TG September Chat Thread: Back To School Thread

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Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Best gaming experiences this year have been an Apocalypse World campaign of which I posted frequently in the AW thread, featuring my three players deciding that their group was going to be a post-apocalyptic motorized mongol horde and the game coming to an explosive finish with the Savvyhead riding the psychic highway and finding out what lie at the end of it while the khanate completely disintegrated.

Currently I'm looking forward to running Burning Wheel set in the Kingdom of Jerusalem after the First Crusade.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 17:15

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 21:10

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Covok posted:

Strangely, I can see this turning out sour. Depends on how certain subject matters are dealt with and the sensibilities of everyone. Then again, it might just be that I'm one of those "friends who want to stay friends never discuss religion or politics" kind of people.

Regardless, I, of course, hope it turns out awesome.

I don't really see that happening in my group's case: the group of friends I game with are what you might describe as casually irreligious. Nobody has particularly strong feelings about religion one way or another (beyond "Dude, whatever you believe or don't believe in, don't be a dick about it") so I think it's safe to assume that the game won't ruffle anyone's feathers. The time period is of interest to us simply because it's so filled with potential drama and conflict, and also because it provides a really good backdrop for the sort of play that Burning Wheel is about, i.e. fighting for what you believe in.

Also, the way I'm framing this campaign is not in terms of "Christians vs. Muslims." I assume that most of the players will end up making Christian characters, although the setting does allow for Muslim and Jewish characters, but the game will mostly focus on the internal conflicts within the Kingdom. Actually, thinking about it now, the time between the Second and the Third Crusades might be better for the latter, simply because it was characterized by internal conflict within the Kingdom.

We're not sure about the extent to which we're going to strip out the supernatural elements of the game: I know that Sorcery is going to be right out, but given the setting I can sort of see Faith being a thing.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 18:20

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Countblanc posted:

If you decide to do the Roll20 thing, lemme give you some advice that should make things go a lot snappier in combat (and snappier combat keeps people engaged and the general mood optimistic); Have your players make macros. This is useful for a few reasons.

1) You simply push a button on your bar and it automatically rolls your ability for you, which is a nice little timesaver [CountTip: click the little "In-bar" box next to your macros in the Settings menu to do this]
2a) It will presumably be a new system for many/all of you, and having a macro which barfs out the entire text box, effect and all, lets people immediately know what your power does without you having to explain it or cross-referencing the book.
2b) This gets people learning the system quicker since you're associating names with powers every time you hit your macro or see someone else's. This helped me internalize the game immensely.

This probably sounds like a huge chore though, especially if you've done things like Veggiesama 4e macros in Maptools. Fortunately you couldn't be further from the truth. To make a macro that looks as clean and useful as this:

All you have to do is c/p this into the macro box (which again is found in-game at the top of the the "My Settings" tab):

And it's easy to customize. Say you instead wanted to make an at-will that does 2 damage and grants the next ally to attack the target Advantage (like the Warlord's "Knock Him Off Balance" for instance). You'd simply change the "name=Cant of Inexplicable Lust" to Knock Him Off Balance, the "damage=3" to 2, and the "effect=[...]" to the Advantage-granting thing. If you just paste the above macro and tweak it as needed it takes like 3-4 minutes to make a full macro suite for a max level character. You can add as much as you want too, here's an example macro from the Psion class I've been designing/testing:

Which has this as the macro text:

Quite a bit more complicated, but still easy to understand.

If you go for this I highly, highly recommend you do the same for your monsters as a GM. In 4e this was a huge pain and notable time commitment, but since enemies in Strike have few abilities and macros are so easy it shouldn't be that big of an issue.

e: It's also useful for non-rolled abilities like your Role powers, hitting a thing that just outputs "Mark: Mark one enemy until the end of its next turn" is super easy and seeing that on your bar is a good reminder that you can do it.

I've actually been thinking of running Strike! on Roll20 in between everything else, and this post is really helpful. Thanks!

# ¿ Sep 1, 2015 19:34

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Speaking of PbP games, my next idea after one of my current PbP's is over is to run a Burning Wheel scenario where the characters are all orcs (because Burning Wheel orcs are cool) and I'm having one problem with translating the mechanics to PbP:

In Duel of Wits and Fight! the players are supposed to plan their turn ahead by three actions and each action is revealed and resolved at the same time. For PC vs PC duels it's simple because I can use emails and/or PMs (which would mean getting Plat) to have each player send me their actions three at a time and then resolving them, but what's the most elegant way for me, as a GM, to show my players that I've actually planned the actions for my NPCs beforehand instead of pulling them out of my rear end?

The simplest solution would be to not do DoW or Fight! but that feels like missing out on some of the best parts of the game.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2015 09:19

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Helical Nightmares posted:

If I recall correctly the only LotfP supplement that is good (and it's off the charts amazing) is Scenic Dunnsmouth.

Unfortunately their other supplements that I've seen are not written by the same author or as innovative.

I'll write it up eventually.

Scenic Dunnsmouth is really cool and it's author has released another adventure through LotFP where the gimmick is playing a dungeon crawl set some hundreds of years in the past as a group of nobodies and THEN playing the same dungeon again in the current day, with the events of the previous group's foray affecting the composition of the dungeon.

# ¿ Sep 2, 2015 09:34

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

I'm starting to lean towards what Astus suggested: for player vs. player conflicts I can act as the middleman, but for NPC vs. PC conflicts I'll just promise to actually plan my actions and be fair about them before the big reveal. It's still not quite what I'm looking for, because I'm really big on transparency in games, but it'll do for now.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 07:42

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Is there an RPG out there that is about the major political leaders in a single-party totalitarian state vying for power? Basically, something like Paranoia except with the players as the higher-ups instead of the grunts.

I could see it as a Fiasco playbook, but I might want something more meaty.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 19:52

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

Kai Tave posted:

Well there's literally a supplement for Paranoia about playing High Programmers if that's your thing.

Is it any good? Basically, the ideal game I've got in my head is one of comic dystopian intrigue and backstabbing, potentially with each player as the highest ranking member of their respective branch, each with their own powers and privileges. So, the minister of information might be able to expunge the other characters' achievements (or at best their entire existence) from the records, while the minister of security might be able to arrest the other characters on falsified charges, and so on. Basically, each player competing for the grace of Big Brother/The Computer/The Great Leader or whatever.

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 20:01

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

potatocubed posted:

My first thought was Fiasco, but if you want something with more mechanical edge... perhaps Burning Wheel or Burning Empires?

There's also Covenant, the Game of Failing Conspiracies that might work with a little reskinning or hackery?

Burning Wheel with a lot of reskinning would work, although that might be a bit too far on the crunchy side. I might just go with my first impulse and run it in Fiasco, although I will check out Covenant as well!

# ¿ Sep 3, 2015 20:13

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

paradoxGentleman posted:

So I heard that a setting I hear from time to time called Glorantha has apparently the best lore since Middle Earth; I would like to check it out, what would you recommend? For now I've been reading the Prince of Sartar webcomic:
http://www.princeofsartar.com/

There's a video game set in Glorantha called King of Dragon Pass. It's sort of a hybrid strategy/RPG game that has it all: going on hero quests to re-enact mythical stories for blessings from the gods, ducks, cattle raids and trying to keep the myriad deities from screwing your tribe over. It's pretty much abandonware at this point, and it's a pretty good game for getting a good glimpse of the stuff that makes Glorantha cool.

It's also aged surprisingly well: it was released at that time when games were moving towards using 3D graphics for everything but was done entirely in really pretty 2D.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 15:25

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

CaptCommy posted:

Abandonware? The original is on GoG, there's and iOS and Android version with additional content and some reduced complexity (in a good way), which just got a Steam port like a month ago. It's like the exact opposite of abandonware.

Still a super good game and totally worth buying!

I did not know that! Admittedly it was many years ago, but I recall at some point you could get it for free online because the copyright holders had no interest in it any more, but I guess that has now changed! Thanks for the correction.

# ¿ Sep 4, 2015 15:35

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

So, my Burning Wheel campaign set in the Kingdom of Jerusalem has officially moved from the idea stage to the actual planning stage. I've been talking with a friend of mine (a guy who's really into the middle ages as well as theology) about the tone of the campaign, and we both agreed that because we want a semi-historical campaign Sorcery is going to be right out. I was a bit reticent about including Faith at first, but he persuaded me with the argument that even if we don't want overtly supernatural effects in the game, the Faith mechanics are easily refluffed as a sort of "Hey, that guy is really righteous and he's preaching about the religion I like, I'm feeling so +1D right now!" thing. We'll just have to remove the more overtly supernatural effects of Faith, but that's easily done because they're all at the top of the Faith test obstacles.

We also started thinking about languages, which is a whole can of worms given the setting: Old French was the language of the ruling class in Jerusalem, but a lot of the crusader overlords were also fluent in Arabic, Greek and Hebrew in addition to their own language. What I'm thinking is that all characters will automatically be able to speak Old French as well as whatever language make sense given their background, and all other languages will be handled through the Foreign Languages skill. This will inevitably put Frankish characters behind other characters in terms of languages spoken, but that I feel is a small price to pay for the fact that the Franks were basically the upper class of the Kingdom with all the other groups being treated as second-class citizens.

Alternately we'll just ignore the language question altogether and assume everyone is a polyglot just to make things simpler.

# ¿ Sep 11, 2015 07:52

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# ¿ May 9, 2024 21:10

Ratpick: Oct 9, 2012; And no one ate dinner that night.

A few days ago there was some discussion in another thread (can't remember which) about the old trope of women dressing up as men to disguise themselves as knights and soldiers. Last night after my Burning Wheel game I got to talking to one of my players about the game and how Burning Wheel's dwarves kick rear end, and he told me that he'd heard Luke Crane saying that dwarven women are extremely rare to the point where a dwarven PC would be very exceptional. Anyway, long story short, I now want to run a campaign where the pitch is all the PCs being dwarven women who have disguised themselves as men to join the host.

# ¿ Sep 27, 2015 10:25

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