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My GenCon Blurry Recollections:
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Aug 4, 2015 20:45
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 10:40 |
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I'm sorry the evil body pillow salesmen ruined your event. You aren't, and they didn't.
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Aug 4, 2015 20:49
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Bucnasti posted:Which hotel? So I can plan accordingly next year. It was the Hilton Indianapolis Hotel & Suites on 120 West Market. I think you could get wireless, but it was $25-30 a day? Their information on it was confusing and unclear, and the website kept redirecting me to pages I couldn't access because I hadn't paid for wireless when I tried to find out more. I think you could get access in the lobby, at least? At the end of each exhausting day the last thing I wanted to do was lug my heavy laptop all the way back down to the lobby, tho. On the other hand, it was a 8 minute walk to the convention center, which was generally a good thing. (One of the subtle benefits of driving in is being able to more easily dump purchases or other extra weight back at the car, tho.)
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Aug 4, 2015 22:07
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He won some awards and a contingent of people including Cam Banks walked out, about "three rows" of people. Fred Hicks supported it on twitter but I don't know if he was there. The funny thing that Zak S himself and others have pointed out that the number of copies of Red and Pleasant Land sold is fairly small and doesn't match up to the ENWorld userbase at all (like 2-3k copies sold and 20k votes cast), which means the ballot box was stuffed in some sense by people who never read it (or who just pirated it, a possibility I haven't seen commented on elsewhere). In theory, it shouldn't be possible for it to win, but it did. Something weird went on but it's not particularly clear what.BlackIronHeart posted:I'm jealous you got to meet Stolze. I brought a copy of A Dirty World since I signed up for a Delta Green game run by him but I guess it was cancelled or something? He never showed up. I rounded the Arc Dream booth like eight-twelve times over the course of the con before I met him on the final day. I had playtested for him in the distant past and really wanted to meet him in person, so it was great to have that finally happen.
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Aug 4, 2015 22:49
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Surprised nobody brought up the Ur-Priest, what with 9th level spells at 14th class level, without even getting into the game-breaking builds it would enable later on. But Monte Cook is bad at rules. He has clever ideas, but the rules are bad.
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Aug 5, 2015 21:34
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Ultimately I'd say say the question is not "what high fantasy game does sailing well" but "what's your favorite high fantasy game?" It should be pretty simple to add in boats from there. I've been wanting to run a romantic Golden Age of Pirates someday using Hillfolk. It didn't work out, but I really like the idea.
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Aug 12, 2015 06:54
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fool_of_sound posted:I dunno. I'm not sure I've ever seen a system that I though did ship mechanics well. That depends on what you need out of ship mechanics, I suppose. I'm not sure any game has really done vehicle rules or vehicle combat well without just abstracting it out. I would just focus on what you can do at the character level. Like, one of the most indepth minigames for that thing, strangely, is probably Exalted 3e, but having cool boat powers probably isn't worth interacting with the rest of that system over. 7th Sea has a modestly interesting setting but it's hilarious how badly it implemented piracy and naval action. The fact that it takes place on a single continent and that boat rules were an afterthought are the tip of the bad implementation iceberg.
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Aug 12, 2015 07:15
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gradenko_2000 posted:Can someone dumb down GURPS' magic system for me and tell me if it has problems similar to D&D Wizards' universalism? I actually really dig GURPS Magic, especially given when it came out. And no, it generally doesn't, presuming you're playing on a 100 or 150 point character base. The thing is, to cast "combat magic" or powerful save-or-suck spells without nasty casting times, you usually have to hyperspecialize to do so by quite a bit. And fatigue plays a big part too. A lot of it depends on how much access a given mage has to powerstones to shore up their fatigue costs, but there's nothing like D&D wizards that can cast dozens of spells before needing a nap. It's actually a pretty solid system for those looking for more of a "low magic" system, though it gets a lot of flack from people who want D&D-style wizardry. A 250+ point wizard will start resembling a high-level D&D wizard in terms of flexibility, but fatigue costs ultimately put a ceiling on the range, scope, and size of their effects. If you want to cast a wish in GURPS, it's going to take a lot of work and effort beyond getting a valuable gem. Though I'm sure there are abuseable spell loopholes I've forgotten thanks to not looking at it in a long time, overall it's a very thought-out system considering when it first came out.
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Aug 13, 2015 05:36
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I don't know about 4th. 3rd had some improvised magic systems, but they're mostly just an alternate way to interface with the existing magic system; basically the GM just determines effect cost and casting time of effects by comparing them to the existing spell list and eyeballing it. They also lean towards being ritualistic and not really applicable to combat due to having longer casting times. It's pretty groundbreaking for when it came out but tends to have some punishing costs in exchange for that flexibility.
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Aug 13, 2015 06:01
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Well, they also do very little promotion of non-Munchkin properties. Despite just having a successful Kickstarter, Car Wars Classic had zero SJ Games promotion at Gen Con. Despite them putting out new scenarios for Ogre, it also had no events. Munchkin had 24 events. I understand Munchkin will kick the crap out of them monetarily in any circumstance, but there's a point where it feels like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Aug 13, 2015 12:22
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The reprinted Arena Books set, though they also reprinted Car Wars Classic a year ago as well. TBF, they were promoting the Car Wars Card Game, but the card game isn't very good.
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Aug 13, 2015 13:05
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I seem to recall one of the Pelgrane guys (90% Hite certainty) doing a version of 13th Age where the Mythos gods are icons for a personal campaign. IIRC, he includes negative results for icons on a 1 with that version, too, or at least made the costs on a 5 considerably sharper.
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Aug 13, 2015 16:51
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If you're going to GM a game on here, you have to be willing to be rude and prod or kick folks as necessary. Most GMs, frankly, just let games stall out when players flake and don't do anything about it, and the game dies as a result. There are a number of reasons games die, but that's the #1 I see over and over. Fear of even the mildest confrontation is a nerd perennial, but people need to either admit when they don't have the time or enthusiasm for a game, and GMs need to recognize the signs and act when they don't.
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Aug 16, 2015 05:04
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Evil Mastermind posted:It's also the fact that, in a lot of games now, you have an Ability Score that gives you an Ability Modifier, but then you never use the original Score anywhere. But you still have the 3-18 stats because D&D, that's why. Yeah. I mean, it'd make sense in games like GURPS where it's "roll under stat" but I have no idea why games like 13th Age use 3-18 other than to give that D&D feels. Generally, though, I think most modern games only need to take one measure of PC competence anyway, whether it's skills or attributes or approaches. I'm not sure most games really benefit from combining two numbers, particularly if those combinations aren't variable. It makes some sense to at least give some unpredictability to make players roll Charisma + Lore at some point, but if you're always rolling Lore with Intelligence, what's the point?
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Aug 22, 2015 23:45
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Let's not forget: I have no fondness for most of Blizzard's output, but it can't be understated how badly WotC squandered the licenses with boring and misconceived products.
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Aug 24, 2015 23:31
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Gravy Train Robber posted:But I am really morbidly curious to pick up those D2 books. I have no idea how they could have possibly translated the game into 3E. Looking into it more, there was a whole line in 2nd Edition as well The cheap answer is: they didn't. The longer answer is: very, very badly. Take, for example, the Amazon, a fighting class that has to use full-round actions to activate most of her powers, or the Paladin's prayer ability that takes a full-round action and heals 2, yes, 2 points of damage to himself and allies up to 5, yes, 5 feet away. It does make attempts to try and dumb things down all over the place, so it's almost like 4e where almost all class options and spells relate to combat, only it's full of trap options and those bad early ideas about balance (where "use clubs at +1" and "get free potions by searching corpses" are somehow equivalent). Also, weapon breakage, because that's the most important thing to emulate from Diablo.  It's not as awful as Starcraft but it has the handwavey loosey-goosey design you see in most early 3e products. (And yes, 3.5 had it too, but to a far lesser extent.)
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Aug 25, 2015 02:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:To be fair the actual Prayer Aura in the video game was not that much better I suppose filling a game with awful trap options is pretty true to Diablo II, upon reflection.
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Aug 25, 2015 13:06
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I actually demoed that for GOO at a con... I can't remember what con, maybe GenCon? There's something slightly surreal and great about running a demo for adolescent girls in the sea of neckbeards, particularly at the time. Who knows if they ever played the game again, but it was certainly a different experience as a GM.
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Aug 27, 2015 04:41
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Yeah, I made a non-binding New Year's Resolution to try Monsterhearts, but I have a harder time because of all the swerves and also just because the recruitments are really competitive, I think moreso than any other game I've seen on here.
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Aug 30, 2015 22:57
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I tend to write big apps, mainly because when I'm inspired on a character I can just write and write and write, but I always feel guilty about that. Partially because it might turn out to be a waste of my time (of which I spend too much on that sort of thing already), and partially because I prefer pithy stuff that sums up my concept. It's weird, though. Sometimes apps I force out get a lot of enthusiasm and sometimes stuff I think is spun gold doesn't make it. It's hard to predict what a GM will like, but I'm getting some tricks down in that regard. I get into games more often than not, though, probably because I work too hard on them... given the lifespan of most games, as mentioned. I've actually gotten passed up for games due to getting into a lot of games and having that get noticed. So it can be double-edged. As for enthusiasm vs. trying to game the system, is there a difference, really...? Grassy Gnoll tried a thing a little while back where people just did elevator pitches rather than full character sheets and backgrounds, and I'd really like to see that picked up again by more games, especially those with involved character creation processes. There are a lot of games where just working out the sheet or learning the system can be a real chore and I'd rather not have that hard work go to waste.
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Aug 31, 2015 04:22
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Kai Tave posted:As someone who's apped to Shadowrun and higher XP 40K games this is true, that said it's also helpful to know in advance whether your elevator pitch actually meshes with what the system allows you to make or if it's going to be a case of "well I have a great concept but now I have to tie it into a pretzel to actually make it work in practice or go back and change some stuff." There are similar issues with stuff like *World games where if two people app the same playbook, only one is going to get in, and having it just be a quick pitch would soften the blow for that kind of dilemma. There's kind of a "honor among appers" where two people rarely do face off for a playbook or class anyway, so it's not a huge issue, but- well, complaining about that is a whole other can of worms to open up.
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Aug 31, 2015 05:24
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 10:40 |
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Captain Foo posted:I run a dece amount of AW here and if you app a character that has more than two short paragraphs of background you're almost definitely not getting in I think the true spirit of AW could very well be to ban background writing at all. Just have players do a one-line high concept and a playbook, maybe an art piece, and gently caress all else, answer any backstory as you play and call it a day.
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Sep 1, 2015 04:11
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