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Qoey posted:I'd be down for reading a series of suburban cyberpunk stories. Just a bunch of working stiffs' bratty kids running around thinking that they're shadowrunners. That sounds in my head like it would be fun. This is Snow Crash, isn't it? At least the first half of it and the bits that aren't about the internet. A bunch of copycat suburbs, corporate owned, each with their own currency.
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Mar 4, 2018 07:22
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Pathfinder is more fun than DnD5e because the hugeass list of classes and silly things is all on the free SRD. So you can have a semi-balanced fun game going "tier 3 and 4 only guys" with it. Miss me with that Fighter Cleric Rogue Wizard poo poo. Hit me with the Harbinger Inquisitor Alchemist Vizier. Do you know what any of those classes do? NOPE and that's great they're all wack in different ways and you get to play one for free just by opening up your computer. Even your phone if you get the text readable.
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Mar 10, 2018 08:15
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Banana Man posted:What is lfqw? Also what is shadow of the demon lord and 13th age like compared to say dnd 5e? Imagine DnD5e's design goals (other than "appeal to grogs") but actually mostly functional, including rules that properly support gridless measurementless combat. That's 13th Age. Has a free SRD at http://13thagesrd.com/ that will answer all your questions. Has a vague "superhigh fantasy" aesthetic with skycastles and cities on beastbacks and an infinite maze-temple to every god. Shadow of the Demon Lord takes a different approach to the same goals (but just measures distances in yards) and has features like "stats are just measured from 10, so 11 is a +1 bonus and 12 is +2" and it only uses d6s and d20s and general "Warhammer Fantasy dirt'n'blood and also steam-power and gunpowder is starting to exist" aesthetic. No free SRD. The real big selling point of SotDL is the path system for classes. You start as a level 0 nothing, which grants you an extra feature at level 4 based on your ancestry. Then at level 1 you pick a novice class from Warrior, Rogue, Priest and Mage. These grant features at 1, 2, 5 and 8. At level 3 you pick an expert class out of 16+ (supplements), like Cleric and Fighter. These grant features at 3, 6 and 9. At level 7 you pick a Master class, out of a ridiculous number, such as Necromancer or Dreadnaught. These grant features at 7 and 10. So your novice class defines you overall, your expert is your focus, and then master is your particular specialisation. The neat thing there is that there are no restrictions. You can go Warrior-Assassin-Healer, or Magician-Cleric-Acrobat, or Rogue-Sage-Zealot. Some things combo better with others so it's best to focus on only two stats, but nothing is totally nonviable as long as you don't poo poo all over your stats. edit: an interesting thing with some of the classes is that, like there are religious classes that don't have spells. Like if you're a Zealot you really love your religion but you're just a religious-themed berserker not actually a spellcaster. The Sage class isn't a type of wizard, they're just straight up someone who knows a bunch of stuff. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 03:21 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 03:18
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Countblanc posted:This is like saying rocket jumping in FPS games should just be a button you press. I unironically believe this.
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Mar 11, 2018 03:37
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Alaois posted:the gently caress popular fighting game franchise has both stances and 360s I haven't played Tekken in a while but I recall Hwaorang has both stances and also insane inputs. Tuxedo Catfish posted:Isn't the entire selling point of 13th Age is that it's D&D without a grid? That's not "the best D&D" that's "a perfectly nice game that lacks one of the few both defining and positive traits of every version of D&D." A massive amount of 4e hate is that it required a grid, which is why DnD5e doesn't have the minis-on-a-grid pics that the last two editions had. Nuns with Guns posted:13th Age was a sort of simplified 4e D&D-alike from a couple of the 4e devs. Johnathan Tweet was a lead on 3e, and I wouldn't call it a simplified 4e at all. It shares some bits of design but unless we call "decent power formatting" a type of game design now, it's not really the same thing. Like, a huge part of 4e is tactical positioning and flanking and so forth, something literally impossible in 13th Age. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 03:52 on Mar 11, 2018 |
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Mar 11, 2018 03:50
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Lemon-Lime posted:
Luckily you can excise most maggotpoop. By default the power level is a little low but you can make things more 'heroic' if you cut out the fear rules and also boost player health by like 10. You can also use alternate healing rules from Forbidden Rules.
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Mar 11, 2018 04:38
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In my head I like to pretend that D Vincent Baker was slightly chafing at being "the influential storygame guy" so he co-wrote a lego mecha wargame just to say he did. Then he wrote a GMless storygame RPG in the setting for it anyway.
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Jun 27, 2018 05:28
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Transient People posted:Yeah but I'd take that opportunity if there was a decent spot It's not a static hub, just a Discord, but the RPG Talk Discord is pretty good and has mostly non-assholes. We sometimes call it 'the reddit discord' but it's not really that, reddit just happens to list it first in /r/rpg in its list of non-specific RPG discord servers. e: https://www.lp.zone/ was formed to be a home for SA-quality Let's Play without actually supporting Lowtax or being on SA. I dunno if you wanna consider at least registering there. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 23:38 on Nov 1, 2018 |
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Nov 1, 2018 23:29
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CR and other 'mainstream' podcasts are not going to switch away from DnD. This is because it gets them advertising from name brand recognition; and also they see idiosyncratic rules that they can ignore at will or enforce capriciously as a boon to drama and a jumping off point for comedy and their stories instead of an annoyance that damages the integrity of the game system. Thinking otherwise, and this whole conversation, is very silly. Also, a fanbase being mean to you on twitter being you criticised the thing they like - even if they really were very mean - is not something worth caring about.
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Jul 8, 2020 06:01
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paradoxGentleman posted:Wait, did I miss something? I know about Beast, obviously, but I was under the impression that the fault for that one lay almost exclusively at BlackHatMatt's feet, and the rest of the company was mostly okay? Was there something else? Their rates have never been good, and other freelancers within their stable have had their own issues. Some of them are great and post on this very board! But it's never been a sunshine and rainbows outfit.
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Aug 1, 2020 17:40
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Whenever I run a game I make sure I legally own the material and pay the creators. I'm benefiting from their labour so they deserve just compensation. That said, as a penniless teenager I pirated a lot of stuff and I think that helped me expose myself to a lot of different ideas and systems I wouldn't have earlier. As noted upthread, this wouldn't have been necessary if one company didn't dominate.
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Sep 28, 2020 13:55
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Elendil004 posted:You mentioned it, and the Lancer guys mentioned it but what was the offending bad copy on the site? " © 2015-2020 TheTrove.is. All rights reserved. Yar har fiddle-dee-dee. "
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Sep 29, 2020 15:20
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Yeah you're not meant to 'catch up' on Discord any more than you're meant to 'catch up' on IRC or on a chatroom, it's designed for live communication and not drawn out discussions. It's not a replacement for forums, it's a complement to them.
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Oct 5, 2020 01:03
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theironjef posted:I mean seriously, how bad do you need another book about edgy goth vampires hunting in a techno nightclub? Aren't there enough to fill a goddamn landfill? Even the slightest moral tinge should be enough to kick the part of your brain that says "A book about this exact subject has been published near monthly for nigh on 30 years." This is an easy pass. Urban Shadows is alright. The gimmick it fills is that it's specifically 'crossover WoD' where, say, you're a werewolf staking out territory, but you're horning in on vampire grounds so you need the Vampire player's help to keep the peace, and in turn the Vampire wants the Mage's help in getting a magical artifact their elders want. It has some rough edges but it's not as thoughtless as stuff like Dungeon World and Tremulus. It's focused on the whole 'exchange of Debts' in the same way that Monsterhearts is about Strings.
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Oct 31, 2020 06:45
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Interestingly (or totally uninterestingly from another perspective) Urban Shadows isn't about banding together against an ignorant mortality, and it's mostly not about staving off your 'inner beast' in the same way both Vampire as well as Monsterhearts (with its Darkest Self mechanics) is either. 'Mortals' are explicitly just another faction - consisting of both 'regular people' as NPCs, but as PCs also being the Aware (your plucky investigator type), the Hunter, and the Veteran (someone who's been surviving all this for a while). So yes, any theme about any specific gameline is very diluted, much as if you were running a crossover WoD/CofD line. If there is any unifying factor it's that the Factions are bigger than any one person - 'always a bigger fish' as well as that allegiances aren't permanent so it's possible as the game develops to be a Fae who has a bad relationship with the Wild but who enjoys hanging out with Night (vampires, werewolves, etc). It's not an original setting, no, but 'dark urban fantasy' in general is not in the same cultural zeitgeist now with Vampire Diaries and Teen Wolf and so on as it was in the 1990s with Nightlife and Buffy, so I'm OK with new stuff popping out and getting revised, just as fantasy has moved on in popular culture too.
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Oct 31, 2020 08:12
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paradoxGentleman posted:Scion's idea of dropping the masquerade angle was an excellent one on the developpers' part. It made the world so much more interesting. It sometimes gets chatter in the WoD/CofD thread but if you think it's cool make a fancy new OP and tell us about it!
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Nov 5, 2020 11:05
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Josef bugman posted:Shadowrun always sounded interesting but kind of dumb as hell to actually play. A bit like Mage. I dunno how Ascension is but Awakening 2e is pretty playable. The hardest parts are getting to learn the freeform magic system, there's not really anything for it but time (and there's a web-based calculator that's handy). You do need to be pretty good at improvising though, since beyond starting character stuff PCs will be doing stuff like "hmm this seems like I can generate infinite mana" and "I think I will go to the local cancer ward and see how much I can surreptitiously cure" and you just gotta either roll with that or be open about how wide your intended plot is.
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Dec 15, 2020 09:05
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Falstaff posted:When/why did this happen? Chatting about this in Discord I can definitely understand why he looked back at the section on the 'Mountain People', the fictionalised version of Native Americans, and thought it needed to be either revised ASAP or dropped. quote:The land here wasn’t uninhabited when the Faith arrived, not precisely, but its natives are nomads and at the time they were elsewhere. While the pioneers were establishing themselves at Bridal Falls and the lush valleys around it, various accidents of history, the travels of the elk herds, agreements between family groups, and perhaps the will of the King of Life all kept the natives away. By the time their paths brought them back, Bridal Falls City and a dozen other towns already stood. It's a very 'Elbow Room' view of history which is what made it uncomfortable. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FfoQBTPY7gk
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Mar 1, 2021 01:37
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Hel posted:Is DITV the game where RAW gay people cause demons or am I mixing it up with something else? Yes, and a woman rejecting another woman in a polygamous relationship does that too. At the same time, demons are invisible and incorporeal and might not be real. The game is about being uncomfortable with the religious doctrine you're enforcing, which is why you're also the recognised highest authority in any town you visit and are tempted to change it.
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Mar 1, 2021 02:17
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Antivehicular posted:I remember reading this quote years ago, and I still wonder how Ed Greenwood thinks pregnancy works. I guess when you're the chosen of a god, you can just kind of... distribute those baby parts all over and have Mystra assemble them at birth, like a model kit? The very boring answer is that yes, the goddess' blessing just kind of... spreads the baby all over until it's birth time.
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Apr 16, 2021 01:04
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The problem with metaplot wasn't that there was a prewritten future (or at least, it wasn't the main problem), it's that this future was drip-fed in supplements that often meant that if you wanted to use the supplement, you had to force that future into your game, and if you didn't then that supplement was useless to you without heavy modification.
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Aug 17, 2021 01:43
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Dancey as well, surely.
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Oct 5, 2021 13:30
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Toph Bei Fong posted:Something like Hamilton where the horrors of slavery, racism, and other such nasty things are ignored in favor of just pretending that black people were there and it was great and no one had a problem with them. Bridgerton the TV show is actually very weird about race but it's in one or two throwaway lines that have weirdly wack implications. At first it seemed to be, basically, this is fantasy historical Britian where there are PoC everywhere instead of mostly white people with PoC servants et cetera. Makes chuds whine but it's really just about the fantasy and aesthetic of the era. But then in a throwaway line or two, it is explained and it's the wackiest thing! The king fell in love with a black woman and his love was so great that nonwhite people across the kingdom were elevated to the nobility in a matter of decades. So apparently there are people in living memory of the setting who remember when things were otherwise! And the reason the leading dude's father was such a work-obsessed dick is that he felt he had to prove his worthiness and that his nobility was justified! (the original books it's based on are just played straight, no race element in the story)
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Oct 14, 2021 05:13
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Also to fully explain the joke at the end, Amy Tan's book The Joy Luck Club is absolutely about the mother-daughter bond, but a major theme of that book is characters being overly critical.
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Oct 20, 2021 09:59
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An interesting thing I witnessed as part of running Lancer's No Room For A Wallflower campaign, which I think I also would have seen if I had been a recent DnD GM, is how much a community invested in a game supports itself and others when running what is effectively 'the latest adventure path'. Because everyone is more or less running through similar scenarios, this means you can share tips with other GMs on the internet of "yeah this encounter is a little too easy, so if you wanted to drop a custom boss, this is the place to do it" or "this plot thread never gets tied up if your PCs don't do x, so here's how I did it" so everyone who runs through the campaign subsequently in theory has an easier time of it thanks to the earlier trailblazers. Since it's impossible to get the adventure without an internet connection this also means that the lack of premade maps (which was a notable omission) was only a problem until someone posted their own maps online for sharing. The downside here, of course, is that all this is on a discord, instead of any kind of official searchable forum. One of the reasons Lancer's subreddit is mostly quiet is precisely because PilotNET is so active and engageable as long as you don't raise red flags about yourself within minutes of joining.
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Nov 13, 2021 01:24
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dwarf74 posted:I'm currently running Wallflower and have found the community drive folder to be invaluable... Not to turn this into Lancerchat but I didn't have the same issues despite having a similar level of Lancer inexperience. I guess for me this was pretty much answered by the sitrep descriptions in the book? You combine "this is a Gauntlet sitrep, it has an endzone and enemy ingress points placed along the map with poor cover in the middle" along with "here's a community map, that place looks like the endzone" and just go with that in terms of length. While sweet maps used with mapmaking programs do a lot for a game, you don't need them for a good time. My first time running Lancer (not Wallflower, was just a two-mission thing) was a fun time and the aftermath of the first scene just looked like this (not the whole map, but that's where everyone ended up clustered).  disposablewords posted:There was at least a little naked opportunism on Paizo's part, kind of like White Wolf's weird marketing campaign where they offered the Exalted 2e core if you turned in your 3.5 PHB to be destroyed around the same time. 'Graduate Your Game' is still the funniest unironic TTRPG marketing I've ever seen.
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Nov 13, 2021 03:04
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Honestly, Forbidden Lands seems good for Dark Soulsing for two reasons: 1. It's an OSRy fantasy system 2. The GM is meant to throw old legends at the players to fill in the blanks of, and there's even a random Legend Generator you can use to make up Soulsy lore on the fly. Here, I'll do it now. Rolls: 1,5 on timeline 2,3 on adjective 3,2 on person 1,5 on target 3,1 on reason 6,4 on location 4 on location proximity 5,5 on terrain type 1 for direction 2,5 for what happened 4,2 for what remains 3,3 for what danger lives there now OK, here we go. Long ago, before the Blood Mist, there was a treacherous rider, who sought their prophesied [reason] love [target], and traveled to a lake [table for location gave 'water source'] located a few days away, in the midst of a deep forest to the North. As the legend goes, it is said that they were never seen again, and their fine riding gear and gifts for their lover [table gives 'a large treasure'] are still there by the lakeside. But so too are the hungry saurians who dive for fish. Game literally lets you randomly generate soulsy bullshit item descriptions like this, flesh out as necessary.
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Dec 24, 2021 01:16
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Xiahou Dun posted:The football one? I think I missed that one for brain dead reasons. Unseen Academicals is not a very good book by Pratchett standards so it's totally fair to give it a pass.
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Apr 15, 2022 03:34
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13th Age is definitely not a DnD4e substitute (because its whole gimmick is that the game is properly designed to be gridless and not measure distances). I did like it though, and a 2e makes sense because it's main problems are fixable. - Make more power-based martials - Make backgrounds just "pick three, they're all at +4" (basically the same as Facts in Godbound and WWN) - Kill off ritual magic as a class feature, instead you can just do out of combat magic if you have an appropriate background - death to ability scores  You can do all the above as houserules in 13A right now pretty easily except you gotta scour the homebrew site to find some good alt-classes. With all that in place it's (to me) what people actually want from DnD5e: a game with moderately crunchy but quick combat and pretty goofy freeform out of combat where you make up some bullshit and say "yeah I totally get a +4 here because uhhh I learned rope-climbing while I was in the Hell Circus, that's one of my backgrounds"
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Aug 15, 2022 02:33
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xiw posted:The other great standard thing they do in adventure books is build a table for each encounter: Lancer does this  The ICON playtest does too, using a 'point budget' system (point budget for a fight = number of players + 1) 
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Aug 15, 2022 05:38
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You're not at cross-purposes in Court of Blades, is the main thing. You're at the bottom of your House's social ladder (e.g. maybe you're all servants of one minor lord... and he just got assassinated) but you're all that one House and so you're working together to improve yourselves within it, as well as to make your House in general better. Doesn't work for a "one of you is Arya Stark and one of you is Cersei Lannister" game.
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Aug 18, 2022 01:19
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Good news for anyone who wants to play an RPG with its creator:
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Aug 24, 2022 12:26
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Despite DnD cutting its video games outside of Baldur's Gate 3, this one in development is apparently still going. https://twitter.com/the_strix/status/1610661091541159937
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Jan 5, 2023 01:15
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Siivola posted:Just combine the stats and the classes: I've got +4 in Fighter and +3 in Rogue, but -1 in Bard. This is literally how the free game Warrior Rogue and Mage works, where those aren't classes but stats.
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Jan 12, 2023 12:22
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Blades in the Dark is pretty popular and that uses as art either photoshop-filtered landscapes made to look like woodcuts, or really harsh-contrast grayscale vector images that are inspired by Mike Mignola (the video game Darkest Dungeon also has him as an influence).
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Jan 30, 2023 00:23
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I am confused at people in the last page saying that PbtA games require some kind of new way of thinking or paradigm. They are traditional games. You play them the same way you play DnD or Vampire or whatever. GM describes the scene. GM asks what you do. You respond. GM responds. If something you say would trigger some kind of rule (I search, I attack, I intimidate) you roll the appropriate rule and interpret. While there's some player input based on how they describe the action and what the move allows, the GM narrates the end result. And then GM asks what you do, player responds, etc. The only big exception is that many pbta games expect some level of shifting alliances or PCs working at cross-purposes.
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Feb 2, 2023 00:50
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GlyphGryph posted:
I play them like I play DnD because I involve my players in DnD worldbuilding too. Like, I'm in a Pathfinder 2e game so I'm chatting with my GM about how the local nomadic elves work with the sedentary towns they pass near and how that impacts my character because he's a half-elf. Yes, it's an Adventure Path, so a whole bunch of stuff is set and neither I nor my GM is particularly interested in changing swathes of it to accommodate my character. But even a detailed setting has plenty of blank space to say stuff like "yeah so I have one mum and two dads because it's normal for half-whatevers around here" or "yeah my catfolk culture is really into fine clothes and food". edit: Again, using that AP - there's a simple bit where the PCs are asked who they're inviting to their graduation ceremony (so you bring in the cultures as a part of worldbuilding); and that ceremony involves making a mask (something the PC has control over) and then the player also gets to say how that mask changes in a way they didn't expect, to seed some room for greater character growth if they want it. triple edit: I am not saying you should play PbtA like it's DND. I'm saying, you will improve your DnD games if you play them like PbtA, because the 'paradigm' of PbtA and getting your players to give a poo poo works for most other games too. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 03:20 on Feb 2, 2023 |
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Feb 2, 2023 03:14
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I think newbie GMs goofing on "don't say your move name" is that the GM is not supposed to announce their GM moves. Because GM moves are just stuff like "separate the PCs" and "announce/foreshadow future badness". You don't say "I am using the foreshadow future badness move" you just say "you hear loud footsteps approaching". It's also a key point that yes, while GM moves are just "how good GMs are meant to play anyway" there is nuance to what is a GM move and what isn't. Since this is the industry thread I figured I would say this is what I've seen some otherwise good-looking PbtA games misunderstand when they just add "or whatever else seems dramatic" to the end of the GM move list. For example, in Monsterhearts, both 'bring PCs together' and 'separate them' are GM moves, because those are both dramatic consequences that often have negatives in a VampireDiaries-esque TV show. But Apocalypse World only has 'separate them' - choosing to go to another PC is always an explicit choice a PC has to make, driven by their situation.
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Feb 2, 2023 23:44
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disposablewords posted:So tell me more about your tabletop adaptation of the Yakuza games. Ettin's working on that one. https://ettin.itch.io/sukeban-dracula
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Feb 13, 2023 09:58
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I didn't stick with it but playing weekly Draft magic at a shop right at the start of a new block is a pretty solid way to get into the game as well as build up a fun enough 'kitchen table' deck to play against your friends who also are building decks the same way.
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May 10, 2023 07:15
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