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Splicer posted:What will 2018 be like? Sorry, I hate to correct so many people, but 2018 is the year Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance takes place.
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Jan 1, 2018 19:10
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Bedlamdan posted:We walk away thinking the bad guy had a point? Look, it's either that or Rollerball, take your pick.
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Jan 1, 2018 20:04
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Jan 2, 2018 21:15
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DalaranJ posted:I'm looking at maybe running Drama System coming up. Does anyone have any recommendations to make the procedural resolution less insane? Depends on what you find insane about it, I suppose. It's a bit obtuse but extremely lightweight in play.
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Jan 8, 2018 11:20
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DalaranJ posted:I’m mostly concerned with the obtuseness. I understand the need for it being lightweight. As far as I can recall, I think the intent behind the cards was largely to make resolution more of a group endeavor than just rolling a die, allowing players to support or interfere with a given task based on their own desires. It also was intended to give the tension of the "thrill of the reveal" with it. The selection of tokens is probably the biggest part, since that's where the GM can influence the pacing / outcome the most, and where players collectively work out an outcome. That all said, the procedural resolution system is probably the weakest element in the game, since a lot of people find its raw chance unsatisfying. I'd suggest giving it a shot, at least, since the number of times you do procedural resolution in a given session is slight once people acclimate to the system - usually no more than once or twice a session in my personal experience. Generally, procedurals are intended for climaxes and major endeavors, and you don't need to call for them very often. In the base setting, a procedural would be best if you're all going out on a major hunt when the tribe is starving, but if Axehandle goes out on a solo hunt in his spare time during a season of plenty, he can probably just declare a result as long as the GM feels the declared result is appropriate. All IMO, of course, but I used to run Hillfolk demos for Pelgrane. However, you can replace it with any other resolution system, really, though I'd recommend something really light and story-based, like FATE Accelerated or Risus. Having a complex resolution system will bend the game towards its own conceits. Dramatic scenes are absolutely the meat of the game and should usually be the primary driver behind the narrative you're building, with GM intervention and procedurals being there to present new twists and dilemmas to fuel further dramatic conflict.
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Jan 8, 2018 19:46
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Tenra is neat, though the system itself is... very 90s, having run a fair deal of it. But it does let you do a lot of mixing and matching of different "packages" to make a character.
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Jan 9, 2018 00:24
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Covok posted:Form user JordanPro ran a game for me and another form user where, by the end, my character blew his own brains out because he had become a cyborg ruling in army but his opponent, another player character, successfully convinced him he was a slave in machines and since he always sought freedom he killed himself. I thought it was a loving great game and I really liked how it all turned out. I played a game where my character successfully trapped a villain in a psychic reality she created, and to make sure he didn't get out, voluntarily had another PC break her neck. All without any forewarning for the GM that's what we were planning. Definitely not something I'd do as a habit, but I've had a few bad ends for characters that just followed from the story we were creating.
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Jan 9, 2018 00:36
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Also bear in mind Atari had the D&D rights at the time and opted to nearly ignore 4th edition. WotC's end for software had a pretty dark reason why it fell apart as well. WotC was absolutely hosed in many ways by how the D&D video game rights got shuffled around, and the missed opportunities are a bit mind-boggling. They were trying to develop a fantasy MMO before World of Warcraft cornered the market, but they could never recover the rights and the project fell apart in its infancy.
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Jan 9, 2018 05:26
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In any case, the D&D 4e team absolutely wanted a videogame, they wanted better online tools, because they were given a mission of making D&D into a Hasbro "core brand" by increasing its profit margin... a task that was effectively impossible while Atari held onto the video game rights (and, to a lesser extent, the fact that Sweetpea Entertainment held on to the movie rights).
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Jan 9, 2018 05:44
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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 enjoyed MAGfest quite a bit, lot of good talking and videogaming. Tabletop scene there was / is pretty meh, but you can't have everything. Maybe I should be the change I want to see next year. 
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Jan 10, 2018 01:18
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kingcom posted:http://tao-dnd.blogspot.no/2008/06/seizing-day.html The Tao of D&D? What is that where you play characters trying to find peace in the dungeon? To avoid setting off a single trap through perfect awareness, to abandon the desire of treasure and the trappings of worldly attachment, to show compassion for natural existence of the aboleth? Oh, wait, no, it's just about appropriation. Well, that's to be expected, I suppose. Plutonis posted:my hard drive broke again Buy a harder one next time? 
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Jan 10, 2018 01:35
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food court bailiff posted:What's so bad about Starfinder, anyway? What are some of the worst ways its 3.X heritage gets in the way of fun? The equipment, to put it in one. The equipment system is probably the worst. See, 3.X games had a whole "soft" magic item advancement system. That is, a character at X level is supposed to have Y value in magical items. The value, of course, restricts the highest level you can have, but it's all very loose and it's possible to have an overpowered item in one sense and end up underpowered in other senses, or just to have a valuable magic item that doesn't help your role. That sort of thing. Starfinger "fixes" this by having all items you get effectively be treated as if they were magical items in terms of balancing, and every item is keyed to what level you can purchase it at. So you end up with weird in-world justifications regarding how you can't buy a rocket launcher because no shopkeep trusts you because you haven't hit a weird arbitrary OOC requirement and... it's weird. It also doesn't really fix the issue that it gives no real guidelines as to how often you upgrade your equipment, or how the GM is supposed to deal with the money churn that results from it. You also end up with weird stuff where you can't buy a gadget because you don't have the level... to buy it...? Also every secondary system they invented is broken in some pretty notable way. Vehicle combat has bizarre maneuvering rules that will lead to frequent crashes or vehicles literally moving slower than people on foot to keep from risking accidents. Vehicle chases aren't terribly reliant on the speeds of the vehicles involved. Starship skill checks have entirely broken math that results in high-level characters literally being unable to operate starships at their level. To be fair, they say they'll fix this last one, but... have they? I haven't checked. And there's just kind of a lot of uninspired design in there in general and I wrote so many words about it, if that wasn't enough. (EDIT: whups, you beat me to it.) To be fair, the balance, class design, and combat is better than Pathfinder, but still not great. There are some interesting ideas tucked away here and there, but as a whole, it feels bland and rushed to me. 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. I love Ezra's blastersaber and will stand up for it.
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Jan 11, 2018 22:36
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Leraika posted:Yeah, they put out errata on a web page somewhere.... Those are definitely better... but they still run into the same problem as before, just only less so. Your starship DCs will still increase faster than your ability to keep up with the total skill modifiers, it just avoids the issue where it becomes impossible. But the differential will be around +4~5 over a 20-level progression, so it's not inconsequential. It's still bad math, but it at least is no longer a point where the game ceases to function entirely. So, uh, yay? Also the same rules issue Starships had is still hanging around the Computer rules where some computers become effectively unhackable, so either they somehow still don't realize that those rules are goofed up or don't care. But that's our Paizo! 
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Jan 12, 2018 09:17
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That Old Tree posted:Hell, the Computer DCs start pretty high and only get loving ridiculous from there. You effectively cannot have any high-octane "hack the CEO's PC/the company mainframe" until at least level 5-ish because, by the rules, those systems have DCs of 29+ minimum. Sorry if your starting character concept was "cool hacker" because all you're good for at level 1 is getting into thoroughly unsecured iPads. Yeah, at high levels all you can do is social engineering (or charm magic) to get a root user to grant you access, since getting security access like a password only grants a +5 bonus. Even if it's the same root user's password. It's weird.
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Jan 12, 2018 18:18
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Yeah. Mind, just getting the password isn't worth too much (and isn't too hard), ironically. Getting them to deliberately grant you access is the only fully effective means, so playing a mystic and using charm person or suggestion to get them to grant you root access is the most effective means of hacking any difficult system. Though you might be able to use Intimidate or the like, the social rules aren't nearly as defined as the magic rules, of course.
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Jan 13, 2018 04:36
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It was a response to the gender parity on the Industry Insider panels for GenCon 2016. Pretty sure it was Tarnowski, tho, not Mearls.
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Jan 22, 2018 20:46
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Kai Tave posted:Nah, Mearls may not have made it (I don't think it was Tarnowski who did but heck, maybe it was) but I very clearly remember him agreeing with it because it was so very blatantly a Dumb Mike Mearls thing to do. https://twitter.com/KasimirUrbanski/status/730780490697998336
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Jan 22, 2018 21:23
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Kai Tave posted:While I suppose you could squint your eyes and claim that Mearls' casual dismissiveness of the these panelists isn't really "gatekeeping" since he isn't actively attempting to keep them away from the convention, merely denigrating them and their accomplishments in a very passive-aggressive sort of fashion along with a bunch of grognard shitheads, I'm gonna say it's close enough for the judges. Yeah, it's definitely possible he wasn't trying to be lovely, but it was certinaly badly phrased whether it he was being malicious or just tactless. I get the impression Mearls does want to make inclusive gestures, but it's only a fair-weather intention.
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Jan 23, 2018 00:55
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Kai Tave posted:I mean it's really hard to discuss whether Mearls wants to sincerely be inclusive and anti-gatekeeping without rehashing the deal with him and Zak S for the gazillionth time, but it remains the biggest elephant in the room as far as that goes. To be honest, it doesn't really matter to me too much, I just think things get pretty wild with demonizing him (I wrote this just as the thread locked down, it feels more than a little prescient). Not that it isn't understandable, and not that anybody should necessarily forgive him for the lovely, cringeworthy groveling he did to some of the worst corners of our hobby. But people can contain multitudes. He can see Chult as a diversifying of D&D while other folks rightly poke at its faults. It's probably better than the last take on it (i.e. just blowing it up), but it's probably not as educated as it needed to be either. Generally speaking I find 5e so dull I can barely bring myself to care about what happens with the "industry leader". And I'm saying that as somebody who was willing to dig through every last page of Starfinger because I thought it might be interesting. (Not as much as I'd hoped, sadly.) As far as I go, I don't have any such delusions about the current version of D&D.
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Jan 24, 2018 03:57
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Kai Tave posted:"Demonizing" seems like a pretty hyperbolic way to frame what just happened here in this thread, nobody is saying Mearls is the Great Gaming Satan, but I'm also not impressed by him tweeting at people to "stop gatekeeping" the same way I'd be equally unimpressed by someone known for consuming entire chocolate cakes in a sitting to be throwing shade at others for poor dietary habits. A lot of folks have positioned him for years as some secret master that deliberately tanked 4e (despite it being his livelihood) instead of, y'know, just being bad at design. All I'm saying is that you don't have to make poo poo up about somebody when their actions are bad enough.
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Jan 24, 2018 13:28
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gradenko_2000 posted: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. And it's one of the things that other games have solved even within its context; for example, Fantasy Craft only lets you hold on to a certain percentage of your money between adventures because it presumes the rest goes to inn stays, ale, whores, whatever. And improving that percentage is an in-game trait you can focus on raising, but it both simultaneously reduces fantasy accounting (since you're not tracking day-to-day expenses between adventures) and prevents wealth bloat for characters that don't focus on counteracting it. Of course, they also just use an entirely different economy for magic items based on a point / reputation system. And games like 13th Age just abstract the whole business entirely. But Starfinger doesn't change what is inherently a headache of a system to begin with, instead they just try and erect walls to prevent player abuse while doing nothing to prevent outright player failure within the system.
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Jan 27, 2018 12:02
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Halloween Jack posted: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. I was always kind of taken aback at that element in The Matrix and the fact it more or less got away with it even though, by all appearances, they're still shooting people who die. But they do it with rad techno and flipping around and cool cinematography so it's all good. That being said, there are more ways to be subversive than law enforcement body counts, though it's true there are myriad factors that are narrowing Hollywood's lens.
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Jan 27, 2018 17:18
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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.
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Feb 1, 2018 16:56
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Plutonis posted:Triple Triad is really great yes I'd suggest trying Sellswords, then!
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Feb 1, 2018 22:43
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Yeah, I've run Apocalypse World with only two players, Breakfast Cult as well (thought the latter takes away from the secret motivation bit somewhat if you've only got two, but that's fine).
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Feb 5, 2018 03:08
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Also, the thing with gaming high concepts is that if you don't like the treatment of that high concept, there's very little keeping you from just taking that high concept and making it your own. Well, other than time and effort, anyway.
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Feb 7, 2018 03:19
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grassy gnoll posted:How did 7th Sea 2E shake out? It's a great improvement on 7th Sea, if not massively groundbreaking. The roll system is oddly obtuse but at least cleaner. Characters are more competent from the outset. The setting is no longer a landlocked continent. A lot of the dumb metaplot was excised. The sorcery is a mixed bag - some is better, some is worse. The new nations are welcome additions. The corruption rules are awful alignment enforcement nonsense. The balance on character creation is very handwaggle. The GM advice is... solid, and a good deal better than you'd expect after Play Dirty. (There's still a little Wick chub in there, tho.) The addition of a New World analogue is welcome, but I haven't seen how well they handled the details yet. The enemy rules are delightfully simplified but the math breaks down pretty hard on high-level villains. In short, it's been much better than the previous edition, but still has some caveats.
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Feb 16, 2018 08:20
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Haystack posted:My 7th Sea review: I don't think they're really substitutes for each other.
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Feb 16, 2018 19:38
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How many mothers has he hosed? I'm not deep enough in Realmslore to know.
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Feb 21, 2018 20:48
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The Dragonlance novels were pretty cool until I read fantasy novels that were actually good.
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Feb 21, 2018 20:57
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Zerilan posted:What's FantasyCraft like. A couple friends mentioned it to me as a possible game to run but I don't know anything about it beyond it being d20. It's a different branch of d20 that diverges far more heavily from D&D 3.5 than Fantasy Craft does. In general it tends to be slightly crunchier - classes and species tend to give you a bit more, and feats are somewhat more robust. The equipment system has a lot more customization, and there's heavy brakes put on building wealth (as a certain amount gets automatically expended on your lifestyle). Magic items are done through a separate reputation / renown economy that can also be used to get contacts and holdings. Characters have action dice each session that can be used to boost rolls or spent to "activate" critical successes and enemy critical failures. Melee combat generally has more options you can unlock through feats or specialization, and combat maneuvers are skill-based. Magic is more skill roll / mana-based - characters get more spells up-front, but wait longer to get access to high-level spells. On the GM's end, monsters are built on a point-based system that determines their XP value. There are baked-in optional rules to modify campaigns or to adjust an adventure's difficulty. It's gotten a little dated at this point, but it's basically a more refined and dramatically retuned version of d20. It's still a very similar game at the core, but a lot of the systems have been essentially rebuilt from scratch with a lot of the knowledge that had been gained about the system at the time.
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Feb 23, 2018 01:17
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The key elements of this relaunch:
People will buy an unfinished playtest version in droves. It will "sell out". Calling it now.
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Mar 6, 2018 23:56
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There's a lot that makes me laugh out loud on their bullet point list of things to reveal about the new edition, like "Support" or "Heroic Storytelling", but my favorite bullet point is:
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Mar 7, 2018 00:24
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this industry needs less pathfinder and more bathfinder amirite
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Mar 7, 2018 00:46
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Well, that was the whole intent.
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Mar 8, 2018 03:54
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Lurdiak posted:Whoever wrote this was extremely opposed to the idea of player characters defeating any powerful entity or claiming any treasure or doing anything at all. Well, AD&D 2e lived in mortal fear of any campaign turning into a "mug-the-gods" power trip, and though the fear was almost always overblown, the fear did have some basis. Planescape didn't want to be about that, so they set up a lot of hard walls, for better or worse.
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Mar 9, 2018 18:36
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RTwP just seems like a kludgey workaround for bad gameplay / controls, IMO.
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Mar 9, 2018 22:00
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I knew a guy once who was a Champions fan, and he'd always seek to play super-strong speedsters, since that was a way to maximize actions (by boosting Speed) and damage (by boosting Strength). Then he'd do this in other systems uncritically, because he presumed that was the One True Build and would be heartbroken when games like Mutants & Masterminds 2nd Edition didn't support that kind of malarkey.
Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 16:33 on Mar 13, 2018 |
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Mar 13, 2018 16:30
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The base dice mechanic in and of itself is pretty awful. The idea of having dice poker be your resolution mechanic isn't necessarily a bad idea, but you'd have to have designers that actually understand the odds involved, and there's just no evidence that they did. The odds chart for a resolution mechanic should probably not look like a seismograph.
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Mar 18, 2018 16:34
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 20:48 |
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I just don't understand why you'd have a poker dice mechanic and not have the hand type be the actual result. It'd be faster, more intuitive, and the odds would be so much clearer.
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Mar 18, 2018 22:09
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