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

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

fozzy fosbourne posted:

I mostly agree with this take on adding a DMPC: https://blogofholding.com/?p=2572

I would also add to the list of reasons to consider it is that running a DMPC from time to time has let me and a couple of the more adventurous people in my group try different systems without having too few characters to fill assumed roles or run published content without a ton of surgery.

Honestly I find the most critical element to players enjoying recruiting an NPC is letting the players decide who they take with them. If it was their idea to hire/rescue/recruit an extra person to follow them around as a support character, it generally works out.

In addition to the well-made point here that these kinds of characters should be supporting cast and function to reveal more about the PCs and let the PCs get more of a spotlight by having a foil.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2021 14:26

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 08:23

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

mellonbread posted:

So how do you handle military ranks/authority/chain of command in tabletop RPGs?

They way we're handling it in my 4 young conscripts against undead/bio-horrors/powerful sorcerers game is that one of them is the fire team leader in story, but they make the decisions about what missions the team volunteers for etc out of character and then the story backports it to Lance Corporal Rital volunteering Squad 6 for yet another nightmare because she's over enthusiastic and the others go along with it because the battles are important and they want to win and protect their buddies. So it's still group decisions and all, but the game fluff has the eager beaver overachiever volunteering her fireteam for everything.

Similar for them sometimes picking stuff out of character and then I write their superiors deciding to issue them what they picked OOC, etc.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2021 17:09

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

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.

Running: Myth: The Western Federation (A really weird rewrite of Dark Heresy as a tactical RPG, military sci-fantasy RPG) and Sacred and Profane (A homebrew Double Cross setting, think Shin Megami Tensei but more urban fantasy than apocalyptic)
Between games I'm playing in at the moment.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2021 08:49

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

bbcisdabomb posted:

If you run this be sure to prepare for the extremely likely scenario that a player will bring home a fetch, rescue their child, and then raise the fetch and child as twins. It's what I'd do.

This was the logic of a fairy lord in one of my games. "Wait, so, I leave a fetch with the parents, kidnap the human child, and then I raise the human child to have a life of adventure and magic which I am informed by MANY sources human children LOVE and then the parents also get a child (the fetch) to love and raise, so it's a victimless crime!"

It was a little awkward but now there's two magic people and they get along so it ended well.

# ¿ Feb 9, 2021 02:46

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

When I got out of Magic I gave away my cards to friends in return for videogames.

Given one of those games was Thief, I feel this was a good decision.

# ¿ Feb 22, 2021 14:06

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Mycroft Holmes posted:

Weird question: Is there a RPG where each player controls a squad instead of a single character?

Albedo's RPG is entirely about each player playing a squad leader, the entire combat system revolves around it.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2021 03:50

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

MadDogMike posted:

Honestly, speaking from the experience of having a GM run it with a custom rule set, Paranoia is one of the only games where critical failure on rolls presents a very good idea. We all about died laughing when a series of three in a row by separate people caused a massive explosion and TPK in the elevator we were trying to fix. A certain baseline incompetence in troubleshooters definitely added to the experience.

Paranoia is a game about cartoon hijinks, though, so a chance for escalating, insane cartoon hijinks being built into everything is completely on point.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2021 02:38

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Halloween Jack posted:

If one can design a fun tactical subsystem for "hit people with weapons until they die " one can surely do the same for "escape from this collapsing building" or "stop this plane from crashing"

The issue is often the number of subsystems in your game. The fewer large, complex, distinct subsystems you need, the better, because getting all those subsystems to work and balancing all of them is an ask. And if your Fight Dr. Mystery subsystem turns out very good and your Rescue People From The Collapsing Building one doesn't work well, you still leave people incentivized to go back to fighting all the time.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2021 20:21

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

CitizenKeen posted:

Are there any examples of metaplot in RPGs that people want to defend? Or is all metaplot 100% garbage?

Games where the metaplot so to speak is 'where is everyone at this exact moment before poo poo really kicks off' can do okay but I'm not sure that counts as actual metaplot.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2021 00:31

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

GimpInBlack posted:

The basic mechanic is straightforward enough, it's a dice pool system where you take your two highest-rolling dice, add a proficiency, compare to a DC. After that, though, it gets... well. Some highlights from the DTRPG preview:

Attributes are made up of dice, which form the pool that you roll. But the number and size appears to be arbitrary--the example given is that you could have a Strength of "5d8 and 2d10."

Difficulty values are in whole numbers, but skill ranks add decimals to your result (e.g. if you roll a 12 and have 7 points in a skill, you have a result of 12.7).

Dice that explode in an ~~inexplicably counterintuitive~~extremely dumb way (a d8 that explodes adds a new d10 to your dice pool, a d10 adds 2d12, and a d12 adds a d20). The reason you don't just get another die of the same size like every other exploding dice system ever is that these are explicitly added to your dice pool, not the total of the exploding die, and thus are still subject to the "only keep the two highest" rule. Yes, that means that your "exploded" d8 has an 80% chance of being worthless.

Any 1s rolled subtract from your result, continuing the "the more dice you have, the more likely you are to kneecap yourself" trend of Storyteller et al.

A skill list with sixty four skills.

Now, granted, I'm going off of nothing but the basic mechanics overview preview, maybe the full book explains some of these decisions or has extra permutations that make them make more sense, but nothing in the basic rules inspires me with any confidence or desire to spend money on it. The impression I get isn't so much a heartbreaker in the sense of "the author has only ever played D&D and has no conception that there are other ways to design an RPG," but it feels like a designer who is so terrified of being perceived as ripping off other games (or maybe just so focused on being "innovative") that they've made a bunch of frankly bizarre and inexplicable decisions in an attempt at novelty.

That explosion mechanic is extremely lol combined with that 1 roll rule. Do exploded dice that roll a 1 become negative because if so, extra :psyduck:

# ¿ Aug 10, 2021 17:21

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

GimpInBlack posted:

It's not 100% clear, the rules don't say anything explicit about how exploding dice and the rule of one interact. But since exploding dice are specifically added to your dice pool, and the rule of one says "any dice in your dice pool that rolled a one," and there's a sidebar that specifically says you have to roll all of your exploding dice even if you've already met the difficulty... I'm pretty sure the intention is yes.

So to amend my previous post, that exploded d8 has a 70% chance to be completely useless and a 10% chance to actively gently caress you over. Amazing game design.

I think that throws it over into the dumbest exploding dice system I've seen, which is an achievement.

E: Rule of 1 plus that explosion rule actually makes lots of low dice an active detriment, doesn't it? Because they're likely to roll a 1, and also likely to explode and both not necessarily be important to your overall 2 die result pool but get more chances for 1s.

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Aug 10, 2021

# ¿ Aug 10, 2021 17:39

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Ironically when 4e WHFRP came out they released a bunch of 1e and 2e as cheap PDFs that you could get pretty conveniently, too.

It was helpful!

# ¿ Aug 12, 2021 19:53

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

90s Cringe Rock posted:

The great wheel is great

As a unicycle

For a clown to ride on

At the circus

Some day. Some day I will put the Dominions Clowns and their deep Clown Lore into an RPG.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2021 12:37

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

CHIMlord posted:

Sanguine's Albedo RPG as well.

The main thing it does there is determine if you have +4/+0, +3/+1, or +2/+2 or vice versa spread across your Clout/Drive stats.

Which is significant, don't get me wrong. Both those stat pools matter a ton since spending the Social ones is how you lead people (which you must do as every PC is an officer, with highly useful attached NPC squaddies who will panic and go to poo poo if the PC can't lead them) and the Drive points go down every time disturbing things happen in combat and you need them to boost most of your combat rolls or 'do something difficult under fire' checks. But all it is is effectively distributing some points, just attached to a psych thing because in-setting the dominant government loves psych metrics.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2021 20:56

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

It's true, a joke by a 6 meter clown is insanely funny.

E: The power of Deep Clown Lore is that A: It's funny and B: It's actually extremely internally consistent with itself somehow and produces a surprisingly coherent nation and C: It's written in exactly the same tone as other Dominions Lore, which is usually talking about like, a hellish centaur who is eternally on fire or something except here it's about how clowns with big hats become central to mythology.

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Aug 19, 2021

# ¿ Aug 19, 2021 03:30

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

the answer to "in Gygax's conception, Lawful Good is genocidal tyrants and Chaotic Good is libertarians" is not to simply erase it, but to lean into those factions just being vaguely angelic- and fey-flavored villains. get all Final Fantasy on that poo poo

similarly anyone who looks at Modrons and thinks "this should simply be discarded and forgotten about" is just wrong

We had a genuinely great time with a 7th Sea-esque setting invaded by all this bullshit for like, the one D&D/Pathfinder/later 13th Age game I really ran. Fighting off D&D Good and D&D Evil and settling Orc refugees in the not-PLC and going on their own adventures into Sigil and beyond after their world got hooked up to the Great Wheel.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2021 13:30

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

PeterWeller posted:

It's always struck me that D&D's settings are more like Westerns with swords and wizards than anything actually medieval.

They absolutely are based on Gygax and it was intentional, because he wanted stories about the slaughter of 'savages'. The LOtR trappings were put in to be marketable; Gygax hated Tolkien's work, from what I remember.

Gygax was absolute scum and the more our hobby washes away his influence the better.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2021 20:42

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Noble is a class in WFRPG. And iirc one of the original suggestions for any adventurer backstory is junior/petty aristocrat who has the trappings and training but just enough money to explain their starting gear.

Also their specific main ability in original 1e was 'they're lucky as hell, after all they got to be born a noble'.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2021 13:41

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

My GM came up with James Bonobo, cybernetic ape in a tux, and I can never equal that one.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2021 18:49

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Megazver posted:

What did you think of Troika's initiative system?

When I was reviewing it I described it as the kind of rule so bad it kills any system around it, if that helps.

Because it is the worst initiative system I have ever seen, without hyperbole.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2021 22:24

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

mellonbread posted:

I didn't know you did a Troika review. Where can I read it?

https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?noseen=0&threadid=3898332&pagenumber=162&perpage=40#post505787832

It's like two updates, but I did do one!

# ¿ Sep 23, 2021 22:56

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Hostile V posted:

Lure of the Liche Lord? https://writeups.letsyouandhimfight.com/night10194/warhammer-fantasy-roleplay-2e-lure-of-the-liche-lord/

Yep, that's definitely Lure of the Liche Lord, which is quite fun.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2021 03:06

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

gradenko_2000 posted:

this is not a "bad" idea per se, but you'd have to make the later "advanced" classes that much more powerful, to account for the fact that you're only getting them from level 6 onwards (and so on)

the problem with 3e's prestige classes (that you already touched on in your parenthetical) is that an Eldritch Knight at character level 6 was competing with a Fighter 6, but the Fighter 6 was intended to be a competitive choice, instead of the PDK (or whatever other class) being objectively better. Like, if this idea were to work, taking EK 1 at char level 6 should mean getting everything a Fighter gets PLUS offensive spellcasting, and so on.

It got brought up before but WHFRP's career system is basically like this and works quite well. One of the neat things in it is that since each Career is a list of advances you can buy (and places you can go after, plus you always have the option to spend some EXP to jump immediately to a new 'starting' career on a track without finishing your current even if you wish) someone in a 'long' career is still going to be on par with someone doing several short ones, because you have the same amount of EXP and thus the same amount of actual advances generally.

This leads to hilarity in the Lure of the Liche Lord's premade party, because they're 'balanced' by number of careers rather than EXP, leading to insanity like their Explorer having over twice the actual EXP and advances as their Fighter, because the backstory they came up with for the Fighter has him slumming around basic fighter careers and never advancing and also everyone had exactly 3 Careers. A complete misunderstanding of how to 'balance' PCs against one another and of how the mechanics of the Career system work.

# ¿ Dec 10, 2021 14:04

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Hiro Protagonist posted:

Okay, I have to ask now, what the gently caress is Spellpunk Cyberfight?

A game where 'blood mage' means 'your appendix has mystically begun to do what it was meant to do: filter out magic from the bloodstream, making you a powerful sorcerer'.

# ¿ Dec 20, 2021 17:57

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Warthur posted:

Was this not, in fact, the basis that many chuds used to take shots at Blue Rose, or at least those chuds who had sufficient shame to not just say "it's gay and for women and those are things I do not care for, sir"?

It was generally framed as 'the deer is fascism', yes. Personally I find the deer interesting, because A: The deer's choices can and do go wrong sometimes because the deer can only measure in the moment, not the future and B: The people the deer chooses still have to convince people it's a good idea to invest them as monarch.

I know Blue Rose wasn't made to explore the idea of why people follow a government, etc and that the deer is mostly a mechanic to ensure you can play as agents of the state without that being problematic, but 'hey we've been following who this magic deer picks for like 300 years and only had two genuinely bad leaders that way, and also our kingdom is pretty wealthy and has a social safety net and a useful public service so maybe it's a good idea to go with the deer' actually makes perfect sense from the perspective of in-setting characters. Plus, it isn't like they don't have crises of confidence about the various leaders, and part of recovering from one of the lovely leaders was significantly lowering the power of the Monarch and creating additional structures so that if the monarch went judge dredd nuts again or something they could be removed more easily/damage could be limited.

# ¿ Dec 23, 2021 15:18

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Serf posted:

Don't be worried about a cliche start to an adventure! Cliches are cliches because they're effective and easy to get into. When I started my Shadow of the Demon Lord campaign we began in a tavern and it turned into a shootout. If all you can think of is a cliche, go for it anyways.

One of my favorite sidebars in Warhams is 'You may well have met in a tavern because they're social hubs people go to meet people.'

# ¿ Jan 14, 2022 15:02

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

hyphz posted:

I think a kingdom has something like this?

The issue here I guess is that if Eric�s the guy who�s really into fae mythology, then his role is now to add fae to the game for people who are less into it than him. That�s a responsibility that a GM takes but that not everybody might want to, since it gets into social management beyond just plotting and exploring.

It's not social management, it's putting things together and finding hooks to get people interested in the things that the others come up with. My Biblefight group had a great time going to the fairy realm and seeing all kinds of weird stuff, or fighting risen Fransisco Franco, or dealing with Evil British Supervillains, despite those being hooks for specific characters, because they had fun relating their characters to whoever's plot was going on at the time. The whole fun of an RPG is collaborative authorship (among other things) and editing each other's work and coming up with fun stuff and how to put it together.

# ¿ Mar 4, 2022 15:02

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

To be fair to CoC 'how to deal with characters dying' is built into the very bones of the game and is genuinely important to its theme and tone.

It's also why I don't run CoC even though I respect it. I can't deal with killing off players' PCs constantly, it stresses me out.

# ¿ May 19, 2022 22:17

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Did a massive pressurized spray of blood come out as is samurai movie tradition?

I admit 'This produced a genuine Kurosawa moment' is an argument for a mechanic even if it's not one I'd enjoy myself.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2022 12:40

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

When I'm playing rather than GMing I like to do a minimum of that building and focus on just inhabiting my one PC as a break from what I do when GMing, for instance.

# ¿ Aug 20, 2022 01:20

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 08:23

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Otherkinsey Scale posted:

Same, Quiet Year is awesome.

Also very good as an introduction for people who've never TTRPG'd before, or whose familiarity is limited to D&D. It's a great example of collaborative worldbuilding, and gaming with mechanics that aren't mainly about violence.

I very much enjoyed playing Quiet Year the one time I've done it. It's interesting how much the 'no table talk' thing actually matters.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2022 14:14

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