|
PDQ# does something a bit similar, Training Points are earned for failing significant rolls. So you advance slower if you're doing stuff like picking a single overlarge Quality and trying to apply it to everything. Also helps self-correct if you choose Qualities that are less relevant, since you'll probably fail more at the tasks you can't handle well and you'll earn more Training Points. Although I know asynchronous advancement rules are a bugbear, this is probably my favorite variant of them.
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2018 11:47
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 01:40 |
|
|
9 section staff, made of lightsabers also connected by lightsaberwhips.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2018 10:52
|
|
|
So, not knowing anything about the blastersaber I do a quick google... wookiepedia claims the lightsaber part is built "light and swift" to take advantage of his speed....how the hell does that work. The only part of the lightsaber that should have any weight is the actual handle, and he's the only jedi that has an actual gun snapped to the base, meaning his should be the slowest (outside of the weird exotic ones light Maul's extra-long saber-staff). Unless they're somehow claiming that his laser-blade somehow weighs less than other laser blades?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2018 23:38
|
|
|
I don't know if I can tolerate bad science like that in my world of slapstick robots and bullshit space magic.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 12, 2018 00:05
|
|
|
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-the-story-marina-abramovic-performance-that-contributed-pizzagate
|
|
#
¿
Jan 15, 2018 03:13
|
|
|
food court bailiff posted:Hey guys, I'm digging through the TG as an Industry thread but I'm hundreds of pages back. I remember there was some discussion about systems that work better for playing around in the Shadowrun setting than Shadowrun itself (which seems like an increasingly low bar with each new edition...) but can't remember what they were. Can someone toss me some recommendations? Was there some PbtA one? I personally use Savage Worlds and I find it works well for capturing the feel of shadowrun. Characters are tough enough to survive missions even if they aren't souped-up street sams or something. Has enough granularity in equipment for softcore gear porn (as opposed to Shadowrun's full-on XXX gear porn) and generally it provides a good action movie feel that fits the setting well. Unfortunately I haven't found a good cyberpunk Savage Worlds game (Interface 2.0 has a lot of problems), so I ended up having to make my own hack for it to balance the races, make some matrix rules, etc. Rules are here if you're interested: https://drive.google.com/file/d/18YxegneG7Ph_yTLNJ_9jEmAMrvVsYrs_/view?usp=sharing
|
|
#
¿
Feb 1, 2018 21:41
|
|
|
Besides, if you're a monk and using two immovable rods you missed the obvious trick of chaining them together into nunchuks. The chain would make it much easier to justify pinning or trapping too. And it's nunchuks. Heck, level up a few time and chain a few more together into a 7-section staff. And you can still pull off the immovable rod ladder.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2018 13:30
|
|
|
Serf posted:I have never been in the GM's seat for the game, but this would actually be a big selling point for me from that standpoint. Taking stats and slapping a name onto it with a different mini/token is huge as a GM. It's one of the reasons I love 4E so much. SW is pretty darn GM friendly for a rules-medium game, especially because it's easy to just stat up the "important bits" for a particular NPC. It hits a sweet spot for me, but I will say it's not the sort of game where you tend to want to run more than one game with the same group in the same setting, because you'll start to notice the fact that say...one Deadlands huckster looks an awful lot like another deadlands huckster with some modest differences in build. Fortunately, there are a lot of settings and so long as you keep it fresh it's gold (in my opinion at least). It's my go-to system for D&D conversions, I've had very successful Dark Sun and Eberron games using SW. Currently using it for Shadowrun.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 3, 2018 03:23
|
|
|
Personally, I'm a big fan of PDQ's Truth and Justice. It's light and encourages DIY powers, but it's also designed to be fairly traditional (rather than more narrative-style supers games which have come to dominate the landscape). That said, it has some significant problems here and there, so I used an unofficial 2nd edition I put together: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1V7uNzfqcB9XYHYR3xa2s_QaLSSUMNj4-/view?usp=sharing
|
|
#
¿
May 10, 2018 01:27
|
|
|
Covok posted:I guess the other issue was that my Godbound game (outside one player having a busted microphone that ended up killing the entire game and, frankly, that was my fault) had trouble challenging the players. I would throw really insane poo poo at them like a Godbound turning an entire city they called home into a spiral mountain into the sky with a full dungeon inside and...the players would just try to find ways to circumvent the whole thing. Which, sure, I get it: that's my bad. But it also was just kind of hard to make challenges sometimes. I'd say one of the things to remember with really high powered games is that most of the traditional barriers (walls or distance), just don't work. You can't have a 'dungeon' scenario when players can casually walk in a straight line through a wall to get wherever they're going. It means that most of the traditional elements used to structure adventures or scenarios just aren't available, and attempts to use them often end badly.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2018 04:18
|
|
|
Covok posted:What you're saying is is that I have to think laterally. Like instead of being in a dungeon, putting them in The multi-dimensional Labyrinth from Gurren Lagann where the issue is more trying to escape your heart's desire and seeking reality over fantasy? In other words, I have to think bigger. That can definitely work, but you also don't want to to just stick your players in a demiplane every scenario. In many cases it's more about breaking things up... In a dungeon you've got a series of rooms, connected by hallways and doorways. Some areas can be explored freely...when players come to a door they can choose to pass it by or open it, when they come to a hall they can choose to go left or right. But you can also set conditions or barriers that prevent progress until the players have tripped certain flags (getting the bone key from room B to enter the necromancer's crypt, pulling the three levers to open up level 2, etc). By and large a well-designed dungeon will have certain set-pieces that you know you want players to encounter, with other rooms there to provide connections or to work as a buffer and prevent things from wrapping up too quickly. You can take that same sort of philosophy and apply it to more free-form adventure design. Think of 'scenes' you want to happen and then treat them like rooms in a dungeon...instead of being separated by walls and hallways they're separated by time or knowledge. Some will require specific plot 'triggers' to unlock like keys to a locked room. That's not to say the process is identical, obviously players will have much more freedom to ignore or skip scenes, you'll find yourself having to come up with more things on the fly when players go off the 'edge of the map', metaphorically speaking. Often it helps to think in reverse of the standard design...dungeons are 'passive' encounters, waiting for players to explore them and generally remaining static and unchanging until the players reach the point. In these sort of games you want ongoing processes, events already in motion that progress on their own until the players intervene or react. The series of odd murders in town lead to the summoning of the demon, the summoning of the demon will allow the cult to raise the hellspire, raising the hellspire will allow them to devestate the kingdom's armies, devestating the kingdom's armies will allow them to lay waste to the land, this will summon the dark god. traditionally this would be the looming threat that causes players to act in order to prevent it. In something like Godbound, the players might intervene early and stop the madness...but if the dark god is summoned and the kingdom is ruined...that's not the end, the players may have hosed up, but the game isn't over. Basically, think less like a map, and more like a flowchart.
|
|
#
¿
May 11, 2018 05:54
|
|
|
So, just thinking about supers games since it was mentioned... Is there a point to having the ability to buy super-strength by itself? Separate from some form of super-toughness? Can anyone think of legitimately superstrong character in fiction (not merely superhuman, like at least 'throwing cars' level) who does not possess at least equivalent super-toughness? Other than obvious joke characters who are designed to be useless for humor value. Obviously there are characters who are super-tough without being superstrong, or whose toughness exceeds their strength (although even then that's relatively rare), so it makes sense to have superhuman defenses available to purchase separately, but it seems like superstrength should come with some level of supertoughness by default. There are a small number of exceptions in manga/anime, characters whose powers take tremendous tolls on their body (Midoriya from MHA is the most obvious example) but these are almost exclusively a 'cost' associated with the character using their abilities, while the characters can typically tank massive amounts of damage from opponents (example, in a recent episode of MHA, Midoriya breaks his arm punching his opponent, but is still up and running after the opponent smacks him so hard into the ground he leaves a 1-2 foot deep crater). So, game-design wise these would be better represented as an attack power that takes vitality or energy to use rather than a persistent ability like X levels of superstrength. Midoriya's arm breaker attacks aren't super-strength, they're more like energy blasts 'refluffed' as physical power. Examples aside, I mainly wonder about this when balancing powers like speedsters vs bricks. Super-speed, as a power, is useful for both attack and defense in almost all systems (where it isn't completely broken to start with), while a character trying to be a 'brick' has to buy their attack and defense abilities separately. It seems like it might be easier to balance simply to have a power like 'Might', which covers both strength and durability, with the option to purchase dedicated defenses (forcefields, ring of invulnerability, etc) as a separate, and more powerful, defensive ability.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2018 00:21
|
|
|
Not untrue, but at the same time I feel like it's important to at least provide the mechanical illusion that gameplay is different for someone who's fast on their feet and someone who was bitten by a radioactive Nokia 3310
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2018 01:38
|
|
|
Well, arguably, if spiderman took a hit then he failed in his defense (since he's a mobility focused character), he might have a certain amount of durability to mitigate the damage (or just more boxes to fill), but if he's been punched through a wall something has gone wrong for him. If Hulk gets punched through a wall...that might mean nothing at all to him. He may have just tripped. There's several ways that it could be represented mechanically...Savage Worlds would give Hulk bigger Toughness while Spiderman probably inflicts a penalty to his opponent's fighting or shooting roll (along with higher-than-human toughness). This means the "perfect opponent" for each is opposite for both...spiderman has to worry about extremely skilled opponents who can manage to land a blow despite the penalties (or opponents who can spam tons of attacks until the dice come up in their favor). It means normal weapons like guns or swords can still hurt him if his opponent manages to land a blow. Those same opponents would be minimal threats to Hulk since his huge toughness means that it would take very high damage attacks to faze him (and even then they're probably soaked), hulk has to worry about the opponents who probably have average or medoicre Fighting scores, but have bought up damage dealing powers to the degree that they can casually bust through his high Toughness. Those high-damage opponents are less of a threat to spiderman since they likely can't touch him and all the damage in the world is useless if you can't land the blow. Not that I would suggest Savage Worlds for supers on the scale of spiderman or hulk, but it's a good example of how a system can emphasize certain traits in different ways, even if the ultimate goal is "don't get hurt".
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2018 02:51
|
|
|
There's also the issue that the "team normal" in something like Justice League just isn't the same character as they are in their solo book. Batman in his own comics is a fairly down to earth brawler and investigator with a few useful tricks and gadgets, justice league batman is a super-gadgeteer just like Reed Richards or Tony Stark.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2018 03:18
|
|
|
Xiahou Dun posted:Jessica Jones? Not an expert in Jessica Jones, but from some quick research I'd say she's probably as tough as she is strong. She's about the same level of strength as spiderman (maybe a bit lower) and both display feats of super-toughness, even if that isn't so tough that they would be bulletproof. They could both probably take a hit from their clone and not end up wiped out. (Luke Cage on the other hand is probably a good example of a character who is tougher than they are strong, even if he is pretty strong).
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2018 04:36
|
|
|
Actually thought of a decent example myself, ironically it's Invincible. Viltrumites seem to be represented as significantly stronger than their own durability, often killing one another in just a punch or two.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2018 05:02
|
|
|
You want to really throw a system into knots, trying and create a mechanical resolution for Stands. Regarding creative use of powers, I think Truth and Justice manages a decent method with it's stunts (it's got some balance issues, but the heart of the idea is fine), basically letting you morph one power into any other power so long as you can provide a relation. So say a forcefield user could create a suit of force-field power armor for a strength boost, or razor-thin fields for an attack power, that sort of thing. But of course, things like Stands are kind of like playing calvinball until one of you explodes or dies messily.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2018 20:23
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:I feel like a good number of shonen battles - at least in better series like Jojo's Bizarre Adventure or One Piece - are kind of more like puzzle challenges than straightforward fights. The hero has to work out how best to leverage their own powers creatively to beat a foe that is likely unbeatable in a straightforward fight. Though that's not always the case, of course, sometimes there's a secondary element or dilemma that keeps the hero from just throwing out whatever their Big Attack is, like a hostage or a promise they made or they've been debuffed somehow. I'm not sure there's a system that really does that well yet, through I know folks have certainly considered it. They're kind of presented like puzzle challenges, but they've always felt more like the Oldest Game from Sandman. A kind of one-upsmanship...can the character think of a way they could have overcome, bypassed or beaten their opponent's latest move, without invalidating the move itself? If so, then it happened. This continues until someone thinks themselves into a corner.
|
|
#
¿
May 12, 2018 21:03
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:In my experience running FAE a fair deal, you have to be willing as a GM to say "That doesn't sound like you're using [approach X], that sounds like [approach Y] or [approach Z]." and at least make them justify their approach usage in the narrative. I find it's more of an issue when people try and run supers games with FAE. It's easy enough to tell someone they can't use Quick for everything, except when they're playing The Flash. The ability to push an approach to superhuman levels really causes the 'one-character, one-approach' style to dominate.
|
|
#
¿
May 20, 2018 20:08
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:I think it says a lot that of all the D&D settings to me, Eberron is the one you could move to nearly any other suitable fantasy system and lose nothing. Those were my two very first Savage Worlds conversions.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2018 21:15
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:Ditch the vancian helmet thing, and instead use Spelljammer to go on a tour of the Totally Not Copyrighted versions of all the popular settings. The low quality midi Forgotten Realms. Yeah, the actual mechanics of a spelljamming helm are probably the least interesting parts of spelljammer (in fact, pretty much every alternative helm is much, much more interesting than the standard one).
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2018 22:54
|
|
|
Plutonis posted:I thought a Spelljaming Helm was the magic version of what the Juggernaut wore It does kind of demand one of those joke magic items, like the box of skeletons that do your laundry. An actual helmet (with a hefty strap) that can travel through space.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 6, 2018 23:45
|
|
|
Tsilkani posted:I'm running a game, and while the combat isn't bad, the non-combat options are really pretty lackluster. It seems to be a problem endemic to the genre Valor is trying to emulate; all the other shonen-style RPGs I've seen (Shonen Final Burst, Fight!, Panic at the Dojo, Burn Legend) all seem to really drop the ball on detailed systems outside of combat. It's not a gamebreaker, it just means you have to go into it knowing the fights are all that really matter here, and everything else is just window dressing on the way to the next fight. As someone who's making an overpowered,exalted heartbreaker type game (not 100% shonen style, but definitely 'shonen-esque'), I'm actually a bit curious here...what sort of systems would be good for a game like this? Obviously if the theme of the game involves stuff like politicking, rulership or dominion management (such as Exalted or Godbound), it behooves you to have rules for things like taking over your kingdom, managing it and improving it. But when creating a more generic system it seems out of place. And while something that has basically no rules for anything other than massive quantities of violence (the recent Fatal and Friends review of Mythender springs to mind), once I get the basic rules for "here's a system for determining your non-combat skills/here's how you can overcome obstacles in ways other than punching them" in place, I do feel a little stumped on how to move beyond that. It probably doesn't help that I'm deliberately averting meta-currency, otherwise I'd probably look to games like FATE for inspiration as they have good emergent rules without getting bogged down into a full set of 'social combat' mechanics. But lacking that...I'm not sure what the best approach is to take.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2018 03:58
|
|
|
Lemon-Lime posted:a) don't make a generic system. There are already lots of those and plenty of them work for Exalted-style stuff. Make a system where some subsystems (like domain management) can be ignored if the players want for sure, but settle on flavour and theme ahead of time and write mechanics that reinforce those things. The ideal is for people to go "if I want to run Exalted, but don't want to use Storyteller, the default game I would use is [your game]" and not "well, [your game] can do Exalted too." Generic may not be the best term here. Let's call it...setting agnostic. Flavor and theme I've got, it's just those naturally deal with the main elements of the system (high power level, setting dials on realism and consequences of your actions, creating cool powers, etc). It's not a generic system in the vein of something like FATE, Savage Worlds or PDQ, it's more like how a super-hero system. Designed for a genre, but not a setting. quote:b) sit down and make a list of the types of things you absolutely must be able to do in Exalted, then figure out how you're going to design mechanics for all of those things. Don't start with designing mechanics with no clear idea of what you're trying to accomplish, it generally leads to poor mechanics-theme interplay. For me it would just be high-powered kung-fu battles and courtly intrigue, but for you it might include other things. Although the system did start life as just 'how can I make my own system I find palatable to play Exalted in" and it will still definitely get used for that (which will also involve me bolting on mechanics for things like social/cultural manipulation), the game itself (called Badass Kung Fu Demigods, for those what care) has moved into broader territory. My closest inspiration at this point is more something like Shards of the Exalted Dream, presenting a system as well as a variety of micro-settings that the system can run. Some examples of the micro-settings to show you what I mean: *After J-Day: Players take the role of angels who rebelled against god in defense of the unsaved humans left behind on judgement day. All about trying to salvage the human race as it descends into post-apocalyptic barbarism and fighting demonic invaders while trying not to Fall. *Neon Knights: Play as one of the knights of the round table who drank from the grail and were granted immortality and immense power. The world is similar to the WoD setting, with the knights serving as secret defenders of humanity against supernatural predators and threats. MIB meets Exalted meets Dresden Files. *Return of the Old Gods. Cyberpunk dystopian future ruled in secret by tyrannical AI. Suddenly gods of the age of myth begin reincarnating all over the place, screwing up everyone's plans. Zeus vs cyborgs. Trinity Wonder has a baby with Scion. *Sword-Lords of The Apocalypse: Post apocalyptic remains of a final-fantasy-esque technomagic world. Players have been bonded with one of the World Breaker Swords, ancient superweapons capable of destroying the planet. Trigun meets Wild Arms So, the system is meant to handle all of these disparate settings, with minimal rules changes, and I think it does the job of that. Main thing is that the themes largely deal with the elephant in the room: the sheer amount of power available to a PC. They're about the consequences (or lack of consequences) that come along with the power levels PCs are capable of. But, that's mostly stuff that's combat, or combat adjacent and I do admit that I worry about stuff that sits firmly in the non-combat camp. As of right now, it's not much more sophisticated than "here are your non-combat traits and what to roll when you want to use them. The GM assigns a TN to beat on your roll". And, ultimately that does work...in fact, I know some people prefer that. But I'm curious about what people might want from this sort of game that isn't met by that, and isn't based on a particular setting. quote:c) anything with too much crunch is going to either stop your players from doing whatever high-flying wirefu they want, or be a nightmare tangle of over-complicated edge-case mechanics. On the other hand, you probably do want combat mechanics with some structure, because combat is going to happen reasonably frequently, so it should by itself be an engaging subsystem. I am (hopefully), good here. quote:FWIW, Fate currently does this big time (and you can easily use Tianxia as a basis for running Exalted in Fate), so you're going to have your work cut out for you if you want to do this. Speaking personally, I'm a big FATE fan, but I feel like it does a horrible job at something like Exalted. That's not because of the mechanics themselves (for example, I'd say FATE could do Scion fine, even high-ranked Scion), but because of the philosophy behind them. I admit that for games like Exalted I like the lack of meta-currency, because I like the idea that a character's success isn't narratively ordained, but rather something they can force on the world with pure strength. They don't succeed because they are the main character, they succeed because they are the very best (no one ever was). But, as I said, that's more of a personal/philosophical disconnect than anything against FATE in particular.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 9, 2018 21:03
|
|
|
Well, there's several cases of spells that cost HP, and those are sometimes random...either they cost a random amount or they're resistible (like drain in shadowrun) so not every spell costs a consistent amount. Closest 'pure' example I can think of off the top of my head is Questers of the Middle Realms which has an interesting mechanic for divine magic where you have a Favor score for gods (and can have different favor ratings for different gods). when you cast a divine spell you make a check to see if your Favor is decreased. So any given spell could cost between 0-1 favor from the god.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 11, 2018 05:19
|
|
|
So, I've got a mad notion to jam Exalted and Dark Sun together. Whipping their respective backstories all together in a big bucket. Psionics combined conceptually with the idea of essence manipulation and martial arts. Sorcery combining conceptually with arcane magic: a powerful force fueled by life energy and invented by the Solars of the Green Age. Solars as chosen of the Sun, created to rule over humans in the name of the Unconquered Sun, as normal humans are not worthy to worship him. Eventually the Solars rebel and go to war against the Sun, killing it (leading to the modern condition of the world). The Great Curse is still around, the dying curse of the Unconquered Sun rather than the Primordials. The Dragon Kings are the creation of Solars back in the Green Age, used as weapons and servants in their war against the Sun. After the Sun's defeat the Dragon Kings turned on their Solar creators while they were still weakened by the battle and eventually killed them. The fallout from these great battles and the extreme use of Sorcerery on all sides as well as the death of the Sun, lead to the current state of desert wasteland. The dragon kings bind the immortal souls of their Solar masters in order to prevent them from being reborn. Obviously this eventually goes wrong. The 'Dragon-Blooded' are actually the Templar servants of the Dragon Kings, who help keep order while the dragon kings spend centuries refining their essence. Essentially the dragon-kings would be 'super DBs', with each on par with the Scarlet Empress while the Templars serve as rank-and-file superhuman opponents. Lunars and Siderals get crammed together into a single concept, created by the Twin Moons as advisors, oracles and companions to the original Solars, as well as the high priests of the Lunar Cults, as they were the religion 'permitted' to normal humans. With the rise of the Dragon Kings they surpressed the Lunar Cults, forcing them underground into the modern-day Veiled Alliance. Most alliance members are just normal humans, but they're led by the Lunars/Pyreen, powerful shapechangers and essence-users who pass along their power and ancestral memories in the form of magical tattoos to their chosen successors. Some want to help the Solars return to power and overthrow the tyrannical dragon-kings, others think the solars are just as bad. The Twin Moons have remained silent to all prayers since the end of the Green Age, leaving the Lunars to choose their own fate. Abyssals...hmm tempted there to either link them to Dregoth or come up with a link to the Obsidian Plain where perhaps the last surviving Solar of the Green Age has mastered necromancy to such a degree that they have reached a status similar to a deathlord, and in turn created their own deathknights. Not sure. Probably not going to worry about Infernals, but may dabble in Akuma. So, does this sound like a Peanut Butter +Chocolate sort of combo, or more of a Avacado + Chocolate kind of combo?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2018 01:34
|
|
|
Hostile V posted:In all honesty it could be a worthwhile idea but the notion of combining them makes me recoil in horror at the kind of mechanics you'd need to sustain it. Hahah, I'm not actually too worried there. This whole idea came about because I was torn between trying to start up a playtest for my Badass Kung-Fu Demigods system or starting up a Dark Sun game...so obviously the solution is do both. EDIT: If I wasn't so taken with Dark Sun's Bone Age aesthetic, I'd throw Mad Max into the mix too and have the wastelands filled with motorcycle bandits and S&M psychos with flamethrowers. oriongates fucked around with this message at 10:02 on Jun 21, 2018 |
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2018 09:44
|
|
|
spectralent posted:I dunno, I ran Fellowship for a group of new players and it went pretty well. The fact everyone pitches ideas makes it very easy to run if you don't have solid ideas on where you're going. I'm not sure there is a worst game to GM first time, honestly; GMing is in general rough and I don't think any game is substantially easier to run than any other; some games just trade improvisation skills for mental arithmatic or tactical wargaming skills. There's a pretty big difference between someone who's played RPGs running a game for a bunch of new players, and an entirely fresh GM and entirely fresh players. Here are my suggestions *Any edition of D&D. Don't ask which edition, because it'll just open a huge can of worms. Just whatever edition you can get your hands on. The quality of the system doesn't actually matter here, they've got the advantage of fitting into the RPG-shaped-hole most people have. They are exactly the games most people think of when they think of D&D. If a player comes to the table with no idea other than "I want to play a wizard", you turn to the page labeled 'wizard' and there you are. If you remember hearing something about casting magic missile at the darkness or shooting fireballs, you can find those in the index. You don't need to make anything up, reskin anything or get involved with any of the higher-grade conceptual work that games like FATE or PbtA demand. It may not meet your needs for long-term play but it's totally unmatched in terms of cultural intertia and it's really hard to beat that with complete newbies. Every edition also has tons of support so finding basic, pre-made scenarios is easy. Dungeon fantasy's linear style also suits first-time players/GMs who often need more structure. *Savage Worlds. Savage Worlds isn't quite as good at D&D at slotting itself into new player's heads, but it makes up for it with a very easy and intuitive system. You want to shoot something? make a shooting roll. What do you roll? the die that's listed right next to 'shooting' on your character sheet. Definitely suggest sticking with fantasy style both because it fits the RPG cliches most people have in mind, and because the more complicated rules are those related to guns and vehicles. I'm not as familiar with them, but the world of darkness system and the Basic role-playing system are also both good options since they feature fairly straightforward mechanics and they're good ways to handle modern play without going too abstract. Both also feature a lot of pre-made material available already.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2018 00:54
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:As someone who has just spent pages stumping for D&D: please god no don't tell people to play D20 Modern. Nobody deserves that. It really is too bad d20 modern had so many problems...because conceptually it wasn't in a bad place. Urban Arcana in particular had a great style as a magical modern world, and some of the best modern-day fantasy art out there (I'll always love you pimp gnoll). Even the general idea of dividing classes up by ability score is actually a pretty interesting idea at heart.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2018 23:04
|
|
|
ProfessorCirno posted:Consentacle is weird, awkward, and can only really be played with someone you'd be romantically entangled with. "romantic entanglement" does sound like a good euphemism for tentacle sex
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2018 03:57
|
|
|
paradoxGentleman posted:I kinda feel like in a game of FAE you have to put your foot down and go "No, you can't use Furtive to attack someone who knows where you are. Pick something else." sometimes. And I don't know, that seems fine to me? Like in most cases you wouldn't let someone in Blades in the Dark use Prowl to fight a constable, would you? It even spells that out explicitly in the book, some approaches just don't apply for some situations. The main problem I've run into is that a significant number of FAE fans are just deeply opposed to the idea that you can't justify using a particular approach for anything at all. I don't think it's a powergaming sort of thing, but it does just seem to be a thing that some of the fans hook onto... The biggest problem isn't so much in core FAE where it's easy enough to say "no, you can't use Forceful to rip a blast door apart, you need to come up with something different)", it's that FAE has become kind of popular for super-hero gaming and it's really, really hard to explain why someone like the Flash can't just use Quick for everything.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2018 02:04
|
|
|
remusclaw posted:Fighting Darth Vader= you lose is so stupid. Luke Skywalker starts out as the archetypal nobody hick kid and he fights Vader twice, once where Vader humors him a bit and a second time where he beats him despite spending half the fight trying not to fight. It's why as much as I liked D6 Star Wars back in the day, I always hated the statups of the main characters. They had Luke, as of the end of New Hope, with like 50D of skill points whereas a starting character gets 7D. Advancement wasn't fast either. Star Wars, especially the original, is full of incompetent smugglers, youthful hick pilots, old men and physically disabled space wizards, and they all get treated like they are gods in these games, untouchable by mere player characters. Cthulhu they ain't, Darth Vader shouldn't just be able to scoop up 1d6 adventurers per turn. Ran into a similar issue with the d6 Hercules and Xena games. I mean, on the one hand you're talking about a literal demigod with Hercules, so that's at least somewhat understandable. But Joxer-the-loving-mighty had higher skills than a starting character could manage. JOXER.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2018 00:28
|
|
|
theironjef posted:Makes me wonder if a patreon that's nothing but like "At $5 you're right, the new Ghostbusters move was reverse sexist or whatever the poo poo crazy thing you think" and "At $10 they should take those pants off the new She-Ra immediately" would work. Set yourself up as a professional black/gay/female/trans/etc friend. For 100$/month, if someone accuses you of being bigoted I will show up to point out that "as a [insert here] person, I feel he makes a good point".
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2018 02:21
|
|
|
Fuego Fish posted:Pretty sure I can beat all of you for embarrassing webcomic-related memories. I don't know, 15 years ago I was making my own embarrassing webcomic. What's bizarre is that I know realize I was creating what would now be an incredibly cliche and eye-rolling isekai-style story, just years before it became a genre. So I was ahead of my time when it came to terrible storytelling.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2018 18:54
|
|
|
yuuuuup And on top of that it was blatantly self-insert isekai world-jumping. I don't mean "oh, the author is clearly fantasizing about being the main character", I mean "the main character is modeled after me and shares my name because I am a garbage person".
|
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2018 19:13
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:The watch is the obvious best item, come on. The watch and the gun are way unbalanced compared to the rest. I mean, come on, that wallet is tier 1 at best but it costs just as many souls as the time-stop watch and the immortality gun, both tier 3 or 4 in the right hands? Pfft. This system is totally broken.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2018 01:57
|
|
|
My Lovely Horse posted:I never played Shadowrun, but I kinda got the impression that that was its entire thing - the street samurais and whatnot deal with the physical security and heavy lifting, the hacker finds a safe place and goes into the Matrix, the mages go to the Astral Plane. So not really a style that lends itself well to 4E's central assumption that a group sticks together in a dangerous place. It depends a lot on how you play it and how wedded to the original ideas of Shadowrun you are. Astral stuff isn't a big deal other than not really mapping well to grid combat, but it's quite uncommon for it to happen alongside physical stuff. Astral projection is primarily a scouting/legwork tool, with astral perception (being both astral and physical simultaneously) used more commonly once things get started. The main problem is that anything purely astral would not interact with anything physical, which is a problem with 4e's heavy battlefield control theme, especially regarding spirits which can exit the physical realm fairly easily. This could be solved mainly by limiting how astral forms can become physical. For instance, if spirits can move freely in the astral but can only manifest at specific physical locations (adjacent to their summoner for instance, or adjacent to their binding rune or what have you). There's little risk of this being a problem with mages since full astral projection is generally not where you want to be during a mission. Hacking is a bit more of a bugbear, but that's mainly because shadowrun presupposes the Matrix as a parallel combat environment which must be battled through in order to achieve your goal. now, obviously you could make the matrix it's own grid, with it's own rules for movement, it's own systems of battlefield control (i.e. you must get from the I/O site where you manifest to the node for the server, between you and it are monsters representing IC). But this loses the teamwork element, since you're dealing with one (or rarely two) hackers completely separate from the rest of the team. Probably the best way to handle that is keep hacking rooted in meatspace, outside of combat it can be handled to do things like open doors or disabling security systems just like a rogue would. In combat it can be done as a hybrid controller/leader with something like your deck's wireless range serving as an "aura" where you can buff your allies and penalize your enemies. The biggest problem is that it's thematically limited...it's fine to abstract your decker jamming cybereyes and confusing drones with bad signals, but if you're just fighting low-tech gangers or a pack of feral ghouls you become useless. Sticking to buffing allies is probably better given that even mages and adepts can throw on some smartglasses to access your wireless tac-net. Bigger hacks could be represented via VR, requiring access to certain specific sites on the map, so it becomes a bit of base defense. The hacker has to plug in to the server and succeed at X skill challenges (perhaps while also having the opportunity to do things like direct drones or aid allies) while the defenders and controllers have to keep enemies off of them. Since they can't move it gives the battlefield control elements of 4e room to shine. Or just keep hacking out of combat and assume hackers take on some other primary role.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2018 01:33
|
|
|
kaynorr posted:The core premise is fine, it's just being badly executed (par for the course). It's not that your poo poo needs to be connected to the Matrix, it just needs to be open to the concept of connecting with ANYTHING. Once you're listening for a connection you have the opportunity to spoof that connection and we're off to the races. It's certainly in keeping with the setting to say that your smartgun link is alright on its own, but once it's getting targeting data from everyone else in your team it becomes a hell of a lot more useful. The medtech on your team has real time access to everyone's vitals and can stimpak you remotely with whatever is best for your injury....stuff like that. You can run completely airgapped, but then you're not really a team anymore but five disconnected individuals on lovely comms. I think the biggest problem is so many of the benefits were just dumb, or difficult to justify as wireless only. I think the shurikens were probably the dumbest that I recall off the top of my head. quote:The hacker has exactly as much to do in that scenario as the face does...which is to say, either everyone brings some violence-doing skills to the table or you adjust encounters such that combat isn't this massive group activity but another kind of spotlight time. I think you may be answering this from a shadowrun perspective. The discussion is regarding converting shadowrun to something based on 4th edition D&D. One of the design elements of 4e D&D is avoiding anti-X specialists. No classes whose abilities only work on "group X".
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2018 20:01
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 01:40 |
|
|
1337JiveTurkey posted:A lot of the plausibility issues with cyberpunk hacking can be solved by saying outright that it really is magic combined with traditional computing. Imagine a world where there's magic and that magic can interact with data in any sense and someone will see the potential in it and want to use it, especially if it's able to hack in ways that nobody can right now. I'm actually currently working on an inverted shadowrun setting. Magical fantasy world that has stuck around long enough for cyberpunk-level tech. I'm not 100% sure how much magic and tech will interact but I know the following will exist alongside the traditional magic-user and the futuristic gun-luggers. *Warlocks who use pocket computers to run speeded up demon-summoning rituals to make up for their lack of innate magic. *Tech-based necromancers: can summon machine-ghosts and use them to reanimate broken technology. *a ritual where you can sacrifice a brand new smartphone by driving a nail through the battery. As the phone burns you it connects you to the phone (or barring that audio device) closest to your target, allowing a few minutes of communication.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2018 02:15
|
|