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Splicer posted:2017 was an international game of Paranoia. Or Fiasco. Twilight 2000
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Jan 1, 2018 18:23
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Lemniscate Blue posted:My current GM wants to run Numenera when our 4e game wraps in a few months. Is there a Numenera/Cypher system thread I just didn't spot in the past couple pages? I'd like to know what issues and suck-traps to watch out for. Don't play the Fighter, and probably don't play the Rogue. It's a Monte Cook game, so Wizards are the best. An unavoidable issue is the basic design of the game: 1. your stat points are your hit points, and also your extra-effort points 2. at any time, the GM can introduce a complication to try and gently caress you over. You can either accept this and receive XP in exchange, or spend XP to block the GM. Since you also need XP to, you know, level up, this can get really annoying really quickly 3. if you ever roll a 1, you get to suffer a complication without the GM needing to reward you with any XP for it, and without being able to spend XP to block it. The "solution" is to never make any rolls, either by simply making poo poo happen (which is why Wizards rule), or by driving down the difficulty to 0 so you auto-succeed. Even the latter is going to have its share of issues, given that applying extra effort to drive down the difficulty further will cost you your stat points (see point 1). ________ Mark Rein  Hagen :https://twitter.com/austin_walker/status/948034579272740864 gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 07:57 on Jan 2, 2018 |
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Jan 2, 2018 05:37
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oriongates posted:PDQ# does something a bit similar, Training Points are earned for failing significant rolls. I was already familiar with RuneQuest's idea of "you increase the skill whenever you fail to use it" as a means of incentivizing people to use low-level skills, but drat, letting people gain skill points that they can spend on skills besides the one that they used is a brilliant next step.
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Jan 2, 2018 11:54
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I'm just saying, if it was an in-person game, you'd have loved my cooking.
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Jan 3, 2018 02:24
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Paranoid Dude posted:Who on Earth complains about people not dressing well for a game of DnD or Fate? I don't think it's about showing up to the game in a coat-and-tails, or even in pants and a collared shirt, but just coming to the game in clothes that have been worn for less than 24 hours.
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Jan 3, 2018 03:08
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There's not, but it sometimes gets talked about in the OSR thread, given its roots.
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Jan 3, 2018 05:31
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Isn't a classical definition of a dungeon the underground part of a medieval castle, and by extension would be used in that manner because D&D was the zoomed-in XCOM tactical-level simulation of what happens when Gygax and Arneson's miniatures medieval combat games turned into a siege and someone tunneled into a castle's dungeon from the outside-in?
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Jan 3, 2018 05:37
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So I found this thing of a Microlite20 being heavily adapted towards D&D 5e. What is the preferred binding method for a work like this that only runs to 17 pages? I feel like ring-binding is excessive or might not fit.
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Jan 3, 2018 07:15
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Halloween Jack posted:But Bloodshadows is great! I don't know anything about the 3rd edition, though. The Dark Eye?
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Jan 4, 2018 02:38
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Haystack posted:Send them emails with a vaguely descriptive commendation and a cute cat gif. 
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Jan 5, 2018 05:10
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Session time seems like a fairly basic measure of how many things you should throw in front of the players. "Remaining resources" is another, but those aren't always quantifiable
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Jan 7, 2018 17:51
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Even if you were playing D&D, you couldn't drop a full adult dragon on a level 1 party because there's a defined range of monsters that are appropriate for the party to encounter. If this was in pre-TSR D&D, it would be based on the dungeon level they were operating in. If this was 3e or 5e, it would be based on their Challenge Rating. If this was 4e, it would be based on their level. You couldn't do this if you were planning/playing a map, and you couldn't do this either if they had triggered a random encounter. And if you were making up encounters on the fly, you still couldn't do this, because again, you're limited to whatever is on the level 1 dungeon encounter list, whatever is an "Encounter Level+5" composition, or whatever comes within the 400 XP budget of a 4-player-level-1 party with a hard cap of level 4 monsters. And you still couldn't keep dropping multiple "hardest possible" encounters either, because the DMG will also prescribe something like:   Now, I can't speak for if every pre-made adventure ever written for D&D follows these rules, but if you're making your own, whether as an entirely pre-planned adventure or as something you're making room-by-room, the rules are crafted in a manner that you couldn't drop something on them that they shouldn't reasonably have a chance against. Now, this is not to say that TPKs don't happen, or that GMs don't step outside these rules, but that's also because these rules aren't perfect, insofar as, say, the CR system isn't a great representation of actual encounter difficulty. But you still have guidelines on what you're supposed to be allowed to do as a GM even if you want be as antagonistic as possible against them. And the reason I bring this up is because, per PBTA, a Move will always tell you if it's time to make a Soft Move or a Hard Move, and how dire the possible repercussions of that Soft/Hard Move can be, so you're never supposed to be able to "arbitrarily" gently caress over the party with a trap or a dragon or some poo poo in the same way that you couldn't do that either in D&D. Except, where in D&D you have to come up with a constantly shifting set of numbers to capture how much your fuckery is capped, PBTA just tells you the scope of how far you can go. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 02:09 on Jan 8, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 02:04
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:It's in running the monsters, for sure -- which is to say, just a different kind of decision. Part of the reason why D&D, at least in its 3e and 4e incarnations, had such fleshed-out rules for "everything", up to and including how to build a dungeon, was so that you could "trust the process" and let the DMG largely make content for you without having to inject your own subjectivity into it. I could go to donjon right now, have it generate a dungeon for me, and play a game "by-the-book" where all I'm doing is controlling the monsters while everyone collectively enforces the rules and have a fairly entertaining "boardgame"-type experience. I've mentioned this before, but this goes back to Mike Mearls suggesting that what if Organized Play sessions didn't come with a pre-assigned DM, that whoever showed up at the table could do it. Setting aside that Mearls only wants this because he's a lazy fucker that wants to cut even more effort out of Organized Play, it could work if the game were "procedural" enough, both on the content-generation side and the rules-execution side that the "DM" can always refer to the book to check what to do next. And for all their flaws, 3e and 4e were closer to that ideal than anything other version of the game. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 03:07 on Jan 8, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 03:03
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Okay, let's nip this right in the bud: Dungeon World and Blades in the Dark still have resource management mechanics. Dungeon World characters have hit points, and one of the moves that a GM can do is to say that they got hit/hurt, and subsequently lose HP. Dungeon World casters have spell memorization, and one of the consequences of rolling a Miss on a spell is to forget it such that you can't use it again. Blades in the Dark has Stress and Trauma mechanics. You can take Stress to gain an extra die during rolls, but you only have so many Stress boxes that you can tick, and the difficulty of rolls is calibrated such that it's difficult-if-not-impossible to run a heist without ever being in a situation where you'd want to leverage it.
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Jan 8, 2018 07:55
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xiw posted:Not many DW or BITD games end up with the PCs running out of resources and failing, but I assert neither do most D&D games. Like I've been running and playing D&D since 1985 and I've seen maybe two TPKs, discounting gimmick one-off games where we were throwing PCs into a random encounter grinder etc. I don't disagree, though that's probably as much a function of practical considerations (i.e. groups don't want to play through that many combats) than the fault of the rules. Kai Tave posted:More pertinently in the case of Blades in the Dark, Stress is what you use to soak up consequences you'd rather not take. Basically what happens, and I'm kind of simplifying here, is that if your scoundrel gets stabbed and would suffer a consequence as a result of that you get to make a roll which tells you how much Stress you need to no-sell it. Thanks. I only played a single (extremely cool and fun) game of BITD when it was early in its playtests, so I was sure I wasn't capturing the whole nuance of it correctly, but I was also sure that Stress is absolutely a thing that exists as a resource that one can run out of. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 09:03 on Jan 8, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 08:58
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I think it also bears noting that even in more open-ended PBTA games, the "hardness" of Hard Moves isn't something that you can keep putting off forever. Like, you can't Zeno's Paradox the orc's axe such that it only ever asymptotically gets closer and closer to the player's neck every time they fail a roll: at some point, the axe connects, and hurt is inflicted. Even if you don't use an explicit HP system, if the stakes are such that the player is going to get injured or even killed, and they Miss appropriately, them's the stakes. Kai Tave posted:it seems inevitable that characters in Blades will eventually get ground down by the thieving lifestyle which is basically the point, you can't go around doing crimes forever. My upcoming BITD hack, White-Collar Speculators on Wall Street, will be challenging this design.
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Jan 8, 2018 11:02
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Splicer posted:What I'm getting here is that some of us find the perception of impartiality a useful or possibly indispensable tool. This is not to say that improvisation or explicitly rule of cooling things is verboten, but the pretence is they're explicit case by case exceptions by an otherwise impartial adjudicator. This helps the players and GM maintain their suspension of disbelief and other such things so they can get on with having fun playing the game I don't know exactly why, but your post made me think about today's session, where the party had just finished a very difficult fight with a sorceress that had a lot of very painful debuff spells. All of us were seriously hurt, two people were knocked out, and all of us had already recovered from at least one knockout. We were talking about the correct order of healing spells to cast to get everyone hale and hearty from untangling the mix of diseases, level drain, ability score damage, and raw HP, and after like 5 minutes of discussion, the Gnoll Warblade pipes up with "while you're trying to puzzle that out, I'm still on the floor bleeding" We eventually handwaved it all away because ultimately we were going to take a Long Rest which meant that it didn't really matter how efficiently we spent all the spell slots, but I thought it was kind of nice that we were all invested enough in the moment that for a while we were trying to figure it out anyway.
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Jan 8, 2018 12:31
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If the players get to the "final" room and do the thing they were supposed to do, and nothing in the fiction nor the rolls suggests that there was anything to stop them ... let them have the win? Like, there's always more content where that came from (your skull).
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Jan 8, 2018 14:55
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Holy poo poo is this seriously what I fuckin' think it is
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Jan 8, 2018 15:09
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Plutonis posted:I'm honestly surprised it took so much to someone make a d20 tactical game There was that one roguelike that tried, but good god a solo-character d20 game might as well not bother.
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Jan 8, 2018 16:08
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hyphz posted:The problem with “it’s beyond their reach to make” is that if the author doesn’t make them the GM has to. So they are saying they expect an unpaid amateur member of the public to do what they, a paid and published and possibly professional author, claim they cannot. An indie game not having a published adventure is more caused by financial limitations than anything else.
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Jan 8, 2018 17:15
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Jimbozig posted:in old school D&D, there was a very real chance that your character bites it on any given adventure and that there was also a very real chance that the party would not get the main loot from the dungeon on their first try, having to retreat to town to rest and try again later (or rarely TPK). My impression is also that in BitD none of those things are true. I think it bears noting that an old-school D&D character has 3.5 HP on average, and will take 3.5 damage on average from any given hit against them. Blades in the Dark shouldn't be held up as the problem one here for having a depletion rate on resources that's actually been thought about for more than five seconds.
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Jan 8, 2018 17:34
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Plutonis posted:Can someone explain me this stupid argument in a paragraph or less I'm not reading four pages of this RPGs are a land of contrasts
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Jan 8, 2018 23:01
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I feel like I'm losing my mind. It's a problem that the world doesn't say that a bank actually can be broken into, and similarly since the Dimmer Sisters house is rumored to be inescapable, the GM has license to throw as many obstacles in the path of the players into order to make sure that nobody really does get out of there alive, because that's what the fiction says. This feels like the intersection of the hyperrealism and hyperliteralism of 2017, where you really cannot hide in the corners of the Oval Office because it is oval, and transparency in building the wall means it needs to be made out of plexiglass.
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Jan 9, 2018 00:57
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http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/958369/robbers-steal-p10m-silver-jewels-cash-via-sewer-tunnel-in-baguioquote:Robbers broke into a local silver shop through a sewer tunnel and stole P10 million worth of silver jewelries and cash at the Mines View Park during the wee hours of the weekend, a police report showed.
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Jan 9, 2018 01:06
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Hot take: Neverwinter is good
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Jan 9, 2018 05:37
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LongDarkNight posted:It was all your parents could afford. 
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Jan 9, 2018 15:05
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Jan 9, 2018 18:34
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To be fair, there's a smidgen of a real issue with what hyphz is describing with his Shadowrun story. If you can create a character that dumps all their points into Shoot, it's possible if not likely that that character will be able to shoot everything in the premade adventure really easily. The natural reaction is for the GM to make the monsters harder to shoot, but if the rest of the party did not dump all their points into shoot, then you have this extreme dichotomy where a monster is either piss-easy to be shot by the Shootman while being "just right" for everyone else, or difficult to shoot for the Shootman while being impossible to hit for everyone else. This is why D&D 4e moved to the "Half-Level Bonus" as a baseline number for all of their stats: the designers realized that in 3e, there was an unsustainable disparity between a character that went all in on AC like a Paladin, versus a caster. Or the disparity between a Fighter's poor Will saves and their good Fort saves. Or the disparity between a skill that you were maintaining full skill points into, versus one that you weren't. At least with 4e's Half-Level Bonus bringing up the rear, there's still a disparity, but one that is within the range of the d20 to be able to capture (and within the player's power to try and mitigate). In Shadowrun 5e, the current workaround is to use the Run Faster sourcebook's Life Modules character generation system to buy predefined packages of skills, that result in more well-rounded characters, rather than a pure point-buy where you can buy as many points of Shoot as you can specifically afford. Sion posted:So, on the subject of literally fuckin' anything else how's everyone's week shaping up? I'm back at work tomorrow oh no The Philippines is passing this tax cut bill which is similar to, but not as explicitly rapacious as, the one the US did, and I've been low-key monitoring it all year because there's a special exemption in it that I'm making use of that was rumored to be getting axed. The exemption is still there in the House version ... it's still there in the Senate version ... it's still there after the bill comes out of conference ... and then on the Friday before Christmas, Duterte uses a line-item veto to strike it (and three other provisions) from the bill. It's kinda stressing me out because I'm losing anywhere between 500 to 1200 USD a year (I'm converting here) because of it, when I already made the grand decision to buy a car in November and everything is pretty tightly budgeted. HR is gonna have an all-hands later this afternoon, but I'm really doubtful that they're going to give a raise just to make up for it. That's apart from my mom's business going under just before New Year's and saddling me with 3,400 USD in credit card debt, and the rest of the family in another 8,000 USD, but maybe that's a story for another time.
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Jan 10, 2018 04:34
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Covok posted:Wow, that really sucks dude. I wish I could help but I don't know anything about that country set of tax laws, only America's. Thanks. And, to be clear, it's not like I'm gonna starve or anything (COUNTBLANC I WILL THROW IN BUCKS FOR GOFUNDME) - it's sort of a bougie thing to be worried about in the grand scheme of things, it just sucks that it's not like I'm getting universal healthcare out of seeing my taxes go up, right?
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Jan 10, 2018 05:16
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kingcom posted:I think what is most frustrating about something like shadowrun is the general lack of guidance of when a number high enough to be the best as many rpgs never have a point you can reach where you are too good to ever need to increase it, especially at character creation. To compare and contrast, GURPS tells the GM that they might want to cap stats/skills at somewhere between 16 to 20 to prevent impossible-to-hit/impossible-to-miss scenarios, as well as introduces explicit rules that will cause very high skills to only count as something like 16 or 18 regardless of how the actual number is in certain situations.
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Jan 10, 2018 08:07
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hyphz posted:So the problem was that I was trying to do the whole fiction based ad-lib thing but I couldn’t because of this character. He obviously wanted to play a bad rear end gun fighter but I couldn’t let him, because any threat that could be defeated with a gun would either be over in 30 seconds or so, or beat his initiative and blast the whole party. Any that couldn’t he’d just be twiddling his thumbs. And anyway what’s action cyberpunk fiction without a cool gunfight or two? (Yes I know original style cyber wasn’t based on that.) Like I said, I don't think the problem is with "the fiction-based adlib thing" so much as the idiosyncrasy of Shadowrun allowing that player to create a character that's so good at shooting that he either trivialized every possible combat encounter, or made the combat encounter lethal to the entire rest of the party. There's a bunch of ways around it (not the least of which is playing a different game), but I don't think writing off the adlibbing style is part of it. Like, it's absolutely possible in D&D 3e and 5e to have a character go all-in on AC and have them be very difficult to hit by monsters, and then have that turn into a serious problem because too many monsters are only AC-attacking melee dudes.
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Jan 10, 2018 16:23
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Plutonis posted:I collected all teh cool equipment on KOTOR and I want my rpg character to be a jango fett brotha with all kind of insane gear hell yeah. Star Wars RPGs should unironically have SpyCraft-esque equipment sections.
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Jan 11, 2018 01:36
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Jan 11, 2018 07:41
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Why stop there? Lightkatars, lightfuscinas, lightbohemian earspoons, lightlucerne hammers, lightflails, lightmorningstars, lightknuckles, lightmain gauches
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Jan 11, 2018 09:46
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food court bailiff posted:I know I've read about it before but I'm drawing a blank on what the Truenamer problem is. The Truenamer problem is when the DC to do a thing rises faster than you can possibly match with your modifiers, leading to a situation where the thing eventually becomes impossible to do. This happens with Starfinder's space combat mechanics. Starfinder is also exceedingly dross, as it's almost literally Pathfinder In Space, with all of the genericness that that implies.
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Jan 11, 2018 17:39
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food court bailiff posted:This does look cool, although I should've specified I wanted some spacefaring nonsense in there as well. GURPS Lite is free, friend.
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Jan 11, 2018 22:55
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_(role-playing_game)
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Jan 14, 2018 10:48
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I've been playing totally-not-D&D-ripoff Low Magic Age (thanks Serf!) and I have opinions: The lack of Marking, or of Iron Guard's Glare/Thicket of Blades really illustrates how bad pre-Tome of Battle tanking was: even if you take Combat Reflexes for unlimited AOOs, the enemy will simply shift one square. ____ You can't Trip until you learn the "Trip" feat, and you can't learn the Trip feat until your learn the Combat Maneuver Familiarity feat, and you can't learn the Combat Maneuver Familiarity feat until level 3. And unless I missed something, you can't "bank" your feats, so you can learn Combat Maneuver Familiarity at level 3, but if you only get one feat at that level, then you still can't learn Trip until you earn your next feat. Also, the Trip feat doesn't actually do anything except enable you to trip. You have to learn Improved Trip (or equip a flail-type weapon) in order to avoid provoking AOOs when you make a Trip attempt. Once you finally do get to Trip, there's a three turn cooldown on it! I do not like this. ____ The Wizard is both really powerful because they always start every fight with their full allotment of spells, but also kinda boring because once you fire off your one Sleep, then there's really not much else to cast so you end up skipping a bunch of turns. Once you finally do get to level 2 and up, you can actually cast more than one spell per fight, but then they also slap on a cooldown mechanic on casting spells (although it's not yet clear to me exactly how that works). The most use I've gotten so far from the Wizard is to have him summon an elemental and have that attack enemies. ____ The Cleric might be a little restrained as far as you start every fight completely unbuffed, so you need to take a couple of turns to put on Divine Favor, and then Bull's Strength, etc. ____ It's both very D&D, and at the same time just different enough from by-the-book D&D that you can see the "houserules" staring you in the face. I'll keep playing it because I'd like to see how much more it develops.
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Jan 17, 2018 13:15
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Splicer posted:http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/228813/Genesys-Core-Rulebook?cPath=36_29258 genesys pdf is half price if you want to run both! All right, someone sell me on how Genesys would work when not being used for Star Wars.
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Jan 18, 2018 13:56
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