the more interesting misconceptions re: d20 is the idea that it was good for the industry as a whole. I think the issue was that the d20 bubble managed to actually cannibalize itself. The overwhelming majority of all OGL product was garbage, and if there was a good product or two out there, I don't really think anyone ever even heard of them. I think you're a little too biased, in that you're looking at the thing as irredeemable that no good has come out. But a lot of those bad products got relatively forgotten, and the OGL helped a lot of small companies who made good product gain a foothold in the RPG industry. For example, Green Ronin started off with D20, but over the years it expanded into other RPGs and got a respectable following. Arcana Unearthed (Monte Cook's Diamond Throne setting) was novel at the time for getting rid of some 3.X sacred cows such as noncasters which were versatile to play. The OGL gave us True20, which led to the creation of Tales of the Caliphate Nights (a very good treatment of mythic Arabia) and Blue Rose (the first RPG setting to feature homosexuality as a setting element out front and as a normal thing not to be condemned). Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Edition was a very good treatment of a superhero RPG. And for settings, we got cool things like Midnight and Freeport. All of the companies and products I listed are very well known and managed to rise to prominence in spite of the deluge of mediocrity. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 19:34 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 19:23
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It also gave us an updated version of Grimtooth series in the form of The Wurst of Grimtooth's Traps. If we include Pathfinder and OSR games under the OGL, the we also got Scarlet Heroes, the first working D&Desque system meant to handle 1-on-1 games I've seen of its kind. Ravenloft got a nice update and treatment by White Wolf. Not only did it reproduce a lot of setting material, the Gazetteer series really brought life to the world in the form of an in-character traveler's journal. Also, Path of War and anything by Dreamscarred Press. Ptolus is a very user friendly city-centric campaign setting. I remember writing up a FATAL & Friends for it last year, but sadly had to abandon the project. Some day I hope to return to it and show off its glory. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 19:37 on Dec 21, 2014 |
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Dec 21, 2014 19:30
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So a thing I've noticed in various Editions and Retroclones of Dungeons & Dragons is that most of the demi-human/nonhuman races have some innate form of ability to see in varying levels of darkness. The humans and halflings are pretty much the outlier in this. In a pre-industrial society where torches and lanterns are the major light sources at night, I can't overstate how much of a disadvantage this is for both warfare and dungeon-crawling. Unless you're playing in a setting where the PC races are more or less completely separate and isolated, this would have a huge effect on stuff. A lot of video games and television shows depicting medieval fantasy worlds have ludicrously bright night-time events. If you don't have the equivalent of a modern city with electric lights on a moonless night, poo poo gets really dark real fast, as in "you might as well be blind" fast. Dwarven and elven city watch patrols would function far better at night than their human counterparts. Bandits, raiders, and guerrilla soldiers of the same races can sneak into human towns at night and gain a massive tactical bonus by taking out the lantern bearers leaving much of the town blind. And when dungeon-crawling in narrow halls and caverns an entire party with darkvision will not give away their presence with a bright lantern. My question is, hasn't this rather major thing ever been reflected in D&D settings and worlds?
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Dec 24, 2014 04:43
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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. *cough*DarkSunEberron*cough*
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Dec 24, 2014 04:52
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It's for this reason why in my current Pathfinder campaign I designed a few "Laws of Magic" as a limit on things. One of them is the Law of Impermanence, which states that the intricate energies of magic must be repeatedly maintained by dedicated castings over time to prevent its effects from becoming warped of malfunctioning. For example, those who forge magic swords have its power slowly drain over time to the point where even mighty artifact weapons become merely mastercrafted blades if rare material components and rituals aren't used to invigorate the fiber; sometimes magical items and spells will simply stop working over time; citadels forged of animated spell energy can suffer disastrous catastrophes if the owner does not care to attend to the central orb holding everything together. This is the explanation of how my megadungeon prison underneath the campaign's magic school is leaking demons and other monsters out into the city. The wards which held them in check have not been maintained enough. It also encourages the accumulation of spell components, because wizards always need more to cast spells, and fabricating goods to try and wreck the economy inevitably backfire when the "wizard goods" break down. My campaign world's still high-magic, but I wanted to place some interesting limits on the one-man Weird Wizard Show that is the Pathfinder spell system.
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Dec 24, 2014 07:22
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