Drone posted:

This is a great idea for a thread but it leaves out those of us who perma-GM

quote:

Play to find out in Band of Blades, a stand-alone, Forged in the Dark RPG of dark military fantasy.

Band of Blades contains all the rules you need to play. In this book you’ll find:

• A clear game structure for playing out missions filled with moment-to-moment danger and tracking the overall fate of the Legion.
  
• Rookie, Soldier, and five different Specialist playbooks, with Legionnaires created as they are needed when the casualties of war set in.
  
• Legion roles for all of the players: the Commander sets mission priorities, the Marshal directs the troupes, the Quartermaster manages precious resources, the Spymaster gathers intel in the field, and the Lorekeeper preserves the histories of the Legion.
  
• Three different Chosen—humans imbued with the powers of the gods, each with their own unique gifts, who aid the Legion.
  
• Army advancement throughout the campaign, including gaining new materiel and the promotion of the Legion’s troops.
  
• Four distinct heritages of brave and flawed people seeking to survive another night from the Cinder King’s horrors.
  

Lemon-Lime posted:

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.

aldantefax posted:

Also, and this is maybe going too far over the hill on this one, but since most of TG's discussion is focused on megathreads, perhaps a sub-subforum for those megathreads might be useful...? Probably not the best idea since it just makes accessibility even harder, but just spitballing stuff while it's in my noggin.

Len posted:

I'm sorry did you see my chunk of a cat?

Len posted:

She has not eaten a kid under my watch, but she came to us a chunk. Cannot confirm her prior life

Len posted:

N...no, should they have?

SkyeAuroline posted:

So I'm actually curious. How many of us are in ongoing (or imminent) games & what are they?
Personally in delay limbo for a switch from Eclipse Phase to CPRED, plus an Over the Edge game that's starting soon.

SkyeAuroline posted:

Insightful stuff about how cyberpunk games get it wrong

Tibalt posted:

At least Victorian naturalists were basing on their own observations. For a long time European anthropologists would base their work on the travel diaries of administrators and colonialists.

Imagine the theories you'd have about American culture based on second-hand accounts of homecoming games.

DalaranJ posted:

Has anyone else read Jon Peterson's The Elusive Shift?

aldantefax posted:

You could just send me money. Money is pretty dope

aldantefax posted:

I could do that but I dunno how to get one set up, and I dunno what tiers I would set up. I think that if I did do a Patreon I'd just use the money to hire an editor to go through my ridiculous word soups that I get through? Does anybody know someone who would be willing to wade through like 50 to 80 thousand words and edit it for more public consumption? And, if so, rates??

aldantefax posted:

Anybody playing any games recently?

SkyeAuroline posted:

If you find a good one, let me know - I'm still looking for a quality replacement that can sit firmly on carpet and can fit my tall-format books (mainly LANCER and Electric Bastionland, which were too tall for my old case).

Len posted:

This is brilliant holy poo poo

Xiahou Dun posted:

Target numbers and dicepools should not be mixed at the table because seriously that's too much math for anyone to do on the fly. If you think you can do it, you're wrong and just being an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Like, this isn't me being lovely but if you think you can do the odds of 6d10 at TN7 vs. 5d10 at TN6 at the speed to make a GM judgement, you're either wrong or some kind of prodigy. I'm a nerd enough that I bring that up with PhD math people and the response is always some variation of, "Whoof! Uh... Let me think."

Leperflesh posted:

We've got a CYOA thread tag now, in TG and in TGR. If anyone wants a thread's tag changed, just let me know.



This new tag is courtesy BYOB.

theironjef posted:

aldantefax posted:

For example, you can emulate having 3d6 by having 3 piles of cards numbered 1 through 6 and you dealt from each pile

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 have got to admit, I'm considering it. Just being able to plop maps and tokens in without printing is kind of amazing. I'm still not sure - but it's a real question when I didn't expect it would ever be.

mellonbread posted:

I like playing online, but I strongly dislike the way maps and tokens work in every virtual tabletop I've used. Nothing has ever come close to the ease of just drawing on a chessex grid with a wet erase marker and throwing down a couple random objects to sub for miniatures. I've tried hooking up a graphics tablet and using it in roll20, but you still have to wrestle with the clunky web interface. Tabletop simulator gets you part of the way there, but adds a lot of friction with the physics simulation - pieces falling through the table or ricocheting off each other and flying into space, an undo function which doesn't work because it's trying to remember the position of every 3D object.

All of this gets easier if you're working from pre-baked material and planned encounters. It's when you try to improvise that things get rough.

Boba Pearl posted:

Is anyone willing to do a PBP FATE game? I've always had a hard time understanding it, and I'd love to pick someone's brain on how it's actually supposed to work.

Mycroft Holmes posted:

drat, too bad. Wanted a WWII game where you could do that.

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I think the easiest way to judge how racist these pulp writers are is to see what happened when they placed their stories in Africa. Here's a quote that really struck me when I read a collection of REH's Solomon Kane stories more than a decade ago, and while I no longer have the volume, thankfully Australia's Project Gutenberg considers them to be public domain, so I was able to track it down. It's from "Wings in the Night", first published in Weird Tales, July 1932.

quote:

KANE stood with the ju-ju stave in one hand and the smoking pistol in the other, above the smouldering ruins that hid forever from the sight of man the last of those terrible, semi-human monsters whom another hero had banished from Europe in an unknown age. Kane stood, an unconscious statue of triumph—the ancient empires fall, the dark-skinned peoples fade and even the demons of antiquity gasp their last, but over all stands the Aryan barbarian, white-skinned, cold-eyed, dominant, the supreme fighting man of the earth, whether he be clad in wolf-hide and horned helmet, or boots and doublet—whether he bear in his hand battle-ax or rapier—whether he be called Dorian, Saxon or Englishman—whether his name is Jason, Hengist or Solomon Kane.

It's not subtle.

bbcisdabomb posted:

I ran the 5e port of Sinister Secret of Saltmarsh and all the bugs in the house nearly murdered a 2nd level party. For a house that has people moving through it on a regular basis there sure are a lot of giant killer bugs.

Asterite34 posted:

Well that brings up the hypothetical: What situations and kinds of stories lend themselves to the traditional RPG mold (a party of differently classed specialists overcoming challenges with discrete moves and skills and attributes) but which would usually involve no physical combat of any sort?

Leperflesh posted:

As we all know, roleplaying game combat originated from tabletop miniature wargames, Gygax's shadow still looms large, and while there are RPGs that don't use minis/grid, the "puzzle" part of combat generally still sticks to mechanisms familiar to wargamers: opposed abilities, chances to succeed or fail at attempts to hinder/injure/kill individuals or groups, maneuver, terrain and cover, morale, and so forth.

But there are tabletop and board games that aren't about combat. Why can't any of them serve as models for noncombat crunch? For example, a worker placement boardgame with lots of depth can serve as a structural model for any RPG subsystem in which limited resources and limited capacities for tasks are engaged with, and both cooperative and adversarial modes are available. Let's use the previous suggestion of cyber hacking; multiple hackers working from their terminals have limited attention or system resources to apply to multiple tasks, each of which can be saturated to a point where additional player resources can't be effectively applied; we model this by using worker-placement mechanics, and can add depth with complexities typical of such games - some tasks have more or fewer workers possible, some achievements give you more workers, some actively hinder your allies but roll dice that could give you a big boost, the situation may shift each round, etc.

One aspect of playing an RPG with crunchy combat rules that differentiates it from a typical boardgame or tabletop battle game is that the GM is there and they (and sometimes the players) are empowered to modify, ignore, add, or replace rules as needed, ad-hoc or formally, which permits players in theory to do things with their characters in a fight that the rules didn't anticipate. To borrow a boardgame mechanism like worker-placement and "RPGify" it, I think you'd want to incorporate that as well. So rather than pulling out a literal worker-placement board game to play your hacking RPG (and why would you do that rather than just... play that boardgame), give the GM the power to make referee calls. A player says "hey, the CEO of McCorp that we're hacking is also the governor of Megatexas, right? I want to hack social media and post fake news to smear him" and the rules don't say what to do here so the GM says "Ok let's add a new custom node you can place workers in called Smear Campaign where you direct resources to social media posts alleging dirty deeds by the CEO that have been covered up."

Without having given it a ton of thought it seems like adapting noncombat board games to mechanisms for nonviolent RPG systems with heavy crunch could be a fruitful avenue to pursue?

moths posted:

Almost no games are actually about violence - they're about violence as depicted in entertainment.

We're just accustomed to the non-action parts being handled off-screen because that's how it's been done as long as stories have been told. We don't conventionally wonder what to do with all these captured goblins because they're no longer relevant to the story after they've stopped being interesting.