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Doodmons posted: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. D&D, particularly old school "fantasy loving Vietnam" D&D, definitely pushes the same buttons as XCOM, particular the original 90s XCOM, wherein you take a bunch of randomly generated characters out into the wilderness and procedurally generate a narrative from their trials and tribulations. On the flipside, more modern RPG design tends to echo the more recent XCOM games, where you can and should take guaranteed rolls, and the tension comes from the limited number of opportunities (read: ability uses) where you can force a good roll, or the difficulty of setting a situation that will create a good roll (as in flanking, et al)
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Jan 19, 2017 16:11
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Ettin posted:Just remembered the Inverse World spiritual sequel I released last year had a Harambe joke in it so I went and edited it out. Doing my part to make 2017 a better year If only the developers of Borderlands 2 were as diligent.
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Jan 20, 2017 03:29
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Meanwhile the Overwatch devs had to be like "please make less porn". Making the Overwatch characters the way they are, then asking the audience to please not make (as much?) porn of it seems ... counterproductive
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Jan 20, 2017 09:36
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Is there a preferred/particularly good PDF reader for Windows?
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Jan 25, 2017 11:37
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Siivola posted:I use Sumatra PDF. It's pretty barebones but it's light and reads files. AlphaDog posted:Yeah, this. It displays the file and has a search function and has tabs. Don't know what else people want from a pdf reader but that's all I ever need. Thanks fam, this is exactly what I needed.
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Jan 25, 2017 13:32
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It occurs to me that one way to heighten the divide between Cowboys and the Program in Delta Green is to rip a page straight from the headlines: The Program has had a gag order put on it. The briefings are being channeled through this new Cell that filters it for "political review". A number of databases have gone dark, and Green Boxes are being shut down, their contents confiscated. And now, your handler is reaching out to you, but through an "Alt" account. What do you do?
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Jan 26, 2017 12:27
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Ratpick posted:I recently blogged about taking cues from the current administration for your games, would also fit in well with Delta Green: http://fuckyeahdnd.tumblr.com/post/156390433272/steal-this-campaign-idea I like this one too: quote:It’s Dungeons & Dragons but every time the DM says bee everyone rolls a save versus death.
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Jan 26, 2017 13:14
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That Old Tree posted:The only proper way to play TES tabletop is to precisely replicate the Daggerfall engine on paper. It already used dice notations for much of its random numbers, many of which are laid out plainly in giant tables in an old out of print third-party guide. I remember writing an email to Scorpia, a columnist on the Computer Gaming World magazine, about what the heck "1d8" meant as a damage number on weapons while playing Might and Magic 7, because I had zero exposure to that kind of notation before.
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Jan 27, 2017 03:37
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I think it'd be cool to have an explicit "Plot Armor" sign at your table as you progress through a campaign. Like, you're traipsing through a dungeon at level 1, and you have a Plot Armor sign up, meaning no matter how badly the players gently caress up, the rest of the universe just gets worse, but the players can't explicitly die. Until they get to a critical point in the dungeon, where you take it down and all bets are off. Conversely, you can put it up for a villain so that the players know that the best they can do is to foil their plans, but not kill them. Unless they go through a particular "side quest", or perform the "main quest" so well, that it's only fitting to take it off.
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Jan 27, 2017 14:56
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Yawgmoth posted:I like a good many anime series but NGE is basically the D&D of anime. It's a pile of garbage that's been sitting in a particularly stagnant and sun-baked area but everyone gets recommended it because it was popular. D&D... is bad?
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Jan 28, 2017 02:44
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https://twitter.com/LotFP/status/825608453200674816 On the one hand, Zak S and James Raggi. On the other hand, the ACLU. Alternatively, C-SPAM is having its own ACLU donation-tracker: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3807854 https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/825910639654744065
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Jan 30, 2017 09:26
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Siivola posted:For all his failings, Raggi's stable includes cool & good people like Ken Hite. Qelong is pretty neat a setting if you're into (quite literal!) fantasy loving Vietnam. This I will agree on. Qelong is cool and good (and strong, and my friend).
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Jan 30, 2017 10:11
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I have a very specific thing I'm looking for: I'm dabbling in ordering POD books from DriveThruRPG, as I've discovered that shipping to here is quite reasonable. I just placed an order for Exemplars & Eidolons and Swords & Wizardry White Box. Is there a d20/3e clone that's POD-able that you could recommend? Iron Heroes, 13th Age, and FantasyCraft are all PDF-only, and Monte Cook's Arcana Evolved is waaaay too rich for my blood (34.95 for softcover B&W!)
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Feb 1, 2017 05:29
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Serf posted:*gazes out upon the blasted, cracked wasteland and the smog-choked skies. the shrieking and wailing of the damned is muffled by the thick haze of congealed despair and the only feature upon the desolate landscape is a titanic gold monument that simply reads: 2017* FWIW C-SPAM is helping me deal with 2017. You're nice person, Serf, and I hope your nihilism burns bright and vengeful always.
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Feb 4, 2017 05:54
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If I had any programming skill at all I'd troll people by making a fully functional PF CRPG And then only put Dreamscarred classes in it 
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Feb 5, 2017 07:57
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Lisa Stevens being able to keep Paizo afloat despite the presence of Dancey makes her smart. I guess the other option would have been to not have Dancey in your employ at all, but there you are.
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Feb 5, 2017 09:13
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It's kind of incredible how much of a gently caress up PFO was. The game is tailor made for the staid, procedural interpretation of a computer game. Like, wasn't there someone that made a roguelike based on the OGL?
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Feb 6, 2017 06:39
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It's my understanding that the Numenera video game is going to use a modified version of the Eternity engine - the main draw is going to be that it's going to be in the Numenera setting. From a "faithful to the source material" perspective, it really seems like a lot of these games are hamstrung by the need to ... not be turn-based. D&D Online and Neverwinter Online are both only paying lip service to the mechanics, and even the Infinity Engine games and the Neverwinter Nights games are on this pausable-real-time thingamajigger which only gets it mostly right because even if they're getting the rounds and turns right, they're still not operating on a grid. Temple of Elemental Evil got it right, so did the Gold Box games, but besides that, it's really slim pickings. Which is a shame because something built like, say, the Avadon: The Black Fortress games could be a faithful recreation of the rules, be fairly cheap in art assets, and still be an engaging game.
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Feb 6, 2017 10:19
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Arivia posted:Edit: also it should be noted that DDO is a very faithful translation of 3e. It's impenetrable to new users because it requires builds and all the usual 3e stuff. Doesn't the number scaling in DDO go up to eclipsing the tabletop's math by a couple degrees of magnitude?
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Feb 6, 2017 11:41
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So which politician has come out to say that they play RPGs?
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Feb 6, 2017 18:38
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Yawgmoth posted:Looks like Myth Weavers blew up their data and lost all of the character sheets stored on their site. According to their twitter it looks like July 25th is the last date of any real backup. But forums posts are totally safe! Some people really just don't want to come and face facts with 2017.
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Feb 7, 2017 08:53
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SunAndSpring posted:So, which of those PbtA games are any good? I've played Dungeon World (wasn't very good, would rather have just played D&D 4e), and a small amount of Broken World (ok, but unfinished and clearly a first effort). Not interested in Monsterhearts, that's not my thing. You should probably start at Apocalypse World period. A lot of the concepts that make PBTA work sometimes aren't captured in the spin-off hacks, but are in AW. Dungeon World, for example, arguably has a weakness in that it tries to adopt D&D sacred cows way too much for their own sake, rather than being a "fantasy dungeon crawler" of its own accord using PBTA mechanics.
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Feb 8, 2017 18:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Spirit of '77. The latter doesn't get nearly enough love around here. I kinda like Spirit of 77, but as a foreigner born in the late 80s, my only cultural reference to that zeitgeist was the Starsky & Hutch remake, and so I couldn't really get into the spirit (ha!) of things.
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Feb 8, 2017 18:52
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The hosts of the I Don't Even Own a Television podcast had a point about wrestling in that while it's so easy to write-off wrestling as "it's all fake, it's all staged", once you get past all that, it's just like any other storytelling medium, and it can be drat good at what it does. Like, we can have a plot of the underdog having to outsmart, outflank and outmaneuver their much bigger, much stronger opponent, with peaks and troughs in the fight as the protagonist suffers setbacks, comebacks, pulling out all the stops, and so on, and it's no less valid to see it play out in, say, Samurai Jack as it is in wrestling.
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Feb 9, 2017 15:09
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drrockso20 posted:(I still have no idea how anyone can enjoy that format) It's basically bottom of the barrel gameplay when you don't have any other choice. Shoot, I'd like to play a game over Telegram, but I don't know how to pitch that to people.
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Feb 10, 2017 12:18
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Rockopolis posted:Like, actual Morse-code style telegraphy? No as in the instant-messenging app.
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Feb 10, 2017 13:34
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Reene posted:I have the weirdest urge after reading this page to run a game that involves punching lots of nazis. The gaming industry could really tap into some serious cultural zeitgeist by releasing a bunch of antifa media right about now. Like, even a rerelease of the earlier Call of Duty games could probably sell well.
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Feb 11, 2017 16:28
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Plutonis posted:This disingenous 'can't believe I'm agreeing with him' crap is staring to annoy me after the fifth time. 2017 makes strange bedfellows of us all
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Feb 12, 2017 10:02
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For Heist movies I'd like to throw in PBTA-hack Daylight Robbery Grant Howitt's One Last Job was one of the very first Heist RPGs I'd ever heard about, though I've not played it.
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Feb 13, 2017 01:46
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Nuns with Guns posted:It was a blatant attempt to court endorsements from people Mearls clearly deemed relevant and worthy of respect, which was gross and awful, but honestly I don't think it had the results Mearls wanted at all. The attempted hype about 5e being the edition to unite all warring factions died on arrival The impression I got was that Mearls was maybe trying to prevent these people from mobilizing their respective fanbases into anti-5e partisans, given how violently they were able to turn against 4e, even after Mearls already tried to remake 4e into a 3e-alike with Essentials.
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Feb 13, 2017 02:49
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MonsterEnvy posted:Facebook friends does not appear to be the case anymore. I have not looked in super deep detail however. I'm not really sure what the point of this exercise is. If people want to play 5e despite its "connections" to lovely people, I don't get the utility of trying to establish that either these people aren't poo poo, or that these connections are either not real or are instead only very tenuous. Like, the entire point of the prior conversations is that "people probably shouldn't be so openly hostile to other people trying to play elfgames just because it's not the ""right"" elfgame". If we already commit to doing that, then trying to "disprove" claims about RPGPundit and Zak S's relevance to 5e itself becomes irrelevant.
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Feb 13, 2017 03:40
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MonsterEnvy posted:Most of the 3e problems are gone from my experience. I've been trying to avoid jumping into this conversation because it's just more "bagging on 5e", but come the gently caress on MonsterEnvy, this is just alternative facts level of denial. 5e is a badly designed game. The saving throw system is a loving sham. Each ability score is its own saving throw, and classes are generally "proficient" at two of them. Except the vast majority of spells target either the Dexterity save, the Constitution save, or the Wisdom save, which means if you the Fighter are proficient in Strength and Constitution, or you the Bard are proficient in Dexterity and Charisma, then the Strength and Charisma saves are largely useless because you never get to use them. It's like they really wanted to keep using Reflex (Dexterity) saves, Fortitude (Constitution) saves and Will (Wisdom) saves, but couldn't because they needed to be different, and then having already committed to tying it to the ability scores, they must have thought, gently caress it, let's include the other three as well! So you've got a Fighter that has good saving throws in Fortitude/Constitution and, quelle surprise, bad saving throws in Reflex/Dexterity and Will/Wisdom saves! Just like in 3e! But you have three other numbers that you have to keep track of anyway! The combat mechanics are a step backwards. We're back to a gentleman's agreement between the DM and the Player to please not have all the Orcs run past the Fighter after he's used his one Opportunity Attack. They've only just recently begun making a dent in this with the Unearthed Arcana articles, but taking the Knight archetype (if your DM allows it) means you get to miss out on the interactivity of a Battlemaster's Superiority Dice anyway. The healing mechanics are a step backwards. Clerics are back to spending Standard Actions to play healbot, and the tight, logical interaction of Healing Surges with the intra-day encounter mechanics was just entirely taken out. Credit to 5e for a lack of solid crafting rules so that you don't have to worry about the players making Wands of Cure Light Wounds anymore, but even the Healing Hit Dice design makes just about zero sense: it's always the rough equivalent of your health, and gaining more levels only means you get finer control over when and how you get to spend it. At level 1, you have 8 HP, and you have a single 1d8 Healing Hit Dice. At level 5, you have 8 + 4d8 HP, and 5d8 Healing Hit Dice. It doesn't give you more longevity, but it doesn't really get any better either - you just waste less of it as each Die starts representing a progressively smaller proportion of your health. Which brings me to my next point that Mearls does not have a single innovative bone in his body. The Healing Hit Dice is a direct rip-off of Reserve Points from Iron Heroes, except worse, because these Healing Hit Dice in 5e are rolled, so a level 1 Bard with 8 HP can't choose to restore just the 4 HP now and the 4 HP later. And Iron Heroes's Reserve Points itself was lifted out of 3e's Unearthed Arcana. The simplification of the Vancian spell system so that slots are no longer tied to spells? Yet another copy-paste from Unearthed Arcana, page 153. They still haven't meaningfully iterated upon the feat system, where Lucky is competing with Sentinel is competing with Tavern Brawler is competing with loving Linguist. They're still running on a system of 5-foot squares and measurements, despite telling people that you can totally run the game gridless. The damage/health ratios are a complete step backwards, where you've got level 1 characters with 8-12 HP fighting goblins that still deal 1d6 damage on a hit. The naturalistic language makes a total mess of trying to run the game "RAW", because there's just so much of it that you either have to fill in yourself or else it doesn't make any sense. Unarmed Attacks had to go through at least two different sets of errata, and woe betide the player that thinks Bonus Action means "an Action, but another one as a bonus" And that's not even covering the entire swathes of the DMG that were just copy-pasted from earlier books, the equipment list that has you spending individual copper coins on pieces of loving chalk when you start with 100 GP, the Unearthed Arcana where they couldn't be bothered to fix a math mistake from over a decade ago, and all the "balance" issues like the book Ranger being a piece of poo poo, the Berserker Barbarian being a piece of poo poo, and the entire goddamned dynamic of casters still being strictly superior to martial classes. ... Now, like Ferrinus said, it's not really hard to "bolt on" whatever pieces of homebrewed design you want to in an attempt to fix these issues. Set the confusing naturalistic language in stone, per your interpretation, for your home game. Copy over the Tome of Battle Maneuvers and give them to the Fighter. Limit the Wizard to only learning spells from scrolls that you as the DM deign to let them have. But if you're going to play armchair designer, you can download a copy of Basic Fantasy for free and use that instead. Won't cost you a dime. And if you're a newcomer to the genre, it's downright execrable to ask someone to play armchair designer by dead reckoning. How do they even know what the issues are that they need to fix, much less know how to fix them? And that, for me, is the core of my problem with 5th edition. I played it three separate times. The first resulted in a TPK. The second also in a TPK. Before I did the third I rolled up my shirtsleeves and redesigned the monster math from the ground up. Ran it again. Great session that time - an hour of medieval mystery to search for a stolen locket followed by a short dungeon crawl to clean out a Druid's grove of corrupting cultists. Finished on time, with a satisfying resolution, the players hurt and tense but not completely broken. After that I stopped - because if I needed to put in that much work to make it work, the designers weren't doing their drat jobs.
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Feb 13, 2017 08:57
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TRUMP YOU OLD BITCH MAKE THE TWEET EDIT: Um okay this isn't C-SPAM. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 13:53 on Feb 13, 2017 |
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Feb 13, 2017 13:50
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The supplements don't really add a lot of "mechanics" at all. Something like 90% of the Starvation Cheap book is about describing what it's like to be in the military, how to add authentic flavor to a milwank-centric campaign, and generation tables on how to create militaristic NPCs, military missions, battlefield random encounters, and some additional milwank weapons. There are mass combat rules, and maybe single-page simple rules on artillery fire, nuclear weapons and turn-by-turn resolution of an army's campaign progress in the game world, but the core of the game is still the same as in the book. It really just a cool simple game without any cruft, but if you want the cruft to have been written for you, you pick up the books, and it still doesn't add too much mechanical material. It's like if you were playing OD&D and you "supplemented" it by picking up a book on the Crusades so that you have a more detailed description of your town of Not-Antioch, rather than pulling something out of your rear end - you're still not adding a bunch of modifiers to an attack roll or adding lots of new classes, you just know that there are xxx number of NPCs in Masada of so-and-so level and equipment.
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Feb 13, 2017 16:12
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Just from a read of the material, I found SWN's character creation just a little too heavy for my taste, what with professions and skills, though I accept that that's a natural part of the demands of the subgenre/setting. I also found the depth and scope of the Tech Level system a bit too much, ranging from complete primitives to high-tech societies, though again, I know that that's part of the Traveller emulation that SWN does. I probably should try giving it a full run before passing judgement, though I did use the splatbooks to generate missions for Traveller.
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Feb 13, 2017 17:32
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On the topic of superhero games and OSR: get you an RPG that does both
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Feb 14, 2017 03:29
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I don't know that I like the distinction between First Aid and Medical. I mean, I get the difference between "patching up wounds" and "identifying bodies and remains", but naming the latter skill "Medical" implies that it's also, or just, Advanced First Aid. Maybe call it Forensics? Biology? That's the only thing that really stood out to me.
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Feb 15, 2017 14:11
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It looks like you want to run 13th Age. Would you like some help with that? / 
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Feb 16, 2017 03:18
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What keeps me from running 13th Age is the realization that there's actually a lot of rules that are just subtly different enough from d20 that I'd have to pay attention to a close read of the book. That's really more an  problem with myself than any failing of the book.
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Feb 16, 2017 04:45
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quote:The Vistani (singular: Vistana) are wanderers who live outside civilization, traveling about in horse-drawn, barrel-topped wagons called vardos, which they build themselves. Compared to Barovians they are flamboyant. Vistani dress in bright clothes, laugh often, arid drink heartily. As much as they feel at home in Strahd's dreary land, they know they can leave it whenever they please and aren't damned ro spend eternity there. Are you loving kidding me with this poo poo, WOTC. A vardo is the literal word used to describe the wagons used by the Romani! That's not even being subtle about it!
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Feb 16, 2017 06:47
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