TG Chat Thread 2018: Please welcome our new mod, Count Strahd von Zarovich

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG Chat Thread 2018: Please welcome our new mod, Count Strahd von Zarovich

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Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Splicer posted:

2017 was an international game of Paranoia. Or Fiasco.

What will 2018 be like?

Beast: The Primordial.

# ¿ Jan 1, 2018 18:56

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 07:51

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Covok posted:

If any of this is true, my favorite part is how these adults have been completely conditioned to actually care about these stickers. They're cooking the meals to get the stickers, and they backed off something because they threatened to take the sticker away. They are literally demonstrating the behavior of a five-year-old child in preschool.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2018 23:31

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

I'm really wondering what kinda weirdo players you play with, hyphz. Because what I'm getting from your posts is that your players make ultra-focused characters that then can't be challenged in their specialty, but then also don't want to be challenged outside of their comfort zones? And then get mad if any of their actions have consequences that weren't put in writing at the start of the game? And also want to have expendable resources... that they never expend because costs are bad always? :psyduck:

# ¿ Jan 7, 2018 23:51

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

"Oh hey, 3 full pages of undead posts. Surely hyphz and Literally Everyone Else have stopped talking past each other like anything is ever going to be accomplished!" -me, a loving moron

edit: I meant unread posts but I think the typo is on the mark

# ¿ Jan 9, 2018 03:09

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Nuns with Guns posted:

If it was a campaign splat it'd get derailed in the first town.

Have you ever been in a game of anything where this wasn't the case anyways?

# ¿ Jan 9, 2018 18:05

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Sion posted:

So, on the subject of literally fuckin' anything else how's everyone's week shaping up? I'm back at work tomorrow oh no

I won $50 on the office football guessing game by correctly guessing the winner of every NFL game that happened last week. Pretty good start to the week!

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 02:06

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

DalaranJ posted:

I want to play Hyphz�s nightmare game. A theoretical game where the fiction doesn�t follow. Some sort of surrealist masterpiece, where I try to attack the goblin and flowers sprout up everywhere, and the goblin wasn�t even actually there.

That's one of the old mage: the ascension "end times" scenarios, iirc.

# ¿ Jan 10, 2018 19:18

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Nuns with Guns posted:

Don't you have some southerners to call "mongoloids that deserve to be murdered"?

what

# ¿ Jan 14, 2018 18:07

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

ImpactVector posted:

Honestly you're probably toast if the entry point is D&D. Unless they're either fresh to the hobby or already jaded storygamers, D&D IS the hobby.

Most people just introduced to D&D will likely balk at the prospect of learning another game because they'll assume it's just as complicated. I mean, you just got finished telling them how a Bonus Action is not an Action, and the handful of different ways spell slots work.

If you're serious about it though, maybe bring some physical books you own so people can get a literal feel for what's out there.

That's why you lead off with "none of these are even half as complicated as D&D because they weren't made by people with a graph fetish."

# ¿ Jan 18, 2018 16:31

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Ettin posted:

It's World of Warcraft

[the keening wail of a thousand butthurt goons in the distance]

# ¿ Jan 22, 2018 14:48

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Kwyndig posted:

I personally won't believe Mearls on any of this topic regarding gatekeeping et al until he does apologize for enabling Z and the pundit in their lovely little fiefdoms.

But then I'm also not the target audience for D&D anymore so who cares what I think.

I am the target audience for D&D and I echo this entirely.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 04:05

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Splicer posted:

I'd play a Jerry Springer/Maury show where you're all trying to top each other with your horrible hosed up families.

Roll to see if you're the father and if so, how many kids.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2018 20:34

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Zerilan posted:

Pretty sure Frank Trollman has written like 10 million words about this.

There's also a good 10 million words about this on the gitp forum by some dude who thinks balancing around Wish and Teleportation Circle is good and makes sense.

# ¿ Feb 16, 2018 15:01

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

senrath posted:

I thought that was Frank Trollman.

It might be, I don't keep track of his various screen names.

# ¿ Feb 17, 2018 01:35

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Nuns with Guns posted:

https://twitter.com/NoraReed/status/965443031829692416

"I hit him in this specific way so I can do this game-breaking thing!"
"No you didn't."

There, I fixed it.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2018 20:38

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Evil Mastermind posted:

I remember one 3rd party 3e book that did have a "Immovable Rod Master" prestige class, but I'll be damned if I could remember what the name of the book was.

If I had to guess, I would say "Quintessential Rods" by Mongoose.

# ¿ Feb 19, 2018 22:14

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

You know, come to think of it at level 10 shouldn't a significant number of enemies have access to Dimension Door or Teleport or Gaseous Form or Etherealness or anything else that at least approximates one of those spells? Even if he lets that poo poo work exactly the way the player wants it to 100% of the time, a good half at least of enemies should be able to go "okay. *poof*" and be somewhere else.

# ¿ Feb 20, 2018 18:24

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

hyphz posted:

Yes, I have.

The problem with the GMing principles thing is that it does a great job of telling me how not to screw the players, but I don't want to do that anyway. It doesn't do the much harder job of being something that I can point to, to prove that I didn't screw the players after the failure has already happened.

I haven't even read AW and I know that the GM's soft moves/hard moves are "the thing you point to" if you even need such a thing, but honestly holy poo poo dude if I had players who demanded I "prove" to them that I wasn't unduly loving them over when they failed any rolls, I'm pretty sure I'd just pack up and leave without so much as a word. Setbacks and complications are the whole loving point of a game, any game at all, especially RPGs. The odds your plan goes perfectly to plan are vanishingly small if your plan is tackling anything of interest. If your players go all :spergin:

because they have a setback, someone needs to sit them down and tell them (a) how games in general work, (b) how life in general works, and (c) how to cope with adversity and change.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2018 15:23

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

hyphz posted:

I do not actually see any aspect of the rules which checks the "compellingness" of a situation before it is introduced

you don't see this because this is a thing humans do automatically without being told

good god man are you an actual robot

# ¿ Feb 23, 2018 01:41

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

gradenko_2000 posted:

So guys when the party meets at a tavern, how much do you tip the bartender?

With a white and gold dress.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2018 02:43

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

demota posted:

I quit watching TNG after three episodes. I just heard about the fourth episode yesterday, and drat. I'm glad I jumped off that ship early.

Start season one at episode 23. In fact, just watch the episodes with Q and the season open/endings, plus a few others that are kinda scattered in there. The one jonathan frakes directed where he's playing a crazy guy but is trapped in an asylum and can't sort reality from acting is loving phenomenal.

Season 7 gets really weird but some people love it, and All Good Things is IMO the perfect way to end the series.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2018 17:47

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Nuns with Guns posted:

The model and the reveal are sure cool, but I don't think I could manage to keep track of a 5+ session boss fight.

I'm currently on session 3 of my game's final boss fight, which may or may not be the last session. I have two google spreadsheets I use for monster stat blocks and roll20 for pretty much everything else, which makes it way easier to deal with than in person. Can't imagine trying to do this IRL.

# ¿ Feb 28, 2018 15:28

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Lemniscate Blue posted:

FFG's Star Wars calls its thing the "Narrative Dice System" because the thing you do with Advantage, Threat, Triumph, or Despair is change the narrative so that something appropriately cinematic happens to help you or hinder you or ruin your week or whatever. You have to think of your dice results in context of the wider scene and story, not just "how well I shoot the guy".

Miss the shot, but with some Advantage? You hit a coolant pipe, and the space pirate spends her next action wiping her eyes out and doesn't shoot at you. Rolled a Triumph? You hit a control panel, and the bulkhead snaps shut, preventing the Sith Lord from getting into the fight so you can board your ship and escape. Failure with Despair? Not only do you not hotwire the bunker door open, but the blast door slides shut and makes the job even harder.

It's designed to emulate the kind of cinematic flow that we see in the Star Wars movies. This is spelled out pretty explicitly in the manuals. From experience, it takes a little work to think narratively and get out of what was, for me, a very D&D mindset about what dice rolls mean, but that wasn't a fault of the system.

There are definitely things to criticize about the FFG Star Wars games but the dice system works really well when you understand it.

The problem with this is that sometimes there just isn't going to be something appropriately cinematic and after a while, especially in combat, you just kinda run out of poo poo to describe. I understand the system just fine, I know what it's trying to do, but it tries to do it in the most mid-90s way possible; i.e. it falls flat very quickly as soon as you have to actually play rather than assigning the rolls to scenes that already happened. Sometimes it's just a pack of storm troopers across a gap and you either hit them or you don't.

# ¿ Mar 3, 2018 16:46

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

slap me and kiss me posted:

Haste allows anyone to take a second action at the bottom of the initiative order so long as they complete their first turn in less than 60 seconds of real-life time.

And if they don't also finish the Hasted action in under 60 seconds it eats their normal turn.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2018 19:12

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

thefakenews posted:

The whole plant is coriander. The leaves and stems of the plant are also coriander. It's even simpler.

Coriander and cilantro are for different purposes; coriander goes in food, and cilantro goes in the garbage.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2018 13:40

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Kai Tave posted:

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.

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".

# ¿ Mar 18, 2018 19:20

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

unseenlibrarian posted:

The fun part is that at some point, they -had- a working mechanic. When Cthulhutech was originally pitched, it was going to use the same system as WOTG/Legends of the Wulin, which had a perfectly functional die mechanic with a probability chart in the back of the book even. Then at some point they decided to go their own way and put their own flourish on things and, welp.

It's kinda like if LotW and L5R conceived something in the middle of the remains of Chernobyl.

# ¿ Mar 19, 2018 21:47

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Desert Beeple were actually in the D&D game I ran. Astro-fish sounds very :catdrugs:

# ¿ Mar 23, 2018 19:37

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

I am angry that the amityville horror is not in michigan

# ¿ Apr 10, 2018 00:40

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

LogicNinja posted:

CHARACTER CONCEPT: a Warforged Bard named Gender.

Because Gender is a performative construct!!!

# ¿ Apr 10, 2018 23:01

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Evil Mastermind posted:

Sure. What thread is that?

Bad With Money thread over in BFC.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2018 23:07

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

hyphz posted:

Hmm, I'm not sure about that. For example, the bad rules that create caster supremacy aren't necessarily too much of a problem for the GM unless they deliberately insulate players against it.

I am repeatedly impressed with your ability to not only have, but argue the dumbest and most provably wrong opinions all the time.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2018 19:46

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Antivehicular posted:

To be fair, if you go by hyphz's previous arguments that imply the major purpose of a GM is to create and adjudicate obstacles of objectively-determined appropriate difficulty, it may be fair to say that wild power imbalances in a party aren't a big deal as long as the GM can still develop obstacles that are fair to the group. "Someone's not contributing and isn't having fun" isn't an issue for this kind of GM to solve, in the same way that "someone's feeling unhappy for any reason that isn't the difficulty level or fairness of obstacles" isn't.

Yeah except that argument is "if you're not having fun as a player it's your own fault" and falls apart from the premise because if your party is imbalanced then having objectively "appropriately difficult" challenges for the party are objectively impossible to create in the first place. If someone can't contribute because the rules of the game say "the wizard can do everything you can and they do it faster and more completely" then I can't see how that isn't a GM problem since (a) that informs how those obstacles are created in the first place and (b) informs the difficulty of the challenges. If character A has an AC of 30 and character B has an AC of 15, no matter what monster you throw at them you either make one character immune to damage or one character gets auto-hit. In either case character B is gonna feel like poo poo.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2018 20:41

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

counterspin posted:

Also, caster power level in 3.5 is explicity a GM problem because it gives the players the capacity to effortlessly destroy NPCs that take too drat long to put together in the first place.

It's really easy for me to put together an NPC in 3.5 because I made a spreadsheet with a tab for each creature type that auto-figures derived stats, base saves, attack bonuses, ability DCs, etc. by entering in number of hit dice and ability scores. :v:

Why yes, I am a nerd with large spans of time to kill at work, how did you know?

# ¿ Apr 23, 2018 14:12

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

My Lovely Horse posted:

Announce a Hellboy campaign and watch that player's face light up like the labyrinth architect's in that one Oglaf comic.

build a labyrinth to house the nazis

# ¿ Apr 24, 2018 15:25

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Covok posted:

Can I be unbanned from the discord server?

Just join the big goon server and chat in the tradgames channel.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2018 16:35

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Splicer posted:

Excel/google sheets etc?

Give each entry a weighting, then set the percentages column to =([previous entry end percentage] + (100/total sum of weighting)*entry weighting)

I basically do this, except with the percentages column just left as a weights column because roll20 doesn't care about individual numbers. Then I have a =sum(a1:a23) cell at the bottom to make sure the weights add up to 100.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2018 15:10

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Mr. Maltose posted:

Caring about poo poo is stupid, yeah.

It is when the poo poo in question is Plutonis's posts.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2018 20:54

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Moriatti posted:

Anyhow let's talk about Eberron and how cool Eberron is. Does anyone else fill Eberron full of guns though because I do.

Eberron is awesome and I run all my games in it because there's so much to do in it. I love how they basically filled the world with writing prompt style plot hooks. I've run three year+ long games in it and I don't think I've overlapped a single plot point.

# ¿ May 1, 2018 21:26

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 07:51

Yawgmoth: Sep 10, 2003; This post is cursed!

Moriatti posted:

Oh poo poo this looks very good!

Yeah, I think one of the things I love about Eberron is that it's mostly suggestions and plot hooks without being pre-written lore. Lots of cool places to go and do (especially in and around Breland) and it seems pretty futureproof as far as character types go with it's uncharted territories and cities of monsters type stuff.

Five Nations is another book in the same vein, but for the 5 countries involved in the Last War. Each one gets a prestige class, a handful of plot hooks, a few factions, and a couple monsters along with the usual important cities/locations/demographics stuff. Really great stuff for fleshing out a given country, doubly useful if you want to run a more "political intrigue"-y style game. Don't know how I feel about the reputation system in there since I've never used it, but it seems like a thing that would function well enough if that's a thing you want to use.

# ¿ May 2, 2018 00:30

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > TG Chat Thread 2018: Please welcome our new mod, Count Strahd von Zarovich

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