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I played the first session of a 2 parter of Nice Marines today, and I think more people should play Nice Marines, it's a good game whose mechanics encourage fun times.
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Jan 2, 2021 18:56
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mellonbread posted:Is there a "tell me about your character" thread somewhere on this board, and if not is it something anyone's interested in? I mean I'm interested in hearing about your character but that feels like exactly the sort of thing that is interesting with the kind of infrequency that it's a good thing for the chat thread.
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Jan 3, 2021 01:14
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Drone posted:This is a great idea for a thread but it leaves out those of us who perma-GM Says "character," doesn't say NPCs are barred!
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Jan 4, 2021 19:16
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Kyrosiris posted:Hilariously this was D&D 3.0/3.5e in a homebrew setting. I'm honestly amazed we kept it going as long as we did (like two and a half years meeting twice a month). This is incredibly similar to how I learned DnD, save that it was FR. I still think it was a good strategy to have just like, a rotating GM slot. Made having any sort of tonal or plot consistency a joke, but at least burnout was low and the whole thing was really an excuse for middle schoolers to be fake jackasses while eating pizza in a basement.
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Jan 5, 2021 02:04
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It's fairly trivial whether or not games are art, but that means we have to figure out a good critical vocabulary for discussing them that isn't pure extension of existing literary/movie/music criticism. It's particularly acute with tabletop games since the game is in a lot of ways a toolbox for creating further art, but I'd say its art on its own regardless of its other merits. Being more specific I really like the way Polaris handles GMing but I also just really like Polaris so.
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Jan 6, 2021 03:45
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This is really good Leperflesh. I'm a little distracted so apologies for not having a heavy level of engagement, but I'll definitely back you up about jargon: not only do TTRPGs already have (very arcane!) jargon, attempts to evade jargon are generally self-defeating. Jargon can lead to impenetrable writing, but writing can be perfectly opaque without any specialized language anyway, and trying to describe a piece of art or physics in depth with only plain language is a great way to make some hot nonsense. Popularity is an interesting metric to talk about in any form of art criticism, and there's generally a decent amount of tension around "does something being popular mean I have to talk about it." I think it's somewhat unsettled and there's a number of approaches to this - something being popular is usually taken as evidence that it 'resonates' and is therefore mandatory to have some sort of opinion on it, but a lot of the value of criticism is a way to push for items that are good but didn't market well. I can think of quite a few RPGs that I would never have gotten a taste for if I didn't know some big nerds with nuanced opinions who sold me on them, and frankly without that I doubt I'd really be into the hobby since the game that really 'stuck' for me was Dogs In The Vineyard.
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Jan 7, 2021 03:20
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Evil Mastermind posted:Honestly I feel the biggest obstacle to good RPG reviewing is getting people to accept that it's okay to criticize an RPG. Roger Ebert famously considered games to be off-limits because they lacked a singular, final vision in their execution. Games are fundamentally open-ended, and the question of what happens in a even a relatively narrow game like Doom includes a set of audience actions that are ostensibly not possible with a movie or building. Personally I think this turns around quite easily to look at the ways in which a movie or a building are going to be warped and changed by the audience experience and I don't take Ebert's conclusion very seriously, but that aspect of open-endedness becomes far more extreme with RPGs, which do not have even defined story events or mandatory checkpoints. This provides an opening for the cowardly "there's no bad RPGs only bad tables" argument, which I can only imagine comes from people who have only experienced bad tables. This mostly means that it's generally not valid to critique e.g. Ironsworn for any specific story that is told at a table, since that's kind of outside of what a given RPG is, but it is fair to critique how the RPG biases any stories that come out of it, which rules IMO. Leperflesh posted:
DnD if anything provides a nice counter example to the "if it's popular, it's popular for a good reason" logic. DnD has such a suffocating presence that I've had multiple conversations over the winter where somebody (unprovoked by me) said they "wanted to play DnD" but weren't interested in playing a game of high-fantasy violence with lots of math. They wanted to play an RPG, but "DnD" is at the level of being a popular synonym for the concept. Which means that in my more general gaming clan, there are 8 people who are in a DnD game that did not consider any alternatives. It's something of a relief since it means Also we shouldn't ignore Monopoly in general, cuz it has an interesting history, but it's also been beaten to death. I do hate the "all criticism is invalid" stance. Just, gently caress it. Friendly arguments are great, one of the best parts of being alive, art criticism is one of the best forms of this.
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Jan 7, 2021 04:03
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SkyeAuroline posted:So I'm actually curious. How many of us are in ongoing (or imminent) games & what are they? Playing - MOTW finished last week, have a session of Nice Marines in 5 hours, and BITD Running - Promethean, sort of Lancer but it's effectively dead. Two sessions is about the most I can get in per week - I have the energy I think for more but scheduling just turns into such a nightmare.
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Jan 9, 2021 07:56
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King of Solomon posted:I'm playing in a VtM game that just started up and running MotW. I'm thinking about closing out the MotW campaign soonish and trying something else, maybe a mecha campaign (I like BCG and am simultaneously excited about and intimidated by running Lancer, but I'm also looking at some other games.) My Lancer game died because, as cool as a setting as it is, and as much as I like the rules in principle, me and my group were not really into solving tactical puzzles as a part of roleplay, so I wound up having fun massively at everyone else's expense until we just started another campaign. If you prefer the style of decision making that goes into VTM or MOTW I'd suggest something more like Beam Saber (note - I have not personally played Beam Saber, but it is forged in the dark so rather than basically a very polished 4e).
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Jan 9, 2021 16:36
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Played a campaign of it fairly recently. It is very much PBTA, it's on the better end. It is really for people who like K6BD already - there were a fair number of asides for the players who were less familiar with K6BD. Worth reading if you just like K6BD since there's some good lore in there that I think is only in the rulebook.
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Jan 10, 2021 16:25
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SkyeAuroline posted:
I've played that one specifically. It's not very interesting, it's basically just a couple of charts that make light fun of Adam Driver. Ego is very short and very transparently "a writing exercise that's more comfortable for people more familiar with TTRPGs than writing more generally." The One is quite cool but I haven't actually sat down to play it (might do that today). This Person Does Not Exist is goon made and was well-received by this community but I haven't (yet) gotten it.
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Jan 10, 2021 19:13
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Just have all your vampires wear mirrorshades and all the mages duct tape cellphones to their heads and WOD is now a credible cyberpunk. Throw in the word "neon" a few times per session and I think it's pretty much complete.
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Jan 20, 2021 18:11
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SkyeAuroline posted:To echo the Shadowrun thread at you: That's p good.
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Jan 20, 2021 18:19
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As a fellow "Demon and Promethean are the best WOD," the distance between Demon as written and pretty legit cyberpunk feels pretty small to me. Werewolf I think it kind of depends on how you want to play it, if the focus is on being Spirit Cops then not very much but if you're using your outsider supernatural powers to gently caress up The Man I think you might have something.
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Jan 20, 2021 18:42
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PerniciousKnid posted:Probably the same kind of people who currently have ham radio licenses or whatever. I just remembered that in Final Fantasy 8, the internet is unusable because they trapped a mighty sorceress in an orbital tomb-prison and she's just hijacked radios and the internet to just be her angry shitposting everywhere.
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Jan 23, 2021 21:56
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KingKalamari posted:Well, keep in mind Lovecraft's racism was seen as quite kooky, even by the standards of his day. Not that he was more or less racist than the standard of the time, just that his contemporaries thought the way he expressed it was notably weird I mean, he was also exceptionally racist for the time too, not that many people in the history of the world felt compelled to write a crappy poem that's just "Look, I'm REALLY racist." REH was also racist enough that his friends called him on it in personal correspondence, and REH's racism isn't that weird it was just very strong. Helical Nightmares posted:Found an interesting minimal RPG with a focus on GMing shared by a number of attendants, coupled to a wager and betting system.
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Jan 29, 2021 23:14
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aldantefax posted:What's your second thought My thoughts are 1. Random.org 2. Ask somebody not in the game to pick a number between 1 and 110
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Feb 2, 2021 04:33
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Feb 2, 2021 05:50
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FFT posted:The solution I decided on, yep. Have to subtract 1 from the d12 result to make 1-10 possible. You printed it? Cut it into 110 strips and put them all in a bowl, shake it, and draw from that.
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Feb 2, 2021 15:04
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Kestral posted:Fairness Neutral Structure Radical identified in the wild??? What those kids were doing is very close to just using rocks paper scissors, which is how Divinity and Vampire LARP do things.
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Feb 2, 2021 20:07
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I've played two different PBTA Avatar games and a DITV based one. The people wanna bend some Greek elements.
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Feb 3, 2021 19:51
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I'm not really invested in pokemon in specific but I do like the idea of an RPG where each player is managing a team. I do also appreciate how bluntly artificial the pokemon universe is. Just, no attempt to make a natural seeming civilization anywhere and screw you for even asking.
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Feb 3, 2021 20:55
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aldantefax posted:Anybody playing any games recently? Just wrapped up another GURPS session and gonna run D&D tomorrow, then more GURPS on Friday. Hooray! Got a blades campaign that is running very slowly (two people work retail, two people work office, the GM is a grad student, what could go wrong?) and am going to be in a second BITD campaign starting Saturday, so I guess I'm gonna be doing a lot Victorian ghost stealing. My dormant Promethean game that I was STing for a long time is probably going to resurrect in a month or two, I've got some long term projects that need too much attention for me to go back through my campaign notes and straighten it out. Honestly I want to play more games, especially to try out more systems, but getting 4 different 30 year olds to figure out a regular time is proving to be an absolute bastard, and nobody I know is a 'natural' GM we all just kind of accept the mantle when necessary and tend to get stressed and burnt out on the role pretty fast. I think the obvious solution is more GMless games but so far people aren't really taking the plunge on that.
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Feb 4, 2021 17:56
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bbcisdabomb posted:Are you saying you had a kid and are temporarily dead because of it? Listen, I'm not saying that it takes life to make life, but it kind of takes life to make life. That church 40 person clusterfuck sounds incredible to hear a more detailed reportback from.
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Feb 5, 2021 19:35
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More of a board game thing than an RPG thing but I have a vague fascination with the legacy mechanics in stuff like Risk Legacy. I say "vague fascination" because I don't live with anybody I could boardgame with, the people I boardgame with the most often are very disinterested (and I haven't seen them in person in over a year), and the people I do game with the most often have nearly no interest in boardgaming, so I haven't gotten to play with them and I don't think I ever will. My favorite recent RPG is by a wide margin Nice Marines, and part of what really charmed me about it was including consequences for going over the target number. Really added to the sense of fun and wonder of the game. And I suppose it does include a piece of tech/trend that I think is more or less unalloyed good: 1 page rulebooks. Which I'd practically just call "decent editing."
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Feb 8, 2021 18:50
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Coolness Averted posted:In terms of recent RPG tech trends I'm enjoying; I'm a big fan of RPGs that ditch unique subsystems for stuff like combat, magic, or hacking and instead have everything use the same resolution mechanic. I know this isn't new tech per se, and was actually closer to where things started, but it seems like games have only really embraced it again in the past 5 years or so. It's much easier to teach someone a game -and easier to at a glance ensure something is balanced- when everyone is playing by the same rules and has the same tools for interacting with the fiction. God yeah. DitV having combat and conversation functionally work the same was a life changer for me and probably the difference between "RPGs are a thing I did in middle school and think about sometimes" and "RPGs are a part of what I do every week." I also haven't seen much of it but I'd be happy to see more whimsical/silly resolution mechanics. Chaos Confetti is still the funniest MTG card to me (ok that's a lie it's Queue of Beetles), and A Scoundrel In The Deep uses lit loving matches that rules.
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Feb 8, 2021 21:46
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Yeah I popped over to the site to look at a few of the entries in the bestiary and it's a little more clear why it matters - a lot of them are not just a one depth wheel but a more complex map that's pretty cool even if I don't entirely get it.
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Feb 8, 2021 23:00
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Evil Mastermind posted:Yeah, that's the one. Incredible. Jon Bois did a video of "how good would Sammy Sosa be at batting without a bat" and I like this parallel of "how good would Goonswarm be at trolling without a game."
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Feb 12, 2021 01:22
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Leperflesh posted:Smiley names aren't load-bearing, and there's been an effort recently to scrub the really lovely-named ones. I'll ping the admins about it because I think this qualifies. There's a common bias that a TTRPG should be basically infinitely durable - that if you buy a copy of Monster of the Week that copy should be ready for you to do a 40+ year game with the only question about durability being if it gets trashed by dropping coke on it. I think this is kind of silly - I've played one campaign of MOTW and I will likely never play another, there's just too many more RPGs I want to try with the finite number of game sessions I have left in my life.
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Feb 12, 2021 02:16
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My Lovely Horse posted:I do feel I should point out that the smilie itself is, if I recall correctly, literally the illustration for Asperger Syndrome from something like an old medical brochure. A related but fun term I like is "martinet," which I learned from a Chinese teacher in college. It's a person who puts etiquette above ethics, or following the letter of the rules above their intent. "Legalist" is also pretty good though quite a few Americans just are legalists on purpose. I'm a bureaucrat and I'll definitely accept "stop being so bureaucratic" as a fair way to tell somebody to shut up.
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Feb 14, 2021 14:45
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I've only played Returns so far but mostly it's a turn based tactical RPG. It's not like, particularly overwhelming from a mechanics standpoint (like, Final Fantasy Tactics is considerably denser on the oddball interactions).
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Feb 14, 2021 15:05
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It wasn't due to pandemic, but when I graduated from college my group scattered to the winds (for a few years, we didn't have any two people in the same time zone), so we moved to Skype and then later Discord and that's been going for about a decade now.
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Feb 18, 2021 16:55
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aldantefax posted:Does Dogs in the Vineyard have its mechanics isolated from the setting material, particularly surrounding its escalation ladder? I never played the game, but if it’s pulled I wonder if there are other games or the core components which feature it (or if the pulling out a gun thing is very central to its narrative and setting details as well). DitV's mechanics are more setting portable than AW's. The thing about guns coming out in DitV is that it's the level of escalation where actually for real dying right now becomes a very serious possibility, even for the PCs who are generally in a very dominant position, even if they win. So for any setting where there's a form of escalation that has real graveness to it, it works. Obviously this makes sense for old school samurai style stuff (chanbara), because Westerns and chanbara are so interlinked, but I did a Conan-esque DitV where magic occupied the same position as guns (didn't even need to change the basic stats, since it's Acuity+Will which feels like what you'd use for magic anyway). Could do Star Wars where light-side powers are traits and dark-side powers are Acuity+Will, or go harder on the 'biotics are really dangerous' than actual Mass Effect did by making that the highest level of escalation. My hazy memory is that the gestapo one did get completed (seriously you can make a DitV hack in minutes) and that 'paperwork' was the highest escalation.
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Feb 23, 2021 16:25
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Coolness Averted posted:By Night Studios recently reused a photo that had folks I know, and so I grabbed it to tease/show them. One of the first comments zuck's algorithms showed me was some garbage complaining about how LARP used to be fun, but it's been ruined by PC police. He was mad because a thousand year old vampire shouldn't be up to date on SJW etiquette, butnhas to be now. Sorry you got banned from the local LARP scene because your ventrue insisted on using the N-word 'for realism,' bro! it's always so dumb because it's always "this 1000 year old person holds view points that are maybe 100 years old but 10 times as strongly" and lacks engagement with just how loving foreign the past is, history of concepts about race and gender and sexuality are far more complicated than "lenient present vs strict past"! 21st century reactionaries always make history so much lamer than the reality
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Feb 23, 2021 17:21
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EthanSteele posted:Not reactionaries but as an example of things in the past being more wild than you think I loving love this. The one that I like to bring up is much older - in ancient Sumeria, the kings had a vested interest in preventing land consolidation b/c of how the taxes and military were structured. So to slow down the rate at which finance speculators could use predatory lending to take people's farms as collateral, there were laws passed that a farm could only be transferred from father to son. So, new contracts were developed where part of the collateral was that the debtor would adopt the creditor as their son. The laws were also loose enough that frequently meant that farmers would adopt "sons" who were much older than them, and "sons" of genders other than men.
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Feb 24, 2021 01:34
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Yawgmoth posted:If it was just one player I would say "toss out the jackass and keep going" but it sounds like the whole table was just terrified of the idea of expending resources of any type, which makes me wonder how they function in real life. Like do they go around saying "I can't believe you expect me to spend money on food! It could be carrying salmonella!" or whatever? As a person who tracks how expensive his home cooked meals are down to the penny: yes, though I'm usually way more mad about rent than other stuff. This is also a soft reason why I like AW/DITV so much compared to a lot of the competition - they're not really resource management games.
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Feb 28, 2021 16:39
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Plutonis posted:It doesn't help with the impression outsiders have of this forum as being full of spiteful indie designers who hate the biggest market share owner. Outsiders have...any impression of us?
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Mar 1, 2021 13:26
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This forum loving loves LANCER which probably makes it easier for some totally hypothetical DnD stan to say that SA is just made of angry hipsters who hate pop. Whatever, fine, sure. Anyway, speaking of being a weird indie guy, I've gotten suggestions about a few games but I'm trying to keep a budget stretched. This pack by the Bakers and Stewpot Tales are what I'm eyeballing. I'm more interested in something that's interesting and innovative than that is practical to play, since I'm in multiple games as is and do not know when I'll be able to play everything, but sometimes a rulebook really gives me some great inspiration for other stuff. Has anybody here read these books and got opinions on how valuable they are?
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Mar 1, 2021 17:12
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Models is kind of tough, since they need to have 3D meshes (or whatever they're called). The one part of the TTS community that I know makes models like crazy is the wargaming side, specifically 40k and Infiniti. Which are both pretty scifi but I think at least chaos daemons in 40k should have a few models that are pretty horror-y. If you don't feel the need to do models and are willing to work with tokens, those are legitimately pretty easy to make on your own. I made a bunch of tokens for hexagonal grid Lancer a while back and my basic strategy was to use GIMP to make the "shape" of the token by making everything but the shape transparent, then paste the chose image into the selected non-transparent region, and then import that as a custom token inside TTS. This was effectively like taking a page of art and then punching a token-shaped hole in the page, once I got it down to an art it was just a few minutes to convert a new image into a token.
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Mar 20, 2021 05:14
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There are two features of game design that I consider pretty key before playing or running them: does the system generate hooks, and do the players collaborate in the GMing? The first part isn't strictly necessary but I do consider it a truly significant plus to play an RPG where standing still is legitimately harder for the players than keeping moving. If the second part isn't built into the system by default I push it in, which is legitimately pretty easy. Just add to your list of GM actions "throw it to the players" - Player 1 beefed her acrobats check and falls, what does Player 2 think she falls into? Player 2 runs into an old acquaintance at the fair, what does Player 1 think that acquaintance has been up to in the meantime and how pissed are they about the lack of contact? At a bigger level you can just talk to the players about it out of character. "I'm kind of out of ideas for the campaign, what do you guys think?" It's entirely possible there's some unresolved plot hook the players want to get back into that you didn't think was that important or that you forgot about, or its possible everybody's out of ideas, in which case probably good to think about starting a new campaign.
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Mar 20, 2021 21:31
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