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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Better yet, is there the wizard equivalent of cameo where you can trade orbs to someone who will then get the wizard celebrity of your choice to make up a memory involving you in some way? Like the memory of Wizard Pauly Shore telling everyone in line at Wizard Del Taco, "you know who was a cool dude to party with? <Borb Cameo Donor #44>" That's because this is exactly the kind of scheme a trashy van wizard would get up to to scrounge up some extra cash.
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Sep 10, 2019 14:59
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How else are you supposed to quantify whimsy if not by the number of tchotchkes you've squirreled away in your wizard tower?
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Sep 11, 2019 22:40
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Halloween Jack posted:Modern occult fantasy has at times been very bad about centering some hidden evil as the source of all human ills, to the point of echoing right-wing conspiracy theories. (And I think we're all in agreement that ascribing the Holocaust to vampires is just tasteless.) FATAL & Friends 2020: anyway Himmler didn't get Embraced until after the war
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Oct 2, 2019 22:34
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Goat is GOAT
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Oct 7, 2019 18:42
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Glagha posted:I do like the skills arguing. Having Empathy be like "Oh, she's very upset with you." followed by Physical Instrument sliding in with "Nah dog she's totally into you lay on the charm" That's not really something that works in a TTRPG though for obvious reasons. Making character motivations and skills conflict mechanically is a fun idea though. I like games that incentivize acting against your own self interest. Trap sprung that's something Electrochemistry would say, not Physical Instrument! But I remember reading that Disco Elysium is partially based off a (personal?) tabletop system the devs used for their own games. I'm curious how much of that is reflected in the mechanics and how much of it is just the lore of Revachol.
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Nov 13, 2019 18:07
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Hourglass in the Sky seems like it could be a fun scenario to adapt to Fellowship. You've got an Overlord, the gods can represent Sources of Power, and you have the Raistlinites as the base army and General with the resurrected Dragonarmy as an eventual Overlord Advance. E: You'd have to throw out the existing Dragonlance lore to let the characters define their own cultures, but given that this is the game that begat Kender and Gully Dwarfs I see this as a plus.
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Dec 5, 2019 15:31
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Kaza42 posted:And the most frustrating part of it is that they had it working so much better in 1e and 2e. Magic-Users were actually not automatically better than Fighters (everyone was still better than rogues), and Fighters had a bunch of automatic advantages to show off how incredibly good they were at fighting. It was, ironically, the attempt to standardize things that messed it up. Spell DCs and Fort/Ref/Will was the best thing to ever happen to wizards. I honestly think Fort/Ref/Will was a step in the right direction (namely, paring down overly complicated mechanics), they just screwed up the math. To start with, Fighters and fightery monsters should still have had high saves across the board to represent their balls of steel, while Wizards should have terrible saves because they are horrible nerds. Just because you work magic good doesn't mean you have an iron will, but being willing to charge several tons of scales and fire with just a sword probably does.
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Dec 19, 2019 21:48
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That's just D&D/fantasy roleplaying as a whole.
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Jan 31, 2020 21:37
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My only exposure to Spiced Potatoes is through Hello from the Magic Tavern, and I'm a bit disappointed the Dragonlance recipe isn't "pull potato from the ground, roll it in spices without washing or cooking, eat."
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Feb 14, 2020 16:05
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I'm impressed with how Heart improved some of the worst problems of Spire. Callings are brilliant (aside from my general agreements re: Zenith beats) and a huge improvement of the old "guesstimate/argue about whether you earned no advance, a small advance or a large advance after each session" system. I like my games fast and loose, but advancement needs to have concrete conditions, even if the ways you meet those conditions are open to the player. e: Plus, they fixed the weird, kind of pointless obsession with a hole in reality in their game about political revolution by just making a game about said hole in reality  . I do like the Heart and the weirdness around it, but it didn't mesh well with the rest of Spire, imo.
Big Mad Drongo fucked around with this message at 15:46 on Apr 9, 2020 |
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Apr 9, 2020 15:44
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CitizenKeen posted:Also, the nice thing about Callings is that they're territory ripe for balance-proof homebrewing. You want to make a "Big Heartblooded Game Hunter" that isn't just an Adventure/Cleaver. You don't need to make a class, with all the balance issues that entails. You can make it a calling, and run with it. It's a lot harder for a Calling to be unbalanced. This is very true, and if I ever run Spire again I'll probably create some appropriate Callings (or if we're lucky, they'll get backported into the system by the writers themselves). "Why do you fight against the Aelfir?" has plenty of space to work with, from motivations of "patriotism" to "revenge" to "I just want to gently caress poo poo up."
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Apr 9, 2020 16:37
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Night10194 posted:The weird thing is that even as I usually play and run games that accomplish more and are about the transition out of being shitfarmers, I find the shitfarmer stuff is really important to my enjoyment of the setting. The idea that the ordinary matters, that there's a home to come back to, and that heroes still have to worry about similar things to yon peasant has its own appeal. I like being able to point at a cool secret agent and say they got their start improvising wildly as a scullery boy (even if that part doesn't show up in gameplay because we started at 2nd tier or something). I think the key here is that Hams has a very clear progression system that guides you from scullery boy to superspy embedded within the mechanics themselves.The class switching/tiering mechanic is a brilliant. All the player has to do is come up with the why and how. Other shitfarmer games don't have that progression, if they even offer any sense of progression at all.
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Apr 21, 2020 18:22
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What is it with ponies and libertarians? You'd think you'd see the occasional communist weirdo into this poo poo, but with ponies on the internet it's fash all the way down.
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Apr 22, 2020 14:24
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Night10194 posted:Yes, I'd love an analytical take on Lancer. I want to get into it, myself, but I am not particularly good at games that require a lot of careful map design and I'm distracted by Troika! and trying out Pendragon at last. I just got this through the itch.io bundle and the description for Wizard Hunters is, well, magical.
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Jun 13, 2020 20:42
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Night10194 posted:I'm also going to run a horror OSR-ish one-shot this weekend called A Wizard that similarly has a detailed content warning list and exhortations to ease the gently caress off if someone is really uncomfortable and to establish boundaries. Which I really appreciate. I'm really interested to hear about how it goes, I read through the module and while it seems really well done, it is an (intentionally) extremely awful experience for the PCs even if everything goes vaguely right. The content warnings are good and show a modern, forward-thinking approach, but the dungeon itself seems to hate the party on the same level as the Tomb of Horrors.
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Jun 30, 2020 03:54
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Emmett Jackson, recovering alcoholic who was expecting to see fewer weird things, not more. e: aw dang
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Jul 3, 2020 19:17
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Man this book goes all in on making the Formians a generic expansionistic hive mind, huh? They seem less like avatars of Law and more like might-makes-right Chaotic Evil, trying to reshape the universe in their image rather than respect the natural order. Or maybe I just miss Modrons.
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Jul 26, 2020 00:18
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Cythereal posted:Arcadia and Mechanus are the only places they're actually causing problems. Everywhere else they get their poo poo wrecked. This book assumes the Blood War will be a thing, but I gather the Formians are meant to be something of an alternative if you want some kind of interplanar war with their efforts to colonize everywhere and integrate all into the hive. It's less that they're succeeding at expanding and more that they seem to be trying everywhere. While I appreciate alternatives to the Blood War, I feel like it should also feature misguided do-Gooders trying to clean up the lower planes and Chaotic types colonizing seemingly random areas, not just Generic Borg Ripoff #782 causing a mess all on their own. More turmoil = more adventure hooks.
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Jul 26, 2020 00:27
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Glad to see the Star Wars EU writer who came up with "mofference" still getting work.
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Aug 4, 2020 20:12
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hyphz posted:
This seems to be the overarching problem with Invisible Sun as a whole: it's full of ideas that (sometimes) sound cool, but no actual thought is given on how they would play out in-game either mechanically or story/setting-wise.
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Aug 4, 2020 21:18
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Tibalt posted:Going on adventures is very rewarding, because XP = GP. Literally, when you get back to town you contemplate the fight with the goblins and begin extruding gold coins. As presented here!
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Aug 5, 2020 15:54
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Joe Slowboat posted:Gene Wolfe's alzabo getting a starring role in a hit movie is just nice to see. The alzabo deserves good things (no it doesn't). I was whispering this to my wife like a huge dork during the whole scene. Surprisingly, she was far less concerned that the spooky bear monster wasn't entirely original! Back on topic illithid adventure seems rad, gotta respect a module that says "Here's a great place to hop off if you like, along with a couple potential hooks for what might happen next." Big Mad Drongo fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Aug 20, 2020 |
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Aug 20, 2020 04:39
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OtspIII posted:Option D is that the player describes how they're hiding and the GM just makes a snap "on a scale from 1 to 10, how good of an idea does this sound like?" judgement, then just sets that as the number they need to beat on a d10 for the xenomorph not to find them. It's not really a formal mechanic, more of a luck check with the odds set by how clever the player is being. It's in some ways similar to option C, since it is still very fiat-driven, but it's way easier to rule "what are the odds this would work" fairly than it is to rule "do I gently caress you over this time or not". You is pretty much the core of OSR play--if you don't know what should happen during a game you just think up a range of possible options and then roll a die to figure out which of them happens. This is how Machine of Death works: you are given a description of a target, their location and how the Machine has declared they will die, draw a bunch of cards/writing prompts that represent stores with a broad set of potential tools (for instance "The Good Kind of Bad" sells stuff like motorcycles, cigarettes and leather jackets) and you use the items you come up with to stage a three-step assassination. Then the whole table collaborates on how likely each step is to work, based on the both target's behavior and their foretold doom, which sets the difficulty for each roll. It's tons of fun in quick unconnected rounds, but I'm curious how it plays out in a formal scenario.
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Aug 20, 2020 16:47
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mellonbread posted:Nice to know New Yorkers aren't the only people who take widely available dishes and try to recast them as some exotic local specialty, then violently object to others enjoying them the "wrong way" If you don't do this, can you truly say you love your hometown? 90s Cringe Rock posted:Hey, I learned about the exciting Chicago-Greek dish of "literally just a slab of halloumi or something, fried, then doused in booze and set on fire" from this post and it sounds amazing. The red hot cheese is nothing new, but setting it on fire (and dousing the flames with lemon apparently?) is a nice gimmick addition than I am excited to try as an excuse to cook more halloumi and similar cheeses. This is the one upside of regional food bragging, if it weren't for my friends in New Haven talking up clam pizza I would have never tried it, and it turned out clam pizza is actually really good!
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Aug 26, 2020 14:00
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Xiahou Dun posted:Don't kink shame. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0hNnhBhdMo
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Aug 26, 2020 17:59
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Something that's bothered me for years: where do gibberlings, which have no discernable society or industry, manage to get all these shortswords? Like it'd be one thing if they had random assortments of pointy poo poo they found, but it's specified to be mass-produced shortswords. I know, I know, D&D ecology is a rabbit hole that breaks the strongest men, but it's so drat specific.
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Sep 26, 2020 17:10
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LeSquide posted:Clearly, they're armed by the Derro in a continued attempt to wage their genocidal war upon the Other through screaming, unyielding proxies. PurpleXVI posted:The Adventurer-Industrial complex is mass-producing shortswords for level 1 adventurers at a loss due to government subsidies, the spare shortswords, rather than being melted down or put into storage, are just tossed into a big hole outside of town. That's where the gibberlings get them all. I choose to believe these are all simultaneously true. Thanks for ending my sleepless nights!
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Sep 26, 2020 23:44
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Everyone posted:I remember that in one game I played a mutant thief-type and I had him swipe one of Forge's "Mutant Nullifiers" and walk around with it, kind of spinning it and freaking out all the other PCs and NPCs. At the end he gave it back and said "That nervousness you guys have been feeling all day? That's what norms feel around you. All the time." IIRC werewolves in UA are animals possessed by human souls, so I would
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Nov 11, 2020 04:06
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:Book of Vile Darkness(3e) This unironically owns and I have no idea what it's doing in the book. A weird little effect that's not directly useful, but may be helpful in an interesting way under certain circumstances and is freely available on demand, is what cantrips should be. As opposed to dealing pathetic damage or whatever else they do RAW. A mage that takes the time to learn a cantrip for cheating at cards says a lot about the character, unlike most spells.
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Apr 27, 2021 15:24
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senrath posted:Remember that cantrips in 3e and 3.5 aren't freely available on demand. You only get a very limited number of uses of them per day. drat you're right, it's been literal decades since I've played 3.x. Still stealing the concept for systems where low-powered magic tricks are unlimited. It's exactly the kind of thing you could see a wizardy-type designing as a bored student looking to make some extra cash and hilariously out of place in the Tome of Edgy Grimdarkness.
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Apr 27, 2021 16:20
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open_sketchbook posted:i am a big fan, conceptually, of horny rpgs, but why is it always like this instead of, idk, not like this maybe??? Nine times out of 10 that's because it's not a horny RPG but some dude's horny in an RPG. Subtle but important difference.
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May 19, 2021 14:20
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PurpleXVI posted:So Dunnsmouth features a cube? Hm, already getting high marks. I kinda hope it's completely innocuous beyond the whole "LOVE SPIDER" thing. Like, the magic bite is just some self-defense mechanism on an off-brand Rom the Vacuous Spider and the cult is an unintended consequence seems way more interesting a problem than Evil Extradimensional Spider #3,963 seeks world domination. The whole mind-altering bite part makes the spider still not great to have around, but having it be an isolated bit of weirdness rather than a threat against the world seems more in line with a module that aims to be a semi-randomly generated pile of strangeness.
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Aug 30, 2021 19:23
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MonsterEnvy posted:I resent that Entreri is cool. I wouldn't go as far as cool, but the only thing I remember from those awful books (despite rereading them way too much as a kid) is Entreri coming to terms with the fact that he was getting old an slow while Drizzt would be in his prime for centuries. Probably the only decent character development in the whole series.
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Sep 8, 2021 23:58
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Mork Borg seems cool, thanks for continuing the review! I really want to dig the OSR weird and horrible style, but the few books I've had recommended were very, very clearly written by absolutely stunning geniuses who are furious the world doesn't respect how important random swearing, random edgy stuff like necrophilia-inducing magic and butchered reimaginings of superior literature are. It seems like half of them include a ham-handed "critic" monster (as seen in Blue Medusa) that just randomly calls things good art or bad art and attacks anyone who disagrees with them. I just about die from second-hand embarrassment every time. The vibe I get from Mork Borg is who gives a gently caress, let's be metal as hell and drat the consequences. It's really refreshing. As long as it doesn't go down the above route I may check it out.
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Nov 3, 2021 15:06
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this was a double post
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Nov 3, 2021 15:06
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I actually like Nightlife's insane list of charms made from just about anything, it feels more "alive" to me than stuff only being made from unobtanium like in so many RPGs. There's something folkloric about, say, onions having supernatural properties if you know the right rituals. I also like the insane demons. A fire demon that doesn't actually want to be on fire, which makes it hate fire even more, is a great concept.
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Nov 22, 2021 16:59
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hyphz posted:Awaiting the moment when the person who wrote Spellpunk Cyberfight either The last one would be like Santa materializing just to tell you he's not real 
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Dec 21, 2021 20:38
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mellonbread posted:Setting the game only one year after the nuclear war seems pretty soon for all these factions to be so well developed. Some of them have the excuse of being formed before the war, but that's a short timeframe for restablishing communications and asserting control over swathes of territory. You're not wrong, but I find this kind of weird refreshing compared to the common (read: copied from Bethesda Fallout) setting where it's been 500 years since the bombs dropped, entire societies have sprung up and yet every last one of them still lives in the burnt out ruins of the old world.
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Apr 6, 2022 14:04
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Halloween Jack posted:I've never understood why people need porn in their tabletop roleplaying games. You're already on the Internet; infinite free pornography is just a few clicks away. Can't speak for art of boob ladies, but the monster pregnancy stuff is dareyouentermymagicalrealm.jpg Plus if you're doing it as a writer/publisher they can't even punch you in the face for it!
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Oct 20, 2022 22:06
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Benagain posted:If you're a good guy paladin and it's a sin to waste booze wouldn't the logical action be to throw yourself in the path of any booze being wasted so you can chug as much as possible Pretty sure this is a potential character concept for a Knight of the North Docks in Spire.
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Feb 14, 2023 21:38
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