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Food Fight actually owns because it's a purely tutorial thing to lead you through the basics of combat while still doing a not that bad job at introducing the more comedic aspects of Shadowrun's assumed dystopian future. It lets you know right off the bat that Shadowrun's setting is the sort of place where a sudden violent shoot out at an even shittier version of a 7-11 is considered entirely ordinary and openly encourages the GM to describe the tofu-tots flying around or the miserable slurry of Freezee(tm) Drinks pooling for would-be robbers to slip and fall over. Shadowrun 5e changed it to be a lovely McDonalds complete with trademarked fave "pick'ls" and a variety of appliances to used, whether it's vats of frying oils to spill out onto the floor (or dunk people in), or an electric grill that can be hacked and hotwired to fry others. And this time, you're the one hitting IT up. There's even an assortment if misery around to make things even more frantic, whether it's the recently divorced dad trying to drown himself in over-salted soy fries while his hyped on sugar substitutes and saturated fats daughter runs around screaming, the frantic college student who Just Needs To Pass This One Test and has a knife "just in case," or the guy who comes every week wanting to roll the place and has never had the guts to do so, potentially until now. Look, it beats the endless versions of the Straylight Job that most cyberpunk ends up becoming.
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Jan 8, 2017 23:21
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Ominous Jazz posted:I'm always leery of world war 2 games because there seems to be a lot of dudes who are REALLY into the nazis This is precisely why I avoid the hell out of Star Wars games that want you to start off as the Imperials, because it turns out that's the favorite game of some people for some unfathomable reason
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Jan 11, 2017 20:22
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Countblanc posted:The HvA ratios were skewed heavily toward Alliance until they added a race more people wanted to gently caress to Horde Horde populations also plummeted to even lower numbers then previous two expansion later because of their insistence on removing whatever moral grey area existed and turning them into lovely baddies. Turns out most people don't like being the stormtroopers.
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Jan 11, 2017 22:25
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The true terror of the stereotypical cyberpunk setting is how fast and how many people would simply accept its dystopia.
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Jan 11, 2017 22:26
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"Whoops I got stuck in this fantasy world!" became such a prolific and garbage idea across light novels that it was literally banned from writing competitions in Japan
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Jan 13, 2017 09:32
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Maxwell Lord posted:I've been toying around with doing something that would basically just be Saints Row: The TRPG. Make everything as insanely over the top as possible, you're shooting bazookas at rival drug farms and battling gangs of masked wrestlers and wannabe Draculas, etc. At this point you're basically playing Shadowrun.
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Jan 18, 2017 04:04
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Everything is rolled in the open, only roll when there's a chance for an interesting success or failure. If the chance for failure wouldn't be interesting, why even bother? I don't share monster defenses and HP, but that's at least in part because I don't think my players would actually pay attention to it; I basically have to be the one to keep track of their own stats as is. Players always describe the cool poo poo going on that they're involved in, be it successes or failures. I have a GM who insists on doing all the descriptions, which means players don't get to narrate their own kills, and it is goddamn insufferable. "Immersion" is a fetishistic obsession that should be cast out of the hobby.
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Jan 19, 2017 22:06
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Evangelion is bad.Slimnoid posted:Baccano! and Dennō Coil are both things I'd recommend as beautifully draw, well-constructed anime. I've heard some interesting things about Death Parade but I've yet to sit down and watch it. Jojo is just straight-up good fun with a lot of weird powers thrown in for good measure. Follow this advice (I know nothing about Death Parade though).
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Jan 27, 2017 23:29
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Like, the strength thing is a) a joke, and yet simultaniously b) how the actual D&D devs typically write their mechanics for doing physical deeds. I'm reminded of in-dev 5e where the level 20 slayer of the gods who crushed the world beneath his sandals also had a like 50/50 chance at best to climb up a rope. Or 3e, where it was so obviously asinine and bonkers that people started to claim that "no see real life human beings who are good at things are level 6" and actually believed it. In fact, glancing over at 3e's strength table, it actually does follow that loving joke until significantly higher levels of strength! Not that it's JUST D&D that suffers from this. Game designers in general horrifically underestimate what normal-rear end humans are physically capable of.
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Jan 30, 2017 02:55
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AlphaDog posted:Strapping your sword to your wrist so you can throw a spear* and then quickly grab your sword before your opponent can react. Moving that fast? Sounds like a wizard who cast haste on himself.
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Jan 30, 2017 22:51
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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* 
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Feb 3, 2017 22:48
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I've legit never "clicked" with gnomes and I've never known where to really put them. Outside of 4e gnomes, they have the least traction and the fewest hooks to really utilize.
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Feb 4, 2017 03:17
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Leeching off old friends and overblowing his own ability to accomplish things is sorta Dancey's MO. He's a con-man. The funniest thing about PFO to me is how much Stevens tried to split Goblinworks away from Paizo and make it it's own thing, only to be left holding on to it and all it's shadiness once Dancey bailed.
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Feb 5, 2017 22:56
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Mearls himself is plenty of a shitbag in of itself, but he's also friends with Zak who is indeed a prolific and serial harasser and stalker, and yes, harassed one much beloved goon out of the industry entirely over made up and incredibly petty reasons; it just so happens, coincidentally that nearly all his targets are trans folk or women. Pundit himself is a far right-wing lunatic who regularly praises nazis, and while he to my knowledge was not involved in that specific bout of harassment and stalking, has had more then his fair share of harassment put to his name. I will not buy a product that involved them. Period. If you want to? Sure, whatever. You're all grown ups, you can make your own decision. I'm not organizing some grand boycott, and hell, I think 5e is a bad game so I wasn't going to buy it anyways. But the fact remains - Mearls actively went after those two and put their names in the book. So gently caress no, I'm not having anything to do with that game.
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Feb 13, 2017 05:36
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gently caress off. Your desperate "defend 5e at all costs!" schtick wore thin months ago. Fact remains - Mearls actively decided toxic shitlords should be a part of 5e's creation process, and not only defended them, but outright assisted one of them in their harassment. That's the 5e legacy as far as I'm concerned. And yeah, unsurprising that you think a dude who's made it his goal to stalk and harass women and trans folk who even so much as disagree with him and who openly brags about how coercing those people out of the hobby "makes it stronger" is "nothing special." After all, his name is in the 5e credits! He CAN'T have done anything bad!
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Feb 13, 2017 06:00
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One of these days I'll actually make that 13a homebrew I keep tossing around in my head.
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Feb 16, 2017 04:38
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P.d0t posted:What would you add/subtract/modify from 13th Age? Redesigns to some of the non-casters, but moreso then that, my own dumb class ideas that are like 90% based off of ToME classes
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Feb 16, 2017 05:33
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I mean, it more or less boils down to Swedish Dracula being completely unrestrained and being allowed to do whatever he so pleases with White Wolf, so the whole thing is turning into his vanity project. I don't imagine it'll be very successful, like, at all, but that literally doesn't matter because, again, this is almost purely a vanity project. So he grabs the EDGY poo poo STIRRER because he's loving Swedish Dracula and can't stop talking about how boring consentual sex is, and he grabs the LITERAL CHILD RAPIST because he was probably one of his heroes or something back in the day, and it continues not to actually matter to him because it's still all just one big insane vanity project. The incomprehensible thing is not how someone like him ended up hiring and defending Zak while gaslighting his victims, it's that Paradox signed off on this and continues to sign off on this.
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Feb 18, 2017 05:44
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Drone posted:Sure. I'm really interested in the game but on the other hand I'm also really bad at games that do Serious Roleplay, and it always seems like L5R is definitely one of those. L5R is as serious as you make it. I mean, yes - the core game books and everything tend to paint a very serious picture, but that isn't entirely reflected in the mechanics, and you can totally run it differently as you see fit. Just note that doing so might alter certain character priorities and make some schools better or worse then others, as a good amount of L5R balance is built into the setting rather then the rules. Courtiers will probably take a hit to their usefulness if you don't want there to be much or any court stuff, for example, and shugenja become way more powerful when they're no longer expected to uphold vague amounts of pacifism. Likewise, it becomes much easier to min/max bushi when they no longer need to worry about having a baseline of social skills.
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Feb 25, 2017 23:53
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Mr.Misfit posted:Right, I´m going to try my hand at this and come back later on to see how that works out. Simian_Prime posted:Goon-favorite podcast System Mastery did a pretty hilarious review of this game. Wasn't this the game that gave ability-modifiers for gender because Out of horrifying curiosity I looked it up, and as far as I can tell, it also doesn't exist anymore.
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Feb 26, 2017 12:37
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, but ironically made women better at combat?
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I'm going mostly off memory, but the big thing with Tolkein elves is that they cannot stop themselves. Once they've given an oath, or they make a passionate declaration, or they even just cared too much about something, it becomes an obsession for them. It doesn't matter what's in their way, and this is not in a rad or badass haha accomplish anything sense, but in the "they will eagerly murder their family on the spot" sort of way. Their "spirit" is also stronger then their actual body because they are not entirely physical beings, so you get stuff like elves literally dying because they were too emotional, or in the case of Feanor, who get so angry at their own approaching death that their body bursts into flames. After telling his sons, even though he knew that their mission would end in failure and misery, to hold true to their oaths.
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Mar 10, 2017 04:21
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Nuns with Guns posted:It's because modern D&D presumes undead are animated by negative energy, which is bad. I guess maybe because giving something life through the essential force of destruction is wrong on some level? I don't get why it'd work at all though. Positive energy is the energy of restoring life and healing, so you'd think it'd be way easier to animate corpses with it. Eberron even had the deathless creature type for the Undying Court, which were basically undead fueled by positive energy. Eberron actually answers this! Negative energy undead are self-sustaining. Negative energy feeds off of life, which is why it's evil, but it also keeps itself going. Fill a body with negative energy and it'll start moving around. Sure, it's immediate instinct is to kill all living creatures, but it's moving around on it's own. Vampires and liches are undead with free will! Sure, they again have to feed off of life, but they can do that on their own. Positive energy just isn't self-sustaining. It needs a steady stream of energy flowing into it. The Undying Court only exists because Aerenal is one big manifest zone - it's connected TO the plane of positive energy, so that poo poo is just pouring in...in limited amounts. So you can only have so many people on the Undying Court, because they'll run out of positive energy. House Vol, on the other hand, turned their best and brightest into vampires and liches, and sure, they gotta eat someone every so often, but there's no limit to how many of them can turn into vampires and liches. This is also why House Vol was so big on liches; they're the most efficient version of undead. They don't need blood, unlike vampires. They don't need anything. They can just exist literally forever, hermited away. Meanwhile the Undying Court exists, sure, but they can't leave their island, AND they need constant literal prayer to keep that energy flowing into them. Remember - in 3e and 4e, which are the two Eberron editions, just touching many kinds of undead hurts you. Just being AROUND some others hurts you, too. This is the argument about undead - negative energy is anti-life. It is always a bad thing to have around. Undead are basically powered by radioactive super-toxic waste, and you have to CREATE that waste (or bring it into this world) to make them. 4e liches damage you just by being in the area. That's not the mark of something cool and totally good to have around.
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Mar 11, 2017 23:28
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Brainiac Five posted:Cool, thanks for your opinion, I'd rather not trawl through EAS department pages to locate good sources from which to compile an understanding of the Muromachi period so I can run a game set in the Onin War via Fungeon World or whatever, in favor of indirectly paying a person to have done that work for me and also converted it into something playable, in case anyone thinks they're funny and wants to say "GURPS!" ARB is actually 100% correct though and this has long been a problem semi-plagueing L5R. "I want to run a samurai game" is close to meaningless because of how broad that is. Do you want high flying over the top swordplay action? Because that's going to be extremely different from a far more drama heavy Seven Samurai style game! Do you just want to be a cool duder with a katana in an otherwise standard fantasy setting? And what kind of samurai are we talking here anyways - are you anime as gently caress, wearing little armor and focusing entirely on your GLORIOUS FOLDED STEEL, or are you someone in armor, on horseback, with a bow and a spear? L5R's been plagued by it's on indecision and the rules have long been a hot mess trying to figure it out. You have shugenja which are supposed to be pacifist holy men and women but in practice end up being D&D wizards, you got a system heavy on lethality and meaningless death in a game advertising being a rad warrior who dies gloriously, it constantly tries to beat you over the head over the idea that you are just another dumb shmuck in a setting that is filled to the goddamn brim with rad heroes who do the impossible, and etc, etc.
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Mar 18, 2017 06:16
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Lightning Lord posted:All kinds of gaming suggestions are fine, I'll take a look at Sig. Right now it's mostly putting feelers out with friends. One guy says he likes the idea of Planescape but finds the Lady of Pain to be too close to an "unkillable DM pet NPC" for his liking so I thought I'd cook up something that only involves Sigil tangentially, or demonstrates the aspects of the city that have nothing to do with her. I'm even thinking of turning her into an urban legend that is the explanation for the disappearance of troublemakers, and why gods can't just gank Sigil that may or may not exist instead of a for sure existing being. Like, the establishment factions still use her as an excuse, people are still scared, there's lots of graffiti of her, the Dabus are still around and messing with them is a bad idea, etc. This is entirely bizarre. Lady of Pain is about as far away from a "DM pet NPC" as you can get. She never makes any moral judgements and never talks to anyone ever. She never even really interacts with anyone. She mostly just exists a) to be a source of more mystery, and b) to keep the setting actually working and keeping the various factions and such in line. People who get upset about an NPC being "unkillable" always has me looking at them warily. Especially when it's an NPC who mostly just exists to stop the shittiest kind of PC.
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Apr 14, 2017 23:36
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senrath posted:I mean, he is the human stretch goal. Plutonis posted:lfmao Barudak posted:I do not begrudge Chris Avellone saying what is necessary to pay the bills with yet another mediocre game in a genre that never worked right. If it's anything like previous kickstarters, there's only about a 50/50 chance he'll actually do the work he's hired to do, anyways.
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May 18, 2017 04:08
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LuiCypher posted:What work did he not do? He's zero for two on promised stretch goal novellas, and is more or less confirmed that he will never actually do them. If it was just the Pillars of Eternity, like...sure. You quit your job there, and there was probably at least a little internal drama with how THAT shook out, so fine. But when he also never did the Wasteland one, it starts looking a hell of a lot more like just sheer uncaring.
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May 18, 2017 21:39
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Greenwood is absolutely a weird pervert, which again isn't exactly an insult, but he gets creepy when he misreads the room, so to speak, and pushes poo poo too far from time to time. Evil Mastermind posted:How long do you think John Wick the game designer was super-smug about John Wick the movie? I would've thought the opposite - I could see him getting angry that something else "stole" his name, and now it's 1000% harder to google himself.
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May 22, 2017 21:44
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Shadowrun 4e had a plethora of legitimately AWFUL sourcebooks as part of their rebranding to be as non-punk as possible, but the most odious was probably War!, wherein they had a plot hook that involved going into Auschwitz to kill holocaust ghosts in order to retrieve a magical artifact which is literally an evil nazi doctor's scalpel.
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Jun 20, 2017 05:49
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Your periodic reminder that the Ennies are sketch as gently caress.
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Jul 4, 2017 22:28
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As I understand it, Meikyuu Kingdom literally uses redshirt peons as a resource for you to spend in dungeons.
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Jul 23, 2017 11:41
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Alternately one player is the adventuring party, and the others are the myriad of dungeon minions desperately trying to keep them out of their master's chamber. I know this also isn't what you're looking for, I just think it's a fun idea.
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Jul 23, 2017 23:02
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Reene posted:The multi-party thing sounds like it would make a better boardgame or cardgame than actual TTRPG to me. It could be a pretty neat deckbuilding game. Yeah, the idea of making one action per turn, not each CHARACTER going, had me think of card games. I'm thinking a vaguely competitive one, where it's the various players vs "THE DUNGEON," and whoever gets out with the most loot wins, and your party composition determines your deck. Maybe a few ways to screw over OR help other teams - jossling each other around until the LORD OF THE DUNGEON appears, and then everyone has to help chip in, as the LORD OF THE DUNGEON is too strong for any one single player.
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Jul 25, 2017 03:39
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Keep in mind when talking about Dancey that...you're talking about Dancey. The man has literally never once succeeded at anything and got by for years based entirely on nepotism. He's a con artist at best. I don't even know what he's doing in his post-Pathfinder Online failure life. Probably grifting someone new.
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Aug 9, 2017 21:02
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 They took him back? Nepotism strikes again. Glad to see he's a giant shitlord to boot.
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Aug 9, 2017 21:26
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LuiCypher posted:What did daddy do that enabled Ryan to do what he does? It wasn't that his family did anything - it's that he became a "big name" for creation D&D 3e and has clung to it ever since. Every job he's gotten since then, he's done so by leveraging "you know I helped create d20 and 3e!" Ryan Dancey is basically your clear example of someone who manages to continuously be put into decision making jobs despite his every decision inevitably ruining the company he works for, but gosh, he's so well known! Or at least was. The zero responses to everything he says isn't surprising. He's been running out of places to grift. I had kinda hoped he had finally finished burning through his good will with the horrendous failure that was Pathfinder Online - which he staked his name on personally - but apparently there was still enough to get re-hired at Alderac, where he worked in the 90's. But then, Alderac isn't exactly the champion of good business decisions.
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Aug 9, 2017 23:22
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I'm in a group that runs 3.x and Fragged Empires, with me DMing the latter. Most of the group is new to ttgs in general. I don't have the physical book so I've mostly used print outs and just told them how stuff works. So far, I'm finding they're learning it and sticking to it a lot easier then 3.x; the way the character sheets are organized is perfect (page 1 non-combat, page 2 combat, page 3 reference sheet), and looking stuff up is, as has been mentioned, practically what the game book was designed for. While it's not entirely easy to learn how everything in the game works just by reading it, god it makes teaching others and generally running the game so much faster and simpler. That there's an actual straight up reference pdf with all the "lists" for gear or ships or traits just means leveling up is a snap.
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Aug 10, 2017 22:25
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Harrow posted:I think gear looks complicated, but actually isn't that bad. Wade Dyer tends to use a lot of shorthand with mechanics, so the lists look really complex or like there are a ton of different things you need to know, but once you get a handle on the abbreviations it's pretty simple. Yeah. gear looks complex because it's all tied to Resources and because there's so many options and mods to stick on things, and it's all presented in list format, but once you realize how few of those various options actually apply to your gun, it gets way easier. There's big lists for gun variants and chemical variants and shell variants and all that...and you're pretty much only going to be using one of those. quote:I've been interested to read people's experiences playing/running Fragged Empire, because I'm going to start a game of that at the end of the month. I feel like I have a pretty good grasp of it, but I'm curious what to expect from how it actually plays out. We have a thread you can ask questions at if this next bit doesn't help! So, as I basically only own pdfs for everything now, I wanted to make some real life props (sorta, I'm busy with life and also lazy) to help out. What I did was, for each of the eight species, I printed out their "main" picture and one page details (you know, the stuff from the start of the book) and stapled them together, then printed out the full species right up and put it in a manila folder underneath. It's kinda goofy, but I felt presenting the picture first, then one page write up, was a good intro to each of the species, and if they were interested, they could grab the folder to flip through it. I went over the stats, told them what each was for pretty broadly ("Strength is for using big heavy armor, big heavy weapons, and punching real hard. Reflexes is for hiding in stealth and dodging attacks. Focus is mostly used for sniping."), as well as how high stats could be used in non-combat situations. Same with skills - most were self explanatory, though there's always questions about what falls under which social skills (like Intimidate being under Leadership). After that, I ran sort of a tutorial mission. We went through the free Ghost Ship Carthage adventure with a bit afterwards where they had to escape from a space station and steal a ship on their way out (thus giving them a ship), showcasing rules as I went - so first fight was theater of mind, second was full grid, for example. Likewise, their big escape scene on the ship I did theater of mind to ease them into rules gently as I could, and it ended with them on their ship in the Haven system in need of cash. Which, you know, is how a lot of Fragged Empire games begin! We actually did traits after the tutorial mission, because that's also where I told them they could change out any of their stats if they didn't like how they worked out. Way I have it set up, first three levels, if they don't like stuff, they can change it on demand. After that, it goes to Retros. My goal was for them to get some practice using the rules before diving into the deeper end of things, and to see how their characters worked with their stats and then letting them change stuff up if it wasn't satisfying. Likewise, gear was done half-way through, and not on the first day, since I didn't want to overload them with rules rules rules right off the bat. EDIT: rumble in the bunghole posted:Wait, Cirno's playing 3e? Never would have guessed. Wasn't my idea ;p. And you can carve a good game out of 3e, uh, sorta, though it's gonna be work for the DM, but hey - I ain't the one DMing that, and 3.x was his idea. My rule is no 5e. Not even for mechanical reasons, there.
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Aug 10, 2017 23:23
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Covok posted:Star Wars saga Edition suffers from the same problem that every edition of Star Wars role-playing games, except Fantasy Flight Star Wars role-playing game, has. Which is that Jedi are too loving powerful. Jedi are OP for the dumbest reasons, also. And in fact get progressively less powerful the longer the game goes on for that same dumb reason; if you actually play until level 20, jedi powers become hilariously useless and lovely.
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Aug 11, 2017 05:16
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Honestly, all the math breaks the gently caress down in SWSE eventually, and not in a 3.x way. They just hosed up the formula. In fact, it's OPPOSITE of 3.x, because SWSE's problem is that defense scales faster then offense. That said, SWSE does get kudos for actually understanding that archtypes are, like, a thing, and trying (and not always succeeding) to work on that. Like hey, almost nobody in Star Wars wears armor, but some people do, so the Soldier class has a talent they can choose to take that lets you benefit from using armor, and otherwise, you probably aren't using armor. That's an idea that mechanically didn't quite work out, but at least thematically, uh, existed. Meanwhile in FFG's Star Wars there's basically no reason not to wear the best armor you can get your grubby little mits on even if you are a Han Solo type.
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Aug 11, 2017 05:41
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"Sage Advice" is literally an ongoing joke in D&D specifically because of Skip Williams. Nobody who paid actual attention to how the game works took it seriously. It was considered "noncanonical" to the game.
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Aug 11, 2017 23:47
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