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13th Age's Fighter is really, really fuckin boring no matter how it might have come about or what its design may be in response to. "Oh I rolled even on this attack that didn't hit, I get +2 to my AC for a turn, that's so fascinzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz."
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Jan 5, 2017 19:17
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Ewen Cluney posted:BESM: A game designed by a man who likes anime far more than he likes game design. The story goes that the way BESM 2E's system worked, 2d6 roll-under, that it basically led to combat in the game being the epitome of rocket tag where it was possible by trivially abusing its point-buy system to raise your defense super-high and dodge infinite attacks until someone effectively "rolled a crit" and splattered you across the walls like jam with their trivially overpowered attacks. Mark MacKinnon completely ignored each and every complaint about this until Dave Pulver sat him down and made him run through a 1v1 combat scenario with him. Of course later on MacKinnon would go on to stiff a bunch of people for the money he owed them, including George R.R. Martin, as well as stealing a bunch of Nobilis 2E books to flip on eBay, before vanishing into the Canadian wilderness
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Jan 7, 2017 04:50
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NorgLyle posted:If I had been sitting here waiting to reply I would have made a snarky comment about running off with people's money but other people responded seriously. That's what I get for doing things other than sitting on the forums for hours at a time. Yeah I mean, nostalgia is a hell of a drug and all but BESM is basically just a generic point-buy game with a bunch of (not very good) anime art plastered all over it, there's a bunch of other games out there these days to scratch that particular itch, OVA immediately comes to mind. Probably the best things to come out of the BESM Tri-Stat days was when they tried turning Tri-Stat into a standalone generic system ala GURPS and started making genre/setting books for it, and they put out a cyberpunk sourcebook with some fairly stealable settings including one written by Jenna Moran, there was also the Uresia: Grave of Heaven setting by S. John Ross, and David Pulver had a vaguely Eclipse Phase-ian Before Eclipse Phase setting book called Centauri Knights.
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Jan 7, 2017 07:17
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To be fair that was hardly the only thing of hers he stole. I wasn't kidding about the backstock Nobilis 2E books vanishing mysteriously, it's one reason why that edition became hard to find except for copies that would regularly pop up on eBay from time to time.
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Jan 7, 2017 09:24
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Godbound is pretty fuckin legit and unlike Exalted 3E actually exists as more than a pdf.
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Jan 17, 2017 04:07
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Yeah I'm not a big OSR buff myself, but Kevin Crawford's output is the exception for me in part because it's clear he's actually trying to break out into interesting new mechanical ground within the framework of OD&D, like how he handles damage in Godbound and Scarlet Tide, and also because he isn't trying to regurgitate the same Ye Olde Gygaxiane elfdwarf fantasy sandbox that there are already too many examples of to count. Plus he's one of the most courteous and conscientious RPG creators out there, dude's super pleasant and loves answering questions about why he did things a certain way and he's never been late on a single Kickstarter.
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Jan 17, 2017 05:35
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Sure seems like you just described a descending AC system there The main difference between what people generally envision when it comes to D&D-esque descending AC is that there's no THAC0, or maybe another way to put it is that THAC0 is fixed for everybody so all you ever have to worry about is "do I hit or beat 20, y/n?" Also there's no such thing as negative AC, the lowest you can go is 0.
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Jan 17, 2017 09:53
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There's always Haven: City of Violence 
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Jan 18, 2017 02:32
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Simian_Prime posted:I'm also not feeling the hype for SotDL. So far it just looks like "grimdark D&D with a better rule set." I have to agree. I checked it out based on all the enthusiastic responses it seemed to be getting here and wasn't incredibly impressed with my admittedly brief look through the corebook. My admittedly extremely shallow sniff test for a D&D-alike is "how rad does the Fighter-equivalent" look and the SotDL Fighter didn't look very rad to me, so oh well.
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Jan 18, 2017 23:41
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gradenko_2000 posted:isn't D&D with a better rule set kind of the point? I mean there's a convincing argument that 13th Age is "D&D with a better rule set" but I still find it pretty dull tbh.
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Jan 19, 2017 00:20
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Man, I'm used to games where the GM doesn't even bother to hide stuff like monster stats because it's quicker and easier to just let the players go "okay I need to roll 7 or higher, nailed it, they take X damage" and keep things moving briskly. I'm not like morally opposed to keeping information hidden or anything but a lot of the time it feels pretty pointless, especially with dice rolls and stuff. I'm also not a huge fan of the oft-cited "randomly make a nothing roll whenever the PCs do something and make thoughtful noises about it in order to keep them paranoid" business either, which seems to be something that always gets brought up whenever hidden rolls do, like if you want to talk about poo poo that'll bog a game down nothing does it faster than pretend-rolls to "keep the players guessing" that does, in fact, keep them guessing to the point that it derails whatever was going on. Admittedly I'm not, and never have been, a big "immersion" person, so a lot of the stuff that always gets touted as more immersive always strikes me as pointless fetishism.
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Jan 19, 2017 11:01
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Doodmons posted: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. Stories that boil down to "one time I rolled really good/bad" are the TRPG equivalent of "man I had the weirdest dream last night, lemme tell you all about it." Also dice rolling should be for when the outcome is uncertain and interesting, I agree. "Everybody keep making skill rolls until one of you fails WHOOPS you all died" isn't very interesting though, is the problem.
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Jan 19, 2017 20:51
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At long last, hyperintelligent gorilla fetishists have achieved the mainstream recognition they deserve.
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Jan 20, 2017 11:54
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Generic gruff white military soldier-man who's too old for this poo poo: totally a fetish.
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Jan 20, 2017 11:57
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2016 marked the beginning of Blizzard's complete global takeover of all video games when years of painstaking research and focus testing revealed that overwhelming numbers of gamers turned out to have a fetish for attractive ladies with butts.
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Jan 20, 2017 12:00
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Terrible Opinions posted:Fine you're right fetish was a poor choice of words. Blatant sex object is more fitting. Compared to the, lemme do some quick math here, four quadrillion video games out there that actually feature blatantly pandering sexualized (almost entirely female) characters Overwatch doesn't even enter the top zillion. Given what I've seen of World of Warcraft's lady armors I'd say Overwatch may be one of Blizzard's less pandering games, the exception being Widowmaker aka Chris Metzen's corruption fetish given form. unseenlibrarian posted:"Buff dude who only ever wears half a shirt: Fetish." Hanzo is designed to appeal to people with a fetish for never going anywhere near the payload.
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Jan 20, 2017 12:13
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SunAndSpring posted:How are the FFG Star Wars games? I'm thinking of playing some space opera games and I'm leaning towards Stars Without Number but would probably be able to get more players if I use a familiar setting. Solid, workable, but it shows through the cracks that it was originally built to be a system for Warhammer Fantasy 3E so certain aspects of it don't exactly line up 1-1 with what a lot of people envision in a more "narrative" style Star Wars RPG, like the fact that Stormtroopers are actually potentially quite lethal and the way PCs weather that is through repeated use of healing drugs like something out of Fallout. It's also got something of a gear porn emphasis and yet money seems oddly tight. I mean overall it seems to be a perfectly enjoyable system and I'll actually take the opposite stance from dwarf74 and say that I prefer games that are up-front with GMs about needing to be ready to come up with interesting consequences every time you roll because GMs should be prepped to do that or else they shouldn't be making you roll in the first place. Something to note, which may be a selling point for you depending on your tastes in Star Wars, is that force users explicitly lean towards the original trilogy end of things rather than the prequel side, so it's less telekinetic super-swordsmen slamming people around with force blasts and scattering people by the dozens and more, well, the sort of thing you see in the OT.
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Jan 21, 2017 06:42
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Hive has a travel version that knocks the size down some.
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Jan 22, 2017 01:11
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Plutonis posted:Weird albino elves aren't sexy at all. You're just not trying hard enough.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:47
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Plutonis posted:I'm being sincere here for weeks. No sorry, I meant that with sufficient effort you can find anything sexy. It's like exercising, you've gotta put in the effort to see the dividends.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:06
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Ratpick posted:What games are there that actually have some manner of rules for character death beyond "roll up another character, you're dead Gary"? Off the top of my head later Dungeon World based games began including unique effects that happened upon a character's death based on their class/playbook, Tenra Bansho Zero has strictly codified rules for character death in that characters are only able to die if players themselves tick a box saying "yeah I can die now" which then goes on to provide various effects, and Keith Baker's card-based RPG Phoenix: Dawn Command is about characters who can die and be reborn multiple times, gaining power as they do so.
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Jan 27, 2017 10:52
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Evil Mastermind posted:Apparently it's still a thing? But without Ryan Dancey's bold, visionary marketing genius it has no possible hope of succeeding, of course. Speaking of which what is nerdgaming's greatest huckster up to these days?
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Feb 4, 2017 05:06
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Nuns with Guns posted:He's back at Alderac for some reason lol, and they don't even own L5R anymore. Ryan Dancey's gonna have to find a way to gently caress up Love Letter instead.
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Feb 4, 2017 05:31
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Mr.Misfit posted:Do we really need another Zybourne Clock? On the one hand Pathfinder Online actually made it to something approximating a playable stage. On the other hand it took over two million dollars for PFO to become a failure while Zybourne Clock managed to fail for free.
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Feb 4, 2017 10:57
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I legitimately can't remember if it's ever been stated anywhere, was the idea of doing a Pathfinder MMO Lisa Stevens' or Dancey's? Because I wonder if Stevens isn't kicking herself at missing a chance to jump on the isometric CRPG revival that's happened in the years since what with Pillars of Eternity, Tyranny, the upcoming Numenera game, Wasteland 2, etc, and now she's stuck trying to spin poo poo into gold because if she simply washed her hands of the whole affair it would cause the suckers who bought into it to revolt.
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Feb 5, 2017 08:06
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ProfessorCirno posted:Leeching off old friends and overblowing his own ability to accomplish things is sorta Dancey's MO. He's a con-man. Yeah I was gonna say, if the idea was that Goblinworks could be jettisoned if/when it failed spectacularly that doesn't seem to have worked out too well since now Stevens is the one holding the bag. People do still pay for the privilege of playing an alpha but I can't imagine it has much of a population.
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Feb 6, 2017 01:47
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Evil Mastermind posted:Have there actually been people who paid upwards of three figures for anything in PFO? I know there are people who bought in huge on the promise of owning their own imaginary inn, not just the $10,000 but like $5,000 pledge levels as well. The thing is that I don't know that there's been an ongoing effort to milk those whales for much more beyond the $15/month subscription fee, so I genuinely have no idea what Lisa Stevens plans to do since all the money Dancey bilked people out of years ago has to be long gone by now.
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Feb 6, 2017 03:34
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The Harebrained Shadowrun games have their flaws but they're still some of the better CRPGs to come out in recent days and they go on sale all the time, if you haven't picked them up I'd recommend them. You can skip Returns and just go straight into Dragonfall and/or Hong Kong. Their Battletech tactics game is also looking like it's shaping up to be pretty decent too. In theory Paradox owning the World of Darkness means that a WoD computer game is in the works, theoretically.
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Feb 6, 2017 10:41
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gradenko_2000 posted:Some people really just don't want to come and face facts with 2017. Reading the postmortem apparently it's even worse than just a random fuckup, it looks like they lost the data because the guy monkeying with the code did something that erased everything and hadn't vetted the backups in six months under the assumption that they were in working order. Apparently some 200,000 character sheets were lost, which given the focus of the site is kind of a big deal.
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Feb 7, 2017 08:59
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Cassa posted:Hopefully there's a way to recover them because holy poo poo. To my understanding there isn't, the siterunners are basically writing it off because there aren't any backups, period. He didn't make any before he started futzing with the database and the thing that was supposed to be automatically backing up the files, well, wasn't.
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Feb 7, 2017 10:10
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MonsterEnvy posted:No it just kind of seems like you are really stubborn. Because I don't get the poo poo that went down about it. People have repeatedly explained it in detail. Maybe you don't like their explanations, maybe you don't really care, but this whole "no I'm not seeing it, you should continue to hold my hand and walk me through it in ever-elaborate explanations to my satisfaction" shtick is really fuckin insufferable no matter what people are arguing about.
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Feb 13, 2017 05:59
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Marvel Heroic I appreciate for its simplicity but the same time the mechanics mostly boil down to throwing handfuls of dice and shrugging which bugs me. I wish there was a little more think in the mechanics. This is my big problem with Marvel Heroic after participating in a somewhat houseruled game of Exalted using it for I want to say the better part of a year...it managed to be simultaneously rules-light and offputtingly opaque at the same time. The resolution system has you stepping dice up and down, breaking larger dice into two slightly smaller ones, assigning some dice to beating a target number and some to establishing potency on an independent axis, and it's frustratingly unintuitive whether you should, for example, keep a 1d10 in your pool or use an ability to break it down into 2d8 instead. The answer to that one, btw, is that if you're concerned more about succeeding then breaking larger dice into smaller ones will give you a statistically higher probability of being able to stack up a larger Success Number at the cost of lowering your potential potency since you have fewer large dice to assign to that part of things, but also rolling more dice means you have more chances to roll 1's which get taken out of your pool and give the GM extra badguy points so maybe it's not a good idea? Stuff like this is why I eventually decided that as lightweight as it was in practice to just chuck dice and go "oh okay, I guess this thing happened" I didn't really feel like I was ever engaged with the system in a meaningful way so much as, well, throwing handfuls of dice and shrugging.
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Feb 14, 2017 04:49
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Countblanc posted:The "widely played" qualifier makes that one a toughie I was going to post something similar. Plenty of games out there are good for that sort of thing. Widely played ones? Not so much.
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Feb 24, 2017 00:23
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slap me and kiss me posted:Here's a broad question - what your opinions on high quality pre-made adventures (both actual adventures, and adventure components)? My opinion is that there aren't very many high quality pre-made adventures out there. Adventures and pregen characters are like two areas that almost all RPGs universally falter in imo.
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Feb 24, 2017 04:43
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slap me and kiss me posted:Does "not many" mean that you know of a few decent ones, or are you just hedging your bets and assuming that somewhere out there someone managed to put something together well? Everybody has nice things to say about the Great Pendragon Campaign though I've never actually played it myself. Umm...Madness at Gardmore Abbey was also supposed to be good. And from personal experiences One Shots for Unknown Armies 2E had at least two or three decent one-shots (and some that aren't so hot). Beyond that I'm legitimately struggling to think of any premade RPG adventure that I've played or read through that didn't seem dull or miserable.
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Feb 24, 2017 05:02
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Lightning Lord posted:Only assholes use adventures like that. They're a bunch of notes someone else wrote that you club into submission and use as best fits your group and their gaming style. The idea that adventures are straitjackets to be used out of the box as is or totally rejected has always been baffling to me. The RPG police aren't going to arrest you if you take Keep on the Borderlands and totally gently caress around with it. See everybody always says to just use published adventures like this but even the most creatively bankrupt nerd is capable of whipping some "go find the magic whatever" plot off the top of his head in five minutes and jamming a bunch of random encounters together which is about the level of quality of most published adventures, so why would you pay however much money someone's charging for the privilege of something you have to sit down and hammer into shape when you could have just cut out the middleman and saved that money for beer? The ideal selling point of published adventures has, in my mind, always been the notion that you would want to sit down and not have to gently caress with it, it just works out of the box with maybe some minimal tweaking for your group, not something you have to chop away at and fix all the holes and okay, now it kinda sorta works.
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Feb 24, 2017 06:01
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Jailbreak for Unknown Armies is probably the platonic ideal of the premade adventure in my mind because it's an entirely self-contained one-shot adventure with premade characters that don't suck, each with various goals and relationships to one another, and an enormous amount of built-in pressure...some people are playing escaped prisoners, some people are playing hostages, some people are playing innocent bystanders, everyone's stuck inside a single rural farmhouse while a massive hailstorm rages outside, and there's a single gun with five bullets. I've played in sessions of this where the supernatural weirdness angle (because it's Unknown Armies, so of course there's a supernatural weirdness angle) never even got touched on while the entire game played out as a tense thriller between the convicts and their increasingly agitated collection of hostages usually culminating with a brief spate of gunfire. You can absolutely pick it up and run it without needing to wrench it into some brand new shape, and it helps that Greg Stolze is a halfway decent writer and game designer. It's all of 18 pages long counting the character sheets and you can get it for free from the Atlas Games website.
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Feb 24, 2017 06:48
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Haystack posted:Let's not forget the Dracula Dossier here, folks. The Dracula Dossier is certainly an impressive feat and knowing Kennith Hite it's probably a fantastic read for the Venn diagram intersection of Bram Stoker fans, history buffs, and roleplayers, but I've yet to see or hear any actual play reports so I don't know anything about how it holds up as an actual adventure you'd run for a group.
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Feb 24, 2017 07:24
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The One-Shots compilation for Unknown Armies is also somewhat (in)famous for having an adventure that would probably be somewhat awkward to run these days. Fly to Heaven is another self-contained adventure featuring a cast of pregenerated characters trapped in a single location having to deal with a sudden and unexpected threat...namely they're all on a passenger airliner when a terrorist hijacker takes control of the plane and threatens to fly it into the Sears Tower. Of course Fly to Heaven was written and published in 1999, so they had no way of knowing that in two years' time the idea of terrorist hijackings to fly planes into buildings would go from a sudden plot twist in an RPG adventure into a thing people were watching happen on the news at home. There's a lot about the adventure that simply wouldn't work very well these days in the aftermath of 9/11 even if you take the stance that it's been long enough to not weird people out by playing out something similar at the dinner table, like the general idea that the passengers of an airline hijacking would largely remain cowed because hey, all this guy wants is some money and a chance to demand some prisoners get released, we'll just hunker down and ride it out. On the other hand parts of the adventure are like retroactive black comedy as the primary antagonist's attempt to brute-force his way into the Invisible Clergy as the archetype of The Terrorist involves making up a scary-sounding foreign name and choosing "Apu al Sayid" because all he could think of was The Simpsons, but he knows Americans can't tell one dark-skinned guy with a funny name from another so gently caress it, who cares.
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Feb 24, 2017 08:07
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Antivehicular posted:The shame of it is that Fly to Heaven is one of the better UA adventures and is largely unrunnable by pure coincidence. As alluded to earlier, some of the UA canned modules in One Shots and Weep are really bad, and To Go is pretty marginal ("hey, UA PCs, which of these uninteresting and/or unlikable NPCs dio you want to give cosmic power? None of the above? Tooooo baaaaaad"). Yeah, To Go is perhaps the biggest disappointment out of the lot because the fundamental premise is a really good one...go on a roadtrip across America to collect the fragments of cosmic enlightenment capable of sending someone up to one of the big seats, going from tracking down a hamburger ground out of a mystically-infused cow to getting tangled up in a cocaine smuggling operation, weighing in on a jury trial, sitting in on a high-stakes poker game in Vegas presided over by an Avatar of the Merchant...but it all builds up to an incredibly unsatisfying Human Revolution-esque "choose which of the three endings you want" resolution which is perhaps the single biggest cardinal sin an RPG adventure can make in my opinion and why so many of them suck. It especially sticks out because while Unknown Armies has always had a substantial cast of named NPCs in the background it's never really been the sort of game where players are expected to be spear-carriers while two NPCs duke it out in the spotlight, plus To Go was the only major long-form campaign ever made for the game, so for it to wind up the way it did with the ultimate reward being to choose which of three forgettable (or unlikable) NPCs got to place their hands on the steering wheel of the world was kind of a let-down.
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Feb 24, 2017 08:28
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