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Nemesis Of Moles posted:It sometimes feels like the role itself needs to be meaningfully examined and played with a bit beyond the current steps forward of distributing GM duties to others at the table. Even that feels to me like admitting there's one person at the table who is doing "work", even if that work is often fun and enriching and good. I can name a handful of games that give the GM a new and interesting set of mechanics and ideas to play with, but basically every system tends to be about giving one side of the table a bunch of interesting and new tools to create new and interesting experiences, then telling one player to just do the same thing they always do but maybe with a different form they have to fill out before play I don't think this is true. PbtA and related design has done a lot to liberalize GMing by making it much more hands on and direct while also being less work - the moves go both ways and enrich both players and the GM. The same players who are intimidated by playing in splatbook-heavy D&D-alikes are also very much better at GMing PbtA, because they don't have to do so much work and it also makes their existing tools and knowledge useable behind the screen. I ran Monster of the Week for awhile and I did okay at it, but I'm not good at GMing PbtA - I like doing way more scenario prep and worldbuilding and actually running the game feels like slowly drowning in quick sand to me. But a completely new player took to the game like a duck to water - first as a player, but then he stepped up as GM for a session and he was much better at getting it immediately than I was. When the game petered out, I gave him the rulebook I'd bought - he was obviously going to get more out of it than I ever was, and its tools enabled him to tell his own stories in different ways and means than I do with a copy of the DMG.
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Jan 5, 2021 04:59
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aldantefax posted:Also, I need some appropriate music for both Sword World and just generic fantasy tunes in the classical music space in general. Suggestions? the soundtracks for baldur's gate/neverwinter nights/etc were on discount as part of the steam sale
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Jan 6, 2021 01:06
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dwarf74 posted:Yeah who the hell nominated me and can I make them my first probe? I literally gave one of these to my sister to go in her copy of frozen 2 monopoly, I'm pretty sure it's worth more than the actual game.
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Jan 8, 2021 03:38
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hyphz posted:I should clarify that I don't mean the entire game. Like, Go has a ton of cases where "if you have a stone in position X,Y and nothing is nearby, and you place a stone in position X+2, Y+1, then any attempt by your opponent to capture that stone in that situation is hopeless because all possible combinations of moves have been analyzed in the past and all have winning responses for you". So it's really easy to play into those as a beginner. But at the same time, the experienced player can't really say "you can't capture this stone" directly because if another one of the newbie's stones ends up in a particular place 4 or 5 spaces away then the situation changes. So the newbie spends a lot of time playing out doomed established sequences. so don't take Toughness
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Jan 12, 2021 22:47
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Maxwell Lord posted:KDM? Key delivery messages? Kingdom Death: Monster, a boardgame with incredibly high quality super detailed miniatures. The only reason I wouldn’t call it borderline porn is because they sell literal porn expansions and options tagged as “pin-ups”, which are frequently explicit instead of the soft core meaning of that name.
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Jan 25, 2021 04:32
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Rand Brittain posted:Extremely confused by the idea that Nobilis is "intentionally obfuscated." idk, the layout for 2e is basically a training program to go permanently cross-eyed
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Jan 27, 2021 20:54
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Plutonis posted:lol they made saltybet for 5E they is cool goon otspIII!
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Jan 29, 2021 19:08
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Chakan posted:The math just works out poorly for GMs for hire in most places, I think. A few years ago there was a news article about a guy that did it in Toronto and his price was like $100 a session, which just isn’t enough after paying taxes for most people to live off of if they do 5 sessions a week. It’s above minimum wage in the US, but that’s not exactly a high bar. Yeah I think the Storm Crow in Toronto makes it work by making the GMs their employees, then charging the players a cover and actually making money off of food and beverages
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Jan 30, 2021 22:22
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I miss playing in person, as easy as playing online is for some things the personal/meatspace connection is really meaningful and important still.
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Feb 18, 2021 17:28
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Dawgstar posted:I got in my Sentinel Comics RPG hardcover! It should be eight, sounds like you got a misbound signature.
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Feb 18, 2021 21:03
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JacquelineDempsey posted:Fair 'nough; I don't know the distinction between a campaign vs an... encounter, I guess? (As I said, I've never actually been in a D&D game, just liked to pore over the Monster Manuals, Deities and Demigods, etc. as a kid) I just never could figure out how you'd have a story with an armor-plated knight fighting anything other than, say, a triton or sea lion while they were on a ship or close to land. Y'know, fending off some beastie that occasionally rises to the surface. If you like reading lots of D&D rules and ideas, there's a dedicated Pathfinder book about underwater adventures and campaigns: https://paizo.com/products/btpy9q00?Pathfinder-Campaign-Setting-Aquatic-Adventures That's bringing you down another rabbit hole of a pile of rules and ideas, but if you like reading that stuff Pathfinder will keep you busy for a long, long while.
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Feb 25, 2021 23:53
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Elector_Nerdlingen posted:I have spent years trying to break my one D&D-only-for-two-decades friend out of the "never ever expend a resource for any reason" mindset. Maybe D&D really does give you brain damage.
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Mar 1, 2021 00:46
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SkyeAuroline posted:Didn't get my start with D&D, still understand the "trying to plan in advance despite having flashback tools available" approach - working with flashback mechanics and the like to "retroactively" solve problems is still a pretty alien mindset to get into and I've never been a fan of any implementation for it. While it's not how the system is intended to work and negatively affects the gameplay experience, familiar with people trying to advance-plan Blades in the Dark and the like more than it's designed for, and understand the mindset. It’s a reference to an infamously terrible essay about game design instead of a substantiative point.
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Mar 1, 2021 03:08
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CitizenKeen posted:My four year old kid loves my 5th Edition Monster Manual. He's memorized it. The baby bestiaries that came out awhile back would be appropriate/fun/cute. Maybe Volo's Guide to Monsters?
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Mar 2, 2021 22:11
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canyoneer posted:https://www.amazon.com/Fantastic-Beasts-Where-Find-Them/dp/1338216791 or you could not give arguably the transphobe with the biggest platform in the world any money, so don't do that and don't buy it
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Mar 3, 2021 00:32
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Oh, it's still WotC but they've produced like pop up art books for kids like Dungeonology.
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Mar 3, 2021 01:03
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Absurd Alhazred posted:When did Hans Landa get an account? September 11, 2001.
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Mar 18, 2021 18:20
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Epi Lepi posted:I have a Foundry question, hope someone can give me some guidance. Yes, yes, and yes. You can upload your existing world file to the Forge - you may have to do some manipulation to get the data arranged correctly/working with addons, but it can be done. It's easy to set up and get going. You can assign your friend as a GM inside the Foundry instance, same as you can if you were hosting it yourself.
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Mar 24, 2021 22:44
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Mycroft Holmes posted:Weird question: Is there a RPG where each player controls a squad instead of a single character? That's how the DCC (Dungeon Crawl Classics) funnel works - you generate about 4 peasants per player, and then use them collectively as a group to take on the first adventure. The survivors become 1st-level PCs and are played singly thereafter. The funnel has been used in other games too, like Lair of the Lamb for the GLOG.
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Mar 28, 2021 01:38
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SkyeAuroline posted:Honestly Google's dice roller in the browser search does just fine for simple rolling if you only need it locally. Though that's not a widget, it may be a solution that happens to take no local storage or anything else. i'm like half surprised google has an integrated dice roller and half not because of course they have random nerd poo poo in there too
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May 10, 2021 17:00
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UnCO3 posted:Likewise all my paid stuff is 10% off (basically passing the savings on to anyone who buys them)! Thanks you two - picked up some stuff that looked good from potatocubed and all those cool typefaces you're making for game poo poo UnCO3.
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May 14, 2021 20:18
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JMBosch posted:Anyone have strong feelings about large roll tables and how they should be designed? I'm trying to finish a "one roll" table for generating a god and then make another to create a cult that worships them. I like the flavor that tables with really specific results can give, but I thought something with more generalized categories as results would allow for a longer shelf-life and more variety from similar results. But as I'm getting closer to finishing the first table, the results kind of feel really generic in a way that's kind of deflating and still tough to create specific details out of. I can't really speak to the whole new school versus old school thing, frankly idk how good your average "modern" player is at using tables in an oracular fashion. What I CAN tell you that's immediately obvious is that your structure - this set of "roll exactly this set of dice and then interpret that one roll and no more" - is handicapping you. You're having trouble filling the tables, which tells me you're stuck for ideas to fill the structure you came up with first, and it also makes your language unclear. (Am I rolling for the deity's form? Or is that what it has a domain over?) I'd break it out - just have separate tables, and you can roll on any or all of these until your deity makes sense. It's okay to have alternative ideas (ie: you can roll on any one of these three tables for its domain), and often I find having discrete rolls actually helps me get an idea of what the tables are helping me create, as it's kind of a multiple passes to get the idea across and play with it in my head. If it's separate rolls, it's also much easier to reroll results that don't make sense, which is an important part of any oracular table IMO.
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May 19, 2021 22:27
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Halloween Jack posted:I don't think the "nega-dungeon" is actually a coherent concept beyond LotFP justifying itself. It has applicability outside of LotFP, since it’s describing a particularly Lovecraftian approach to a dungeon (where winning is arguably worse than dying.) It also applies to Black Sun Deathcrawl and hell even some FR dungeons.
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May 26, 2021 15:27
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Halloween Jack posted:Black Sun Deathcrawl is an interesting curiosity but like...LOL at the authors talking in interviews about how they were inspired by Ligotti. Like they just made a ludicrously grimdark scenario where everything dies. (The best part is the recurring villain traveling backwards through time.) I can't wait for the OSR to fully grow out of sketching death metal album covers on its notebook in class. Does it really need to? Can't we just have cool RPGs about fun crazy things such as death metal? I want to see more stuff like Mork Borg - we can have extreme metal RPGs that are fun and interesting and evocative without the racism or misogyny of LotFP.
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May 26, 2021 16:10
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I just learned about the American Indian ghost dance. Doesn’t Deadlands turn that into something gameable? That’s loving horrifying jfc.
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May 27, 2021 00:05
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CitizenKeen posted:What are some role playing games with good, board gamey mini games that aren't combat? Shardix's mentality is similar to my own, but also, for most games, combat is the part that's the crunchy, interactive, gamey part. Which is the part I want. 3e, because the biggest chapters are spells! In all honesty, I'd look at Pathfinder 2e, which has really strong involved skill rules and subsystems built off of them. This is the big subsystems chapter http://2e.aonprd.com/Rules.aspx?ID=1187
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May 29, 2021 19:54
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Haystack posted:Are there any RPGs that use mechanics that are more typically associated with board games? Check this out for a really fun combination of the two http://tenfootpolemic.blogspot.com/2017/05/flee-snakes-ladders-chase-mechanics.html
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May 29, 2021 20:48
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Bumper Stickup posted:Hey does anyone have any experience with mongooses Paranoia series? Trying to get a more in depth answer to what differentiates regular Paranoia and Acute Paranoia. Like I know that you can blay as bots but are there any mechanical/rules/etc differences or is it just an expansion? PARANOIA reached its peak with the mid-2000s revamp and the various new editions from Mongoose since then have been worse and worse. Just buy this PDF https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/1937/Paranoia-Service-Pack-1?filters=0_0_10122_0_0 (also called PARANOIA XP) and print off whatever pages you want, it's all in black and white. Rules don't matter in PARANOIA. Rules really don't matter in PARANOIA.
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Jun 2, 2021 19:20
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Ghost Leviathan posted:Discussions about Paranoia tend to turn into impromptu games of it for a reason, I think one of the books itself specifically says Alpha Complex is more of a frame of mind than a setting. The problem with PbtA for PARANOIA is that it requires clear playbooks and moves, so the GM couldn't gently caress with the players nearly as much.
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Jun 2, 2021 19:33
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Bumper Stickup posted:I had no idea there was a white box. I was talking about this vs this. Acute looks like a supplement to the Starter Set, but seriously you should just buy XP Service Pack 1, it's going to be wayyyyyyyyyyyy better.
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Jun 2, 2021 19:44
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Halloween Jack posted:I was gonna say, FR seems to be the classic example of a vast setting where almost everything published for it concerns the Northwestern coast of one continent. That’s everything in 5e, but definitely not the case overall. What makes figuring out population density harder for the FR is that there’s actually two sets of numbers - 3e cut the listed populations by up to 9/10ths, which makes comparing numbers between different editions’ sources quite difficult. However, one thing that the FR (at least pre-4e and all this goes out the window after that) makes quite clear is that there are a lot of settlements and people NOT explicitly labeled on the map. Any town or larger is surrounded by farming villages, homesteads, and so on. There’s plenty of settlements to make the numbers make more sense, which makes the 3e numbers a bit easier to work with, as there’s general demographic systems in the 3e FRCS. 180 miles sounds very very wrong to me for the distance between Waterdeep and Daggerford, but I’ll have to pull out some maps to check.
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Jun 5, 2021 03:30
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Okay, let me see about distances first, specifically the distance between Waterdeep and Daggerford. 2e The North poster map: directly measured by hand, it's 4 inches aka 120 miles. This is a direct line between the two, the Trade Way curves out a bit. 3e FRCS page map of the North: directly measured by hand, it's 1 3/8ths of an inch, aka 110 miles. (Note this map has an incorrect scale in the first printing.) The 3e maps were changed significantly, this doesn't surprise me. 5e map of the Sword Coast from Laeral Silverhand's Adventuring Kit: directly measured by hand, 1 and 3/16ths of an inch, aka 115 miles. So between the three, they're all relatively similar and work fine. Population: Cyclopedia of the Realms and A Grand Tour of The Realms (so the 1e and 2e campaign setting box sets) note over 100,000 people in Waterdeep. Waterdeep: City of Splendors (the 2e box set) notes 122,000, and that it can swell to up to 600,000 during holidays, with the season, trade and so on. The 3e FRCS notes the City itself as having 132,661 (a 1,347,840 population is for the area of the whole city state extending 30 or 40 miles beyond the city's walls). City of Splendors: Waterdeep matches the 3e FRCS city figures, noting it expands to x5 in spring and summer. So for the actual city, you have a total of 120,000-130,000 over about three decades, when the Realms is comparatively equal to the early Renaissance. Waterdeep is the major cosmopolitan and trading city of Faerun, so it's definitely comparable to the Italian trading city-states of the real world: Wikipedia tells me Venice was over 100,000 and up to 170,000 during the medieval and renaissance periods. It matches pretty well. The seasonal swelling of Waterdeep makes sense in setting - it is THE single major port (the only other competitors being Luskan, which is not safe to ship through, and Neverwinter, which is geographically remote and does not have Waterdeep's harborage) for the incredible natural resources of the North, and the economic details we have about the North describe rushes of economic activity to try and ship goods of all kinds to and through Waterdeep as soon as the frosts fade. At this point, you can begin sending stuff south down the Dessarin to Waterdeep, and it takes another month for the roads to become solid instead of mud. In other words, the city is so large because it is the single focus point for incredible amounts of trade and exported resources across the continent. Not completely realistic? Sure, but it makes for excellent gameplay, and isn't that what we want a D&D setting to actually do? e: looking at your project closer, you used the 4e map which is Just Bad, basically someone just scribbling on the 3e map with a bunch of photoshop brushes. It's not an effective way to compare the entire setting. Arivia fucked around with this message at 04:28 on Jun 5, 2021 |
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Jun 5, 2021 04:13
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KingKalamari posted:Why are you putting so much effort into verifying the distance? I just looked at a hexmap of Faerun before I posted,. noticed Waterdeep was 2-3 60 mile hexes away from Daggerford and rounded up to the nearest hex. The total distance doesn't even really matter as my point was that the other nearest city on the map has an incredibly lower population. But that's the whole point - you're spreading gross misinformation, and it sucks to have people making poorly informed value judgments like you were? Like, you went "well these demographics make no sense and it sucks" off of a distance number that you (without telling anyone) made a guess at off of a hex map (and there aren't any official hex maps of this area, period) and compared two incomparable population numbers without any understanding of any underlying relationships. It's okay to say you don't like a thing! But you were posting numbers as if you had discovered concrete information and made educated critique on the basis of those numbers, when both your numbers AND your criticism was incorrect. So the setting's population distribution isn't unrealistic: you just didn't know how it worked, and hadn't researched it adequately.
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Jun 5, 2021 05:11
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FMguru posted:From the 1988 boxed supplement Glorantha - Genertela: Crucible of the Hero Wars Here's the similar comparative map from the 1e Forgotten Realms Campaign Set: 
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Jun 5, 2021 05:25
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KingKalamari posted:Oh no, the bureau of academic ethics in Elf-Games is going to disbar me. If you're trying to make a critical argument, it helps everyone to make it clearly and from a well-informed basis. I'm not being academic, I'm responding with the same rigor as is usual for the forum? I looked up the distances because 180 miles felt off to me. The various maps I used are from different editions; I didn't know what you were going of off, so I checked what was reasonable (aka what I have at hand readily) just in case it was different between the various projections. You just confessed to using a fan made hex map and you interpreted it very broadly, so I was right to double-check your measurements. Then, you're saying you've checked a source (the FR wiki) that can often be missing information or incorrect. You used a general figure and made a gross comparison without making any effort to understand the underlying demographics that you were critiquing! You may not have a lot of experience making critical statements, so maybe you thought you were coming off as making an estimate or being less certain than you actually did. But what you actually did - providing no sources nor supporting details, and not making an actual critical argument but instead taking two disparate pieces of information - isn't actually informing anyone, nor does it come off as a guess. Your wording portrayed you as attempting to make a critical statement and advance an argument that you couldn't support. So I've gone into such detail and done the work to try and check all the corners of the actual issue you suggested, exhaustively disproving it from all the angles to make it clear that your original statements were incorrect. I'm not trying to style on you, but I am trying to show others reading this that you are incorrect so they won't repeat your incorrect statements elsewhere. I'm trying to fix the mistakes you made as part of this discussion. If you'd made a better statement in the first place, this would be easier to do, and I wouldn't need to do so much work that you seem to think is showboating. But I respect that you may be coming from a place where you don't know how you came off, or what you were actually saying. I'm not mad at you, or trying to make you feel bad, but I did this to correct the (guileless) faults you've made. Hopefully this explains where I'm coming from.
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Jun 5, 2021 06:01
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Time Team was loving fantastic and I miss it so, so much.
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Jun 5, 2021 07:15
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KingKalamari posted:I don't feel like I need to apologize for getting miffed at someone making an incredibly condescending "WELL ACKSHULLY..." reply to an offhanded statement I made. If this happens all the time when Arivia makes FR loreposts, maybe there's a problem with the way they're presenting this information in conversations that other people are finding off-putting. This is all I will say on the matter as I have been consciously trying to drop the subject for awhile now. I didn’t say “Well actually” or anything of the sort. I read your post and went “hmm, that feels wrong to me” and busted out a bunch of maps and books to verify what felt off. I posted my findings in a clearly stated manner to add to the discussion. Then you lost your poo poo about being corrected. Don’t blame me for whatever you read into what was a positive contribution to the discussion. My presentation was fine, you got your back up for some reason and I don’t know why, nor am I responsible for it. I’ve been trying to let this go, but I refuse to let you paint me as an aggressor when I was trying to help you in a very neutral, approachable tone.
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Jun 5, 2021 17:14
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Imagined posted:One thing I had to learn as a GM is that it's totally ok to admit that you need a second to recalibrate or come up with what happens next. It's easy to put a silly amount of pressure on yourself to never be caught flat-footed, to always know what happens next. Nah. Give yourself permission to say, "Ooh let's take a smoke break here while I think about where we're going." It's also okay to be like "yes, that is a plot hole and I am just one person who made this up by myself, please ignore it and just play along." (if it's something like why didn't the guards see the murderer, this wouldn't be great for saying no to player actions)
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Jun 5, 2021 19:13
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UnCO3 posted:
i appreciate the updates but i also want it to slow down because there's a new one every week it feels like so I'm always running to catch up!
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Jun 9, 2021 20:36
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UnCO3 posted:
Haha, I'm just teasing you. It's a great project, I'm really happy you're putting so much hard work in to make it so accessible and useful, and I'm plugging it wherever I can.
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Jun 10, 2021 04:34
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If it helps, the next update (v1.5, end of this month or early next) is gonna be the last for a while besides bugfixes and translations, maybe even the last v1 update period. I'm getting to the end of my list of ideas for new features and getting to the point where it'd be better to do a major overhaul, and I wanna take a long break before releasing that kinda thing.