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I'm still working on the setting for my 13th Age sci-fantasy campaign that I'm gonna run here on the forums. I've just got to write up the last 4 Icons, flesh out 2 species and I'll be good to go.
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Mar 1, 2015 13:49
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 13:20 |
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So while talking with a friend about 13th Age, we got on the subject of D&D-alikes and they mentioned one I've never heard of: Fantasycraft. They described it as "D&D but with more cool stuff and fighter-types get nice things", which is always a neat idea in my mind. I was wondering you folks thought it would be worth picking up even if only to pick apart for its ideas.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:34
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Sounds like more of a curiosity to me than anything else then, I'm not that big a fan of crunch. Maybe there'll be a sale or I can find a secondhand copy or something, because "D&D with sound mechanics" seems like a cool idea, but from the way it sounds I wouldn't be a fan of all the extra mechanics.
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Mar 3, 2015 20:48
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Evil Mastermind posted:Well, another part of the magic problem is that D&D only really treats magic primarily as a weapon used to blow poo poo up in combat, with everything else feeling like an afterthought. My home campaign rolls with a combination of Dark Sun and Eberron, in that magic is plentiful and has revolutionized society, but ruthless exploitation of it is starting to harm the world. It is a renewable resource, but the society based on magi-tech is beginning to use it up faster than it can be replaced, and that's causing problems for people. Magic is an intrinsic part of the world, and everyone is connected to it, so when the magic gets used up, the result is sickness, blight, wonky physics and intermittent portals to Hell getting ripped open and letting through Bad poo poo. It's basically a way for me to explain the casting system for our games since it fits pretty well with whatever game. In 3.5 spell slots are part of the narrative in that you can only use to much magic, in 4E a wizard can cast magic missile all day but the flashy stuff is draining and needs to recharge, 13th Age is a mix of both, and in FATE I have an extra stress track for the environment that makes bigger spells/feats have a draining effect. ...also I guess its kinda like fantasy oil, so there's an environmental metaphor thrown in there too.
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Mar 4, 2015 21:36
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And this is why in my home campaign I also got rid of charm person and all other mind-altering spells like geas and detect thoughts and whatnot. I couldn't reconcile the effects of such a minor bit of magic on the world, plus anything that cuts down the wizard's ability to just make the plot go there way is good in my mind. One player made a very good case for why illusions should get cut too, but I figure that as long as they are actual false images/sounds that you can make a save against, they can stay since they're not actually messing with anyone's head. In-universe the justification is that the mind is just too complicated to much around with because people are special.
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Mar 4, 2015 22:02
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I'll throw in a recommendation for 13th Age and 4E. Both of those have served me very well over the years. Dungeon World looks awesome too, but my group hasn't gotten a chance to play it yet, but all I hear about it is good things.
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Mar 5, 2015 21:40
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Also some creatures like dragons and high-level demons/devils get to use the escalation die as well. I like to let the big bads of individual arcs/adventures use it too, just to up their threat level without having to necessarily increase their damage. I've also done things like run battles where crits increase the escalation die, or where PCs have done things (usually involving explosives) that up it as well, to represent the situation getting more intense or dangerous. Really I love the escalation die, and I use it in any D&D-type game that I can. When I first read about 13th Age I immediately stole the mechanic for my 4E game, and we noticed the effect pretty quickly as it did lead to sped-up combats.
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Mar 6, 2015 14:20
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The other great thing I will always use in a D&Dalike is damage on a miss. In 13th Age I add the escalation die to miss damage as well, just to speed things along. When miss damage kills an enemy, my players like to describe them getting themselves killed in some silly accident or weird happenstance. For us that usually involves stumbling off the side of an airship, falling into sinkholes, or getting struck by meteors. It's awesome and hilarious despite the fact that it doesn't happen often.
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Mar 6, 2015 15:19
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Okay I'm reading this PFO leveling thing and it's like... how did anyone think this was a good idea? If you're gonna have passive XP generation like EVE, then why also require the achievement gating? It's really an either/or system, you can't dip into both. Passive XP generation + kill XP + quest/crafting XP would possibly be a cool idea, but don't remove the grind only to add in a gating mechanic that is also a grind. I still have some faith that the skinner box only works for so long before people get tired of it, and the rest of what I've seen from PFO doesn't look nearly good enough to justify time-gated and achievement-gated progression.
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Mar 9, 2015 18:30
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4E has lots of crunch, but the crunch is competently designed in such a way that it is a dream to both run and play. I was able to learn the system alongside my players as our first RPG and the experience was remarkably simple, fast and fun. It helps that we all had experience with miniature and card games before that, but even the newbies who joined later on were getting into the swing of things in a single session. As a GM, 4E was amazingly fast to set up for, even if the combats took a while. I could take a statblock and throw a different name and some flavor on it and put together a battle in under 5 minutes totally from scratch. I could design really cool boss encounters that relied on the tactical combat and set up neat environmental things for my players too. My prep time for each game was about thirty minutes, mostly picking out stats for a range of monsters they might encounter in that week's game. I cannot extol the virtues of 4E enough, but 13th Age is our current game of choice. The combat is faster than 4E, the Backgrounds are far more elegant than skill rolls, and the flexible attacks are a godsend for players who used to agonize over which power to use in our 4E combats. Overall 13th Age is just about as tightly designed as 4E, lacks a little combat depth but gives you speed, and has more ways for players to affect the narrative with Backgrounds and Icon rolls. The only mechanic I really miss from 4E are action points, but I haven't found a good way to work them into 13th Age.
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Mar 10, 2015 18:20
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Was there ever a 4E strategy game? Because hoo boy if there is a system out there that could support a computer game it's 4E. A good tactical dungeon-crawler with the option to build and customize a party beforehand, shops to grab new magic items to supplement your loot, randomized encounters built using their encounter rules... Sounds like a match made in heaven. Too bad the ship has sailed on 4E stuff because that would be incredible.
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Mar 10, 2015 18:57
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My Lovely Horse posted:So everyone kept saying, but nothing ever came out. Well I guess there's Daggerdale, but that's the same tired old real-time Forgotten Realms bullshit they warmed over and served up billions of times now. No D&D game will ever move beyond that. That's really too bad. Like you said, everything in 4E is expressed in very clean mechanical terms. Slap that onto a good game engine and port over the massive amount of content they produced (even if it is mostly fiddly trash feats and long lists of magic items) and it would be amazing. I know videogames aren't WOTC's thing and it wouldn't help the "4E is WoW" crap, but I know I'd play the hell outta a game like that.
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Mar 10, 2015 19:07
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moths posted:And that's fine because magic is the VERY FABRIC OF THE COSMOS. I actually love this idea but in a cool way that lets anyone get to do cool things. Part of the reason I loved 4E was that one of my players just ran with the straight mechanical approach and described all his fighter powers as being magical sword attacks and he had a blast. So long as you axe caster supremacy and make everyone capable of being awesome, magic-as-physics can be very enjoyable.
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Mar 10, 2015 20:02
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I actually bought Numenera just on the strength of the videogame's KS and found that while the system is garbage, the setting stuff is easily mined. I then also bought The Strange while it was on sale and its the same story, bad mechanics but a cool world. I could totally see myself running a game of Numenera or The Strange using Fate or even FAE. The Strange would be trickier with the translation mechanic, but I guess you could create a new set of stats pretty quickly and reuse them as you travel around.
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Mar 11, 2015 01:21
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Evil Mastermind posted:Why would you need to redo all your stats? When your character translates to a different world, you can change into a new body/get different, comparable skills. So like when you go to the weird sci-fi world your doctor becomes like a cybersurgeon or whatever. Depending on how crunchy you want to get, I suppose you could either just swap skill names or go ham and come up with whole new skills for different worlds. I also imagine if you turn into an elf or whatever you'd want some different stunts and maybe aspects. I suppose its a decision to make with your players on how complicated you want to get, but it's hard to outdo the rules in the book itself.
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Mar 11, 2015 01:47
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ProfessorCirno posted:Thing is, this is exactly what most 3.x fans want in my experience. For far too many people, minutia and metagaming is what constitutes as "immersion." I could write endless minutiae for gaming because I love designing worlds and whatnot, but I realize that's exactly the sort of thing I hate to build around because it feels so constraining. I'll admit that I love reading it, but I know some of my players do too and having them try to contradict me when I go off-book isn't fun and I feel like it is a creativity killer for them too when I try to ask them about the world. I like my published worlds to have big gaps in them where I can fill it in myself and improv when I feel like I need to without worrying about conflicting with the "facts" of the world. But then again I don't play 3.X anymore for a reason I guess.
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Mar 11, 2015 03:24
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Blockhouse posted:I don't know how kitchen sink could be a criticism but I was raised on Final Fantasy as my primary fantasy setting so if a world doesn't have at least two of the following (guns, magitech, aliens, robots, and a not-Japan) then it just can't hold my interest. Same here, to be honest. I think it's mostly a side-effect of growing up in the '90s for me, but Tolkienesque fantasy doesn't grab me because I'm so used to my fantasy settings being so much more weird and cool. I use a kitchen-sink setting so that my players can zero in on the thing that interests them and run with it. They've gone from hijacking airships in sky-cities to dungeon-crawling out in the wilderness to fighting corporate strikebreakers in a factory town. I can just throw out hooks and see what they're into that week. For me a kitchen sink setting is a big draw because it appeals to my style of GMing and also lets me steal from it if I just want to run the thing in my home setting.
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Mar 11, 2015 13:08
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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. In our 4E campaign, my players were hired to fight fantasy Pinkertons and scabs. It was essentially a recreation of the Battle of Blair Mountain with the players blowing up strikebreaker camps and eventually kicking the evil factory owner out of a window while fighting his bodyguards.
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Mar 11, 2015 18:49
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Terrible news. Pratchett was a huge inspiration and an excellent writer. Ankh-Morpork has always been one of my favorite fantasy locations. I'm gonna miss him a lot.
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Mar 12, 2015 18:24
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ProfessorCirno posted:One idea I've had is that everyone - enemy and PC - acts simultaniously (outside of maybe a talent for specific situations). It'd probably work best if it was some kinda card based game so everyone would lay their card down and flip it together to see what went down. I really enjoy how this works in Cosmic Encounters, where you can choose to attack or negotiate, but neither side knows until you flip your cards. I feel like you could do something like this in an RPG, where everyone designates which monster they're going for, the GM slaps down a random card in opposition and all of them get revealed together. Most of the character abilities would revolve around modifying the result, like swapping your attack number with someone else's or flipping the numbers or nullifying the monsters' cards. But now that I write it all out that would probably be even slower than rolling dice.
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Mar 16, 2015 21:00
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Fyxt followed me on twitter and I was coming here to post about it, but I see things are already under way. Carry on.
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Mar 17, 2015 20:52
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I will say that the thing that finally got me to stop sitting around looking at RPG books and run one was WotC and Penny Arcade doing that podcast. It seemed like the rules were very streamlined and easy to pick up, and most importantly for me the DM seemed to be having fun too. I'd always pictured DMing as being a chore, but Perkins was really into it, so it sold me and my friends on the 4E rules and we played for years. So yeah I think podcasts/streams/videos could get people into the hobby if they are done well and kept relatively free of the awfulness that pervades much of the hobby. I recommended Six Feats Under to another friend and now he wants to try out Eclipse Phase, so they are also good for getting people interested in other games in my experience.
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Mar 19, 2015 20:52
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FMguru posted:That's a nice compare/contrast between the marketing of 4E and 5E. It's a shame that PA has gone to poo poo recently because they are still doing D&D games once a year at PAX and using 5E but I won't touch any of that with a ten-foot-pole anymore. Edit: sorry, not "recently" more like "it's come to my attention recently"
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Mar 19, 2015 21:30
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Evil Mastermind posted:I think it's interesting to point out too that WotC has no D&D presence at PAX since 5e was announced. I can't speculate on their motivations, but maybe it's because they tried to revitalize the game with 4E, and then eventually caved to the requests of the old guard and now no longer want to be seen as repeating 4E in any way, shape or form? I mean I came into the hobby with 4E and I dunno how it was for the launch of 3E but it seemed huge when 4E came out. Between the PA podcast and the pretty prominent displays it got in my local comic shop and places like Waldenbooks/Barnes and Noble it felt like they were pushing D&D hard. You could go to a bookstore/gaming store and pick up any of the books and those nice starter sets at any time. If I got a wild hair up my rear end and wanted to buy 5E there's like one copy at the comic shop and none at the other bookstore in town. It feels like they're not even trying anymore, and maybe part of that is they're no longer looking to pick up new players and know that the portion of their fanbase they're appealing to will pick the game up regardless of any marketing? Also it sucks remembering the 4E launch because it so quickly went from "this looks cool" to "this sucks and is bad and if you like it you're a terrible person" around here. I remember dudes loudly and vehemently trashing 4E in the comic shop and the owner marking it all down 50% to "get rid of it and make more room for Pathfinder" which worked out well for me because I picked up a bunch of 4E books/minis on the cheap but was kinda depressing to watch. Funny thing is he still has a whole shelf of 4E stuff and I sometimes pick up something because it gets him going on a huge rant.
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Mar 19, 2015 21:50
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Covok posted:Yealling at customs for buying your product is bad business. A good way to NOT get repeat customers. People used to tell me they didn't go to that comic shop because the atmosphere was really lovely and I never knew what they meant until I started buying 4E stuff there. Like every time I'd buy a book he'd try and sell me on Pathfinder of 3.5 instead, roll his eyes when I insisted, and even get his regular customers in on it. After my group had basically all the 4E stuff we wanted, I stopped going there for like 2 years even for comics and Magic cards. The owner now has other people running the store, and they're much more laid-back so I've started going again. I had a fantastic time running 4E for my friends, but starting there was like taking a swan dive directly into the toxicity of the hobby from the get-go.
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Mar 20, 2015 10:38
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Lichtenstein posted:CAH shittiness aside, is "punch down comedy" like a new en vogue sjw topic? Legit question, I think I began seeing the phrase a lot recently. The idea has been around for a while AFAIK, but the name for it has been popularized recently. Turns out a lot of comedy hinges on making GBS threads on marginalized people and people are starting to come around to the idea that it isn't very cool and actually not at all funny.
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Mar 24, 2015 14:33
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bunnielab posted:Isn't the point if CaH to be offensive and to make light of awful ideas and scenarios? Like, a nice and respectful version might as well be Apples to Apples. It is fine to not like the premise of the game but it does pretty effectively fulfill its design goals. Offensive and mean poo poo can still be funny and people are going to laugh at stuff that they would be offended by presented in a more serious tone, that's like the whole idea behind black comedy. If the point of your game is to court lovely people and entertain them by letting them laugh at marginalized groups, great. But that doesn't mean we won't call them out and criticize them for perpetuating this terrible poo poo. As has been pointed out, CAH is a fantastic tool for revealing the bigots and lovely human beings among your group of friends for immediate ostracizing. But that's not the spirit in which it was designed, nor the intended use for it as a game according to the creators themselves.
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Mar 24, 2015 15:38
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Like I said, the game's existence is great because if people laugh at certain things, they get the boot.
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Mar 24, 2015 17:07
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Fuego Fish posted:OK so moving on from that post which I didn't read a word of, and which nobody else probably read either, in more important news it's my birthday today. Happy birthday! 
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Mar 24, 2015 17:15
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Well, given what's been going on with Monte Cook and Bruce Cordell recently, everybody is drowning in poo poo and appears to be only interested in swimming deeper.
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Mar 24, 2015 18:26
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Lotta assumptions being made ITT
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Mar 24, 2015 20:49
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Helical Nightmares posted:Goddamn guys. I come here to discuss and analyze games. If I wanted a moral outrage I'd go to Debate and Discussion. Yeah if only we could just talk about games without discussing their politics. Wouldn't that be nice, to live in an apolitical fantasy world where our games about killing goblins and stealing other people's shiny poo poo had no basis in reality to talk about.
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Mar 24, 2015 22:57
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Yeah this thread being pretty helpful in showing who not to game with right now.
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Mar 25, 2015 01:10
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bunnielab posted:Isn't true equality having to be a punch line now and then? No, it's not using people as a punchline when they're part of a marginalized group of people anyways. Edit: Loki_XLII posted:You're right, we should mock straight cis white men more. This goon gets it
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Mar 25, 2015 02:07
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Yeah, looks like the chat thread is doing a great job of revealing exactly the people I would never want to game with. So in that respect: great job chat thread!
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Mar 25, 2015 03:17
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I'm going to GM a game on April, for both of you, maybe. Pass. GrizzlyCow posted:I love this thread sometimes. You know, you goons alright. Is this still being worked on? I see the last post is from 2014. I ask because I think I have an old playtest document of this kicking around from years ago. It always struck me as an interesting system but one that's just a bit too much crunch for my tastes. It has a cool advancement/class system that's for sure. I never played it, so I can't comment on how it actually runs.
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Mar 25, 2015 04:07
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Captain Foo posted:yo is there any reason to play a game these days that doesn't involve some form of collaboration of setting design / explication between the players and the gm I used to write up these elaborate setting descriptions and places for the players to explore and they didn't seem to really be all that interested. Probably my problem. But I started listening to some podcasts where the GM would be like "well, what have you heard is around here?" and started trying that and everything fell into place. Hell my players came up with their own adventure seeds on more than one occasion, and would constantly bring in new and weird stuff for me to work with. I think if you have the right players in the right mindset, a collaborative game can be awesome. At the same time, some people are shy or just not all that creative and are totally cool with the GM doing all the heavy lifting or getting it all from a book. There's nothing wrong with that approach either, so long as everyone is having fun. As my grandpa would say: different strokes for different folks.
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Mar 25, 2015 12:55
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I would totally play in a game where we just founded a bank in a world where gold comes from monster-killing. Imagine the hijinks as you fight other banks and develop more and more sophisticated ways of killing monsters to generate loot to buy out your competitors. Game ends when you own/destroy all the other banks or have hunted all the monsters to extinction.
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Mar 25, 2015 16:10
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 13:20 |
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Pathfinder Online is like the biggest joke at this point. I mean christ, even Elder Scroll Online tried. At least it had a clear vision and something, anything interesting behind it. Sure it failed, but at least there was an attempt to make a half-way decent game.
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Mar 27, 2015 21:08
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