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LuiCypher posted:I gotta admit that they got game when it comes to Cthulhu Although I'm surprised it's that popular given that they call him Kuturufu.
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Jul 25, 2017 23:02
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Yawgmoth posted:I think your friend might actually hate you. Heh, well, I'm in the reverse position. Having to get ready to play in a 5e campaign, which I have very limited interest in, because a friend wants to DM for the first time and there's no easier system I could propose that has published adventures.
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Jul 26, 2017 14:10
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I've run 13th Age, and I didn't find it all that easy, in part because of the vagueness of skills and paratrooping Icon rolls. Haven't tried SotDL though.
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Jul 26, 2017 15:13
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Kwyndig posted:Is this real? Shut up and take my money : It appears to be. http://www.rpgnow.com/m/product/217037
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Jul 27, 2017 19:33
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Spotlight sharing conversations rarely if ever work anyway. Inevitably the result is that the loud player(s) will retreat at key moments to throw the quiet player into the spotlight like a deer in the headlights, and when he/she shows discomfort, let this be an implicit argument for the former status quo to return. The sad truth is that RPGs just aren't that great at letting players play personalities other than their own; they can only manage it in a few select cases.
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Aug 5, 2017 14:35
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Nuns with Guns posted:There's definitely middle ground between *player gets talked over and dragged along with other, less serious character's wacky antics at every turn* and *spotlight is thrown on quiet player by aggressive player in an uncomfortable attempt at balance* and I think it's worth exploring that for a solution that satisfies both people. Especially if you're producing a podcast for the entertainment of others. Of course, a quiet player can be perfectly fine with letting a loud player drive the plot and tagging along for the ride. In that case the GM might want to work with the group to find a tone and story that works to everyone's strengths. Well, the podcast matter is a whole other thing. I really don't like the idea of the Stream of Annihilation, as if WotC were claiming that the way people play for podcasts is equal to the experience a closed group will have at their own table. It becomes the reality TV version of RPGs and plenty of disappointed storage lot buyers will tell you it's not a good guide.. quote:I don't know if there's much RPGs can do to help a person with no experience take on another persona, other than suggesting that they play tons of games across multiple genres with a skilled GM. Or buying Acting One and learning the theories and principles of acting. Another problem I do notice is that GMs tend to throw "face" characters into unreasonable situations based on fictional portrayals of faces who have substantial authorial fiat. I've seen cases where a face player said, "Well, I can't really do anything about that.." and another player, or the GM, said "But what about <X> in <Y>?" And the answer of course is that the writer who wrote <X> got to write the other guy's response too, and had multiple drafts. It seems hard for some groups or DMs to accept that you're not going to get Coyote stories from players who have 30 seconds to come up with them and have to hedge their bets.
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Aug 5, 2017 16:01
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To be fair, a store that put Fate Core on a shelf would risk having to deal with an irate customer saying they were cheated by being sold something that is free online.
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Aug 9, 2017 20:26
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Oh god, that Pathfinder Online thread reminded me of the same social honor system crap that plagued Castle Marrach back when... Wait, it couldn't... Oh god. Marrach is still up. Even with those "get Acrobat Reader" buttons from years ago on their site..
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Aug 10, 2017 14:32
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This is a really good point - you're damned either way. If the new system is as complex as DnD/PF, it's too much trouble to learn. If it isn't, it must be a weak fudgey system.
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Aug 10, 2017 15:17
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I'm pretty sure Burning Sands was killed by the decision to dump a bunch of card designs from Five Rings into it without play testing them in the new system. Blacksmith anyone?
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Aug 10, 2017 17:20
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Chuubo is hugely confusing for everyone. Honestly I think part of the issue is that you spend a while learning a new system then find it's just as broken as the old one. That happened in our group with EotE. And it creates burn out really quick.
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Aug 10, 2017 19:02
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Cassa posted:Why is it bad handwavium for the skill guy to use his skills to punch above his weight and take out evil speedster? Because 90%.. No, wait, 100% of RPG systems I've seen don't have very good integration of the skills system with combat. Even if they use the same numbers, any ability to use non-combat skills in combat is 100% handwavium, and that becomes a nightmare in a points buy game as the GM is torn between what makes sense and the fact that in most such games skills are explicitly mundane and have a lower points cost that powers. Honestly, Delivery Boy Man becomes the perfect example of why superhero tropes have a terrible time of integrating with RP.
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Aug 11, 2017 13:53
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Yawgmoth posted:Tell me this story (here or skype whatever) because I've not heard it and Skip Williams is like #3 on my "game devs I'd like to bludgeon with a cosh" list. After a bit of Googling it seems that there was a massive flamewar on the D&D forums involving Skip Williams over whether or not Sorcerers could use the Quicken Spell feat. Skip interpretation: The rules say that a Sorcerer takes a full action to cast a metamagic spell. A Quickened spell is a metamagic spell regardless of what effect that metamagic has, so it takes a full round to cast, overriding Quicken. Other interpretation: The rules say that a Sorcerer takes a full action to cast a metamagic spell that would normally take a standard action to cast. Quicken Spell states that a spell can be cast as a free action if it would otherwise cast in a full round or less. So there are two interpretations: * A quickened spell would "normally" take a free action to cast (not a standard action) so the full action modification does not apply and the spell can be cast as a free action. * The spell would "normally", without Quicken, take a standard action to cast. Then the sorcerer's modification makes it a full action, but this does not prevent Quicken working because Quicken still works on full round spells. So Quicken then makes it a free action. This apparently took up 5 threads on the D&D forums and ended with the originator of the argument getting banned at the same time Skip was laid off. hyphz fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Aug 11, 2017 |
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Aug 11, 2017 20:04
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Strike has Miss tokens which aren't really fail forward but have a similar effect.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:14
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Unknown Armies has damage on a miss for PCs and NPCs if they're using knives. It is meant to make them scary and it works.
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Aug 11, 2017 20:57
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Hostile V posted:Taking into account what I just said and all of the other stupid, stupid rules-based shenanigans I've ever seen in a d20 product, that bolded sentence is still the dumbest thing I have ever read in regards to mechanical balance in elfgames. I can.. vaguely see an argument there? Like, "in a game in which teleportation is available but has a cost, the details of mundane travel must not be handwaved, because if they are it becomes mechanically equivalent to teleportation but without the cost?" It's a really silly way of putting it though.
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Aug 12, 2017 17:24
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Oh, ok. It seems there that his argument is not so much "driving a car is overpowered compared to magic" but that "mages have to be much more powerful in modern settings than fantasy ones, because things that require magic in fantasy settings can be done relatively easily with technology in modern ones."
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Aug 12, 2017 20:40
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Kwyndig posted:Or the fact that even if mages can't use technology, there's usually nothing stopping them from getting someone else to just drive the loving car. I don't think it's "mages can't use technology", it's that a spell that lets you move really fast is a lot less valuable in a world where cars are available than in ones where they are not. Of course, he seems to make a silent assumption that mages have to be more powerful than anyone else. As compared to Unknown Armies where it says "yea, magic is kinda weak compared to guns, but who the heck is going to persuade the cops that they were attacked with magic?"
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Aug 13, 2017 01:11
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drrockso20 posted:Neat My Jedi gets in a drinking contest.
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Aug 16, 2017 20:55
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Antivehicular posted:Oh, sure. I'm not saying that the PCs have to have a Pyrrhic victory -- if they can successfully get to the end of To Go, they're definitely in a position to get what they want and get away clean. I'm just saying that, if the module's justification for not letting the PCs grab the Cosmic Football is "everyone in the Occult Underground will stab them if they do/only someone with a lot of institutional backing can get this and survive," well, it's still a better and more UA-y story to let them get their moment of power and suffer for it than to have them yield that power to an NPC. I think it was simpler than that - just that the "prize" for ascending is losing your PC, and exploring the world after their ascension will leave that one player either sitting out or with a ridiculous advantage.
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Aug 17, 2017 14:55
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So is Starfinder any good? Or bad in any hilarious ways?
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Aug 17, 2017 16:16
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DalaranJ posted:I'd love to read a F&F of this, but presumably it would be pretty tedious to write. It wouldn't necessarily be tedious, but I'm not sure it'd be that funny, because apart from the railroading it's actually quite good.
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Aug 18, 2017 20:13
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Halloween Jack posted:oriongates did one! Are we talking about WLD or To Go here? I tried to run WLD once and it broke down after about the 20th goblin fight.
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Aug 18, 2017 20:36
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Please tell me that was a raid. If not, well, ugh. It's not just the fetishy stuff, it's that even ignoring it BitC is a terrible adventure. The plot and framing are weak, the integration of traps makes no sense, it rips off Willy Wonka but removes all the aspects that gave it even Carroll-style logic, has blatant player manipulation to encourage more nonsensical traps, and the final boss is a random encounter.
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Aug 19, 2017 12:37
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Nuns with Guns posted:Freeform/fandom RPing has always been a thing, but separated from tabletop RPGs. Have there been more attempts at integration or adapting RPGs into freeform spaces? I've never understood those. 90% of them seem to break down within a few posts or weeks at most, yet people hammer away at them.
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Aug 20, 2017 18:11
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Andrast posted:Sounds like a typical pbp experience to me That's what's so odd. There's whole fora of freeform RPs that never get beyond intros with anime pictures or starters, yet the same people start them over and over. Nobody ever says "hey guys, this isn't working". What are they looking for/hoping for?
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Aug 20, 2017 18:34
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Yawgmoth posted:They want to RP their mary sue being the extra special awesome main character of the universe and have everyone else fawn over how amazing and wonderful they are Oh god, memories of Second Life freeform role players. Which is exactly the same except one or all of the people involved are paying $195/month for hosting the zone. GOMO and drama everywhere.
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Aug 20, 2017 18:46
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Arivia posted:Yeah, it's not great. But it is sadly an integral part of the original material Blood in the Chocolate is parodying, and not touching on that would be really weird. Blood in the Chocolate isn't a parody - or if it is, it's not at all funny. It could have almost worked if it was, but then most of the iffy material would have to be taken out. Furthermore, doing a dark parody of a Roald Dahl story is about as redundant as it gets, given that 90% of Roald Dahl's children's stories were already dark parodies of children's story tropes, only it was actually good and funny. Heck, the best Roald Dahl parody I can think of is that a bunch of kids compete for golden tickets and get really excited only to discover it's just a regular chocolate factory with vats and machines. (Though if you really have to, why not put the PCs in a glass elevator that can travel through space and time and explore the world of the haunted unborn!?) But my real issue is that not only is the fetishy stuff terrible, but if you take it out - say the poisons just do damage and the pygmies are just hanging out playing cards - then it's still a terrible adventure. The main explorable space is two corridors; there's nothing for the PCs to actually do in the vast majority of the rooms other than get killed; and the architecture doesn't make any sense. The main boss appears randomly, and there's no escalation over time. None of the significant bits of the backstory appear in the adventure, or have any explanation. Heck, even the objective doesn't make any sense, looking back at it. The absolute best outcome is that the PCs kill Lucia and then hand over the chocolate operation to someone else who has no idea about anything that's going on with the poisons and can't do anything about it. That is assuming that the new owner doesn't get beaten to death by the pygmies as soon as they walk in because it's not likely the 20+ angry pygmies suddenly all disappear because Lucia is dead, so I guess the PCs are meant to kill all the pygmies too. And then there's no guarantee the new owner will be less evil because, hey, hiring some guys to slaughter the owner and the staff of a factory because it's doing better than us isn't exactly a great start on being good. hyphz fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Aug 22, 2017 |
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Aug 22, 2017 22:12
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Arivia posted:A parody doesn't have to be humorous - it can be an exaggeration merely to comment on the original source. Exaggerations to the point of horror as parody are not that uncommon. With the caveat that I haven't done as close a reading as you have (at least I presume you did, if you're reviewing it for Fatal and Friends), let me try to respond to some of your other comments. I don't think the factory is laid out nearly as illogically or as linearly as you think - there are plenty of connections between the different rooms, and a party could traverse them in a number of different ways. The rooms aren't just death traps and suggest possible things to do in them, but even if they were that fits both the horror genre and most D&D adventuring anyway. Lucia's actions are prescribed on page 23, and are not random - they even include her responses if she finds out the factory is being attacked! Then there's the guards, the pygmies themselves, etc. I think you just might not be familiar with the short descriptions of most OSR stuff, where not much is prescribed and it's up to the GM to decide how things go. The adventure tells you to introduce the backstory to the players before play, and then provides more detail through both NPCs and written materials. The objective makes a lot of sense - it's the concern about the factory outdoing everyone else with their goods and resulting corporate espionage in the original Dahl story! And there's two pages breaking down the resolution, including answers to all the situations you've brought up. Ok. First of all, again, exaggerating Roald Dahl to the point of horror is a dumb idea, because Roald Dahl himself already did it better than you will. Secondly, (and screw you for making me open that drat PDF again) the problem with trying to paint Lucia as an evil capitalist is that.. well, it doesn't make any sense. Lucia's described as successful because she's invented the chocolate bar centuries earlier than real history, when everyone else is selling drinking chocolate. She has a natural monopoly because the transplanted tree lets her alone grow cocoa in Germany. After that point, literally anything else - making the chocolate addictive or harmful or poisonous or whatever - is making her business worse not better. If she was a determined businesswoman she wouldn't be doing anything like that. If every death is a victory for her, why isn't every chocolate in the adventure poisoned to cause death? Furthermore, there is nowhere in the adventure where the PCs can find out that the chocolates are addictive, unless they eat some and then meta-game the effect on themselves. If that knowledge is public and accepted, then it stops being evil because people are choosing to eat it knowing it is addictive. If there are no other brands of chocolate bar on sale, how does anyone know it's Lucia's specifically that are addictive instead of bars in general - and if they don't know that, wouldn't they be fine with Lucia being brought down as long as another factory replaced her? The adventure says that Lucia removes the harmful effects from her chocolate before sale, but the entire chocolate production line is described in the adventure and there's no component that does that. It's ridiculous and makes Lucia's character a discoherent mess. Also, why we don't put dungeon crawls in cities. If any of the PCs gets body horrored, why don't they just leave and go to a doctor or the police with evidence that this was done to them inside the factory? And yes, I got that the PCs are effectively being hired by Slugworth. Which is doubly stupid, because Slugworth was a villain in the original book and a "test" in the musical version. So obviously the players are going to be predisposed to believe that the person hiring them is the villain, not Lucia. Here's the full description of Lucia's actions: quote:Roll 3d6. Lucia de Castillo starts play in the corresponding room on the Main Floor. She moves counter clockwise to the next room every 10 minutes. She is accompanied by four pygmies who act as her assistants. Once she has visited and inspecting every Main Floor room, she will ride her paddlewheel boat down the Chocolate River to get to her Inventing Room. She will work there for 5 hours, then make her way to her Quarters to sleep. If Lucia is certain things are not going her way, she will retreat to her Quarters to prepare an ambush. She will call out for reinforcements from her window to her Factory Guards waiting outside. So, yea. Leaving aside that there are only 19 rooms on the main floor (and Lucia can't be in the first two, although they're outside, so that actually makes sense) you could roll a 4 on the dice, in which case Lucia is standing in the entrance lobby and fighting her could be the first thing the PCs do. (Heck, I've just noticed you could roll 1-1-1 in which case she is hanging out in the guards' quarters for no reason at all.) What does "not going her way" mean? The guards outside sound the alarm if intruders come in, so if Lucia hears that alarm she.. calls the same guards who just sounded the alarm!? Duh! Also, a really great place to prepare an ambush is behind a locked door that as far as you know the enemy can't open, and to call out for help to your allies who the intruders have almost certainly already killed to get in. Now, the layout. There are three main corridors, areas 7, 9, and 15. All of the main rooms in the adventure branch off these, and some have connections between them, but none have any access to deeper rooms that aren't accessible by the corridors. Here's the description of one of the rooms: quote:14. ROASTERY AND MILL. A broiling dark room filled with ovens, metal contraptions, a giant mill, and conveyer belts. Here cocoa beans are roasted, then milled and ground into cocoa nibs. There are 30 pygmies working the ovens and the machines at any one time. They are focussed on their work and do not pay attention to the player characters unless they are disruptive. The room is so hot that a player character must roll 1d6 each round she remains in the room. On a roll of 1, her Constitution score is reduced by 2 points for 1 hour. Subsequent rolls reduce her Constitution score and if it is reduced to zero, she falls unconscious from heat stroke. The pygmies are unaffected by these conditions. Unattended player characters who fall unconscious are dragged by pygmies back to their village as prisoners. Cocoa nibs are carried via conveyer belt into the Liquor Flow Room. So the PCs here have two choices. Try to steal the beans, which are one of the items Slugworth wants, which likely means fighting all the pygmies; or leave. There's no clues to the backstory, no other information, no interesting mechanisms to play with and nothing to do. Pretty much all the North side of the factory rooms are basically that in different ways.
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Aug 23, 2017 01:04
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Nuns with Guns posted:It's high profile because it's from Monte Cooke Games. The game is a heavily watered-down Cypher system, which is honestly an improvement on that side. I'd be shocked if it's ever played as intended, with age categories and "increasing complexity" because playing at "lower complexities" actually makes the game harder. It leans heavily on the GM making everything up because a lot of the equipment has no set mechanics behind it. The powers and archetypes that do have rules are really unbalanced against one another. Archetypes sometimes have powers that don't even use their primary stat. There's a great review of it in the F&F archive. For all the humph I wrote about NTYE, I followed a Facebook group on it and it seems it's having some fantastic results. There's people who've been hugely inspired by it and it's gotten their children into reading and imagination play much more. There's even one claim that an 8-year-old girl was so keen on it that she ran the game for her brother and parents, with her own adventure - a simple one, sure, but I just find that heartwarming. Oh, and she felt one of the archetypes didn't match the character someone wanted to play so she GM fiated their stats. (I did post some "rebalancing" ideas to the group as well, mind you, which some people openly admitted they stole..)
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Aug 23, 2017 14:49
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Plutonis posted:So there's like these twenty-seven super 'vampires' who can range from a living labyrinth to a giant robot spider alien from mercury to a man who's made up of a trillion animals in a chaotic primordial soup but they just want to chill out despite the church wanting to exterminate them and there's this association of rear end in a top hat wizards who want to reach the akashic records and hold a deathmatch between mages that summon historical and pseudohistorical figures as familiaras once in a while to get their wish granted by a mystical thingamajig and that deathmatch was plagiarized centuries later by the quantum supercomputer built by aliens in the moon and there's some people who can see the conceptual lines that separate life and death and can sever them to 'kill' anything, including other concepts and what if i tell you that other than a few branching timelines these are all the same setting Also here are most of them doing a dance https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvbaM-URygs
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Aug 25, 2017 16:24
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LuiCypher posted:Fun fact - Descent is actually a modification of the original DOOM boardgame developed by Fantasy Flight way back in 2004, if you can believe it. Technically, it would be DOOM - Second Edition but I think few enough people are even aware of the first edition and it would just confuse people. Yea, it's deeper than that too. DOOM Descent 1e (DOOM + Runebound) Descent 2e Imperial Assault All basically just refining the same engine.
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Aug 27, 2017 18:48
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Len posted:I still think Doom was better than Descent and I will fight anyone who disagrees. Original Doom is brutally hard. Original Descent is stupidly easy.
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Aug 27, 2017 20:38
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drrockso20 posted:I think we can all agree that Descent 1e had better art than Descent 2e does though(seriously it's amazing how generic the art became in the second edition) That's because most of the Descent 1e art was cribbed from Runebound.
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Aug 27, 2017 20:59
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Len posted:Also related what's the easiest way to take a game with a loving boatload of cards and make the cards digital? I have no experience with coding but goddamn Shadows of Brimstone has too many decks and that's part of why it doesn't hit the table that often. I found an iOS thing called card vault that sounds promising, you take pictures of the cards and it automatically puts them in decks you can shuffle and deal from anyone use that? I thought Card Vault was for, like, credit cards!?
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Aug 28, 2017 02:02
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There's the "unicorn problem" too which is bad in D&D and worse in Shadowrun. In both cases magic users are supposed to be between relatively and exceptionally rare in the setting. Which is ok for the wider fiction but when the party is trailing one around with them it means everyone in the typical village should be like "OMG it's a wizard isn't that amazing" and _should_ be solving many problems trivially because nobody would have expected a wizard to show up; and if they do, they seem ludicrously paranoid/delusional.
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Aug 31, 2017 13:16
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The problem is that letting the PCs get away with resting is a natural DM response to knowing that if they do not rest, they will die. When around the next corner might be a bad guy with Flight and Protection From Missiles, you have to run to the schedule of the only guy who can cast Dispel.
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Aug 31, 2017 18:35
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Ferrinus posted:4e didn't require you to have taken Burning Hands before you were allowed to take Fireball and it was fine. Yea, the problem isn't the scaling of spells, the problem is the easy ability for magic to just render anything that non-magic people can do irrelevant. Classically this is a part of most settings with magic and because of the unicorn problem rarity doesn't work as a balance, so it needs something else. Maybe everyone just expects there to be magic, maybe everyone can use a bit of magic in the area they work in, maybe people who have no magic are just "too real" to be reliably affected with magic, but you need something to change the situation.
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Sep 1, 2017 15:45
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Ferrinus posted:4e also had totally non-magical character classes whose power sets simply could not replicate certain feats of magic (try teleporting when you're a human fighter who didn't multiclass into another power source) and it was fine. And serious restrictions on the power of that magic. It also didn't deal with the non-combat issues of magic balance - ie, we come to a village where the crops are failing; the fighter can swing a sword and look at the wall, while the Wizard summons rain with one Arcana check. There were plenty of times in 4e where Skill Challenges would basically say "well, you can use Arcana on this if you can argue that it would apply (but magic can do anything so who the hell can argue it wouldn't?)"
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Sep 1, 2017 16:03
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Well, yes. In fact the classic D&D balancer was that a high level fighter was expected to be leading an army. Obviously an army can do things to the setting one guy with a sword cannot. But if you look at the published Skill Challenges in 4e, they love Arcana to bits for anything (saving drowning people? Arcana! Impress the King? Arcana!) but hate Intimidate.
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Sep 1, 2017 17:04
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