Fellowship - Feminist Mushroom Orcs - The Something Awful Forums

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spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Androc posted:

See, my first thought for the spirit was 'sweet, I've always wanted to play a rogue AI.'

Something to tempt me away from overlord, wow.

# ¿ Sep 12, 2015 21:27

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 06:59

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

THE LESBIATHAN posted:

Any idea when the Giant's playbook is getting its last move? I'm playing one and I'm saving an advance just in case its amazing.

Do we have the bonus books somewhere? I couldn't see them in the last playbook update, so I assume they're in a seperate folder?

# ¿ Mar 11, 2016 15:36

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

When it says "direct action" against a threat to the world, what does that mean? I had assumed it meant "to attack, stall, persuade, etc face-to-face, or at least via direct means such as live over a communication system", but it mentions a "thinky - planny" general will force people to pay prices every time they act against their plans; does this mean, for example, if the overlord has set the army to attack a city, the PCs have to pay a price every time they try and stop the army, too? Or even just once to start the attempt? I'm not sure what the limits are on "direct actions" with the advice on p 189.

# ¿ Mar 14, 2016 12:48

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

gnome7 posted:

What that is is old advice that I think I need to rewrite. Your initial assumption is correct - it's when you act against the Threat to the World personally.

EDIT: Yeah basically this entire page is redundant now that the Generals move better describes how to make one already. I'll keep this section in but it needs a hard re-write.

Aah, right.

Also, the general's minions are just permission to have whatever goons they need, right? Not an entire second army?

# ¿ Mar 14, 2016 17:09

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

I had another thought: If the general or overlord is present as a direct commander of forces, does it count as acting against them to interfere with their will? For example, a general saying "Guards, seize them!", when you don't want them to be seized?

# ¿ Mar 15, 2016 21:14

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

gnome7 posted:

No. In the old version of the rules, the answer would've been yes, but with the new version of Threat to the World you only pay a price when actively dealing with the Threat to the World itself. In your example, the players are only dealing with minions, not the General themselves, even if they are acting on the General's orders. So even though they might be trying to Get Away from them, they're trying to escape the General's minions at that time, so they will not pay a price.

If the General tries to go in an seize the players themselves, rather than rely on their incompetent guards, then the fellowship would need to pay a price to try to Get Away or any other move they make, because now they're opposing a Threat to the World. The TttW needs to be personally involved to trigger the payment.

So "help me get them" would work (I'm picturing the guards moving to cut off the exits while the general goes to grab them)?

EDIT: Tsundere should be a bonus to helping people in a scene where you break a bond with them and a penalty in a scene where you've made a bond with them. Or make the move "Just passing through", perhaps.

spectralent fucked around with this message at 22:32 on Mar 15, 2016

# ¿ Mar 15, 2016 22:30

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Alright, cheers. I'm just getting the image of the new version in my head.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2016 22:42

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

How're the voted-on playbooks progressing? Not to rush or anything, just out of curiosity.

# ¿ Mar 21, 2016 23:13

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

gnome7 posted:

I haven't done much of anything with them, as I was working pretty heavily on just getting the main book done, but now that all that's left is waiting on art I've started to pick up working on those. I don't have any ETA on any of them yet, but previews will start coming as I make solid drafts of them happen.

EDIT:
https://twitter.com/Veliministriari/status/712147568705277952

# ¿ Mar 22, 2016 17:06

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

I am way more excited about dragons than I was seeing that "armour and spear" and "manifest willpower" are things you can have as your shtick. Also much more excited having seen how much you managed to do with Giant.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2016 22:23

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

So am I picking up right that dragon both encompasses "literally smaug" and also final fantasy dragoons and D&D sorcerors (with the "children of dragons" background thing going on)?

# ¿ Mar 22, 2016 23:09

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

unseenlibrarian posted:

Oh, hey, that's also handy for what I was going to do with a Demiurge overlord. (For those 'defeat the evil demon king settings where it turns out Overlord's just trying to protect his Monster people from the actual evil: God and his secretly villainous fantasy Catholic Church threat to the world.)

I think that one's more covered by your secret motive.

# ¿ Mar 24, 2016 01:14

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

I mean there's also boromir, for "hero corrupted by evil".

# ¿ Mar 29, 2016 12:24

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

kalonZombie posted:

So quick question which may have already been addressed: Generals, for the most part, just act exactly like their minion counterparts except they are Threats To The World. I get that. But do Threats To The World get any special rules about not getting immediately chumped by a 10+ Finish Them roll? I feel like if you build a General, and they're a big threat, it's kind of... silly and against the spirit of the thing that a Fellowship member can just immediately put them down at the very start of an encounter.

Well, they need an Advantage, which hypothetically should be hard to get against a terrifying foe such as a General, though I can see an Orc with the weapon-breaking move just unloading on a dude from the go, which does seem like it could be kind of anticlimactic.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 16:57

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

My read is that Fellowship takes fictional positioning very seriously, so you probably should reasonably exacting about how they accomplish their Keep Busy and Take Out and be exacting about if it counts. But, then, we haven't played properly yet.

# ¿ Apr 8, 2016 18:19

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

I think it's essentially a way of surviving one death, yeah.

# ¿ Apr 17, 2016 18:25

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

nomadotto posted:

I ran my first session of Fellowship on Sunday, and overall, the players enjoyed it. I had a couple of quick questions, though.

1) The players were exploring a ruined city. I wasn't sure how to handle things like "climbing up a stone pillar". I assume best practice was to make the city a set-piece, or to handle it similarly to the journey mechanic. I ended up letting the Elf roll Grace for it (a la Dungeon World Overcome), but am curious about how to handle it in the future.

Ordinarily this is the kind of thing I tend to just let people do in PBTA games. Unless it's a pillar with a monster on it, or full of traps, or a pillar with strong opinions about orcs or something.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2016 01:24

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Boing posted:

I just ran my first session of this and it totally rocks. Beautiful system, cheers to gnome7.

There's something I'd like to clear up about dealing with big threats, which was the only stumbling stone that I ran into.

I read this differently. The Overlord Basic Moves (p. 162) say that the Overlord and their Generals have all of these moves, from An Offer You Can't Refuse to Twist the Knife. This includes the Overlord Damage move, which says that when you take damage,

I didn't come across that reading until after my first session. The Orc and the Overlord's orcish Warmonger General were having an honour duel in front of the Overlord's army (because the Orc's people were already conquered by the Overlord, and the Orc player commanded lore about the Orcish honour system about who gets to be the boss). the Squire managed to keep the General busy by taunting him while in the crowd, which gave the Orc an advantage to Finish Him by chopping off the General's head from behind. It was cool, but it was a fight that was over very quickly, and all the players found it underwhelming. Finding that Overlord Damage thing made sense to me, because it makes the Generals more able to be the recurring threats that I suspect they're meant to be. So your 'change' is my default interpretation, unless I've misread the "The Overlord and their Generals have all of these moves" thing.

But maybe the other reason I struggled to make the General a plausible threat is because I'm not much good at that in general. I had the Fellowship run into a Giant (the True Threat from one of the set pieces). I intended them to skirmish with it for a little while as it caused collateral damage and brought the building down around them, but as soon as they ran into it, the Star Elf immediately decided she'd keep it busy by blinding it with an arrow (7-9 result, disorienting it for a moment) and the Orc used that as an advantage to Finish It with a 10+. That means a dead giant, and I might have interpreted the rules too liberally in the Fellowship's favour for that one, because that was also underwhelming. I know in most PbtA games you're supposed to dynamically ramp threats up and down depending on what's required by making your Moves harder or softer, but Fellowship has a much more mechanically defined system of Advantage and Finishing Them that I wanted to follow closely to the rules. 'When you do something that sounds like an Advantage, you have an Advantage' applies here - and there's no wording on Finish Them that implies a harder Trigger, it's just "When you attempt to defeat an enemy you have an advantage over..."

How do I ramp up the difficulty of that challenge within the rules of Fellowship? In that case, when the Elf said "I want to shoot a dazzling arrow in its face to blind it" as soon as they stumbled into the Giant's lair, how should I have interpreted that? Should I have made a hard Cut immediately to say that the Giant's not to be hosed with, and you need to be cleverer than that to keep it busy? Because that doesn't seem right, it's a perfectly sensible way to create an opening on a giant. Or is the underwhelming nature of that encounter more in how the Orc's single 10+ on Finish Them ended it without a fight? I'd like to use the Overlord Damage rule on more than just Overlords and Generals, if I want to particularly play up a threat, but that's not in the rules so I'm wondering if I'm missing something.

We just went and rolled with it, which might actually be what I'm supposed to do in this case, but I'd like to know if I have the option of scaling an encounter's difficulty up and down on the fly like I do in Dungeon World, when I say "you can't just hack and slash, the dragon is bigger and badder than you, you'll need to find a way to its weak spots..." - which Fellowship in principle codifies with the Advantage rule. Am I supposed to be able to say "You can't just Keep It Busy, you'll have to Overcome its attacks first"? It felt like none of the players actually triggered Overcome at all in my session.

Characters in Fellowship are really strong, yeah; you should probably throw up more in-character issues or make more things threats to the world.

# ¿ Oct 3, 2016 16:00

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

gnome7 posted:

Panic At The Dojo is now live! It is a tactical, grid-based combat game, with a focus on crazy action movie physics and flashy, showy combat styles. There is also a free preview adventure available, with pre-made characters and encounters. Check it out!

Mind if I ask what the rationale for going grid-based was?

# ¿ Oct 21, 2016 20:30

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Nuns with Guns posted:

So I have a question about the single, irreplaceable item that the Heir gets.

One possible choice is a map:

Another one is a keep in a community that grants you a Fellowship move of your choice:

Wouldn't it be more mechanically sensible to take the castle with the Fellowship and grab "Many Died for this Information" as your Fellowship move over taking the map?

You learn about two sources of power that way, and get to dictate where they are. You also get way more information about the sources of power this way. The only difference I see is that the map says that the source of power can be used to permanently damage a stat... except no matter what, a Fellowship gets to permanently erase a stat from the overlord when they seize a source of power.

I was going to say that it's taking away an item of power that lets you damage them, but you're right. That's weird.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2017 15:55

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

gnome7 posted:

It is intentional, yes. Sorta.

See, the main thing with Pounce is that it mostly lets you do things you could do without Pounce anyway, at least as the Spider. The Escape Route web option also lets you quickly avoid their action by moving out of the way. You can already jump on top of enemies with just the first part of the move, letting you jump to anywhere you can see. Pounce just combines both of those parts into a single Web.

Now, it is definitely a better move in the hands of a non-Spider, although Pounce still becomes awkward for them to use. Without the Web currency, you actually need to prepare a Pounce in advance. So while this is still technically better than Mighty Leap, it isn't significantly so, except in the hands of a Halfling who can use The Little Folk to set a trap in the middle of a situation.

And lastly, IMO the Giant is probably the worst designed playbook in the game and I'm not very happy with it in hindsight, so I'm not going to use it as a measuring stick for future content. Like, its still mostly fine, but it doesn't play well with pretty much anything else in the game and I don't know how to really fix that. I am fine with playbooks using their single multi-class move to take Grasshopper and with Grasshopper being a technical strict upgrade over Mighty Leap, because its better in a way that makes the move more interesting.

I really like the giant's concept, so, I'd be curious about what you'd say the issues with it were?

# ¿ Jun 11, 2017 23:57

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

gnome7 posted:

I think the biggest issue is that its actually really hard to play around the scale difference. Like when you make a Giant of the Hills or a Giant of Spirit, its fine, you basically play in the same ballpark as everyone else, you can mostly stick with the party wherever. Because of course the two options that play best with everyone else are the ones that both remove one of the aspects of the playbook that doesn't play well with others. Like if your huge-ness is just that you're twice the size of everyone else, it works out fine.

The problem is the power of Command Lore doesn't limit you to that, at all. You can be 200 feet tall. You can literally be a mountain, and the playbook promises that this is okay. But in practice, it doesn't really work. There isn't any reasonable way to limit someone that big and strong. A lot of things can be easily solved by massive size and strength. But then, being that large also means there are a lot of situations where you can't do anything at all. You just have to sit out if the Overlord ends up having an underground base the rest of the party wants to raid. Your massive hugeness means you can never do a sneaking mission or an ambush to mix things up, so while locking out options is a reasonable downside, its also a downside that reduces interesting play options.

Like mechanically I think the playbook is pretty much fine, its just in a weird place where it promises you a lot of things that, if you actually take those promises, ends up creating a hero who doesn't work well with the framework of the game. Play as Ogres and Oni and Ents and it works fine. Play as mountains and legendary figures and actual giants, which are a huge draw of the playbook, and things fall apart. Which is a huge shame and I don't know how to fix it, because it just promises something the playbook doesn't deliver.

The way I pitched a legend-giant was that their height was "Bigger than you", so her head pokes above treetops when they're walking through a forest but when they get to an inn she's "merely" bending down not to bump her head, and such. It felt like a reasonable fluff of Giants of Myth.

That said I can kind of see the issue if your deal is being 200ft tall and always be that size.

# ¿ Jun 12, 2017 00:57

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

unseenlibrarian posted:

I am now picturing Ira Gamagori, Giant of Myth.

It works surprisingly well.

That was basically where I got the concept from :v:

# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 02:16

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Two questions:

1) How exactly do spider traps work? Should, for example, Manipulate/The Catch be used as triggers for finish/keep busy/etc or is their effect intended to purely be fictional positioning (potentially providing Advantage)?

2) We're playing online, with a couple of hours running time and our advances are coming very frequently as a result; is it fair, in this circumstance, to go down the list every few sessions, or maybe just be pickier about the questions?

# ¿ Nov 7, 2018 23:25

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 06:59

spectralent: Oct 1, 2014; Me and the boys poppin' down to the shops

Thanks!

gnome7 posted:

1) It's mostly fictional positioning, but fictional positioning counts for a lot in this kind of game. Manipulate and The Catch can be used to basically succeed at Overcome/Get Away without rolling if you use them right before someone is put in danger.

Right! So, in essence, they're not triggers for things like keep busy, they just straight up happen and frequently give you the sort of outcomes you'd expect of strong hits. That's quite powerful! Thanks.

# ¿ Nov 8, 2018 08:47

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