Mors Rattus posted:

It definitely took a while for 1st edition to really figure out what it wanted to do, especially with the first three games.

PurpleXVI posted:

Maybe I just hang out with the wrong people, but I've yet to hear a single, well, story, or positive comment about nVamp. Like, that's not to say that I hear bad stories about it. Just no one mentions it. Ever.

DalaranJ posted:

Imagine how bad of a bartender you would have to be to not be able to come with an answer to "where can someone find a little adventure around here". That's not a dumb question. It's a question that thousands of bartenders doubtlessly answer every day, because that's part of their job.

Kurieg posted:

Someone had to hire Phil to write that book. Like, I know that it's a book about hypersexed furries because Phil wrote it. But someone also hired Phil to write a book about hypersexed furries in TYOOL 2007.

hyphz posted:

See? What am I supposed to say about that? Just a bunch of stuff about how great Smolensk is with absolutely no guidelines on how to do this ourselves.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

Atomic Blonde

Cythereal posted:

Only with a lot of trans symbolism.

Rand Brittain posted:

“Quite” can be used to mean “not very” in the same way that “bless your heart” can be used to mean “gently caress you.”

“Oh, yes, she’s quite pretty, I suppose...”

wiegieman posted:

Hit points are a binary metric. Either you're fine (whether that be at 100 hp or 1 hp) or you're in negatives bleeding out, which doesn't map to the idea of a desperate swordfight.

Everyone posted:

I cited it as a "For Christ's sake don't do this poo poo in your game" in the WoD thread, but after having re-read Carcosa, I'm considering doing a review of it. I'm hesitant to do this because I really like my new (to me) MacBook Pro and I don't want to ruin it by vomiting blood from my eyeballs.

Night10194 posted:

There's always something darkly hilarious about nerd organizations devoted to screaming about how the 'x-risks' will be cool science fiction plots like aliens or super AI rebellions or whatever while mostly supporting the politics of things that make the real, existent 'x-risks' more and more probable.

Libertad! posted:

coughdisastrousclimatechangecough

Everyone posted:

At that point the party has a fun character who's a Fighter/Thief that's immune to fear effects and can use that Taunt ability to debuff enemies. The secret to playing a Kender is "don't be an rear end in a top hat to the other players." Once you set that up, why wouldn't you want a Kender in the group? They're great.

Everyone posted:

This is where a game benefits from having a Game Master - a person who says "Yeah, this is what the setting says, but in the context of Wilikin not stealing from Grimwrath Bloodsail, the PC 20 Str Minotaur pirate and Grimdark not using his axe to chop Wilikin into Kender kibble, we're gonna do it this way."

Everyone posted:

One of the points of having a Game Master is to interpret/alter the setting and rules to best fit himself and his group of players. The GM in the Wlikin/Bloodsail game could easily say "RAW and if Bloodsail murders Wilikin tough poo poo." Of course, that's likely to lead to hard feelings between the two players which could end up with the group dissolving, but the GM is certainly free to take that risk.

And let's face it, good GMs "fix" games all the time. They rework published adventures to fit their party and change other aspects of the setting. One of the GMs I played with thought the idea that certain spheres of magic were restricted by alignment seemed asinine. Granted that Black Robes might be more likely to employ Necromancy spells, but it's not like only Good wizards should have access to Abjuration.

[...]

Basically, a role-playing game is a game first or foremost. It's supposed to be a fun activity. And if certain aspects of the rules and setting are making that game less than fun for those participating, those aspect should reasonably be de-emphasized or altered.

JcDent posted:

I bristle at the idea that a product I paid money for leaves me work to do. I already have a system to master, I don't need the work of fixing it. I paid you money with the hopes that you did the work for me, drat it.

FoldableHuman posted:

Who wants a writeup of The Lawnmower Man?

That Old Tree posted:

In every RPG I've ever encountered that elaborates on it even a tiny bit, "Carousing" is used as a synonym for "partying."



EDIT: That'll be 23 experience to…be Aleister Crowley, I guess. I'm sure that slays at parties.

Nessus posted:

Crowley probably partied hard but I wouldn't say that it was definitional... using him as an exemplar for Occult or Rites or some kind of Write Magical Manual skill would make sense. I'm starting to think this Brucato guy ain't that well read!

GimpInBlack posted:

quote:

When Stuck, Get More Intel

GimpInBlack posted:

Count John Dracula (yes, that is really his name), Vlad's son from his second marriage.

GimpInBlack posted:

Thing is, it's not actually hard to improv this game. I mean, coming up with a challenge on the fly isn't really any more work-intensive than establishing the stakes of an action roll in Blades in the Dark, for example. You're just coming up with a good, great, and bad outcome, and maybe an idea for an extra problem the player could take on in exchange for a bonus die.

PantsOptional posted:

I know what you mean by this but I cannot stop picturing Jordan dunking over Dracula.

Libertad! posted:

But can he do a Chaos Dunk?

GimpInBlack posted:

TBH, I literally only got as far as thinking "huh, the score/downtime/blowback/score loop of Blades maps really well to the espionage genre, and as far as I know nobody's done a Forged in the Dark superspy game. Maybe I should do that someday." I figure you could use the backgrounds in NBA as a good basis for playbook concepts, and crew sheets could cover whether your group is, like, a CIA black ops team, a Mission: Impossible style disavowable cell operating without oversight, an Archer-style freelance intelligence service, or a bunch of ex-spies on a mission like Ronin or NBA. That's about as much work as I did before Solo Ops came along and did pretty much everything I wanted for NBA mechanically.

GimpInBlack posted:

That's certainly true, but it's also true of pretty much any game that aims to emulate a genre or setting people might not be super familiar with. Both NBA and Solo Ops have chapters on spy tradecraft, for instance, and the Leverage RPG has a whole section of grifts and con jobs. Even when it's wholly fictional, this kind of thing is really useful--Star Trek Adventures dedicates a few pages to how to come up with appropriately Star Trek-themed technobabble.

For sure if I was going to make Spies in the Cold as an actual, commercially-released FitD espionage game, I'd include both player-facing and GM-facing advice on how to act like a spy and how to emulate the structure of spy fiction (that last part is actually something Blades already does pretty well, the cycle of "score -> downtime and planning -> next score" maps really well to NBA's "thriller structure" idea that "the reward for danger is new information, new information leads you into more danger").

Josef bugman posted:

Yes... it was. It was easy enough for me on xbox, but not on PC.

GimpInBlack posted:

As near as I can tell Hring is a purely fictional character--the closest I can find is Sigurdr Hring, but he was a King of Denmark and supposedly the father of Ragnar Lothbrok, so he's almost 500 years too late for this period.

GimpInBlack posted:

Excellent catch! You'd think I would have remembered to check Hversu Noregr byggðist to identify the king of goddamn Norway. You're absolutely right, and I'm sure the authors of Yggdrasil decided that Thorri and Thor are the same figure so that they could have the three royal dynasties claim descent from the three chief gods venerated at Uppsala. Thanks for pointing that out!

Everyone posted:

Dear God, I love this site for stuff like somebody being able to do Norwegian Google. It reminds me of the old WEF (Warren Ellis Forum) on Delphi back in the late 90s. 50K+ diverse, weird, creative people bringing all kinds of knowledge and experience to bear on just about any possible question or problem.

GimpInBlack posted:

The only one of his advisors who counsels caution is the famed Gautr hero Bjovulf, already renowned as a great warrior and slayer of monsters. Yes, the Gautar are the Geats, and Hugleik is the Old Norse form of Hygelac. I'm not sure where Yggdrasil gets "Aegthjof" as the name of his father, though; in Beowulf his father is Hrethel.

Stephenls posted:

Also, funfact: That picture above that's censored? The art note did not instruct the artist to draw the middle priest topless. That was a surprise when the art came back.

GimpInBlack posted:

Most bondi own at least a small plot of land, but others work as hired hands on larger farms. Importantly, the bondi are free people, with all the rights and privileges thereof, whether or not they own land. They can participate in the thing*, buy and sell property, get married, and start a family without any permission required from the upper class*. The book also tells us that bondi are required to work the lands of their jarls, which sounds suspiciously like later medieval manorial feudalism to me, and I'm not aware of this being mentioned in the sagas.

GimpInBlack posted:

In fact, the most consistent term used to describe slaves in the sagas is "sunburned" (older translations usually render this as "swarthy," which , but that's more about 19th century racism than anything else), and when they are named, their names usually translate as things like "Ugly," "Bad-Smell," "Lazy," and similar abusive terms. Whether that's a literary conceit or the way slaves were actually addressed is unclear, but it definitely shows how they were thought of.

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

Ha, funny that even back in the 70s fantasy fans were contrasting the obviously superior Katana to the "crude" blades of Europe. Makes you wonder if Gygax was taking a specific stance in the fandom discourse of the time by not including them?

Cooked Auto posted:

The Lanze (no idea what it is)

Falconier111 posted:

Falconier111 posted:

Oh, I was talking about CR in GURPS specifically; from what I remember you’re right, Law Level was absolutely gun control level.

quote:

CR2 – Free. Some laws exist; most benefit the individual. Taxes are light. Access to items of LC0 and LC1 is controlled.
[...]
CR4 – Controlled. Many laws exist; most are for the convenience of the state. Broadcast communications are regulated; private broadcasts (like CB) and printing may be restricted. Taxation is often heavy and sometimes unfair. Access to items of LC0 through LC3 is controlled.
[...]
CR6 – Total control. Laws are numerous and complex. The individual exists to serve the state. Many offenses carry the death penalty, and trials – if there are any at all – are a mockery. Taxation is crushing, taking most of an ordinary citizen’s income. Censorship is common, and private ownership of any information technology is forbidden. All goods are controlled, and the government might even withhold basic necessities.

Young Freud posted:

I was thinking about how to do this like a Fate-style trait, like a character receives bennies or fate points or what have you if they flirt or hit on someone and maybe get a bonus if the target character actually reciprocates.

FMguru posted:

One of the reasons I was kind of disappointed in Gumshoe/Trail of Cthulhu was that the big innovation in the system (you always get the appropriate clue you need to progress in the scenario! No more dead ends because nobody made their Library Use skill!) was solving a problem that CoC had mostly solved in its first iteration.

Night10194 posted:

That's about where I am, with the added effect of being very annoyed that CoC also influenced the development of stress/mental health systems in RPGs very heavily, leading to many, many imitators. Which annoy me on both the ethical/problematic level, but also that it depicts mental struggle purely as 'now you have major penalties/extremely anti-social or troublesome behaviors'. I think I made an error calling it a loss of 'control' in the review, when what I'd be interested in is a model of stress and distress that centered around retaining player agency.

My ideal system would have breakpoints where the players, themselves, come up with the things they do to cope, or the unproductive things the stress and terror of the moment make them do, rather than being focused on 'now the GM decides what dumb poo poo you get up to' on a gameplay level. Revealing what characters do in emotionally fraught moments is intriguing. Tracking how someone copes when they're exhausted or deeply afraid is also a way you can start talking about how people live with their issues and can come back around to more positive portrayals. While still possibly letting you track stress and have a pressure mechanic that provides tension and helps people put themselves in the characters' shoes about how unpleasant what they're dealing with is.