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Continued from last thread:remusclaw posted:Where the hell does D&D get it's usage of the word dungeon from, as opposed to the usage it is most known for, as in being a place to lock people up? Mr.Misfit posted:It was a year of fire.... Alien Rope Burn posted:Look, it's either that or Rollerball, take your pick.
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Jan 1, 2018 22:47
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 09:37 |
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I didn't know about Guild Ball or Steamforged Ltd. until today; now I am familiar with all their products to ensure I never give them any money or praise ever.
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Jan 2, 2018 21:32
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I think my first grimdark was, like, a particularly gothic episode of The Real Ghostbusters, and not fantasizing about raping a woman until she loves me
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Jan 2, 2018 21:58
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Mr.Misfit posted:Let´s see....I´ve got Blood & Bullets, a bad d20-ified Western DnD, A Palladium Fantasy RPG Book 2:Old Ones, Osiris RPG - Spielerhandbuch (German, unknown game, weird manga-esque style, boring kind of bad), Testaments of the First Cabal for Mage, Trinity Shattered Europe, Midgard Books, several d20 Mythic Vistas (Medieval Players Guide [bad]), Three Days to Kill (Penumbra-Series), Star Wars d6 Slaves of Goroth, or ERPS (Erstes Deutsches RollenspielsSystem [First German Roleplaying System, but not really] with imaginative adventures like Mother-In-Law´s Brows Furrow, or Icy Lands of Cold Towers), Bloodshadows RPG, LODland, and several old unboxed DSA (TDE) 4th Edition books I´ll never ever use again because I despise the system and world behind it. I´ve got some other pieces, but can´t be bothered to write them up completely, but much of it is in german, so I´m unsure if it´s of any use to someone outside What's the best original German RPG?
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Jan 4, 2018 02:35
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Collaboration is always good, except when you're playing Godlike or PATROL
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Jan 8, 2018 19:47
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I mean, 13 Assassins isn't for everyone but everybody saw Rogue One
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Jan 8, 2018 21:07
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"Oh poo poo, I'm hosed up mang. Time to head back to the hardhold." --Me, luring my fellow players into a fiendish trap
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Jan 8, 2018 22:01
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The most common form of brain tapeworm is the pork tapeworm -- Taenia solium. Taeniasis, the intestinal infection transmitted by the adult worm, is a mild condition, caused by eating undercooked pork. But infection with the worms' juvenile (larval) form has worse consequences as the younger worms can migrate to other parts of the body. If they enter the nervous system the worms can form cysts in the brain, which have severe consequences, including epilepsy. The young larvael forms of Taenia solium can migrate to the brain where they burrow to form cysts. Pigs are the primary source of contracting Taenia solium. Though pork when properly prepared and cooked is not problematic, the World Health Organization says poor sanitation and substandard slaughterhouses contribute towards transmission. The worms release their eggs in the pigs' feces, which results in more severe infection. In 2013 a British man of Chinese ethnicity was diagnosed with a tapeworm, Spirometra erinaceieuropaei, inside his brain. The 50-year old first experienced headaches four years earlier and was treated for tuberculosis. After four years, the British patient returned to hospital in pain to find his brain lesion had migrated to a new region of the brain resulting in new symptoms, including seizures. His MRI scans show the tapeworm's burrowed migration through the brain over four years. The tapeworm has a complicated life cycle through which it infects both animals and humans. The juvenile form of the worm -- known as larvae -- are found in contaminated water as well as the flesh of frogs and snakes. Consumption of raw flesh from these animals or drinking contaminated water can lead to infection, from which the larvae can migrate to many parts of the body, including the brain. In China, the practice of using frog meat as a form of poultice to calm sore eyes or treat wounds can also cause infection.
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Jan 8, 2018 22:18
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Gear porn never really fits into Star Wars no matter how often they do it. A blaster is a blaster, Jedi wear robes, and none of the many lightsaber variants have improved the concept of a lightsaber.
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Jan 11, 2018 00:59
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This reminds me of an old old "Ask Blackjack" on Blackjack's Shadowrun page. The question was about what mechanics to use for cigarettes vis a vis other drugs. The guy who wrote in said that his players had different ideas about it, but one guy was adamant that there should be no drugs in the campaign.
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Jan 11, 2018 06:05
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unseenlibrarian posted:No gear porn, sure, but I feel like Star Wars -does- need some sort of crafting/repair minigame because it's something that just keeps happening on screen, probably because Lucas was a teenaged hotrodder Of all the dumb lightsaber variants this is definitely the dumbest. Easily the worst moment in the first season of Rebels. I get that any franchise for kids and nerds is always going to have to have new and better versions of things, but you can't. You can't make a lightsaber better.
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Jan 11, 2018 15:18
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Rebels, especially season 1 and anything involving Ezra, is all about stupid weapons. You can see his lightsaber in person at Disney Hollywood Studios and it is just as dumb irl.
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Jan 11, 2018 17:02
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FE is one of the best designed games ever IMO, and it works really well for that classic Traveller genre of game.
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Jan 11, 2018 19:49
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I remember that in Shadowrun 2e and 3e, an important article of equipment every PC need was a Pocket Secretary, which was what we now call a tablet.
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Jan 12, 2018 20:10
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Man, I didn't realize I could get paid for fanboyishly @ing Avery Alder.
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Jan 14, 2018 03:34
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mike12345 posted:A couple years ago, someone posted a thread in this forum about a time-travelling RPG. It was specifically about time travel, had mechanics how to deal with time shifts, plus combat that might include time travel as well. Maybe. Not sure about the last one. Anyway, I think it was out of print, and the OP provided a PDF that might have been just scanned in pages. Anyone know what I'm talking about? Because I lost my PDF and would like to read it again.
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Jan 15, 2018 00:39
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Cassa posted:Pizzagate? That could not have been a more transparently made up conspiracy. Pizzagate is really funny to me, because I imagine myself trying to explain to some middle-age Republican couple why Marina Abramovic does what she does. "Yes this woman literally looks like a witch from an Argento movie, and yes, that's her naked covered in blood with a skull. But it's not Satanic cult poo poo, she does this because, um, to make a statement on, uhhh..." Plus, I mean, John Podesta is legitimately a weird a creep.
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Jan 15, 2018 02:19
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:I have no idea what non-conspiracy thing you're referring to here, he seems like a pretty bland democratic operative besides his UFO enthusiasm which is weird but hardly creepy Also, his job is to help corporations buy out the government, so in all seriousness, he is as bad as any pedophile.
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Jan 16, 2018 19:58
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Plutonis posted:Lets see about that
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Jan 17, 2018 03:55
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Fragged Empire is much simpler in practice once you know it, but its organization as a reference work makes it more difficult to learn. Maybe it's my brokebrain learning style. I have the same issue with other D&D With Actual Good Design works like Let Thrones Beware. Marvel Heroic Roleplaying made me grumble and growl out loud, but I don't think I'm alone on that one.
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Jan 18, 2018 18:01
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Andrast posted:There’s also nothing about forgotten realms that prevents you from making good stories that take place there. Like a lot of D&D stuff, Forgotten Realms is fine if you ignore the vast majority of it in favour of focusing on the specific stuff you like. But that is of course damning with faint praise. In my experience, anything good about the Forgotten Realms can be cut out and dropped into another setting with little or no friction.
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Jan 22, 2018 17:02
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Mearls courting the worst elements of the hobby is bad enough, I don't need to make up conspiracy theories about him. Mearls can't rape anyone anyway because he's still trapped in a giant wet paper bag after a tragic game design accident.
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Jan 22, 2018 18:36
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unseenlibrarian posted:Given that at least some of the Forgotten Realms backstory was literally cut out of another fantasy game that TSR acquired the rights to in the eighties and pasted into FR it's only fair that the same happen to it, really. It would be fun as hell if TSR had gone around buying out all the D&D heartbreakers that failed to compete with it. Some of them had ideas worth folding into the big weird D&D multiverse. If I run another more-or-less conventional D&D game, I'll probably take a lot of inspiration from Pool of Radiance. Which is a good FR thing because it happens in an unimportant backwater region, and is just basically about rebuilding a beleaguered city-state and destroying a monster empire.
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Jan 22, 2018 20:58
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Isn't Diplomacy basically designed to make you horrible?
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Jan 22, 2018 21:44
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Ettin posted:Probations finally went through so the thread is open again. No more lovely jokes about what game devs look like.
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Jan 24, 2018 06:29
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Y'know, I thought "never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence" first gained currency in nerd circles.
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Jan 24, 2018 18:55
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Moriatti posted:Yeah, wasn't Mearls jsut a guy who wanted Wizards to always be the best and also made boring, barely functional classes?
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Jan 24, 2018 19:44
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Mearls jumping on the bandwagon of becoming a dishonest woke ally is the most predictable thing in the universe. If his social media feed were curated a little differently he'd be a Proud Boy.
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Jan 24, 2018 20:34
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Simian_Prime posted:One could say the D&D license is a pretty good metaphor for the current state of American democracy: An outdated system that once set the standard, but still riddled with problems solved long ago by its imitators, mostly due to an entrenched fan base that despises change.
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Jan 24, 2018 20:49
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Most fun I had with the Essentials classes was with the Hexblade, an Elricy warlock that summons a magic sword and has some neat summons. Sadly, the online character builder didn't handle some of its properties very well, and the Essentials era coincided with them tapering off and dropping support for the builder entirely. (In short, your pact blade mirrors the properties of your implement, and the builder wasn't designed to have equipment that exists as the effect of a power and copies the properties of another piece of equipment.)
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Jan 25, 2018 05:07
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hyphz posted:I find a problem with less fantastical RPGs is that they are much more static, especially if they’re combat focussed, because magic provides a neat excuse to introduce new mechanics as players level. I have a lot of thoughts on Mr. Misfit's post, but here's a specific one: my pet theory is that in a "traditional," non-narrative RPG, games where you just have Ability Scores and Skills are almost always pretty dull. People gravitate to games with some element of the fantastical to add an extra dimension to allow for more unique PCs. Whether that's magic, cybernetics, or all kinds of science-fictional gear. Feat systems are one way of doing this, but there are a few design problems you quickly run into, especially if you hope to write and sell a lot of supplements. gradenko_2000 posted:Now in a game like, say, Call of Cthulhu or Twilight 2000, where you're all human comrades that are completely terrestrial and pedestrian, you're correct that all you really have to look out for is raising your Shoot Gun percentage from 60% to 80% if you ever manage to live that long, but that's okay too, because denying everyone of "fantastic abilities" keeps everyone on the same playing field. PATROL is a great example of a more traditional game that has distinct character classes in a game where the PCs are as similar in their gear, training, etc. as in RECON or Twilight 2000. (Even so, it has a WWI expansion that is obviously PbtA inspired.) quote:The problem with most versions of D&D and its ilk is not only that "new mechanics = spells", but then also that some classes don't get spells. quote:Starfinder's level-gated equipment was put in because the the designers at some point realized that the narratives that would spring from a sci-fi game might produce outcomes where the players could become fabulously wealthy beyond the prescripted wealth-by-level rules, so they had to say that you couldn't wield a level 20 Gun even if you could afford it. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:37 on Jan 25, 2018 |
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Jan 25, 2018 17:19
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hyphz posted:But I just haven’t seen any situation where a level 20 gunfight has notably different tactics to a level 1 gunfight. Yes, you can change up the terrain and so on, but that doesn’t feel like a natural tie to level or a thing the players have earned. I guess you could level up into Revolver Ocelot or something but that’s at least mildly fantastical. I get what you're on about. A lot of traditional games have a lot of combat rules, but in the end it boils down to just attacking and dealing damage. Lots and lots of tables of modifiers, but anything like tactical movement and cover ends up being this loosely-defined thing that happens on the margins, and therefore, most groups end up not doing it at all.
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Jan 25, 2018 18:56
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Mr.Misfit posted:I had a fascinating discussion today about role-playing and dnd that I wanted to recap here because it was inspired by a number of interesting points. Re #4: Are you sure about that? In any given year for a long time now, the most popular films are genre movies. Re #5: The big groups of potential roleplayers who aren't being captured by the medium are people doing freeform, online roleplay, and people playing RPG video games. First, I'm not convinced that the way forward for RPGs is to recruit more people by imitating whatever is popular in whatever other given medium. It's better to focus on what's being done in things that are at least games in the first place. Not everything adapts well to a tabletop game--you could certainly make a game about The Amazing Race or American Ninja Warrior, but what about Dr. Phil, The Daily Show, and The Bachelor?
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Jan 25, 2018 19:13
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Instead of a Dr Phil rpg, specifically, you could do an Oprah RPG with a hack of kill puppies for satan. The PCs are all scumbag quack doctors trying to get rich by getting regular guest spots on her show.
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Jan 25, 2018 19:34
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That's a big, broad question I don't think I can answer, but some thoughts in response: The "action film" didn't emerge as an archetype until, Idunno, the 60s. Before that they tended to be labeled "adventure" films, if they weren't war movies or Westerns. Some of it is about money and technology; there wasn't enough of either in the 1950s to do something as frankly decadent as building a fake highway to shoot a chase on. Another factor is that the Hollywood industry has become based around a few huge "tentpole" blockbusters each year, and it's like they don't know how to make a film that isn't insanely expensive. For example, Ghostbusters was considered a very expensive film, maybe the most expensive of 1984, at $30 million. Adjust that for inflation and it's still less than half of what they spent on the new Ghostbusters...which was just an also-ran action film, probably not in the top ten most expensive films that year. Two corollaries to this: one, everyone is nervous about these tentpole blockbusters failing, so they gravitate towards adaptations. (It's not about the "built in audience," most of the time, but the original work serving as a proof of concept: someone will buy this.) It's easier to pitch the "high concept" of a sci-fi/fantasy novel than a contemporary drama. Film is becoming both more and less subversive. You see films that are blatantly anticapitalist and question the American empire and blah blah, but you know what else did that? Star Wars in 1977. I recently rewatched Bronx Warriors 2: Escape from the Bronx, and I was stunned at a scene where the heroes just gun down some cops and keep right on going. Yes, this is a dystopian ripoff of Escape from New York, but the cops just look like contemporary cops. You can't do that in the U.S. film industry in 2018 unless there's enough science-fictional window-dressing to obscure what's happening in structural terms. Katniss kills cops, but they're Tron Star Wars cops.
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Jan 25, 2018 23:17
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FMguru posted: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). I am a silly person to remember or care about these things, I know.
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Feb 1, 2018 17:14
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For lighter and more narrative rulesets, Technoir and The Sprawl (PBTA) do CP2020 just fine, but they don't incorporate magic by default. I would still probably look at hacking either one of those, or Fragged Empire if I wanted something more tactical. But I also get not wanting to hack the poo poo out of an existing ruleset just to get something better balanced than Shadowrun. If you're willing to go very loose with the rules, and model your game specifically on the shadowrun itself, Hollowpoint will do that. Magic is just a matter of narrating how you use one of the core 6-8 skills.
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Feb 1, 2018 17:55
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In the season 1 finale of Apocalypse World, the other playbooks killed the Operator and took all his stuff.
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Feb 1, 2018 19:58
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I've been making houserules and homebrews for years like any other tabletop gamer, but I've always just put it in, like, Word or a Google doc. What are the preferred design tools for doing layout on stuff like PbtA playbooks?
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Feb 5, 2018 16:19
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| # ¿ May 12, 2024 09:37 |
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Thanks for the recommends!potatocubed posted:I'd say Scribus is great because it's free, but if you have the cash InDesign is straight-up better.
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Feb 5, 2018 18:08
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