|
Kwyndig posted:Yeah pretty much the only versions of Gamma World that are compatible with their contemporary version of D&D are fourth edition and seventh edition which is the one that uses 4e mechanics (only technically compatible). Fifth edition was Alternity, and sixth edition was White Wolf doing a D20M game. I'm not even positive about fourth. Edit: Also this: 
|
#
¿
Feb 13, 2017 20:33
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 17:46 |
|
|
Reading The Sprawl has made me realize that there are several design features of PbtA that I'd like to see become standard in roleplaying games, but without just converting everything to PbtA. MC Moves, for instance. Not every game needs to have the GM work off of fronts and refrain from statting NPCs entirely, but PbtA makes it clear to the GM that you only need to act against the players when they fail. I've seen other games try to have some kind of token system where the GM has resources to spend to hinder the players, but it doesn't make much sense to me in a context where it's understood that the GM controls the universe and acts against the PCs whenever they think it's appropriate.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2017 05:23
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted: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. gradenko_2000 posted:Right! Things like "this is the DC for a wooden door" and "a monster encounter in the first level of the dungeon can only be these monsters" are the more explicit, more mechanically-involved version of PBTA's GM Moves, in that they're a limiter on how much of a dick you can or should be as a GM. Elfgames posted:right but a Gm Has limitless resources where as players do not so it's inherently balanced by the skill and pettiness of the gm. Making the gm abide by actual rules when playing the game can mitigate that to a large degree. Moves are decent for this but I actually like more hard guidelines. By presenting Fronts, basing MC moves off of character moves, and keeping to Countdowns, PbtA explicitly or implicitly prevents pretty much all the problems that even good GMs have with creating opposition for the players. And it does this without setting up a strict adversarial relationship (as in a board game like Descent), and while leaving the MC's job as pretty much the traditional job of the GM: playing the world the PCs are adventuring in. But like I said, I don't want every game to be PbtA's setup with the 2d6 die mechanic, playbooks, and Moves. I'm reading the new edition of Chill right now, and it has a token system where players can flip tokens from Light to Dark to get an advantage or use supernatural powers, and the GM can likewise flip them back to screw over the PCs or use certain monster powers. Not sure how I feel about it--it seems at once wise and kinda bolted-on. I've heard the same thing about a similar subsystem in Shadowrun Anarchy; anyone have thoughts on that?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2017 19:30
|
|
|
Look, if you get drunk as hell and start floating around and wear a collar that doesn't let you look down, you're gonna lose your shoes at the party.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2017 16:53
|
|
|
Oh, both her legs are straight and that is definitely not her knee. Oh my.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2017 17:11
|
|
|
Really shouldn't, or really should?
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2017 17:19
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:I mean, it more or less boils down to Swedish Dracula being completely unrestrained and being allowed to do whatever he so pleases with White Wolf, so the whole thing is turning into his vanity project. I don't imagine it'll be very successful, like, at all, but that literally doesn't matter because, again, this is almost purely a vanity project. So he grabs the EDGY poo poo STIRRER because he's loving Swedish Dracula and can't stop talking about how boring consentual sex is, and he grabs the LITERAL CHILD RAPIST because he was probably one of his heroes or something back in the day, and it continues not to actually matter to him because it's still all just one big insane vanity project. Kwyndig posted:They hired an untalented scumbag and then proceeded to throw their own staff under the bus when called out about it. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 07:38 on Feb 18, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Feb 18, 2017 06:45
|
|
|
Parkreiner posted:EoD's setting is an apocalyptic sci-fantasy kind of thing influenced by '80s cartoons and video games (I believe one piece of character creation advice is "visualize what your character would look like as an action figure"), where Satan's spaceship crashes into a technomagical civilization and wreaks such massive havoc that large masses of the population surrender outright in hopes of surviving. Space Satan's porcelain-masked psychedelic-drug-addicted minions battle the rebel alliance of Glitter Boy pilots, cyberwizards, androids, and psychic kung-fu priests, while the native shamanic minotaur population who predate the planet's human settlement decide now is a great time to wipe out all the colonists while they're having their civil war. All three factions are available as PC fodder, but the rebel alliance has the most class options (and you should definitely avoid mixed-faction games). And it just drops this on you one bit at a time, and you learn to accept the world as you go. Tabletop games have a hard time doing this without hashing out an extended rationale and a lengthy setting history. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Feb 20, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2017 16:01
|
|
|
Parkreiner posted:The Devil Himself being statted up as the explicit end boss (with God as optional hidden boss?) also strongly fits into that vibe. With JRPGs, God is always secretly the Devil, or just some cosmic douchebag.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2017 22:22
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:1. Are there any games that allow or expect you to play more than one character at a time? This sounded to me like something an author would recommend without actually playtesting it. But sure enough, the Example of Play is a story where the party is going to get betrayed and ambushed, and every player knows it's going to happen because one is the GM, one is GMing a related subplot, and one is playing the NPC who will betray the party. Vaya con dios, if that's your thing.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2017 15:29
|
|
|
Us millennials, always worshiping evil gods.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2017 15:24
|
|
|
Welp, I now have 2 1/2 weeks to figure out that Mass Effect hack for my wife's birthday.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2017 17:32
|
|
|
I'm probably going with Strike! or maybe a hack of Fragged Empire.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2017 17:46
|
|
|
No offense, but Rolemaster always seemed to me like one of the many many games that have a lot of rules for combat, but little in the way of actual tactics.Covok posted:I can see Strike!, even if it isn't my cup of tea. Of course, the question becomes "does she like tac combat?"
|
|
#
¿
Feb 22, 2017 18:48
|
|
|
Thing is, from what I can tell, Gamma World and Star Frontiers both had better mechanics than AD&D, and Buck Rogers was basically AD&D.gradenko_2000 posted:Because of the way your rolls start taking penalties as you get progressively more wounded, the game seems to emphasize "alpha strikes" and winning initiative. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 05:08 on Feb 23, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2017 05:04
|
|
|
I actually really like Mystara.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2017 18:01
|
|
|
At its best, Mystara is like Warhammer in that it takes a really facile concept like "this country is fantasy not-a-European-country" and runs with it until it becomes very fun in its own right. And it does stuff that's out of the box for that kind of thing--whereas Warhammer has not-Vikings, not-Slavs, and not-Renaissance-fencers, Mystara has medieval Poland and Iroquois.
Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Feb 23, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2017 18:22
|
|
|
I think I get what you're saying, and IME it happened when we had a group that was used to playing old-school D&D without a skill system, and hoped that they could sort of wheedle their way into accomplishing everything outside of combat without rolling by describing exactly how they do everything. At some point we had to just say "Your Thievery skill determines exactly how well you climb up into a 2nd story window; don't describe to me exactly how you're placing your feet on a lintel." Edit: Also, this tends to come out in people who have been trained by a Gotcha Killer Dickbag DM. You may just have to promise the players that you're not looking to punish them for not being obsessive-compulsive. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Feb 24, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Feb 23, 2017 23:44
|
|
|
Arivia posted:Not really. Old D&D doesn't need to be emulated, it's good as is. Retroclones are nice for having updated formatting, layout, and editing, but the Rules Cyclopedia is probably the best single D&D product ever, for example. PST posted:Dracula Dossier (Night's Black Agents)
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2017 04:46
|
|
|
Kwyndig posted:I'm actually working on an adventure slash campaign thing with multiple branching paths based on player actions and the further I get into it the harder it's getting to make both meaningful choices and have any kind of plot whatsoever. Now I see why Bioware just half asses it in their mass effect games. Mr.Misfit posted:I´m currently writing a localized sandbox module based around a locale (lets call it a "city") in which different factions with different goals plot against each other, and each faction comes with a storyline (aka a scenario) Depending on which scenario the players go for, another gets locked off, as they will be working directly against the opposing faction. Also, each scenario has to include what happened if the players have already finished or are working on another scenario. With eventualities for EVERY OPTION of ending the other scenarios have. I´ve got 10 scenarios so far. That means about 20 different eventualities for each scene that has connections to another faction due to the way each scenario can end...'barf'. Kwyndig posted:It's a lot of goddamn work with relatively little payoff, is what it is. So here's the thing: every possible branch in a video game has to be scripted and even voice-acted and poo poo. Video games also have a set of expectations among the player base where the player sees every eventuality as their fault--if you take a course of action that results in bad things happening anywhere, the reaction is to get mad, then replay the game so that All of the Good Things happen and None of the Bad Things happen. With metaplot in a published series of RPG sourcebooks, there have to be meaningful events that affect the world, and there's no way to do that while allowing for your campaign to go in a completely different direction. The dirty little secret of a lot of metaplot-heavy 90s games is that they were written more for people who wanted to be fans of the game by buying and memorizing all this Extruded Lore Product because they couldn't find a group to play with. Neither set of constraints applies to your group's campaign. Instead, I suggest you handle ongoing developments the way Apocalypse World suggests: while the PCs are off doing one adventure, think to yourself, "Hey, what is [NPC] probably doing while this is going on? What's happening in [City] right now? How is [Group's Plan] going?" If you want, you can following AW's model of having "countdown clocks" for things you want to be time-sensitive and blow up if the PCs don't get around to dealing with them in time.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2017 05:02
|
|
|
Designers & Dragons is the actual only good D&D.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2017 15:56
|
|
|
The key to the whole "ursine swarm" thing is that the druid player in this situation isn't even a min-maxer, just a guy who takes all bear-related options because being the Bear Priest is awesome.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 28, 2017 17:14
|
|
|
Drone posted:The core of Battletech (and the most recent version of the RPG, called A Time of War -- not sure about the older Mechwarrior versions) is a "simple" 2d6 mechanic versus a TN (with modifiers applied either to the roll result or to the TN depending on which game you're playing). So in that respect, it is "simple". However, the sheer amount of modifiers and rules makes it seem stupidly daunting.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2017 15:18
|
|
|
OD&D also supports a Clash of the Titans campaign insofar as your stats are so scant, the magic crap you find is a big part of your character. You'll probably have to do something about the high mortality rate and using hirelings as expendable resources to stave off death, though.Plutonis posted:I love to shoot Hitler in the face but people cynically trying to profit on the Culture War going on are the lowest of the low.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2017 20:17
|
|
|
I came close to losing my job once because my boss missed his most important meeting of the year. Turned out the organizer never contacted me about it at all.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2017 20:31
|
|
|
gently caress, Harn has detailed rules for managing a field of turnips.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 04:10
|
|
|
Haven is a weird game because of how simple it is. There are a zillion games out there that are like "It's a crime-ridden city, and..." but Haven is just, like, a crime-ridden city. There's nothing supernatural going on, no cyberpunk conceit. That's not to say you can't have a compelling game without those things, but Haven also doesn't have the style to be the Sin City roleplaying game it seems to want to be. There's just not a lot of there there.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 15:43
|
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:Haven* was also from that weird 90's era of RPG design where the idea of having your game be about something hadn't quite hit yet. You just made RPGs, what people were supposed to do with them was up to them. c.f.: most licensed games That's a good point. I guess Haven really stands out because AFAIK there is absolutely no reason not to just get in a car and drive to a different city.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2017 21:16
|
|
|
So instead of Strike!, I'm running a Dune-based game on Sunday, and I'm looking for suggestions regarding rulesets. This is going to be either a one-shot or a short campaign, so I'm not going with Fate or PbtA. Making a full set of playbooks in a few days would be too much work, anyway. My basic idea is that there will be several classes (Assassin, Bene Gesserit, Mentat, Heir, Warmaster) with 3 special abilities each. Because the PCs are such badasses, they get a primary and a secondary, with all the abilities of their primary and 1 or 2 from their secondary. Abilities will mostly be simple but potent things like "You get a bonus on any roll related to gathering information, no matter the skill," or "You have a special class skill that covers three other skills." What I'm looking for is a ruleset that's simple, but has enough complexity that the players feel like their special abilities matter. Another thing I want is for the action/combat rules to be balanced so that a Swordmaster actually can hold his own against a pack of mooks singlehandedly. Hm. Some people want to play Fate with nothing but Aspects; I'm thinking about trying something like Fate's setup without aspects. I like the idea of making it skills-only, no basic ability scores.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2017 05:20
|
|
|
I feel pretty silly for forgetting that Fate is based on FUDGE which is great and has been kicking around forever. So basically I'm going to go with an all-skill system, used Fate combat, and steal ideas from Spirit of the Century's stunts for the class abilities, though I'm doing pretty good on that front. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Mar 8, 2017 |
|
#
¿
Mar 8, 2017 16:46
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:wondering what game to run next?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2017 02:27
|
|
|
then why are you taunting me with this. <  >
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2017 02:30
|
|
|
OK but do they do the Wilderlands of High Fantasy thing of "Has dark skin = really mean, takes slaves?"
|
|
#
¿
Mar 9, 2017 04:57
|
|
|
My Dune game went really well, especially considering that I haven't gamemastered in a long, long time. I ended up going with a FUDGE hack using the d6-6 mechanic instead of FUDGE dice. (Although I basically used the FATE Spirit of the Century SRD as a reference for everything, there were no Aspects or Fate points.) The only stats the players had to deal with were Skills and unique class Traits. I made several classes (Assassin, Bene Gesserit, Mentat, Noble, Warmaster), told the players to pick a primary and secondary class, and take 3 traits from their primary and 1 from their secondary, then allocate their Skills. Coming up with good traits was hard--I tried using SotC Stunts for inspiration, but a lot of them are honestly pretty petty advantages like "In this type of situation, you can use a different skill instead of the usual one." One player had never played before and wasn't very familiar with Dune either, but he engaged with the system and the setting very well--asked good questions, used his skills creatively, etc. I wrote an 8-page setting handbook for the players beforehand, which I'm glad I did. The Spice Punch helped. I used a recipe graciously provided by a St. Lucian tour guide and added a lot of extra bitters and cinnamon.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2017 16:25
|
|
|
Which steampunk game has the swarthiest aliens? Asking for a friend.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 17, 2017 18:57
|
|
|
How can you possibly suggest Pathfinder for a samurai game... ...without insisting on Kaidan: A Japanese Ghost Story, a Japan-inspired dark fantasy setting for Pathfinder?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 18, 2017 02:41
|
|
|
This is just a foot in the door for that 4chan monster princess thing, isn't it? Fess up.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 21, 2017 16:05
|
|
|
Kwyndig posted:How would a Bolshevik heartbreaker even work? Do dragons control the means of production?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2017 18:54
|
|
|
Kwyndig posted:Soviet propaganda art was pretty sweet, yeah.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2017 19:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 14, 2024 17:46 |
|
|
Kwyndig posted:Trollman's a goddamn idiot. Your average feudal peasant's life wouldn't change at all under Communism unless magic or technology was used to increase crop yields in a way that improved their labor burden. Without that all that changes is the title of the guy who they hand the grain over to and maybe how much of it they get to keep for themselves. Farming before mechanization doesn't change with politics unless somebody does something really stupid, so farmers don't care about politics.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 22, 2017 20:12
|
|