TG June Chat Thread: Bruce Willis' Bonus Feats

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG June Chat Thread: Bruce Willis' Bonus Feats

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

while we're on the topic of maps, how many people here would play in and/or run a game in this world;

# ¿ Jun 2, 2015 00:01

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 04:54

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

unseenlibrarian posted:

Sorry, all my fantasy gaming map needs are handled by

One day I'll get players who want to visit Kanga-Rat Murder Society. One. Day.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Then once they get used to that, you can expand it out to the real map.

you guys have good taste

Fuego Fish posted:

I prefer to make my own

this looks really neat, mind going into detail about this setting?

Evil Mastermind posted:

Has there ever been a game that captured the whole Kirbyesque Kamandi/Thundarr vibe well?

I'd say the most recent version of Gamma World could pull it off fairly well, and Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG has a lot of it's third party supplements focus on Post-Apocalypse/Space adventures that would be useful for this as well(also you forgot to mention He-Man as part of that set of influences, cause Eternia would make for a kick-rear end RPG setting)

# ¿ Jun 2, 2015 00:36

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Fuego Fish posted:

I already did! It's for retro pulp crime-fighting adventures in the style of the Shadow, early Batman, and so on and so forth.

neat, might have to borrow that for a Golden Age Superheroes game I was planning on running with Hideouts & Hoodlums a superheroes RPG made using the Swords & Wizardry ruleset that's specifically designed to be used for Golden Age superhero shenanigans(and is so far the only Superhero system I've seen to use a class system and actually work)

# ¿ Jun 2, 2015 02:38

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Fuego Fish posted:

Huh, that sounds like an interesting system. And sure, go for it! I'm happy to know people are usin' my material.

If I had PMs I'd send you a copy to look over(although it is pretty cheap over on Drivethru)

# ¿ Jun 3, 2015 05:15

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

TheLovablePlutonis posted:

There are, they just patrol around in police cars.

Where's Duke Nukem when you need him?

# ¿ Jun 7, 2015 00:34

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

DocBubonic posted:

Too bad no OSR people want to go in that direction because that sounds like fun.

There's a ton of stuff like that available for the Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG actually(one of the reasons it's one of my favorite games in the OSR movement)

# ¿ Jun 10, 2015 22:08

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

one could go with the solution that pops up with Goblins, who often are noted as being given to Multiple Births, which is varying degrees of Communal upbringing, also races like this usually are R-Selection specialists, compared with Human's K-Selection strategy so that's also something to keep in mind

# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 20:36

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Mormon Star Wars posted:

Sounds like you need to grab some people from The Piazza and start a retro-supplements hobby.

One of my favorite BECMI books describes a Kopru who goes on at length about how Mystara is full of NERDS and then goes on to give you rules to play a Kopru.

This is a Kopru:

I've been wanting to write a supplement for Dark Dungeons for years to cover all the additional races and classes that BECMI D&D added in it's expansions(and maybe some new ones as well), but I don't have the skills needed for such a thing(although I'd be glad to help anyone who would want to tackle such a project)

# ¿ Jun 11, 2015 20:40

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

paradoxGentleman posted:

People who condemn all anime are approximatively 17% worse than people who defend all of it, and I say this as someone who watches exactly one [1] anime.

To bring this back to tabletop games, is there a game that allows you to play monster adventurers better than D&D does? In that game picking a race with a level modifier has a tendency of leaving you behind the curve compared to your human and dwarven companions.

I'd recommend looking up Fantasycraft, it handles races very well

Also for most editions of D&D I'd recommend just ignoring Level Adjustment/Level Limits for most races, never really felt any race is actually strong enough to warrant them

# ¿ Jun 14, 2015 23:20

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

well I think I found the inspiration I needed for the next game I'll run

Halloween Jack posted:

I hear DCC is actually pretty good, but I seriously cannot get past that "Halt! If thou desireth not for Erol Otus to cum on thine face, this horseshit is nuncupatory!" thing in the prologue.

I find it incredibly silly that people are taking something that is obviously meant to be Tongue-In-Cheek seriously, but really you should ignore that and get into DCC cause it's a pretty incredible system, closest thing to flaws it has are a slightly anemic Monster selection, and being a bit lacking in some of the DM material that other OSR games tend to have(but said material will probably be covered in a third part supplement or in a fan supplement/blog somewhere, that or you can just borrow what you need from another OSR game as they're all pretty compatible when you get down to it)

fosborb posted:

Picked up a Dungeon Crawl Classics DM screen at Free RPG Day today. Looks pretty slick even if the back of it is full of gibberish numbers.

haven't seen the DM Screen in person myself(although it looks incredible) but once you read the actual game it'll make sense, DCC is actually pretty straightforward mechanically for an OSR game(once you get past it using weird dice and being heavily reliant on charts)

# ¿ Jun 21, 2015 04:02

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

gradenko_2000 posted:

It took TG's OSR thread years to get over that and finally look at DCC seriously. I still find the system too light on DM support for my taste, but it actually is quite good, with class design that's significantly more innovative than a lot of other D&D-likes

yeah that was a really pathetic and petty reaction the OSR Thread had to that, also a supplement focusing on some of the missing DM support stuff would be a really good idea

# ¿ Jun 21, 2015 04:37

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Lightning Lord posted:

One of my favorite things about DCC is that it doesn't cordon off cool poo poo behind barriers that you have to be a certain level to cross. It assumes most people wanting to play the game are tired of fighting goblins. There's a level 1 adventure (Intrigue at the Court of Chaos) that's about bickering chaos gods calling upon the PCs to be their champions. There's another about exploring a Barrier Peaks-esque time-lost installation frozen in a giant glacier, and part of the concept is that the PCs are cavemen, Frozen in Time.

Seriously if you have any interest in old D&D, get over the intro page. Yeah, it's goofy. There are enough grogs who regard Gygax as a religious figure and walk around with the Greyhawk supplement in their breast pocket at all times so the scripture is close to their heart that I totally get the apprehension towards it. But in the end it's dumb goof rather than malicious. I'm not saying it's a perfect game, absolutely not, just that if you've got any interest in the subject matter at all, give it a shot.

Oh and this is more in praise of the community than the game itself, and maybe it's just the people I've played with, maybe I've gotten lucky, but I haven't encountered a single overt, fun ruining grog while playing DCC. All the fun stuff grogs present as examples of bad things? Totally would fly in all the games I've played. One form of "earn your fun" I dig is typical D&D characters getting warped into weirdness through play. I played a typical swordsman who ended up as a Rob Liefeld vigilante type. A monk class I pulled off a blog who became Goku through mastery of the seven sacred martial arts of the cloud temples. Another character who died and became a ghost. I tried to possess another character, failed the roll but the GM ruled that we melded together. I suggested we become some sort of gestalt being so we became a super-character for as long as the two of us could maintain speaking in the collective, as players. Who knows? Maybe I'll run into some guy who only allows Mighty Deeds to be boring trip actions, but until then, I'm having a lot of fun. Someone should make an shonen zine for it or something, I'm sure it would be pretty welcome.

As for the DM screen, it's pretty cool. There's going to be a retail version in a couple months that I believe comes bundled with a mini-adventure and will be on thicker cardstock for $10 but don't quote me on this.

mind linking that Monk class, it's entirely possible I already have it saved in my collection of DCC stuff, but I want to be sure of it(I should really get around to finishing that Class List for DCC I was fiddling with a while ago)

Lightning Lord posted:

DCC wants the monsters to be unique, or at least weird. But sometimes you just don't feel like handcrafting everything. One possible solution for the DCC monster blues (I want to stress for people unfamiliar with the game there totally is a chapter that contains monsters and a generator to help make monsters unique in the book) http://www.rpgnow.com/product/112841/Critters-Creatures--Denizens sadly there's a bunch of dumb charts about running speeds in the back, but those can be easily ignored, and there is a bunch of info for helping to convert monsters from other D&D games.

I have that book, and personally I found it pretty mediocre, especially since they try to expand the stats on the monster profiles making them annoying to use(also I'll say this while DCC's magical monster selection is rather lacking, and the absence of Were-Creatures and most Undead besides Skeletons and Zombies is ridiculous, they do at least include all the major Monstrous Humanoid types and put some semi-unique twists on a lot of them, and include a couple somewhat more unique types as well)

# ¿ Jun 21, 2015 09:48

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Lightning Lord posted:

This is a pretty complete (well it's 2 years old) list of classes for DCC http://noahms456.blogspot.com/2013/04/a-plethora-of-alternate-classraces-for.html I used Jeremy Deram's monk, which is just listed as monk.

I think that book is useful but I did forget to mention that it did have a lot of mundane animals, one thing to consider.

yup already have that one

# ¿ Jun 21, 2015 10:03

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Evil Mastermind posted:

I'd honestly like to try DCC but I think the biggest problem I have is that it seems like you pretty much need at least one physical book at the table, and generally speaking I'm the only person in any of my groups who actually buys books.

Well on the plus side the DCC core rule book is an amazingly beautiful book so I'd say it's worth buying

# ¿ Jun 21, 2015 20:40

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

there's a reason that the only way I'd run a Pathfinder campaign would be as a Beginner Box campaign(especially with the expansion material from EdOWar's Blog and maybe some extra stuff from the d20PFSRD site as well), currently got an idea floating around for a Science Fantasy Post-Apocalyptic campaign where Classes represent types of semi-magical Power Armor used by players to fight horrors in the broken fragments of a world trying to survive

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 06:44

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

paradoxGentleman posted:

So, I just watched Jurassic World.

The question now isn't wheter I am going to put a Mosasaurus in my campaign the next chance I get, but wheter I am going to call it a whale dragon or a dragon whale.

I feel like the latter is more appropriate since the focus should be on the whale part, since it's a sea monster.

call it a Leviathan or a Sea Dragon(or to mess with your players have some sailors mention Sea Orcs, and while they think it's just some fishy Orcs, it's actually those things, since Orc used to be a term for sea monsters before Tolkien used it as a more dignified term for what were previously Goblins in his stories)

drrockso20 fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Jun 24, 2015

# ¿ Jun 24, 2015 22:18

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

personally I'm excited for Blue Rose as it's one of my favorite original settings to have emerged out of the D20 boom along with Dragonmech, Dinosaur Planet: Broncosaurus Rex, and X-Crawl(this last one more relating to the basic idea behind it than the actual execution, as that was kinda weak from what I recall)

# ¿ Jun 27, 2015 08:49

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Queen Fiona posted:

The later games end up moving away from the darkspawn plot and into actually interesting territory overall, capitalizing on smaller hints from the DA plot. I mean, your mileage may vary on that (and the quality of the follow-ups in question), and it's still all Fantasy Europe poo poo, but they've certainly tried to mix things up a bit over time.

I don't think Dragon Age Origins was ever intended to be particularly original, mind. (gently caress, Thedas was a placeholder name in the forums, for The Dragon Age Setting, that inexplicably stuck.) It still ends up being a rather well-done execution overall, and the game is notable for including one of the few instances of capital-d Dwarves as a thing I actually enjoy in some manner, Oghren aside. It's not necessarily the most original thing, but it did what it did well enough and it feels a bit like hating the fish for swimming, y'know?

I read the F&F of X-Crawl way back when. It's...weird. It's got some pretty good concepts to it, but it sabotages itself in very White Wolf-y ways, and being a d20 system manages to ruin all the mechanics it has that might be interesting through, well, using d20 resolution systems. It's another textbook case of not examining whether your concepts fit your mechanics. (Reminds me a bit of someone trying to make a DXHR-like social combat system - in and of itself a really awesome concept someone should do - who was really insistent it had to be Pathfinder for some reason. Unsurprisingly, this comes up with d20-based systems a lot! _{she says, shamefully hiding her copy of d20 Modern under the bed})

My knowledge of Blue Rose is essentially zero, so I'm not really getting the deer references myself. Doesn't really seem like my thing, though.

personally if I were going to run X-Crawl I'd probably run it with Dungeon Crawl Classics(especially as there's a lot of supplementary material to help expand it to fit), and go with a setting that keeps the basic premise(Dungeon Crawling as a Reality Show/Competitive Sport) but go in a different direction

# ¿ Jun 27, 2015 09:30

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Sion posted:

Hi I want to run dnd 3.5 but I don't want to run dnd 3.5 what is a good fantasy system these days

well if you want something derived from 3.5's rules, then I'd recommend Fantasycraft as it's a very solid system(indeed I'd say it's the best fantasy oriented D20 variant around)

# ¿ Jun 28, 2015 02:23

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Fantasy Craft is there for those that want 3e with much better design. 13th Age is more of a blending of 3e and 4e with indie sensibilities.

Both have their place depending on your tastes.

yeah the only real weaknesses I'd say Fantasy Craft has is; 1) it's organization is kinda bad(not the worst I've ever seen, but can be annoying and confusing with a book as huge as it is), 2) has an incredibly lacking monster section(at least in terms of premade stuff, although they give you a lot of info about making monsters and NPCs, and there's a widget online for making creatures and NPCs), and 3) ironically enough for a 3rd edition derivative it has a somewhat lacking selection of spells and other magic stuff going by just the core rules(there's a supplement that's going to expand magic stuff, but it's been in development hell for at least 3 years by this point due to Crafty Games making some really boneheaded decisions regarding taking up a license for a book series and doing an RPG for it[and making a whole new system for it instead of just making a setting book for Fantasy Craft which would have saved them a ton of time and effort], with that causing the Spellbound supplement to be unfinished for ages, and we'll be lucky if it comes out this year or even next year at this rate)

overall it's one of my favorite systems, only reason I've never run it is due to it being the sort of thing a more experienced DM would run, and I've never successfully managed to run a game in any system(between 2008 and 2013 I tried setting up a game almost 20 times under at least 5-6 different systems, and none of them made it past character creation, gave up trying in late 2013 after I moved to a different county from my primary group of friends, and despite having lived in my current location for almost two years now, haven't made any friends here, let alone anyone I'd play an RPG with)

Lightning Lord posted:

There are also Radiance and Heroes Against Darkness which I have not played, but are supposed to be blends of 3.5 and 4e as well.

both of those appear to be pretty drat dead in the water in terms of support(Radiance's publisher barely exists and seems to only really support Pathfinder these days, while HAD's creator seems to be focusing exclusively on his RPG meant for kids), kinda feel that invalidates them as good choices(doesn't help that neither of them really have much if anything in the way of fan support either)

# ¿ Jun 28, 2015 10:41

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

gradenko_2000 posted:

There's also Legend RPG and the Trailblazer supplement for 3.5

if I recall properly Legend has almost no monsters statted for it, and never included a monster creation system or released a monster manual style supplement either so it's also kinda useless(especially as it isn't compatible with any other RPG), and I've heard Trailblazer has some major issues(can't remember what exactly) and isn't really a proper RPG it's merely a very ambitious supplement

Lightning Lord posted:

Just bringing up their existence. Maybe someone will dig them. Not to mention that they're both complete games, you don't really need a whole game line to just play something. Plus, they're free, so what risk is there?

complete but incredibly limited in what you can do with them after a point, since I'm fairly sure neither of them include monster creation rules(although I'll admit it's been ages since I read HAD or Radiance), without those included any D&D style system that's not a Retroclone(as monsters are dead simple to create for those, not to mention a huge backlog of compatible sourcebooks for that sort of thing) is fatally flawed in my opinion

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I think the monster and spell selection is fine, given that it has a whole monster design system for GMs to use, and honestly I'm happy with the spell selection not being too robust. It's only a system that two classes really require (sages and prestige classes aside), so not having it take up a third of the book like certain other 3.5 derivatives is a decision I'm quite happy with.

oh I agree that FC not being Magic dominated like most other D&D derivatives is nice(indeed from what I've read Pure Casters in FC are actually a rather sub-optimal choice at the moment, although Spellbound is supposed to help with that), but it does kinda limit things for those who like that sort of thing and want to run and/or play in Fantasy Craft

# ¿ Jun 28, 2015 11:05

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 04:54

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Lightning Lord posted:

HAD at least has monster creation rules, there's a chapter called Building a Monster.

well that's good to know(as I said it's been years since I last read HAD), can anyone confirm that for Radiance?(cause if Radiance has Monster Creation rules than I might have to look into that system again, HAD has definitely made it onto the list as well)

# ¿ Jun 28, 2015 11:15

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