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Admiralty Flag posted:My only real complaint with the system is that starship combat drags a bit; it feels like there's less room for improvisation and tactics than in personal combat, so it comes down to rolling dice, and the only dice that make a huge difference are weapons dice. You'd hope that a Star Trek game would enable more creative solutions, since so many episodes are about "Federation wins with clever plans and technological trickery rather than superior firepower"
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Nov 19, 2020 20:15
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Reading the Dune 2D20 now. They pull in a bunch of lore from the Brian Herbert books for the setting. Which is straight up blasphemy, but I can understand why they did it. The canonical six novels are pretty confined in scope and don't give a ton of playable detail on the broader setting. If you want to get to RPG sourcebook levels of detail, you have to either draw in some of the non canonical books, or just start making poo poo up. When it comes to non canonical Dune books, I personally like the Dune Encyclopedia better. But I can understand why the Herbert estate would prefer that the game reference books that still make them money, rather than an out of print book by a dead guy.
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Apr 4, 2021 18:56
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Drone posted:Yeah, I just picked it up today too. I've read the first three Herbert books and am currently working my way through God Emperor, and the backstory in the Modiphius book is my first exposure to the absolute bullshit Brian Herbert and KJA seem to have come up with
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Apr 8, 2021 20:23
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Helical Nightmares posted:The physical book/pdf is gorgeous. First 80 pages or so are backstory to the DUNE universe from the first 6 Frank Herbert Dune books up to the events where the Atreides take over Arrakis. Its a great supplement to the movie and goes over how the Atreides gained the critical eye of the Emperor, and the anti-thinking machine and robot crusade (Butlerian Jihad) that occurred centuries ago.
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Jan 16, 2022 04:57
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In fairness to the player it's not absurd to assume "strong guy who's extremely good at fighting" is an appropriate character build for a game based on the Conan franchise, regardless of your RPG background experience. Conan's emphasis on clever plans and unexpected moves over sheer brute strength is something that only becomes apparent if you dig into the source texts, which I doubt most people do for an RPG.
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Feb 9, 2022 21:52
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Finished the first session of Dune 2D20. The House creation minigame is bare bones, but has enough flavor that the group can still create something exciting. We made a House Major, a House Minor, the planet they're from, and the same again for their rival Houses. I suspect a lot of it comes down to a group's familiarity with Dune, and their ability to create something that fits with the world. I don't think the massive lore filibuster at the beginning of the book is a good way to introduce players to the universe, but hopefully people interested in a Dune RPG will arrive with at least a surface level understanding of the themes and aesthetic already. The House creation system is no help creating notable NPCs, like Dukes and warmasters and mentat assassins. You get a list of roles that need to be filled, and you're on your own. The system is overall pretty fun. The metacurrency is not as much of a pain to track as I feared, and the players quickly picked up how spending points worked. The main challenge was calling for enough die rolls to actually let them build threat/momentum and use their special abilities. I don't normally make player characters roll for lots of things in RPGs, but in 2D20 you need explicit mechanical challenges to keep the economy going, without going so far overboard that you gate everything behind a skill check. Half the group elected to do creation in play, and the other half prebuilt their characters before the first session. The advancement system seems a little skewed toward combat - you get a point every time you fail a DC 3 skill test, and if you're fighting that can happen every turn if you're attacking a hard target or increasing task difficulties by keeping the initiative. The combat system is fun. Using the "gain information" move in battle is powerful because it grants immediate momentum, and if your character has the right skill focus you can build up a lot very quickly. I like it because it's a tight thematic fit with the combats we see in the Dune books, where carefully observing the enemy's fighting style is the key to survival. It's also not as broken as it sounds, because it costs your action to do it, meaning there's a significant opportunity cost that can only be offset by spending momentum and increasing your task difficulties to keep the initiative. The whole thing seems like it could bog down in combats with multiple fighters per side, especially since each attack has to be opposed by an active defense roll from the target. One rules quirk we ran into was having to pay twice for friendy NPCs. In the rules, a friendly NPC can be an asset (mechanical tool that you use in conflicts and skill tests) and a supporting character (statted NPC that you bring with you on your adventures, and even play as). One of the players picked a mentat as a starting asset, then wanted to bring him with them on the adventure. But starting with an NPC as an asset doesn't mechanically entitle you to have that NPC as a supporting character, so the player paid the cost and added four points of threat to bring him on as a permanent member of the cast. Maybe there's a rule we missed about this, or maybe that's working as intended. It does bring up a hypothetical scenario where a player has an asset like a mentat or a courtier or whatever, but doesn't pay the cost to bring them onboard as a supporting character. So they're with you the entire time, but only as a playing piece that enables skill checks. Good game overall. Looking forward to next session.
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Feb 27, 2022 23:44
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Splicer posted:STA handles this with difficulty 0 checks. The players can choose to just succeed at a d0 check or voluntarily roll to build momentum (with the accompanying risk of a complication). Drone posted:I feel like this is probably because the player shouldn't have used both an Asset and a Supporting Character slot on the same NPC, or they misunderstood the difference. It's gonna be one or the other. Drone posted:Also, Supporting Character in STA is basically just a stand-in for a player character that can't be in a scene for a particular reason. It's been a good while since I've read through the Dune rules but I assume it works similarly there -- the character should probably be one or the other: an off-screen asset or occasional NPC guest in scenes involving the main character, or a supporting character that is a member of the party but that doesn't necessarily get tapped into for conflicts/skill test bonuses in the way that an asset would. I suspect they ported the supporting character rules over from Star Trek or some other 2D20 and developed the Dune asset system separately, without fully resolving the overlap it created. If this issue is actually addressed somewhere in the rules then someone please let me know.
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Feb 28, 2022 20:15
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Dune doesn't have random chargen. There's an "in play" system where you can run the first session before your character is complete, and lock in the remaining stats, assets and special powers when they become relevant.
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Feb 28, 2022 22:51
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Wrapped up session two of Dune. The book doesn't say whether threat carries over from session to session. It says that it refreshes at the beginning of every "adventure" based on the number of players present and the size of the House the players work for, but the text never defines whether an adventure is a single session, a full campaign, or something in between. I suspect this is something explained better in earlier 2D20s, and ported into Dune without the accompanying clarification.
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Mar 6, 2022 21:35
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Three sessions into Dune 2d20, I can say the skirmish battle rules (any combat with more than two participants) are much weaker than the ones for one on one duels. You still get the varied movement types, trait creation minigame, and the momentum system, but it's all layered over a combat engine that plays like every other RPG battle system you've ever played. You move into contact with the enemy, roll to hit, and the target maybe gets a defensive roll to negate the damage. You don't have HP, except you actually do, because defeating you in combat requires the enemy to accumulate successful hits equal to your most relevant skill. One of the players articulated quite well why it doesn't fit in with the rest of the game. Normally in Dune 2d20 a single die roll is a big deal. You negotiate which drive and skill to use, which traits might be in play, whether any of your special powers enter the equation, and how much metacurrency to spend. The inputs and outputs of the die roll have narrative weight. Meanwhile in the skirmish battle mode, you have a full table of players and a stable of NPCs making a sequence of very similar die rolls in a round robin. It feels less like 2d20 and more like, well, d20. Like a standard fantasy brawler with lots of rolling to hit and chipping away at HP. It's an interesting reversal of the usual RPG paradigm. In so many other games, the combat rules are the most functional and interesting part of the system, with everything else as an afterthought. Whereas Dune has quite good rules for bargaining with NPCs, blackmailing people, "locking in" bargains with ironclad mechanical guarantees, introducing interesting narrative twists using the point economy... I'm interested to see how well the "mass battle" rules hold up. I can already see some problems with keeping all the players engaged in an exercise that essentially boils down to moving pieces around on a board. It isn't like Star Trek where you can put one character on weapons, another on steering, a third on communications or shields, etc. One solution could be to have each player command a unit of troops, with the assumption that any relevant skills or powers they have could buff the performance of the soldiers. This means writing my own mechanics, since the corebook doesn't have much to say about the possibility of player characters directly intervening in a force on force battle. But I've already resigned myself to adjudicating situations the corebook doesn't cover, like the aforementioned overlap between NPCs as assets vs NPCs as supporting characters, or the nebulously defined "adventure" that determines the rate at which Threat decays and refreshes. The publisher has released a ton of physical peripherals for Dune 2d20. GM and player notebooks, special edition dice, multiple collector's editions of the rules and adventure books. One thing that would help a lot is a set of cards or tokens to represent assets. Whether in a hand to hand fight, multi character brawl, intrigue battle, espionage or all out war, Dune's conflict system is driven by the positioning of assets in zones. A set of cards that you could toss on your chessex grid to quickly show where the crysknife or the double agent was located, along with image files for those cards that could be loaded into a VTT, would be a massive value add. E: I was browsing the store page and they do actually have asset cards in the upcoming beginner box. I just missed it because their main Dune page doesn't list all the upcoming products. I'm really looking forward to the House management splat that Nightmares mentioned. I realize that adventures on Arrakis are the thing most people who play a game with Dune in the name are interested in, but I find House creation and Wars of Assassins much more stimulating. Take a look at the glossary in the back of the first Dune book and you'll find implications of a much broader world than ever got explored in the following novels, even books 5 and 6 which finally got away from Arrakis as the center of all the action. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 23:21 on Apr 4, 2022 |
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Apr 4, 2022 22:44
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Finished up the fourth session of Dune 2d20. This transition definitely qualifies as the end of the "adventure" although mechanically all this means is that threat resets to the default for the Noble House and number of players. We didn't get much use out of the rules for espionage/intrigue "conflicts" because those activities already fit naturally into the flow of play. Breaking out a separate subsystem and using different mechanics would just break the flow and make it harder to involve all the players once the focus shifted to moving assets around the board. If any of the players had invested character generation resources in feats that functioned in these specific minigames we aren't using, this could be a real issue. Since nobody seems to have built their character on that assumption, it's just an interesting side note. If you want your NPCs to be a danger to the players in conflicts, they need threat to spend. Their default two dice are unlikely to penetrate the players' defenses, especially given that most characters in Dune are walking around with defensive assets that increase the target number on the opposed roll. Easiest way to build up threat if the tank is empty is put an "officer" or "cheerleader" character on the back line, who does difficulty 0 actions every turn and converts the successes to threat that the other enemies can spend. If you're feeling really nasty you can give that guy the "Direct" feat that lets him immediately give another character an action after acting himself, so that one of the NPCs can spend that threat doing something nasty. This type of back line buffer is a priority target for the player characters, which in-turn makes the movement and zone rules more relevant. The trait/asset creation/destruction minigame gets more important the more moving parts you introduce to a conflict, giving the characters reason to do things besides just attack the target every round. One thing I'm not clear on is whether task difficulty is meant to be public information, or kept vague/hidden from the players. I find that revealing it publicly makes the players more likely to spend metacurrency/increase threat in order to succeed on higher difficulty rolls. Though hypothetically it could have the opposite effect, with players knowing a task is trivial and declining to spend resources on it.
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Apr 11, 2022 06:28
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One more thing we have to talk about is the use of lasguns. In the world of Dune, if you shoot a personal shield with a lasgun, it causes a nuclear explosion that kills both the firer and target. This is an extremely cheap and easy way to annihilate terrain and forces, by simply smuggling an ersatz nuke near the target. You could put a clockwork timer on it (an allowable technology according to the glossary at the end of the first novel) and leave it somewhere, or you could send a suicide bomber to use it. Dune has no shortage of suicide troops - the Atreides send men on a suicide raid to destroy the Baron's spice reserves on Giedi Prime, the Baron leaves suicide troops in Arrakeen to mess with the Atreides, the Sardaukar are described as suicidally brave in battle, and the Fremen give no fucks about dying for the dream of Liet. The 2d20 book addresses this by telling the GM and players that causing a lasgun shield explosion is an instant game over. If they aren't incinerated by the blast, the players will be hunted down by the Landsraad and their Noble House dismantled. They lose the game, out of character. There are a couple problems with this approach. First, there are many people in the Imperium who aren't members of a Noble House. The most obvious are the Fremen, which the book includes as a playable character template. To that we can add criminals, slave rebellions, and other people with "nothing to lose". These people have zero reason to care about the ban on Lasguns since the Empire is already hunting them anyway. Even if the players don't fit this description, the game world is full of people who do. Second, even if the players have no intention of causing a nuclear blast, they (and everyone else) have the ability to threaten such an explosion if they're ever cornered. Just spend a couple momentum to pull out a hidden laspistol and swear to God you'll do it. Sure, your House will be dismantled if you actually go through with the threat. But that will be someone else's problem, because you and everyone in earshot of the threat will be a smear of radioactive glass. This is a fun narrative device the first time it happens. Both sides establish that they can instantly nuke everyone in the room, so they have to resolve their dispute through negotiation rather than battle. I can't imagine it'll be fun if it keeps happening, since Dune is a setting where we expect swordfights and various other types of combat besides mutual nuclear annihilation. The obvious solution is to make lasguns a lot rarer. The 2d20 book calls them the most common ranged weapon in the Imperium, which is absolutely not true. The first novel makes it quite clear that they're reserved for specially trained and unquestionably loyal elite troops, who can be trusted not to blow everyone up. Lasguns don't become ubiquitous until the time of Leto's Peace, when the Tyrant bans shields across the Empire, allowing him to equip the Fish Speakers with large numbers of lasguns without fear.
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Apr 11, 2022 18:24
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Mirage posted:The minimum shield-lasgun interaction described in the books annihilates both the shooter and the shield-user. The maximum is kerblammo. neaden posted:To be clear too according to the book a lasgun hitting a shield might cause an explosion, but it also might just do nothing or kill the shooter. In Chapterhouse Dune, the lasgun shield explosion is treated as a guaranteed nuclear blast. Miles Teg uses shielded decoys to nuke the lasgun armed forces of the approaching Honored Matres. mellonbread fucked around with this message at 01:00 on Apr 12, 2022 |
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Apr 11, 2022 22:51
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Ok it gets even better. The lore section of the book says that a lasgun shield interaction is an instant game over for the players, even if they don't die in the blast. But the description of the lasgun in the asset listing says that threatening to cause a nuclear explosion is a completely valid use of the weapon. They tried to write a Dune game and accidentally wrote Iron Sunrise instead.
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Apr 20, 2022 21:38
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Wrapped up the last session of Dune 2d20. We'd been hemorrhaging players for a month and I decided to rip the bandaid off rather than kick the can down the road. The two remaining players were the ones least experienced with the system, and they really struggled for the first hour or so. If you don't know how to manipulate the game's economy you can get stuck in a downward spiral, unable to achieve the successes necessary to generate the momentum to succeed on further tests. Indie Game Club's Band of Blades Postmortem had a good discussion on the challenges of reminding players what all their mechanical choices in a given situation are, without outright quarterbacking them through the whole game. What helped in the end was being very explicit about why the NPCs were making the choices they were. Eg "He's going to take an observe action and get some free Threat with a DC 0 test", or "This guy knows he can't beat you head on, so he'll try a DC 2 test to create a trait that lowers the difficulty". Since NPCs largely use threat the same way the players use momentum, those examples helped them understand the options available to them. I was correct in foreseeing a couple issues with the "warfare" version of the game's conflict rules. Moving squads around the battlefield is basically a one player affair for whoever has the highest battle skill, with the other players offering advice where they can. I don't think this is a huge deal, the duel minigame is similarly a one player affair. But it leads directly into my second problem. The game has no rules for what happens when player characters take to the battlefield - other than providing a small buff to the move actions of the unit they are attached to. This is a glaring omission in a setting where lone badasses with superhuman abilities (The Voice, Ginaz Swordmastery, Honored Matre Martial Arts, the list goes on) regularly take on a dozen combatants and win. We ended up declaring that individual characters could not attack and damage units of soldiers, unless they had a trait or asset that let them fight a whole roomful of people. They could use special powers, like buffing units and distributing bonus actions, and could otherwise do everything a character could do My overall impression of Dune 2d20 is that if you want to run a Dune RPG, it's worth using this game rather than hacking another system. I could say a lot of nice things about it, and I'd have to counterbalance them all with things that were poorly thought out, or poorly explained, or still don't make sense after running half a dozen sessions.
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May 22, 2022 23:16
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Azhais posted:I feel this is accurate for every 2d20 setting I've read so far The best example I can think of is trait creation. In most circumstances, creating a trait is a straightforward 2 momentum spend. In the conflict minigame, it's a difficulty 2 skill test. But if you are trying to force that trait onto a hostile character in the conflict minigame, it's an opposed test, with a DC determined by whatever your opponent rolls on their skill check. That last mechanic is not explained anywhere in the book, it appears in the example of conflict the devs posted on the Dune 2d20 blog. I am suspicious that the rules author did not explain this special case because it was obvious to them from their experience with prior 2d20 games.
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May 22, 2022 23:51
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Does the Fallout 2d20 have any guidance for taking a city/region and developing a post apocalyptic version of it? I want to check out the game but I don't have any interest in the Fallout 4 setting.
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Sep 28, 2022 19:58
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The best part of 2d20 is the way the designers mechanically systemize the themes and settings of the licensed IPs. In Star Trek shooting your phaser builds Threat. In Dune Gurney Halleck can recite a poem to build Momentum, and play a cool dueling minigame in a one on one fight. Take away the theming and you've got a serviceable generic system, but not one that really stands out against a background of other generic systems.
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Jan 17, 2023 18:53
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Modiphius announced The Great Game: Houses of the Landsraad for Dune 2d20. I expect that the glossary of Great Houses will be larded down with worthless garbage from the prequels, but the parts that the designers got to write themselves will be good, and the mechanics might even be worth saving. This is the only thing that could convince me to run more of Dune 2d20, so I'm cautiously optimistic.
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Feb 2, 2023 02:16
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Nevermind, god drat
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Feb 2, 2023 02:31
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Drone posted:Were you using the right website for your region? They have separate domains for US and EU. Whatever, it dropped the shipping rate closer to what you'd expect. Would be nice if they just had one portal that assigned shipping cost when you entered your location into the Country field. Maybe they have two different webstores because the sites operate under different regulatory regimes. When you order the book you get access to a PDF of the sample adventure which will be included with the splat. The intro says it takes place after the "Emperor's Great Spice War", which according to the wiki is from the Brian Herbert books. As I expected, the prequel bullshit is here in spades. But the intro also says the adventure "relies heavily on architect level play" which is encouraging. Dune 2d20 is supposed to let you play as the leaders of a House, and use side characters for street level missions where it wouldn't make sense to bring a Duke or a Master of Assassins. But the corebook does not provide a ton of support for this premise other than rules for creating the supporting characters, and none of the other published modules appear interested in exploring the concept. More discussion when the actual book drops.
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Feb 4, 2023 03:24
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thorsilver posted:As hype as I am for the content of The Great Game, I'm a bit shocked by the pricing -- £38 (plus £8.48 shipping) for a 128-page book is frankly ridiculous. This £38 price point is massively more than similar-sized hardcover sourcebooks in the other 2d20 lines. As a point of comparison, I recently paid £33 for the Zweihander core book, which is 692 pages and noticeably higher-quality than the Modiphius hardcovers. Does anyone know what's going on with this price hike?
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Feb 19, 2023 22:28
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Kwyndig posted:Old school Vulcan, bloodthirsty.
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Oct 30, 2023 00:31
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What's the mechanical effect of power armor in Fallout 2d20? Is it like wearing a shield in Dune 2d20, where it makes you outright immune to certain types of attack?
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Apr 12, 2024 22:52
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