TG August Cat Thread: it was like a sweaty danny devito

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG August Cat Thread: it was like a sweaty danny devito

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

A Red & Pleasant Land Is a quite original setting. It deserves the awards it got. :smugdog:

Edit: A simple google search turned up this comment by ZacS

http://www.therpgsite.com/showthread.php?p=845684

quote:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Paraguybrarian View Post
Any other authors of note walk out? I don't want to accidentally buy their products.
Not really: Adam Jury? People who supported them on Twitter included Fred Hicks, Daniel Solis and all the usual suspects who've been harassing us for the last year and 24 days.

Adam Jury is a Posthuman Studios member. That's all I know.

Looking for conversations from the other side of the coin on who was there/who left.

Why am I getting all these MMA sites?

Edit: Why the hell am I finding nothing else on this topic but that one site?

Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 02:53 on Aug 5, 2015

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 02:27

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 22:55

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Slimnoid posted:

Because no one else really gives as much of a poo poo as a site built on the discarded trash from other forums?

Nah. Evidently most of the complaining and walkout was on twitter.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 03:24

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Kwyndig posted:

Adam Jury is good people from my vague recollections of the few times we hung out in the late 90's, and Posthuman Studios tries very hard to be inclusive while keeping the Zac S and Pundit types out.

Who were the original Eclipse Phase writers. Was Adam Jury one?

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 07:42

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

True of a lot of people really.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 08:06

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

TheLovablePlutonis posted:

I'm watching the Anime Overlord and reading its novel an I have a question: what's the best system to play as a high leveled super Lich with powerful Monster minions?

Exalted: Abyssals?

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 15:45

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Iirc the mortal hunter prestige class was hilariously broken.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 18:14

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Yawgmoth posted:

Most of prestige classes on BoVD are hot garbage, except for soul eater (all your natural attacks do a negative level on hit, and you get a ton of 24 hour boosts after causing a negative level) and disciple of dispater (triples your crit threat range and expressly stacks with the imp crit feat). Ever wanted to crit on a 9? DoD is for you!

eta: BoVD is one of the few D&D books where I actually like the fluff writing better than the mechanics. There's a lot of cool ideas in there, but the mechanics are more often than not just really bad.

Hahaha. I never did the breakdown for how broken the classes were. So good :allears:

Yeah the writing for BoVD had some gems and it feels like it was just reaching for being a fantastic supplement, but it was bogged down with weird unneccesary poo poo like...really long torture rules, the dullest rational for evil halflings I've seen in a while, and D&D standard half assed essays on how to run an (evil) campaign.

But it did have the best PC trap. Some absurdly powerful evil mage with four children chained to his life sucking armor.

# ¿ Aug 5, 2015 20:17

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Simian_Prime posted:

So, change of topic: Been watching The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. lately: Any good Wild West RPG's that aren't Deadlands?

I keep hearing about Aces and Eights. The combat is supposed to be quite lethal.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2015 19:17

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

gradenko_2000 posted:

Are there games that experiment with, or straight-up use, a method of character creation in which you only define your stats/skills/etc in the spur of the moment?

That is, you can possibly start the game with half or more of your "skill points" unallocated and then you're only supposed to invest them when you see that you need to?

Ruin, Ross Payton (clockworkjoe)'s in development architectural horror game, is planned to be like this according to the last RPPR podcast.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2015 19:23

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

bunnielab posted:

I want D&D due to intense nostalgia. The 1ed books I was given as a kid in the 90's were this portal to crazy 70's madness that I just loved. I want a game that could be airbrushed on a dude's van. I want 10' poles and encumbrance tables. But, I also want to try some PBP stuff as I have a weird schedule so I will never get to play in real life, so I want to learn one of the more current systems and I haven't liked any of the more modern rules lite games I have looks into. Like, they look fun, but not the very specific D&D itch.

Try Dungeon Crawl Classics

http://slangdesign.com/rppr/2015/04/podcast-episode/rppr-episode-113-van-art-gaming/

http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2015/04/genre/fantasy/dungeon-crawl-classics-sailors-on-the-starless-sea/

# ¿ Aug 16, 2015 10:41

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Splicer posted:

You can't say something like this and then just leave it there.

homerlaw posted:

Lemme guess, It's like House of Leaves?

For more Ruin talk, check out the Gencon Game Designer Workshop podcast : http://slangdesign.com/rppr/2015/08/game-designer-workshop/game-designer-workshop-live-at-gen-con-2015/#comments

Here is a thread where people have compiled interesting/spooky architectural stuff : http://slangdesign.com/forums/index.php/topic,1870.0.html

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drrockso20 posted:

Bunch of links to homebrew RPG settings

Thanks for taking the time to gather and post these drrockso!

-------

News about the upcoming Delta Green book!

http://theunspeakableoath.com/home/2015/08/unspeakable-episode-21-delta-green-seminar-at-gen-con-2015/

Featuring:
-Less math in rolls!
-Fewer skills and a concomitant shift to using basic stats! For example: Want to take a picture under duress? Might take a Dex x5 roll rather than the Photography skill.
-Your skill level actually matters more than a roll! Have a 50 in Archaeology? You may get further insight into a scene automatically without rolling Spot Hidden!
-Combat is more lethal! Introducing Kill Chances! Grenades and mortars are loving deadly!
-Combat is more dangerous! You can be shaken and lose sanity!
-Gun fondling!
-Greg Stolze! Integrating the Sanity mechanics from Unknown Armies into Cthulhu!
-Bonds as sources of stability! Be like Martin Hart and take out your frustrations on your family to gain a small respite from the horrors of the Mythos! Who is the real monster now!?!

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Ratpick posted:

Hey, I just got the weirdest idea and I'd like to see if this gets any traction. There might be a homebrew in this:

So, John Harper's Lasers & Feelings is pretty much the best rules right Star Trek RPG out there, and the best thing about it is that it converts to almost any genre where you can easily see two poles that are used to define characters, right? So, you could probably use it for, say, the Cthulhu Mythos as Sanity (traditional investigative techniques) & Sorcery (knowledge of how things work under the rules of the Mythos and how to use it).

What if your character's place on this scale wasn't static but it was used more as a sliding scale? What if events in the game could push your character towards the Sorcery end of the scale (as your character experiences the mythos they lose sight of reality and start to lose their mind, which also grants insight into how magic works)? Strangely enough, it produces an effect that emulates the way Call of Cthulhu is traditionally played but also reinforces the narrative of going slowly insane until the only sensible thing to do seems to be to cast that spell you found in one of the old dusty tomes, because as your character slowly loses their mind and moves towards the Sorcery end of the scale traditional investigative techniques become much less reliable and characters need to rely more on supernatural tools.

I don't know anything about the Lasers & Feelings system, but the first thing I thought of when I read your post was Bloodborn and how some of the lore suggests how the Insight works in the world.

The two poles for a Bloodborne character could be Insight (high "madness"/low sanity/ability to do "magic") and Beasthood (low "madness"/low sanity/no "magic").

A normal human (and arguably the "best" place to be) would be on the middle of this continuum; balanced between Insight and Beasthood.

Bloodborne characters start with an Insight of zero. During gameplay Insight can be gained by consuming a Madman's Knowledge/Great One's Wisdom item, encountering a boss (A being associated with the Eldritch Truth), defeating a boss, opening up/discovering a new gameplay area (Eldritch location), discovering the truth about some NPC, being witness to an unnatural event, or killing another hunter associated with the Hunter's Dream (PvP).

As Insight increases, the player begins to observe hidden things (a doll comes to life, invisible creatures become visible), some monsters become more dangerous, and the player begins to have audio and visual hallucinations/visions that are relevant to the plot. This suggests as Insight increases the Bloodborn character is beginning to uncover the Eldritch Truth, go mad, or both.

The gameplay benefit to having Insight is access to a shop where the Bloodborne character can buy weapons, armor and items he has unlocked, by spending Insight as currency. Insight is also spent to call another player into the gameworld for Coop mode.

The downside to Insight is that each point reduces your resistance to Frenzy, and reduces the Beasthood stat.

This indicates that Insight is antithetical to Beasthood.

http://bloodborne.wiki.fextralife.com/Insight

Frenzy in Bloodborne:

quote:

Frenzy is a mechanic of Bloodborne. It fills up like a bleed or poison meter, and it lowers both your damage intake and output.

Frenzy works similarly to bleed in Dark Souls. When the Frenzy meter is filled, a large amount of the player's health is lost instantly. However, unlike the Bleed status, Frenzy will continue building up once you receive it. Because of this, you don't necessarily need to keep getting hit to Frenzy; simply getting hit once or twice can cause it. It will eventually cap and stop building up.

Extremely alien and unnatural creatures in Bloodborne induce Frenzy.

http://bloodborne.wiki.fextralife.com/Frenzy

In a tabletop Lasers and Feelings Bloodborne hack, we could interpret Frenzy as the physical damage a high Insight/madness stat does to the body.

In game, Sedatives can reduce Frenzy at the cost of Insight. The above description also states "Blood serves to calm the frayed nerves" and "Naturally this leads to a reliance on Blood Ministration".

So on the other end of the spectrum, a character with a high Beasthood stat would behave like a beast, being faster and stronger than a character at the middle of the Insight/Beasthood spectrum, and craving blood to the point where they are feral.

The lore and plot suggests that individuals with high Insight have the ability to call/influence/transcend the Great Ones as well as possibly having greater facility with magic.

As far as I know there is no gameplay mechanic where a high Insight increases the amount of Arcane damage a Bloodborne character does; but in a tabletop hack, you could require certain thresholds of Insight for learning spells or simply make the roll to cast a spell additive with a character's Insight score to indicate higher Insight translates to greater facility with magic.

The thing I'm unsure of is how would you incorporate a shop where a character can spend Insight into this tabletop hack? Would you incorporate it at all? What would the justification be?

In terms of Beasthood, the gameplay mechanic is described as follows:

quote:

Beasthood is a stat in Bloodborne that determines your maximum damage multiplier while using the Beast Claw or after using a Beast Blood Pellet. A higher value in this stat determines how high you can push your attack damage while these effects are active, but also reduces your defense by an equal amount.

Details
Beasthood has inverse scaling with how much Insight is currently held by the character. The higher your insight the lower your Beasthood will be, and less Insight gives more Beasthood.
Equipping one or more Beast Runes will increase the Beasthood stat.
Attire will also increase Beasthood, the Ashen Hunter Set have the highest stat increase.

Equipping the Beast Claw and pressing L1 to transform it will give your character giant werewolf claws and activates the Beasthood state, indicated by a light brown smoke effect coming off your character. This effect lasts until the weapon is transformed back or switched out. Every attack made while the weapon is transformed will fill your Beasthood gauge by a little bit, which increases the damage you deal with each attack but also increases the damage you take by an equal amount. R2 attacks and L2 attacks will fill the meter faster than R1 attacks.

Using a Beast Blood Pellet will allow you to temporarily access the Beasthood meter with any weapon instead of just the Beast Claw. Note that most weapons have a hard time filling the Beasthood gauge because they cannot attack fast enough with R1s to keep it from emptying, forcing them to rely on R2 attacks instead.

Filling the meter does not have any effect aside from giving a limit on how high your damage increase can go.

http://bloodborne.wiki.fextralife.com/Beasthood

So perhaps the benefit of a high Beasthood stat would be transforming into a werewolf(beast), berserker rage, increased damage, feral senses (increased observation) to stalk prey or the like.

Increasing Beasthood/reducing Insight in the tabletop hack could be governed by overindulgence in blood, imbibing a potent beast's blood, or relentless killing perhaps.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2015 23:41

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

gradenko_2000 posted:

I'm pretty excited for Red Markets just by listening to it being talked about in RPPR. Lot of great ideas there.

The bits of Red Markets podcasts I have had the privilege of listening to as part of the Beta are just goddamn wonderful. I had to turn the podcast off when I realized it was 1 in the morning and I was laughing way to loud.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2015 23:58

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

And they wonder why anime fans are socially shunned.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=UUcGZ2u4Q1c

# ¿ Aug 17, 2015 21:49

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Ewen Cluney posted:

Even I don't know how to feel about the fact that Maid RPG got a huge boost in sales from that.

Retail Magic was the game that started as "let's do something non-pervy with the Maid RPG rules." Schoolgirl RPG started as an attempt to make the simplest Maid RPG variant possible, though I did make a point to keep it PG.

I thought Retail Magic was your take on a tabletop Recettear. Or was that something else?

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 01:43

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Splicer posted:

Nah that's pretty cool, as long as a crit success and a crit fail have different, independent effects. "You nuked that guy superhard but also blew out your coolant tank" is a good game thing. I have no idea what the crit successes and fails did in that game though, but based on the rest of the game I assume they involve rape in some manner.

Hastur's faction that took over Europe and Asia was literally called "The Rapine Storm".

The other salient problem with CthulhuTech was that the adventure(s) written allowed no player agency at all. At least that is what I got from the F and F review. Here is a bunch of horrible and sick stuff you have to witness and you can do nothing about it. It was less of an adventure and more of a poorly written sick hentai fanfic.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 02:39

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

clockworkjoe posted:

Awesome! Random fun fact - on the Base Raiders website, I posted about super soldier drugs once during the Kickstarter. To this day, random people find the website, think I'm describing real drugs and volunteer to 'test them out' http://www.baseraiders.com/2012/11/04/compound-b13-and-other-super-soldier-drugs/

Unsure if trolling.

Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 03:58 on Aug 18, 2015

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 03:50

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

clockworkjoe posted:

I can't tell either but I love every single comment there. It reminds me of the time when I learned that Delta Green has been worked into conspiracy theories

You can't just say this without a link.

Adam Scott Glancy and the rest of the Pagan team must be so proud :allears:

# ¿ Aug 18, 2015 08:24

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Ewen Cluney posted:

I had the idea to do a silly thing about the staff at a magic item shop years before Recettear existed (I ran it a couple times using Risus), and I revived the idea when I decided to try to do something non-pervy with the Maid RPG rules. I ended up playing Recettear and incorporating some ideas from it after I started on Retail Magic, and I still need to figure out how I'm going to implement the "Commerce Rules" that'll let you do a retail shop simulation in addition to the silliness.

I certainly think there is a market for editing or refining ideas from other games. Sine Nomine did a great job reimagining Traveller in Stars Without Number and using that as a launch pad for exploring other genres. Ettin's Nyarlanthotech (sp?) was a hack of Cthulhutech with the aim to remove all the stupidity and I think that had merit. So as much as I detest anime and the fanbase of drooling amorphous manchildren, cleaning up the Maid RPG rules into something that doesn't involve rolling for lolita is also useful.

I haven't seen a full magic shop simulator table top game, and I think the idea is very cool and has a lot of potential. Whether you design a full simulator of a fantasy economy or reduce supply and demand scarcity to a series of tables (or both!) I'm interested to see what you come up with.

On the subject of modeling business, Caleb Stokes' Red Markets will have some very interesting negotiation mechanics. At this moment in the Red Market's beta they are one of the most gritty and bleak systems I've ever come across but I'm certain they could be adapted to any number of different genres.

In a magic retail shop I could also imagine bidding wars for a rare object or perhaps stock at a wholesale marketplace. This brings to mind the Auction rules in Kenneth Hite's Bookhounds of London.

And if you design a full system for a retail magic shop economy and rules for interacting with gear hunting adventurers why stop there?

How about running a shop on a space station?

Or applying the rules to a goodfella who is trying turn a profit running a Speakeasy in the 1930's and has to make border runs to Canada to keep his stock full?

# ¿ Aug 19, 2015 03:09

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

I keep hearing the same. Won an Indy award on the previous page too.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2015 03:19

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

My Lovely Horse posted:

Don't remember which of the two it was, but my group totally did one of those, and it was everything you imagine and more.

Details? Commentary?

# ¿ Aug 25, 2015 10:12

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

01011001 posted:

It's a bit misleading, as those projects might start communally, but in most cases you can bet that if one of them got finished it was less a function of the community and more a function of the 1-5 people who gave enough of a drat about whatever silly poo poo everyone thought up to actually stick with it.

Pretty much what happened with Chapter Master and Engine Heart (though the latter was directed by one man, Viral, from the beginning iirc)

# ¿ Aug 27, 2015 03:27

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Swagger Dagger posted:

I like how a lot of stuff has really extravagant names and then there's Snow Wizards. Just Snow Wizards.

Take "Snow Wizards" as code for Wizards of Cocaine and roll with it :black101:

# ¿ Aug 28, 2015 21:25

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

I think it's mostly just enthusiasm. People are really happy their favorite game setting is getting screen time.

# ¿ Aug 31, 2015 01:15

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

Kai Tave posted:

This is true and it's happened in face-to-face games I've played in too, the idea that everybody's gotta be their own unique thing with minimal overlap. Part of it is that a lot of games favor specialists over generalists and if you have folks doubling up then you wind up with "gaps," but then again more games could stand to discuss modifying the sorts of challenges to throw at players if they don't have a rogue or a hacker or whatever and how it's fine if you have two people who want to be The Whatever (though a lot of games also don't give you enough tools to make two nicely differentiated versions of the same schtick/archetype/class/whatever too so there's that I guess).

The Shadowrunner problem (TM)

I do like the elevator pitch idea for characters.

I think the responsibility is really on the GM to say not only what kind of game it is (Dungeon Crawl/ Political/ West Marches/ Whatever) but to really specify what type of party composition they are looking for. This is a D&D game but you are all wizards so someone should have knock/invisibility. Welcome to Cthulhu, have any skills you want but high interaction and perception skills are more important than firearms. Welcome to D&D 4th ed, any composition but no healers. Etc.

Edit: I realized after what I'm saying is that the Gamemaster needs to exercise clear communication and good management. :shrug:

Helical Nightmares fucked around with this message at 08:04 on Aug 31, 2015

# ¿ Aug 31, 2015 08:00

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 22:55

Helical Nightmares: Apr 30, 2009

gradenko_2000 posted:

"It generally means that the players will represent some selection of individuals who are often but not always small-time crooks of some variety, and who will have some selection of desperate motives for important things scattered amongst themselves. The game involves the steady unraveling of the characters' lives by events precipitated by these desperate motives, with usually most of the group exiting the scenario with less (possibly a lot less) than they started, and maybe one actual happyish ending."

"It means everyone is playing a desperate person with poor impulse control making very bad life choices and trying to be the one person who gets what they want by screwing over everyone else."

Holy poo poo yeah that sounds about perfect for four war criminals all trying to steal a Lovecraftian artifact for themselves.

That would be an interesting adventure design. Take the floor plans from the NY Met or something, have the Cthulhu McGuffin in the middle of the museum, sprinkle additional weapons/treasure/eldritch artifacts about, have a detailed guard schedule and places to cut lines to powerlines and set off sprinklers/fire foam, and then set off four players to compete against each other to pull off the heist.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 17:33

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