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Feb 3, 2021 13:43
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aldantefax posted:That reminds me of a GM I used to play with when we were all kids and he was really into animals having crazy stats. Fighting his version of a crocodile was worse than fighting a dragon. Then again his dragons that he ran were also similarly crazy. Reptile family monsters in general just had amazing amounts of attacks, hit points, damage, and damage resistance because of their formidable hides. Put your head between your knees and kiss your rear end goodbye if you ran into a lion or something. 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.
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Feb 3, 2021 22:53
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I'm currently running a 4e game over roll20 in a homebrew setting where the players are part of the downtrodden masses living in the outlands and using jury-rigged magitech scavenged from the junk that the Guilds throw away. They've recently seized a source of the flangey magical substance that the Guild make magitech from and are planning on setting up business, selling it to the Guild, skimming some for their own experiments on the side, and running a casino town nearby to sell vice to Guildborn visitors.
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Feb 5, 2021 08:56
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Boba Pearl posted:The thing is, I've never done a fight this hard, it could be an absolute slaughter. I want to make sure that it's not unwinnable, while at the same time, if the party fails, I want to do a cool thing where everyone they've helped and all the powerful NPCs they met show up and transfer their energy to a cleric or a device or something that gives the group mass heal a few times to balance the odds in the opposite side. I can't speak for the encounter balance specifically, but one thing a GM did with my group once was run a hard-as-nails battle with a list under the table of various parties who could step in out of nowhere to save our bacon: if things got bad for us, they'd jump in and distract the antagonists for a round while the party got its poo poo together, but then they'd pull back out of the fight. The evil bit was that the ones at the top of the list were genuine allies who we were on equal terms with -- but as you got further down the list, they became people to whom we really wouldn't want to be owing a favour to.
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Feb 7, 2021 01:37
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Endorph posted:the people saying the bad word hate autistic people. it is part of a history of autistic people being seen as literally less than human. i dont think this is a very complicated angle. I think the point is more that giving them another word they can say which carries all the same negative connotations -- which is effectively what renaming the smiley would do -- doesn't make things any better, it just means a different word is now bad.
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Feb 13, 2021 11:34
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paradoxGentleman posted:So I just discovered that I own Shadowrun Hong Kong, Shadowrun Dragonfall and Shadowrun Returns on Epic, probably having gotten them from a promotion or something 'cause I sure didn't pay money for them. I am vaguely aware that the Shadowrun RPGs are so-so and super crunchy at best, but are the videogames any good? The videogames run on a completely different system to the boardgames, so they have none of the disadvantages of the boardgames' awful crunch. It's a pretty decent system, combat is fast and satisfying and there aren't many awful builds. I've not played Returns, so I can't speak for it that much -- the story is said to be fairly mediocre. Dragonfall and Hong Kong have some absolutely incredible plot and writing, some of the best I've seen in a computer RPG, and a system that's decent enough to back it up.
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Feb 14, 2021 15:09
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Halloween Jack posted:With Hong Kong, I still haven't got past the JRPG Mode, but it's supposed to be very good. I'm super confused by what you mean by this, all the mechanics in Hong Kong are practically identical to in Dragonfall.
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Feb 14, 2021 20:05
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I'd say another iconic thing of 90s design was merit-flaw purchasing at character generation as a way either for players to indicate to the GM "this is the area of my character's plot that I want you to mess with, please", or for the system to drive players towards coming up with interesting backstory.
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Feb 19, 2021 08:26
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Speaking of Unknown Armies, if you're looking for a list of names to grab a random adept from then this post has you covered:ultrafilter posted:
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Feb 21, 2021 00:24
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Plutonis posted:rpol.net? that site is still trucking right? Also spending enough gold to make a difference means that whoever you sell it to becomes filthy rich and creates huge problems for their lord and for the economy in general, which definitely gets the Quaesitores down on you for meddling in the affairs of mundanes.
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Feb 24, 2021 08:24
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busalover posted:I think a year or two ago someone released an updated version of a 90s RPG about some kind of... cyberpunk island? I read the original source book years ago, and thought it was kinda cool, but forgot its name. Is the new version worth a try, anyone bought it? Are you thinking of Hard Wired Island by Ettin?
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Mar 27, 2021 15:04
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Xinder posted:We haven't really played any deck builders to be honest. We took a look at Dominion but she thought it would be too simple for her to get invested in. Dominion is definitely not simple. The rules themselves aren't very complicated but because each game plays with 10 randomly selected card types from your library, the real skill of the game is figuring out which of those card types will synergise in a way that's obscenely overpowered -- and that's a new puzzle each time you play.
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Apr 8, 2021 08:56
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I think there's a big difference between playing an evil but likable antagonist and playing an evil but likable PC. Evil antagonists tend, unless the story derails, to get their comeuppance. The story is set up to implicitly criticise the stuff they do. PCs are much harder because as a protagonist they have the story on their side, so there's a tendency to feel like the narrative excuses or downplays their actions. It's certainly not impossible, but "PC is ultimately thwarted" is a story that's much harder to make land.
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Apr 21, 2021 07:23
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One of the ideas that a certain class of grog clings to is "things used to be more racist, because racism is the natural state of things", and depending on the grog, this is followed up with either "so we should be grateful for the few crumbs of equality we've managed to achieve" or "and things would be better if we went back to that". Ditto with sexism, ditto with homophobia. In reality a lot of our society's prejudices about race (and gender and sexuality) come from the Victorians. The medieval period wasn't great of course -- they had their prejudices just like anyone else -- but pretending that it was a neverending tide of bigotry and hatred is primarily an excuse used by people who want to justify their own bigotry and hatred.
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May 2, 2021 09:32
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CitizenKeen posted:Is there a campaign pitch for a tactical game any of you wish existed? I'm cobbling together a tactical system that I think has some potential, but for the first time in my life, I'm completely blanking on cool settings. I've been fleshing it out with bog standard fantasy, but that's boring. Should be a good setting for lots of grid combat, and have room for some fantastical abilities. It's the near future. Every conspiracy theorist's vision of the apocalypse has come to pass at the same time and now the various apocalyptic entities are fighting it out amongst themselves over who gets to rule over whatever's left of Earth.
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May 11, 2021 22:25
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theironjef posted:Do you play as an apocalyptic entity? My thinking was more that you're one of the humans caught in the middle of it, and you're either trying to serve an apocalyptic entity in the hopes that they'll eat you last or just survive as best you can while the world goes to poo poo around you.
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May 12, 2021 08:46
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Magepunk. Your characters are plausibly-deniable wands for hire, employed by one of the dozen or so epic-level wizards who rule the world in a complicated tangle of diplomacy, treachery and backstabbing, or more likely for a Professor Johnson working for one of said archmages. Characters do shadowruns on the holdings of other mages, or go out into the blasted wastes that have been scorched barren by magical warfare to loot the weird magical poo poo that remains after an rear end in a top hat wizard has hexed the place till it glows.
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May 12, 2021 12:42
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hyphz posted:Yea, "there are literally living creatures that form themselves into random dungeons" is pushing it a bit as an in-universe explanation! Why? It's no more fantastical than "there are giant winged reptiles that breathe fire" or "reading hard enough lets you bend the laws of reality over your knee" or "gods are real and grant you magic powers"
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May 26, 2021 22:02
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Gort posted:So what's so remarkable about A Wizard, anyway? It's a module that takes a very standard trope of high fantasy -- the smiling, benevolent wizard -- and turns it into Cronenbergian horror. Which is to say, it's really not remarkable as a piece of literature at all because "beloved icon but body horror" is a concept that was played out sixteen years ago when Nancy kept turning into Zalgo. It probably is the first time someone's done it where the icon is an RPG trope I guess? (I'm probably being too harsh. It is solidly written and the horror works well, it's just .. eeh, read one OSR module full of wall-to-wall grim awfulness, read 'em all.)
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May 27, 2021 08:26
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm amazed at the propensity of the biggest companies in the tabletop business to keep putting out games that don't improve on rulesets from the 80s. Know your audience, please your audience.
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Jun 4, 2021 18:28
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Megazver posted:How do people here feel about doing some kind of a TTRPG equivalent of the Creative Convention's Thunderdome? An Adventuredome, if you will? Writing up my entry was fun as hell, I'd be on for it!
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Jun 11, 2021 20:29
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I don't know, I'm not a historian or anything but I'd be amazed if kids hadn't been playing tag and Hide and Seek and stuff since kids have been able to play.
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Jun 21, 2021 08:22
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Skyarb posted:For the very short time windows, (5 seconds or 10 seconds) does anyone have any suggestions for timing this? I could obviously use my phone or Alexa, but I want some tactile and in their face. Sand timers are great for this but they don't exist at such small increments. Any suggestions would be very appreciated. Spin a top, they have to give an answer by the time it stops spinning.
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Jun 22, 2021 18:06
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Tosk posted:I think this is kind of what inevitably kills freeform roleplays. There's always a constant pressure between the idea of freeform and the need to implement systems so that there's a logic to everything, and it's impossible to satisfy both ideals, especially on a community scale. Hilariously, combat roleplay was super popular at the site I linked and was literally conceived out of that very blindsight, where people basically tried to write each other into a corner describing their characters' actions abstractly with very loose rulesets. It was as hilariously awful as anything else involving the e-peens of two nerds on the internet crashing together, and basically always ended in flame wars or one person trolling the other into submission and was generally incredibly toxic. Groups I know who've done in-person freeform in the past always got around this by having the roleplay happen in an IC situation where it was hard to do much beyond talking (specifically, violence was out of the question) and having players periodically submit turnsheets describing what they were using their skills to do. Kind of like taking the structure of Diplomacy but instead of a defined victory condition of "conquer the world" players had fleshed-out characters with a more complex set of in-character motivations and goals, and also instead of armies some of them had spies or were religious leaders or captains of industry or something.
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Jun 26, 2021 09:52
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Jimbozig posted:In this system for escaping burning buildings, you can use your Spinning Fire-Toss to move 1 adjacent square of fire 3 squares, or you can use your Tumbling Stair technique to descend one level through a burning staircase without catching fire. You can't just keep doing that, though - it's an encounter power! Next time you encounter a burning staircase you'll have to do something else. You've only just described it and I'm on board as hell with this system. Can there also be telenovela-style firefighter melodrama between rescuing NPCs from burning buildings which then feeds into the tactical grid combat, so that I get +2 to my morale roll because I know my rival is watching and I would die rather than have him see me too afraid to run into a burning room?
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Jul 19, 2021 21:57
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I think I may have posted this elsewhere, but to me the defining feature of Westerns isn't that a land is being colonised but that a land is rough and unsettled, and law comes from the barrel of a gun. Maybe the answer is to have that breakdown of law and order come from some other source instead. There's a reason why post-apocalypse games often feel Wild-West-y, after all.Jimbozig posted:If you make the land truly empty, same thing. "Manifest destiny but correct." I feel the blow is softened here if there's a really good reason why the land is truly empty. Like, maybe it's a place of no honour where no great deed is commemorated, but people back home sure will pay through the nose for those pretty glowing rocks you sometimes find there. At that point it becomes a story about manifest destiniers setting themselves up to get hosed in the rear end by karma.
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Jul 21, 2021 07:25
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neonchameleon posted:Genuine Terra Nulla has been rare for good reason, but the Falkland Islands qualified. And Antarctica arguably still does. It's just hard to have NPCs in Antarctica Yeah, definitely, you need to come up with some plot reason why it's that way (I had no idea that Terra Nulla was a term but I like it!) and why, if it's so awful, people want to colonise it, but "a new discovery has made a previously worthless natural resource valuable" or "a new discovery has made a previously inhospitable land settleable" feel like they could work. I think also thematically removing the nature of the land being colonised from actual historical atrocities helps: "we discovered how to cross the ocean and now we're colonising a big continent to the west of the Old World with tobacco, cotton and sugar, but it's somehow uninhabited" feels worse than "we discovered how to cast long-range teleport spells reliably and now we're colonising a ruined underground city the size of a country filled with valuable mana deposits" even though they're both likely to lead to the kind of rooting, tooting and shooting that you're after.
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Jul 21, 2021 08:30
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The solution I like to go with for alignment is to have any divine magic that references good or evil work according to the moral code of the god who's providing it, and for every god to have their own moral code that's incompatible with every other god's.
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Aug 18, 2021 16:21
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Drakyn posted:I seem to recall the guy who wrote the Clowns mod for Dominions 5 may actually have an account somewhere on SA, but I could be out of my mind. Either way I think that sort of undercurrent (communicating entirely through 'reflexive systems of acausal meta-irony', JESUS) is deliberate. It's a mod? I'm severely disappointed, I had been under the wonderful impression that for some reason the writer of this incredibly serious high fantasy setting had snapped at the last minute and filled the world with clowns and by the time anyone noticed the CD was already being duplicated. Halloween Jack posted:I definitely think that planar travel should involve traveling through a liminal zone where the reality of one plane gradually gives way to another. And yeah, don't have planes that are too inhospitable to even traverse. There was a Planescape-like cosmology I never got round to running a game in where the premise was that the elemental planes that the City of Doors linked to got more and more 'pure' as you got closer and closer to the centre. What we call the Plane of Fire is really the home of a platonic concept so pure and alien that mortals have no hope of even comprehending it. The ideology at the heart of the plane encompasses things such as passion, the spark of inspiration, upheaval, destruction of the old to make way for the new; fire is just like the ectoplasm it leaves when that raw spiritual power interacts with physical matter. Because permanent portals have been around so long, the material realm has spilled into the elemental realms they link to -- so the area on the other side is the kind of place that people can inhabit and make a living, if they don't mind the laws of reality sometimes being a bit wonky. Wizards like it when this happens because they can run in, steal a bunch of magical reagents, and run out again before they get eaten. The inhabitants of elemental planes like it too, because they can take advantage of the cool things you only find natively on the material plane, like physical matter and this interesting "free will" thing that so many mortals take for granted.
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Aug 19, 2021 18:10
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Leperflesh posted:I also, while we're talking about it, find it decreasingly plausible that the whole multiverse is stuck in quasi-medieval technology for countless millennia the more you add additional planes and worlds and populations. Thematically, to me a multiverse type situation demands more of a RIFTS-like mishmash of hyper-tech and swords than a D&D-style mishmash of high magic doohickies, scrolls of Wish, and swords. I imagine that in a cosmology where the Wish spell can be researched, the Great Filter gets brought forward five or six centuries to before anybody can invent hyper-tech.
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Aug 20, 2021 21:32
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That is not the image that springs to mind when I read "adult dungeon master costume".
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Aug 29, 2021 17:00
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Toshimo posted:6 Nimmt Seconding 6nimmt, it's not very strategy-heavy but it's still an absolute blast. Also Cubirds and the Century series are really good and quite simple.
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Aug 30, 2021 19:25
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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 amazingly good advice and I'm totally going to be integrating it into my characters from now on, thank you!
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Aug 31, 2021 17:42
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Plutonis posted:Or maybe From Another Time, Another Land instead of Lamentations This. Even having the name of his game be a punchline is a degree more attention than Zak S, a serial abuser who shat his pants outside a Chik-A-Fil-A, is worthy of.
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Sep 1, 2021 14:32
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I haven't played the latest edition, but I've always found running Unknown Armies to be really easy to pick up. The game is in general about weird postmodern occult horror, but the rules for your players having their own magic powers can be easily discarded to just run a game about mundanes trying to investigate weird mysteries. What Unknown Armies doesn't do, and standard CoC doesn't do much of, is have rules for managing and structuring a mystery -- it leaves all of that in your hands as a GM. There are other systems -- Gumshoe is one of them -- which build their rules very specifically around the idea that your players are going to be unravelling a mystery, so you might also want to look into those.
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Sep 9, 2021 09:21
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Kestral posted:Instead, my prep between sessions went in to a quick homebrew minigame centered around FitD-style opposing clocks, such that each faction they were courting had: This... kinda sounds like a skill challenge from 4e, just with multiple success tracks, a limited number of actions per PC, and an emphasis on doing more than just rolling the same skill each time? Which, in fairness, were all things that 4e's skill challenges really needed.
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Sep 11, 2021 08:25
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Wow, your roommate sounds like a barrel of laughs.
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Oct 6, 2021 18:20
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I would like to play the feudal life simulator where each player is the knight in charge of a different nearby lovely village who all hate each other, but they can't escalate to murder because they all answer to the same king so instead they have to persuade their peasants to go steal the other village's peasants' lucky pig and frame someone else for it.
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Oct 21, 2021 18:39
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Nehru the Damaja posted:If I wanted to run a game similar in setting and tone to Disco Elysium, what would be the best game to run with? Just thinly disguised Over the Edge? Surely the correct answer is Everyone Is John.
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Oct 31, 2021 10:43
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Mr.Misfit posted:Quick question to the chat: I recently gm'ed the second long-form session (basically the 2nd weekend me and my friends meet where we play from friday to sunday) and my group basically came down hard on my "the world moves on" -style of GMing, where I offer them side commissions if they take missions on a planet, which fall down by the wayside sometimes because they feel like another hook I'm presenting them with seems "more important" or "main-plotty" and they feel bad for not being able to take the opportunity. The approach I take in my current game is that the thing which causes time to move on isn't travelling and doing missions -- it's resting, repairing, and recovering. If you're willing to keep on pushing the risk of going into a situation at less than 100%, you can keep on chasing sidequests without letting the main plot fall by the wayside. The other thing I'd suggest is ensuring that the sidequests you're offering them all have explicit rewards made clear that tie into what they perceive as the main plot. These don't have to specifically be loot (although of course they can be) but things like "These people would make useful allies against the pirates if only their food shortage problems were solved" or "Wait, fix a flood on Cephelon 9? Isn't that where the pirates' first mate was born? You bet you could get some useful leverage on him there" will work as well. Basically ensure that "which of these hooks is the main plot" isn't such an easy question to answer any more.
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Nov 16, 2021 15:31
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