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Wow that's garbage.
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Jan 2, 2018 21:15
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Literal good boy points.
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Jan 2, 2018 23:20
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Jimbozig posted:Okay so I don't remember any of the details of BitD, but what would you do if you've established in the fiction that the vault is guarded by a fearsome monstrosity that once was human and is now possessed by a vicious ghost, and the PCs are on the BitD equivalent of 1HP and 0 Fate Points to spend, and they decide to open the final vault anyway? Blades In The Dark, page 191 posted:You’ve telegraphed the threat, so go ahead and follow through when it hits. Players have several tools at their disposal to deal with adversity. If they can react in time, they can make an action roll. If they’re hit with trouble, they can resist it. You don’t have to pull your punches! BITD is pretty explicit that if a threat is established and not actively opposed in some fashion that you as the GM can and should simply let it happen, and that the players should expect this to occur. On the other hand, the book is also pretty explicit that putting the players in a no-win scenario is something to be avoided. No-win doesn't mean it can't come with a cost in terms of consequences, and there's a whole how-to-GM chapter that's all about how to handle various situations.
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Jan 8, 2018 01:34
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Blades In The Dark very specifically has rules for what happens when your character accumulates too many wounds and consequences over time and by default the assumption isn't that every character is going to make it through a life of crime unscathed and/or alive to the end of a campaign. Once again, this is stuff that's actually in the text as opposed to whatever's being argued here which seems to be based on assumptions and manufactured premises. Stress in BITD isn't some endless bottomless resource that you can always spend that exists to give you the illusion of cost or whatever, this is kind of a silly way of framing things.
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Jan 8, 2018 07:26
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gradenko_2000 posted: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. 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. Stress doesn't replenish automatically between heists though, and in fact you have to spend downtime actions, resources, and rolls in order to clear it. If you mark your last Stress box, then you suffer from a Trauma which does reset your Stress but also brings your character one step closer to "retirement" of which you don't get to just handwave it away, four Traumas and your character is done, finito. Maybe they don't die but they can't continue play, which means if they cash out and retire it's probably not to a life of luxury and excess.
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Jan 8, 2018 08:36
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gradenko_2000 posted: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. The example roll the book gives is of someone getting stabbed and needing to spend 4 Stress to avoid the consequence thereof. It's worth noting that BITD characters have 9 Stress, period, so it's quite possible that if you take a lot of real risky moves and/or roll like poo poo you can very easily blow through a good chunk of your Stress in a given heist. Stress also gets spent as a resource for group actions. You can assist another player by taking a stress to add +1d to their roll, but you might wind up sharing in the consequences if things go south. You can also choose to lead the group in an action which is BITDs way of saying "okay let's not make each player roll Stealth to sneak past the guards," where you elect one player in the crew to lead the particular action, everybody rolls, and the single best action rolled is chosen as the result for everyone...but for each roll that comes up a failure, the leader of the task takes a Stress. So how do you recover Stress? By indulging your character's vice as a downtime action. Bear in mind that A). you only get to make two official downtime actions between jobs, or only one when your crew is at war, and the list of actions includes things like training, recovering from harm, reducing the heat you've accrued, and working on long-term projects, so by choosing to regain spent Stress you're sacrificing your ability to focus on other stuff, and B). regaining Stress is based on a die roll which means it's entirely possible that you can wind up regaining less Stress than you would have liked and have to go into the next job with accrued stress still on your tab, so to speak.
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Jan 8, 2018 10:01
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rumble in the bunghole posted:You have accumulating traumas so there’s effectively more, although it’s definitely not something you want to get deep into. Right, hitting your limit and getting a Trauma does refresh your Stress but it's also basically one tick down on the timer to your character being forced out of the game for good. And yes, BITD does say that you don't have to die once you hit that limit, you can insist that your character lives through everything if you feel that strongly enough, but four Traumas means that character is done for, do not pass go, no exceptions. I mean, it's fair to say that BITD does give you some leeway in how precisely your character deals with consequences, you can always opt to not take Stress and simply deal with it, though this can inflict harm upon you that requires other means and methods of removing. Unless you simply have the luckiest dice in the world 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.
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Jan 8, 2018 10:52
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ITT: people who have never played or read games nonetheless have strong opinions about how well they work.
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Jan 8, 2018 23:06
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remusclaw posted:Outside of some nihilistic takes on horror, the whole "no one ever comes out again" thing always has an implicit "until our heroes went in" tacked onto it. This is what's blowing my mind tbh. "Oh so no one who goes in ever comes out again but the PCs can? So much for following the fiction, checkmate bladeailures."
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Jan 8, 2018 23:32
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lol who the heck reads something like that "the worst book ever is better than ANYTHING you've ever written you idiot, you absolute fool" statement and takes it to heart rather than going "hmm this sounds suspiciously like something a stupid loving rear end in a top hat would say."
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Jan 9, 2018 02:20
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That person deserves to go to book jail where all they get to read is Ready Player One for ten years straight.
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Jan 9, 2018 02:21
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Also I'm reasonably confident saying that the expectations of the average RPG group are tuned such that the average GM's output is nonetheless considered enjoyable, nobody I have ever known has gone into an RPG expecting the GM to bust out some award winning literary masterpiece and if I ever did know anyone like that I would assume they had some hardcore brain problems.
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Jan 9, 2018 02:28
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In fairness to Plutonis, which is possibly the first time those words have ever been written in that order before, the people working at WotC right now are super dumb.
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Jan 9, 2018 05:04
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One day I hope I can be so sure in my convictions that I can argue for literal days straight about poo poo I have no understanding of whatsoever.
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Jan 10, 2018 23:51
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food court bailiff posted:I spent like twenty minutes reading the F&Fs about Starfinder and it cured me of wanting to play it. This is the best cure for the urge to run anything published by Paizo fyi.
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Jan 11, 2018 22:28
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Today I found out that Covok is the reason D&D Next exists.
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Jan 14, 2018 00:13
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Didn't Mearls at one point make a tweet about how a bunch of people being honored with awards at some convention or another weren't real game designers or something? Among them being Mike Pondsmith?
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Jan 22, 2018 20:12
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Bedlamdan posted:Personally, I'm fine with a better environment for women in tabletop gaming, and am glad that Mike Mearls and Wizards of the Coast have taken a stand to support it. I don't know why that's so controversial. I can't imagine being so desperate to post dumb poo poo like this that you'd repeatedly spend ten bucks to do so even after being told to gently caress off and go somewhere else.
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Jan 22, 2018 20:44
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It was a response to the gender parity on the Industry Insider panels for GenCon 2016. Pretty sure it was Tarnowski, tho, not Mearls. Nah, Mearls may not have made it (I don't think it was Tarnowski who did but heck, maybe it was) but I very clearly remember him agreeing with it because it was so very blatantly a Dumb Mike Mearls thing to do.
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Jan 22, 2018 20:54
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Flavivirus posted:Here's the tweet in question: FMguru posted:Note the @lewpuls he's responding to is Lew Pulsipher, an ancient grognard who got his start running Diplomacy play-by-mail 'zines in the 1960s and whose last published game design was in 1986, who was wondering why he'd never heard of any of the panelists. Yeah there we go, I knew it was someone else Mearls was replying to instead of Tarnowski though I'm not at all surprised he had to weigh in too (lol at calling Maximum Mike a "douchebag with delusions of grandeur"). While I suppose you could squint your eyes and claim that Mearls' casual dismissiveness of the these panelists isn't really "gatekeeping" since he isn't actively attempting to keep them away from the convention, merely denigrating them and their accomplishments in a very passive-aggressive sort of fashion along with a bunch of grognard shitheads, I'm gonna say it's close enough for the judges.
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Jan 22, 2018 22:08
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yeah, it's definitely possible he wasn't trying to be lovely, but it was certinaly badly phrased whether it he was being malicious or just tactless. I mean it's really hard to discuss whether Mearls wants to sincerely be inclusive and anti-gatekeeping without rehashing the deal with him and Zak S for the gazillionth time, but it remains the biggest elephant in the room as far as that goes. That's sort of the problem with palling around with complete shitheads and going to bat for them, it puts your sincerity into question even if you ostensibly state an otherwise decent point (like "gatekeeping is bad.") Talk is cheap, and as far as I can tell Mearls is all talk.
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Jan 23, 2018 01:02
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Alien Rope Burn posted:To be honest, it doesn't really matter to me too much, I just think things get pretty wild with demonizing him (I wrote this just as the thread locked down, it feels more than a little prescient). Not that it isn't understandable, and not that anybody should necessarily forgive him for the lovely, cringeworthy groveling he did to some of the worst corners of our hobby. But people can contain multitudes. He can see Chult as a diversifying of D&D while other folks rightly poke at its faults. It's probably better than the last take on it (i.e. just blowing it up), but it's probably not as educated as it needed to be either. "Demonizing" seems like a pretty hyperbolic way to frame what just happened here in this thread, nobody is saying Mearls is the Great Gaming Satan, but I'm also not impressed by him tweeting at people to "stop gatekeeping" the same way I'd be equally unimpressed by someone known for consuming entire chocolate cakes in a sitting to be throwing shade at others for poor dietary habits. He also isn't a very good game designer either so I'm not privy to those positive multitudes he may or may not possess, just the lovely ones which is what I base my opinion on. Covok made a really stupid post and instead of everybody going "hey yeah, he is ugly so he must be a sexual creeper" a couple people went "yo this is real fuckin dumb" and he copped a probation.
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Jan 24, 2018 04:08
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Banana Man posted:So what exactly were the best parts of 4e with classes and monster math specifically, I am really confused about the essentials and the large number of classes. 4E's monster math didn't get formally good until the Monster Manual 3, but the Monster Vault is an Essentials trade dress redo of the first Monster Manual with all the classic staples like orcs, goblins, dragons, various sorts of undead, etc, and so if you want all the traditional D&D monsters but with the actual good statblocks you will want the Monster Vault, and then the MM3 for more variety. The Monster Manual 2 can be used but requires some finagling to make sure things like defenses and damage are where you want them, but the formula for designing a monster is generally simple enough that it's merely a minor pain in the rear end rather than a major one. As far as classes go, to be honest the classes straight out of the very first PHB contain some of the better stuff right out of the gate. The PHB 2 brings in a lot of the classes that they didn't put in the first one like the Barbarian and the Sorcerer along with new ones like the Avenger and generally between those two books and the assorted Martial/Arcane/Divine Power supplements you have more cool poo poo than most people will ever actually use in a lifetime. The PHB3 is where things kind of start to run out of steam. The Monk is fun but the power point using psionic classes suffer from some wonky design, and the Runepriest and Seeker feel half-baked and just sorta there. The redone core classes in the Essentials line were divisive because they were very much a return to the form of "fighters get to hit things, and then maybe hit things slightly harder X times a day, but spellcasters get all these cool toys over there." Some people swear by them but honestly, I tried my hardest to play through several mini-campaigns using an Essential-ized Assassin and it was the dullest, least enjoyable 4E I've ever played in my life, 90% of which was spent making basic attack after basic attack. That Assassin, by the way, is from Heroes of Shadow which is hot fuckin garbage. Highlights of that book include Literally The Worst 4E Class Ever Printed (the Binder, a Warlock variant whose main ability is to make you wish you were just playing a regular Warlock), the absolute lamest way anyone could have made a 4E Vampire class, a lovely ghost/shade race option that I'm not sure anyone ever took because it's the only 4E class with arbitrary penalties out of nowhere, and a Blackguard class so boring I can't even remember what its deal was. Heroes of the Feywild, by contrast, isn't half bad. It presents some class options which are kinda sorta halfway between regular 4E classes and Essentials stuff, and most of them aren't my cup of tea but at least they aren't utterly, egregiously bad and half-assed like Heroes of Shadow was. Oh wait, there was Heroes of the Elemental Planes to, wasn't there? Uh, poo poo. Oh right, it had a couple new Monk subtypes with elemental kung fu and...another wizard variant. I mean of course it had another wizard variant. You could probably just skip that one tbh.
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Jan 25, 2018 04:11
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Lurdiak posted:Completely agreed, but at worst it can be adapted to other systems that aren't poo poo. Alternately you could just look up a bunch of Lisa Frank art at work, play a good game, and not pay for a Next supplement guaranteed to be bad.
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Feb 6, 2018 03:45
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ProfessorCirno posted:I mean yeah it sucks it's for 5e but that shouldn't be hard to transfer over to other games. I really feel weird and uncomfortable giving the makers poo poo just because they made a thing for 5e. Good ideas are good ideas and "what if the feywild was just the strange lovechild of that movie with David Bowie's leather-bound crotch and Lisa Frank?" is a good idea imo. I'm not really giving the designers poo poo, it just seems real weird to me in 2018 to pay for a supplement for a bad game that you know you'll have to convert/rewrite to get anything useful out of it because it's got some neat art I guess.
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Feb 6, 2018 09:01
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The sense of wondering just how dumb someone can be.
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Feb 10, 2018 22:19
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Countblanc posted:did that Unity game ever come out The last backer update was January 17th where they said they were aiming for February to have the pdf finalized for proofing and printing, and the creator posted a comment on the Kickstarter page a few days ago claiming that there'd be an update at the end of this week.
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Feb 16, 2018 05:14
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Zerilan posted:What's FantasyCraft like. A couple friends mentioned it to me as a possible game to run but I don't know anything about it beyond it being d20. FantasyCraft is a d20 fantasy game made by the Spycraft guys. As such it's a reasonably well designed but extremely dense and fiddly game. I would describe it as the ultimate expression of someone sitting down and saying "I'm gonna fix 3.X so it works right!" and it does, but the way it goes about doing that adds a lot of different layers of stuff and while I don't feel like it's unnecessarily complex, I also feel like a lot of the information is presented in unintuitive ways that require a lot of flipping back and forth to crosscheck stuff and so the actual effort required to come to terms with how everything works is more tedious than it needs to be. It does a lot of things pretty well imo, martial characters get a decent enough array of impactful abilities and options that don't feel like lovely afterthoughts, the mandatory overelaborate weapon list actually attempts to give all the various flavors of weapons characteristics and capabilities to meaningfully differentiate them, feats aren't utterly insufferable, the default race selection gives you the standard orcs and elves but also lets you play dragons, giants, ogres, lizard people, tree people, and warforged/golems...I would say that if what you and your friends want is a robust and decently designed d20 fantasy game with a lot of crunch and you absolutely can'd stand 4E D&D for whatever reason it's probably the best option that exists.
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Feb 22, 2018 23:17
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kingcom posted:Also theres a cool as hell mecha game made using the system. Speaking of LANCER, there hasn't been a new update in a while but that's because the creator has apparently been working on a fairly extensive overhaul to the rules based on feedback and his own dissatisfaction with how certain systems have been playing out in practice: quote:Hey all! quote:I'm going to also mention briefly that I'll be cleaning up a lot of the more 'finicky' systems in this update, such as critical damage, disabling individual systems, etc. This is being replaced (along with heat) with some new statuses and a new system which is a CRITICAL gauge. I think it'll be both way more interesting, easier to use, and more flavorful in general. quote:Posting an addendum here - Update's coming along, but it's a fairly major overhaul of the game (drastically for the better in my opinion) that doesn't fundamentally change too much but makes systems both simpler and easier to use. This will require some more play-testing and balancing to get right but it's such a good departure from some of the wonkier parts of the old system that I think it will go over really well. He also mentioned that his work on Kill 6 Billion Demons precludes him from taking the lead on artwork for the final version and that part of the funding for the game when it's launched will be for commissioning artwork, but that he'll still be contributing a few pieces here and there. He actually posted this on his tumblr page just the other day: 
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Feb 23, 2018 00:44
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Holy fuckin poo poo are we seriously going to have this out again?
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Feb 23, 2018 02:29
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For sale: RPG, never read.
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Feb 23, 2018 02:49
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Order your Rough Draft Deluxe Edition of Pathfinder 2E and get a free subscription to Pathfinder Online.
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Mar 7, 2018 00:14
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gradenko_2000 posted:The topic of "super speed" came up in the TG Kickstarter thread, and I had a thought: I mean this is how you can handle it in a lot of effects-based games, yeah. A number of superhero games, for instance, don't let you take Multiple Actions as a power but tell you that if you want to represent your speedster punching a hundred times in one second to just build it as some sort of special attack that does X more damage or maybe hits over an area instead of literally allowing you to take multiple attack actions in a row. Lurdiak posted:I don't see any problem with that in theory, but it depends on the level of abstraction. Something like that wouldn't raise any eyebrows in something like a CCG, but in a roleplaying-heavy game it might seem weird that going fast doesn't just make you go fast. "Being able to run really far really fast" is never the problem, it's games which represent enhanced speed in ways that break the game's action economy. Anything which lets you get more actual actions in a game where the default assumption for characters is having a set, limited number of actions per turn should be regarded with suspicion, because it's probably easy as hell to exploit. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 06:45 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 06:43
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Lurdiak posted:Yes, I understand that, but if you cast a speed spell in, say, Dungeons and Dragons, and the result is that the target hits harder, it's going to be met with some confusion. I believe you could solve this easily enough with sufficient application of naturalistic language.
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Mar 13, 2018 09:47
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If I recall correctly, CTech's dice system is one of those where the higher your character's dice pool is the greater your chances of critical failure is.
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Mar 18, 2018 19:01
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Yawgmoth posted:It's also got the fun of listing critical fail-fail-success-crit success as a continuum, yet having independent ways to determine crit success & failure. So any given roll could be both a critical success and a critical failure, which wouldn't be that big of an issue (it could at least be built around) if they weren't so big on making them "you fail, also poo poo is hosed" and "you are successful and get a bonus good thing". Oh right, I forget about that. I mean yeah, you can have games with multiple axes of success/failure within a single roll, the FFG funny dice RPGs aim in that direction, but with Cthulhutech it's clearly not an intended consequence.
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Mar 18, 2018 19:29
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food court bailiff posted:The best part of Cthulhutech's dice system is that it was totally, obviously broken even at a cursory glance. Like, anyone who has passed basic algebra should have read the rules with a growing sense of awe and horror. And yet, somehow it made it to print, and sold a gazillion copies. Cthulhutech was largely sold on the back of its artwork, which was extensively previewed leading up to its release, and the premise of fighting giant alien bug monsters with mechs. My guess is that a bunch of initial sales were from people who didn't even know what the system was like, they just wanted a good looking mech game.
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Mar 19, 2018 20:06
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Foglet posted:I still do. LANCER has looked pretty good so far.
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Mar 19, 2018 20:50
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Lemon-Lime posted:It's extremely beta, though. Still more playable than Cthulhutech though.
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Mar 19, 2018 21:44
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Witch Girl Adventures actually pisses me off more than Cthulhutech because if you just casually glance at it WGA looks like a neat RPG aimed towards younger players, that's pretty cool, only then it turns out to be not only a lovely, badly designed game but also a vehicle for the creators' transformation/snuff/vore/whatever fetishes. CTech is full of gross poo poo but at least it isn't pretending that it would be a good thing to buy your daughter to play with her friends.
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Mar 20, 2018 02:59
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