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Is Spellbound Kingdoms still full of really sad poser "illustrations," because I found the mechanics delightful but the presentation is so infuriatingly offputting
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Oct 2, 2023 23:48
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disposablewords posted:No Poser stuff now. The art is currently a mix of a bunch of classical work across the past 500-ish years and current professionals. It's overall a pretty good selection. That's so much better, good to know! Thanks!
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Oct 3, 2023 00:46
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Youremother posted:I used Disney as a dungeon for an insane child-loving (in a genuine way, not the creepy way) lich that was infested with rat-men the lich considered his sons. It was a really good adventure, I had Tomorrowland and the Animal Kingdom and all the classic Disney properties hosed up beyond recognition. As a teenager I ran a haunted theme park dungeon for my friends, they had to fill out their rides and attractions stamp cards to leave. Everyone loved the rollercoaster setpiece fight with a beholder floating in the middle, but when I had them fight incorporeal undead clones of themselves in the Hall of Mirrors, instead of recognizing that was a bad idea and smashing the mirrors like I intended, they just... died. I was not a great GM at 14.
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Nov 6, 2023 02:57
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Mister Olympus posted:should have let them die, told them they won, and they continue as the mirror party, deeply concerned about their reality drat!!
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Nov 6, 2023 13:57
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Vulpes Vulpes posted:My Monster of the Week game wrapped last night, which was the first time a campaign I was involved in ever made it to a finale. A very satisfying experience, especially since it was mostly first-time RPG players. Hell yeah. Monster of the Week is one of the few games I've played in (rather than GM'd) where the campaign truly finished, holds a special place in my heart.
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Nov 13, 2023 02:13
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this is the track list for a 2007 prog rock album
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Nov 14, 2023 21:13
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Admiralty Flag posted:I ran Dark Sun in 4E. I found the DS Monster Manual lacking for my needs a lot of the time, given that I was running a 1-10 campaign and a lot of the material was for 11-30, and had a blast building encounters/monsters from scratch using the business card math and searching through the online compendium to find effects that were appropriate for the opposition. It was a lot of work in the end but I too thought it was well worth it. So many memorable encounters! drat I did pretty much the same thing, ran 4e Dark Sun for a few years and frankensteined all the encounters together from spare parts. Lots of overworld desert survival that 4e (or D&D in general for that matter) is utterly inadequate for gamifying or supporting that I had to constantly improv but I found the Skill Challenges framework to actually be surprisingly good for that once I stapled on some BitD style clocks, in a very bare bones handwavey way.
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Nov 16, 2023 20:49
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Yeah I love Chuubo's but while I've had a good time with it and sort of got it I didn't feel truly comfortable with the system until I solved backwards from Glitch, which I grasped much more easily.
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Nov 16, 2023 21:55
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sebmojo posted:Yeah skill challenges work very well once you take a *world approach to them. Also the condition track is an excellent flexible mechanic. A lot of people who defended 4e still threw skill challenges under the bus and I never really understood that attitude. Sure they're not amazing but they accomplished adding a bit more depth and texture to the sacred "roll a d20, pass/fail" paradigm that bores me to fucken tears so, that's nice?
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Nov 18, 2023 00:03
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Measured against roleplaying games as a whole, 4e skill challenges were a flawed half baked mess. Measured against Dungeons and Dragons, they were the best skill system we've ever had 
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Nov 18, 2023 01:50
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Agreed on all fronts!!!
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Nov 18, 2023 19:31
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busalover posted:The recent video by People Make Games made me curious about LARP in the US and elsewhere. Is there a book that gives a general overview, or maybe one system that's the most popular? Doing a quick Google Mind's Eye Theatre is or was really popular? You can see in the video I assume you're referencing that at one point they "die" to a fight that was nothing but rock paper scissors. This is the most popular "system" for big open festival style freeform larps because anything more complicated gets in the way of the fiction and requires referees, which is unsustainable in the first place at an event of that scale and leads to weird bickering and power cliques. A major part of making big freeform events like that successful is *not* having a rules system, people just play pretend with lots of "Yes, and." There is a somewhat more regimented larp event scene in Europe but I don't know much about it other than that some are very good about safety and consent and some are very notably not.
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Nov 24, 2023 22:29
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PuttyKnife posted:Are there games out there that shift from a tabletop game about amassing wealth and power to defeat the evil, walking home and starting a life, and then getting older and basically becoming Max Von Sydow in Conan? Someone help me remember: there's this published system agnostic (I think) framing device that's supposed to fit over a D&D like game where instead of the players telling the story as it happens, all the characters are telling their story at a tavern after retirement. So like every time someone would die someone else can come up with a "Obviously that's not what really happened, how we got out of it was blah blah blah." I was reading about it a year ago and thought it was brilliant at the time, now that your question reminded me of it I'm losing my mind trying to find it again.
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Jan 11, 2024 06:21
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Halloween Jack posted:Dragon Union. Thanks very much!
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Jan 11, 2024 19:41
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Sionak posted:Thanks all. Those all sound really interesting in their own right. I'd never heard of Glitch. It would be great to have some more positive and unique (like Pendragon) examples, too. Seconding Glitch, it's the most beautiful game I own. A masterclass on handling difficult topics in a way that doesn't feel gross.
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Feb 14, 2024 03:25
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Backgammon LARP
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Mar 7, 2024 07:26
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Splicer posted:Trolls being "naturally athletically gifted, it's just biology" has connotations, but the even bigger problem is trolls /not/ being able to start with elf level intelligence. my favorite example of this is the previous edition of Shadowrun (or is it two editions back now...) where in the core game book they explicitly state "there is absolutely no difference in intelligence between the races, that's a racist myth," then you turn the page and the game rules tell you that orcs have a -1 and trolls have a -2 to their maximum intelligence scores that cannot be overcome no matter what
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Mar 14, 2024 06:33
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I ran a year long 13th age campaign and can agree that it was mostly just... ok. Better than playing D&D but still tied down to a lot of dumb sacred cows and half baked doesn't do justice to how weak the Icon stuff was, more like... some raw batter that's sitting cold in the oven because you forgot to turn it on.
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Mar 25, 2024 02:45
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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.
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Mar 26, 2024 07:00
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More games should crib Tenra Bansho Zero's great idea that when you die it's because the player chooses to do it meaningfully and otherwise when fights go wrong you suffer other consequences (as appropriate to the game system and setting.) Even if it's a tediously serious and grim fantasy story where death is swift and life is cheap or whatever, you can make character death more interesting than the wet fart of a random save or die. In fact, it *empowers* the idea of a save or die because you can always not die... at a cost. You can even run a peasant meat grinder character funnel like that and it still works. (Games should not crib Tenra Bansho Zero's art direction)
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Mar 28, 2024 04:45
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Nessus posted:So this is how our posts will be cited by the cockroach xeno-archaeologists! that's correct, Chicago Style citations are only used by subhuman cockroach monsters
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Mar 29, 2024 10:13
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Glagha posted:It's also not a solution unique to 4e D&D. There's a long standing tradition in all sorts of games and fiction of having like, Wood Elves are the ones that hang out in trees and shoot bows, and High Elves which are the ones who are magical, even putting aside the 3.5 million types of elves. "Long standing tradition" here being that Tolkien did it and trapped us forever in the cursed dichotomy prison of being either "Derivative of Tolkien" or "Trying too hard not to be Tolkien."
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Apr 9, 2024 17:30
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Rand Brittain posted:Looks like IPR is getting down to the last dozen or so copies of the limited edition of Glitch. I feel kind of guilty for having ordered a second copy of Glitch with the Far Roofs kickstarter, but not *that* guilty. It's the best game book I will ever own. (Spire and Heart are pretty close contenders.)
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Apr 30, 2024 20:23
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hyphz posted:The problem is the “perfect magical flight” thing. That has the implication that he just chooses where he wants to be and the magic applies as much mundane force as needed to move him. So you can grab hold, but can’t move him. If you could then having basically no Strength he could also end up blowing away in a strong wind.. That's a completely unreasonable rules as physics interpretation. Not assigning a skull's magical flight an effective strength score does not imply that it either exerts infinite unstoppable force or is so weak that it would be helplessly restrained by a paper bag, any more than passing an item as a free action implies that you can make a line of peasants into a railgun. The problem here is that whoever told you this is an rear end in a top hat.
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May 7, 2024 00:30
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Bucnasti posted:Hard agree! Isekai where the protagonist's stupid cheat ability gets patched out so he has to stop being such a loser and actually develop real life skills
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May 7, 2024 04:27
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