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Band of Blades is enormously successful at doing the very specific thing it wants to do, and that's a thing its audience enjoys. SkyeAuroline is not that audience, and that's ok. It's a niche flavor, but for people who've been waiting for this exact thing - and I count myself as one of them - it's delicious. "Actively unpleasant to play" is very much a personal preference: I've played and enjoyed it, and you can watch an entire campaign of it run by the author to great success over on Actual Play. It is absolutely not Blades in the Dark, and if you go in to a BoB game expecting it to be like BitD you will be disappointed and probably frustrated. If you go into it expecting The Black Company: The Roleplaying Game with everything that entails, including hideously dangerous combat and a campaign layer that is actively trying to make you lose, you will get what you've ordered.
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Jan 6, 2021 00:16
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drrockso20 posted:Honestly I'd say a heavily hacked(pun intended) apart and refurbished Lancer would work wonderfully for a Cyberpunk game of the Shadowrun vein as it would be able to handle all the interesting ideas it has while avoiding a lot of the parts that end up sucking What parts of Lancer would you want to salvage for Shadowrun, given that it's a game completely about hex-based tactical combat with a vestigial "doing things as a person" system tacked on? Honest question here, not trying to be snarky. I skimmed Lancer when it came out and set it aside after realizing another prep-heavy game wasn't something I was up for after a lengthy Exalted campaign, so maybe there's something I've missed, but I don't see the connection. A good crunchy cyberpunk system is kind of a white whale of mine, so if there's something to salvage there I'm interested.
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Jan 27, 2021 05:23
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Evil Mastermind posted:Something just occurred to me; despite everyone being in isolation for almost a loving year now, have we ever had a thread dedicated to solo rpgs/board games? Not to my knowledge, and I know I'd read one.
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Jan 30, 2021 03:00
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni_mSNO77Y8 The dueling system in Burning Wheel, Fight!, is about as close as we've come AFAIK. It's very, very good, but it isn't trying to be the same level of intense simulation of actual swordplay as Riddle of Steel, and it'd be cool to see someone take that on again in the age of HEMA.
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Jan 31, 2021 07:46
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aldantefax posted:I wanted to go to sleep early but then I stayed up and had half a pack of ramen, and for some reason I started looking at zithers and came across the ajaeng: Thank you for posting this! I love this entire piece, and it's absolutely going into the soundtrack for my next Exalted game. I do A Lot Of Soundtracking for my home games, so I'd definitely post in a music thread if you do make one. Edit: as the nearly-lifelong owner that exact d100 but in red, I want to consider myself Fairness Neutral Structural Neutral. Given that said d100's casing popped open and was shoddily superglued back together by my mom but continues to be used to this day, I should probably admit to Fairness Radical Structural Neutral. Kestral fucked around with this message at 05:54 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 05:52
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Tulip posted:You printed it? Fairness Neutral Structure Radical identified in the wild??? Edit: I've actually seen Fairness Radical Structure Radical in the wild, come to think of it. The kids I run D&D for, before they had ever played the real game, would play what they called "Campfire D&D" on camping trips. Rules resolution consisted of saying you were doing something, and the DM picking a number in their head between 1 and X, and if you guessed the number or within a certain range of the number, you did the thing. I can only imagine what the ratio of "fair adjudication" to "shameless cheating" must have been for 10-11 year olds given that job. Kestral fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Feb 2, 2021 |
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Feb 2, 2021 19:27
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Tulip posted:What those kids were doing is very close to just using rocks paper scissors, which is how Divinity and Vampire LARP do things. God, now I'm imagining Vampire LARP with the ability to undetectably cheat at will because you can always claim they didn't guess your secret number. I'm pretty sure people would literally be murdered by mall katanas.
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Feb 2, 2021 20:37
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Whybird posted:Honestly I think that's pretty cool, I like the idea of a setting where wild animals like rhinos and elephants and stuff are actually really dangerous and tooling up to go kill one is a job of a whole party of high-level adventurers. This is something I've been thinking about lately. I've been rereading Elfquest, which has always had a "nature red in tooth and claw" streak to it, especially early on, and I like the balance it strikes. The protagonists are a hunter-gatherer tribe of barbarian elves who are virtually immortal, inhumanly fast and agile, and have the senses of wolves, but they routinely get murdered by bears and sabertooth tigers because large carnivores are loving terrifying, and a hunter getting impaled by a buck or gored by a boar happens on a regular basis. The series antihero gets his start as a vengeful rear end in a top hat when he tries to hunt game for his starving family as a youth, but gets crippled by a jackal because he didn't respect the danger it posed. If you're playing with a relatively grounded system, you could get a lot of gameable mileage out of the sorts of animals that work in that series: Ice Age-era megafauna like smilodons, dire wolves, giant elk, mammoths, overgrown cassowaries, that sort of thing. If you're in a setting where you need to hunt to survive, or to provide for your loved ones because agriculture isn't reliable, you're going to be forced into conflict with these things at some point. Even regular hunting is absurdly dangerous when you're doing it with a premodern bow and a spear. Hell, you could easily get a good "level one adventure" scene where taking down a small herd of wild boars requires the same level of SWAT team preparation as kicking in a dungeon door with a high-CR encounter behind it.
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Feb 4, 2021 10:09
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I am sad that the physical editions of the new EverWay are so expensive: $150 for the books and cards is probably reasonable given the production costs, but that's way out of my price range, and a small print run means it'll be just as difficult to get a hold of the new edition later on as it was to get a copy of the old.
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Feb 11, 2021 04:03
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aldantefax posted:Cards + tabletop RPGs combining has always been a pretty underutilized space, I feel like. It super, super is. I played in a lengthy playtest of a friend's unpublished card-based RPG, and while that game was never going to be publication-worthy, it demonstrated a lot of really interesting design space. Characters were represented by a tarot-esque spread of cards (which we all customized to our preferred aesthetic using shared template files), and just having your "character sheet" be a modular set of physical objects that could be rearranged on the fly opened up so many interesting options. Damage or setbacks could flip cards to disable them, while rest or a shoulder to cry on could flip them back. Secrets could be hidden deeper in your array (closer to the heart) so that casual observation revealing only the surface layers of the array would miss your contraband or your identity as an assassin. One memorable scene required that we collapse the entire array into a deck ordered by how much emotional weight each thing had for us, which was then eaten from the top down as we progressed into a cave whose psychic emanations eroded us, so that the cards were physically destroyed ala Risk Legacy. In the end it was very much a fantasy heartbreaker that needed a lot more exposure to the modern state of game design to get to a publishable state, and the custom cards were a burden of prep for everyone, but it's something I'd love to see tackled in other forms.
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Feb 11, 2021 09:16
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On the subject of rarely-seen mechanics, what systems have good base-building / community-building subsystems? I know they're in Pendragon and Harn, and a little bit in Dungeon World, but I can't recall where else it's been done well.
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Feb 12, 2021 02:35
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SkyeAuroline posted:On the flip side, dice don't have the issue of presenting a barrier to usage for those with impaired manual dexterity. At worst, god forbid, we bring out a dice tower (or commit true sacrilege and use electronic dice). OTOH, not every game needs to be made for every audience. Dread is also impossible for people with impaired manual dexterity, and many games feature themes that make them impossible for people with a variety of traumas to play. They should still be avenues open to exploration. Edit: Feels like people are unnecessarily hung up on the randomization aspect of cards, when it's the "is a physical object you can tie novel mechanics to" aspect that gives them their real design utility.
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Feb 12, 2021 07:45
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Leperflesh posted:The word from On High is: "When there is a mechanism to change the names of smilies without breaking posts that use them, the old names will be revisited." Honestly, with SA's status as the internet equivalent of a historically significant site, I can respect that. This has probably been suggested, but just on the off chance that it hasn't: could we just get new smilies with the same images as the problematic ones, but with different names? Preserves the existing threads, lets people use useful emoticons without having to Write A Slur. Ghost Leviathan posted:Key thing I think is that building a base or organisation shouldn't really be that different from building a character. This more an aesthetic preference than a dictum of good game design, IMO. Personally, I'd love to play something like a Rimworld / Stardew Valley / Valheim RPG, where a major focus of gameplay is to acquire the resources (materials, technology, expertise, relationships, etc.) to build something: a settlement, fortress, cathedral, space station, etc. Let the "base" have meaningfully different mechanics from the characters to emphasize the themes and aesthetic of whatever it is you're constructing, and to enable interesting choices that don't resemble PC-scale choices at all. Kestral fucked around with this message at 20:00 on Feb 12, 2021 |
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Feb 12, 2021 19:50
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dwarf74 posted:So for those who have moved from in-person games to remote via roll20 or whatever... Who's considering keeping it that way even post-pandemic? I'll preface this by saying that while I've had to do about half of my roleplaying on Discord for the last 5-6 years, I don't like running games by VOIP for a lot of reasons: I lose the ability to read the room when I can't see my players in person (webcams don't work well enough for this purpose thanks to a mild form of face blindness), I like to get up and pace around or embody characters with my whole body while GMing, and frankly there's just something vitally human missing when you're not all together in the same physical space, which I'm sure there's a term for. That said, for my teen D&D group, I'm considering staying with VOIP, or mixed meetings. We have one player who really thrives on tactical combat, and another on the autism spectrum with untreated ADHD who gets way more focused when they can reference a map instead of theater of the mind. Managing combat maps is my least favorite thing about physical, in-person D&D by a country mile, but the big fights in high-level D&D are much, much easier to manage on Roll20 even without modules. I'd want to meet in person at least once a month, just because we're all friends and it's nice to hang out in person, but the game itself probably runs better over Discord + Roll20. The optimal scenario would be meeting in person with some kind of large (that is, substantially bigger than tablet-sized) display surface that I can put Roll20 on, but I don't see how that would be possible without throwing thousands of dollars at it. For my home group of adults, in-person gaming resumes the instant our vaccines take full effect (or boosters are administered, if the immune-escape strains get a foothold). Playing by Discord for that group doesn't work well at all for the indie / storygame stuff that we prefer, and we miss the ability to just hang out in one another's presence. We also have the issue of married players feeling uncomfortable expressing themselves fully if they're RPing within earshot of their non-gaming spouses, and generally feeling like if they're at home they should be with said spouses instead of on a call.
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Feb 18, 2021 22:15
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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). The Bakers are in playtesting for a Star-Wars-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off game using a modified version of DitV, so you'll get to see that plus the inevitable dozen or so games it inspires some time in the next year or so.
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Feb 23, 2021 09:16
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PeterWeller posted:Thanks, y'all! I'll do my best to not be the worst. Do we... Do we have to experience bij now? 
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Mar 26, 2021 20:24
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If a game offers an experience with zero replay value, but executed at a high level, I feel like I've got my time and money's worth. I don't need to play something repeatedly, in the same way that I almost never rewatch movies, re-read books, or re-play games. There's a handful of RPGs that my group comes back to because they're well-suited to us: Burning Wheel, Apocalypse World et al, Exalted whenever I forget how much I hate prepping for Exalted, etc., and I suspect Blades in the Dark will end up on this list as well. But there's too many good games and too little time to play them all, so I'm happy to see an upwelling of systems that are designed like a torpedo, to deliver maximum impact just once.
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Apr 26, 2021 19:38
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KingKalamari posted:TL:DR - I just want to play a low magic game where a lizard person, a giant spider an orc and a robot delve into dungeons, why aren't more people catering to that? Because it's a narrow niche. If you want dungeon-delving that isn't trying to be Dungeon Survival Horror ala Torchbearer, D&D / OSR of varying stripes is What There Is, and most designers generally want to do anything else rather than retread that well-worn ground. You occasionally get something brilliant like The Nightmares Underneath, but not often.
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May 1, 2021 23:15
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super sweet best pal posted:Are the RPGs on Humble any good? Seconding That Old Tree, Tales from the Loop is excellent and you'll get more than your money's worth from that alone.
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May 26, 2021 09:28
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Pocky In My Pocket posted:Also, combat probably has a full chapter of rules, persuading people probably had a paragraph Nailed it. A game is about what its rules cover, usually in exact proportion to their pagecount, and any fruitful voids they contain.
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May 29, 2021 18:22
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Tulip posted:Honestly, agreed. Remember how much chaos you got the first time you had NPCs surrender early in a combat? That shouldn't be an incredibly rare situation! Depends on the game. In something like D&D it should be rare because "now we must deal with our prisoners" slows gameplay down immensely and becomes the same kind of logistical slog that people hate in games where you're asked to track your supplies. In, say, Unknown Armies, someone throwing up their hands and pleading for mercy makes things more interesting because it's already a game (largely) of horror, hard choices, and moral complexity. D&D being none of those things, dealing with every third or fourth kobold surrendering is not furthering what the game wants to do. Now, AD&D is a different beast. Morale rules were more important in earlier editions, because they were trying to impose a base level of "you are real people living in a world where carrying capacity matters," and the system had support for that sort of play. It wasn't very good support, but it did exist. But the fact that people almost universally houseruled away morale rules, leading to the dynamic that has existed since 3E, says something about how fun it was.
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Jun 2, 2021 02:20
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KingKalamari posted:See, this is what I'm talking about : I've made some incredibly mild criticism about an entirely subjective aspect of a campaign setting (The believability of population demographics) and you're presenting this like I'm some kind of elfgame scientist being paid off by the tobacco industry to falsify research papers. What happened is you cited information that was incorrect, Arivia - a person who knows the subject matter intimately, is passionate about it, and was willing to put in the effort to verify their information - corrected you, you immediately denigrated their efforts and started making personal attacks and throwing around "elfgames" to make their caring about the subject seem worthy of ridicule. This happens all the time when Arivia makes loreposts on FR, and it sucks. You owe them an apology, but this is the internet so that's unlikely to happen. I've said my piece, so I'm going to drop this now so that Leperflesh doesn't have to come in and break up our taking potshots at each other. Instead, since mapchat is a thing, have 40,000 premodern digitized maps from 1500 to 1824.
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Jun 5, 2021 09:33
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Does anyone have a link to that story - I think it might have been an imgur album? - about how infamously hard it is to get fantasy artists to draw the thing you've commissioned from them, and how they instead keep wanting to draw whatever titillates them? The one where it contrasts something to the effect of, the commission description of a female ranger in functional wilderness attire, and the actual art being basically softcore porn?
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Jun 20, 2021 06:18
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Nessus posted:I heard this story about Exalted artists. Some of the artists they hired would give them what they wanted, more or less, with, yes, some of their personal tastes intruding, but like that dude who really wanted to draw panda people drew so many they were just like "Ok fine, the panda people are canon, this is easier than arguing with him." Yeeeeep, it's widespread apparently. The post / article I'm thinking of had several examples from RPG books and, IIRC, Magic cards, where very reasonable, easy-to-follow instructions all turned into something the artist was clearly drawing with one hand.
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Jun 20, 2021 07:29
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grassy gnoll posted:Nonsense, there's also like twelve different drawings of the Roseblack in that scratch pen style, where she's making a face like she just ate a whole lemon. Given how the Roseblack's day tends to go in all the times she's appeared in my Exalted campaigns, that face is 100% accurate.
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Jun 20, 2021 18:29
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Crossposting from the D&D thread in the hopes that someone actually remembers the article / discussion I'm thinking of: Has anyone here adapted traditional children's games (tag, hide and seek, Red Rover, etc.) as the basis of D&D minigames, or seen them adapted elsewhere? I know I've seen a discussion of this somewhere years ago, where a minigame turned out to be an elaborate adaptation of, like, What's The Time Mister Wolf or Freeze Tag, but damned if I can find it. For context, my players are off to confront a horrible ghost-thing that used to be a child and is now one endgame antagonists of the campaign. Rather than have a dungeon and a boss fight, they're instead going to try to reawaken the ghost's humanity, and part of their plan involves playing high-stakes children's games with a creature that can rewrite the natural world: the Floor is Lava, but the floor is actually lava, Ghost in the Graveyard but with an actual ghost, etc. This is The Best Plan and I want to encourage it, so I'm pondering what could be converted into minigames.
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Jun 21, 2021 04:11
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Galaga Galaxian posted:Ironsworn maybe? It was designed for both solo and low-player counter GM-less cooperative/GM'd play. Its also free. Seconding this, as I'm doing exactly that thing with a 3-person Ironsworn group and it's working great.
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Jul 4, 2021 03:14
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Yeah, it's worth noting that the vast, vast majority of streamed (i.e., non-podcast, and many of those too) Actual Plays don't really resemble normal RPG tables more than superficially. Between having to adhere to strict time slots that warp the flow of a session, and having the groups be comprised almost entirely of content creators or actors/comedians with outsized personalities and a need to self-promote, streamed games almost always have a very different table dynamic than you'll see at home, and IMO it's for the worse. You can find GMs who run their streamed table like a home table, and with normal-ish humans instead of rabid content creators and comedians, but they're rare as hen's teeth.
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Jul 10, 2021 18:21
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potatocubed posted:If you want something that's more like a home game, there are plenty of AP podcasts which are just home games recorded and lightly edited. Apparently a lot of people don't like the ones with table talk and rules confusion but they're my favourite. 100% agreed, just give me the actual audio from the table. “Polished production” too often comes off as disingenuous, and it does new players a disservice: discussing the rules and talking out of character about the situation and the characters is core to the hobby. Also, those games tend to be played for laughs less, which I find absolutely intolerable. If you were good enough at comedy to be worth listening to, you wouldn’t be doing a tabletop RPG show, stop trying to make funny happen.
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Jul 10, 2021 19:37
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Colonel Cool posted:I've heard Critical Role called the commercial porn of tabletop gaming before and it seems pretty apt. My god, that is dead on.
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Jul 10, 2021 21:26
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Hostile V posted:Yeah, Dread, Slasher Flick and the new Alien RPG would be good picks. Yep, these are the correct recommendations, as they form a nice gradient you can pick from depending on how much crunch and how many sessions you want.
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Jul 13, 2021 19:01
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potatocubed posted:Oh! The NPC tables in Ironsworn and Starforged are top-grade. Seconding this, the effectiveness of those tables is a large part of why those games work so well. Ironsworn's tables are great, Starforged's tables are even better.
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Jul 22, 2021 18:36
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bewilderment posted:Unless an RPG has an inbuilt endpoint, like Ten Candles or Polaris or some PbtA depending on how you count it, how heavy a system is has little to do with how many sessions it supports. On the one hand that's technically true. On the other hand, "heavier" games tend to offer more robust systems of progression, which is pretty important for a lot of folks in sustaining their interest over a long (12+ session) game. You can theoretically do infinite sessions of a game where the entirety of the mechanics are "roll 2d6 PbtA style, adjudicate results freeform," but for me and the people I tend to game with, we'd get more satisfaction out of a system where meaningful mechanical changes take place over the course of that long campaign. I've done long FATE games before, and while shifting aspects provides that sense for a while, for our group, it got stale eventually.
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Aug 7, 2021 04:33
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What D&D has over anything else is brand recognition, to the point where we've had this same conversation dozens of times. I propose, probably in the spirit of futility, that we talk about virtually anything else instead of spending the next five pages on this. How about this: tell us about the last time someone else at the table truly, genuinely surprised you. For me it was this week when, after literal decades of hanging the fruit of temptation in front of players to make them sell out, I finally got two members of a three-person party to sign on with the sinister megacorp making them an offer too good to pass up. They sold out the Persean Cluster in exchange for wealth, life-extension drugs, and the opportunity to research the alien technology they were fighting for the chance to recover, and have thrown the region into chaos. Oh, and they shot the third party member in the head to make it happen. (He survived, and appeared in the epilogue with a cyber-eyepatch and Monte Cristo-esque plans for vengeance) My GMing style for a lot of games is pretty much a campaign-length series of "if you do this thing that compromises your principles or your long-term best interests, you'll get the thing you really want in the short term." It often works, chipping away at PCs like knapped flint until they're sharp enough to cut anything that tries to touch them, or until they realize they have to actually stand for something. I was playing this game as a short series (four sessions) with the teens I usually run D&D for while another player was out of town, and expected my normal tactics to maybe get them to debate the megacorp's offer internally. But no, once I clarified that the mega was genuinely willing to give them life-changing opportunities in exchange for this priceless advantage, and all it would cost them was their freedom and the stability of the stellar-political order, they just did it. They talked it through out of character while I mostly listened and answered clarifying questions, and they came to the conclusion that this was something none of their characters would pass up: they had thought they were scoundrels with hearts of gold, but no, they were really just scoundrels and this was too much for them to resist. The only reason it didn't get all three of them was that the third had a higher ambition, and double-crossing the megacorp would give them the infamy they craved. It was the final session of a short series and we knew people were probably going to die, so the holdout player cheerfully got into an unwinnable Mexican standoff and told us out of character that he expected to die in this scene, but that it would be the right death.
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Aug 13, 2021 17:06
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That entry looks like a direct reference to Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and the cave of the man-apes, and the trope of humans devolving back into Smart Animals or straight-up monsters over deep time. Make of that what you will.
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Aug 22, 2021 22:44
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SkyeAuroline posted:Decision paralysis (and spotlight paralysis) mixed with what I'm suspicious are knock-on effects of (diagnosed) brain defects. Complete aphantasia, serious memory issues, whole nine yards. Hard to envision a fictional character doing fictional things when the "envision" bit doesn't have a function, and I have to work entirely from written notes for everything since I can't remember anything we've done or seen otherwise (which also makes continuing a character with a consistent personality hard, because I don't remember how I've been playing them!). Multiple layers of barriers making it harder to get "into" the game, and not really sure how to deal with them or if they can be dealt with. As another aphantasia sufferer, I hear you on this, though yours sounds even more extreme than mine. While I can't offer any complete solutions, something that helps me a great deal is art. Concept and mood art help a lot for me. If at all possible, when I'm GMing I like to have an image of an NPC up on a laptop at the table, or just off to the side in a virtual tabletop. When I'm playing, having a central piece of evocative character art surrounded by several ancillary pieces representing other parts of the character works well. Even if you can't remember what this person is like from session to session, being able to glance down at the array of images and be hit with their combined aesthetic effect might jolt you back into the right headspace. For getting proactive, two suggestions. First, go with your impulses. What do you as a player want to do in that moment? If it's not detrimental to someone's fun, then do it. Drive your characters like stolen cars, and try to cultivate an attitude of zen about the outcome: it'll be interesting no matter what happens, and memory issues mean you're looking for moment-to-moment engagement over the satisfaction of long-term arcs. Second, leverage your notes. The fact that you take notes at all means that if you're diligent about note-taking mid-session and reviewing them before every game, you may have a better grasp on some aspects of what's going on than you're giving yourself credit for, and even better than some of the other people at the table at times. It also means that when you're doing your review, you can find something in what's going on in the upcoming session that you as a player want to engage in; highlight that thing! Make a stickynote for your character sheet or similar in-your-face kind of note, and pursue it aggressively in that session. Whenever there's a lull in the action, leap forward with something that will drive toward that goal. Above all, keep trying new techniques and don't give up! You're confronting a legit disability, but you're motivated to overcome it because you enjoy the hobby. With support from your fellow players and with the right "prosthetics," whatever those end up being for you, you can get where you want to go.
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Aug 30, 2021 02:24
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Megazver posted:It's kinda crap. It's just a bunch of tables for rolling up wizard towers with a bunch of weird Lamentations-y stuff on them. Your mileage may vary, but I got a lot of use out of Seclusium. There's a ton of neat implied setting stuff in that book which the tables then put into player-facing, interactable material, and I enjoyed the aesthetic it produces of a magical tradition where magicians rise and fall in predictable cycles, and the Dying Earth-esque culture of sorcery (and the plunder of sorcery by rogues) that those cycles engender. Edit: Come to think of it, one of the best one-shots I've run was prepped almost entirely by use of Seclusium's tables. I was asked to GM Pathfinder for some folks I don't normally play with, and was ambushed at the last minute with "Oh and btw we're playing a troupe of traveling circus performers, no, we don't see any problem doing this with loving Pathfinder. Oh and we want to be level 13." I ran through the Seclusium creation process to give them a venue: a wizard's seclusium opening for the first time in a couple hundred years after accidentally imprisoning herself on another plane, only to find that her tower is on the border of a war-zone between men and elves, with armies camped on either side of the "ruins." To rid herself of this nuisance, the sorceress organizes peace talks during a harvest festival, and throws open the outer gates of her seclusium to all and sundry, offering a ludicrous sum of treasure and the granting of a wish to anyone who can provide the jaded magus with the novelty she prizes over all else. The seclusium's baroque weirdness was the main character of the session in the same way that the house is the main character of a haunted house story, and worked out quite well for giving them an environment sufficiently weird to give mid-level adventurers pause, while also letting them get up to ridiculous shenanigans as they tried to manipulate the peace talks, ruin their hated circus rivals, and win the favor of the mercurial sorceress. Kestral fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Aug 30, 2021 |
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Aug 30, 2021 20:57
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Arivia posted:Yeah tables as a worldbuilding method are great. I’d also look at the Cthonic Codex by Lost Pages, which is expressly about Wizard schools and campaigns set in them. Also, Veins of the Earth. If you ever wanted the Underdark / fantasy caving to feel legitimately sinister, claustrophobic, and by turns nightmarish and darkly wondrous, Veins is your ticket. I've rarely - maybe never - gotten so much value out of a sourcebook. While it's technically OSR, the ideas and tables are system-neutral: I used it for a lengthy Burning Wheel game set in the Forgotten Realms Underdark, for example.
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Aug 31, 2021 01:01
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Tulip posted:This is a place where I think a lot of traditional RPGs hinder rather than help. I've had this problem before and I would not say that I have solved it but I would say that I've gotten better at a personal level, and what I did was learn from the fields of writing and acting what is to have a motivated character. This is such good advice, A++. Burning Wheel is excellent for training you to make characters along these lines, because before you can leave character creation you need to have three Beliefs that state things they believe in strongly enough to define them as a person, and the immediate thing that each of those Beliefs is driving them to do and for which you as a player will get rewarded with metacurrency for pursuing. You write yourself into a position to be proactive because you know what this person needs more than anything else, and what they're fixin' to do to get it right now.
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Aug 31, 2021 18:00
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 02:36 |
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BlackIronHeart posted:Comic book stores/game stores are almost never run by someone with good business sense because people with good business sense would almost never open a comic book store/game store. It's this. There was - emphasis, was - a place in my region that was a hybrid game store / escape room / cafe, of all things. When it opened it devoted most of the store's floor space to long tables and shelves of board games, and you could take games from a curated selection and play them at the tables for a few bucks, plus the usual Magic tournaments and Adventurer's League stuff. It was run by some classic gatekeeping "alpha nerds" with terrible hygiene who actively resented their clientele, despite being reasonably successful. After about a year of being in operation, one of their competitors went out of business: a pure comic store with the traditional "all our floorspace is devoted to tables covered in comic longboxes and shelves of Marvel/DC memorabilia" setup. The escape room comic store cafe decided that the wisest business decision they could make would be to buy the entire inventory of the store that had just gone out of business and replace all but one small table with comics and overpriced statues which, demonstrably, no one wanted. Unsurprisingly, they are no longer in business.
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Sep 1, 2021 06:13
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