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FFG Star Wars is actually pretty bad. It suffers from wanting to try to do fail forward/fiction first while also being mechanics-heavy (which doesn't work), the core of its mechanical system is Dark Heresy (which completely clashes with the fail forward/fiction first thing it says it wants to try for, and also doesn't work for Star Wars), the custom dice don't add anything other than making it a pain to arbitrate results as a GM, and they're so swingy that you can expect starting PCs to gently caress up more than they succeed on "average" difficulty checks. It's basically a tedious, poorly-thought-out Dark Heresy hack which doesn't fit the pulpy space adventures feel of the supposed source material.
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Mar 3, 2015 01:09
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DW has always been and always will be a compromise. It's PbtA for D&D players.
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Mar 3, 2015 09:17
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Ratpick posted:I do agree that DW is vastly improved by throwing out the base playbooks and using third party content, mainly because it lends itself to more interesting types of fantasy than just D&D fantasy I don't agree that you improve DW by throwing out the base playbooks and replacing them with playbooks that aren't "D&D-esque." I do agree the base playbooks have a lot of issues and need a fair few changes to make them mechanically more interesting, and that doing this makes the game better, but like every good PbtA game, DW's design focus is very narrowly-focused (in this case, on "a game that plays like you think you remember BECMI-era D&D playing"). You need the spread of playbooks on offer to have a cohesive "flavour," and if you want to replace the base playbooks' "oldschool D&D dungeon crawling" flavour with something more interesting, you need to modify the basic moves to take that into account, because they're absolutely based around that flavour/mode of play (this is why all the non-combat rules are so insubstantial).
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Mar 3, 2015 10:45
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Zurui posted:On a related note, my biggest problem with AW is that there doesn't seem to be any common pop-culture reference for the "fiction" that Baker has so tightly designed his game around. The three most commonly cited influences (Mad Max, Fallout, and Tank Girl) are so different that finding common ground can be difficult for players starting out. It's gritty like Fallout, but without the cheeky nostalgia. It's epic like Mad Max, but doesn't really support the "lone wanderer" aspect. It's gonzo like Tank Girl, but not cartoony. It's Joss Whedon's Mad Max: The TV Series, where it's actually set in and around one town so they can reuse sets and keep the budget low. PresidentBeard posted:This still boils down to being upset that something you don't like is popular. There's absolutely nothing wrong with being upset at the popularity of something that is both in itself bad and whose community is toxic for the hobby as a whole. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 19:57 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 19:54
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Stop replying to the Imp Zone shitposters, you idiots.
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Mar 3, 2015 19:58
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Captain Foo posted:It's pretty easy to convert straight AW to fantasy without turning it into DW - I think LemonCurdistan posted a thing in the AW thread that effectively did it in a single post With the caveat that the game will literally just be AW but with horses instead of cars and swords instead of guns, you can do this: Lemon Curdistan posted:THE BARBARIAN (Gunlugger) Use Fists of Asphalt as a starting point for melee weapons/styles if you want.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:24
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Reminder before anyone decides to continue last page's proud posting traditions:Lemon Curdistan posted:Stop replying to the Imp Zone shitposters, you idiots. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Mar 3, 2015 21:59
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Splicer posted:SWEotE isn't fail forward, it's multi-layered success The game claims that the advantage/threat results let you have "positive failures" or "negative successes," i.e. tiered successes (which naturally lends itself to fail forward), and the game itself tells you it wants to be those things. Even if it had binary pass/fail, you would still want it to be fail forward because there's literally no reason ever to not have failing forward.  Splicer posted:and I'm confused by the unbolded dice bits and your Dark Heresy comparison. Most of the damage system comes from DH et al., complete with the d% random critical injury table. Dark Heresy is a d% game, so the critical injury chart actually uses the same dice as the rest of the game, unlike FFGSW where it's horribly tacked-on. The high lethality also comes from DH, where it makes a lot more sense than in Star Wars (do you remember that bit where Luke and Leia fight Storm Troopers, and they keep getting knocked out by a blaster shot and stimpacking each other back up every round?). Splicer posted:Assuming you're using a 3 die characteristic untrained against an average roll with no situational advantages and no light side points spent you're going to get at least a conditional success about 60% of the time. Yep, I didn't do the maths.  The numbers you provided still lead to the PCs failing on rolls more often than is desirable for something like Star Wars unless they've dumped 90% of their starting XP into raising their primary characteristic and are specifically rolling for a skill that uses it. It plummets even further if you put them out of their comfort zone at all. On top of that, the amount of crunch in the rules just doesn't lend itself to just treating the action narratively enough to a) work for Star Wars' brand of pulpy action and b) work with the tiered success system unless you go out of your way to ignore the rules when adjudicating advantage on failures/threat on successes (this is not helped by their decision to not include suggested narrative effects for threat/advantage in the skill rules).Instead of trying to hack FFGSW so that the damage system actually uses the fancy dice, the lethality isn't off the charts and the system is pared down enough for their tiered success system to work, I'm just converting our group to Fate because it will do everything FFGSW claims to want to do, except better (and I say this as someone who doesn't like Fate). Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 23:59 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 23:55
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DocBubonic posted:Did you just read the rules or have you played the game? Yes, I've run the game. I know the damage system is not literally DH's (it still majoritarily borrows from DH instead of being its own thing better suited to Star Wars), I know what the game has to say about tiered success (I mentioned this in the post you quoted and why it doesn't really work), and I know about destiny points. Obviously, there's nothing stopping people from playing and having fun with FFG SW, but it's got a whole host of design issues and just isn't very well suited to the source material at all.  e; the whole advantage/threat system is just really bad. There are no guidelines provided for adjudicating the narrative difference between different amounts of advantage/threat on a roll, all the suggestions in the skill chapter are for mechanical effects like "it takes half the time" or "maybe it affects more than one person" (when the stated goal of the entire system is to provide room for more narrative nuance), the guidelines for "positive failure" are even worse ("uh, maybe this makes things slightly easier for when you roll again to try to get a success on the same task?"), there's an entirely separate system for spending advantage/threat in combat (not that surprising since the combat system is clunkily bolted on from another system). It wants to do tiered success (which is great!) except instead of doing it right and having "fail/succeed at a cost/succeed," it has "fail/fail but maybe something tangential and good might happen?/succeed at a cost, but the mechanics get in the way of you describing the fiction impact of the cost unless you want to require PCs to roll another skill check most of the time/succeed" and muddies everything up. It would be much better if it just ditched threat/advantage entirely. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 12:14 on Mar 4, 2015 |
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Mar 4, 2015 09:33
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Covok posted:In response to the first, and I hope this doesn't come off the wrong way, that sounds somewhat intentional. Yes, it's absolutely intentional. Focusing your moves on a narrow range of fictions is a big chunk of how you get a good PbtA game. DW's main issue is mostly the mechanical complexity of playbooks (a DW playbook is 30 moves, and the player will only use half of those at best), and the fact that some of the core playbooks are pretty lacking (Druid Shapeshifting is poorly thought-out, the Fighter is mechanically weak and boring especially compared to the Paladin, the Bard has very mechanistic starting moves when it should be one of the more fiction-focused playbooks, it's easy for casters to end up significantly more powerful than non-casters, etc.). Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Mar 4, 2015 |
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Mar 4, 2015 14:43
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Does anyone have anything to say about AMP: Year One? It's by the Part-Time Gods people and apparently uses a system based on that, and I'm always looking for good supers systems.
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Mar 5, 2015 15:39
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Evil Mastermind posted:I haven't played it yet, but I like it. It's a good middle-of-the-road supers system, where all the powers are prebuilt for you. Think more Icons than Champions/M&M. This sounds somewhat like Double Cross, except potentially without the layout nightmare that is the Double Cross rulebook, so I'm down with that. I'm also okay with pre-built powers and nonsense power names - I'm not convinced by Icons, but mostly because of the weird mishmash of Fate and other stuff. If I'm honest, I'm probably looking for something that lets me do X-Men/Runaways/Young Avengers stuff, and this sounds like it might do the trick.
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Mar 5, 2015 16:37
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Evil Mastermind posted:Actually, yeah, I'd say it's like DX but less complex and with clearer rules. You just pick powers and go. And it can totally do Runaways/YA. That's enough to get me to get it, since it comes out of my account credit anyway. Thanks! 
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Mar 5, 2015 17:29
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Famethrowa posted:Is it possible to convert up to a later edition (or a good variant homebrew) that gets rid of the complicated bullshit but won't make me redo all my character sheets? Nope. Just run any other D&D-ish game. Whether it's 4E, Dungeon World, 13th Age or even Pathfinder, it will be better than 3.5 for everyone involved.
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Mar 5, 2015 21:27
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Famethrowa posted:Sent Dungeon World to my friends asking what they think and they got really excited. It is precisely what we are looking for, and matches our current style of play. Thanks thread! 
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Mar 6, 2015 19:20
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Captain Walker posted:I know the honeymoon is sort of over re: goonpinions of Dungeon World, but I would argue there's no better gateway to the magical land of "RPGs that are not Dungeons and Dragons". Have fun, Famethrowa! Post a trip report. It's still a very good PbtA game. A lot of the criticism comes from people not liking the fiction it's about (oldschool D&D dungeon-crawling) rather than with its quality as a game, I feel.
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Mar 7, 2015 00:14
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Evil Sagan posted:It's not ideal if you're not specifically looking to do a game about D&D-style dungeon-crawling Yeah, but then again, that's entirely the point of a PbtA game.
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Mar 7, 2015 01:26
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Evil Mastermind posted:In related news, and online buddy has invited me to his PF game. Just say "thanks very much for the offer, but I'm really not a fan of Pathfinder and wouldn't want to play it, even if you run things looser." It's better than joining his game and then hating it.
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Mar 9, 2015 20:25
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I've been in a grand total of four PbPs. For two of them, the GM burned out or went AWOL and cancelled within two weeks. For one of the other two, we managed to play for about a year until the GM's other commitments made him unceremoniously put the game on hiatus, and for the last one, I joined as a replacement and the game concluded a couple of months later, but it didn't peter out. This is honestly about on-par with my RL games; about half of them ended because people were bored of the campaign/system/setting, about a quarter or two fifths ended because the players couldn't commit any more, and the rest hit some kind of natural conclusion.
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Mar 9, 2015 20:37
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bunnielab posted:What is the basic rundown of the various D&D editions? My only playing experience was a mishmash of 1ed and 2ed, but I do remember owning the red box as a kid. Honestly at this point I think whatever bastard version Baulder's Gate used is the only one I am really familiar with. Wikipedia actually has a pretty good summary here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Editions_of_Dungeons_%26_Dragons#Version_history Reading this will save you from having to listen to individual people's opinions. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 15:12
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bunnielab posted:2)4ed is going to have less rules crunch, but more tactical style combat? 4E is a competently-designed system with balanced mechanics and lots of tools to make the GM's life easier, unlike Next (which is a massive step back in this regard) or basically any edition of D&D. It has more "crunch" than Next, but the mechanics are also much better-designed. bunnielab posted:3)Nothing in the D&D world is close to a modern "storygame" ? Nothing produced by WotC, sure. There's Dungeon World and Torchbearer and probably others.
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Mar 10, 2015 18:08
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bunnielab posted:Oh lord so many choices. It looks like most of the games here are an even split between 4ed and 5ed ( which is also called Next, correct?). It sounds like 4th is the way to go if I want ease of use. It looks like both editions have online chargen programs, is one of them massively better then the other? Same question, but about PDF rule books? If differing editions of D&D are confusing you and all you want to do is kill a goblin, play Dungeon World. The entire point of DW is "rules-light game that feels like what you think you remember AD&D played like when you were kid."
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Mar 10, 2015 19:58
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I would get in NEXT or PFU if Hasbro or Paizo got the former Black Isle people to make a computer RPG out of it. Paizo and Obsidian have entered into a deal whereby Obsidian gets to use Paizo's IP to make games with. The first thing they're doing is porting the Pathfinder card game to mobiles so that's not super exciting, but it does mean Obsidian can just make a Pathfinder game once Pillars of Eternity is out if they want to.
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Mar 10, 2015 21:13
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Davin Valkri posted:Might be Dark Heresy, too. Dark Heresy is neither fantasy nor from the 80s/90s, nor does it have locational crit tables.
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Mar 10, 2015 22:20
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Kai Tave posted:Well it has the latter in the sense that each hit location has its own separate critical hit table. It doesn't have "you got a crit so you shoot them in the *roll roll* spleen." Yeah. This sounds like Rolemaster if he's sure it's an 80s game, or otherwise something like Riddle of Steel.
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Mar 10, 2015 22:32
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Simian_Prime posted:What would you (the thread) think of a video game based on a *World or Fate property? How would the storygame format translate into a video game? It wouldn't in any way, shape, or form, because you can't have a conversation with a computer. I mean, you could do IF using 2d6+stat to select one of three responses to every situation, but that wouldn't be PbtA.
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Mar 11, 2015 00:35
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gradenko_2000 posted:Did 4e ever have its own version of mass combat rules? Not officially, but there were at least a couple homebrewed ways of doing it. Honestly, you don't need mass combat rules for 4E; just stat units as monsters and then play normal 4E combat.
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Mar 11, 2015 10:57
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Blockhouse posted:I don't know how kitchen sink could be a criticism Kitchen-sink doesn't mean "has weird things like aliens and guns," it means "throws every cliché into the pot with zero regard for any kind of originality, thematic consistency, or quality;" that's why people use it as criticism.
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Mar 11, 2015 16:09
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Evil Sagan posted:I'm now realizing that none of my D&D campaigns have ever featured violent union disputes. That's a shame. You haven't played sufficient Eberron, which means you, as a person, have failed.
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Mar 11, 2015 19:02
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The problem is that the mechanical approach (lots and lots of pointlessly complicated crunch) isn't well-suited to the aesthetics (cool mythic fights in the age of the gods where everything was possible, Creation wasn't fully formed yet and we had magitech!)
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 15:04 on Mar 13, 2015 |
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Mar 13, 2015 10:06
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Foglet posted:And the next Bundle of Holding presents to us The Dying Earth, yet another product designed by Robin Laws. ibntumart posted:I immensely enjoyed the two sessions of it I played back when it came out. I'm not sure how much was the GM and how much the mechanics, but I will say that settling encounters via subterfuge, seat of your pants rationalizing, or clever tricks seemed pretty natural during gameplay. My PC managed to never once directly engage in combat (or take responsibility for causing food poisoning in the city's militia) and hung out at a "The City Is Surely About to Be Conquered So Let's Get Blotto" party while the rest of the party foolishly manned the ramparts (they may have a bit guilty about the militia's lack of vitality post-lunch). FMguru posted:It's great but it's really focused on playing Dying Earth style characters having Dying Earth style adventures on the Dying Earth. e; someone also pointed out that it has three "levels" of play (petty conmen/thieves, gritty adventurers and politicking wizard nobles) and only the first one works really well, but I can't find the post that was mentioned in. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 11:21 on Mar 17, 2015 |
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Mar 17, 2015 10:55
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There's a Pathfinder thread here which would probably be a better place to ask for concrete optimisation advice. That, or try brilliantgameologists or whatever they're called these days.
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Mar 18, 2015 18:42
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DigitalRaven posted:Though a game about late-90s American weirdness might not work as well when narrated by a bunch of Scotsmen. Just shift the setting to Edinburgh and surf the Trainspotting vibe.
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Mar 19, 2015 13:34
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I'm also in for a hardback, despite the murderous shipping charges. First thing I'm doing when it's out is writing a pre-metal-age City playset. 
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Mar 19, 2015 21:10
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Kai Tave posted:Something to note is that John Harper clarified that if you back at the Tinkerer level I think it's called (the all digital tier that gives you access to the source files) that you'll also receive the Kickstarter exclusive stuff that comes with the hardback tier as well, so if a physical copy isn't 100% necessary for you that might be a more affordable option that doesn't cause you to lose out on anything. Yeah, but I like what I've seen enough to want a hardback. I've missed out on getting print stuff for a couple of games I ended up really liking and I don't want that to be the case this time. I kind of wish I could justify going up to $100 to get the source files, but that's a bit silly.
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Mar 19, 2015 22:26
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It's not really unfinished, though. The game system is written, the only thing still in writing is the setting guide.
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Mar 19, 2015 23:55
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It was specifically written as a tournament module, which is why it's one giant pile of bullshit. It's basically the only possible case where the giant bullshit pile could possibly be justified.
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Mar 20, 2015 23:08
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Mouse Guard is getting a new edition/reprint soon so a BW/Torchbearer/MG thread would be nice. I'd post it but I have very little interest in the system outside of MG, but I can throw together an OP for someone else to post if you want; it's not very hard.
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Mar 22, 2015 00:30
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I mean, all you need to do is put together an OP that's just a blurb about BWG (with maybe a little about previous editions), a blurb about Mouse Guard with whatever the latest news about the new edition is, and a blurb about Torchbearer, with a nice banner per title. Here you go, here are your three banners:   
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Mar 22, 2015 01:59
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Zurui posted:I always suspected that Cards Against Humanity was a metajoke, like the play-within-a-play in Hamlet. "Let's make the most offensive game and see who laughs!" Nope.
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Mar 24, 2015 11:35
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