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Whoa, can Trail of Cthulhu support an action-adventure pulp kinda game? It looked like it was more about investigation and dying horribly rather than busting down the doors and spraying the shoggoth with a Thompson.
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Jul 16, 2015 00:37
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Lightning Lord posted:Yes, this is even called the Pulp Style in the game. Would you say it does it well? I've never used Gumshoe, just curious as to opinions of people who have.
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Jul 16, 2015 00:52
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inklesspen posted:Specifically, I'd like to talk about how game and setting designers can construct things to make it more likely the PCs will need to broker a difficult peace between King Ulfbright and the orc tribes instead of taking a commission from King Ulfbright to slay the orc tribes. A good first start is to strip "Always Chaotic Evil" and such language, but I think there's more to be done than that; most elfgame RPGs have more pagecount devoted to waging war than waging peace. I think that if we had a social interaction system that was as robust as the combat in most RPGs we'd be on the right track. I'm usually a rules-light kinda guy, but I'd love to see a conversation/social "combat" system that was really detailed. More than just "beat this skill check to make them like you" type stuff. Unrelated: Also, ostracism seems like a pretty good punishment for a convicted sex offender. I fail to see why anyone would think sex offenders have any right to be included in our hobbies.
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Jul 16, 2015 03:19
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Plague of Hats posted:I like some of the ideas in nWoD 2's social system, where you have to "open Doors" based on how, uh, I guess willful or disinclined the target is, and it's more or less difficult based on how you come off at the beginning. I think with some more work it would be really great. There's also the Weapons of the Gods/Legends of the Wulin system, though it's definitely not as complex and full of hooks as the combat system. This got me thinking, and there's a game where the entire method of moving the story forward is through turn-based "battles" using words: Last Word. While it's probably way too detailed to model in a tabletop game, I've played it for about 2 hours and once you got the hang of it the conversation system became pretty fun. I imagine something like that. You could have a rock-paper-scissors type setup where certain "moves" are countered by other "moves" and force you into using moves that will be easily countered. Or maybe a few zones that represent the stages of the conversation, where making different moves will push your opponent into other areas, and either you score points each time or the goal is to get them into a certain zone. Like maybe your goal is to piss off your rival and you have to use aggressive moves to push them into the "furious" zone which is your win condition. I'm just spitballing here, and in practice this could end up even more convoluted than the combat system. Though you could just reskin the combat system in most games and use that I guess.
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Jul 16, 2015 03:54
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In my games I've pretty much done away with the idea of "savage" people as consequence-free enemies because that inevitably leads to some pretty gross parallels. No species is meant to be any less than the others, and there are no nations or groups that are species-exclusive. There's no orc tribes or elf-kingdoms, just nations made up of various species. There are plenty of actual monsters you can use as punching bags for your players without endorsing the wholesale slaughter of sapient beings. Fun fact: in the setting I use at home, halflings used to run a continent-spanning empire built on magic and slavery. It collapsed, but the stereotype of the evil halfling wizard has never really gone away.
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Jul 16, 2015 11:42
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inklesspen posted:How and where do you draw the line between monster and sapient beings? INT score? ability to communicate? ability to interact with others without immediately trying to kill/enslave them? I guess INT score isn't a bad measure. Like a griffin or a manticore or whatever is basically just a badass animal, so yeah go wild on them. No one is going to go to bat for a bulette or a displacer beast. I mean I'm not opposed to the players indiscriminately murdering anything that looks at them funny, it's just not going to be rewarded in the fiction for the most part.
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Jul 16, 2015 18:17
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Davin Valkri posted:As for what makes a monster in a D&D setting...aren't there a ton of spells that allow one to talk to plants and animals and extradimensional beasties and stuff? And since all these griffins and the like have to cast spells, don't they get high INT scores to do so? So sapience or INT score or ability to communicate in a language don't seem like they get the desired effect. I think that's a matter of tone and setting. Like, Speak with Plants is gonna be of dubious use if you ask me, because plants aren't exactly gonna be able to tell you much. And Speak with Animals should get you, at best, rudimentary animal communication that should be hard for the humanoid mind to understand. Unless of course everything in your world is sapient and just lacks the ability to communicate with humanoids without magic, then you've either got a sorta goofy setting or a horrible nightmare world where your every meal requires butchering an actual being.
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Jul 16, 2015 19:29
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In my last campaign, the players mostly fought the fae, who were basically stories made real. They materialized from nowhere, were made of this weird undifferentiated matter, faded away after being killed and would return for as long as their story was being told. They can't communicate beyond whatever the legends say, and are only as intelligent as the story says they are. They defy the laws of magic and science, and exist seemingly only to hurt or kill people, and they can't be reasoned with. I just raided history for ideas, so my players ended up fighting Springheeled Jacks, Mad Gassers and Mothmen.
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Jul 16, 2015 19:47
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Gonna give this a cautious yassss
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Jul 21, 2015 18:07
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Evil Mastermind posted:Apparently the mechanics are being updated and streamlined. Thank the lord. The game will now require only one graphing calculator at the table instead of one for each player.
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Jul 21, 2015 20:23
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I try to always make humans more interesting than they're presented in the books because my players basically never pick them. In my last campaign, humans were an alien species that had spent millenia punching holes in the planar superstructure and invading other worlds of humans, conquering and assimilating them. Like locusts, they would absorb all the resources that they before ripping a hole in space-time and leaving a dead world behind them. Eventually their god-king led them to a world without humans, where he gets killed by the native goblins and their army gets wrecked by orcs. So they were these exotic aliens with all kinds of weird customs brought over from a hundred different cultures. Without a central authority holding them together, they've imploded and integrated into the goblinoid nations, where they're still about as weird as the bug-people and the elf robots.
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Jul 22, 2015 15:35
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I bought both Numenera and The Strange and they were a serious waste of money. The Cypher system is hot garbage, even with a few interesting ideas. Reading The Strange made me seriously wonder if I could get back the money I pledged to the Numenera game.
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Jul 22, 2015 20:53
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If nothing else, that art is fantastic.
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Jul 30, 2015 20:53
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Much like alignment, the disconnect mechanic from Torg is pretty stupid and I'd ignore it if I ever (gods forbid) ran the game. It seems like half the appeal of a kitchen-sink setting is, y'know, the actual kitchen sink. They kinda shot themselves in the foot there.
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Jul 30, 2015 21:12
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Sometimes its fun to play the game counter to how it was designed. Like the players in my last game were generally pretty murderhoboish, but sometimes they would choose to talk their way past a fight, often at the oddest times. I'm all for that, so I ran with it whenever they tried it. That's how they ended up being buddies with a demon lord of hell and having a friendly rivalry with a spider-person gunslinger. Both of which I thought they would kill immediately, but my players are weird.
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Jul 31, 2015 14:37
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I do love that passage. Too often we just gloss over the combat chapter without thinking about what the rules really represent. More than that, it just works with the tone and themes of Unknown Armies, so while it may be a little much for a D&D-style game, it totally jives with the rest of UA. E: Although to be fair, even in most D&D games you could probably do with at least a passing mention of the implications of killing sapient beings. For monsters it doesn't really matter, but killing people deserves at least a little thought. I'd say include suggestions on how to avoid conflict, since murdering seems to be ingrained into so many players' minds as a first and only means of problem-solving. Serf fucked around with this message at 15:06 on Jul 31, 2015 |
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Jul 31, 2015 14:59
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I mean there's nothing necessarily wrong with liking violence in your tabletop games. I think the point here is that it is often presented as the first viable option of conflict-resolution and that trains players to see any obstacle as a target for violence. It's totally fine to have that as an option, and in many games there are other ways to navigate conflict, but overall the focus on combat and violence tends to get players thinking one way about things. And in UA it makes sense because it takes place in (sorta) the real world, and placing a heavy emphasis on the awfulness of fighting and killing is pretty important in that context.
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Jul 31, 2015 15:56
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