|
Bucnasti posted:I don't understand why the 4E ranger wasn't a martial controller. Rain of Arrows, pinning shot etc would have made them really cool. The rogue was already a martial striker, and having a martial controller would have allowed you to have an all martial party that filled all the roles. Oh my god that reminds me, the number of times i had a new player who wanted their ranger to be about snaring things with nets, tripping with bolas, tranquilizing with darts, dropping things into pit traps... blinding with pocket sand... only to be incredibly disappointed that they are instead supposed to happily choose from a bespoke collection of different ways to get the same +2 bonus to hit with a weapon. if you can use a net it has to be lovely and doesn't scale because Reasons. if there's poison it's lovely and doesn't scale and you have to do fiddly inventory management with the materials because Reasons. also if you use poison the game will wag it's finger at you for being evil. you know who doesn't have to do fiddly inventory management? the wizard with a generic spell component pouch who just doused a goblin village in "Cloudkill," and the game didn't nag him about that being evil either. it's magic so it's cool! there's never been a version of ranger in any edition that does "experienced nature warrior" properly. ranger is a great example of d&d's agonizingly dull cultural baggage. a lot of the above completely mundane effects that should be useful but aren't because Reasons are still somewhat folded into ranger most editions... but as useful *spells*, because if it's not hitting it with your +2 short sword and it's *useful* it's got to be a loving spell. you can't just prepare x uses per day of "I Dug A Pit Trap There Earlier," you have to cast x uses per day of the magic spell Entangle even though it's the same god drat thing. high fantasy, zero imagination.
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 07:00
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 10:12 |
|
|
Speaking of monster manuals, I want to give a shoutout to Wildsea. Every one of their bestiary entries has a sentence like this at the end of the description text block:quote:Use a pangoska if you want the crew to face a powerful foe That's not handy in terms of being a specific CR for designing a fight scene, but it's super useful from an RP perspective.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 07:08
|
|
|
On campaigns, I found Impossible Landscapes to be pretty great, and big enough that I think I could run it again for the same group and only worry about touching two or three scenes again - there's a lot of material.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 08:31
|
|
|
Jimbozig posted:I think you're reading into my post some things I didn't say. One of the Level 3 encounters is a ranged damage + attack penalty to the target /as an interrupt/. Acting out of turn absolutely counts as an effect, both in terms of effectiveness and fun. Turning an enemy hit into a miss at range while breaking out of the action economy? Phwoar. There's also a level 5 weakening daily. Jimbozig posted:Aside from their rare daily uses, they can only get shifts and one push. Everything else is just accuracy and damage bonuses and extra attacks. I'm not saying they're not fun or not effective. They are those things! I'm saying they don't get cool and interesting effects, and that's just an objective fact. Compare to wizards. Or not even! Compare to another Martial Striker, the Rogue. Rogues get a larger variety of effects available to them. They can potentially do more things. You're also badly underestimating the coolness and funness of precisely targeted deading /in 4e/. Taking out the /right/ minion (or standard enemy) can change the available mobility or targeting options on the board as much if not more so than a wizard making some hazardous terrain, and starting a fight with "those two guys evaporate" is a great way to make your gm rub their forehead and think for a sec. A level 1 ranger built to be fiddly has an at-will that's doing near-encounter level single target damage or sniping one near-dead enemy and smoothly rolling new damage onto a fresh one or sniping two minions at opposite sides of the map... and some other at will because those are all the same one. If someone hits them they dip out of the way, shoot them in the face, and haven't even started their turn when they'll get to do it twice more. And once per day you shoot an arrow with a bear trap on it at someone. And all this complements, but also complicates, your base class abilities. Yeah you can build a Ranger who just walks up to someone and double taps them every round until they fall over, but that's a good thing. That's why I think the ranger is the "simple character" concept done right. Each level has simple options or complex options and you can choose whichever you want, and if you get sick of the simple options the game is set up to allow you to phase them out for more complex ones as you level, if you want. You can make a more than contributive simple ranger (good) but you're not trapped in one (even gooder). I'm not saying the Ranger is perfect. Far from it. It's a v-shaped class, which among other things impacts "real" power choice spread because there's at least two per level that are needlessly redundant or restrictive or require two maxed primaries lol. If you build for precision target deletion then solo fights are going to be just "I attack" a lot while giving up on your to-hit bonus, but that's also a monster/encounter design issue. And yeah, "I shoot him with two arrows" isn't going to sound as cool or have the out of combat utility of shooting fire from your hands, and that's not even getting into ritual casting. But comparing it to the 13th age "roll to see if your abilities exist" fighter... dude that's just mean.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 08:51
|
|
|
Tosk posted:What do people think of as "well-written" campaigns? Regardless of system. I think the two I hear most about are Masks of Nyarlathotep and Griffin Mountain, the latter I think for pioneering the idea of a sandbox setting splatbook (I could be wrong, I haven't run it). I haven't read Masks. "Masks of Nyarlathothep" is a barely concealed cult-of-the-week adventure chain with very few connections and bad design which, just like "Horror on the Orient Express" or Beyond the Mountains of Madness" has a far better prestige than anyone who actually ran it would allow them to. I've run MoM, it's really loving bad, you have to cut out so much, the entire story is written without incorporating the player characters at all and the finale is a hodgepodge of bad design decisions during which a player character is basically taken out of the game just because. Orient Express isn't much better, the overarching plot is dumb, none of the problems the players encounter are actually ON the orient express and the titular train is only ever used as a transportation device except for one scenario that is so badly written that you won't even get to the finale if the players aren't totally dumb. Also it has a stupidly high death count because just about everything is lethal as gently caress, but that's actually a CoC-problem, something which doesn't really mesh well together. "Way of the Wicked" is...well, at least in my opinion, not good either. It bends over backwards to not let the player characters be evil freely, and constantly uses devices like magical domination and demonic contracts instead of offering a free playing field. Also it runs in Pathfinder, which means "evil" and "wicked" are seen from an alignment standpoint, which is dumb already and just goes worse the further it goes.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 11:41
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:As far as I understand it, Tweet was always conservative but in the "nerdy rear end in a top hat with strong views on atheism" kind of way instead of the Rush Limbaugh way. So you have stuff like him posting about race science, but iirc the actual post was mostly him talking through his thoughts on the subject of race science from first principles and so much could have been avoided if he listened to authorities on the subject and just accepted that race science is nonsense without going through all of it on Facebook. Tweet had plans to write a supplement for Lamentations of the Flame Princess based around an Early Modern Era version of Al-Amarja, the Over the Edge setting my morbid curiosity is a little disappointed that it never materialized
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 13:30
|
|
|
Splicer posted:
I'm not!!! I didn't say the ranger wasn't fun and cool! You're thinking you're disagreeing, while we are actually in nearly complete agreement. I do have a preference for classes that can do what I am calling cool and interesting effects, and I would like the ranger to have powers that let you pin down an enemy or do area denial or whatever, but I know that you can have cool and interesting gameplay with only basic ingredients like attacking and positioning. Like, in XCOM, one of my favorite computer games, most characters just have basic attacks most of the time and absolutely everything is about positioning, focusing, and timing. It rules. You're also right about the 13a fighter. And in fact, I feel that way about all the 13a even/odd stuff. I'm converting Eyes of the Stone Thief to Strike! because I'm running it for my group right now, and the even/odd thing sucks so bad for PCs. It's like those perks in Gloomhaven that give you a chance of adding Immobilize to your attack - those seem to almost always be a complete waste, coming up either when you already have a plan to keep the monster from attacking you or when someone is in melee and the monster wasn't moving anyway. Obviously a 50/50 shot is better, but still too unreliable to count on. I'm a bit more torn on having it for monsters... On the one hand, I have no problem making tactical decisions with my monsters as GM. It's fun, and the fact that it makes things a bit slower as I decide on tactics is NBD because GMs get to have fun, too. Everyone at my table can take a reasonable amount of time mulling over their options - I don't like to rush. But I do see that the mechanic speeds things up, which is good; that it adds swinginess, which I like in an RPG; that it removes a decision point, which some GMs will prefer (not me, though). I am sympathetic to GMs who would rather not make a certain kind of decision because I'm that way about choosing Target Numbers. I just want the game to do that for me. Don't ask me whether knowing the secret name of Hooerth is a "very hard" Arcana check or an "extreme" one! What does everyone else here think of the even/odd stuff and the 16+ stuff on monsters?
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 15:22
|
|
|
Major Isoor posted:Speaking of Iconoclasts, how well do you think it links up with the Kali Ghati scenario? Obviously it's different, but I'm wondering about potentially starting with KG as a "one quick job" situation that inadvertently leads into the whole Iconoclasts debacle, due to the agents being nearby Are you running it for brand new players? That's the only reason I can think of to stick another module in front.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 15:26
|
|
|
Bucnasti posted:I don't understand why the 4E ranger wasn't a martial controller. Rain of Arrows, pinning shot etc would have made them really cool. The rogue was already a martial striker, and having a martial controller would have allowed you to have an all martial party that filled all the roles. The essentials Ranger from one of the two small handbooks was basically this. I always thought the monk was a demi-controller, but I think their power type was psionic though they basically played like a martial. Man, I miss 4E sometimes. But I'm in my boardgames phase; I haven't chucked dice in anger in years, just run some stuff (Star Trek Adventures, Scum & Villainy, Monster of the Week) over Discord in weekly games.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 15:51
|
|
|
The Primal class, Druid, does at least some of the stuff that I see folks asking for a Ranger to do - it's a controller with some martial abilities. But you know, magic, because you have a beast form and elemental damage types and so on. The Shaman and Warden also touch a bit on some of that stuff too. If I was trying to build a ranger that does like, traps and nets and controlly stuff, I might be multiclassing ranger + one of these primal classes. It's a shame there wasn't that base martial class though, and I agree that having so many magic effects that can do controllery stuff but not letting martial characters use nets, making poison evil, etc. are all unfortunate decisions. e. Earth Warden is a defender with controller as a secondary role, and the warden font of life class feature is very ranger-ey. The level 1 encounter evocation Earth Spikes could be flavored as "I prepared a spike trap here earlier" and the L1 at-will evocation "Weight of Earth" (damages and slows a target) could be flavored as a tangle attack too. I'm leaning now more towards Warden as a better Ranger than Druid. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:42 on Mar 26, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 18:35
|
|
|
The Seeker (4E Primal Controller) was also sort of a "ranger controller," with its at-will weapon ranged attacks either slowing & preventing shifting/inflicting to-hit mali/doing AOE damage to adjacent creatures/forcing movement. I don't have my PH3 anymore, so I'm just going off the wiki and can't see the encounters/dailies, but I remember the Seeker messing up bad guys pretty severely. Not a great minion popper, but locking down or discomfiting serious threats pretty well for an underdeveloped class. It was, however, not a martial power source class, for whatever that mattered. Also, I found the Essentials Ranger I mentioned, the Hunter ("Martial and Primal Controller"). Their at-will, in addition to weapon damage, could either ignore partial cover/concealment or reduce superior cover/total concealment to -2; attack the target and each creature adjacent to them at a -2 penalty; or on a hit could (a) slide the target 2 squares, (b) knock prone, or (c) slow (save ends). They also had bonuses to attack, stances to help attacks, wilderness knacks to help the party, as well as an encounter power that immobilized or dazed (save ends; half damage and slowed until end of next turn on a miss). I played one during a Lair Encounter or whatever those one-off dungeons were called and it ruled. I guess the message here is there were a lot of ways to be a tricksy "adventurer with bow" that didn't rely solely on inflicting big red numbers.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 19:16
|
|
|
Yeah I just cracked my PHB2 to look at the primals, so I forgot about the Seeker, that's another good one. I never used Essentials and only owned those books after the last time I ever played 4e so I never even saw the Hunter class. It is interesting though to see how the game kept dancing around inventing a more interesting rangerish class idea.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 19:18
|
|
|
i got their edgy essentials book when it came out and that's when i realized i'm not gonna like the direction of the essentials line, even though making vampire a class instead of a race was a really smart move
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 19:46
|
|
|
The problem with the Seeker isn't even a lack of support (because there isn't a Primal Power 2 to back it up) but that it just sucked as a controller even at the best of times. All soft controls with hit requirements. It's super easy to just reskin the various attacks they use as "A ball of tightly wound vines prepared before battle" instead of "I summon a field of vines" and make it martial, like that barely affects the game's mechanics in any kind of way at all, you'll just already be swimming uphill with just a bad frame.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 19:56
|
|
|
I think they just didn't realize they could Ranger controller. It would have even fit with giving Martial one of each roles.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 20:25
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:I think they just didn't realize they could Ranger controller. It would have even fit with giving Martial one of each roles. You gotta remember the times. Not that long after the LotR movies. Everyone who wanted to play Legolas’s long-lost half-brother would be complaining about their attacks. “Slowed? And d10+3 damage? Meanwhile the rogue is putting out 2d8+1d6+4 and they hit on a 3? This game sucks!”
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 20:31
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:I think they just didn't realize they could Ranger controller. It would have even fit with giving Martial one of each roles. They did try, twice, both with the Hunter subclass of Ranger (different from the Hunter fighting style for Rangers!) and the Seeker class. The problem is that "uses trick arrows," or even "uses magic trick arrows," is just inherently more limiting than "uses trick arrows, magic trick arrows, plus magic that isn't tied to arrows." The bigger problem is that "martial" as a power source defines what you can't do, while every other power source says what you can do, on top of the sword-slinging that everyone can take for granted. What I'm saying is that Final Fantasy 1 had the right idea by having Fighters that promote to Paladins and Thieves that promote to Ninjas, i.e. gaining overtly magical powers as part of the expected progression.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 20:39
|
|
|
desegregate power source for player classes in D&D been sayin' Leperflesh posted:in a world where your body can be healed by magic, you can be resurrected by magic, and you magically don't get hurt in a way that hampers your function until the last "hit point"... all damage is magic. You could fix so much that's wrong with D&D by just defining it this way. Literally a man with a sword who hits you for one or more hit points is doing magic damage. Your character is made of magic. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 20:47 on Mar 26, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 20:44
|
|
|
Honestly, power source mattering only made sense to me in two cases in 4E; one was a setting case and one was an edge case. Defiling vs. preserving for the arcane power source in Dark Sun (and no divine power source) Artifacts that are oriented toward a power source: a weapon so perfectly balanced that only a true sword saint can wield it for maximal benefit, a psionic necklace, a leafy laurel that channels primal power, etc. (But even here you get into questions like, "why is this ranger automatically a truer swordsman than this paladin or swordmage?")
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 21:03
|
|
|
IMO power source is primarily about flavor. You can use the 4e sources or make up your own, and the flavor affects how you describe what's happening. She travels to another plane by asking her god to send her there; he does it by stepping through a branch of the Worlds Tree that extends into every plane; but I do it by being so good at sword that I can chop a hole through the fabric of the cosmos. I don't mind "this gadget is only for martials, that gadget is only for primals" etc. as long as they're not carving out important parts of gameplay as Not For You because your class is Divine and Divines just don't get to participate here. Obvious examples are "getting to know book stuff" or "being allowed to be clever" but more subtle stuff is like, being a controller-type in combat, or getting to invalidate all the enemies in an entire encounter with a single move, etc. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:18 on Mar 26, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 21:15
|
|
|
Roles in general are just way more important than power source in 4e. It's harder to design something that every Divine class would care about (but not other power sources) than something that every Leader would like. Personally I prefer to think of both as abstractions and having magic items in the world that recognize them as discrete categories that actually exist isn't something I'd want to do.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 21:39
|
|
|
So is my Monk actually cutting people with the dagger, or just holding a dagger while killing people with psychic energy? I hate weaplements
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 21:42
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:So is my Monk actually cutting people with the dagger, or just holding a dagger while killing people with psychic energy? I hate weaplements Is there any sort of mechanical difference? Not to my knowledge. So functionally, it's entirely up to you. Describe as desired. I use a quick rule of thumb when people want to swing weird stuff around in combat. Basically "Do they want it to do anything different from what their normal version of that attack would be." So like if a Fighter wants to use Sure Strike but they want to do it by kicking over a statue on a guy, I ask if they want it to do anything different. If no, fine, roll out Sure Strike exactly as if you were using whatever weapon you normally use, who cares, why are we bogging this down. If yes, like they want it to knock the target prone or kill 3 minions in a line or something, then sure, we head to page 42 and figure out the details. But in general there's nothing in the game checking to see if you stuck a sword into a monster or not, so I don't care about the difference between swinging it and doing something mechanically similar enough. theironjef fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Mar 26, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 21:46
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:So is my Monk actually cutting people with the dagger, or just holding a dagger while killing people with psychic energy? I hate weaplements If I remember right, some monk powers had the weapon keyword and some had the implement keyword so you technically always knew what was being struck with what by a strict reading of the rules. Except that it was more likely you enacted weapon powers by kicking or elbowing people in order to use your unarmed strike [W] while holding your ki focus as an empowering talisman. Maybe daggers couldn't even serve as key foci? In that case you'd actually have to stab people with them to get their bonus and therefore probably have to avoid implement powers.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 22:24
|
|
|
no monk powers have the weapon keyword, they're all implement powers even for monk paragon paths, only one of them has weapon powers, and that one's also a ranger and barbarian PP, otherwise they're all implement powers Red Metal fucked around with this message at 22:28 on Mar 26, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 22:26
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:If I remember right, some monk powers had the weapon keyword and some had the implement keyword so you technically always knew what was being struck with what by a strict reading of the rules. Except that it was more likely you enacted weapon powers by kicking or elbowing people in order to use your unarmed strike [W] while holding your ki focus as an empowering talisman. Rather than being a ki focus, daggers are their own type of implement (just the way a sorcerer might use one), and monks don't get any weapon powers whatsoever. The fact that they get features and feats that let them use their fists as weapons is a horrible design flaw that only serves to confuse and mislead first time monk players. To further confuse matters, their attacks are generally not psychic energy, they are for the most part just physical melee strikes. Monks can be pretty good, mostly due to ready access to burst powers and extremely strong minion popping, lots of mobility and staying power and appreciable battlefield control. But getting a handle on them in the first place is no small feat.
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 22:32
|
|
|
Mr.Misfit posted:"Masks of Nyarlathothep" is a barely concealed cult-of-the-week adventure chain with very few connections and bad design which, just like "Horror on the Orient Express" or Beyond the Mountains of Madness" has a far better prestige than anyone who actually ran it would allow them to. I've run MoM, it's really loving bad, you have to cut out so much, the entire story is written without incorporating the player characters at all and the finale is a hodgepodge of bad design decisions during which a player character is basically taken out of the game just because. Orient Express isn't much better, the overarching plot is dumb, none of the problems the players encounter are actually ON the orient express and the titular train is only ever used as a transportation device except for one scenario that is so badly written that you won't even get to the finale if the players aren't totally dumb. Also it has a stupidly high death count because just about everything is lethal as gently caress, but that's actually a CoC-problem, something which doesn't really mesh well together. I've run Masks twice all the way through (once with Australia, one without) and both times it was great. London in the second pass was the best because they managed to screw up spying on Tewfik and then went straight to the Shipley's in Soho. Naturally Tewfik (who was following them) became interested why they were first following Gavigan and then went to this little house, investigated and found the paintings and confronted Your point on the lethality of CoC (Delta Green and CoC Modern especially) is dead on. In the canon fiction, the good guys did win a lot. The cultists may have had huge potential supernatural power, but they were also ,you know, insane? That meant they did things on a reactive rather than a proactive level and weren't the best at planning ahead, and the majority of the casualties were from people loving with things they shouldn't. Look at Dunwich Horror, for example. Armitage, Morgan, and Rice knew what was up, and they didn't go in to the Whateley Farm planning on doing anything but wrecking the place. Modules for the games tend to make everything so complex and planned by geniuses anticipating every opposition move and being so horrifically lethal, that the players have no chance at all (At Your Doorstep, I am looking you especially) and that can and will piss a lot of players off. Slim chance of survival is fine, microscopic chance, though?
|
|
#
?
Mar 26, 2024 22:49
|
|
|
mellonbread posted:I really dislike Kali Ghati. I think it's a boring railroad with one of the worst combat encounters in Delta Green. The ending is the only thing that comes close to redeeming it. If you've read/played it and fallen in love with it then I won't try to dissuade you, but I don't have any helpful advice for using it as an intro scenario. ICONOCLASTS already has an incredibly strong and fun intro and I don't think it needs another adventure tacked on. I understand that the scenario recommends you run it to cap off a campaign for experienced Agents, but I don't think it works that well for an established group of player characters because the professional and skill requirements are quite strict. Ah, yeah that's fair - I recall reading mixed opinions about Kali Ghati, now that you mention it. Seems like some don't mind the railroady nature, while others hate it. And well, I'm considering running it as a second campaign for a group of players who I'm already running a DG campaign for, once we finish this one. Just as a change of pace, kinda thing. But yeah, definitely using new characters as you said, since it would feel very weird using their current characters for this kind of campaign.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 00:09
|
|
|
Humbug Scoolbus posted:Modules for the games tend to make everything so complex and planned by geniuses anticipating every opposition move and being so horrifically lethal, that the players have no chance at all (At Your Doorstep, I am looking you especially) and that can and will piss a lot of players off. Slim chance of survival is fine, microscopic chance, though? I recently picked up a volume of technically system-agnostic but very CoC-flavored horror scenarios (No Security), and this was my major problem with them: the lack of any win state, even on the level of "the investigators prevent the ritual that can only take place every 50 years" or "the investigators help innocents escape the horror." Lots of emphasis on how fights were functionally unwinnable, human antagonists were so brain-broken as to be unapproachable via social skills but not so brain-broken that they weren't ruthlessly efficient evil machines, most scenarios ending with "your PCs have a slim chance to survive, but even if they do, they will be MAD AND HAUNTED FOREVER by what they've seen..." I get that a lot of people like this sort of game, but it just seems like a drag, especially in a heavy system. If I want to play "your little dudes see some poo poo and die," there are a lot of fatal horror one-shot systems, you know?
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 00:30
|
|
|
Yes, you don't necessarily need to have a "good ending," but it just feels like fair play to give your players a chance to fulfill some goal, and "prevent worse bad thing" is a pretty reliable one. Of course, with a premade convention game you could tailor it to the premade PCs...
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 00:52
|
|
|
lightrook posted:What I'm saying is that Final Fantasy 1 had the right idea by having Fighters that promote to Paladins and Thieves that promote to Ninjas, i.e. gaining overtly magical powers as part of the expected progression. I'm in board for this. But I also want a system where Fighter is just this dude who wreck house and a trio of adventures struggles to kill because he's just so good a being a fighting man. https://youtu.be/XaI-EOVpDvo?si=M_jhI9d6R01b-k0N That knight is quintessential fighter. Slapping down a barb and rogue, he flex out of a god damned Hold Person spell. They had to drop part of a building on him to put him down.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 01:06
|
|
|
Years ago, I found some source material to run a Resident Evil D20 game; it was freely available and I think anyone could contribute to it. I cannot loving find it again, and I'm kind of wondering, since this is a stupid question, could anyone here help me? It wasn't anything crazy, just a PDF with a bestiary, some weaponry, and a few pre-made characters and scenarios, I think? I can't seem to find the magic combination of words to Google like I did before.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 01:31
|
|
|
Leave posted:Years ago, I found some source material to run a Resident Evil D20 game; it was freely available and I think anyone could contribute to it. https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?49714-Resident-Evil-D20 Is it this? Edit: or this? https://www.scribd.com/document/47430385/Call-of-Cthulhu-d20-Resident-Evil-The-Umbrella-Files
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 01:36
|
|
|
Antivehicular posted:I recently picked up a volume of technically system-agnostic but very CoC-flavored horror scenarios (No Security), and this was my major problem with them: the lack of any win state, even on the level of "the investigators prevent the ritual that can only take place every 50 years" or "the investigators help innocents escape the horror." Lots of emphasis on how fights were functionally unwinnable, human antagonists were so brain-broken as to be unapproachable via social skills but not so brain-broken that they weren't ruthlessly efficient evil machines, most scenarios ending with "your PCs have a slim chance to survive, but even if they do, they will be MAD AND HAUNTED FOREVER by what they've seen..." I get that a lot of people like this sort of game, but it just seems like a drag, especially in a heavy system. If I want to play "your little dudes see some poo poo and die," there are a lot of fatal horror one-shot systems, you know? I feel like the whole Cthulhu genre of tabletop got infected by Tomb of Horrors performative sadism slash DM power tripping pretty early on.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 02:38
|
|
|
Covok posted:https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?49714-Resident-Evil-D20 I'd found a different one, and come to think of it, I know what the big difference was between that one and those two. The one I found had the D20 Modern rules in it, in addition to the RE stuff. Those will work, though, thank you!
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 02:41
|
|
|
lightrook posted:What I'm saying is that Final Fantasy 1 had the right idea by having Fighters that promote to Paladins and Thieves that promote to Ninjas, i.e. gaining overtly magical powers as part of the expected progression. This is my current heartbreaker idea, actually. Every class starts with no supernatural powers or very minor ones, but eventually becomes more supernatural. The classes would include Knight (Fighter/Paladin/Cleric), Knave (Rogue/Bard/Illusionist), Hunter (Ranger/Druid), Alchemist (Alchemist/Transmuter), Ascetic (Monk that eventually gets energy blasts and flight and astral projection), and Wanderer (Fighter/Nomad Psion?). The Wanderer would be a guy who can use a variety of weapons and has a backpack that gradually magically increases its storage capacity; the Wanderer would develop the power to instantly switch objects between his hands and his backpack, and then gradually gain more powerful and varied space-manipulation abilities, eventually including long-range teleportation. One advantage of this approach is that it preserves something I find interesting about some versions of D&D, where the characters get new tools as they increase in level that change the nature of the game (Teleport, Commune, Polymorph Any Object), while addressing the problem of only some classes contributing those kinds of tools (often multiple such tools per class), as well as some of the really powerful ones coming too early instead of being capstone abilities. Come to think of it, 3.5's prestige class system sometimes toyed with this promote-to-supernatural idea (Rogue/Chameleon, Barbarian/Champion of Gwynharwyf, Monk/Fist of Zuoken). The results were surprisingly balanced for 3.5 (all three of those combinations are considered "Tier 3"), but often convoluted mechanically (because 3.5) and/or bizarre flavorwise (Barbarians becoming Paladin-like). Ghost Leviathan posted:I feel like the whole Cthulhu genre of tabletop got infected by Tomb of Horrors performative sadism slash DM power tripping pretty early on. Tomb of Horrors is at least actually winnable, though. Silver2195 fucked around with this message at 04:49 on Mar 27, 2024 |
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 03:22
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:So is my Monk actually cutting people with the dagger, or just holding a dagger while killing people with psychic energy? I hate weaplements Even your free powers were "weaplement" attacks, waving around a bigger sword makes your magic missiles stronger, all that I remember there was an achievement for hitting Diablo with a basic attack; you were supposed to unbind one of your power hotkeys to get it (which you would never do on purpose except to get that trophy), but I did it the natural way via a horribly unoptimized Necromancer build that constantly ran out of mana 
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 03:25
|
|
|
Earthdawn already has all of the classes being magical disciplines, with everyone else having to learn skills through hard work and practice.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 04:04
|
|
|
ninjoatse.cx posted:Earthdawn already has all of the classes being magical disciplines, with everyone else having to learn skills through hard work and practice. I always liked that aspect of Earthdawn. PC were doing crazy stuff and were tougher to kill than normal folks because they were adepts, it was a simple explanation for player power increases.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 14:46
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 28, 2024 10:12 |
|
|
Ferrinus posted:If I remember right, some monk powers had the weapon keyword and some had the implement keyword so you technically always knew what was being struck with what by a strict reading of the rules. Except that it was more likely you enacted weapon powers by kicking or elbowing people in order to use your unarmed strike [W] while holding your ki focus as an empowering talisman.
|
|
#
?
Mar 27, 2024 14:57
|
|