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MonsieurChoc posted:What would be a good system for doing a game inspired by Shin Megami Tensei? Not PErsona, but the original cyberpunk post-apocalyptic demon summoning world of the mainline series. Tenra Bansho Zero. Even comes with demon-summoning rules.
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Jan 2, 2020 15:44
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MonsieurChoc posted:I've got that, but it's pretty tied to it's own setting, no? No more so than Shadowrun. You might want to revise the karma mechanics if you don't want them to get into that particular power spiral, but otherwise you can just go and call it a day.
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Jan 2, 2020 18:04
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Skeeziness aside, KD just isn't that good a game. There's a lot of "huh huh you ate poop, lose your turn" which is not fun. There's no skill or planning involved in save or die. It's not a good Monster Hunter ripoff, and it's not sufficiently novel to stand as its own entity apart from being a vehicle for titty miniatures. If you guys are into dungeon crawling adventures, Gloomhaven is the current standard. It's pretty good! There's basically a campaign-structured dungeon crawler for any kind of taste these days. What about KD is really speaking to you?
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Jan 11, 2020 01:21
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GorfZaplen posted:A friend of mine wants to do a play by post style game but is having trouble finding a good space for it that's free, easily accessible on a phone, and isn't affiliated with Facebook. Anyone here have any ideas? Discord. Your posts typically smaller, but you can still write a grand honking epic if you really feel the need.
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Jan 14, 2020 18:24
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Mr. Maltose posted:Not going to lie, The Leverage RPG was going to be my example of a game that gets close to covering that conceptual space. I wouldn't call it a perfect fit by any means but it would be far from the worst jumping off point. I wish this were a better and more fleshed-out game, because its pitch is great and it does a fantastic job of capturing the feel of the show as a result. It just has a bunch of needlessly complex dice junk in it, and not a whole lot after you get through that part.
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Jan 30, 2020 17:33
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Can confirm that Um Jammer Lammy is a magical item, even if you can get digital copies of it these days.
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Feb 19, 2020 20:25
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MonsieurChoc posted:Alright, thanks guys. Turns out we're gonna do a FFVII game using the Shadowrun 4E ruleset anyway. That's significantly worse. Can you at least convince them to go for 3E?
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Mar 11, 2020 14:28
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I would argue SR3 is the least-bad edition of Shadowrun, just barely. The 4E technomancers and wireless rules were pretty bad on top of being useless. Play Dragonfall anyway.
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Mar 11, 2020 17:06
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Gobbeldygook posted:4E is so superior to 3E that I'm assuming you're trolling. Why would you want to go back to combat pools and floating target numbers and all that other garbage they left behind in 3E? I learned on SR3 and knew what not to touch to avoid breaking things, but didn't get to that same parity in 4E. It's me, I'm the Shadowrun grognard.
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Mar 11, 2020 17:54
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Leperflesh posted:I haven't played Shadowrun since 1993, so I may be off base, but this is the impression I continue to have: the game is fundamentally broken because it's actually two different games. It is at least four games, in addition to the two you have listed. The third is shitfarmer gangland stories, but the system isn't calibrated for play at a level where the most exciting gear you've interacted with is the lingering flatulence of someone who looked at a cyberarm once. The fourth is the complete other end, where you're basically a superhero and the game is busted in the complete other direction, you have millions of nuyen worth of augmentations and customized weaponry, and most of your time is spent in a spreadsheet tweaking modifications to your guns and spells, rather than having an adventure.
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Mar 11, 2020 19:59
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drrockso20 posted:Agreed, honestly it probably would be for the best if he was banned from this thread Hyphz is strange, but gently caress you, buddy.
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Mar 13, 2020 15:14
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Oh, about a couple hundred pages, with the Pokedex.
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Mar 13, 2020 21:24
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Fruits of the sea posted:Hey, not sure if this is the right place to ask so feel free to direct me to a better thread: The game is in one sense realistic, because the entire thing depends on eastern Europe. The German player should pump tanks and try to take Moscow and Karelia, while the Soviet player should dump everything into infantry first turn to make a meat wall, then build tanks to punch back. Everybody else can do whatever. Setup and teardown will take about as long as playing the game, which is also quite long. Good luck!
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Mar 16, 2020 17:01
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Yes? You do the math in your head, like if you were at the table.
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Mar 16, 2020 20:38
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Chakan posted:Gonna pick up Dishonored, but I'd also like to hear people talk about the FLP library. It's kinda hard to sift through all the stuff they have and determine what's really good. Alien looks like an easy sell to me, but I don't know if it's any fun. Things from the Flood also stood out, I've heard good stuff (I think) about Mutant Year Zero, but wouldn't know where to start. Failing a quick rundown, any reviews that you find accurate are also appreciated. I'd also like to know most of these things, but I have M:YZ. It's okay. I neither love nor dislike it. I would turn to Apocalypse World first for my post-apoc adventures, then Gamma World, and then M:YZ. It's the crunchiest of the systems I've listed, and sometimes you want a good crunchy game. It's less complex than a Fragged game, for instance, though by that same token not as tactically robust if you're in it for the gameplay of the Mutant PC game. The biggest complaint I have about any of the Mutant series is that GenLab Alpha seemed weirdly biotruthy for a game about playing a bunch of freakish mutants. Not in a weird regressive way, just a lot of "if your character is X kind of hosed up animal, they will do Y." 
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Mar 24, 2020 21:53
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hyphz posted:Really? I can see a big problem if one of the players is better at storytelling than the GM. The term "conversation" is used in this context because it's a back-and-forth process. Regardless of an individual's storytelling capability, Apocalypse World provides a ready list of things to do to the PCs to make their lives interesting and put a kink in their plans. Some PbtA games don't make that resource available, and that's a problem, but it's not inherent to the type of system. Your point is tantamount to the same scenario in a D&D game, where one person is railroading the whole table and the GM literally will not speak. This is a thing that is theoretically possible, if prima fasce weird, but it isn't a problem with either game's mechanics or presentation.
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Mar 25, 2020 17:40
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I would just like to play, period. On a lighter note, Heart comes out in a week, and I am unreasonably excited.
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Mar 26, 2020 01:34
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Night10194 posted:Heart's the Spire dungeon crawler, right? That's the one. It's supposed to be a lot more about the world beyond drow intrigue and insurrection.
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Mar 26, 2020 03:11
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:even if InDesign has handy ToC and indexing tools god drat it loving seriously, man. There's no excuse for broken bookmarks or a non-linked ToC these days, and yet!
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Mar 28, 2020 17:10
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Covok posted:Did anyone hack Tenra Bansho Zero to keep the setting and use less of a clunky system? Okay, I'll take the bait. What exactly do you believe is clunky about TBZ?
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Apr 1, 2020 03:59
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Covok posted:Character creation is a goddamn mess, regardless of the method you use. Either's its a pregen, you mix together a bunch of archetypes which is still messy, or you masochistically use the pointbuy system. I can understand why you would be skeptical of the statement I'm about to make, but - I'm not trying to poo poo on you, but I don't comprehend what you're tripping on. Archetypes are designed to be picked up and used wholesale for rapid character generation, like picking a playbook in a PbtA game. If you double-up on a skill you swap it for something of equivalent rank. You shouldn't be doubling up on anything else if you're picking by archetypes. A la carte chargen is going to be more complex. Like, it's point buy. It has set values for each cost, but if you want that level of fidelity you're going to have to put more time into it. I don't know how you would customized generation where you're manually setting each value on a character sheet, but simple. You can redeem your aiki chits for a small boost or to buy character attributes. If you buy character attributes, your karma goes up. 108 karma means you auto-lose the game, so don't go over 107. You can reduce karma at the end of a scene by burning a Fate, which come in values of 0, 10, 30, and 70 karma reduced for ranks 2, 3, 4, and 5 Fates, in that order. TBZ is explicitly designed for one-shots and fast play. You should be highlighting the important decision moments of a scene, and then power-talking the rest of it. I don't follow your issue here, and I'm not sure what anime has to do with how the game plays. Again, this isn't a personal attack. But to my eye, TBZ is one of the most elegant holistic systems I've played, so I'm absolutely bamboozled by your concerns. The flip side of that is that I like the game quite a bit, and if there's something I can do to Sherpa you over some rough spots, I'm happy to do so.
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Apr 1, 2020 22:23
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Elfgames posted:i agree with everything you say but this, i feel like the karma systyem only really shines when you have a longer playthrough so you can chase or sublimate desires organically In practice, I totally agree with you and I think the speedrun one-shot style the system claims it's designed for is how a crazy person would play an RPG. But approaching the system in good faith kinda requires accepting its insane premise, and dismissing Covok's concerns with "well yeah, but just don't do the thing you're explicitly told to do" isn't cool. Like, TBZ does have flaws, and they mostly reside in some of the subsystems where it's really easy to accidentally break things and become either useless or godlike entirely by accident. But the core systems are absurdly elegant in how they flow together, and I want to evangelize for it as much as possible.
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Apr 2, 2020 14:34
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It's all good. But since we we're ultimately arguing about elfgames on the internet, I figured I should be entirely clear about the stakes and personal investment involved here. You're not wrong! I would love to see a third edition of TBZ with modern influences and a lot of the cruft stripped out. I suspect the answer to "why is this so complicated" is "because we didn't know better" - the original Tenra is from 1998, and TBZ came out in 2000. That's contemporaneous with the original release of D&D 3. Even the English localization is nearly a decade old at this point.
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Apr 2, 2020 22:58
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Ettin posted:
So when are you restarting the EP game, now that you've got all this copious spare time?
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Apr 7, 2020 14:45
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hyphz posted:Btw, I didn’t run CFA for my group. I ran it for a group from the Dragon Friends fan discord, one of whom had only ever played 5e before so fighting the good fight I guess, plus a goon who joined from the TG discord where I recruited to balance the numbers. It's entirely contextual, but the context should create the rolling conditions naturally without effort on your part as hypothetical GM. In Spire and other PbtA games, you roll when
AND there is a reasonable chance of failure, AND the consequences of success or failure are both relevant and interesting Moves come up contextually as part of the conversation. They would say to you, "Hyphz, I want to dose everyone in Spire by poisoning the water." And you would say "Okay, how?" "By obtaining poison, and tipping it into the water supply." "Okay, how do you get the poison?" etc. until you get to granular points where they start triggering moves. Let's say the players have narrowed it down to finding a distributor for their chemicals. The Azurite player wants to use their contacts to find someone who can provide the poison. They already blew their once-per-session find a guy move, so they can't just do what they want. You ask them to describe how they're finding a poison distributor. They say they're going out onto the street and asking discreet questions about who might know a guy who knows a guy who has some poison of the type they need. You feel this makes sense and doesn't need any more specification, so you ask them to roll +Investigate, because success or failure matters. From here, they can get a perfect success and find a guy, so now they need to convince him to sell them the poison, which may mean more rolling, and get it back to the reservoir undetected (more rolling), and they may have to live with the fallout of being hunted because they killed thousands of people. Alternately, they could blow the roll, which means the Paladins know someone is asking dumb questions about buying a shitload of poison, so now they have to evade the fuzz, which means they're probably going to roll more times. Note that in each instance, whether or not you should roll comes up naturally as part of the flow of what's going on in game. You're also not rolling at the player's whims - you have to do a thing to do a thing in PbtA games, you don't just get to pick a move and roll. Additionally, it's got to be important - if they fail their check finding a source, that's interesting. It's not interesting if they have to make a roll to open an unlocked door when nobody's around or put one foot in front of another while they're idly walking. It would be interesting, and potentially merit rolling, if the PCs were trying to open a locked door in a warehouse full of hostile guards, or trying to put one foot in front of another crossing a tightrope five stories up. There is not a set of conditions more specific that the ones I've broken out above to tell you when to make rolls.
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Apr 16, 2020 18:00
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hyphz posted:I can see how the breakdown works, but I'm cautious about it. That was pretty bad GMing on your friend's part. My first thought is "why does the specific information matter?" You either successfully infiltrate the rebels, or you don't. We don't care if you did it by giving them the high sign from the Sting or you happen to share their unique accent so they accept you as one of their own. The proper response is "Okay, you attempt to do some signals intelligence on the rebels, and [PASS/FAIL/BUT WITH A COST]. Now what do you do?" But! I understand. I like those kind of minutia, plus you can always turn them using the high sign into a recurring plot element. So the second big trick here is for your GM to instead say "I don't know, Hyphz. You made a listen check - tell us what you hear?" That way you as a player have some agency in the game, and the GM doesn't have to think of something on the fly. To torture our extended metaphors, I don't think your core problem is one of plotting, so much as editing. We shouldn't give a poo poo how the warp drive works, only that it gets Kirk to the scene of the action [in the nick of time/alas, too late]. Editing is hard, but it is easier to figure out than improvisational storytelling, because the big thing you need to do is just ask yourself "is this thing in front of me interesting?" And if so, "Is this interesting thing important?" If the answer to the first question is "no," then why is it in your game? If the answer to the second question is "no," don't spend much time on it. It is a total coincidence, I assure you, that these conditional statements strongly correlate with the parameters for rolling that I laid out in my last post.
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Apr 16, 2020 19:44
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Magnusth posted:okay, but, like... why are you trying to win roleplaying game? I've seen this a couple of times, and I legitimately think it's because the word "game" is involved. I knew a guy in college, specifically, who was a pretty reasonable, pleasant human being normally. Not without his foibles, but not a screaming rear end in a top hat, y'know? You could have a discussion with him about pretty contentious subjects and if nothing else, at least amiably agree to disagree. Except when it came to games. Uno, Street Fighter, D&D, didn't matter. As soon as things were attached to the framework of a game, he had to be the one who did the things best, and preferably in a solitary fashion. Like, guy would get pissed off if he wasn't the one to trigger cutscenes in Halo co-op. His tabletop characters were inevitably gothy loners with tortured pasts we never found out, and trenchcoats and katanas whenever the setting allowed. There was one way to play, and that was to be the only one who got rewarded at the end of a session, whether that meant stealing all the reward money (because he made sure he was the only one who was allowed to accomplish things, which must be accomplished perfectly or not at all) or killing the other PCs so they didn't get XP/karma/whatever. I can only assume there's a small but significant group of people out there who mentally attach "zero sum" to the word "game" whenever they hear it.
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Apr 17, 2020 17:50
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PerniciousKnid posted:Anybody know anything about Torchbearer 2nd Edition? I'm looking at the Kickstarter and imagining what my life could be like a year from now. Dare ye enter Luke Crane's magical realm? Torchbearer is Mouse Guard, but harder and with fiddlier equipment. This is intentional. If you want a game actually designed to be Fantasy Vietnam, Torchbearer is a good choice. I personally can't stand it and I would rather stick sharp objects through my eardrums than watch Crane jerk himself off with Wizardly Prose instead of communicating with the backers of his project like a normal human. YMMV.
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Apr 22, 2020 21:09
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Jimbozig posted:He's not using wizard speak. He did that one time years ago. This is like being mad that Vincent Baker puts rules for rape in every one of his games. (He doesn't. He did it once, years ago.) Luke Crane literally cannot stop obfuscating what good elements are in his games with terrible, unintuitive writing and intentionally bad layouts for the sake of ~vision~. He does it on games where he's only the layout artist, let alone his own products on his employer's website on which he has editorial control.
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Apr 23, 2020 00:33
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FMguru posted:1) It takes a lot of effort (and some specialized book-production knowledge) to make a good index Lemme preface this by saying I'm not getting lovely at you, I'm getting lovely at people who suck at layout - It super doesn't! Modern desktop publishing software makes it incredibly easy to make an index and a table of contents! You set a flag on a particular term or section, which you can do through a right-click menu right there at hand, and it'll auto-populate the ToC and index for you. It'll even update your pagination if you add or remote content and it gets shuffled around, so none of that pp. XX poo poo should ever show up in your books. Unless you are Kevin Siembieda and you are still literally gluing your layouts together, there's no excuse for a lovely index these days.
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Apr 24, 2020 17:19
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JIZZ DENOUEMENT posted:Is there a goon consensus Nope. There are a jillion minis wargames out there, and what's most fun for you is going to depend on your preferences. Are you looking for something historical or fantastical? Crunchy or simple? Inexpensive or full of jewel-like objects of wonder? A less subjective answer is that if you have a local scene for a particular game, play that even if it's not "the best" at whatever. Otherwise pick whatever you think has the coolest models that will sustain your engagement by themselves, because you're going to be playing every couple of months at best.
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Apr 24, 2020 21:01
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Leperflesh posted:I'm 100% with you on the rants about RPG writers not understanding the basic features of their desktop publishing software, and that it's relatively simple to learn how to auto-create an index. I agree with you on pretty much all of those points, but this is mostly an issue of function, rather than intent and future trends. If your typical small-print book publisher is a general practitioner, and you're coming at this from the viewpoint of a surgeon, RPG layout artists are Creepy Luke, who wants to take back to his alley to exchange your phlegmatic humors with antifreeze. In this tortured analogy, indexing tools are asking Luke to wipe off the needle before he sticks it in our neck.
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Apr 24, 2020 21:41
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Ferrinus posted:The funny thing here is that PF2 fighters really feel like MMO characters, because each one has got a "rotation": a sequence of moves of escalating power that you optimally follow rigidly, but which the vicissitudes of tactical combat might interrupt your ability to cleave to perfectly, either because an enemy AoE requires you to move out of the way while you want to stand still or an ally is down and you need to use an action reviving them or whatever. This is unrelated to the PF2E discussion, but are you familiar enough with Spellbound Kingdoms to say how it would stack against an idealized version of this tabletop MMO style? I keep trying to mine flowchart combat for my own games but it always ends up feeling either too rote or insufficiently unique to make the whole thing worthwhile.
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May 1, 2020 20:34
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credburn posted:Hey gang, I want to play Shadowrun with some of my pals. I've never played anything but a little White Wolf and D20 stuff. As a new guy not wanting to spend a lot of money, what book(s) do I need to get? I thought this would be easy, but apparently Shadowrun has had a lot of weird evolutions since the local comic book guy tried to sell on it. As a long-time fan of Shadowrun, steal the setting and run it in a better system. FATE if you want rules light, The Sprawl if you want something PbtA flavored, Fragged Empire for tactical shootmans action, or GURPS if you need the technical crunch. If you must use a mainline Shadowrun system, 3rd edition is probably the least jacked up. Avoid 6th edition and Anarchy at all costs.
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May 8, 2020 16:22
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Damned if "Donna Matrix" isn't a perfect Shadowrun band name.
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May 19, 2020 17:17
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Dawgstar posted:It's interesting you mention the Face type character as I was playing an elven version in 3E which when they started the stuff like Tailored Pheremones as... not cyberware but the other stuff that I can't remember off the top of my head so even there 'metal' helped. And they got pretty good at the talking thing. Bioware. Twelve dice on social checks with Tailored Pheremones didn't help much when you still went splat at the drop of a hat, unfortunately. Mil-spec combat armor was the real bugbear I tripped over, on a related note. I ended up making a character that was invulnerable but otherwise useless, and anything that could affect my mall ninja would instantly gib the rest of the team.
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May 21, 2020 03:43
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Countblanc posted:what systems would people recommend for a Pokemon game (either literally pokemon or a more generic monster/buddy theme)? i know that's pretty broad but the only systems i know of that are explicitly designed for something like that are a really lovely BESM spin-off and the PTU system which is probably more crunch than people would be interested in trying. iirc this http://apocalypse-world.com/pbta/games/title/Legend_of_the_Elements evolved out of a Korra AW hack, but I haven't played it and can't vouch for it.
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May 24, 2020 23:52
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Benagain posted:I'm glad that I found this random rear end place back in the days when tg chat was a subforum of the game room. I have learned a bunch and I'm still a poo poo gm but that's not for lack of education. We're so loving old. The first game I ran back in those days is ten years old. Dragged it kicking and screaming to a finish, too. Here's a horrible thing to consider: I've run to completion six games across PbP and Discord that started here, from start to an approximately-intended finish. That's still a success rate in the mid-teens, but probably still one of the high scores. Anybody got me beat?
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Jun 25, 2020 13:48
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Jimbozig posted:Luke Crane... revolutionary France Oh, good Christ.
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Jul 17, 2020 01:44
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Jimbozig posted:Probably not the revolution you're thinking. I wasn't being specific enough about what revolution. It's 1648, the Fronde. I suppose that's preferable in the grand scheme of things, but I'm still not comfortable with the Ye Magickal Realme taking on any kind of historical setting.
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Jul 17, 2020 03:54
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