Trad Games Chat: squabbled over drafts, forked, and disbanded

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Trad Games Chat: squabbled over drafts, forked, and disbanded

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

christ, i remember this article too but have no idea where to find it. the fact that it used magic cards as examples really makes me want to revisit it too to see if there was anything else shady going on

# ¿ Jun 20, 2021 08:18

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 03:05

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

hyphz posted:

According to the write-up in the preview, you're supposed to actively engage against your own character:

I think that's going to be a pretty tough sell to a player group.

is it? that's honestly the most appealing part of something like vampire (masquerade or requiem, either works) to me - you're playing a really just grotesque awful person and doing so like a stolen car, with every expectation to have a glorious crash and burn as part of overreaching some obscure scheme

# ¿ Nov 15, 2022 22:15

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

my perspective on wod is weird anyway because the best times i ever had playing wod were with a small-scale, short-run (10 session) series of vampire larps. the larger playerbase meant the setting felt more organic because nobody could tell whether any obstacles they encountered were the results of player action or game plot, and characters could be developed along with the GM team to have interesting details in a vacuum tied to other characters' issues, creating opportunities for factions, rivalries, etc. the overhead of having to make a new character after you died wasn't so bad either because you had a few weeks between games to do so, and the hard 10-game limit meant that even if you survived the whole duration you were probably staring down an orgy of bloodshed anyway as chickens came home to roost.

that said, even if i did conventional tabletop vampire with one gm and four players, I'd still lean into the buildup to a grand and tragic downfall because it's pretty much the text of vampire, even if the text text frames it in like, a poetic way and the reality of the game frames it in a grindhouse movie way. i would however not use the storyteller system, just the setting

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 01:36 on Nov 16, 2022

# ¿ Nov 16, 2022 01:34

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Xiahou Dun posted:

In anno loving domini 20-god drat 22, how did you really expect that to go.

Much like it does in most 5e dominated spaces, that narrative got passed down wholesale to the newer dnd players who weren�t around for 4e and they have no reason to not accept it

# ¿ Dec 22, 2022 03:01

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

hyphz posted:

One thing that surprised me recently was the attachment to 3e.

Yeah that�s what I�m talking about. Nobody actually PLAYS 3.5 but the 3.5 grogs are still out there, they just assimilated with either the OSR or 5e crowds

S.J. posted:

Imo PF2e felt almost nothing like 4e to me. Itemization felt like the primary way to build your character a lot of the time and 4e let me ignore that except in broad strokes very easily. Maybe I didn't sit with it enough though.

I think this is backwards in that 4e had way more impactful and build-defining items than PF2, but they�re still not remotely the same system. PF2 is much closer to a Paizo take on 5e with all that entails in terms of everything-is-feats

# ¿ Dec 22, 2022 05:27

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

I think the most defensible similarity between 4E and WoW is that 4E has role division (and that role division actually functions and preserves everyone's niche pretty well) which is an absolutely wild thing to complain about.

e: beaten, at that

wow did that worse than 4e still when 4e came out

# ¿ Dec 22, 2022 19:53

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

I could see it having been true in terms of tournament D&D, if something like tomb of horrors came out of that environment. It's just that that's nearly a lost subculture at this point

# ¿ Dec 30, 2022 23:33

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

mellonbread posted:

It doesn't. The filler combats are the worst part of Kingmaker. Because of the aforementioned resource expenditure issue, and because a lot are just more of the same - more bandits, more kobolds, just in a slightly different shaped room.

I need to read the original adventure module and check which battles are actually taken from the text, versus which ones were added by Owlcat. I increasingly suspect that the cool boss fights and ambushes with varied enemy composition were written by the original module authors, while all the "this room has four more trolls in it" fights were added by the CRPG designers.

from my experience with paizo modules it's probably the other way around. owlcat is pretty painstakingly faithful to paizo's design process in terms of how dungeons and quests are laid out, and where they deserve the credit as video game adapters is in expanding the story scenario and giving their unique twists on the big important bits.

a paizo dungeon kind of asks to be done OSR style, with exploration rounds and tracking time and wandering monster ecology, but the books themselves don't really aid you in that, and neither edition of pathfinder is particularly interested in the exploration-as-hazard playstyle

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 22:38 on Feb 5, 2023

# ¿ Feb 5, 2023 22:35

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

mellonbread posted:

I can only speak to the Pathfinder scenarios I've played, including the PFS version of only the first act of Kingmaker (the tradefort-to-Staglord arc). For all their flaws, they were very intentionally designed and did not waste the players' time with filler combat. There were definitely "popcorn" fights that didn't present much challenge, but that was because the players either happened to hard counter to one of the threats (eg a Gunslinger versus an enemy with poor touch AC) or carried a broad range of consumables as a matter of course that protected them from the most threatening monster abilities (antiplague, various forms of energy resistance, movement options, etc).

This may be a divide between Pathfinder Society scenarios (bite sized adventures combining investigation, diplomacy, puzzles, exploration and combat in a four hour package) and full adventure paths, which I haven't played any of.

my experience is exclusively in full adventure paths so yes that would be it. there are some paizo outings that are just... choked with the whole Kingmaker pattern of "here's a Goblin Hallway #3 out here with the next breadcrumb of exp/quest to do" that video game kingmaker has. extinction curse is the first big example which comes to mind that evoked the comparison with my group, lots of those bite-sized dungeons with a few encounters and when you're done with all of them, you move on to the bigger one

also, having read through the 2e version of kingmaker, i'm struck by the degree to which it's essentially a hexcrawl, just with some systems missing and other, different systems present. again, owlcat does a huge amount of heavy lifting in creating character motivations and reasons for plots to happen.

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Feb 6, 2023

# ¿ Feb 6, 2023 06:17

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

anything adjacent to owod and its thoughts on the various peoples of the world is very much not good, i can say that without even looking at how it treats snakes.

especially because it's going to be werewolf-adjacent and therefore extremely race sciency

# ¿ Feb 27, 2023 21:55

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

ninjoatse.cx posted:

Has anyone ever played a game of Root against experienced players as cats and won?

With or without vagabond/otters/lizards? In terms of base game, vagabond fucks everything up because there's no actual points incentive to spend your turns beating it down beyond "don't let the vagabond win," as opposed to fighting the other factions which do give points for beating them up. Otters have a similar problem and lizards have the opposite where they'll just be randomly unable to work towards points based on card stuff

# ¿ Mar 3, 2023 02:05

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

alignment memes are great though. if everyone forgot about alignment charts overnight we'd lose the landerig joke and the sandwich categories. unforgivable

# ¿ Apr 26, 2023 22:26

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

if it's a big enough server it's also good for clearing people out

# ¿ Jun 9, 2023 05:26

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

(world ninja war jiraiya (1988), episode 25)

# ¿ Jun 16, 2023 03:51

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

yes, in academia, i.e. the powerless ones without venture capital

# ¿ Sep 30, 2023 19:17

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

should have let them die, told them they won, and they continue as the mirror party, deeply concerned about their reality

# ¿ Nov 6, 2023 06:58

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

13th age has too much dnd cruft to warrant inclusion here. i don't think anything that has six ability scores, a fighter, wizard, and thief is going to encourage them to break out of that mindset.

I think the list is missing examples from japanese trpgs, which are generally very comfortable with episodic play and leaving things open. double cross? shinobigami? dracurouge?

# ¿ Dec 11, 2023 04:27

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

everdell asks that you determine start player by who is the most humble, which i think is self-defeating

# ¿ Dec 18, 2023 19:22

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

that feels weird, because the 3-18 range seems pretty much designed for the roll-under type skill checks, right? so that even at your best you have a slim failure chance, and vice versa

# ¿ Dec 28, 2023 05:24

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

the forebears have achieved levels of posting that we can only look at in faint awe

# ¿ Dec 28, 2023 07:07

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

thank you for bringing up the source of the first few issues of dragon. these ridiculous things are worth hours of entertainment

# ¿ Dec 28, 2023 09:05

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Silver2195 posted:

Ah, a mecha game in the sense that it has giant robot fights, not in the sense that it has masked antiheroes and idealistic princesses and so forth.

Now I�m wondering if there�s a mecha game that does lean into those kinds of tropes. I assume someone has made one, although most of the mecha RPGs I�m familiar with seem to draw on Evangelion rather than Gundam for some reason (often with rather tasteless results).

Firebrands

# ¿ Dec 29, 2023 21:31

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

The thing about a gundam rpg is that actual piloting skill or the advanced technology of the robot can't be a factor in conflict resolution. Piloting skill is a character trait, weapons development is a setting detail, but the question of who wins this fight in Gundam is 100% always answered by "which of the participants is the more self-actualized as a person and confident in their ideology?"

# ¿ Dec 29, 2023 21:35

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Because Amuro grew as a person, he could kill Ramba. More recent character development = more effectiveness, except in the case of blatant death-flag type character development

# ¿ Dec 29, 2023 21:49

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Colonel Cool posted:

I can't tell if this whole current conversation is a dry meta joke or not.

ferrinus is a gimmick poster, it's like arguing with video game quotes or lottery of babylon

# ¿ Dec 29, 2023 23:35

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Lancer's inspirations are iirc Armored Core (before it was cool again), Titanfall, definitely not a small amount of Gundam, and oddly enough pretty clearly Star Trek, with super-future 3D printers basically functioning as replicators and an interstellar superpower that's pretty much the Federation, complete with a near-religious devotion to egalitarianism and alleviation of poverty and slavery. (Though as a relatively recent change from a former regime that was more Starship Troopers slash borderline Warhammer 40k) Definitely some Marathon too particularly with the treatment of AIs. And some HORUS mechs definitely get rather EVA.

There are some rules and Talents representing psychic abilities and calling up your foes to monologue and/or poo poo-talk to them. Though overall it's more its own thing, one thing that stands out to me is the emphasis on electronic warfare, drones and hacking that's proved eerily prescient as to where modern warfare ended up going.

tom lancerman is on record as only having played armored core and seen evangelion before doing lancer, in terms of proper "robot anime" genre. if there were gundam influence it'd be much more visible. 40k is clearly there tho

# ¿ Dec 30, 2023 00:24

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

yeah i'm talking 100% about the setting, lore, general attitude of the thing towards the idea of giant robot fights, rather than visually

# ¿ Dec 30, 2023 02:15

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Jimbozig posted:

In my game this week, I had the characters answering riddles and I needed a way to handle it mechanically. I didn't want to have riddles that had a specific solution because then the players would have to figure it out and the characters wouldn't matter. Or if the characters just roll well then I tell them the answer, which doesn't give any of the fun of trying to solve a riddle to the players.

So instead, I made up poo poo that sounded like riddles with no particular solution in mind. (E.g. "what has 3 heads, 2 hands, and 1 foot?") Then the players came up with ideas and suggested them. Then, they would roll on appropriate skill (depending on what their answer was) and if they succeeded, that was the correct answer. If they failed then I would give my best answer that I had come up with while they were debating. If their answer was very good, I would give them advantage on the roll as well, so there was good incentive to try come up with a plausible answer.

It worked out so well. The players were really good at coming up with plausible answers to my obscure bullshit. My favorite was when I asked:

I gain in value as I age. I lose value when wet. I am most valuable when burnt. What am I?

The players thought for a while and came up with a whiskey barrel, because they char them to improve the whiskey. That's a great answer! So I gave them advantage and they rolled a pair of 2s: a failure.

So even though their answer was way better than mine, the sphinx asking the riddles had to reply "No. The correct answer was a property with fire insurance but no flood insurance," which left the characters very much bemused.

Anyway, I highly recommend that method. The players get to have the fun of solving riddles, but the characters' skills are what determine in the end how well they do, so even if you suck at riddles, your character can pull you through. Plus, coming up with inscrutable bullshit is just fun as the GM.

i threw this one at players today and they said "a dry-aged steak"

# ¿ Jan 16, 2024 06:03

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Leperflesh posted:

SPHINX: "I gain in value as I age. I lose value when wet. I am most valuable when burnt. What am I?"
VALDUBOR THE BRAVE: "...oh! A Sphinx!"
SPHINX: "Hmm. OK, I agree on valuing as I age, and I do hate getting wet. But how am I most valuable when burnt? That makes no sense!"
VALDUBOR THE BRAVE: <I cast Fireball!>

The Sphinx: "Fish want me. Women fear me. What am I?"

# ¿ Jan 16, 2024 21:57

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

That�s saved for the tonberry class

# ¿ Mar 13, 2024 19:20

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

DalaranJ posted:

I�m het up about some unrelated stuff, so I�ll try to be as charitable as possible here.

For someone whose conclusions I largely agree with, I must say, I�ve never been so irritated by a person�s tone before.

based on their website in the twitter profile (and the ideas in the thread itself), this is an OSR person so if you think some takes are weird, they're probably coming from that particular perspective

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 21:40 on Mar 18, 2024

# ¿ Mar 18, 2024 21:28

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Druids are a build-your-own class. You have three specialty points to spend between offensive magic, healing, animal companions, and animal shaping. Max of two points in any one specialty. It's VERY easy to make a weak druid that doesn't contribute to anything at full-strength comparative to other classes in their respective specialties.

Monk is definitely the most complicated class in the game. It's very analogous to FF14's concept of monk, where you're in a stance at any given point, and you have several abilities that can be used in that stance, and using any of those will move you to the next stance in line, locking and unlocking available abilities. It's very strong but easy to choose a bad set of forms. I also wouldn't say it's necessarily more complicated than, say, a bunch of classes in PF2, let alone most classes in 4e. But that's also a matter of those games having way more build options and "pre-game" strategy.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2024 00:20

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

as the above few posts demonstrate, the worst thing most people think of 13A is that it has too many old dnd standbys that don't need to be there. the reason for the loud hate is that those are mostly tweet's fault, he says so in the sidebars, and he was going to not be on 2e which gave people hope then suddenly he got brought on board

# ¿ Mar 25, 2024 02:57

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

Gatto Grigio posted:

I sort of understand, but it seems a shame to make a module about a prewritten story without allowing players at their table to diverge wildly from the narrative.

Welcome to rpg writing circa 1985-2016 or whenever it finally takes people to give up on the idea of metaplot. Would you like a wod or l5r followup

# ¿ Apr 8, 2024 14:49

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

The video game reference point for isekai/litrpg is primarily old school mmos, anything from MUDs to ff11. Games that were insufficiently documented and had regular updates changing the world, where it�s feasible someone could figure out a new gamebreaking strategy and keep it mostly to themselves.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 03:55

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

after recently finishing running Abomination Vaults I had the thought that the dungeon itself would be fairly well-served by a touch more OSR style play than pathfinder 2e is really capable of. the book even seems to want to push you there at points, but paizo is generally allergic to committing hard to GM advice or plot hooks

# ¿ May 9, 2024 18:31

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 03:05

Mister Olympus: Oct 31, 2011; Buzzard, Who Steals From Dead Bodies

the difficulty of vaults is a bit overhyped, i found, and mostly due to people coming in with more 5e based expectations in terms of how much strategy the system wants you to use. as long as you have a coherent fight specific gameplan most encounters in vaults aren't really that nasty.

the real problem is that because of the separate books structure, and the overall house style for paizo's setting writing, you have to do a lot of legwork in terms of logically connecting stuff that happens around and between dungeon levels, or properly foreshadowing some stuff the game really wants to be impactful.

this applies to their setting books too, where there'll be a lot of plot hooks laid but no suggestions on motives or overall plans for the presented characters because they want every gm to fill in all the background themselves, rather than commit to crafting an interesting plot. it's frustrating because in my view, the use of things like modules and setting books is to be given more of a baseline to work from if you yourself don't have any ideas.

like ok here's an example. in extinction curse, the transition from book 4 to book 5 is that you go where the next plot item is supposed to be, and the druids there tell you "nope. no idea where it is. never had any idea. maybe you should just look in the underdark for the deactivated sixth orb instead." and the adventure makes a point that they're being super suspicious, hiding something, trying to get the players away, etc.

the answer to what they're hiding is that the head druid took the orb away from its place years ago, and planted it down in another city to make a huge tree grow. the remaining druids are here because they disagreed with her, but still refuse to answer where the orb is unless the players scare the information out of them.

this isn't a fork in the plot, though, as the module simply continues on regardless as if the players took the suggestion to go into the underdark. the module does not present anything about the fact that there's a whole other mcguffin out there they could easily use that doesn't require crossing a radioactive desert cave.

in the setting book for absalom, the other half of this plot is mentioned when it details the dryad queen who moved the orb there and used it to grow that big tree. it only says "yeah she did this" and doesn't give any indication of why she did it, what purpose it may serve, how she might respond to adventurers coming along and saying "hey we need this orb to save the world," etc. just like, hey, this is there for some reason, people don't want to talk about it for some reason, and something unclear is being done with it. just the absolute bare minimum of writing.

Mister Olympus fucked around with this message at 20:18 on May 9, 2024

# ¿ May 9, 2024 20:10

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > Trad Games Chat: squabbled over drafts, forked, and disbanded