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I'm currently reading through Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. I don't know if I'll get to play it, but the mechanics seem really solid and the books are well written. I'm planning to run a PbP of something this month, just waiting to see if my current PbP signups pan out else I'm going to be too busy.
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Mar 1, 2015 07:02
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Splicer posted:Also in the last thread I misread a request and accidentally offered to implement a Subset sum problem in javascript. This may have been a mistake. Uhhhh drat dude you don't have to do that it's really not that big a deal. ... but if it's not too much trouble there is this Minesweeper thing I could use help with too No seriously it's okay
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Mar 1, 2015 14:03
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Plague of Hats posted:No, Pundit's been slobbering all over it since before it came out. He'd start a loving thread like "Is D&D5 super-great, or super-awesome?" like every other week when I was still poking my head into the Site. I've seen him trot out a few criticisms, but for some reason they just don't have the usual tone you'd expect! WOTC's survey posted:So, what did we learn from our last survey? Let’s take a look at some trends: The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Games > Traditional Games > D&D NEXT: Great Edition or GREATEST Edition?
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Mar 3, 2015 05:20
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Impermanent posted:It really is funny how the playbooks for Apocalypse World can encapsulate character archetypes as diverse as "batman, luchador, Rorsharch, Jacket, Phantom of the Opera, Tuxedo Mask, Jim Carrey or Green Goblin." Meanwhile Dungeon World's playbooks with far more moves and text allow you to play "D&D fighter" or "D&D wizard." That's mostly why I feel World of Dungeons is in some ways better than DW: if you're already playing a storygame, you really shouldn't weigh it down with heavy mechanical limits on what a player-character is capable of, much less the skewed limits of D&D's tropes.
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Mar 3, 2015 08:55
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Has there ever been a public official that was known to play D&D?
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Mar 3, 2015 10:04
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Captain Foo posted:why isn't there room for a game people want to play? There's a big difference between saying it's a poorly-designed game and that there's no place for it, one of those is a lot stronger than the other It is a poorly designed game, but a combination of identity politics, sunk cost fallacy, and the uniquely TRPG fallacy of games whose mechanics can never be reviewed critically because "the DM can throw out any rule that's bad" which causes the quality of the game to enter into this "well our table is having fun" quantum state is what pushes it into there's-no-place-for-it territory.
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Mar 3, 2015 19:20
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PresidentBeard posted:This still boils down to being upset that something you don't like is popular. This is where I justify it on grounds that the other side does it too
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Mar 3, 2015 19:55
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Sorry to make this my "Personal Reactions to the Adventure Zone" thread, but the following exchange just happened on the pudcast: Spells in D&D aren't really magic so much as they're "make an absolute declaration of truth" tokens. Hell, if the Wizard yells "I damage the monster!" and shoots a Fireball, and the monster makes its save, the Wizard still deals (half) damage!
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Mar 4, 2015 07:33
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While it's true that it was actually rather difficult for Magic-Users to get all the spells they needed to really start making GBS threads on other classes prior to 3rd Edition busting open the gates to spell selection, I think that was sort of neutered by the fact that people threw out those rules regarding how spells were supposed to be acquired specifically because it was so difficult. Besides, the DM refusing the Wizard from ever finding a scroll of Knock is no big consolation to the Thief whose chances of successfully using their skills is low even when no one is upstaging them.
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Mar 4, 2015 19:29
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Glorified Scrivener posted:Yes, people throwing out rules does rather undermine any sort of balance those rules might have achieved, however limited it might have been. And I won't argue that the chances of success for low level thieves in AD&D/2nd aren't atrocious. My point was that while it might have worked, it's not particularly good design for your class to be balanced with respect to others by making it really inconvenient to actually flesh out your class.
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Mar 4, 2015 20:03
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I've always wanted to try Iron Heroes to get around the whole issue of dealing with Wizards/magic-users in D&D (and the RPPR campaign made it sound fun as all hell), but not only is it 3.5-based*, it's also written by one Mike Mearls. * particularly, good monster/encounter creation in d20 games seems to be rather difficult and never fast
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Mar 5, 2015 04:16
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Ratpick posted:This is actually a playstyle I'd like to try: everyone starts with a bunch of 1st-level characters and just picks one for their first adventure. If your character gets damaged to the point where normally you'd spend a couple of weeks in town recuperating, you just bring a backup character to play in the meantime. Between forays into the dungeon the DM checks whether rooms the PCs have already cleared out become repopulated. I'd imagine the internet could make this even easier to pull off: you just post "ok I'm running OD&D every other day at this time" and the roll20 link and whoever shows within the 15 min grace period gets to play. On a different note, that also made me realize what the point of measuring how long it took for a character to heal up via resting, and even the case where different classes took different amounts of time to heal because healing/time is absolute but Fighters have more HP. It makes sense if you're measuring time in the campaign strictly and swapping characters in and out because the rest of your stable of character sheets is recuperating from their wounds. Just another one of those things that maybe don't make sense with the way the game is played nowadays.
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Mar 5, 2015 16:45
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Has there ever been a quick way to stat up monsters in 3.5, even?
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Mar 5, 2015 21:25
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PresidentBeard posted:Just writing down hp, saves, and attacks based on level ballparks. And which ones are those?
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Mar 5, 2015 21:38
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I've used the Escalation Die in B/X retroclone There's Always a Chance, where it's actually recommended as a variant rule. It works well enough. However, if you're not going to dig in to your game's mechanics and introduce something that lets players interact with the various faces of the die, as 13th Age does, all it's really doing is reducing miss chance over time, and that's a general enough problem that can be approached several ways: an attack that misses within 3-4 of the required roll still does partial damage an attack that misses still does partial damage, period you could even combine it with Kevin Crawford's Fray Die mechanic: every turn, you can deal damage to an enemy equal to the face of the Escalation Die
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Mar 6, 2015 07:49
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Bob Quixote posted:That sounds like it could get really lethal for PC's if the rules worked both ways - especially if you are fighting swarm enemies like kobolds or something. It doesn't apply both ways. The original implementation in 13th Age only gives the players the +attack. Some monsters do have abilities that key off the face of the escalation die, but that's more on the scale of anticipatory timing: "he's going to blow on 5!" "melee get out because it cleaves every odd face!" and so on. Porting it over would demand that you only let it apply to the players, for the reasons you already pointed out.
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Mar 6, 2015 14:15
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Bob Quixote posted:Ah alright - that makes sense. I haven't ever read 13th Age directly, the only place I've seen the Escalation Die mechanic explained was in There's Always a Chance where the text seemed to imply that the bonus applied to both PC & monster attacks. Or possibly I actually misread it there as well? Huh, I just double-checked TAAC and: quote:In the first round of combat, participants make their attack rolls as normal. In the second, however, all to-hit rolls (for both sides) get a +1 bonus as the heat of battle intensifies. In the third they get +2, and so on, all the way up to +6. (A six-sided die can be used by the DM to show this escalation...) So you weren't wrong, it did apply to both players and monsters, although I never closely read that part and just did it for the players when I was running it.
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Mar 6, 2015 14:32
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How is that still Pathfinder? Does it even resemble the rules of the tabletop game anymore? For that matter, why did so many D&D-like games completely eschew the use of a grid and formal turn limits? Infinity Engine games didn't, Neverwinter Nights didn't, D&D Online didn't, Neverwinter Online didn't, and now it looks like this PFO thing doesn't use it either. Even Temple of Elemental Evil just used miniatures-style precise actual measurements IIRC. That just confused me more than anything trying to translate what D&D was like outside of the PC.
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Mar 9, 2015 17:09
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Quarex posted:AD&D 2nd Edition was not meant for play-by-post. I'd rather think that PbP would be perfect for crunchy games because you have all the time in the world to obsess over all the rules and spergy bits.
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Mar 10, 2015 01:44
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Next isn't ~~terrible~~, it just has a disappointingly narrow range of appeal that has more to do with identity politics/branding than any real concerted effort at good design. I mean, even if you couched in criteria such as "fast-playing, rules-lite, easy to learn, must be named Dungeons and Dragons", there's still Basic/Rules Cyclopedia.
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Mar 10, 2015 11:00
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PurpleXVI posted:If you want to give 5E a shot, I can pass you the tentative house rules I'm using to improve my group's experience. Maybe you could share those in the Newbie thread? 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. This is a really broad question, but to oversimplify, Baldur's Gate used AD&D 2nd Edition rules, which were themselves the evolution of Original D&D and then Advanced D&D 1st Edition. 3rd Edition was more of a bottom-up rebuild of the game (for better or worse) but there's seriously so many differences that you might want to check out wikipedia or even Shannon Appelcline's work into the history of the hobby unless you have specific questions in mind. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Mar 10, 2015 |
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Mar 10, 2015 15:29
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Len posted:Is this about 5e? Can you explain for people like me that didn't follow it? RPGPundit and Zak S are credited as consultants for D&D 5th Edition, and without getting too deep into the rabbit hole, they're very much bad people. While I do not know how much they actually contributed to the content of the game, the fact that they were recognized at all speaks very ill of how WOTC has chosen to manage the brand and the community. The other part is that 5th Edition is heavily into identity politics: it's been regarded as a sort of return to the real D&D, which heavily implies repudiation of 4th Edition. I believe that at some point there were gamers that burned their 4th Edition books in "celebration" of 5th Edition's release.
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Mar 10, 2015 15:54
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bunnielab posted:1)5ed is going to be closer to the AD&D I remember, in mechanics and tone. 1. For the most part yes. 2. 4th Edition technically has more rules crunch, but as has been said it's written in such a way that it's very easy to digest. You can run the game completely rules-as-written and not only is it going to work drat near flawlessly for the first 10 or so levels, but any rules issues you do run into can be looked up into the rules and explained in a clear, concise manner. Also, every D&D is about tactical-style combat. 4th Edition is really good at it because it embraces the idea entirely and makes a lot of "gameplay over realism" concessions to support it. 3. The closest thing you're going to get is Original or Basic D&D: the lack of rules for everything means you can make up whatever you want for them, although technically that's also true for every edition as long as you're not yet in combat. bunnielab posted: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? WOTC recently did a crackdown on online character generation programs, so I'm not sure how healthy that approach is anymore. D&D 4th Edition still critically lacks the first Player's Handbook, but enough of the other core books are out on PDF (PHB 2, PHB 3, Rules Compendium, Monster Manual 3) that you can run a full game legit through them. 5th Edition has PDFs of the free "Basic" rules, but are so barebones that they're not much more useful than getting the general feel of the game.
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Mar 10, 2015 19:38
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I've always taken storygame to mean certain practices and principles when running and playing RPGs where you put the emphasis on producing an interesting story rather than trying to (there's no good way to express this) create a literal window to another world using the GM as the conduit and the rules as physics. Giving the PCs plot armor, using deus ex machinas, introducing twists to keep things moving over dead-ends, handwaving away improbabilities, that sort of thing. Certainly there are games that are tailor-made to cater to this playstyle, but it's really more of how you approach a game than anything else. Even certain parts of GURPS are storygamey. All that said, there isn't any one definition of it, and it mostly spawned from people who're slinging it around as some kind of epithet, but I'd like to think it can be co-opted to mean a good thing.
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Mar 10, 2015 20:38
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PurpleXVI posted:I'm personally really sad we never got a Birthright for 4E, the two seem like they'd have fit together pretty well. Did 4e ever have its own version of mass combat rules? Babylon Astronaut posted:Red Box basic had a catch all rule for anything that you could do not covered by the rest of the game. I think 4e had a similar system somewhere. It's really nice because then you don't have that 3e moment when you're just referencing books back and forth and finding complete jibberish about something unrelated. The three books thing really sucked. Yeah Basic's roll under rule and 4e's per-level skill DCs and damage assumptions are just a few of the things that make DM'ing it such a breeze. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 10:06 on Mar 11, 2015 |
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Mar 11, 2015 10:04
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Night10194 posted:Are there any RPGs where people legitimately enjoy the combat mechanics as mechanics? Like, beyond the narrative it creates, actually have fun fighting because of the mechanics? I like D&D 4E's combat because it's never boring: it's always shift this, grapple that, miss on attack this, directed attack that. You don't necessarily have to make an effort to make a dramatic narration of how you totally owned that dude because the ownage is mechanically supported and the drama comes "for free", and even as a DM I know I can play the monsters as intelligently as they're entitled to be (or even moreso) and the characters will always have the tools to be able to deal with it. I want to try a game of 3.PF with Tome of Battle / Path of War classes, as well as 13th Age for much the same reasons. EDIT: I also managed to recreate WoW's Four Horsemen encounter in D&D Basic and the players had a great time trying to "unpack" that particular encounter, but that's mostly because by then we had throw out most of the rules.
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Mar 13, 2015 07:54
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Davin Valkri posted:I don't think I've ever played one of those hyperlethal games before. The idea of rolling to make my character makes me a little confused, to be honest. The best way I can describe it would be that OD&D was less a roleplaying game as we think of it now, and more of a strategy game where you happened to only control one dude. You don't care about Bob the Fighter dying quickly and violently any more than you would care about any individual GI getting shot and killed in a game of Company of Heroes. Rolling for character creation worked because it reinforced the idea of quickly stamping out stacks of character sheets while also providing just enough variation that it didn't literally feel like you were all playing the same guy over and over. As well, the stats were almost meaningless. It wasn't a big deal to roll an 9 on your INT if you only ever got a -1 to things on a 8 or lower, or a +1 to things on a 13 or higher. It's just incongruous nowadays because on top of characters taking a relatively long time to create and flesh out (and therefore subliminally causing higher amounts of a player's personal investment), the stats are extremely important. 4d6-drop-lowest doesn't fly when the difference between a 10 and an 18 is a 20% higher hit chance.
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Mar 15, 2015 05:54
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PurpleXVI posted:At 1st level, the difference between and 18 and an 8 could be loving huge, though, so your stats weren't likely to make a huge impact, but if you rolled an 18 for one of the three core combat stats(Str, Dex or Con), it could REALLY affect your character. The stats, if anything, meant more than in 3E and onwards, because there were far less non-stat ways to get bonuses, and those that were, were much more rare. You were just less LIKELY to have a stat that gave a bonus, due to the gap(roughly 8 to 14 for most stats) which was considered "human average" and didn't really yield any notable bonuses or penalties. I'm at least referring to OD&D where even an 18 only got you a +1 and STR didn't affect to-hit nor damage at all. Yes, I agree that stats started to matter by as soon as AD&D 1e, but it's also easily forgotten that AD&D had numerous stat generation methods beyond 3d6 in order. It's arguably Basic that was the odd man out by letting 18s give you +3 while still only having OD&D's stat generation. I also agree that while it was certainly possible to run a campaign where the DM didn't fire off save-or-dies willy-nilly and characters have multi-year campaigns, the books as written didn't support that style of play if you didn't go out of your way to avoid it. You could end up killing your players in straight-up attack vs AC combats, the dungeon level 1 random monster table includes a crab spider that inflicts a poison save or die and traps are also normally save or die's as well, to say nothing of published modules that are built like that but are intended to replace a DM having to make up an adventure by himself.
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Mar 15, 2015 07:26
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Quarex posted:I still remember when I first decided to start seriously posting in here and was like "hey I hear 4th Edition is kind of like World of Warcraft, is that true?" and the resulting assault made me want to block a half-dozen people or more. At the time tempers were still pretty flared about it, but saying "yeah, well, that is just meaningless hyperbole, 4th Edition is just an evolution of Dungeons & Dragons toward a system where every character class is balanced for in-and-out-of-combat purposes, taking another step away from the original 'roll some dice and hope something good happens and do not expect to live too long'" would have made me say "oh, O.K.!" instead of "WHY ARE YOU ALL SO HORRIBLE" People who make the comparison between 4th Edition and WoW in complete innocent earnestness tend to get jumped on pretty hard because from get-go the comparison was never ever made in good faith. It was always made out to be a bad thing, specifically and especially by Ryan Dancey basically declaring that Wizards of the Coast had noticed how many people jumped ship from 3E D&D and switched to WoW to get their RPG kicks from there, and then that WOTC developed 4th Edition as a Tabletop-WoW in order to win some of that market back. The implication was that you should all play Pathfinder instead because PF stays true to D&D's heritage/tradition/roots. Without sperging out on an analysis of how WoW and 4th Edition are actually rather different from a design perspective (unless you really want to hear it), there are 2 key points to be made from trying to take the comparison seriously: 1. While I don't know if people actually did jump ship from playing D&D to playing WoW, there is some merit to the idea that people would get their "sense of community" buttons pushed by being in a guild, while adventure modules are basically the predecessors of instanced dungeons and raids. 2. 4th Edition making every class competitive and giving them an equal share of the limelight tracks closely with WoW making every class "soloable" (to varying degrees of success in Blizzard's balancing)
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Mar 15, 2015 17:19
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Lord Frisk posted:At least you didn't make them confirm their crit. That was the worst design decision I think I've ever seen. Let's take the only fun part of rolling a d20 and make it not happen 50% of the time. gently caress. What really soured me on this was listening to RPPR's Iron Heroes campaign where one player had a Scythe with a critical threat of nat-20s-only in exchange for a critical multiplier of 4x, but he only ever got one confirmed crit in the entire run AND more than half of it was wasted on overkill since it triggered against some mook. I really liked the Glory Points mechanic from that game, though.
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Mar 15, 2015 18:46
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PurpleXVI posted:Maybe just give everyone a flat Initiative stat, have people go from highest to lowest always. Hard to make it any simpler than that. This is a clever idea. I was thinking you could even simplify it further by getting rid of initiative as a number: Class x "always goes first". Class y "always goes after class z" And then monsters slot themselves in between: A zombie is always dead last. A Minotaur is slower than a Rogue, but is faster than the Warrior.
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Mar 16, 2015 12:39
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Splicer posted:I think Payndz is trying to break out of the your turn/my turn system, not find a better method of determining who's turn it is. Defining initiative order in absolute terms could let you do WEGO!
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Mar 16, 2015 13:41
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You could probably get close with 4e DTAS rules and power cards.
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Mar 16, 2015 15:32
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If the game is based around inter-encounter attrition (such as in D&D), letting whole sides take first initiative should still be okay unless the game is so rocket-taggy that the players are completely dismantling the fight and never taking damage and not really expending their resources. Like, sure, go ahead and nova on the goblins, but if you needed to blow a daily to do it and the goblins still managed to do a couple healing surges worth of damage before you managed to end the fight, that's going to add up. I personally don't really like roll-based initiative systems and would rather let whole sides go first, awarding the first go to the players if they sought after it in the pre-battle narrative part (and succeeded on the skill checks).
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Mar 16, 2015 16:25
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^^^^ that was an official variant rule in 3rd Edition: instead of the DM/monsters rolling d20+attack bonus vs 10+AC bonus, the player would roll d20+AC bonus vs 11+attack bonus to avoid getting hit. You're right though that technically it doesn't really speed things up. Eliminating initiative rolls and using average damage is probably as close as you can get to minimizing rolling short of diverging far from D&D. Another thing you can do is get rid of the concept of opposed rolls entirely - everything is a check against a DC. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Mar 16, 2015 |
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Mar 16, 2015 17:08
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PurpleXVI posted:For some reason reminds me of Robo Rally's(now there's a boardgame that needs more love) approach to initiative, I wonder how well something similar would work in an RPG? Essentially everyone plots their turn in secret from a limited supply of options, then initiative happens after actions are revealed, determining whether someone manages to get out of the way of something else or whether they're still standing there and taking a whomp right to the face. Dark Dungeons does a thing where initiative is determined by a d6 but actions are executed simultaneously. If you declare your action before the DM, you get a +1 to your d6. If you declare after, you get a -1. Basically trading the ability to react with the ability to make sure you go first.
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Mar 16, 2015 17:52
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clockworkjoe posted:This character generator got me interested in running DCC. What else do I need other than the main book? Do I absolutely need those weird dice? What's a good intro adventure? If you're willing to use a digital solution then no you don't need the weird dice. These Purple Sorcerer guys have even made a web-based/Android/iOS app that serves as both a dice-roller and as an automatic look-up of all the various tables of roll results. The corebook itself already has a level 0-1 adventure included.
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Mar 17, 2015 08:23
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I believe it was Arthur C Clarke that said, "any sufficiently averaged rolling method is indistinguishable from point-buy"PurpleXVI posted:That way you get randomly rolled stats but no one is forced into being more gimped than the others. Everyone rolls a set of numbers with whatever method. The players pick one person's set and everyone uses those, just changing which number gets assigned to which stat.
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Mar 17, 2015 16:36
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Loki_XLII posted:Honestly the idea of a website based rpg that handles all character sheets, rolling, and rules reminds me of the ideas for Twine based rpgs a couple people on twitter were talking about a few months back. Orokos + the DDI character builder works well and should be the baseline for any moderately crunchy RPG
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Mar 18, 2015 04:59
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Can I get a recommendation for a good FATE Accelerated Edition LP? I want to read/hear about how it actually is before trying to grok the rules again.
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Mar 18, 2015 20:41
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