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Aspects in Fate.
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May 19, 2018 17:51
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Lemon-Lime posted:Because Bloodbowl isn't football, it's American football. Couldn't it be rugby?
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May 24, 2018 11:32
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There was a nation that entered WWII with semi-automatic rifles issued to every soldier in the army, and it wasn't Germany. There was also a nation that entered WWII with self-loading rifles for every third combat soldier, and that wasn't Germany either. There were some things the Wehrmacht had that were good (petrol cans, MG34) but the claim that a horse-drawn army with bolt-action rifles was the most well-equipped army of WWII is stretching it a lot.
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Jun 6, 2018 16:33
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Bedlamdan posted:there really is nothing in 3E that isn't an explicit improvement from 2E or 1E systems wise. How to adjudicate Stunts is less clear than in 1e.
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Jun 10, 2018 11:58
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Xiahou Dun posted:In the majority of the systems I'm thinking of off hand, damage against such a resource is randomized, either because of the question of whether the attack hits or, more specifically, for the amount of damage done, i.e. there are a lot of systems where you roll to attack and then you roll for damage. Delta Green RPG has you lose 1d3 or 1d4-1 points in various non-Sanity, non-Health ratings from time to time. Stat-damage is often randomized like regular damage in a bunch of systems, especially older ones.
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Jun 11, 2018 23:20
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You can, however, patent game mechanics in some circumstances. Several specific aspects of collectible card games, including turning cards sideways for certain purposes, were held in patent by WotC from 1994 to 2014, and Nintendo holds a patent for certain sanity systems causing audio changes and changes to scripted situations in video games until 2022.
LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 09:10 on Jun 12, 2018 |
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Jun 12, 2018 09:08
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Bedlamdan posted:I reiterate, who here is romantically involved with someone, who would also be into playing some nerd's erotic card game, for whatever loving reason? Nerds being romantically involved with other nerds isn't that uncommon.
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Jun 30, 2018 13:00
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Lemon-Lime posted:That's not remotely true. Mostly the problem with EP's rules is that it's incredibly rules-heavy and character generation is a huge pain as a result, but the system itself is pretty fine outside of that. Eeeh... It's a clunky system with a combat action economy that makes Shadowrun look restrained in comparison, and it's a system full of traps where you can end up putting valuable character generation points in perishable categories like morphs or gear, losing you up to a fifth of your build points. As a system it insists on making you count out your purchases down to the individual credit, yet at the same time makes money near-obsolete through the presence of near-ubiquitous (or at least player-accessible) nanomanufacturing, so half the time it's all for nought. And did I mention it was clunky? Roll-six-to-eight-times-each-combat-round-clunky? Overwrought-hacking-system-that-makes-non-hackers-twiddle-their-thumbs-clunky? Recalculating-derived-stats-several-times-per-session-probably-clunky?
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Jul 3, 2018 21:21
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The Deleter posted:I mean the temptation to roleplay Hulk Hogan the Bear Druid or something to disrupt the session is very strong, but the thing about it is none of the stories that get posted on 4chan actually happened and also nobody is funny enough to make it actually work, so your best bet is to just get out and find a group that knows how to keep their dick in their pant. When Olivia Hill suggested that you could compact rules because people these days were watching streams and listening to Let's Plays, one response I read was, to paraphrase it, "there's a difference between how you play to entertain yourself, and how you play to entertain an audience". Those funny stories are not necessarily someone playing well, or without impolitely disrupting.
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Jul 9, 2018 03:12
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Lemon-Lime posted:The problem is that no one (to my knowledge) has really tried to make a post-cyberpunk game, because people are more interested in playing D&D where magic swords are cyberware and dungeons are arcologies than they are in playing a game where a replicator blueprint cracker, a collectivist micro-farmer, a teashop owner, a freelance actuary and a vocaloid collector get together to stop the shutdown of their local community centre. Once you get out of the most densely Shadowrun-inspired parts of Eclipse Phase, it begins to look like this.
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Jul 18, 2018 10:41
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DigitalRaven posted:Oh no, this isn't just in-universe. Didn't D&D (or was it Pathfinder?) run with card packs for the various classes that gave you a randomized selection of powers? I can't remember if it actually was in the CCG style or not, but it would certainly lend itself to it!
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Jul 18, 2018 12:58
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DalaranJ posted:You should sell three different tiers with nicer art. Free, $5, and $10. The only rules difference is that the $5 copy says “If you paid for this game add 1to all rolls you make in game.” And the :tenbux: one says ‘2’. I don't recommend making it free; first because it ruins the joke a bit and secondly because it's bad business sense. Now, what you need to do is have the money be spent to convert to an in-game currency that you can spend on rolls, with the amount of in-game currency being just slightly more than you can spend on any combination of in-game items.
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Jul 18, 2018 16:56
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Since puzzles are a task you can outright fail to accomplish, you should treat it like any other part of the game that you can fail to accomplish: it probably shouldn't be a barrier to progressing the game. Consider it more like a clue in an investigation: if the clue is necessary you should just give it to the players, rather than giving them an opportunity to fail. Analogously, since it's possible to fail a riddle, it shouldn't be necessary to progress. One solution is to only put puzzles in front of "optional" parts of our dungeon. Another would be to make the puzzle one of multiple ways to progress. A third is to have someone outright give the players the solution at some later point, if they don't figure it out. Which sounds a bit silly at the face of it but it's one of the better pieces of advice for how to handle investigations in GURPS: Mysteries; if you want the players to find a clue in a dead person's car, first have them find recipts for gas, and if they don't think to search the car have someone call them to say it's parked in evidence lockup if they want to have a look, and finally have an NPC search the car and tell them what the clue is. With a puzzle, first present it, then give the players a clue, and finally give them the solution (or have something bypass the puzzle, like copious amounts of explosives).
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Jul 26, 2018 02:45
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Is it just CAD with PA for flavour or are they going to branch out? I can respect a well-aimed parody with far too much effort put into it (see the Duckman RPG), but seems narrow. I remember reading far too many mediocre gaming comics back then. Shortpacked might count as an honorary member. Skimming it, CAD is certainly seems to be the strongest inspiration but there's elements that are either obviously from another comic or very obviously not a thing CAD had. The Weird One is really more of a Pintsize (Questionable Content) than Zeke (who is more of a The Evil One) and the more down-to-earth side of The Evil One (the character who is scheming or cruel but not murderous) is just straight-up absent from CAD. One of the Drama examples is from Dumbing of Age which is neither a gaming comic nor a 00's comic. I'm 100% sure I've seen every non-CAD element somewhere, though I've thankfully forgotten enough to not be able to tell you where for most of them.
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Jul 27, 2018 16:33
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Ettin posted:(I also found some other comics. Have you read God Mode? Look at this poo poo.) That one! I remember reading it when I was 14 and would read anything that was free and about video games. Actually an excellent case study in what The Evil One can be in these types of comics. And of how some of the humour from that era was really bad, like the joke about trans prostitutes. ...can I go back in time and murder my 14-year-old self?
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Jul 27, 2018 17:23
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BinaryDoubts posted:e: god mode might be the absolute platonic ideal of the gamer webcomic, even moreso than CAD It's not, for two reasons. The first is that it's not about two friends playing games on their sofa, and the second... OK so just thinking about defending GodMode makes my breakfast want to exit through my throat, but for all its flaws it acknowledges women as something more than people you can play games with and gently caress: chainsmoking single mom running a business is more creativity in the character department than all of CAD put together. I mean the acknowledgement is that women are evil and manipulative, so it's not exactly a great leap forward, but at least the women get to exist for their own purposes? LatwPIAT fucked around with this message at 01:39 on Jul 28, 2018 |
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Jul 28, 2018 01:36
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Halloween Jack posted:By "something more" I mean Marten discovers that Pintsize is actually a doomsday weapon sent from another dimension where robots have replaced all the humans, and Faye turns out to be descended from an alien race, and she has to use her newfound Saiyan powers to stop the invaders from the robot dimension, and when all is said and done they're working at a coffee shop again, but occasionally reference the fact that Faye lives in a castle on the moon. Hannalore has that father who lives in a space station, otherwise the most radical change to the setting is this whole time it's actually been a hard sci-if setting where robots live alongside humans as actual persons with their own complicated politics and relations with humans and there's apparently some superpowerful AIs running things behind the scenes. Which is like, something that's taken several years to slowly leak out with elements of it being mostly setup for the relationship drama, not a diversion from it. But also super weird because we all know this was a comic about college grads struggling with rent and talking about music, not the post-cyberpunk future. Oh, and Emily is actually a compsci savant I guess.
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Jul 30, 2018 20:27
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Splicer posted:You're thinking of the quirky mentally unstable one with brown hair. They're talking about the quirky mentally unstable one with blonde hair. No, they're both talking about the brown-haired one but Halloween Jack is talking about stuff that didn't happen but would be typical of this sort of comic. Faye is not, in fact, a space princess.
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Jul 30, 2018 22:41
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I also remember that being one of the comics that after a history of typically clumsy takes on relationships and women introduced a bunch of LBGT characters and themes with about the grace you'd expect. (with one character literally named Leslie Bean) Leslie is a precious cinnamon bun and I will not have you tarnish her good name!
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Jul 31, 2018 14:10
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Aside from never being able to live with myself if I ever used the locket, it's also just not terribly useful to me because I'm a lesbian...
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Aug 7, 2018 04:19
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One of the better period-agnostic realistic hacking systems I've seen was based on the hacker rolling a bunch to scan the target system to gather bonuses on the actual infiltration roll, while the sysadmin scanned for attempts to scan their system and rolled a bunch to gather bonuses to oppose the actual infiltration roll. SJG's Hacker is also a surprisingly good baseline for what more realistic-toned hacking feels like. Wardialing indials and hoping the sysadmin doesn't boot you off the system. There's also a more modern form of hacking that involves Raspberry Pis running Kali Linux and compiling exploits from metasploit on the fly, which honestly fits pretty well into a hacking-as-spells paradigm: you have a bunch of abilities that do specific things to a target device or network (spells) and you roll against the A few systems that draw distinctions between combat-time spell casting and out-of-combat rituals with grander but less immediate effects, and I wonder if that might be a good model for the modern day hacker: Raspberry Pis cracking Wi-Fi passwords and delivering simple payloads from metasploit for your then-and-there watch_dogs style hacking as your spells, and the eight-hour energy-drink-fueled sessions of squinting at open-source printer drivers to bypass authentication as your rituals.
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Aug 8, 2018 02:54
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Also, of course, social engineering, ie posing as a teenage girl who is inexplicably interested in the company middle manager and even more inexplicably interested in his passwords. A technique for modeling the vulnerability of computer systems is to make a little map (a Directed Acyclic Graph to be specific) of all the different ways to get into a system, broken into components with multiple vulnerabilities (the 'password' one had both stealing the password file and cracking it, and compromising the person who knows the password as options in an example) and how to attack those vulnerabilities. Taking one of those maps and just writing the different skill names next to each vulnerability basically gives you a computer network that can be attacked from multiple angles, including slinky dress cryptography, and even approaches that require multiple competencies. (Though, naturally, this makes the issue of the people sitting on their thumbs while the hackers hack somewhat worse, if you don't have an approach for every player.) gradenko_2000 posted:agreed. the issue isn't the hacking per se, it's the game taking a break for 3/4ths of the party A lot of games about cooking and vector calculus make it surprisingly easy to not play a mathematician-chef. It's very poor design. 
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Aug 8, 2018 07:05
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JackMann posted:Several pages late to the game, but a few bits. Victory Games' James Bond: Roleplaying in Her Majesty's Secret Service from 1983 has a system of Hero points specifically for emulating the kind of ridiculous luck James Bond has in the movies. (Really, James Bond is an amazing achievement in genre emulation and genuinely innovative design. There are things in that game that are still revolutionary.)
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Aug 8, 2018 07:39
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Subjunctive posted:Why a DAG? Most computer systems would produce cycles if mapped this way, I think, given how common it is for trust to be transitive. The article I read used DAGs and I think it has to do with how you can model an attack as following one of many paths towards the top node. The example used by Weiss when he proposed using DAGs for computer security modeling[1] was this:  You can see how easily you can start assigning skills or scenes to each of these. "Obtain Password File" is pure Hacking, "Encounter Guessable Password" is Cryptography with a bit of Luck, "Break Into Computer Center" is a little stealth mission, "Access System Console" is some very simple Hacking, "Corrupt Sys. Admin." is a Slinky Dress or Rubber Hose approach, etc... Would be quite good for games where you play a team with different competencies, who may choose to attack a problem from different angles or try a different approach if one fails. Here's an example using individual machines[2]:   This is definitely in the "everyone else sits on their thumbs while the hacker rolls a bunch of dice"-territory if used in an RPG. The article also proposes modelling this as a solid state machine. Here's an even more specific example with trust and exploits[3]. The numbers in parenthesis denote what the trust is at that point in the chain, with 1 and 2 being the attackers and 0 being the target:  In an RPG this is definitely only for computer security aficionados. 1: Jonathan D. Weiss. A system security engineering process. In 14th Nat. Comp. Sec. Conf., pages 572–581, 1991 2: Comparing Electronic Battlefields: Using Mean Time-to-Compromise as a Comparative Security Metric 3: Towards Measuring Network Security Using Attack Graphs
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Aug 9, 2018 00:00
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Glorified Scrivener posted:Visually that reminds me of the way that GURPS Cyberpunk represented hacking. It's not something I ever got a chance to actually use in a game, but the diagramming stuck with me. I've not actually read any other cyberpunk game books - is this usually how it is mapped out? The first figure is an attack tree, where each branch is a way to get to the target. You could draw one for any situation: a door in a medieval dungeon has a top-level node called "pass through" with approaches like "open door" (which has child-nodes like "pick lock", "steal key", etc.) and "remove door" (children include bashing it down, casting Disintegrate, etc.) The second figure is a network map, which is closer to what GURPS Cyberpunk does. The network map approach is also used by Millennium's End. I'm guessing it's used in a bunch of other RPGs too, but I'm not up to speed on every cyberpunk game or game with hacking rules. 
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Aug 9, 2018 01:23
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Lurdiak posted:It definitely isn't a cyberpunk series though. Almost every single game is very openly about preserving the status quo. Yeah, sure, there's a bunch of parts that point out why that's bad, but it's still what you're doing. Thematically I think the fact Snake/Raiden is tricked or forced into supporting the status quo doesn't diminish the "we should improve society somewhat"-message. MGS2 is incredibly cyberpunk with its themes of information control (which are ridiculously relevant today) and Raiden's unwilling participation is something that the game acknowledges and comments on: the way the establishment directs his actions is ultimately something it thinks should be rebelled against, and the final lines of the game are Snake telling Raiden that he shouldn't have to be a tool of establishment.
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Aug 16, 2018 06:36
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Ratoslov posted:The 'Vance' (Vancian) wizards have a sheet of paper that represents the amount of spells they can have in their brain, and cards that represent spells that have to physically fit on the page. This is sort of neat, but the spells are all either one or two times the size of the smallest card and they're all the same shapes. Furthermore, you can get a power that lets you make the big cards the same size as the little cards, which they suggest on the forums representing by physically folding the cards in half. (My GM said to just overlap them because that's stupid.) Why is this not a spell-point system? You're getting none of the cool stuff from the physical card format and all of the drawbacks. I suspect trying to play Tetris with non-rectangular spell cards on a non-rectangular grid would get arduous pretty fast, though. It should probably just be spell points, or be spell cards in the Vance's "hand".
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Aug 26, 2018 00:37
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Splicer posted:Remember that cyberpunk discussion where people were saying hacking a car was unrealistic? Welp, need to steal this for my Person of Interest-inspired RPG.
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Aug 26, 2018 19:26
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Kai Tave posted:This has to be something that a GM sprung on one of his players. There is the tale of the wight dragon...
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Sep 24, 2018 23:44
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dwarf74 posted:And ... sorta on the albino bit. I mean yeah, cave-dwellers in the real world lose their pigmentation over time, but that's because they're in dark caves, among other blind creatures, where that's not a problem. So for drow, it would depend on what else sharing the underdark with them was sighted. If you assume "occasional light sources like luminescent fungi, tons of shadows, other beings who can see with real eyes" then jet-black skin would be good for camouflage whereas a pale albino elf would stick out. The loss of pigmentation is also because there's a selective pressure that significantly reduces the fitness of animals that have to produce unnecessary pigments. If there's no such selective pressure on a population, it'll keep its pigmentation even though it's not optimum fitness. It's also possible that the Drow are an ethnicity of black/purple/grey/brown/dark-skinned elves who only recently (on an evolutionary scale) settled underground. As a dominant civilization with few natural predators, the Drow would not have a pressure on them to evolve a lack of pigmentation, and may not have had time. Consider: white South Africans are still adapted to North and Western Europe despite living in southern Africa, and the native Greenlanders did not have a pressure on them to evolve light skin because their cuisine had sufficient vitamin D.
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Sep 25, 2018 14:44
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Imagined posted:Obviously details and exact numbers would need to be tweaked but thoughts? 1. Reveal of secrets on behalf of both player and GM is a lot of overhead. 2. Both players and GM need to do a lot of risk-evaluation, but it's of the kind that doesn't do anything other than being a mathematical optimization problem. (Which, when solved, probably becomes a game of never having any choice because the optimal choice is the only viable choice.)
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Oct 1, 2018 19:25
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Imagined posted:But you might know by sound if the GM rolled two dice, but you don't know if the GM rolled a 2 or an 8, at least in the dice variant. So how does that become a solved problem. The long answer involves statistics and game theory, the short answer is that even if you don't know what the GM rolled, there's ways to bet/bid that maximize your earnings. And in a simple system, those ways are going to be pretty easy to determine.
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Oct 2, 2018 01:28
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Using paper books effectively and using e-books effectively are both skills, and I spent my childhood learning the first. It's easier and more convenient for me to get books and use them effectively than it is for me to use e-books effectively. Additionally, the convenience of e-books for roleplaying is very limited if you don't have a sufficiently powerful tablet to load and swipe through big books with lots of design and art, and even more limited if you don't have a laptop.
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Oct 4, 2018 20:50
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Lemon-Lime posted:Artificers can create devices that run off druidic principles to interface with this network, allowing the free exchange of ideas and information. Meet Hot Dryads in Your Area Tonight!
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Oct 22, 2018 10:32
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The game is really bad!  Everyone will want to vote for their own card because that's how you win, and there's no rules for how to break a tie. Additionally, since cards that don't win are returned to your hand, as long as you don't win a round all you can do is continue to play the cards that the other players have already rejected.
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Nov 21, 2018 12:45
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NinjaDebugger posted:that is the dumbest loving mechanic I have ever heard. What the hell are you going to do when they all fail? Disembowel the Keeper for designing a scenario where the game stalls when you don't find clues.
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Nov 22, 2018 23:55
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Jeffrey of YOSPOS posted:I hear this a lot but it seems like the rules lead to this a lot, and while a Sufficiently Smart Keeper can avoid it, a system that leads to the same failure mode over and over across many tables probably warrants a design review. (Trail addresses it completely, pushing rolls helps.) The actual answer is that Luck rolls are not actually meant to be used that way; I just like disembowling people. The actual result of a failed roll to accomplish something in CoC is usually that time passes fruitlessly, and you have to spend more time. It's not the best and I'm sure there's a whole lot of badly written CoC scenarios that stop dead if someone fails their rolls to find clues, but the game explicitly has the default state of a failed roll be "time passes and you can try again". Though they really could have made that clearer. It's easy to miss. (Re: Gumshoe: Yeah Gumshoe is neat and all but the thing about Gumshoe is that once you've learned the central lesson of "just give the players the clues they need to progress the plot" you don't actually need Gumshoe anymore: you can just make good investigation scenarios in any other game. It's not so much a system-thing as it is having a system that coincidentally shines a very bright spotlight on good GMing advice. Now, making a system where you can't make a common mistake is a pretty good idea, but Gumshoe doesn't actually stop you from gating Investigative tags behind General skill rolls...)
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Nov 23, 2018 01:08
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My Lovely Horse posted:Seriously, Ennis is doing Wildstorm? Like, Apollo and Midnighter Wildstorm? Garth "anal sex is hilarious" Ennis? Ellis is writing a relaunch of Wildstorm. Ennis also wrote some Kev and Midnighter books for The Authority back in the noughties, which I haven't read because I prefer Ennis' larger-than-life war veterans and crime dramas (and maybe his over-the-top spy antics, even) to his incredibly bitter, self-loathing superhero stories. (And I don't much like superhero stories anyway.)
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Dec 24, 2018 12:05
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Pope Guilty posted:In fairness "anyone in a position of power is a monster" is just art initiating life. Ennis just tends to be crass about it. There's a passage in The Punisher: Valley Forge, Valley Forge where the conspiracy of eight generals has one member utter some immense racism, which goes uncommented upon by the other seven generals. The first time I read it, I felt that it was kind of eye-roll-worthy that the evil generals were also racists. Like, when someone's evil you don't have to have them engage in every moral depravity just to emphasize the point, y'know? I no longer roll my eyes when rereading that issue.
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Dec 24, 2018 17:01
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