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Evil Mastermind posted:Anima: Beyond Fantasy is the most incomprehensible book I've ever read in my life. I refuse to believe it can be understood, let alone played. I have played in several campaigns of Anima, and am slowly gearing up to actually run one. If you have a calculator to hand and your body is ready for the Rolemaster, it's totally playable. There's nothing else quite like it on earth - every single supernatural power source has wildly different rules and they're all, without exception, totally insane. Your average psychic is constantly flying, reading the minds of everyone within 800 feet, surrounded by multiple layers of forcefields and moving at 1500 miles an hour. Your average ki user is two seconds away from literally going super saiyan, big golden hair and power levels included. Your average wizard has probably killed himself and all of his friends and rezzed them as a Being Between Worlds one level higher than their original character and now they can buy things off the restricted monster list. Your average fighter-type attacks somebody, then prepares to make his second, third and fourth attacks while the enemy panics that they only have one action to defend with - also the fighter is an invisible ghost moving at 1500 miles an hour and firing twin Uzis which can go round corners in this medieval fantasy setting. There's so much to talk about with Anima and it's all equally sorta unplayable but amazing fun. Hell, if your stats are high enough at chargen and you cross-reference them to the Size & Weight chart you can come out, like a character I once played with was, as a 9 foot tall 800 kg completely normal human being. That's the kind of game we're talking about.
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Jan 7, 2017 15:58
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Phi230 posted:RPG chat The Regiment is a pretty solid WW2 RPG that fits onto 12 pages and neatly models volume of fire, battle stress and regimental-level bureaucratic fuckups. It's a lot of fun. Other than that, GURPS and Night Witches are the only two I'd recommend. Grey Ranks is definitely a WW2 RPG but you'd have to be made of pretty stern stuff to find that fun, imo.
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Jan 10, 2017 13:26
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rkajdi posted:One other thing-- Does the Third Age hold up on the same level of insane stuff happening that the Second Age has? Yes, basically. The Lunar Empire is totally nuts - their Goddess should basically by all rights be a Chaos Goddes but doesn't really seem to be, and her party trick is that when she came back from going into Chaos she brought the Crimson Bat, a flying kaiju, with her and loans it out to her people when they really need poo poo loving up. There's a subplot featuring a lovely gentleman by the name of Sheng Seleris who is a random guy who was born in the same year as the Lunar Goddess. When her enormous red moon appeared in the sky, he went "I'm definitely going to walk on that some day." He later led a slave rebellion, got captured and horribly tortured, achieved karmic enlightenment and then disappeared up his own bum and came out as some sort of Ultimate Murder Buddha. He then proceeded to go on what can only be described as an almighty rampage where his chosen method of choice for calling out people he wanted to get into fights with was depopulating entire provinces and dumping the bodies in the rivers so they turned red. Sheng Seleris later gets his murder on again, heads up to the Red Moon with an army and lays waste to it - the Red Goddess has to personally show up herself to kill him and sends him to Lunar Hell to suffer for all eternity, but not before he leaves permanent scars on both her and the moon. One of the defining "jesus christ calm down" moments of the previously mentioned Arkat, who was a hero who hated the Lunar Empire, was that he decided to break into Lunar Hell to free Sheng Seleris so that they could buddy up and commit genocide on the Lunars. It may be obvious that this was a monumentally bad idea.
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Jan 16, 2017 17:54
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And the classic wizard Bigby and his associates Digby, Rigby, Nigby, Zigby and Sigby Griggbyson.
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Jan 17, 2017 15:43
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Arivia posted:Or you could do it in the projects and use the tenements as real life dungeons complete with unpeople as monsters! I give you: Violence, the RPG which has exactly that as a premise.
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Jan 17, 2017 16:39
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I always roll everything out in the open and don't really see the point of a GM Screen unless you need big pages of stats and secrets out in front of you to run your game - or you're playing 1970s D&D and you've got the actual map in front of you that they definitely shouldn't be allowed to see. For me, hiding rolls is pointless because the only purpose behind it is to be able to fudge rolls, which is lying to your friends imo. Ratpick posted:What's everyone else's preferred approach to players rolling vs. GMs rolling, and keeping rolls hidden vs. rolling in the open? To specifically talk about your Perception check topic, I'm not an enormous fan of describing the room and requiring the players to, for example, specifically check the bookcase to find the secret door. What I don't want to end up happening is the classic A4 page of standard operating procedures for entering a new room that the players just go down because it's the best way to ensure they safely find everything. I like immersion in my games, but I've seen people on the internet make fun of people who say 'I roll a Perception check' and I think that's dumb because to me that indicates the person is not that interested in searching the place and wants to move on. For me, I always end up using the litmus test of 'is the task difficult enough to roll for?' Whether that task was 'I search the whole room thoroughly' or 'I start pulling books looking for a secret door', those tasks might be easy enough that they just find whatever it is that's there to be found. On the other hand, either of those tasks might actually be difficult enough to require some sort of roll - maybe the hidden desk draw is especially well hidden, such that a normal thorough search wouldn't find it, or maybe the book switch has a couple of other arcane steps required to actually activate it. I guess in D&D this would be Taking 10 or Taking 20 on a Perception check, mechanically. A friend of mine has the whole party roll out a half dozen Perception checks each at the start of the session and checks them off as they use them, partly to speed things up and partly so that they don't necessarily know they're making them for ambushes and stuff.
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Jan 19, 2017 13:44
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Ratpick posted:Basically, if my players describe that they do a thing, then they do the thing. The character who describes inspecting the bookshelf to see if one of the books is actually an opening mechanism for a secret door, then they do it. However, even if they don't have a specific clue as to what they're looking for, they can always fall back on the dice. Agreed 100%. Dice rolling is for when the outcome of the roll is both uncertain and interesting. Ratpick posted:I don't think fudging rolls is necessarily a bad thing, but I'm of the opinion that if a GM has to fudge rolls constantly to make the game's events match a more desireable outcome (for them) then they're probably using the wrong system for their game. Possibly this is my inherent bias but I tend to find that people who play a lot of D&D fudge dice rolls a lot more because a single d20 roll is incredibly swingy and D&D often has very serious consequences for failing single rolls. I tend to play systems that are either less swingy (dice pool or multidice systems, usually), have some way to mitigate failures of critical rolls or simply have less serious consequences for failing rolls. Examples: GURPS is a 3d6 system where a quick trip to anydice will tell you that fully half of your rolls will be in the middle 9-12 range. Wild variation is statistically unlikely. Blades in the Dark has very serious consequences for failing rolls - getting anything but a full success on a desperate roll can lead to your character being instantly killed. However, any consequence in the game can be resisted for 0-5 Stress if you don't want to take it. Spellbound Kingdoms lets you spend 1 Mood after you roll to just maximise the die. It's impossible to die permanently in Tenra Bansho Zero unless you voluntarily tick the Dead Box on your health track in exchange for massive dice bonuses With a decent size dice pool in WoD you're rolling so many dice that the probability curve tends to flatten out. I guess when you get to higher level D&D and your modifiers start outstripping your dice roll massively things get less swingy, but there's still going to be a potential variation of +/- 19, any of which is equally likely. It was when I was playing through Horde of the Dragon Queen in D&D 5th and there's a bit early on where the party are sneaking into a war camp and everyone has to make a DC 5 Stealth check or something. The success of the whole party is basically required to a) avoid a TPK and b) advance the plot. They set it at DC5 going "oh ho ho what a laughably easy check to pass" when actually the chances of the whole party passing are surprisingly small. The odds of at least 1 person failing in a party of 4 is 60% (assuming no modifier, and for the sake of argument I'm assuming the high-modifier characters cancel out the negative modifer ones) and that's if you exclude having disadvantage from wearing heavy armour - which like half our party were wearing. I haven't played further into the adventure but apparently there's a similar thing later on where you're being accused of a crime and get separately interrogated. You all need to pass a Bluff check or you get executed - same story, odds are that's a TPK because you just can't guarantee people will pass die rolls in a single d20 system. In some ways that's part of the draw of D&D, I suppose. The high level of randomness keeps things interesting and provokes cool stories. You're never absolutely outmatched because you can always just roll really well even against incredible opposition and that feels good. Even stories where someone rolls dismally are still fun to tell. In WoD, for example, if someone has better stats than you then you're basically dead barring some extremely unlikely rolling or serious hustling. I actually really liked the dice system that one of my friends came up with for a homebrew: you were trying to roll underneath your stat number by adding up a pool of d6s, and the difficulty of the check was how many d6s you rolled. If you rolled three 1s it was a crit success and three 6s was a crit failure regardless of the rest of the dice. The probability curve on regular rolls was very steep so you could be very confident in what you could expect to roll, but there was the increasing probability of insane, unlikely critical failures or successes on difficult checks to keep things interesting. Most rolls were predictable, which kept things satisfying and sensible, but there was a reasonable and ever-present chance of craziness which kept things interesting.
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Jan 19, 2017 15:58
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Y'all seem totally convinced that videogame designers don't make their characters as wide-reachingly appealing as possible by any means necessary when they totally do. If you think that they didn't do a design pass on Overwatch characters to make them more cosplayable and, yes, make them sexually appealing then I don't know what to tell you.
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Jan 20, 2017 13:15
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I will always recommend Monster as a sober, depressing look at a man making a series of terrible decisions in incredibly poo poo circumstances while his life and the lives of those around him go catastrophically wrong. It's very similar to Breaking Bad, thematically - it's a bit like an HBO anime. The actual plot is that a spinal surgeon is fired when he refuses to stop performing life-saving surgery on a young boy and let a drunk take over when the mayor comes in after a car accident and they need him to operate. He is resigned to having been punished for making the right decision but then all the people involved in his firing turn up murdered, making it look to the FBI like he definitely did it. Turns out the boy whose life he saved was a serial killer. He decides the only morally correct thing to do as a doctor is to evade the police and hunt down and kill the boy. This is episode one and there are like 70 episodes and it just keeps getting worse. I also have a soft spot for Elfen Lied for being the first anime I ever watched and its unflinchingly horrifying portrayal of what combat looks like between people whose superpower is that they can slice anything at a 3 metre range with invisible vibrating knife limbs.
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Jan 28, 2017 04:32
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Bedlamdan posted:You're exaggerating how dark this series is. I mean, yeah, Johann hurts and traumatizes a bunch of people, but Tenma never really loses his sense of ethics no matter how bad things get, and generally continues to make people's lives better even if his driving goal is 'kill Johann.' Tenma's role in the series, though, is not so much hunting down Johann, but rather figuring him out while preventing or mitigating the harm that he's causing. At it's core, its not so much a horror series as much as a mystery: who the gently caress is Johann, and what happened to make him into such a psychopath? Yeah, those are fair comments. Like, it didn't make me want to literally put a gun in my mouth like Saikano did, but I can't say I came away from Monster feeling good about existence.
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Jan 29, 2017 03:41
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Kwyndig posted:Saikano isn't even the saddest anime. It's really goddamn sad, but there are other sad anime shows and movies out there. Grave of the Fireflies is one, of course, Now and Then Here and There is another, I can't remember any others off the top of my head because I'm trying not to bum myself out. Well that's 2 things to put on my 'never watch' list
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Jan 29, 2017 14:59
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Does anyone have a link to Liesmith's old paladin threads? My google fu is failing me.
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Mar 20, 2017 02:59
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I like Legends of the Wulin's damage system, where hitting opponents places a certain numbers of Ripples on an opponent depending on how well you rolled. Ripples don't do anything at all... until a Rippling roll is called for. This happens either if you hit someone super, super well - the crit-equivalent is that you do a bunch of Ripples and also make them roll them out right now - but normally happens at the end of combat. More Ripples = more and more bad stuff happens to you on the Rippling roll. Like actual wound effects, maiming injuries, emotional damage, called shots to the self esteem and so on. The main effect of this is that two kung fu masters can wale on each other for a few rounds, realise that nobody is going to roll well enough to actually force a mid-combat rippling roll, wale on each other some more until one or both opponents start looking nervously at the amount of ripples that are stacking up, bow to each other and turn to leave. At this point, one of them examines his wounds, realises that he is bleeding to death, both his arms are shattered and he can't see out of one eye and the other kung fu master realises that his leg is broken, his opponent's style was superior to his, that he is a bad Buddhist and then he keels over into unconsciousness. One of the special abilities Buddhist monks get is the ability to, when an opponent makes a rippling roll, offer them the choice to become obsessed with becoming a better Buddhist in exchange for not having to make that ripple roll. A Shaolin monk kicks the gently caress out of you to the point where you're certain that when you stop fighting you're just going to drop dead and then offers to help you get back to the righteous path. You look at your fifteen ripples that you have stacked up and take his generous offer. Obsessions, maiming wounds, mental trauma, reputation damage and emotional and psychological effects are all handled the same mechanically and are all equal fodder for results on a bad ripple roll. You can choose to get stabbed the gently caress up and crippled, or sub some of that out for your mentor thinking you're a waste of loving space and having a lingering phobia of loud noises. Meanwhile in combat, there's no death spiral because ripples have no effect until you're forced to roll them out and it takes some serious stats before you can just dunk an in-combat rippling roll on somebody. Meanwhile it's actually really hard to perma-kill someone because that requires a whole hell of a lot of ripples and they're almost certainly going to duck out before then. This way, it sets the stage for long-term continuing relationships between rival kung-fu masters and a lot of pissed off people in bandages questioning their life choices as they learn valuable lessons in self-reflection from the village healer. And some games just have you subtract hit points until you hit zero and die 
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Apr 6, 2017 16:08
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Yawgmoth posted:This reminds me of a time when I was playing a Black Lotus master in LotW. For those that don't know, it's a style where several of the techs give your target one or more "petals" which are basically a hairline fracture and act kind of like combo points; you can spend these to gain other effects with other techniques. I was fighting some other master and we were each getting in near hits/misses, trying to whittle each other down when I offered to let him leave or I would end him with my next attack. I had a few injuries and he had almost nothing, so he of course declined. Next attack, I put everything I had into one attack, including the ten petals I had racked up to having a rippling roll of twenty five. Took him from "not a scratch" to "powdered skeleton" in a single blow. which was good since if I had missed I'd have been a dead man. I love that the fluff for that style is that the guy who invented it loved wearing white robes and was seriously tired of getting people's blood on his clothes every time he had a kung fu fight. So he invented a style that let him wait until after he'd got out of splash range to detonate someone's body explosively. Lotus style has a bad rep.
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Apr 6, 2017 21:20
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So I made some custom style sheets for Spellbound Kingdoms for a boss fight that went down pretty well with my players. The Lich King one isn't pretty but there were some appropriately pant-making GBS threads moments for the party when one player had an Inspiration-nullifying arrow stuck in him and two others were mind controlled. It's the first time I've homebrewed anything for the system and I'm pleased that it didn't crash and burn horribly. I kind of want to keep doing it for boss fights and maybe write a few more regular combat styles to fill a few gaps that I think exist in the core selection. The actual boss fight itself was the Lich King and a summoned shade of Lord Archer, the setting's equivalent of the Grim Reaper, vs the party in an underground chamber flooded with soul-shredding necrotic water. The party were grappling hooking between pieces of rubble that were islands in the water. When he dropped to zero, the Lich King was resurrected by the chained up corporeal form of Lord Archer who was trapped inside the rib cage of a titanic skeleton. Once they freed Archer, the shade disappeared and they could final kill the Lich. Two supporting NPC wizards were using battlecraft magic to alter the terrain at the player's orders to create temporary bridges and walls and the like. Three of the players had been previously branded by the Lich King's servants with a magical brand which prevented them from resisting Force Obedience and only two of them had managed to remove the brand before the boss fight. It got quite hairy. Meanwhile the party's NPC backup are keeping the bone kraken in the water, the Lich's cultists and his army of summoned zombies occupied while the party take on the Lich. It was crazy. After they jobbed the Lich, the party Trader decided to bend the knee to Lord Archer and has cross-classed into being a Chosen One of Archer. Meanwhile a bunch of the backup NPCs also bent the knee and became vampires, liches or Chosen Ones themselves - this includes some enemies of the party who they temporarily allied with to deal with this whole Lich King situation. Now there's a bunch of vampiric devotees of the Grim Reaper rolling around town. I like the direction the game is taking 
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Apr 26, 2017 00:34
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Nuns with Guns posted:That all sounds pretty cool! How do you deal with classes that don't seem meant for multiclassing once you enter them, like the Chosen One? Just ignoring the Mood penalty? Or will they never switch back to levels in Trader? Under ordinary circumstances, once you go Chosen One or Noble you're stuck there - it seems like a deliberate design choice to me so I wouldn't waive the Mood penalty. In this game, the players are at level 15 so I gave them the offer of a full respec if they wanted to go Chosen One, since being a level 15 something/level 5 Chosen One is kind of poo poo. The trader went from a cross-classed Rogue/Trader to pure Chosen One 15. Fortunately he was already a master of Arrowheart and quite into archery in general - he has a Reputation for coming first in the annual duchy archery competition by a country mile - so being a Chosen of Death Cupid fits his character concept nicely. The Quality 15 bone longbow which is now his weapon of choice is going to raise a few eyebrows amongst the local archery community, I think. As for  I would second the suggestion for Feng Shui 2. I quite enjoy the car chase rules in that and the game as a whole is appropriately action movie like for Fast and Furious. Car Wizards is an excellent read but I haven't played it so not sure what it's like at the table. More out-there suggestions include Demon: The Descent for the availability of overt superpowers which let you replicate the kind of stunts seen in the Fast and Furious franchise in a setting where normal people can't do that poo poo, or Apocalypse World 2E for having pretty good Mad Max car chase rules.
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Apr 26, 2017 13:44
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I'm in a game being run over Slack - it's pretty much just better than forum PBP in every way. You can PM, split into different channels for different scenes, use a dice roller and so on.
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May 1, 2017 19:32
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Gobbeldygook posted:Has Slack solved their atrocious performance issues? It works fine on my lovely-rear end years old phone so probably yes. The lack of permanent archiving in the free option sucks a bit if your game is going to last ages. I'd be tempted to switch to Discord if it's just Slack with permanent archiving but one of my friends is convinced that the people who run Discord must be selling personal data to ad companies because otherwise their business model makes no sense and refuses to use it.
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May 2, 2017 01:53
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I love the facial expression of the Diabolic Tutor guy. He's like "ohhhhh poo poo that's a really good idea goddamn why didn't I think of that, well done Mr Skeleton this is gonna be great."
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May 2, 2017 14:31
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Nuns with Guns posted:Arivia and Fuego set up dueling discords a while ago. The battles between both channels will be as eternal as the Blood War. Duelling Discords would be a great band name.
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May 5, 2017 13:11
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So I have a rules question about Legends of the Wulin and I think we have some of the writers posting here, but not actually sure if we have a specific thread for 'I have a random rules question' and there isn't a thread for LotW that I can see. Chat thread seems like the best port of call? I'm sure that I've read somewhere that if you have an Elemental Chi pool you regenerate a point of that elemental chi in addition to your normal chi regeneration every round. Half Burnt Manual definitely seems to strongly imply this as one of the reasons why elemental chi is perhaps too powerful. I cannot for the life of me find this anywhere in the core rulebook - the section on Chi Regeneration just says that you regain your rank level in chi every round (eg 2 chi at rank 4). Do you actually regain bonus chi if you have elemental chi? Or do you have to choose for some of your normal allotment to be elemental? Example to make things clearer: Li is a Rank 4 fighter with a normal cap of 11 Normal Chi, 2 Wood Chi and 1 Earth Chi. He is on 5 normal, 0 wood chi and 0 earth chi and did not focus on breath this round. At the end of the round does he: 1) Go up to 7 normal chi, 1 wood chi and 1 earth chi? 2) Go up to 7 normal chi and gain 1 point of elemental chi to go into either wood or earth? 3) Regain 2 chi, which can be allotted to normal, wood or earth in whatever proportion he likes? Doodmons fucked around with this message at 16:47 on May 10, 2017 |
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May 10, 2017 15:50
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Yawgmoth posted:It is #1 by the book, but there are some who would houserule to either 2 or 3. I'd try to find it in the book but I am at work. I was sure I'd read that's the case but I've scoured the book and cannot find any mention of bonus elemental chi regeneration anywhere. Maybe I'm just blind.
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May 10, 2017 16:54
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My Lovely Horse posted:Yesterday one of my players gave us that coveted moment of excitement you get when you experience something you've only ever heard of by rolling three critical hits in a row. Then turn order moved on to the next player, who made an attack and also rolled a critical hit. One time in a Vampire game, an Akhud blood sorceror used magic to set off a demonic fiery gently caress-you in front of the whole party. We all had to roll frenzy checks at some godawful penalty and if we failed we'd take a derangement among some other awful poo poo. Every single one of us was on a chance die. Every single one of us rolled a ten. There were four of us so it was literally one in ten thousand. That was the absolute best time to accidentally step in a faerie glade and for the normal laws of probability to go out the window.
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May 24, 2017 15:05
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Zurui posted:Languages are useless outside of the edge case in D&D because nearly everyone speaks Reign's rules for languages are pretty good, imo. There's explicitly no 'Common Tongue' in that game and languages and translation are meant to play a big part of it. Literacy is a relatively big deal, too.
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Jun 11, 2017 23:04
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