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I think someone in the previous thread was asking about a game to play Harry Potter with. Houses and Wands is a PBTA hack covering the genre: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1avqZm0uZXEVLLki7OfvveyxEF4awjWSQ_62aABPO3Ko/edit
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Jan 2, 2017 17:26
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Serf posted:CAH sucks. It somehow manages to be an even worse version of Apples to Apples. Plus the people who make it are morons. I think the people who make it know exactly who they're fleecing and trolling
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Jan 3, 2017 01:37
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13th Age chat:P.d0t posted:
So first off, this is a Talent, which means it's always on, so it's no skin off your nose if it doesn't go off. Meanwhile, Fighter Maneuvers, which have specific triggers, can be selected after you see the result of your attack roll, so assuming you choose something that goes off on an even roll, and something that goes off on an odd roll, then you're pretty well covered. The criticism of the Fighter Maneuver system is that it can feel overly complicated, and overly fiddly, and for too little effect, and what it's worth I do agree to a point, but I think context is important here. Turning Fighter abilities into this convoluted system of die rolls and triggers was, in my opinion, a strong counter-reaction to two talking points regarding 4th Edition: 1. Every class has At-Will Powers, Encounter Powers, and Daily Powers, and therefore all classes are the same 2. Diegetically-speaking, a Fighter having a Daily Power makes no sense, because why can't the Fighter twirl his sword in the exact same way a second time within the day to achieve the same result? Setting aside the grogs.txt discussion that'd stem from disproving why those two talking points are bunk, it's pretty clear why Maneuvers are structured the way they are if you have those two in the back of your head. 1. It means that Fighters aren't operating on the same resource and ability mechanics are everyone else 2. It means that Fighters can use their "power moves" more often than once a day, but you can also say something like "Villain's Menace needs the enemy to make a certain mistake in their footwork to be open enough to be attacked by the Fighter like that, and the wait for that opening is represented by the triggering conditions to line up just right" 3. It creates a third category of "power level" between "usable all the time" and a daily limit. That is, one of the problems of combat maneuvers in 3rd Edition is that if you could make a Fighter that could trip dudes, the fact that there was no limit to their trip attempts made it difficult to balance - anyone that could be tripped could be easily dispatched, but there's a very narrow band between "can be tripped, therefore isn't a challenge" and "cannot be tripped, therefore makes the Fighter feel like poo poo for having their specialization be rendered useless" (which then later leads to Pathfinder nerfing combat maneuvers rather heavily across the board anyway). You could limit Trip attacks to a certain number of uses per encounter or per day, but again that runs you into the sameyness and can't-do-it-twice arguments. The approach 13th Age seems to have taken to reconcile this problem, therefore, seems to have to create this middle category, where instead of 3rd Edition's "Trip is a feat, and you can Trip all day", or 4th Edition's "Trip is a power, and you can trip once per x", you instead get something like "whenever you roll an even number, you gain the benefit of Improved Trip and Greater Trip, and can attempt a Trip attack instead" And even/odd by all means isn't even the only "tuning mechanism", as you can also say "whenever you roll a 16 or better ..." instead.
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Jan 5, 2017 10:35
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Huckabee Sting posted:Why do we place limits on spell casting? Why can't a wizard summon fireballs every round? Only because we think that's how magic should work? Swinging a giant chunk of metal around will tire a person out really fast. Wearing out an opponent is a big part of boxing in real life. We have physical evidence that you can only do manual labor for so long, but we have no evidence that magic would be that way. It makes sense a martial would only be able to use their maneuvers so many times, because they only have so much stamina to do so. I'm not saying that casters need buffed, but placing a limit on martial power usage isn't so far away from real life as that train of thought tends to suggest. If we accept that there can be limits on martial powers we can open them up for more powerful abilities. I don't disagree that "you can exert your muscles the same way as many times as you want" is a dumb statement to argue against Daily martial abilities with, but people bought it, and it was an argument that gained a fair amount of traction against 4e. And I don't even really disagree either when we say that 13th Age comes with own set of flaws, overly fiddly Maneuver tracking included. I was trying to go into why the designers might have made the system that they did - that it was essentially a compromise with the 4e system being picked to death by bad arguments and cheap criticism.
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Jan 5, 2017 11:17
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I was 5 seconds into typing "the grappling rules aren't really that complicated", when I realized I've been playing 3.5 continuously for over a year now and have had lots of practice. It's me, I'm That Guy.
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Jan 6, 2017 13:16
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Arivia posted:Speaking of minority representation Paizo lent their iconic Pathfinder characters to the Kingdom Death guys for use as characters in the new edition of KD. Including their three most prominent women. Wonderful. I'm assuming your "wonderful" is being said sarcastically, because good god I can't imagine how you might consider that a good thing.
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Jan 6, 2017 13:29
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Yawgmoth posted:I've been playing 3.5 since its inception and I still have to have the SRD page up when I use them because they're such a pain in the rear end. I'm thinking back to our very first session where the very first combat action of the very first combat was "I grab the halfling" and everyone goes OK BREAK OUT THE FLOWCHART.
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Jan 6, 2017 15:04
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P.d0t posted:Are there any d20-ish games that use 3 ability scores? Microlite20 only uses Strength, Dexterity and Mind.
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Jan 8, 2017 06:37
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I don't think it's an indictment of D&D to say that there are things it just doesn't cover in its rules, but are things that people regularly engage with regardless. For the longest time you just didn't know what was supposed to happen if the players talked to The King besides whatever you made up on the spot, but it's used as a framing device for when you enter the dungeon and you start engaging with the rules-based, mechanical side of the game again. The issue is when you like talking to The King so much that you start playing entire sessions about talking to The King, and hold it up as a point of pride that you've gone through whole sessions without escaping the framing device. Indeed, when the framing device becomes the main activity you're engaging with, maybe it's time to look at a different game.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:19
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Brainiac Five posted:This just leads us to demanding people roll for every task, since someone just automatically getting on a horse to ride it is not playing the game, but it becomes part of the game if you have to roll for it If the rules state that trivially easy actions should not be rolled for, or in fact that certain actions can be passed by "Taking 1" (in fact a cornerstone of the Cypher System and d20, to certain degrees), then you can still "engage with the rules" without having to roll for everything.
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Jan 9, 2017 15:40
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B-17 Queen of the Skies is kind of like an RPG
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Jan 10, 2017 14:57
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Serf posted:Oh man they're doing a Freeport book for Shadow of the Demon Lord. Rad. Oh snap that's actually really cool and good.
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Jan 10, 2017 18:56
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Jan 11, 2017 10:40
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FastestGunAlive posted:There is a one page WW2 rpg that is I believe pbta. Can't recall the name. The author also reflavored the rules to do Colonial Marines/Aliens. Both are free on the authors page. Operation Husky by Moriarty Games is a PBTA-hack about the crew of an M4 Sherman during the invasion of Siciliy https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-ssoH7YZYcYeEN1V1BzQmVTYXM/view
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Jan 11, 2017 18:22
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Actually most TRPGs I've encountered don't really cover playing as the Germans.
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Jan 11, 2017 19:01
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TheSoundNinja posted:PASTA IS THE BEST FOOD, YOU loving DICKBAG Steak should be well done Also don't tip ever
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Jan 12, 2017 02:49
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Serf posted:And the Empire is America Boy do I feel silly for guffawing at how ham-handedly Revenge of the Sith handled a transition over to fascism. Turns out it's going to be even easier than that!
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Jan 12, 2017 04:13
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Serf posted:Lucas was just a decade too early. But like for real one of the villains is named loving Nute Gunray and their flagship is the Invisible Hand. The big Trade Federation ship that Anakin blew up in Ep 1 was a Lucrehulk-class Battleship
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Jan 12, 2017 05:24
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Isn't Paragon/Renegade a sort of gamified emulation of the sort of curated, player-driven plot you'd get with a human DM in the first place, such that you might not need an explicit representation of it anymore if you already have a human DM driving the game to begin with?
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Jan 12, 2017 11:55
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I am down with the clown. Seriously though my only exposure to juggalos is through System Mastery and they don't sound so bad.
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Jan 13, 2017 03:35
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Nuns with Guns posted:is there a single pure thing in this world that someone hasn't tried to poorly convert to d20 rules??? Well technically Ponyfinder is Pathfinder rather than d20
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Jan 13, 2017 04:49
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Oh man now I just remembered Munchkin d20. Two great tastes that taste great together
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Jan 13, 2017 07:14
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On the subject of combat in PbP's, what I've been doing in a D&D 3rd edition game I've been running is to squash it into two-dimensions:quote:0 feet - Entrance of the room. Michael the Cleric, Rul the Targeteer, Prae Poi the Duelist If Prae Poi charges right into the melee, the situation then changes to: quote:0 feet - Entrance of the room. Michael the Cleric, Rul the Targeteer And then you would need Tumble checks to get past the overturned tables and chairs at the 40 foot mark, and you can push targets into the roaring campfire at the 50 foot mark. It saves me the trouble of going full battle map, but keeps distance measurements precise. It also allows me to create "interactive terrain" for the players to use, just by dropping a short phrase of a thing somewhere in the room. I'm thinking it might break down as far as people trying to set-up flanking, but that really hasn't come up yet. Credit to P.d0t for giving me the original idea.
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Jan 14, 2017 16:38
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Thanks for the feedback, all. As I said, in the particular game I'm running, flanking hasn't come up very much because the party is a Human Cleric, a Halfling Targeteer-Fighter that hurls harpoons from a distance, and a Human sword-and-board Fighter, which means we rarely get more than one person up in melee, but I was thinking that, barring any special terrain, to just allow any two people to flank a target by declaring it to be so, as long as the three of you (two flankers and the target) are all in melee range of each other.
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Jan 15, 2017 04:24
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Iron Heroes is all right for a Monte Cook production. Which is to say it's still a goddamn mess (there's a proto-Defender class which has literally zero ways of forcing / incentivizing the enemy to hit them) but there are some ideas in there that are ahead of the vanilla D&D curve, at least. I just ran an IH adventure in 4e with Martial power source only classes allowed instead.
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Jan 17, 2017 05:06
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:I downloaded the PDF, saw counting-down style AC, closed it and deleted it. OSR's not really my thing. Godbound doesn't really use descending AC. To resolve attacks, you roll a d20, add your modifiers, add the targets AC, and you hit if the result is 20 or higher. Positive modifiers, like a high Strength or a magic weapon, are still positive, because it makes it easier for you to get to 20+ Light/low armor, which is a high number (base 9), makes you easy to hit, because a high number makes it easier for you to get to 20+ Negative modifiers, like a curse or a low Strength, are still negative, because it makes it harder for you to get to 20+ Heavy armor, which is a low number (plate armor AC 2), makes you hard to hit, because a low number makes it harder for you to get to 20+
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Jan 17, 2017 05:27
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Covok posted:What's the best F20 (fantasy d20) game? Kind of a broad question. FantasyCraft has been mentioned, but it suffers in the playability department from how incredibly dense it is. D&D 3rd Edition with rule and class curation can come close, but since so much of what you need to make it work well isn't documented, there can be a high barrier of entry. D&D 4th Edition gets a lot right out of the box, but like 3rd Edition you have to do quite a bit of background reading to get it all down pat. There's also something to be said about combat length exerting a disproportionate influence on how games of it would tend to turn out. Basic D&D (or an appropriate retroclone) hits a nice balance of playability versus balance, but it can be too mechanically light for some peoples's tastes, and most retroclones still have faintly annoying legacy mechanics. 13th Age has a lot going for it, but it assumes that you're already familiar with the F20 genre, and still has issues with play balance at the far ends. Some people also don't like the narrative elements for being too open-ended. Personally, I'd probably use D&D 4th Edition if I knew the players were deeply into tactical combat, and Labyrinth Lord if I wanted a less focused game.
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Jan 17, 2017 06:24
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The literal descriptive values of the armor types are still "lower is better", yes, but it doesn't use any of the other trappings of descending AC such as THAC0, or to-hit matrices, or converting a bonus into a subtrahend or a penalty into an addend.
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Jan 17, 2017 10:00
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Well yeah "Target20" is backwards-compatible with all of OSR up to and including the very first print-runs of original D&D, but Crawford (and whoever originally came up with the idea, maybe this person) still deserves credit for writing his games where Target20 is the method used to explain how attack rolls are made from the get-go.
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Jan 17, 2017 10:36
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D&D used to be (and still is?) marketed and sold as a kid's toy, and any number of people became familiar with the game from having their moms, dads, or certain other older parental figures run it for/play it with them, so barring any sort of comprehension barrier I don't see anything wrong with letting children play it, on whatever end of the sliding scale of full-rules-vs-play-pretend. What tends to be distasteful is if you use your kids as replacements for not being able to get together with your same-age-group peers, or if you're forcing your hobby on them because this is what you like and they drat well better like it, too.
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Jan 17, 2017 14:40
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Plutonis posted:Male Elf M'elf *tips fedora*
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Jan 17, 2017 15:12
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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! The Lost Citadel of Pruitt-Igoe.
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Jan 17, 2017 16:15
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Arivia posted:As a disclaimer, I'm not actually advocating that. It's a reference to Davis Chenault (one of the Castle & Crusades' guys) ban from rpg.net for unironically suggesting it, though. LARPing while you get your vigilante massacre on. Ah geez Arivia, I didn't get the reference - that was a bad joke, I'm sorry.
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Jan 17, 2017 17:29
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Is there a guide on what kind of book-binding should be used for a given situation? I think it largely depends on how large the document is and how much you're willing to spend, right? Is there a clearly better one under certain criteria?
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Jan 18, 2017 04:18
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"You are the police" seems like a fine way to build a framework around a campaign of any system. Like, the hard-boiled Crusader is building a pile of cigarette butts as he stakes out the warehouse on the wharf, while the rookie Swordsage is sneaking in through the roof, balancing on some support beams so she can watch the deal go down. There's an exchange of illicit emberflower extract between the Drow mafia and the corrupt psionic longshoremen. The Crusader warned the Swordsage to not do anything rash, but she tries to blowdart a tracer pod onto the drug package anyway - only she flubs the roll, and it ends up hitting one of the Ogre enforcers at the back of the neck. The dumb lout looks up, sees her, and yells. The group starts breaking up as they realize their cover is blown. The Swordsage jumps out onto the roof under a hail of crossbow fire, and whistles her partners on the ground. The Captain, and old, grizzly Favored Soul and the Lieutenant, a by-the-book, straight-laced Samurai, have a fight with the Drow as their break out from a side entrance. The Crusader tries to rush in, but they tell the veteran to go round the back and chase down the longshoreman's GIthyanki boss. A long chase scene ensues as the Crusader pursues the fleeing perp on the ground, with the Swordsage trying to keep pace from the rooftops. Fruit carts get overturned, bystanders get yelled at to get out of the way, and the Githyanki breaks through a pane of glass getting transported across a street. The Crusader and the Swordsage eventually corner the Githyanki into a dead-end alley, but just as they say the jig is up, the GIthyanki reaches down, raps on a loose floor tile, and recedes into the wall. The two partners try to break through, but come to realize that they're pounding on the back wall of the Neogi ambassador's compound. They look up, and they see the Neogi Great Old One, its long clawed appendages resting on the winded Githyanki boss's shoulders. "You'll never get me ... because of diplomatic immunity! HAHAHA"
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Jan 18, 2017 04:39
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Covok posted:Also, looks like there hasn't any new big F20 games since most of the answers to that questions were the sames one from a while ago. Shouldn't be that surprised as, while many come out, most are bad. As far as "new hotness", a number of us (including you, didn't Libertad! host that oneshot?) are enthusiastic about Shadow of the Demon Lord, although that doesn't use a d20. And then there's also Godbound, but it's somewhat more "high-powered" than "standard F20"
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Jan 18, 2017 17:59
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isn't D&D with a better rule set kind of the point? I mean yeah you could play in another setting/subgenre but then good rulesets for those then do already exist as well.
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Jan 18, 2017 23:42
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I roll absolutely everything out in the open. For Perception checks, it's something like: "Roll Perception" *player gets a 2* "You don't really see anything of interest" and we keep playing. They can assume all they want that there's something there, but the dynamic I'm thinking of is kind of like how an actor in a horror movie intellectually knows that the monster is in the closet, because they read it in the script, but because they know it's there, they play along with it all the more. Pretty much everyone I've played with ends up doing this without me having to explicitly declare it. "Derp, I can't see" and they move on or try something else. I also don't like the concept of "fudging rolls". As a DM, I am already the sole arbiter of what a roll means, once it hits the table. I don't need to undermine my own credibility when I say that the 5 doesn't actually mean a 5. I can pull my punches, or make the NPCs target someone else, or make the penalty for failure significantly milder, but if the player rolls something that they expect is a failure, that actually is a failure per the rules, I think it's overall better to the integrity of the experience to continue maintaining that it actually was a failure, even if the landing isn't very hard. Either that, or admit that I made a bad DMing call, rather than retconning the world to adapt to my mistake.
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Jan 19, 2017 10:58
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I'm also generally in favor of full info on monster stats, or at least not playing headgames like "you rolled a 23? Uh-huh, that's a hit" but still not saying exactly what the AC was. There's also something to be said about systems that don't ask you to rear end-pull a DC except if you want to make it exceptionally hard or exceptionally easy.
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Jan 19, 2017 11:24
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My DMing has been heavily influenced by listening to hours and hours of Trail of Cthulhu and Nights Black Agents APs, and I'm an advocate of the whole "just tell them the loving clue" approach. You enter the room, and I give you the lede. The interaction may be driven by the dice, and maybe there's a Perception check to see how much more extra information you have, but I have an elemental dislike of the players needing to "pixelbitch" just to begin the process of interacting with the environment. Or to put it another way: even if you told the players everything, all the time, there's still a lot of room left over for dice rolling and failures based on what they do with the information.
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Jan 19, 2017 14:46
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