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SkyeAuroline posted:It works poorly in practice, as does most of Band of Blades. This is extremely not the case. BoB is very good at doing the exactly one thing it wants to do, which is replicating the early Black Company/Malaz 7th Army feeling from Black Company/MBotF. It's not a generic "Blades in the Dark but you're mercenaries" hack, it's a hack for playing one specific military campaign with a very specific fictional positioning and an understanding of the game's theme that everyone at the table needs to share for the game to work. 90% of the stuff you bring up (Corruption, high lethality, recruits being a shared pool of initially-nameless characters, campaign roles being given out to players, the existence of Scale and Threat as two different axes) exist specifically to drive that fiction. It's not designed to, and will not, work for anything else, but it also makes it very clear that it's not interested in even trying to work for anything else. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Jan 5, 2021 |
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Jan 5, 2021 11:59
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SkyeAuroline posted:"Force a fantasy tactical combat game into an intentionally loose narrative framework You keep calling it a tactical combat game when it isn't. Fights in BoB are just a type of narrative obstacle, one you'll see more often than you would in BitD because of the thematic nature of the game, but they work the same. They're not trying to be tactical combat.
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Jan 5, 2021 18:04
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fozzy fosbourne posted:Seems like maybe there are two different discussions being had but that might be mistaken for the same conversation: The answer to these two questions are "yes" and "yes if you want the thing the previous question was asking about," respectively. If you don't want the thing, you won't have fun, but that's completely irrelevant because the game is explicitly not intended or designed for you. Also "but is it fun?" has no place in a discussion about successful game design.  The question people want to be asking is "does it only introduce as much frustration as is strictly necessary to drive its themes" instead.
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Jan 6, 2021 01:44
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Joe Slowboat posted:Personally I found the point about how the distributed-GM roles actually don't function very salient, regardless of genre or style preference. They're not meant to be taking load off the GM - they're meant for the players to have control over what the Legion is doing as a military force so they can more closely identify with the unit as a whole.
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Jan 6, 2021 09:52
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Yawgmoth posted:I hate those too, however the latter can be easily fixed by just providing the houserule. Criticism of bad mechanics isn't "it's impossible to houserule around X," it's "X is bad," so sharing the houserule doesn't actually address the criticism of those mechanics.
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Jan 7, 2021 16:09
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Jimbozig posted:prophets Without putting more than 30 seconds' thought into it, here's how I would do a PbtA "make a prophecy" move if you actually wanted the prophet to be actively played: Prophecies have a goal (e.g. "the kingdom falls") and a number of conditions tiered as minor/moderate/major (e.g. "_____ dies," "a great natural disaster happens," "the kingdom goes to war," etc.). The prophecy's goal happens only when the conditions are fulfilled. The player always provides the goal, and the GM always provides the number and type of conditions required. Full success/partial success/miss determines how many of the conditions are picked by the player (with them always getting to pick at least one), with a miss additionally giving the GM license to add horrible unforeseen consequences later on. This gives the player agency on two levels: by letting them pick what they want to happen as an outcome of their prophecy (and some individual conditions if they roll well), and by letting them make the prophecy come true by directly fulfilling the conditions. The GM gets direct control over how difficult it is to make the goal happen but most of the work is on the player side (and it's fiction-first so players should always be offering suggestions even for the conditions they don't directly determine). This bypasses the "use divination to auto-solve the mystery" thing entirely. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 19:14 on Jan 7, 2021 |
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Jan 7, 2021 19:08
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hyphz posted:So it presumably has to be handwaved. It's not "handwaving," it's literally how fiction-first works.
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Jan 8, 2021 18:56
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TQY has a good Tabletop Sim module.
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Jan 10, 2021 22:07
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aldantefax posted:At my wizard school, everybody gets a gun at Grade 5. See, this is the problem with American wizard schools.
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Jan 15, 2021 09:55
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itch by an incredibly long shot. DTRPG takes a 30% cut if you're exclusive (35% if not), itch lets you set how much you give them (the default suggestion is 10%; you can set it to 0% or anything else you want).
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 00:17 on Jan 19, 2021 |
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Jan 19, 2021 00:15
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Does anyone have any opinions on the Expanse RPG? I'm hankering for some hard sci-fi space adventures but I don't want something with 900 pages of fiddly bullshit rules. e; actually, there's an Elite Dangerous RPG as well - I'd be curious to hear about that one too. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:17 on Jan 21, 2021 |
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Jan 21, 2021 10:49
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Glutes Are Great posted:Did you ever try Stars without Numbers? I saw it the other day and got the book for it but failed to ever really read through, let alone try it, but I had the feeling it had a lot of hard sci fi stuff It's B/X reskinned to space stuff with psychic powers instead of spells. Gort posted:Pretty much garbage. Percentile skill system with each character getting a few unique abilities powered by like four stamina points, so you'll spend a lot of actions in a given adventure just rolling skill checks. It's barely a system.  I hope the Expanse one is decent, then. I didn't hate Fantasy AGE as a system, so the core system is probably workable, but I have no idea whether it works for hard sci-fi space stuff or not.
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Jan 22, 2021 00:22
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Kavak posted:Why is this a thing? Is there something in British culture that creates a stumbling block for accepting trans people? It's just rainy fascism TERF island, where it's considered mainstream acceptable to spew trans panic bullshit in newspapers every other week.
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Jan 27, 2021 19:24
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dwarf74 posted:I am okay making fun of British cuisine and it's really weird to call it classist when that poo poo is in fine dining restaurants and poor kitchens alike. What "fine dining" restaurants do you go to that serve steak and kidney pie, toad-in-the-hole, bangers and mash, or chips with gravy and mushy peas?
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Jan 27, 2021 20:12
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paradoxGentleman posted:hot take: d&d is not good Truly this take is hotter than nuclear fire.
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Mar 1, 2021 12:58
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Tsilkani posted:It's like one of those kitchen claw monotools that's only good for shredding pulled pork and nothing else, but it's a terrible shredder and doesn't really work. We haven't tortured this metaphor nearly enough, so: It's a kitchen claw monotool for shredding pulled pork that doesn't work for shredding pulled pork, and also the people using it insist on using it for literally everything, and every time you suggest that perhaps a whisk would be a better tool to whip cream, the pulled pork claw monotool people scream at you that the pulled pork claw monotool works just fine for them and the majority of people who cook and that by pointing out whisks exist you are alienating everyone from cooking, and those same people refuse to buy pots or pans or plates or cutlery because they insist the pulled pork claw monotool is just as good as any of those if they just do this One Weird Trick they figured out. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 00:00 on Mar 2, 2021 |
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Mar 1, 2021 23:52
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aldantefax posted:Has anybody received their Hearts of Wulin stuff yet? I ordered the book and just got the PDF but from preliminary reports I’ve been getting from some of the folks it generally focuses more on the emotional ties between characters and the narrative moreso than how to get charm cascades or other such mechanical beat em up the most wuxia way possible type of affair. I can get behind this but I also am curious on other interpretations. That's what makes it cool, IMO. It's designed to emulate wuxia drama series with love triangles and conflicting loyalties and star-crossed lovers, which is 100% the right approach to take for PbtA. That's why Entanglements are so important and why the Scale mechanic is designed so that the big evil sect leader can just trounce you single-handed until you go away and train or find some secret manual teaching you a new technique that lets you fight them on an even footing.
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Mar 8, 2021 11:55
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Boba Pearl posted:What is lancer? (...) Like how do you roleplay in giant robots? Is there stats for when you're not in the bot? What do you do between times? A game where you play a human who pilots a war machine to fight against (usually) other humans piloting war machines. The same way you roleplay in combat in any other rules-heavy tactical combat system. Yes. The sort of things you would expect to do between fights if you were a military person piloting a war machine in a war zone. e; vv Tulip posted:LANCER is, at core, very heavily modified 4e D&D. It's actually a Shadow of the Demon Lord hack. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Mar 25, 2021 |
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Mar 25, 2021 22:15
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No Room for a Wallflower is still a bad introductory adventure because it immediately breaks one of the things the game has told you is a core setting assumption in an irreversible way. It's a good adventure, and the stuff in it is very cool, but as an adventure meant to introduce people to the game and the setting as described in the core book, it's terrible. Plot considerations aside, it's definitely worth looking at as a GM because it's putting into practice the structural advice given by the core book and shows you what a Lancer campaign "should" look like.
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Mar 26, 2021 12:12
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Tulip posted:That looks cool but as soon as I saw this I laughed and had to post: There's 40 pages of core rules, 40 pages of player options, 15 pages of GM advice, 65 pages of pregens and scenario seeds, and everything else in the book is setting information.
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Apr 22, 2021 21:40
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Nessus posted:So is the idea that the humans fight the dinosaurs or that there's a Dinotopia situation going on here, if potentially one where the dinosaurs are not intelligent? Can human and their natural enemy, dinosaur, unite forces in the face of -- something? The something should be oil companies that want to kill the dinos and grind up their bones into oil.
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May 14, 2021 08:46
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moths posted:Has anyone ever actually done the meta RPG where you play as a fictional group of friends playing an RPG? https://kierongillen.itch.io/die-beta
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May 14, 2021 11:46
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Hel posted:To be fair if you are selling the game with references to Gits, Cowboy Bebop and Bubblegum Crisis. GitS is an introspective conspiracy thriller, Innocence even more so, and SAC is mostly a melancholy police procedural with a lot of horror elements. They have occasional fights, but they're really not the point. The other two are more action-focused but Cowboy Bebop is also a show about poor people trying to make ends meet in a run-down future, which is the part that HWI explicitly says it's cribbing. "People want fights" isn't the point - the point is people thinking that all cyberpunk roleplaying forever is Shadowrun's "D&D but with cyber-arms and arcologies instead of magic swords and dungeons" take on things when it's really not true. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 17:45 on May 27, 2021 |
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May 27, 2021 17:42
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This is not a case of something namedropping Cowboy Bebop with no context. The game explicitly tells you what parts of Cowboy Bebop it's inspired by, and it's not the part about them fighting bad guys:  (It's also not the point. The point is elfgamers having a tendency to assume that Shadowrun/CP2020 are representative of all cyberpunk, instead of one very specific type of cyberpunk story that happens to also be the most boring type.) Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 00:44 on May 29, 2021 |
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May 29, 2021 00:28
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quote:Written and co-designed by award-winning and New York Times best-selling author Matt Forbeck (The Marvel Encyclopedia, Dungeons & Dragons: Endless Quest), the MARVEL MULTIVERSE ROLE-PLAYING GAME: PLAYTEST RULEBOOK will introduce players to the all-new D616 System, an accessible and easy-to-learn system for newcomers to tabletop RPGs and a natural evolution for those familiar with the most popular tabletop role-playing games on the market. Use Might, Agility, Resilience, Vigilance, Ego, and Logic to win the day, and discover your true abilities as you face impossible odds! 
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Jun 4, 2021 17:49
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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. Why put time and money into making something good when it's just a cheap cash-in/marketing for the films? Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Jun 4, 2021 |
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Jun 4, 2021 18:50
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Anyone know anything about the Exalted: Essence mechanics? The KS ended just recently and while the idea of "Exalted but rules-light" sounds good on paper, I'm not sure I trust OPP to make it streamlined enough.
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Jun 24, 2021 23:29
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Ferrinus posted:Its core mechanics are pretty well streamlined, the Charms that go on top of those mechanics aren't that great and like to break their own streamlining rules. Not super appealing as a whole package as opposed to regular 3E, not really possible to patch piecemeal into 3E (except for a couple small but cool systems) because its mechanics are different enough that 3E's existing Charms barely apply. That doesn't sound super great, unfortunately. Coolness Averted posted:So I guess I'm the weirdo demographic that wants d10 storyteller for attributes and abilities, then some storygame stuff or FATE for the rest.  But thanks for the answers everyone.
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Jun 25, 2021 20:17
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100YrsofAttitude posted:Hey! So I've actually never played a role-playing game but I've been plenty interested in them for ages now. I've done some of the video game equivalents, Baldur's Gate and similar games, but I think it'd be nice to play with people, either by post, or even fancier means (I guess Discord?) Your best bet would be to join a roleplaying game Discord and see if anyone has some space in one of their games to introduce you to the concepts. People in those Discords will also usually be happy to answer questions about how X, Y and Z work. This is one that I'm in that's pretty friendly and has people running games: https://discord.gg/e4tsAJ8X 100YrsofAttitude posted:Being a huge Tolkien geek, fantasy/high fantasy would be a fine place to start with, so D&D's fine. If you're a big Tolkien fan, you want to look out for The One Ring, which is a game explicitly designed to enforce Middle-Earth-appropriate actions through its mechanics, with rules for pipe-smoking and riddle-making. It's okay to start with D&D if you want, because it remains very popular and thus it's easier to find a game to join, but keep in mind that there are a lot of games out there that play radically differently and have much better-designed mechanics. D&D is really the "Michael Bay films" of roleplaying games.
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Jul 10, 2021 23:28
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100YrsofAttitude posted:I'd be happy to, the options seem endless. If you have any specific suggestions I'll look into them. Someone linked unpossiblejourneys earlier and it's been really good to see what else is out there. You probably missed this post which I made last page: Lemon-Lime posted:Your best bet would be to join a roleplaying game Discord and see if anyone has some space in one of their games to introduce you to the concepts. People in those Discords will also usually be happy to answer questions about how X, Y and Z work.
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Jul 11, 2021 12:21
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100YrsofAttitude posted:I've saved that discord link for sure. Since it'll be a month before I can be sure to be good and present I'll join up then and begin to see what can be done. You can just join it now and start talking to people! It's a good idea to check in as early as possible to see who is planning to start a game and when, just so people know you're interested.
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Jul 11, 2021 17:53
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Nuns with Guns posted:This sounds life-sapping, but it makes me wonder.... what's the best "officially licensed" game someone here has ever played that feels like a proper translation of the IP into a tabletop RPG? The One Ring.
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Jul 16, 2021 10:15
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TheDiceMustRoll posted:IIRC its extremely challenging to actually pull off killing him, and you can again try in BG1, where it's even harder unless you know where he is and do a lot of prep work. I do wish rpgs would let you kill guys more. "A lot of prep work" being "surround him with summoned creatures, attack him from range, spam cancel action on the summoned creatures so they stay neutral to him and he can't get to melee range."
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Jul 25, 2021 12:40
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CitizenKeen posted:Hello, new fantasy game from the co-creator of Lancer (Tom Parkinson-Morgan). Disappointed by this being so close to Lancer mechanically, but it does seem to remove most of what I dislike about Lancer. The amount of player options is sane, and the out-of-combat rules seem to be a bit less barely-there than Lancer's. The art is fantastic and the lore is pretty cool. I'm mildly amused that this is the second tabletop RPG I read with obvious FF14 references in the last week or so (the other one was Gubat Banwa). Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:ICON has both a "rules we do differently/how we define rules terms" section and a "relevant rules for the class following this page" page for each class in the book. It's already won my heart. Yeah, the usability stuff is really nice.
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Jul 27, 2021 22:45
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canepazzo posted:I'm guessing Fate also works for low-prep, high-improv? Coincidentally, there's a current Bundle of Holding offer with most/all of its rules and *worlds. Fate Core itself isn't really a game, it's a toolkit for making your own game, which means the GM has to put a lot of prep in to write their own rules using the system (or borrow them from other games running on Fate, or from the Toolkits which exist to give examples of how to write Fate rules) unless they're running something that's already a complete game (e.g. Shadow of the Century or Tianxia). You'll also usually have much better results by prepping your encounters ahead of time like you would in something like 4E, it's just that prepping these is much less intensive since statting up enemies and scenes is very easy. It's possible to completely wing it, but unless you're incredibly good at coming up with interesting encounters on the fly, it'll probably not be as good. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Aug 2, 2021 |
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Aug 2, 2021 12:51
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Fate Core is "a toolkit and not a game" because by design you are supposed to add mechanics created using the fractal (whether you create them yourself or take them from one of the examples provided) to model whatever things are actually important to the campaign you're running, rather than just running what boils down to a resolution system out of the box. It has nothing to do with whether or not you can run Fate Core vanilla; you can, and the end result almost certainly won't be good, which does a big disservice to Fate as a system. (The "real" Fate main game is Shadow of the Century, which replaces Atomic Robo as the best "generic modern" implementation of the core rules. It's good!) Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 09:37 on Aug 3, 2021 |
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Aug 3, 2021 09:21
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Leperflesh posted:Does what you guys are saying about Fate Core, also apply to Fate Accelerated? Fate Accelerated leans more into being explicitly an extremely-rules-light generic system (think PDQ/Wushu) that you're not intended to bolt anything extra on, so it's mechanically unsatisfying by design. It absolves the GM of prepping the system, but you would still want to prep encounters.
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Aug 5, 2021 21:23
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I don't think that's a fail-state for approaches. The swashbuckling rogue trying to swashbuckle his way through everything is wholly appropriate for the kind of larger-than-life pulp action/drama characters that Fate as a system wants you to play.GetDunked posted:I think Fate: Accelerated is fine for like demoing the system for a one-shot maybe, giving people a taste of the regular Fate gameplay. But Fate Core just seems way more fleshed out, and all the neat toolkit stuff out there is for it and won't work with Accelerated without further hacking (iirc). It's just a very barebones resolution system for when you want an excuse to roll dice without detailed mechanics. There's not enough meat on that bone for any kind of campaign play, but it works completely fine for that purpose.
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Aug 5, 2021 23:46
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Unfortunately, Frazetta popularised the depiction of Conan as a mostly-naked, oiled muscle-man, which is not at all in line with how Conan is actually depicted in the Howard stories.
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Aug 7, 2021 02:32
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CitizenKeen posted:D&D may be hot garbage, but at least it's a clean, easy answer for new players. Goon wanders in to the general RPG thread looking for a nice, simple on ramp, and gets overwhelmed with suggestions of everything from Pendragon to Wanderhome. Oh man, what a loving shame that there are multiple good games that people are suggesting, instead of a pile of loving garbage. 
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Aug 13, 2021 12:34
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