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Yawgmoth posted:No. You never roll a dice. You roll a die. You roll more than one dice. This bugs the poo poo out of me. Funnily enough, the word dice (from Middle English "dyce" which came from Old French) was originally used as both singular and plural, although the plural form "dices" also existed in parallel. The word "die" is a later introduction and was originally used as a plural. It's only later through analogy that die became used as a singular and dice became accepted as the plural form. By analogy I mean that it just sort of makes sense that the form without a plural s sound at the end (die) became assumed to be the singular, while the one with the s sound at the end (dice) became assumed to be the plural. But yeah, in modern usage it's singular die, plural dice, if you want to be pedantical about it.
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Jan 5, 2017 15:52
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Someone on tumblr posted a way back about using Strike! for Mass Effect. I have to admit that I'm not familiar with the series myself, but as far as I understand they're essentially sci-fi RPGs with some cover-based shooting, so it does not seem that far-fetched an idea. You could probably even hack the emotional attributes system in some way to make a Paragon/Renegade system. Maybe? I don't know.
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Jan 12, 2017 09:19
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Brother Entropy posted:yeah the cover + positioning stuff of strike could actually be a real good fit for how mass effect 2 and 3 play It's in the core book, but it's an optional rule. I think the example given was using it for a Sanity system, but one of the Kits (the moneybags kit) used it for Greed. Of course it'd have to be hacked so that it's not a single scale but a continuum, but I could see it working.
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Jan 12, 2017 09:33
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Brother Entropy posted:the whole 'stop becoming a PC or lose the skill at 6' is a little extreme for paragon/renegade though. i'm actually getting kinda interested in running a mass effect strike game now, if anyone's got any other ideas of how to do paragon/renegade stuff(or if it's really even necessary) i'm all ears Oh, definitely, that'd have to be the first to go. In general I'm not a fan of any kind of emotional attribute system where at some point you lose agency over your character: V:tM's Humanity comes to mind, but Burning Wheel also has it for Dwarves, Elves and Orcs (although there it's a much slower process and much better tied with the rest of the game's mechanics). But yeah, the Paragon and Renegade stuff might be completely unnecessary to the game, and even though it works in a single player experience like a CRPG it might be jarring to have a party with multiple different Paragon/Renegade scores across the board.
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Jan 12, 2017 11:46
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remusclaw posted:The recent posts have given me an idea on using flanking in d20 while using somewhat more abstract positioning such as range bands or even full theatre of the mind. A dumb idea I had with regards to flanking in abstract combat a long while back was to make flanking rely on outnumbering the enemy and then giving other means to setting up a flank. So a Fighter and a Rogue can't set up a flank while fighting against ten goblins unless they work for it through making appropriate skill checks. Rogues would have the ability to make the appropriate skill checks as a Minor Action while for other characters it'd be a Move Action, meaning that on a round which they started already engaged with the enemy they would potentially be able to try setting up a flank twice in case they happened to fail their first attempt. Fighters and other defendery characters would act as a number of combatants equal to 1+their level for the purposes of flanking and outnumbering enemies.
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Jan 16, 2017 10:29
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Glorantha has always seemed like the coolest setting to me, but I have absolutely no interest in playing any version of BRP. HeroQuest seems pretty alright though. The one thing that keeps me away from Glorantha even more than finding a proper system to run it with is that there's simply so much of it. While all the stuff I've heard about it sounds cool the problem is that it's a setting built with a ton of anthropological detail and history and it's been around for more than twenty years now, and that poo poo adds up. It almost feels like if I were to get into Glorantha it would require a huge emotional investment just to get a clear view of what the setting is actually about and what grabs me about it. And that's really a shame, because even though when I run homebrew settings they tend to be very bare and sort of lifeless because I only prep the absolute minimum I need to run a game. While this is good for the sort of off-the-cuff adventuring I like to run, at times I do crave a bit more verisimillitude in my settings (and just to make it clear, I'm not using the word in the understandably reviled "Fighters shouldn't be able to do cool things!" sense but in the sense of having an internally consistent and organic setting). And since everyone's talking Kevin Crawford now, his sourcebook An Echo, Resounding may be just the thing I've been looking for: while it's really about domain management and warfare it also has advice for using the tools presented to prep a borderlands area where different polities compete for power and resources. I think going forward I'm going to prep my campaigns using it and use the domain rules to run background events in the game to make the setting feel a bit more organic instead of everything staying the same since campaign day 1.
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Jan 17, 2017 08:31
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Mathematically speaking Kevin Crawford's system is exactly the same as THAC0 and in his very earliest works you basically get a single target number given for monsters which is basically THAC0 but never called out as such. His method of expressing attack rolls ("Okay, you have this number, and if you roll that number with all of your bonuses taken into account and you add your enemy's AC to the roll THEN you hit the enemy!") is THAC0 but being all coy about it and not actually saying it. But that poo poo's alright because not only do I have a tolerance for dumb old mechanics but also his method of expressing it is the most straightforward I've ever seen in an OSR RPG (e: that still insists on using descending AC). I mean, it's still dumb as poo poo IMO, but I understand where Crawford's coming from with regards to deciding to use descending AC: he started off writing supplements for Labyrinth Lord and pretty much all of his later stuff has been written with the idea of maintaining compatibility with his earlier stuff. I can forgive him that one design quirk based on the fact that all of his stuff is otherwise really solid. Also, I hope I don't come off as too harsh towards descending AC: while I personally prefer simple target number AC where higher is better I kind of actually love descending AC as part of the greater aesthetic of old-school D&D. Even though I could easily convert to ascending AC when running old-school games I usually just go "You know what, we're playing this older edition, let's just take all the dumb poo poo that comes with because it's just part of the experience." Except for Thieves, seriously, gently caress Thieves.
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Jan 17, 2017 10:29
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Having run RPGs for kids (ages 7 and 8 mostly) I can say that while I agree with what you're saying (i.e. parents forcing their niche hobby on kids is weird and bad) at the same time playing RPGs with kids can be very rewarding, with a couple of caveats. Firstly, 5 year-olds might be too young to really understand role-playing. RPGs require cooperation and 5-year-olds don't have a really well-developed sense of empathy yet, so they might not see the appeal. Even with 7 and 8-year-olds it was a struggle at times, but at least they showed potential for being willing to play nice. Secondly, I agree that you should never force it on kids: when I ran games for kids it was at after-school activities at an elementary school I worked in. Taking part in the game was never compulsory and at first I was lucky to get two, maybe three players, but after those couple of kids told everyone else about their adventures my games were suddenly packed. So, you know, kids can definitely see the appeal of getting to play pretend while rolling dice. Thirdly, D&D is probably the worst choice of game to offer should the kids be interested in actually playing. Not only is the genre of D&D something that is completely alien to most kids these days (seriously, it might've flown in the 80s when everyone was into crappy swords and sorcery films, but that poo poo just doesn't fly today) it's way too mechanical and has too many moving parts. Thankfully there's a lot of child-friendly games on the market these days: my best run was with Astraterra, a Finnish adventure RPG meant for kids, which is simple enough for most kids to understand but has a bit more optional crunch if you want to introduce a bit more complexity. Also, it has a lot of stuff that (in my experience) kids want in RPGs built in, including rules for getting pets and teaching them tricks, because what kid doesn't want a pet dragon or something? For reference, I'm also a non-parent who's probably never going to get kids (I'm quite happy with my dumb cat) but I think kids are actually kind of cool.
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Jan 17, 2017 13:54
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Something in the Kickstarter thread made me start thinking about stuff, namely using GM screens to hide your rolls and it made me think about my own experiences and how I personally do it. Like, I've gamed with GMs who insisted on rolling absolutely everything behind the screen, including attack rolls and damage, because they felt it was better for immersion. Personally I'm not a fan of this approach: part of it has to do with the fact that I actually enjoy rolling the dice myself and I think actually getting to engage with the actual mechanics of the game (both as a player and a GM) is the best part of the game, not to mention that this approach really doesn't work in games where players have the ability to trigger rerolls or otherwise manipulate their rolls. Not only this, but playing with this style feels like I always need to be reminding the GM of all the various abilities I have on my character sheet: "Did you remember to add +1 because I'm fighting goblins? And +2 because I'm in my goblin-slaying stance? And +3 because it's Tuesday?" Not only that but I just don't like hiding my rolls from players at all. None of my rolls. Even stuff like surprise rolls, wandering monster checks, and so on. I won't always telegraph right away what the roll is for, but I feel it's only fair that my players actually see me rolling the dice in front of them, and rolling stuff like monster attacks and damage in front of them reinforces the feeling that we're playing by the same rules and I'm not fudging things either in their favor or against them. I know some people rail against letting players roll stuff like Perception checks and stuff to notice things because it leads to metagaming. Personally, though, I think rolling to see if you see a thing is the worst example of the sort of need to codify everything into the rules that leads to lovely games, but in addition to that rolling stuff like that in secret from the players leads to a whole new kind of metagaming ("Okay, we can't be sure if our failure to notice anything out of the ordinary in this room was on account of there being nothing out of the ordinary ordinary or the GM rolling badly on our Perception checks, so just to be sure let's search the room again in case we missed something.") which I feel is much worse for the flow of the game than "Well, I know I hosed up that Perception test so I might as well try again." I know this is a really bad example since I just railed against Perception checks. I haven't found a perfect answer to how stuff like that should be done, but my preferred approach has been to tell players exactly what they see, let them ask follow-up questions should something in particular about the scene interest them, and stuff like Perception or an elf's ability to detect secret doors or a dwarf's familiarity with construction just act as ways to give them information that's not plainly visible in the scene. For an example, I might describe to the players a room with a bookcase. If one of my players plainly asks me "Is one of the books actually not a real book but a switch that opens a secret door?" I'll tell them "Well, now that you look at it, yeah, it is." If there was an elf in the group upon describing the bookcase I'd ask them to roll to detect secret doors and were they to succeed tell them "Oh, and the elf notices a draft coming from the direction of the bookcase, there's clearly a secret door behind it." Or if it was the dwarf who made the test, it'd be "There's something distinctly strange about the architecture of the room, the placement of the bookcase clearly clashes with your sense of dwarven feng shui, almost as if it'd been placed there simply to hide something." I know it's not a perfect approach, but it's been good enough for me. What's everyone else's preferred approach to players rolling vs. GMs rolling, and keeping rolls hidden vs. rolling in the open?
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Jan 19, 2017 10:35
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gradenko_2000 posted: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. Kai Tave posted: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. Yeah, same here. I tend to be really transparent about what players need to roll. "Roll to hit. Did you hit an AC of 7? Good, roll for damage." I tend to run systems that have fixed difficulties instead of sliding DCs these days, so even outside of combat it's as simple as "Roll under Strength," or something, so my players immediately see if they failed or not. It's been a long while since I've used a system that has sliding difficulties, but were I to do so again I'd also make sure to telegraph the difficulties to my players before they roll. But also the consequences of a failure or a success.
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Jan 19, 2017 11:17
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This does remind me of one time I had a GM hide the mechanics from us (in part) to great effect: while playing a Delta Green scenario our GM kept track of our Sanity scores instead of allowing us to keep track of them. However, the particular scenario had the idea that the more Sanity the characters lost the more vivid hallucinations and supernatural effects the characters began to experience. Since we were playing according to all the stupidest horror movie tropes we spent quite a lot of the time split up, which meant that we as players didn't know whether the supernatural poo poo we were seeing was actually real or just the consequence of our characters going crazy. That was actually the one and only horror game I've played in that was actually, seriously scary to me, and I can say that horror might be the one genre where I would actually be down for keeping some of the mechanics hidden, because horror itself relies on the fear of the unknown. But were a GM to pull similar poo poo with hit points in D&D would be some bullshit like in that one dumb Jurassic Park FPS where you didn't have a health bar but had to check your character's body to see how badly hosed up you were.
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Jan 19, 2017 11:40
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Doodmons posted:To specifically talk about your Perception check topic, I'm not an enormous fan of describing the room and requiring the players to, for example, specifically check the bookcase to find the secret door. What I don't want to end up happening is the classic A4 page of standard operating procedures for entering a new room that the players just go down because it's the best way to ensure they safely find everything. I like immersion in my games, but I've seen people on the internet make fun of people who say 'I roll a Perception check' and I think that's dumb because to me that indicates the person is not that interested in searching the place and wants to move on. These are all really good points and I do understand that having players meticulously describe the procedure of looking for secret doors eventually becomes stale. I actually agree with you but I think it's a testament to how bad my example was that I didn't get my point across entirely. Basically, if my players describe that they do a thing, then they do the thing. The character who describes inspecting the bookshelf to see if one of the books is actually an opening mechanism for a secret door, then they do it. However, even if they don't have a specific clue as to what they're looking for, they can always fall back on the dice. To be honest, my actual beef isn't with Perception checks, it's the use of Perception checks to gate off valuable information or parts of the adventure from the players. Like that one podcast from the D&D 5e playtest where the group spent multiple minutes stuck in a room because they couldn't succeed at the check to find the secret door, and they'd already explored all the other branches of the dungeon. That's dumb. But another type of bullshit is hiding information from players and making finding it reliant on a Perception check. If the characters are investigating a crime scene and you make finding each clue reliant on a Perception check you're just making a puzzle where the players have to roll the dice to see how many pieces they get, when the real challenge of a puzzle is putting all the pieces together. But yeah, as I said, the dice are always a fallback that the players have access to: I would never do dumb poo poo like "Well you didn't describe exactly how you were poking each floor tile with a ten foot pole or that you actually had your eyes open so of course you didn't notice the trap" to my players. I like to think that I telegraph my traps pretty well (if there have, thus far, been no carpets on the floor in the dungeon, the sudden appearance of a carpet on the floor is a pretty good sign that something, whether a pit trap or a secret door, is hidden under it) and most of the time my players can just say "Yeah, okay, we avoid the obviously placed trap," but even when they fail to notice me signaling traps to them I assume that their characters are smart enough to always be on the lookout for traps, which basically gives them a last chance roll to see if they notice the trap right before they trigger it. Anyway, that litmus test of yours is really good and it's something that I should actually keep in mind more often. A lot of the time we just skip to the "roll the dice" part of action resolution before we've even thought about whether the thing merits a roll and what the actual consequences of success and failure are. e: Pope Guilty posted:Fudging rolls isn't always a bad thing, unless you've agreed to play some kind of hard simulationist thing and it would ruin the integrity of the whatever. Like, back in the day when my friends and I still played D&D 3e I'd be constantly fudging rolls for my friends to make sure they survived the first couple of levels, because making new characters in that game was a pain in the rear end. Since then I've realized that I'd rather run something like 4e (less swingy and deadly at low levels) or Basic D&D (much less complex so creating a new character is quick) because I don't have to fudge rolls in either to get a desireable experience (although those two systems lead to very different experiences). Ratpick fucked around with this message at 14:49 on Jan 19, 2017 |
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Jan 19, 2017 14:39
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Helical Nightmares posted:I want to hear more about this "domain management" system Crawford came up with. I've only given Stars Without Number a cursory read, but it seems very similar: Domains have Wealth, Military and Social scores. Locations a Domain controls increase these stats: for an example, having access to a gold mine would give you +2 Wealth, while a Town within your Domain will give you +2 Wealth and Social in addition to modifiers unique to each Town (like, a town with a proud military tradition might give +2 Military and so on). You also have Ruins, which also give a stat bonus to a Domain that controls them (for an example, a Ruin which used to be the seat of the king who ruled all these lands might give you +2 Social, because being able to control it is a pretty convincing way to add legitimacy to your rule). Before Domains can tap Resources or Ruins they have to resolve whatever issues they might have: the assumption is that Domains have already resolved whatever issue there is with a given location that lies within their borders at the beginning of the campaign, but should they wish to expand their borders into other locations they must first resolve whatever issue there is at that location. Each issue also has a set of tags that determine what stat is used to resolve that issue, and some types of issues even require special units to resolve. For an example, a tribe of goblinods squatting in a mine would have to be resolved with a Military test, and so on. It's also openly stated that not every issue on the campaign map needs to be resolved through Domain play: with the assumption being that players start as low level characters beneath the notice of Domains, it's entirely possible that the players resolve these issues through simple play. If the PCs go into the aforementioned mine and drive off the goblins its issue would now be resolved and whichever Domain happens to have it within their borders would now be able to make use of it. Apparently the idea is that the GM use the Domain system to add organic background events to the campaign world which the players can react to, meaning that even before the PCs get to name level they already know at least something about what's going on in the world politically speaking. It also ties PCs into the Domain Management and Mass Combat systems: once characters reach a certain level they start gaining Champion abilities on top of their normal class-based abilities, which actually make the PCs assets to whichever Domain they are loyal to. A Dwarf PC might give the Domain they are loyal to the Dwarf Friend asset, which allows for the recruitment of dwarven units, while a Cleric PC, simply by virtue of existing, will attract a bunch of pilgrims into the Domain they are loyal to and have them build a Shrine. It's cool.
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Jan 20, 2017 08:40
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lovely Chinese knockoffs are my fetish. That's why I play Paladins instead of Overwatch.
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Jan 20, 2017 12:20
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I'm shocked and apalled that a poster named Terrible Opinions is posting stuff like this.
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Jan 20, 2017 12:37
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I don't actually think your opinions are terrible. I just wanted to fit in. I'll get back to dumb and bad seriousposting now.
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Jan 20, 2017 12:41
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Countblanc posted:Paladins isn't lovely, you move around really fast like an old school shooter and ultimates don't actually feel like buttons you press to instantly win a team fight. It's actually a really good game. Yeah, I kid because I love. I actually really like Paladins though I have to admit that I haven't played it for a while now. Last time I tried to play it though it took ages to find a match. I'm not sure if it was just bad luck or if the game's userbase has dwindled here in Europe.
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Jan 21, 2017 09:49
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gradenko_2000 posted: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. 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 My dumb blog posted:Donald Trump makes good on his promise from his inauguration speech to unlock the mysteries of space. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Jan 26, 2017 |
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Jan 26, 2017 12:44
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Halloween Jack posted:With all due respect, please let my D&D game be 4 hours of the week when I am not constantly bombarded with new and horrible information about You Know Who. Yeah, you're right. I know it's easy for me to joke about what's going on in the States on account of not living there, but I can imagine it's rough having to actually live with what your administration is doing.
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Jan 26, 2017 19:56
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Yawgmoth posted:Rough is a word you could use to describe it. "Moist" is a word you could use to describe the Pacific ocean. Yeah, that was a major understatement on my part. "Really loving terrible" would've been more apt. I'm sorry, I really shouldn't make light of an administration that has already steamrolled on pretty much all climate legislation and is doing its utmost to suppress actual climate science, and is probably on the fast track to making life horrible for pretty much all minorities whether religious, ethnic or sexual.
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Jan 26, 2017 20:11
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Ominous Jazz posted:Things are bad, but you know what isn't? That's right mother fuckers I'm talking elves. My favorite elves are the Elf class from Basic D&D. I don't know why, but I goddamn love the fact that elves are a class even though it's so loving weird. It basically says that all elves in the implicit setting of Basic D&D are weird warrior mage dudes who kill you with a sword and then kill your friends with a fireball spell. I don't even really know what their culture is like in the official Basic D&D setting Mystara because I never delved too deep into it, but goddamn do I love them. Also at a high enough level they go and live in a forest and suddenly all the surrounding wildlife is like "Yeah, this elf is cool" and become their servants. And then at an even higher level some elf turns up in their forest kingdom and plants a magic tree from which the elves make goddamn solar-powered flying ships. Having said that, I recently bought Red Tide and while I don't like what it's setting does with the demihumans (they're all basically turned into "humans but they were changed into Dwarves/Elves/Halflings by a god/magic/whatever) it introduces an interesting variant for players of the Elf class called the Scion: I'm not going to delve into the setting details of the Scion, but basically they replace their standard Magic-User spells with wyrds, which are actually more akin to Warlock incantations from 3e in the way they work (i.e. they're essentially spell-like abilities but each wyrd has its own set of limitations as to how often it can be cast) but the wyrds are also really weird and cool, being more subtle manipulation of reality than overt stuff like fireballs. My favorite wyrd is Dream Logic: while it's in effect its targets perceive everything the character does as rational, reasonable, and justified, no matter how weird it is. You can even attack someone and while the victim can defend themselves they won't consider the attack a cause for umbrage. Already There is also cool: it allows the character to instantly teleport next to a living creature whom they've seen in the past half an hour, and all onlookers will instantly assume that the character has always been there with the target. It's cool enough to have made me consider that from now on whenever I run Basic D&D I'll just have all elves use the Scion rules to differentiate their magic from standard Magic-User spells. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 21:54 on Jan 26, 2017 |
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Jan 26, 2017 21:38
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Oh and just wanted to share this, it's really old but I only recently became aware of it when a friend linked it to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoBwKp_J9yg Basically, a bunch of kids told an epic fantasy tale together and then some grown-ups acted it out and it's basically like a D&D story but actually cool as hell.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:51
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rumble in the bunghole posted:Donald trump is going to push me down the stairs? Holy poo poo I didn't even realize I was making a reference to an old as hell thing from this very site.
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Jan 26, 2017 23:30
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What games are there that actually have some manner of rules for character death beyond "roll up another character, you're dead Gary"? I started thinking about this a while back because most traditional RPGs still have the idea that all fights are to the death and once you die you just roll up a new character. I know some games have qualifiers for character death (like "If you TPK the whole group it doesn't actually count for reals unless they were fighting a big baddy, but having the entire group beaten should carry some dramatic consequence") but I'm thinking more along the lines of games that actually prescribe in the rules what happens upon character death beyond having to roll up another character. Not necessarily even death, but codified consequences for what happens when you reach the point of critical existence failure where by the rules your character is taken out. Examples of the sort of stuff I'm looking for: being reduced to 0 hp (or whatever the equivalent) doesn't kill you, but instead gives you a permanent scar of some kind; your character dying meaning that you immediately come back as some kind of undead with appropriate drawbacks; being killed meaning that you must roll a new character, but your new character already starts with some benefit relative to our previous character's power level or achievement (alternative: if your character dies in a really dramatic manner that perfectly encapsulates what the character was about, the player's next character might start with dramatically better benefits). The reason I'm thinking about this stuff is that most RPGs are still based around what you might call challenge-based gameplay (i.e. the GM's role is largely one of setting up challenges and obstacles for the players to overcome) and death is almost always on the line in that sort of gameplay, but most games don't seem to consider the effects of death beyond having to scrap your character or waiting for the rest of the group to resurrect them.
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Jan 27, 2017 10:34
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Thanks for the responses. This is all good stuff, and I wouldn't mind seeing more if people can think of more examples. Another one that I was suddenly reminded of: Paranoia, which does have death but gives each player a number of clones, which essentially act as extra lives. The reason I'm asking this is that I'm thinking of finally writing one of my many heartbreaker ideas into an actual game. I really want the game to be geared towards the aforementioned challenge-based gameplay (because it's what I personally enjoy playing and running) but because "You died, roll up a new character" is the worst and most anticlimactic thing that can happen and completely breaks the momentum of the game I'm thinking of different possibilities of handling death (or defeat) in the game.
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Jan 27, 2017 14:13
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Rockopolis posted:Buddhist RPG where you can die all you like, but the goal of the game is to escape suffering and achieve Nirvana. CottonWolf posted:Is this a thing? I'd totally play a Buddhist mythology RPG with that premise. Buddhist myths are weird. Hell, same. I could actually see an RPG where reincarnation was an important mechanic being really cool.
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Jan 27, 2017 15:55
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I'm pretty sure some game has replaced health points with some manner of simply tracking specific injuries. Burning Wheel sort of has it, and Fate has consequences which you can take, but in Fate that's in addition to Stress which is a more traditional health track.
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Jan 27, 2017 16:19
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FactsAreUseless posted:I might be running a solo game (L5R) for someone soonish. I've never run a solo game, anyone have advice? I think it can work, but I'm not certain how I want to approach it. I've been running Basic D&D solo for a friend of mine, and it's been fun. Even though it's been a couple of sessions thus far, here's one really simple piece of advice: solo games should be much more player-driven. With a large group it's understandable to have more GM-driven adventures, because taking into consideration every player's wishes for where the game should go is hard. To ease prep I suggest simply asking your player where they want to go and what they want to do, and pretty much close each session with "What do you think you'll be doing next time?" so you can prep your next session as appropriate. One of the greatest benefits of solo games is that since you don't have to divide table time between multiple players you can use whatever messy subsystems that your game of choice has for different character types or activities even if in group play they would be really aggravating because they give certain characters inordinate amounts of attention during those activities. I'm not familiar with L5R, but I'm pretty sure it has at least one activity written in that gets inordinate amounts of page-space dedicated to it, and in a solo game you can go hog wild and use it without having to worry about the rest of your players falling asleep while you resolve that activity. (I would imagine that L5R would have some kind of an involved system for katanas-at-dawn iaijutsu duels.) And yeah, related to solo games being perfect for player-driven games, you can make the stakes more personal in a solo game. With a multi player group it's hard to keep the stakes personal for every character, because each character will have their own personal goals and desires, but in a solo game you only have one character's goals to worry about. e: Oh, and if L5R doesn't already have a system in place for a single character being able to stand up to multiple enemies at once by having damage overflow to multiple opponents at once or something, you should probably hack one in. In normal group-based games every player is bringing a separate attack to the table, but with a single character having to deal with each enemy separately with the possibility of whiffing each attack can easily lead to frustration. Plus, cool samurai dudes slashing multiple enemies in twain with a single stroke feels very in-genre to me. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 10:23 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 10:17
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Siivola posted:Also Vincent Baker wrote him a book about wizards' towers, that one's probably neat as well. I have said book and it's alright, I guess? It's a neat book for adding color to your adventures if you've already got a wizard's tower mapped out and such and you need help with coming up with hooks for who the wizard is, what kind of crazy magical experiments they have been working on, and what manner of guests they were entertaining at their tower before things went south (the book assumes that the wizard, for whatever reason, has become unable to keep their tower in order and that things have degraded to a situation where their experiments and creations are running around while the guests and servants of the tower are also somehow unable to leave). It also injects a bit of weird flavor into how magic works: spells themselves are plasmids, spiritual entities made out of the purest essence of magic, and the process of a Magic-User memorizing and casting spells is described as a process of trapping a plasmid in your mind and then releasing them into the world. It's also got great ideas for what kind of weird magic items and constructions you might find in a wizard's tower, like a portal to prehistoric earth which allows for astrally projecting to go and hang out with dinosaurs before they became extinct or something. e: What the book is specifically bad for is helping you with mapping and stocking your towers. Even the stats of the various monsters and NPCs to be found in the tower are left up to the DM and there's very little advice on the mechanical side of things. It's still an interesting read and I've gotten some good ideas out of it. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 10:37 on Jan 30, 2017 |
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Jan 30, 2017 10:33
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All this Pathfinder Online keeps reminding me of the fact that there hasn't been a good video game using a tabletop RPG licence in ages. I had high hopes for the latest D&D video game (Sword Coast Adventures or something?) but apparently that was a bug-riddled mess and also a bad game. The very idea of a co-op game where one player is sort of playing the DM appeals to me. Hell, an asymmetric MOBA where you have Team Heroes vs. Team Monsters where Team Monsters is a single player controlling a large amount of monsters using a more traditional RTS-style interface would be cool as hell IMO. There's that new Torment game based on Numenera, but I don't know how good it's supposed to be. One would hope that they took most of their Torment cues from the narrative and not from the mechanics and also that they didn't simply try and copypaste the mechanics of the tabletop RPG into a video game haphazardly.
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Feb 6, 2017 10:04
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Like many other posters here I'm eternally salty about the fact that we didn't get a turn-based tactical RPG in the style of X-Com during the D&D 4e era. It needn't have even been a 100% direct port of D&D 4e's rules into a video game, but a tactical RPG utilizing the trappings of 4e, like the four roles, every class having something to do beyond choosing "attack," and so on. The closest thing we've got to something like that is Card Hunter, which is actually pretty fun.
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Feb 6, 2017 10:31
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DDO also did that weird thing where, to match the level cap to something that people are actually used to in MMOs, they divided each level into 3 sub-levels or something, so between getting from level 1 to level 2 you'd actually get two minor incremental advances. Then of course 13th Age decided to do something similar but oddly enough 13th Age never got called out for being an MMO in tabletop form. Come to think of it, 13th Age could make for an interesting CRPG. Make it as aggressively by-the-numbers fantasy RPG as possible in the style of Dragon Age and the Infinity engine games without actually using any d20 mechanics, then make 13th Age's one unique thing that separates it from standard D&D, the icon system, the focus of the game, probably as some type of elaborate moral choice/faction system.
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Feb 6, 2017 11:58
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You know, I'm not that huge a WoD fan, but I wouldn't mind a Crusader Kings 2 DLC that adds Vampire: The Dark Ages stuff into the game. Does White Wolf still own Ars Magica? Because a grand strategy game about playing wizards in medieval Europe would be totally my poo poo.
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Feb 7, 2017 10:09
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P.d0t posted:I know you're talking about computer games and poo poo, but how copyrightable is the "d20+mods vs. TN" mechanic? It's not. As far as I understand it, game mechanics are not protected under copyright, but the specific presentation of those mechanics can be. There's nothing stopping you from writing a game with d20+modifiers vs. TN without using the OGL (to my knowledge both Shadow of the Demon Lord and Monte Cook's Cypher system are basically this), but then you get into weird stuff like the OGL being separate from the d20 System Trademark and I am not a lawyer
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Feb 7, 2017 11:21
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Simian_Prime posted:The premise of Werewolf is pretty much The Dumbest Thing, so it's not like they don't deserve each other. What, you think a bunch of ethnic caricatures with magical powers teaming up to fight a bunch of villains whose sole motivation seems to be to destroy the planet is dumb? Basically, what I'm trying to say is that Werewolf is supposed to be played as a grimdark Captain Planet and you're supposed to relish all the stupidity.
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Feb 8, 2017 10:10
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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. There's Fellowship which is a goon-made PbtA game that started out as a hack of Dungeon World but developed very much into its own thing. It's basically based on the structure of Lord of the Rings: a fellowship of the champions of the various peoples of the world go on a quest to stop a big bad evil guy. However, they can't just march to Mordor (unless they want to get their asses kicked); the best tactic for dealing with the Overlord is reclaiming the various sources of power in the world and using their power to weaken the bad guy until they feel they're ready to take them down. On the side they get to help the various peoples of the world deal with the Overlord's influence and thus gain more allies. On the player side, whichever playbook you choose you the player control all the lore about the people that playbook represents. So, the player of the Dwarf gets to determine what Dwarves are like in the setting, and if anyone around the table asks a question about the Dwarves then the Dwarf's player has final say about what is true. On the GM's side, well, the GM is called the Overlord, and they not only are the referee but also play the Overlord as a character, with rules for how the Overlord advances their plans and extends their influence in the world. It's a great game but some of its mechanics are significant departures from the traditional PbtA formula, so it requires a bit of getting used to.
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Feb 9, 2017 08:02
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I've been posting in the old-school D&D thread about the two B/X campaigns I've been running recently, one in real life for my actual friends, one online for a cool online dude I met through online RPG blogging years ago. I'm using Rules Cyclopedia for both games on account of it being easier on me to have all the rules available in one PDF, but I've decidedly kept some of the rules off the table (for an example, no skill rules at all and no weapons mastery for now; the latter I might introduce in some capacity later on), and for the latter I plugged in the Solo Heroes rules by Kevin Crawford so I don't actually have to specifically design encounters with one character in mind and can be safe in the knowledge that he can usually take on most encounters solo. What's been fun to me has been thinking about dungeon design in a way that works well for solo play, and as this happened to coincide with replaying Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past I've been trying to apply ideas from that game in a lot of places in my solo game, with regards to stuff like how to actually build interesting dungeons, how to make combat encounters that make use of the environment effectively. This has actually resulted in a lot of feedback into my other campaign, and it's made me realize that a lot of the lessons I've applied to my solo game apply equally well to standard group-based dungeon crawls. The most fun I've had has been with coming up with interesting magical items to throw at the players to allow for interesting ways to traverse the dungeon, essentially allowing for really elaborate ways of gating stuff off in the dungeon (for an example, the pile of boulders covering one tunnel which can only be cleared by a character who happens to have a potion of giant strength) besides the usual locked or stuck doors (which I've come to despise over the years). But all of this stuff has made me think about dungeon design in D&D in general and how many of the elements we take for granted in D&D dungeons actually have deliberate thought behind them. Like, how much of the stuff we see in traditional dungeon crawls has been deliberately placed with actual thought put into how its placement affects the flow of the dungeon, how players can traverse the dungeon and which paths are open and which are blocked to them. The few published dungeons I've played have been very much not like this, being essentially linear paths with maybe a side path or two, or alternately dungeons with multiple paths but all leading to the same end goal, each path being essentially linear. I understand that in a tabletop context chasing plot coupons to open new branches of the dungeon might not be very exciting, but people usually wrongly think of locked doors with matching keys immediately. I mean, sure, locked doors and keys are the most obvious method (and they allow for sequence-breaking the dungeon when you have a character who can pick locks, which I think is actually okay) but there's so much weird poo poo that the genre of D&D allows for that you can do, and the strength of the tabletop medium is that even though you might have one option presented to the players as the obvious solution (provided they're willing to explore) there are multiple approaches to each problem that the players can try: for an example, using the lens of true-seeing or whatever to see the illusory bridge that bridges the great big chasm. Even in this situation there's multiple ways to go around it: if the players are clever and assume that "no way would the GM put this great big chasm here unless there was some way to cross it" they might look around for illusory bridges, then use flour or sand or whatever to clearly mark the illusory bridge in the air, or if they're feeling particularly foolhardy have one of the characters jump over the chasm blindly hoping they succeed and then fix a zipline for the rest of the group to follow them, or something, I don't know. Hell, in the above example of my group cleverly sussing out that "Hey, this potion of giant strength we found in an ogre's lair when we took a side trek on the way to this dungeon might be the key to clearing out these rockcs" was not the only way they could've approached that: given enough time and work they could've cleared out the boulders together, the potion just made it so much quicker and meant they didn't have to deal with multiple wandering monsters. There's no real point to this, really. Video games rule and people should take more ideas from them while at the same time remembering that the limitations that exist in video games don't need to be applied to tabletop RPGs. Also I wish tabletop RPG designers put as much thought into designing dungeons as video game designers, I want more dungeons inspired by Metroidvanias and Zeldas damnit. Ratpick fucked around with this message at 11:17 on Feb 13, 2017 |
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Feb 13, 2017 11:01
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Speaking of OSR and PbP, I've been considering running a Labyrinth Lord game with the Solo Heroes rules here. Running a PbP game solo would do away with one of the main hurdles of PbP, i.e. being reliant on multiple people posting for the game to progress anywhere. Especially when combat breaks out PbP games tend to slow down to a crawl because you have to wait for each player to take their turn in order and that's when things usually start slowing down if people have different posting habits and times. Running a solo game would alleviate a lot of that, since even in combat it'd be a simple "I go, you go" affair. Hell, make it even more simple and just let the player know the Hit Dice and Armor Classes of each monster so they can resolve their turns on their own, just telling you which mob of enemies they attack, rolling to attack, and then telling how many enemies they killed with their attack.
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Feb 13, 2017 19:26
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It also gives Clerics spells starting at level 1 instead of making them wait until level 2, which I'm not sure how I feel about. On the other hand it gives Clerics something to do beyond turning undead at level 1, but Clerics are also graced with one of the quickest level progression schemes so they're bound to get their first spell pretty quickly. Also, there's a free edition of Labyrinth Lord available, and the Solo Heroes rules are also free and they can be found easily by googling Black Streams: Solo Heroes.
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Feb 13, 2017 19:44
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| # ¿ May 4, 2024 01:32 |
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I like Mutant Future but I have one major problem with it, namely the fact that the combat charts work exactly like in B/X. Monsters use their HD to determine how well they hit whereas PCs use their level. Vanilla Mutant Future generally has tougher starting characters so monsters generally have more hit dice as well. What this means is that monsters will generally hit the PCs really often at 1st level whereas PCs will whiff most of them time. Besides that, yeah, it's great, and I love the fact that it's pretty much 100% compatible with Labyrinth Lord and has rules for introducing mutants into LL so if I wanted to offer psychic plants as a character class in Labyrinth Lord I could.
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Feb 13, 2017 20:25
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