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Bear in mind the pyrrhic Confederate success is, in the larger metaplot, an evil plot by the archvillains to divide America. Though there is some Confederate apologism afoot, the Confederates ultimately are deeply in the wrong, though not for reasons they're aware of until it's too late (and Hell on Earth happens). Of course, the Union is also manipulated too. Both sides are essentially victims of the Reckoners' manipulations. I'm torn because there aren't great solutions to the issue, but bear in mind it's not that the game treats the Southern victory as without terrible consequences. It's ultimately a very real problem that because it prevents America from being united just when it needs it most.
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Dec 1, 2014 07:03
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gradenko_2000 posted:Can someone talk to me about the game design behind "saving throws" and defending against spells in general for D&D-esque games? Bear in mind part of your question involves "what is an armor class?", and it originally for the most part simply represented the armor you were wearing and its ability to protect you from harm. AC bonuses from Dex and magic bonuses muddy this a bit, but if you look up the table in AD&D that crossreferences weapon type with the ability to hit a particular AC, it's clearly designed around different weapons being effective against different armor types. Parrying was its own action and is another issue entirely. Therefore, it makes sense that armor - or AC - wouldn't protect against a lightning bolt or sleep spell. It's easy to forget because AC was generalized into a generic defense stat by the time of d20, but mostly what it represented in earlier editions was "what armor are you wearing?" Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 13:21 on Dec 1, 2014 |
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Dec 1, 2014 13:17
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Wait, Fantasy Craft actually released another class expansion and has news on Spellbound? Just when you think a game line is down... Always thought of it as "the game Pathfinder players ought to be playing instead".
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Dec 1, 2014 16:36
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I saw the Fantasy Craft classes topping the rpgnow sales charts; Crafty has always been kinda bad at getting the word out on stuff, it's not even mentioned on their frontpage yet. And you'd think those of us with preorders for Spellbound could use an e-mail about that kind of thing, instead of tucking it away on the Crafty boards... Still, really glad to see it getting some support, even if it feels like it's likely a last hurrah.
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Dec 1, 2014 21:31
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:This whole thing is pretty dumb because the world ends in a nuclear holocaust and they could have easily just had that happen with a victorious Union. The world pretty much follows the same trends it followed in the regular timeline anyways so it's not like that scenario is dependent on a CSA existing. The idea is that a unified America could have dealt with the supernatural threats in an organized fashion without both sides being distracted by the North-South Cold War. Whether or not that's a convincing conceit is an exercise for the reader, but the general idea is that the big reason the timeline diverges from ours at all is because of Reckoner meddling. Well, that and ghost rock, but the two go hand-in-hand.
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Dec 1, 2014 21:37
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Kai Tave posted:Gygax was basically just making poo poo up on the spot though, he wasn't really sitting down and concerning himself with things like unified task resolution. Saving throws were basically "ugh fine, even though the medusa should totally just petrify you I'll let you roll a die and if you roll the right number then it won't," which then got codified as a standard thing probably because the other players present suddenly all wanted the same consideration. Also Gygax was an inelegant a designer as you could imagine, where if somebody came up with a ruling, he just threw it into the game, which is why early versions of Dungeons & Dragons and Advanced Dungeons & Dragons are such an incoherent mess. (Which isn't just hindsight or from the perspective of modern design, people like Greg Stafford or Ken St. Andre said as much at the time.) AD&D itself didn't even start to be properly organized as a rules set until after Gygax left the picture with 2e. It's a testament to the strength of the role-playing concept that it thrived despite AD&D being a practically unreadable mess, as the grand majority of people played it ran it based on fan interpretations of the rules rather than the actual rules. Gygax and Arneson certainly deserve the credit due, and it's not as if Gygax didn't make some powerful ideas, but his game design mostly consisted of throwing things at a wall and seeing what stuck. Some things became powerful pillars of game design (XP, classes, levels), and many more did not (class level limits by race, weapon AC modifiers, random psionics), but Gygax was never that strong a designer, as evidenced by his inability to design a successful game after AD&D.
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Dec 2, 2014 14:43
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gradenko_2000 posted:Also, THAC0 was purely a fan-made invention from people that didn't want to work with a matrix/write down the to-hit number for multiple sets of armor classes. D&D just ran with it in later editions. One wonders what might have happened if people thought of "Target 20" first/instead. It was absolutely a fan-invention.
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Dec 4, 2014 15:23
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7th Sea just needed a mechanic where you randomly roll up a secret society and assign it to the players but they don't know. Five years into a campaign, you are finally allowed to inform your players they were *rolls* crab-men from *rolls* the moon and have a plan to *rolls* destroy all freedom through *rolls* a photonic virus.
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Dec 4, 2014 19:23
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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!".
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Dec 5, 2014 15:35
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Yeah, isn't 7th Sea just a step below L5R in terms of being hit by the CCG plot train? Not exactly. That's not to say 7th Sea didn't have the CCG pushing the line forward, but having the RPG come first let them actually plan things out to be consistent, as opposed to Legend of the Five Rings, which has always had the CCG moving ahead of the RPG and leading the direction of the line, often leaving the RPG scrambling to make sense of the CCG's oft-incoherent plotlines. Evil Mastermind posted:What was the "gotcha" on Shadowforce Archer? My memory's fuzzy on this, I can look up the details later; if memory serves, the head of Shadowforce Archer turned out to be the world's first psychic and his murderer turned out to be one of the first experiments in psychic research who was his chief agent who founded one of the key villain organizations and as also the most powerfulest psychic in the world or something. There was also something about Archer's inner circle being centered around protecting the world from threats involving "The Fringe" which was like a mashup of occultism and The Matrix where you could get weird luck effects if you were mixed up with it. And it had stuff like a evil cabal of Russian ghost wizards. I'm probably getting it wrong somewhere but that's about how weird it got, which was pretty drat weird for a setting ostensibly about espionage action. FMguru posted: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. 7th Sea was an RPG first, actually, but the CCG followed very soon after.
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Dec 5, 2014 16:19
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What's worse is that the original heritage tables aren't really balanced from clan to clan; I remember the Phoenix tables being particularly punishing. I don't know how they measure up in L5R 4e, tho. Having just done a writeup of Play Dirty, they strike me as one of the most Play Dirtiest bits in the game, where you charge players XP for what usually ends up being an even gamble (which the usual result being neutral), but with the possibility of ending up with some terrible, character-changing flaw like finding out you're a ronin at the end of cgen. I ended up giving out table rolls for free in past, that's about the only way to justify them, but they still could be pretty terrible if you're unlucky.
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Dec 5, 2014 19:57
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Kai Tave posted:Metaplots seem to be one of those "90's RPGs" things (give or take) and as RPGs have gone forward they've mostly fallen out of favor. The only big-for-elfgame-values-of-big games I can think of that really revel in a metaplot anymore are Forgotten Realms and Shadowrun. Legend of the Five Rings still has the metaplot running due to the CCG, it's just downplayed in 4th edition. It's still present, though; for example, Second City and a few other supplements advance the timeline from where it was in the corebook. For the most part, though, we generally have a lot less of the rolling supplement lines than we used to anyway, the idea of buying a largely incomplete game that would be fleshed out through a nine-book series on the Heartguilds of the Bloodstates has fallen by the wayside.
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Dec 5, 2014 20:39
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Not really. Metaplot is literally that - a plot that takes place in the setting at the "meta" level, not the game level, but in the fiction of the supplements itself. For example, in Legend of the Five Rings you have the Scorpion Clan who attempts a coup in Otosan Uchi and then are declared ronin by Way of the Wolf. Generally, if you have a supplement with a status quo that hinges on events from another supplement, you've probably got a metaplot. Planescape has a villain get killed off in Hellbound, return in The Great Modron March, and then advance his plan further in Dead Gods. If you just have Hellbound and Dead Gods, it doesn't make much sense, but the three together form a story. Edition changes often see what you're referring to, which is more of what's usually called a setting update.
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Dec 5, 2014 22:00
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Please, no more. At least I posted it out over only two days, just imagine what it would've been like if I had done my usual "post once a day" F&F policy. I ripped that bandaid off lightning-quick, all things considered.
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Dec 7, 2014 09:10
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Is there any other good RPG review / discussion podcasts other than System Mastery? I admit I usually don't have the patience for play podcasts, but I like hearing about games I may have missed.
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Dec 8, 2014 18:10
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Quarex posted:I JUST DO NOT UNDERSTAND THE HATE AHHHHHHH but I still love all of you Well, another point is that some of us make have physical conditions that make, say, surviving through an apocalypse difficult or untenable. Not "oh, I'm out of shape and don't have firing calluses", but more "well, without modern medicine aiding my condition, my timer starts... now." Obviously that can be ignored or worked around to an extent, and that may be the least of one's issues in a disaster, but there are problems with self-play that can be unique to playing oneself, or that might hit too close to home. Then, does one self-idealize to ignore that issue or remain true? I don't have an answer, and obviously the situation would be different if everybody becomes psychics or the like, but it's something to consider regarding self-play games, especially if they're being published.
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Dec 9, 2014 05:28
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AmiYumi posted:The longer this argument goes on, the more I'm seeing an underlying attempt to justify hiding away your life in a bubble. Tell me more of this strange world outside the bubble. 
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Dec 9, 2014 18:51
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If you wake up one day and discover you are in a world where everybody's capabilities are measured in dots, you may as well just give up.  unless it's exalted in which case its time to punch a raunchy ghost or two
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Dec 9, 2014 22:26
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So, I just finished The Genius: Rules of the Game season 1. I enjoyed it a lot! Is it worth it to continue on to season 2?
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Dec 10, 2014 03:41
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Sometimes E for Everyone really can mean everyone.
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Dec 10, 2014 21:47
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gnome7 posted:"The third printi... Oh, the one from the Humble Bundle a week or two ago? There was controversy due to one of the artists tracing Touhou fanart for their contributions.
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Dec 11, 2014 20:21
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Just think, we could have had a Neuromancer RPG if only the designers had been able to come up with a quasi-element plane of krill and poo poo. Gibson is a bad example because he's at the far end of writing re: giving no shits about researching anything, which is fine when you're writing a book (usually, anyway, Gibson has written some of the most influential sci-fi of our time and some awfully incoherent garbage as well), but doesn't work as well when you have five people at a table doing a shared reality. I don't think simulation is a problem, it's a tool. The main issue is just jerks that champion simulationism as a virtue. But it's not a virtue any more than, say, improvisation. It's just a means of handling plots and settings. It can be done well and if you can juggle what's needed to do that kind of game, more power to you. I think where the core issue regarding simulationism and its worship comes from The Dungeon, and how D&D trains people to build The Dungeon, which is just a way to build an environment down to each 5' x 5' square, and the natural outgrowth of that (as we see from Judges' Guild material) is to build The City and The Wilds, and once you've put that much crazy work in, it's easy to turn around and sneer at somebody who doesn't know what store happens to be at their corner of Wyvern Way and MacAllister Lane. But knowing that kind of detail is a tool, not the actual goal (which is just enjoyment of the game), and it's easy to confuse the two. Also nerds just love putting things in boxes. Putting things is boxes satisfies some raw nerd urge, and RPGs are full of putting things in boxes (classes, skill groups, magic schools, whatever), so it feels like a natural outgrowth to start putting everything in a box. I don't even know why it's satisfying, maybe it's just interesting to impose order on things. I just know bullet points are exciting and I have no drat idea why.
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Dec 16, 2014 15:04
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Even aside from that, it bears repeating that The Escapist is a dumb site that smells like a butt.
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Dec 16, 2014 22:21
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NutritiousSnack posted:Online Journalism, particularly entertainment online journalism is complete and utter garbage. gently caress even Jezebel isn't just clickbait rage, but native ad breeding group and it's feminist website meant to talk about issues not Hollywood Press Release site 2.0. It's still a part of Gawker, and Gawker is basically targeted clickbait. That's not to say there aren't good authors occasionally on Gawker sites, but they started out as an online scandal rag and have mostly just broadened their target audience.
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Dec 18, 2014 23:49
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Covok posted:I was pursuing drivethrurpg when I saw Designers & Dragons: the history of tabletop roleplaying games. It sounds intriguing, but expense. Anyone know if it is any good? It's quite good, I've read through most of it, and it has a lot of informative chunks. Shannon Applecine really does his homework, and there's a lot of details on companies that would otherwise be forgotten despite their influence on the hobby, or modern companies that rarely get their due. Occasionally the histories devolve into "they released this which was important because of this, and they released this, and then they released this-", but I really feel like my $60 was well-spent. It's true the D&D 4th era comes off as overly harsh. I think part of it is that D&D 4e wasn't a failure by RPG publishing standards (quite the opposite), but was absolutely a failure by Hasbro's standards. And though Hasbro's standards are ridiculously unrealistic for the RPG industry, the ways in which they impact the D&D line are immensely real. Effectronica posted:It's the only attempt at a full history of the hobby, and the original version was four thick volumes. You can probably ditch the first volume for Jon Peterson's Playing At The World, which covers a lot of 70s designers as part of its history of D&D up to AD&D, but there really aren't any equivalents out there for the second through fourth volumes. Well, bear in mind the 1970s volume of Designers & Dragons covers the whole history of any company that started in that decade, so it covers the whole history of TSR, Fantasy Games Unlimited, Games Workshop, GDW, etc. It definitely overlaps with Playing At the World but doesn't just have the same material because it covers an entire company's history at once in a given volume.
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Dec 20, 2014 18:17
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Mormon Star Wars posted:What does Shannon say about his book, the Gloranthan supplement for how to play Elves in the Runequest glorantha variants? Nothin'. The Runequest releases from Mongoose get an even-handed treatment, but an elfbook isn't a big enough deal to be mentioned Mongoose's history, which is where it'd go.
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Dec 21, 2014 04:48
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The d20 bubble burst is probably the worst disaster in the gaming industry - I can't think of anything, historically, that even comes close. The fall of TSR is barely even a bump in comparison, though it was bad. In that, you can probably blame 3.5 for instigating it, though if D&D had been revised later, the damage may have been even worse. We did get some great products and great companies out of it, it's not all bad, but far more companies didn't survive, old or new, or were deeply diminished. It basically was a death knell to most game lines running beforehand, and then managed to kill off the majority of the game lines it spawned. Of course, having the economic downturn exacerbated the effect. After it slew much of the gaming lines in the industry, the economic force to build new ones took at least a few years to recover. About the best thing you can say is that it shook up the industry to the point that it gave real impetus for the indie scene to grow and provide innovation that would have been glacial under older publishers, but it's really hard to say for certain.
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Dec 22, 2014 02:08
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You could also blame Iron Kingdoms on the collapse of FASA for that matter - what if Matt Wilson's original minis line, VOR, had survived to this day? Would we have an RPG filled with neo-soviets and growlers at this point? There's a lot of things that probably led Matt Wilson to where he was for that, including d20. As for Tremulus , I wouldn't call it shovelware; it was just made early on for a World game and didn't have the best grasp of how to adapt it in retrospect, but I don't get the impression Sean Preston went into the project cynically by any stretch.
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Dec 22, 2014 19:20
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Mongoose was the king of the "shovelware" attitude in their early history; they deliberately shipped out books at times to beat out competing products, irregardless of their quality. Products like Creature Collection from White Wolf, shipped before the Monster Manual was even out, probably is also a good example. That's not to say that kind of rushed product is necessarily without merit - Creature Collection does have some cool monsters, but it also had numerous errors, balance issues, and low-quality art.
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Dec 22, 2014 20:40
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unseenlibrarian posted:*Eyes Khador, eyes trolls* I'm not sure we -don't-, really. Fair enough, really. Evil Mastermind posted:Characters can speak an additional 1D3 languages if they desire. Ah, yes, random determination of character traits, that's clearly what FATE is all about.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:42
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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.
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Dec 22, 2014 21:48
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Swags posted:Hey, is there a Mutants and Masterminds thread anywhere? I've got 'how do I do this' questions and I don't see a place to ask. Not that I'm aware of, but I can probably answer any questions you have.
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Dec 28, 2014 20:23
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Swags posted:A friend of mine is playing in the Heirs of the Atom living campaign in Denver in a few months, and wanted to make a dude. Neither of us have played since 1st ed, and we're not totally up on the rules. It's a PL-8 campaign with a noir feel. He wanted a guy who's kind of unconciously lucky. The Shadow meets the guy from Get Smart, who thinks he's a badass vigilante but is really just bumbling around. We came up with a bit, and then someone on Reddit suggested this, but we don't know if it's any good. That's... more complicated than it needs to be.
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Dec 29, 2014 07:01
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