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Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Halloween Jack posted:


It compares unfavourably with Unknown Armies, which also seems very unwieldy because of its themes and the fact that every PC is a lunatic.

Every adept is a lunatic. Avatars have behavioral restrictions but don't necessarily have psychological problems, and "the person with no supernatural skills but with the general ability to act rationally and navigate mainstream society" is a valuable part of every UA PC group. (I've always wanted to run or play the Tuxedo Squadron campaign idea from the 2E book, where the concept is that the PCs are a group of stage magicians who investigated "real magic," decided they wanted no part of it, but are now embroiled in the Occult Underground, where their primary strength is having their wits about them and not having all the baggage that comes with the Real Mojo.)

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Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give


This has one hell of a one-star review:

quote:

Forcing players to mutilate themselves is what killed my campaign, bad module.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Lurdiak posted:

So a friend of mine is wondering about how to mechanically represent a disability in Dungeons and Dragons 5e without being offensive. Here's the setup:


Despite the silly premise they don't want it to be demeaning to anyone and are wondering what the best way to mechanically express it would be, and if their character should have a wheelchair at the ready as well, etc. Any input you have is welcome!

My first thought here, ignoring the disability representation, is that it feels weird that the character has a body slave -- does the player functionally have two PCs, or is the goliath just there as a prop? I'd be inclined to give the halfling some kind of non-sapient mobility aid, personally. (Maybe they saved the life of a goliath artificer who set them up with a cool magic wheelchair/prosthesis and can serve as a contact for the party?)

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I once roleplayed an alien superhero who, when granted a human form to integrate with Earth locals, immediately used it to eat too many corn dogs and had to go back to base to lie down and try not to puke. This is a scene I remember pretty fondly. The disease is clearly already inside me.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Asterite34 posted:

An idea to synergise two thread conversation topics at once: Dying Earth genre dinosaur game, set in the Last Days of the Cretaceous

If you want to add some relevent scifi weirdness, have two competing factions of time travellers, future humans and David Icke esque Reptilians from mutually exclusive futures, in a struggle to determine whether reptiles or mammals come out on top of the coming mass extinction

Alternately, a post-apoc game set directly post-extinction, where the last remnants of sapient dinosaur civilization try to survive and build a society that can endure the oncoming paradigm shifts. (Basically just the backstory of Anonymous Rex, but wouldn't it be fun to play?)

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I also assume that a lot of those meatgrinder OSR modules are written primarily for reading and maybe for scavenging a few bits, with usability at the table a distant secondary goal. A Wizard is very clever, and I found it fun to read, but it doesn't seem like it'd be remotely fun to actually play.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

LatwPIAT posted:

That's her. Bald ladies with lip piercings and literally everyone with nipple piercings.

God, the loving nipple piercings. I once pulled out my copy of 1E Games of Divinity just to illustrate to my largely Exalted-ignorant partner that, yes, every humanoid demon in the Malfeas section has nipple piercings and it's incredibly off-putting -- maybe less so if it's just the artist's kink rather than an actual art-design decision, but still, ugh.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I still don't know what "Sword of Swallowed Darkness" as the title of a "joke" porn supplement is supposed to mean. Dick docking?

Also, the thing that always sticks in my mind about the Savant & Sorcerer cover is the loving eyehooks on the lingerie, like she bought it at Home Depot Intimates

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I would like to know more about The Trang

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I received my Thousand Year Old Vampire Companion Volume today, and... wow. I think I should maybe feel ripped off, but dropping 45 bucks on a beautifully-produced book with literally no content feels like the apex of my Beautiful Roleplaying Object collection.

At this point, I mostly want to know the story. Was this a production gently caress-up that Hutchings is now trying to unload, or is this a deliberate art project?

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

That Old Tree posted:

I'm not sure I ever even played it. I think I was the only one in my school that owned any of it, and I only owned enough for one player.
I think this was everyone who tried to get into niche CCGs as a kid. So many games I owned that I definitely never played, or played twice at a meetup at the university commons (that I probably shouldn't have been at because I was like 12). Any game that two people both had decks for got a poo poo-ton of play by default, which is why I got really into Spellfire -- another friend also had decks! We could play it! It was super-bad!!

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I have a friend who's making his game-store dreams work (at least, he's had his storefront open for several years and seems to be doing okay, without much or any family seed money). The key for him was having a lot of retail experience and actually treating the place as a business, not as a personal hangout zone. The fact that it's the only comic/game store in the region not run by an old guy who will start unprompted political arguments with customers also seems to help.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Flashing back to early Spellfire and how the photo-illustrated cards were the super-rares and thus "special"

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I think that may be because "The Game" is a diegetic term in the Highlander universe, iirc? So there's a lowercase-g game (the CCG) emulating the in-universe capital-G Game (immortals beheading each other).

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

hyphz posted:

So, Meguey and Vincent Baker's new game, Under Hollow Hills just dropped to backers. And it has a rather unusual rule.

Inside the "communication and consent" section, which normally deals with the X-Card, is a rule stating: Players may fudge dice rolls.

When asked about this on Discord, the response was (paraphrased): It's to deal with the situation where something you'd X-card is going to happen, but your PC has the chance to stop it if a roll succeeds. If you X-card before the roll, it breaks up play and might not even be necessary. If you X-card after failing the roll, ditto, plus the situation has to be retconned. This bit's a quote: "What [you] really need is just to roll a hit and it's no big deal."

Does this seem reasonable in the light of the more collaborative narrative style? Or does it - as some commented - conflict with the rule that "if failure wouldn't be interesting don't roll the dice"?

The vibe this gives me is that it allows the player to use the X-card to indicate that the consequences of a failed roll are uncomfortable for them above and beyond just the standard consequences of failure, maybe as an emergent thing -- "hey, I didn't realize this before I rolled, but I honestly can't deal with (bad thing) happening, so can we make it not happen?" That strikes me as a reasonable tool if it's being used in good faith. I think my first instinct as a GM would be to say "okay, so, what consequence can we have here that isn't going to hit a nerve?," but if the easiest option is to just let the character succeed instead, why not? Creating a story and experience that's fun for everyone is the most important thing, not the sanctity of a single die roll.

(The obvious caveat, of course, is good faith: that the person using the X-card isn't doing it on every roll because they can't deal with their character ever failing, or doing it specifically to screw with another player, or whatever. Those sorts of situations would clearly force OOC conversation, and probably some questions about whether the player is comfortable in a roleplaying setup involving randomness at all.)

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Holy balls, that initiative system is loving garbage. Definitely a system-killer for sure.

While the subject is being discussed: what are some good options for OSR-type games that cater to an improv-friendly table? I've been considering running a dungeon crawl lately, but I like the idea of something that supports improv and freeform resolution options, since that's a strength of my group and something they enjoy. Into the Odd advertises itself as supporting this play style -- is that accurate?

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Yeah, even if Alexis Kennedy were a person I felt comfortable giving money to, I'd side-eye any project where he wrote mechanics. Fallen London was a great story experience wrapped in a really tedious game, and I can't assume his TTRPG design would be any better.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Siivola posted:

Well I want to play a Fighter who is incredibly buff but sucks at fighting nonetheless! :colbert:

"My strength is not for violence, friends. My calling... is bending bars and lifting gates."

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Xiahou Dun posted:

And pee just isn’t scary. Sure, it’s gross but that’s all it’s got. It’s fundamentally a thing we all deal with multiple times a day. It’s gonna fall flat compared to something actually gross and scary.

Yeah, this is my thought on it. "The acolytes use the body fluids of the Lamb as a hallucinogen/entheogen" is fine, but having it be urine feels juvenile and boring, not particularly scary. Even having them bleed the Lamb for it would be more interesting and add more activity to the module (and poo poo, if you're going to have gonked-out priests running around, why not gonked-out priests with knives and inability to discern the correct stabbing target?), and a little more thought would give you a lot of options. Hell, maybe it's a substance that has no clear biological analogue, and maybe doesn't even look biological, but it's definitely being pulled out of subcutaneous glands of this horrible maggot-baby-god and that's not great!

Honestly, a lot of the gross-out and edgelord stuff in the worse OSR product lines strikes me as being the product of a lack of imagination. "Gross things happen and then the PCs die" takes basically no mental effort to create.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

potatocubed posted:

Can we please find something else to talk about than the piss adventure?

For example: I'm assuming that I'm not the only one here with a List of games that I want to get to the table sooner or later. (Still haven't managed to convince a group to play Nobilis, boooo.) What's on yours?

A vast bookshelf of them, but Chuubo's is probably at the top of the list, especially Glass-Maker's Dragon. I occasionally consider doing a PbP recruit, but I feel like Jenna Moran games are a really big ask.

My problem is that a lot of my hopeless bucket-list games are things that have a ton of lore and which I can't reasonably expect other people to pick up for my sake -- like World Tree, which is intricate and bizarre and frequently great, but who wants to play an elaborately-worldbuilt furry fantasy game that's also an Ars Magica heartbreaker, and also appears to have no PDFs available anywhere? I should really start with tiny zine things that I can maybe at least give people itch.io links for.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

potatocubed posted:

I ran a bit of GMD once upon a time, but I didn't really get what pastoral roleplaying is supposed to be about. When things worked out, it absolutely sang, but mostly it felt like I was struggling with the system a lot.

I keep feeling like PbP is actually a better way to do pastoral stuff because if it comes to it you can just do a post where you narrate your character doing something slice-of-lifey and you're all set.

I'm relatively comfortable with pastoral roleplaying, but I suspect it's because most of my early roleplay experience was the online chat-room "here's a bar/city/haunted hotel underneath the earth/other oddly enclosed but mostly mundane location, bring in some weird dudes and just have them interact, no particular plot/only emergent plot from the consequences of PCs' actions" format. GMD really rings that nostalgia bell for me, but has the added bonus of all the PC options actually being the kind of ridiculous, overpowered, delightful lunacy that I wasn't playing as a teen because I was too self-conscious and trying too hard to be "good." Really, I should probably just run/play it with the same people I used to game with on IRC, but a lot of them are uncomfortable with mechanical systems and I'm not sure if even Chuubo's is too much.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

So, uh... is the entire Spellpunk Cyberfight book written like the DTRPG description of the core? Because that is quite a choice.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Stardust chat is making me nostalgic for a Masks character I never got to play, append for a game here that wanted explanation of where your character fit in to a comics continuity. I apped a Protege of a thinly-veiled Stardust-type, with the meta-explanation being "our publisher just got the rights to this gonzo vintage title about a crazy space wizard, and someone wants to put a modern spin on it with a likable/marketable teen protagonist."

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Every superhero on Earth has the same origin: an item of power given them by a dying alien hero to carry on the legacy. Big questions in the setting include "why are all these aliens crash-landing here? It's like fifty now, what gives"

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

My Lovely Horse posted:

Hey, I used "has been resurrected" as a OUT once! I wanted to establish both that being resurrected is a really big deal (see also that whole recent discussion we had), and that he was important enough to someone to spend a resurrection.

Yeah, I've always thought the heavy narrative weight of resurrection in 13A makes it an ideal candidate for OUTs. One of my recurring character ideas for the game has the OUT of "my village was wiped out by disease when I was a small child, but I (and only I) was resurrected by someone at the Cathedral; nobody will tell me who or why."

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I did "only halfling to ever win her way out of Axis gladiatorial slavery" recently, and while we never really got to dig into what that implied about the Empire, it was an excellent excuse to have a paladin who turned into a dirty tavern brawler when backed into a corner.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Zorak of Michigan posted:

I believe this is where I plug The Shadow of Yesterday.

This is a very good game and definitely something I'd play if anyone else wanted to, or had even heard of it

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I have a whole collection of these damned things, maybe 5% of which have ever seen play. It's a problem.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

That Old Tree posted:

Most games I buy I'd like to play, but I also buy quite a bit of stuff that I just want to own as a curiosity with no expectation or desire to play. In fact a significant proportion of my "historical artifact" purchases are things I would outright refuse any opportunity to play.

There are definitely some here that fit that mold, although I'd probably give Synnibarr a spin if anyone wanted to. deadEarth is definitely in the "no way I'd play this, no way in hell" pile, though, among others.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

This conversation is reminding me that I own three copies of World Tree, since they started showing up at the used bookstore and I bought them "to give to people who might be interested."

I should really just do an F&F for that drat thing already, although iirc there aren't PDFs available, and that's a huge issue.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Don't do it -- dispose of old Forgotten Realms material at designated locations at clinics and pharmacies, where it will be safely recycled without entering the water supply

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

PurpleXVI posted:

I do want to play SenZar some day if I can track down the monster supplement and get that OCR'd as well, because otherwise there's a hell of a lot of legwork missing.

I own SenZar and would definitely give it a shot! It seems like that system might actually be playable and fun, even if the fluff is mostly bad and tedious. (As opposed to Synnibarr, which has unplayable rules but some wild fluff -- not good, but instantly inspirational and bizarre. I highly recommend the Synnibarr Complete Adventurer's Guide for absolutely bizarro fluff about all of the many, many races in the setting. Did you know that a particular tribe of cougar-centaurs are the only growers of marijuana in the world? :catdrugs:)

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Gray Ghost posted:

So, I have been incredibly frustrated with using the four books in the Black Cube for our actual play, particularly with locating rules for play as opposed to GMing resources. So, I’ve been collating the books on a Notion as two separate texts: one for players focused on play, basic setting overview, spells and spell systems, common equipment, and character creation (the “Vislae Handbook”) and one for GMs focused on making NPCs and creatures, interpreting Sooth deck pulls, secret setting info, and additional adjudication ideas.

Where i’m struggling is the sheer number of systems and cruft in play here: in order to make this resource complete, i have to transcribe so much *fluff*, over 900 spells, and a whole host of Warlock invocation-like Secrets.

I kind of want to go over everything in the text once I’m done copying and pasting and take a scalpel to everything and take another crack at all of the magic sub-systems.

It’s just so galling because I read something like Heart: The City Beneath, which is super elegant in its rules and so evocative in its setting and Invisible Sun has a ton of the latter without much of the former.

Edit: For more frame of reference, check out Wapole Languray’s write-up.

Yeah, this sounds about right for IS. The book organization is so bizarre and scattered that I suspect it'd definitely need a reorg to be playable, and it's so... much... stuff. (And so little of it matters, but that's another rant.) I'd be curious to hear how this has been working out for your table.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Better Tynes question: has anyone ever played Puppetland? It's a fascinating game, but I've never been clear on how it plays. (Multiple PC types that can't interact with objects seems like it might be a problem?)

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

The thing that gets to me is stating "well, Aunt May obviously can't hurt Galactus, duh" as a good thing and a design goal. Systems with large power discrepancies/different axes of power also really need to have ways that every PC can screw with (or meaningfully aid) every other PC -- see, once again, Apocalypse World, where you have huge swings in power, but nobody is un-gently caress-with-able. Every successful superhero game I've ever played in has started with the principle of "every PC can viably fight every villain and potentially win, even if we have to come up with novel scenario design so Aunt May is taking the fight to Galactus on the Psychic Emotions Plane where she can appeal to some impossible vestigial compassion in his heart," because it turns out it's way more fun!

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

All I remember about Arcana Unearthed was making a Mageblade and feeling like I had to burn my first-level feat on something that gave me the money to start with a masterwork weapon, so I could start with an athame I could actually keep and enhance. I'm not sure d20 ever figured out how to make a "cool signature weapon you won't have to throw away later to stay optimal" class work.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Hello! I've got a lot of bad opinions, and now I have some buttons!

Safe travels, potatocubed. Looking forward to your flagrantly irresponsible freestyle posting.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

I've considered running Chuubo's as a PbP game on SA (probably the Halloween Special, since it's of reasonable length), but I've never been sure if the interest is there. It does seem like it'd translate well to the format, though.

Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Yeah, you can replace "have sex" with "demonstrate real emotional intimacy or vulnerability to another person" and it works fine, since that's really the point of the moves. You can also play AW where nobody ever triggers the moves and the game will still play well.

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Antivehicular
Dec 30, 2011


I wanna sing one for the cars
That are right now headed silent down the highway
And it's dark and there is nobody driving And something has got to give

Nuns with Guns posted:

What does it say about the hobby that a tabletop RPG game being The Writer/Game Master's Barely Disguised Fetish is a commonplace gaming horror story and meme?

And I'm not saying "sex" is a fetish, but I don't blame people for being guarded when they pull up a character sheet and there's a box on it that says "Special" and "When you have sex.. [x mechanical thing happens]." It's not hard to explain that this is a rare situation where it's handled tastefully and building in intentional ways towards the genre and prestige drama conceits Apocalypse World is trying to simulate.

This is valid, but it's interesting to me because I feel like AW is the opposite of all the thinly-veiled-fetish RPG content. I feel like fetish content tends to be stuff that's not labeled as sexual, and often will have elaborate lore justifications ("all the women in the world dress like this to fuel their magic / have to rub oil all over their bodies to channel fighting power / accept the Ritual of the Whizzard Forest as a rite of passage, it's NOT a sex thing") to barely veil it. Just saying "your characters can have sex, here's what happens when they do" and having those results be about emotional connection (or its explicit absence), in a game where all PCs are adult badasses, doesn't feel like it hits the same sort of illicit kink levels.

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