TG December Chat Thread: And Gygax bless us, every one.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG December Chat Thread: And Gygax bless us, every one.

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

In the (slight) defense of the 7S/L5R RPGs, they are adaptations of a property with a built-in ongoing storyline (their respective CCGs). Complaining that it's hard to run L5R because there's a constant stream of new developments and setting-changing revelations attached to it is a little like complaining that Star Wars has wizard-knights with laser swords in it. It's part of the package.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 15:31

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 07:24

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

Yeah, isn't 7th Sea just a step below L5R in terms of being hit by the CCG plot train?

Yep. They were originally CCG properties, which means they were designed to have dramatic reveals and everything-you-know-is-wrongs and signature characters doing important, world-changing things on a regular basis from the very beginning. They're not the usual RPG setting-worlds, which tend to be static sandboxes with a thousand possible plot hooks casually waiting for the players to engage them.

They're meant to simulate playing in the world of 7S/L5R - worlds that by original design have most of the important things constantly being handled by super-NPCs. Some people want to play in a world where the most they can hope to accomplish is fetching a Diet Coke for Hida O-Ushi or make a brief walk-on appearance at the Battle of Beiden Pass, and the L5R RPG is for them.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 15:52

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

Feng Shui's original metaplot is how you do it. Some poo poo went down, the 'old' heroes are all dead with your PCs expected to probably step in and become the main drivers of stuff, everyone's at a stalemate, and then the sourcebooks are just describing where specific factions and guys are at that exact point in time (or generally) and providing plot hooks instead of 'moving' things.

Harn had my favorite metaplot - they declared the setting frozen as of January 1, 720AD (or whatever that is in Harnic time). Huge setting books full of backstory and history and maps and charts and details and more details and politics and things in the process of happening as of December 31, 719 - and not one peep about what comes later, a promise they've kept for more than 30 years.

# ¿ Dec 5, 2014 20:29

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Agreed. Traveller is literally "a bunch of dudes rattling around a thousand year old interstellar empire, trying to make a living", and Mongoose is probably the best available option for that right now (unless you're already on board with GURPS, in which case get the GURPS version).

# ¿ Dec 7, 2014 02:22

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Kai Tave posted:

I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that the vast majority of people who play tabletop RPGs do not, in general, possess the sorts of skills and abilities that many genre fiction protagonists, even "everyman" types, possess, at which point I'm left wondering what the value of statting up the members of your game table are if the vast majority of what you commit to paper isn't really game applicable. "Okay so we've got three guys who do IT, Bob's still in college for his Master's, and Steve does medical billing. Nobody knows anything about guns or survival, Bob had a year of Tae Kwon Do when he was 15, Jake had to be first aid certified but hasn't ever had to actually use any of it, and Steve is 300 pounds and has asthma."

Back in the 1990s the members of the GURPS forums at sjgames.com thought it would be fun to stat themselves up with the GURPS rules and post the results. I once read the collected document they put together, and yeah, every single one was IT Guy or Academic with the same set of disadvantages (Lazy, Overweight, Shy, Bad Vision (Correctable), Easily Distracted, Wealth/Struggling, Dependency:Insulin, etc.) and office/hobby skills (things like Art/Miniatures Painting and Perform/Filk). It was kind of depressing, all the more so since a statting up of myself would fit rather seamlessly among them.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2014 22:12

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Not reviews, but I can confidently recommend Ken And Robin Talk About Stuff for your listening needs (and not just because I got name-checked on an episode a few weeks ago).

# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 18:37

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I think the best way to build a blog audience is to be zen and don't worry about your audience. Write for yourself, write everyday, link to other blogs like a good blog citizen, and don't worry about your traffic numbers. If you're good, and consistent, you stand a good chance of finding an audience.

In short: write a blog because you feel the need to express your thoughts, not because you need to reach a big audience. If the audience shows up, hey, bonus.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2014 19:12

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

clockworkjoe posted:

Thieves Guild: http://heroworlds.blogspot.com/2014/03/retrospective-thieves-guid-and.html

Thieves' Guild owned. Super crunchy rules for thieves, scenarios for parties of thieves, a big sprawling fantasy city (Haven) full of opportunities and institutions for thieves, etc.

Also: for fantasy games built around everyone playing the same archetypes: Iron Heroes for fighters.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2014 02:32

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

ProfessorCirno posted:

Meanwhile on the note of simulationism, over in the Shadowrun forums, someone is getting sad that their need to make the proper immersive world has excluded PCs existing, and has yet to realize what the actual flaw here is.

Simulationism is the idea that the best game is the one you can never play.

It is the death of actual gaming.

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.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 16:04

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

PresidentBeard posted:

Did their sessions consist of the DM and players staring at each other from across the table until the pizza man arrived?

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.

It was like someone took that old criticism of Forgotten Realms - that canonically, there shouldn't be anything significant for the players to do, because if something was significant one of the super-NPCs (Elminster, etc.) would have taken care of it already - and built a whole campaign around that.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 16:21

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

The other thing about the Traveller trade tables (and fuel costs and maintenance rules etc.) is that they're specifically designed to make free-trading a shoestring operation with enough randomness that they essentially require the PCs to do PC-like things in order to stay solvent. Similarly, the world creation tables are biased towards creating a mixture of strange worlds with an incongruous collection of tech levels, government types, and physical forms and not a reasoned, ordered, sensible stellar polity.

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 18:22

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Doodmons posted:

No lie, that's a really good campaign concept in the right hands.

Scarface: Waterdeep Edition may be a good idea for a campaign, but it's pretty loving far from standard D&D monsterbashing and treasuregrabbing. The joke is that this guy built a campaign fantasy world where standard D&D adventuring cannot exist and the players had to come up with their own thing to do in order to make their fortune. He logically extrapolated from the D&D ruleset (in proper grog rules-as-physics fashion) and ended up concluding that under D&D rules there's no possibility of ever having a D&D adventure.

FMguru fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Dec 15, 2014

# ¿ Dec 15, 2014 18:48

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

It's from the age of early D20 shovelware, but Pinnacle had a D20 WWII setting called "Weird War II" which was historical WWII but with magic and zombies and werewolves and such.

# ¿ Dec 19, 2014 14:31

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Yeah, what you're seeing is the disappearance of the most of the RPG mid-list, the walls of books for non-D&D games like GURPS and World of Darkness and Rifts and L5R and lots of D20 publishers that have largely exited the marketplace, leaving D&D, Pathfinder, and a bunch of little one-book Indie games.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2014 20:42

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

neonchameleon posted:

That's slight revisionism - the Fantasy Heartbreaker was a term built around 2E heartbreakers.

Yeah, FHs were a 90s phenomenon (I blame the availability of cheap desktop publishing). FHs went into decline in the early 2000s, because now you could just publish your AD&D campaign notes as an real live D&D-compatible expansion product. It's one of the few areas where Dancey's prediction of D20/OGL sweeping away all the other RPGs in favor of D20 products actually came true.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2014 00:57

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

gradenko_2000 posted:

I was actually going through the D20 SRD and I found this little thing:

They've had a working justification for martial classes being capable of doing all sorts of caster-level stuff sitting there on the shelf for years! They just didn't want to use it.

Here's some limp-wristed la-di-dah storygamer trying to argue that fighters in D&D have inherent magical power because they're the heroes of the story and so drat swole

quote:

The term saving throw is common enough, coming to us from miniature
wargames and D&D. It represents the chance for the figure concerned to
avoid (or at least partially avoid) the cruel results of fate. In AD&D it is the
same. By means of skill, luck, magical protections, quirks of fate and the
aid of supernatural powers, the character making his or her saving throw
takes none or only part of the indicated results - fireball damage, poison-
ing, being turned to stone, or whatever. The various saving throws are
shown on the appropriate tables -for characters, monsters, and items as
well. When someone or something fails to roll the number shown, or
better, whatever is coming comes in full. To better understand the concept
of the saving throw, the following is offered:
As has been often pointed out, AD&D is a game wherein participants
create personae and operate them in the milieu created and designed, in
whole or in part, by the Dungeon Master and shared by all, including the
DM, in imagination and enthusiasm. The central theme of this game is the
interaction of these personae, whether those of the players or those of the
DM, with the milieu, including that part represented by the characters and
creatures personified by the DM. This interaction results in adventures and
deeds of daring. The heroic fantasy which results is a blend of the dramatic
and the comic, the foolish and the brave, stirring excitement and grinding
boredom. It is a game in which the continuing epic is the most meaningful
portion. It becomes an entity in which at least some of the characters seem
to be able to survive for an indefinite time, and characters who have
shorter spans of existence are linked one to the other by blood or purpose.
These personae put up with the frustrations, the setbacks, and the
tragedies because they aim for and can reasonably expect to achieve
adventure, challenge, wealth, glory and more. If player characters are not
of the same stamp as Conan, they also appreciate that they are in effect
writing their own adventures and creating their own legends, not merely
reliving those of someone else's creation.
Yet because the player character is all-important, he or she must always--
or nearly always - have a chance, no matter how small, a chance of
somehow escaping what otherwise would be inevitable destruction. Many
will not be able to do so, but the escapes of those who do are what the
fabric of the game is created upon. These adventures become the twice-
told tales and legends of the campaign. The fame (or infamy) of certain
characters gives lustre to the campaign and enjoyment to player and DM
alike as the parts grow and are entwined to become a fantastic history of a
never-was world where all of us would wish to live if we could.
Someone once sharply criticized the concept of the saving throw as
ridiculous. Could a man chained to a rock, they asked, save himself from
the blast of a red dragon's breath? Why not?, I replied. If you accept fire-
breathing dragons, why doubt the chance to reduce the damage sustained
from such a creature's attack? Imagine that the figure, at the last moment,
of course, manages to drop beneath the licking flames, or finds a crevice
in which to shield his or her body, or succeeds in finding a way to be free
of the fetters. Why not? The mechanics of combat or the details of the
injury caused by some horrible weapon are not the key to heroic fantasy
and adventure games. It is the character, how he or she becomes involved
in the combat, how he or she somehow escapes ~ or fails to escape- the
mortal threat which is important to the enjoyment and longevity of the
game.
If some further rationale is needed to explain saving throws versus magic,
hece is one way of looking at it. Magical power is energy from another
plane channeled through this one by the use of certain prescribed
formulae. The magic obeys (or disobeys) he magic-user because he or
she controls ond constrains it by a combination of the formulae and will-
power. As magic-users advance in level, their willpower increases through
practice, and so does their control. Inherently magical creatures exercise
such control instinctively.
A character under magical attack is in a stress situation, and his or her own
will force reacts instinctively to protect the character by slightly altering the
effects of the magical assault. This protection takes a slightly different form
for each class of character. Magic-users understand spells, even on an un-
conscious level, and are able to slightly tamper with one so as to render it
ineffective. Fighters withstand them through sheer defiance, while clerics
create a small island of faith. Thieves find they are able to avoid a spell's
full effects by quickness . . .
So a character manages to avoid the full blast of the fireball, or averts his
or her gaze from the basilisk or medusa, or the poisonous stinger of the
giant scorpion misses or fails somehow to inject its venom. Whatever the
rationale, the character is saved to go on. Of course, some saves result in
the death of the character aqyway, as partial damage causes him or her to
meet death. But at least the character had some hope, and he or she
fought until the very end. Stories will be told of it at the inn, and songs
sung of the battle when warriors gather around the campfire. Almost,
almost he managed to reach the bend in the passage where the fell breath
of the blue dragon Razisiz could not reach, but at the last moment his toe
struck a protrusion, and as he stumbled the dragon slew him! his or her
character check to determine if the fluid was harmed. Such
failure will not otherwise be notable without examination and testing.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2014 21:20

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Parkreiner posted:

Sadly, it just gets a sidebar in the Atlas Games section, which is frankly all it really deserves in the scheme of things, but I have been curious about it for ages.

It was a one-man show, and that one man showed that enthusiasm for gaming and sound business sense are wholly non-correlated. Daedalus's implosion left a ton of unpaid bills, and a lot of people would like to get a piece of him if he even pokes his head up again.

"Nerds with no business sense, sometimes shading towards scam artistry" is a sadly recurring theme in RPG history.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2014 23:03

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Lightning Lord posted:

Like James Shipman of Outlaw Press, that dude who outright steals Tunnels and Trolls books, puts his name on them and sells them.

Also: the guy behind Guardians of Order

# ¿ Dec 23, 2014 02:41

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 07:24

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

gradenko_2000 posted:

Can someone give me the elevator pitch/lowdown on Iron Kingdoms? I tried looking it up on F&F but it never got to the mechanics.

D&D plus steampunk (not the full airships and top hats style, but early industrial revolution (guns, railroads) and clanky steam-fired robots controlled by magicians. World has generic good guy kingdom in the center (with a weak king and lots of unrest), a Russian/Soviet empire in the frozen north, a nation of crazed religious fanatics in the desert to the south, and a giant evil swamp empire ruled by an demigod-grade undead dragon and his council of liches to the west.Plus Dwarf Mountains, the Elven Forest, mysterious ruins, and some frightening invaders from across the eastern desert. Very well detailed and supported with good production values. You could do much worse for a D&D-with-a-twist setting.

# ¿ Dec 29, 2014 06:54

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG December Chat Thread: And Gygax bless us, every one.