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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FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

gradenko_2000 posted:

I was already familiar with RuneQuest's idea of "you increase the skill whenever you fail to use it" as a means of incentivizing people to use low-level skills, but drat, letting people gain skill points that they can spend on skills besides the one that they used is a brilliant next step.

Not quite - RQ has you put a tick mark next to your skill when you succeed in using it during an adventure. When downtime arrives, you go through all the checkmarked skills and roll them (modified by INT), and if you fail the roll, you add +D6 percentage points to that skill. So someone with 15% in Lockpicking has an 85% chance of improving his ability to pick locks after successfully picking a lock in an adventure, while a grizzled duelist with Sword 90% only has a 10% of getting better with his sword after winning a series of swordfights.

It's a great system with a couple of glitches (most notably, it incentivizes players and parties to make a lot of extraneous skill checks and sub-optimal attempts in order to maximize the number of tick marks, which leads to things like the "weapon caddy" effect).

RQ also had (like a lot of early RPGs) extensive rules for spending money and time on training to improve skills.

RQ Classic Reprint Rulebook posted:

To learn a skill by experience, a character must use it
successfully in conditions of stress. The player may then try to
make a roll of 100 minus the current ability with the skill, or less,
on D100, modified by his INT. For each point of INT over 12,
add 3% to the roll needed. For each point under 9, subtract 3%
from the roll. If he makes it, the character goes up 5% ability in
that skill.

A character can also buy training. When a character does,
non-fighting skills are learned at the same rate of Lunars per
week as fighting skills are. 100 L buys 2 hours a day of training
for a week. The cost of learning shown on the tables indicate
how many weeks each 5% increase in skill takes to learn. Some
skills must be learned all at once, rather than 5% at a time. The
cost of learning these skills indicates how much time must be
spent by the character in learning the skill.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2018 16:27

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 02:05

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Leraika posted:

buy a pound of dice and ~~let god sort out the rest~~ see how many you can hold in your mouth at once

# ¿ Jan 5, 2018 21:46

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

gradenko_2000 posted:

The Truenamer problem is when the DC to do a thing rises faster than you can possibly match with your modifiers, leading to a situation where the thing eventually becomes impossible to do.

This happens with Starfinder's space combat mechanics.

Starfinder is also exceedingly dross, as it's almost literally Pathfinder In Space, with all of the genericness that that implies.

Yeah, they had the resources to do something interesting, or at least something tightly-designed, but they took the path of least resistance and just sort of farted out a half-baked Pathfinder-in-Space game.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2018 18:48

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Antivehicular posted:

Shadowrun PCs rocking a filofax is hilarious, incidentally. It's substantially outside the intended tone, but I would totally play a decker who's mastered the obsolete arts of the mid-20th-century office.

All his data is stored as pages of mysterious indecipherable glyphs (that turn out to be steno shorthand).

# ¿ Jan 12, 2018 19:54

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Flavivirus posted:

Here's the tweet in question:

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.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2018 21:40

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Halloween Jack posted:

Isn't Diplomacy basically designed to make you horrible?

Yeah, it owns.

# ¿ Jan 22, 2018 21:49

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Kwyndig posted:

Not that shortly, TSR didn't kick it until the late 90s and Dragonquest's last edition was in '89,

The was a DQ game published by TSR in 1992 - but it was an oversized boardgame of battlin' dragons that had nothing to do with the SPI RPG except the name (and I always assumed the 1989 DQ RPG reprint was just to maintain the trademark for the title).

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1543/dragon-quest

FMguru fucked around with this message at 23:24 on Jan 22, 2018

# ¿ Jan 22, 2018 23:22

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

sexpig by night posted:

I always like the '(x) tanked (y) ON PURPOSE' conspiracies because they're so clearly always from a place of someone just learning about the handful of times that actually happened and assuming it must be a common business move done in smoky back rooms rather than just thinking 'maybe this guy was dumb and did bad moves'.

Hanlon's Razor wins again.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 18:55

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/mikemearls/status/955558545872662528

and here I am thinking "why the hell is your game so hard to understand that people need to be mentored to get it?"

I kind of like the implied logic of "if you' know the rules and are not out there actively pushing our game and training people to play it, why, you're a gatekeeper!"

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 20:13

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

The real gatekeepers are the people who selfishly refuse to do the work of our marketing department for free.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2018 20:23

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Aberrant had some neat ideas in trying to do "superhumans, not superheroes" in the way the world changed and pop culture and that. Buuut it also had some of the worst rules White Wolf ever did where most options were trap options, the lethality was ridiculous, and there was an overbearing metaplot featuring a struggle between godlike characters far, far above the PCs.

Yeah, Aberrant and Trinity really were a mix of interesting ideas ruined by the terrible Storyteller system and its ancillary characteristics (splats, metaplot, etc).

Adventure! was the best of the three because it was one book (no metaplot), the ST system actually works at the pulp power level, and they introduced some interesting and innovative narrative mechanics (which caused endless meltdowns on RPGnet when it came out).

# ¿ Feb 1, 2018 17:01

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

unseenlibrarian posted:

There was basically just one guy who broke his brain against the idea that any sort of dramatic editing where you spend a point to say "Oh this thing was here all along" could belong in a real game or be used to emulate scenarios on screen in pulpy movies. "BUT INDIANA JONES DOESN'T SPEND INSPIRATION TO DO THAT" stuff.

Yeah, and he just would not shut up about it. It was amazing.

# ¿ Feb 1, 2018 18:21

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

LongDarkNight posted:

Watch Julie Taymor's Titus.

This is good advice even if you're not trying to put together ideas for a post-apocalyptic RPG campaign.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 21:54

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

There's HarnManor, but that tops out at the size of a large monastery or landed estate.

# ¿ Feb 21, 2018 01:12

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

thefakenews posted:

For the fourth time

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

# ¿ Feb 23, 2018 02:49

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

gradenko_2000 posted:

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

I put a stack of coins in front me, sorted by value, with platinum on the top and copper on the bottom. Every time I get bad service, I look him in the eye and take the top coin off the stack and put it back in my pouch.

# ¿ Feb 23, 2018 03:14

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Serf posted:

the FFG star wars system is bad, and genesys is even worse

# ¿ Mar 2, 2018 16:55

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Blockhouse posted:

it's the time of the year where I hunt down an rpg setting book and read it. I'm open to suggestions before I reach into my girlfriend's pathfinder books and just read about the not-byzantines or something.

Glorantha Sourcebook

(or The Guide To Glorantha :getin:

)

# ¿ Mar 3, 2018 09:43

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Hostile V posted:

System Mastery once compared WotC to a rounding error in Hasbro's ledgers and that's still pretty accurate.

D&D maybe, but WotC includes Magic:the Gathering, which was doing $200 million in annual sales at the start of the decade. Only Apple (which sells $250 billion worth of stuff annually) would consider that pocket change/rounding error.

# ¿ Mar 7, 2018 23:01

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

dwarf74 posted:

So we don't have grogs.txt anymore, and this definitely isn't Industry, so I give you um ... this.

http://www.enworld.org/forum/showthread.php?623152-When-Fantasy-meets-Medieval-Europe

"Elves come from "West over the Sea" in other words they are native to North America, they have discovered Europe in this setting rather than the Europeans discovering America, as of 1100 AD, this hasn't happened yet. Dwarves live in underground kingdoms in the various mountain ranges of Europe. Orcs come from the Asian steppe. Halflings and Gnomes come from South America. Half-elves and half-orcs are created from the Union of elves and humans in the first case and orcs and humans in the second."

For a moment I thought it was the same brokebrain who just got permabanned from RPGnet because he kept posting these semi-literate "setting ideas" that were all versions of "what if L5R, but everyone is white with blue eyes (except the foreigners, who all look Asian)?" but no it's some other dumbass racist.

# ¿ Apr 2, 2018 21:10

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

The tapping out of wells of grog was the big problem for g.txt, as it became a mixture of 1) minute-by-minute coverage of what industry chuds were up to and 2) yet another person being quoted making a point that had been already made in the thread a zillion times before. When what passes for new material became yet another nine year old amazon review of the 4E PHB calling it not actually D&D but tabletop WoW, it's probably time to bring the curtain down on the whole project.

I do kind of miss having a place where we can clown on terrible people and web boards and companies, but the various chat/industry threads seem to have that covered pretty well when the need arises.

# ¿ Apr 4, 2018 16:36

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

There was a local game store owner that didn't reduce the price on back stock, and even after the store closed he'd show up at local cons with the same old stock in booths. And he had a lot of stuff he hadn't been able to sell, like a bunch of copies of Battlefleet Gothic that was a required purchase as a GW retailer, or a stack of World of Synnibarr he'd gotten somewhere and tried to push on folks. I don't know if he made just enough money doing that at cons, or if he was just stubborn, but I think eventually he ended up getting this stock bought by another local store before moving elsewhere.

Was always a bit surreal to see the same half-dozen copies of the Batman Role-Playing Game floating around the area, dreaming of a better home.

The inability to understand the Sunk Cost Fallacy undoes a lot of small businesses.

# ¿ Apr 12, 2018 17:17

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

canyoneer posted:

Exactly. I go to a really well run local store that is pretty merciless when it comes to products that aren't performing well.
They brought in comics and were doing pretty well with comics, but then scaled it back 75% or so because vintage video games were selling through like crazy and they needed the space. They kept 50% of the profit from comics by keeping a neat curation of current releases in 25% of the space, and filled that space instead with used video games that were doing 10x the inventory turns.

Dominion is a far better game than Munchkin. You're doing your store a disservice if you're stocking 2 deep in every Dominion SKU when you're selling 6 copies of Dominion core and 3 or 4 expansions every year, grossing you $120 in profit each year. You're better off keeping 1 or 2 copies of Dominion in stock (keeping those sales) and filling the rest of that space with Munchkin Zombies Against Humanity grossing you $450 in profit each year.

You'd think that people interested in hobby strategy games enough to open a retail store would be better at recognizing all the game parallels in optimization problem solving, engine building, and resource management.

There's a store in the Bay Area (Black Diamond Games up in Concord) whose owner writes a blog and he runs it in a cold and calculated and pitiless manner, and has great success while doing so (I think he turns more than $1m in sales yearly). He's very good about following his numbers and carrying things that his customers want to buy, not things he likes or wants to see succeed or "believes in". He's especially ruthless about killing underperforming game lines and firesale-ing the old stock (when Flames of War flagged in sales/popularity, and a new edition did nothing to reverse that, he just straight cut new orders to zero and marked the existing stock at 25% then 50% then 75% off) which lets him recover at least some dead money and plow it back into new stuff that will sell. It might break his heart that no one wants to buy GURPS stuff any more, but business is business, and if that space would make more money as, I dunno, Starfinder token packs, well...

He's turned his observations into a book ($10 electronic/$25 dead tree): http://gameplaywright.net/books/friendly-local-game-store/

# ¿ Apr 12, 2018 23:28

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

dwarf74 posted:

Loving the new thread title. It reminds me I have to go through my library and cross out all the fnords.

Cross out all the what? There seems to be a word missing at the end of your sentence.

# ¿ Apr 16, 2018 15:45

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

It's going to be like that Simpsons episode where Lisa gets a personal caricature down by an artist at a festival.

Artist: [making small talk] So girly, you like roller skate'n?
Lisa: No.
Artist: Yeahhhhh, everybody loves roller skate'n!

And hands Lisa a picture of her on roller skates.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2018 13:48

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Xiahou Dun posted:

Is that from the OP of grogs.txt?

You called it

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3098558

# ¿ Apr 20, 2018 16:24

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

His stuff is so dull. Nicely presented, and there's a lot of it, but every time I try to read something of his I can feel my imagination withering and shutting down.

He's really good at building a name/brand for himself and cultivating a dedicated audience and giving them what they want, and I appreciate his willingness to explore the high end of the RPG marketplace, but the appeal of his actual work is utterly lost on me.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2018 19:04

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Kemper Boyd posted:

That game is absolutely amazing and should get far more love than it gets.

It's loving superb.

Someone should write it up for F&F.

The spinoff games (Gaean Reach and Skullduggery) are also excellent. It's Laws's best system design, IMHO.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2018 20:26

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Rip_Van_Winkle posted:

lmao GMS is changing the engine for Far West

It took him 7 years to realize that the D20 engine might not be the best fit for a gonzo wild-west kung fu game.

My goodness, just imagine how long would it have taken if he wasn't such a grizzled, seasoned, veteran game design professional.

# ¿ May 1, 2018 23:30

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

There's an upcoming Deadpool limited comic series coming out soon, and its cover design may be relevant to the interests of this thread:

# ¿ May 2, 2018 15:21

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

dwarf74 posted:

Oh god the Paranoia cover is perfect.

The lovely fonts make their invocation of the 1984 TSR Marvel Super Heroes game cover just :kiss:

# ¿ May 2, 2018 16:42

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Kibner posted:

For this dumb WW derail, please spare the general population and post in the White Wolf thread : https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3712435&pagenumber=540&perpage=40

Counterpoint: the TG Chat Thread is the literal designated place for other threads to send their dumb pointless derails. A sockpuppet posting walls of text in defense of a terrible game revision is exactly the sort of thing this thread was created to accommodate.

# ¿ May 3, 2018 17:43

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

dwarf74 posted:

Those are all still better than Beek Gwenders, Fonkin Hoddypeak, and Fage the Kexy

G1 G2 G3 pregens represent.

# ¿ May 3, 2018 22:40

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Denver-area gaming convention just got shut down because of too much violent behavior.

http://www.nerdandtie.com/2018/05/12/dark-carnival-games-con-cancelled-mid-event-due-to-safety-concerns/

Oh, did I forget to mention that it was Juggalo-themed and staffed and organized? Well, it was.

# ¿ May 13, 2018 06:48

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

The first product for the 7th Sea product line was the (huge, successful for a time) CCG - which was all about pirates and buried treasures and press gangs and belaying pins and running out the guns and preparing to repel boarders and bosun's mates and pieces of eight. You moved your (multi-masted, square-rigged) ships around the various seas and accomplished objectives and literally every piece of artwork, flavor text, ad copy, and rule indicated that this was a fantastic version of the European Age of Sail. There wasn't a single hint of ancient Chinese river piracy, apart from a couple of references to the distant not-China of the setting (Cathay).

When the RPG came out shortly afterwards, it had almost no pirates (the emphasis was on Musketeer-style swashbuckling) and worse, there was no reason for the setting (one big blobby continent, no equivalent to the New World or Mediterranean) to ever develop anything more sophisticated that simple shore-hugging junks or dhows, people were baffled, and Wick's "it's actually about Chinese river piracy, duh" comment was his response to their bafflement.

That Old Tree posted:

Was his Martin Luther-nailing-a-critique-to-the-Church-door weird rant about D&D3 before or after What's That Smell? was met with a thunderous "meh"? Or was it mostly unrelated? I can't remember and I couldn't begin to Google the original "essay."

That "D20 (and also Ryan Dancey) killed my dog" essay was where he announced he was going to turn the D20 world on upside down with his revolutionary headsmashing mindblowing D20 adventures, starting with "What's That Smell?".

# ¿ May 31, 2018 06:53

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Here's Wick's existential scream against D20 and Ryan Dancey: https://pastebin.com/R7b1HgyT

# ¿ May 31, 2018 07:17

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

sexpig by night posted:

I like 7th Sea and L5R a lot, including the new 7th Sea but I can't defend Wick in any way other than 'he's pretty good about getting his promised products out and communicating well on KS'.

He seems a lot less annoying compared to the current crop of chuds and harassers and creeplords we are dealing with these days. Dude just has Bad Game Opinions and an irritating way of expressing them. That's almost :3:

by modern problematic gaming personality standards (which include things like "is an abusive drunkard" and "literally raped a child")

# ¿ May 31, 2018 20:21

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Halloween Jack posted:

Wick's entire thing, as a GM, is impossible obstacles and bullshit traps.

The thief's entire thing, as a class, is bypassing obstacles and avoiding bullshit traps.

See also: his hatred for ronin, the masterless samurai who can walk away from all the contrived "heads you lose, tails you lose" Sophie's Choice no-win social situations that Wick loves to put L5R characters in.

# ¿ Jun 5, 2018 21:00

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Lemon-Lime posted:

A lot of this hobby in general is obsessed with making the PCs fragile and near-useless for no fathomable reason.

Realism! Zero to hero! Verisimilitude! Immersion!

# ¿ Jun 6, 2018 00:32

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 02:05

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Ratoslov posted:

Also, any bridge or patch of mud. And I seem to recall hearing they were heavy enough that they'd destroy any paved road you drove them on. They look cool, but were basically useless, which is a common theme with the Nazis.

IIRC the Maus was equipped with an advanced-for-its-time snorkel system to cross rivers because it would have destroyed most of the bridges it would have otherwise tried to cross

# ¿ Jun 6, 2018 14:59

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

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