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

Sionak: Dec 20, 2005; Mind flay the gap.

LuiCypher posted:

I thought about removing the image link, but then realized that this post would not have cat in it.

Anyhows, try Delta Green! It's Cthulhu-y enough, but based in the 90s/2000s, so I think it is very easy to relate to. Plus, who doesn't love government conspiracies?

_{The government, most likely.}

The new version's rules for characters were previewed at a GenCon panel and they're pretty slick, too. Definitely designed with an eye towards speed of play. I imagine the handout will be posted online fairly soon.

# ¿ Aug 4, 2015 14:27

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 17:13

Sionak: Dec 20, 2005; Mind flay the gap.

gnome7 posted:

Yes, they are, but DW wasn't designed as a story game, it was designed to be OSR. It just happened to get very popular with the story gaming crowd.

I think my biggest dislike of DW as someone who wrote for it for over a year is how Hit Points and rolling random damage work together. Sometimes basic enemies can take ages because nobody rolls higher than a 2 on damage, even if they roll 10+ on everything else so the enemy poses no threat. And sometimes a boss monster will go down in one hit because someone rolled max damage on their first attack. It's really swingy and there's no real control there. The game isn't gritty enough for a hit point mechanic to be worthwhile, and hit points are very low in general so how good that d8 hits the table can make a huge difference on how long a fight goes on for.

This is totally accurate. Towards the end of my Dungeon World game I moved towards using average damage for monsters the way that 13th Age does. It cut down on time and let players plan out a little more (this one is almost dead but doesn't hit very hard, should we take it out or focus on the new one who hits like a truck?).

When you work out the health numbers and party of four characters, most monsters shouldn't last more than 2-3 rounds unless there are a whole lot of Defy Danger rolls going on or people are rolling really poorly. Most fights also start to drag after that.

Regardless, the game is pretty swingy.

fool_of_sound posted:

That isn't a DungeonWorld thing specifically, it's common across most of the *world games, and while I agree that it's a decent system for games where every test has story importance, like most of the *world games I've encountered do, it falls apart when you're rolling half a dozen times for every player every combat. You can't have meaningful consequences when each player is rolling 3 partial successes and a failure every combat, times two or three combats a session.

This is actually pretty accurate, though. As a GM for Dungeon World, you end up either repeating yourself a lot or pulling your punches sometimes. It's one more thing to keep track of in addition to the usual organization and description that go with every fight. And it's made worse by the fact that the book really isn't great about telling you what a failure looks like for a lot of the Basic Moves. Apocalypse World is much better about describing what that 6- result is going to look like in play.

Sometimes you can bank the failure for future badness, but it's easy to forget about it - especially with so many rolls in most combat sequences.

I would sometimes do work-arounds by trying to come up with interesting failure/partial success options during my game prep, but it's one of the places that DW is weaker.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2015 06:10

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