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

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drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Aniodia posted:

Finished it right at the rear end-end of last year, with everything available here. And by "everything" I mean "just the three core rulebooks so far", and by that I mean "I totally skipped out on the little scenario/mini module adventures in each of the three books because I totally thought they were replays and not actually viable adventures so I need to translate them over the next few days." Outside of that, 100% playable as-is, and I'd be more than happy to answer questions and such via PM, mostly so it doesn't clutter the thread.

This is most righteous, assuming you'll be continuing translating past the core books, what could be some things we might see in the future?

# ¿ Jan 6, 2021 11:05

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 21:56

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

I need a good PDF reader for my new tablet, anyone got any good recommendations?

# ¿ Jan 15, 2021 10:41

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Glutes Are Great posted:

Yeah Cyberdecks came back in 5th and are also in 6th, it's the bread and butter of engaging with the matrix on any notable level outside of using it as fancy AR Google. Well, except for technomancers who are some sort of magical hackers that use their brain as a cyberdeck as they have access to a metaphysical plane of existence that is the foundation of the matrix.
As a general rule of thumb of how the editions developed, it kinda became more and more complex over the years and the focus shifted back and forth between the role of mundane folk, magic stuff and the influence of matrix, until the latter was reworked entirely into an omnipresent wireless land of endless information, power and people trying to abuse either of those. This led to an ever growing bulky rulebook that go messier over the time, especially with CGL's involvement going from "Yeah we want to do this but are bad at it" to "Yeah we don't care actually at all let's not even pay the writers anymore lol but here's merch buy this".
6th edition as the latest one is the last iteration of this, where they tried to somehow reform the mess into a more streamlined approach with a lot simpler rules, a lot less skills and abilities and everything being much, much, much easier to handle. CGL being CGL, however, hosed up making the result playable and led to utterly absurd rules where, unironically, a naked troll fighting a grown rear end dragon will probably win.

In terms of punkiness, I guess it kinda depends on what you define as "punk" or what direction you want to see the development go to count as such, but there's definitely stuff out there that covers this better, yeah.

True, like I love the Cyberpunk aesthetic but I'll admit I am not a fan of the themes of Cyberpunk as a genre very much at all

Halloween Jack posted:

I haven't seen a satisfactory attempt to do cyberpunk within a D&D variant ruleset. I wish I had, because then it would be fairly easy to patch in magic rules from some other D&D variant.

Yeah if I ever do get off my rear end and actually try to make an OSR book someday rather than just be a useless "idea guy", doing something like that is towards the top of the list

# ¿ Jan 20, 2021 21:34

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

SkyeAuroline posted:

I return as promised.

It takes a ground-up rework at this point. Shadowrun's gameplay loop of "gear porn chasing gear porn" inherently incentivizes for-profit running against all else, because you don't keep going without feeding your gear porn. The system itself is flawed as poo poo on account of 6 editions of creep too. What I would suggest is taking a lot of hints from Spire: The City Must Fall, particularly its "Things to Know" page that establishes some of the structural concepts of the game. I'm not going to copy it out straight, but paraphrasing them into core concepts to carry over:

This is an unkind world that has marginalized you and pushed you into action; your fellows need freedom, and that means risking your life for them and for yourself. Even (and especially) where they won't or can't.

Burning down the powers that be isn't the end solution; there's always someone higher up the chain who can smack you right back down if you push too hard. Instead of destruction, subvert the systems of oppression and turn them to liberation. Don't shed blood for the sake of shedding blood - it's unavoidable, but it's a very important line to draw and not to cross unless you have to.

"Subversive resistance against the man" isn't a cushy career you retire from in your sixties with a severance package. It's going to kill you, sooner or later, and you don't get out of the game. So you put 100% into it and make your mark before you burn out.

I could probably muster a very long rant on how cyberpunk as a genre has failed to live up to its best examples or to carry its themes forward as they become increasingly relevant. That's boring as poo poo, so I'll cut it way down instead. What Shadowrun treats as cyberpunk is "corporations own everything and company towns are back and... that's about it". This isn't even just the system, I (shamefully) have some of the tie-in novels and it never digs an inch deeper than that. Shadowrun utilizes competing corporate fiefdoms as backing matter for "you can get hired by whoever against whoever!" with about as much nuance as Warhammer uses its own setting to justify "any army can fight anyone" and with little paid beyond that. Injustice just exists as flavor to a job or background details that don't come up in practice. The social alienation of the individual in future-society is handwaved away and instead pinned to abstract spiritual destruction as some inherent destruction of humanity through alteration. Hell, even runners' own alienation from their fellow man is cast aside entirely as a theme. Corporate authority gets treated as a fact of life that can't be fought back against. None of this can stick around as-written and still do the job.

(edit because somehow 8.5k characters wasn't enough for me to remember to actually say this:
do not gloss over the systems of capital and technology responsible for the state of shadowrun's world, or any cyberpunk world
Ignoring any form of political theory in favor of "wow! cool future!" is how we got here. Examine those themes in play. Bring in ways to subvert the tools that create them. Not everything has to be nihilistic, or should be nihilistic! Let your players lead success stories, even if they're fleeting or flawed. This is not D&D standard "turn your brain off and chop orcs" - playing a cyberpunk game means you're opting directly into a genre that requires you to give a poo poo about the themes surrounding and pervading actual play. It's a safe environment to examine, deconstruct, and reconstruct tropes & real-word parallels collaboratively and experiment with something better.)

Yeah, I'm going to say "look at Spire" again because Spire is the only bloody RPG I've seen actually do revolutionary praxis remotely right. (I'm told Misspent Youth does it too but I'm not especially familiar.) Bring in aspects of Red Markets, too, especially in the economic aspect if you want to preserve Shadowrun's work-for-pay system; instead of runners living high on the illegal life, drive home that they're part of the permanent underclass of the extraterritorial web, and much like the powers that be treat their workers as tools to perform whatever work they can't automate away, they treat runners as tools to make problems go away, not some trusted allies to be lavishly rewarded. You're a runner, you (probably) don't have a SIN, anything you do is illegal and under-the-table; corps are going to bait you in with just enough you can't resist and just little enough you can't earn your way out of desperation for good. I'm by no means arguing for cutting out "running for corps" entirely, but it's a balancing act that a theoretical rework would have to do. Sell your soul to fund your efforts to fight the bastards you're selling to. The work that makes changes in the world won't pay out in cash.

On that note, make runners' community important; PCs aren't lone murderhobos with no worldly attachments, they're people existing in the same streets and neighborhoods as the thousands, even millions, in the repressed underclass that keeps the luxury world of the wealthy and powerful running. They came from somewhere, they share their lives with others, they have the range of the human experience. These people matter. Some of them are friends, even allies; some of them are the poor bastards that sold out on the other side of a firefight, no different from you but scraping their way to survive under the authorities you're out to subvert or push back. It's not some faceless clone goon there on the floor that quietly disappeared from the narrative when it stopped being their initiative pass; that's Ted, your old army buddy you still go drinking with down at Jarrety's, bleeding out from the hole you put in him and crying for his daughter at home. Or maybe you didn't. Maybe you couldn't pull the trigger on him, you couldn't leave her without a dad, and you had to take a harder path. Who are you willing to betray or hurt for the cause? Where do you draw the line?

The importance of the community isn't just in individual people, it's in the broader effects too. What are you going to fight to change? Putting a stop to the string of "urban renewal sites" booting your friends and coworkers to the street to clear land for luxury towers and labor sites? Build up a voice of resistance to go against the propaganda machine? Take a callous criminal kingpin out of the picture and guide a "better" successor to the throne? Rescue the downtrodden taken as lab rats for corporate experimentation? Every action you take has ramifications on your community and those need to show. Bring them back around in play. Show the ramifications playing out down the line. Let the players try and push the pendulum back when they've gone too far. The characters won't last forever, they're going to die in the line of duty, but they will make a difference that outlasts them.

Building on that last example bit: holy poo poo essence is a terrible system, and CP2020/RED Humanity isn't much better, but "mechanically describing a character's alienation from themselves and from society" is a system with value when implemented properly. (Another place I think Red Markets actually handles it well - it's still kinda poor terminology, but it works out in practice, not least because it's divided. edit 2: Unknown Armies! How did I not think of Unknown Armies as a well-done example.) The issue with "Joe Gunbunny wants a cybereye with a smartlink in it so he can shoot his Ares Alpha better" that causes dissociation from himself isn't "oh no, his new eye isn't natural, BOOM CUT THE ESSENCE". (I mean, it can be metaphysically, but it's a waste of a valuable theme.) How is Joe Gunbunny handling his everyday life when every new person he glances at gets a crosshair and targeting data on their face - a reminder at every turn that he's sold a bit of his body to become more of a machine to kill? How's Elijah the vehicle tech going to feel when every time he goes to work on a car at the service stop, he slots a chip and someone else's muscle memory overrides his own, watching his hands work outside of his control? You get the idea; one of the themes at the core of cyberpunk is treating people as things, and "humanity"/alienation/whatever is a perfect place to leverage that. This isn't TOTALLY related to the broader "how to make Shadowrun punk" question but it does reinforce the structural causes of the issues the average working-class person faces while also partially solving SR/CP2020's weird ableist streak (without RED's "medical cyberware" that introduces a mountain of mechanical issues).

Where a lot of this ends up going is "remember the human elements". A side effect of Shadowrun's intense focus on Gear Guns Combat Wow Flashy Stuff is that it promptly stops giving a poo poo about people as... well, anything but an obstacle to Wow Flashy Combat or a lever to get to it with. Turn that around and you're already on a good track. I know there's a shitload of "but magic", "but the matrix (that's just computer magic)" and all that that, frankly, I despise in Shadowrun and am deeply unqualified to comment on. I don't have a solution for putting handwavey magic in your punk game. That's your call. My concerns lie in having players actually do things for the world around them and not just as some get-rich-quick scheme that happens to cater to adrenaline junkies real well.
I used to be better at writing these sorts of things. I'm not really any more, and keeping everything straight in my head as I write has gotten harder over time. If any of this is unclear or needs expanding on I am here to do so.

tl;dr go buy Spire, read and internalize Spire's GM section, and apply it to punk themes. for advanced methods, actually build a system around the result. (I have the remnants of a couple tries at that lying around. I'm not very good at practical game design.)

I figure most modern Cyberpunk stuff either ignores or only pays lip service to the genre's deeper original themes because A) it doesn't really contribute anything actually fun to play or watch and B) it's gotten too uncomfortably real to really be worth exploring deeply anymore without becoming a depressing mess that no sane person would actually enjoy

# ¿ Jan 21, 2021 04:01

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

aldantefax posted:

I feel as though the items about moving away from "humanity" and to "cyber-humanity" along with the dissociation of the self is what GURPS Transhuman Space and other transhumanist fiction tends to have in spades, though often in a more optimistic lens (not as a strict requirement, just as part of genre convention).

One could also argue that other games commoditize people into character sheets full of mostly combat related stats and practical skills, but maybe that's a bit too meta of a discussion ad nauseam? In any case, that was a pretty good critique of Shadowrun. I hadn't realized it was nearly as much of a hot mess after 3e and only remember Essence as a "character limitation" rather than as something from the mechanics that influences the narrative (though iirc SR3 did have notes about what happens with excessive essence loss).

Probably because combat is the easiest direction to take RPG's in since it doesn't require anywhere near as much effort as actual role-playing does to get actual enjoyment out of

# ¿ Jan 21, 2021 04:14

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Honestly I'd say a heavily hacked(pun intended) apart and refurbished Lancer would work wonderfully for a Cyberpunk game of the Shadowrun vein as it would be able to handle all the interesting ideas it has while avoiding a lot of the parts that end up sucking

Which makes sense Lancer definitely has some Cyberpunk DNA in it's inspirations

# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 02:55

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Kestral posted:

What parts of Lancer would you want to salvage for Shadowrun, given that it's a game completely about hex-based tactical combat with a vestigial "doing things as a person" system tacked on?

Honest question here, not trying to be snarky. I skimmed Lancer when it came out and set it aside after realizing another prep-heavy game wasn't something I was up for after a lengthy Exalted campaign, so maybe there's something I've missed, but I don't see the connection. A good crunchy cyberpunk system is kind of a white whale of mine, so if there's something to salvage there I'm interested.

You laid it out with the first line, it's because Lancer has an excellent and crunchy combat system, with everything outside of combat kept fairly light, highlighting perfectly what I generally want in my systems

# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 06:45

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

mellonbread posted:

France for sure did pillage the world

Heck the Belgians who are usually stereotyped as basically harmless pseudo Hobbits who like to eat fries and make comics(when people even remember that it's it's own country and not just an odd branch of France), had probably the most brutal example of Colonialism the world has ever known with how it treated the Congo

Leperflesh posted:

I lived in England for 3 years and have been back twice since. The food there is fine. There are plenty of excellent, traditional British dishes. The reputation for tasteless boiled meats and mash is weird and undeserved.

They are especially solid on their pie game. Pie crust makes everything better. They have good seafood, some excellent beef dishes (beef wellington, for example), very good sausages, a wide array of amazing desserts, and of course, they invented pub food.

Do they have junk food? Of course they do, everyone does. But I defy you to point to a better tasting junk food than a piping hot battered fried fish sided with fat fluffy crispy chips, drizzled with malt vinegar and lightly dusted with salt, served in a wad of (uninked, please) newspaper and wolfed down steaming in the cool night air along with your fifth pint of beer.

Speaking of British junk food;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_oIys5KS4A

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogfyJICT9aI

# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 21:57

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Asked a while ago for PDF reader options for my new tablet, still looking for one

# ¿ Jan 28, 2021 04:32

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

It's a Samsung

# ¿ Jan 28, 2021 05:12

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

CitizenKeen posted:

What is wrong with the Android version of Acrobat? Am I the only one who uses it?

It's file browser is atrocious

# ¿ Jan 28, 2021 20:18

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

BattleMaster posted:

Lovecraft's racism is interesting because it shows that he really felt like the only thing going for him was the circumstances of his birth. I wonder if most people of his time that were in a position to get written work published felt like they had more value as a person and thus didn't go all-in like he did, even if they probably were pretty racist themselves.

It makes me think of some analysis I've seen of white supremacists today and why they always seem to be massive losers - the only thing they can cling to that they feel has any value is their whiteness. This is probably a common theme that goes back a lot further than now, but in the pre-internet age they didn't get their thoughts recorded and broadcast worldwide.

The thing with Lovecraft and his racism is it doesn't really feel like it comes from him just being a shithead like most racists, it's more just the most glaring symptom of the mental illnesses he most definitely had that were only exacerbated by the fact that the aunts who helped raised him were from all accounts just plain horrid awful people who had no business being involved in a person's upbringing

# ¿ Jan 30, 2021 07:08

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Leperflesh posted:

IMO a spinner is dice, so just make a spinner with 110 perfectly equal segments. If you don't want to have fights about whether the pointer is pointing at a line, fabricate a clicker-style spinwheel with pegs that force the pointer to always be unequivocally on a value.

Then, program a random number generator to spin the spinner, to remove the human cheating element, and you're all set!

e. alternatively, get 110 unique cards (you probably have enough board games in your closet to do this right now), sleeve them, and make a chart that maps cards to numeric values. Shuffle up and deal!

That's pretty much how the "paper dice" in Whitehack(soon getting it's third edition) works*, it's a sheet of paper with a random spread of numbers on it, then you take a pencil or something similar, spin it and you use the number it lands on

*for situations where you don't or can't have access to real dice(it'd be a great game for people in Prison for this reason)

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 06:38

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

KingKalamari posted:

Also all the modules he writes are generic death traps in the vein of Tomb of Horrors...but ones that don't really provide any incentive for the players to try to go through beyond "It's there".

His work is all slathered in this very juvenile, Cannibal Corpse-style "Blood and guts and murder and rape and other stuff that freaks the normies out" and most of his brand has been built around pretending there's some form of ongoing moral opposition to his work based on said aesthetic.

Large segments of his writing and modules are taken up by him angrily rambling about how people are stupid for not playing D&D the right way, or the players arte stupid for not playing the module the right way, or the play-testers are stupid for not figuring out the arcane moon logic of his stupid death traps, or you're stupid for wanting to have fun with the module you're reading...

Also the entire system that won him fame is a retroclone of B/X-era D&D with some houserules stapled on top, so it's not like he's really doing much in the way of actual game design...

...Now that I think about it, why does he have a fanbase to begin with? His only real contribution to the scene mostly involved throwing money at other, more competent people and being an rear end in a top hat.

To be fair LOTFP is a very well put together clone of BX D&D*, particularly for the era it first came out in, as WOTC was still doing that whole "No PDF's" thing and the market hadn't been flooded yet with other BX clones like it is now, so at the time it felt revolutionary

*BX is still probably the best official incarnation of D&D besides 4e

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 06:52

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Thankfully LOTFP is no longer necessary, if people want BX in official form they can go get it for like 10 bucks on Drivethru, and if they want a more modern format for it they can go for OSE instead

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 07:36

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Coolness Averted posted:

Wasn't he the one who popularized the no-prize "actually the dungeon is a barrier that keeps a giant undead horde from ruining the map, players beating the dungeon fucks the world over" gimmick?
There's some novelty there, though I think that format works best with player buy in, and "Ok that's our intro, now we play the real game about dealing with that," I think his version was just one upping Tomb of Horrors's 'gently caress you' ending.

The concept originates with an adventure called The Lichway from a very early issue of White Dwarf back in the 70's

gradenko_2000 posted:

I do keep hearing people repping Old School Essentials lately, which I assume is a fairly recent release, and I've been out of the OSR loop for a while. How does it compare to stalwarts like, say, Labyrinth Lord or Swords & Wizardry?

It's a very slick presentation of BX formatted from the ground up to be easy to use whether in the all in one Rules Tome format, or the more modular Black Box format where it's divided up into five little hardcover volumes, alongside that they did a Kickstarter for their Advanced Fantasy subline that ports over AD&D's rules over into a more BX compatible form*(either in four^ additional small books like the Black Box or in a two volume tome format that combines all of both the Classic Fantasy and Advanced Fantasy content together like the Rules Tome but in two volumes due to total size)

One of the reasons they did the multiple volumes version is to support modularity down the line, like want to run something more like Gamma World, just swap out the book that has the fantasy classes out for one more genre appropriate

*by which I mean for example Gnomes and Half-Orcs are done as BX style Racial Classes by default, though it does add rules for separating Race and Class for people who prefer that sort of thing, also Monks are left out cause they want to include it for an Asian Fantasy book down the line

^technically the first two volumes were printed up as part of the original release as an add-on but they did another print run so that they could be included with the new volumes for those who missed out the first time(or wanted extra copies)

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 08:43

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

So Fragged Empire recently released a Cyberpunk variant called creatively Fragged Cyberpunk, currently it's a digital only product as a trial run to decide if it's worth doing a print version of, anyone here given it a once over yet?

# ¿ Feb 5, 2021 08:59

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Evil Mastermind posted:

Woo finally!

e: this is about the same size as the Lancer book, for reference

Evil Mastermind posted:

I thought I'd let people know since a lot of folks have been wanting it: the Sentinel Comics RPG is available for purchase for hardcopy & PDF.

e: it's $60 but it's about the same pagecount as Lancer so you're getting a ton of content.

Sell me on this game people cause I've been looking for a good Superheroes system

# ¿ Feb 7, 2021 04:34

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

aldantefax posted:

I just double checked and they're anticipating fulfillment August 2021? That's optimistic especially given the print run. I would love to see a print on demand option of the cards in the future. I was actually looking into how DriveThruCards has editors for making custom cards for some games and there are a surprising amount of print and play cardgames out there, or at least, that are brand new to me. Cards + tabletop RPGs combining has always been a pretty underutilized space, I feel like.

Still want to do that idea I had for a Yu-Gi-Oh RPG where combat is resolved through actually playing a modified version of the real card game

# ¿ Feb 11, 2021 09:35

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

King of Solomon posted:

Rush duels, start with one of the initial starter decks, and build progression mechanics around getting new cards (spend EXP to pick up specific new cards with pricing based on the card's power level), figure out a resolution mechanic for when you're not actually playing the game.

Personally, I wouldn't be thrilled with this idea because Rush Duels are lame, but it's also more or less exactly what someone would come up with if they were trying to modify the rules to make playing the actual card game a reasonable resolution mechanic.

Nah wouldn't use Rush Duel rules(for one thing that version hasn't even left Japan yet plus the card pool is too small), might borrow some bits from the Speed Duels/Duel Links format though(especiallythe skills system), but yeah a bit aspect of character progression would be in improving one's deck, like a starting character would be about on par with early Duelist Kingdom where most of one's deck is composed of crappy low stat no effect monsters and maybe a couple actually useful cards

Also playing the card game would only be for major events much like in the source material, probably just use a very rules light system for everything else

# ¿ Feb 12, 2021 01:52

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Tulip posted:

There's a common bias that a TTRPG should be basically infinitely durable - that if you buy a copy of Monster of the Week that copy should be ready for you to do a 40+ year game with the only question about durability being if it gets trashed by dropping coke on it. I think this is kind of silly - I've played one campaign of MOTW and I will likely never play another, there's just too many more RPGs I want to try with the finite number of game sessions I have left in my life.

I think the old 1st edition AD&D books set that standard, from all I've heard those books were tanks

King of Solomon posted:

I was thinking you'd use a simulator where having access to the cards was less of an issue, but yeah I can see that. The thing about Rush Duels for this kind of thing is the ability to get out boss monsters on turn 1 while still being relatively simple rules-wise, but I definitely considered something like Speed Duels, too, because having access to skills seems like an interesting thing to have in an RPG.

Speed Duels as the basis(albeit with further modifications) is a good balance between speeding the game up as needed while keeping it feeling like the version of the game that most people would want to emulate with this concept

As for skills yeah in fact I'd be expanding upon them quite a bit, both for one's that actively effect the duel like the existing ones and ones that would be used to modify the deck while building it

Really the main challenge is figuring out how to balance cards beyond just simple DM fiat, like one could probably figure out a point system of sorts for doing it(after all several of the video games did it), I'd just need someone better at math to help with that

# ¿ Feb 12, 2021 03:59

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Splicer posted:

If you want to go oldschool scribbling on a grid https://www.owlbear.rodeo/ looks neat.

Yeah that does seem pretty neat

# ¿ Feb 19, 2021 00:57

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

JacquelineDempsey posted:

Quotin' myself here; I asked this over in A/T's Stupid/Small Questions and got referred here.

I'm curious if anyone's DM'ed a totally underwater campaign, and if so, how'd you do it?

There was a supplement for the Basic D&D line centered around doing fully underwater adventures, complete with adding a bunch of weird aquatic races one could play as

# ¿ Feb 26, 2021 00:29

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Splicer posted:

TSR era D&D is a very different beast to 3.x+ D&D. Paizo became The Other D&D by piggybacking on WotC's work and grog outrage, with changing as little as physically possible being considered a good thing. That's a very different situation to trying to steal market share from D&D (and now Pathfinder) with "The game everybody knows, but good".

e: Which is why I really wish the not poop version of SotDL would come out so it wouldn't be "Do you want to play D&D but good? OK first off, please ignore all the poop jokes no wait come back"

I'm still kinda mad about The Forest Hymn & Picnic getting derailed so badly, it seemed like it was going to be such a wonderful game too

KingKalamari posted:

Honestly, the big thing holding D&D back, from a purely design-focused standpoint, is that there are at least a half dozen different opinions amongst the fandom as to what D&D "should" be: A dungeon crawl simulator that focuses heavily on resource management? A Colossal Cave Adventure-style puzzle game except with a human responding to your prompts? A medieval fantasy world simulator? A tactical, grid-based fantasy combat game? A tabletop wargame where you control individual units? A free-flowing RP system where you hardly ever touch the dice?

The fact that D&D is to RPGs what Kleenex is to tissues means that all of these things are essential D&D qualities to someone based on when they got into the game and how fast and loose their group played with the rules, and a new edition of the game can definitely excel at some of these things, but it can't excel at all of them. WotC has been clear that they're trying to manage the D&D property as safely as humanly possible, which leads us with a game that tries to be everything to everyone but ends up not being particularly good at any one thing it's trying to do.

I think there's potential for an actually decent system amongst the mechanics of 5e, but it would need to be redesigned with a central focus on what it wants to achieve in order to realize that.

I'd say the highlighted ones are the facets of D&D that have tended to come out the best in the official editions of the game, the first in most of TSR's editions, the latter in 4e, the others don't really work out too well because it's harder to have the rules reflect the intentions of those ones

# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 12:48

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

CitizenKeen posted:

My four year old kid loves my 5th Edition Monster Manual. He's memorized it.

I'd like other good monster manuals, because I'd like him to not grow too fond of D&D.

What are some awesome books of monsters that are encyclopedic both in their coverage and in their descriptions. Should be kid appropriate for sex and violence and spookiness (as appropriate as the 5th Edition Monster Manual is, because that ship sailed). Needs beautiful color pictures, obviously. Should be in print.

Any genre. Get at me.

Dougal Dixon's speculative biology books After Man and The New Dinosaurs would be good ones(probably best to wait till he's a fair amount older to show him stuff like Man After Man or Nemo Ramjet's All Tomorrows though)

# ¿ Mar 3, 2021 00:18

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

FFT posted:

lol

There's a reasonably good quality scan of it up on the Internet Archive

# ¿ Mar 18, 2021 11:37

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Speaking of Kevin Crawford, just did a reread of one of his older products, the Red Tide setting, and while overall I have a higher opinion of it than when I last read it(about 5 years ago), it does still have some huge glaring issues;

1) even by OSR standards it's way too low fantasy for it's own good by default

2) the titular Red Tide is honestly incredibly lame as an antagonistic force, essentially just a bad Warhammer Chaos knockoff but with most of the interesting parts of that shaved off

3) the Shou(this setting's equivalent to Goblins and Orcs) unfortunately more than anything just come off as an incredibly racist* concept in execution as on the one hand the book goes out of it's way dozens of times to remind you that Shou are barely any different at all from regular humans physically, while also reminding you just as often that they are horrible people with literally no redeeming factors as a culture

Overall it has some good ideas but if I were to use it I'd probably be making a good amount of changes to it

*which since Crawford did a reasonably good job on avoiding making them match too closely with any one particular real world people means it feels like they're a racist caricature of an ethnicity that doesn't exist which feels really weird

# ¿ Mar 18, 2021 12:42

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Helical Nightmares posted:

I like procedural generation in gaming supplements because it usually makes it fun for me to whip up something that will have features I do not anticipate.

Scenic Dunnsmouth (published by Lamentations of the Flame Princess, but it's system agnostic) takes a dice-and-deck-of-cards approach to building a unique decaying backwater with plots, hooks and treasure.

I recently saw that Mothership - Dead Planet had a dice-and-tables method for making the entire floorplan of a derelict spaceship. Included are rules for procedurally generating hidden airduct connections. The rules are quick and easy.

In addition if you are looking for tables for nightmares, weird weapons caches, personalities of space cannibals, or a module for a planet like in Dead Space, then Mothership - Dead Planet is for you.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/249108/Mothership-Dead-Planet

Last Gasp Grimoire is packed full of good stuff like that, indeed it's one of my favorite aspects of the OSR movement as a whole, tons of great tables and charts to roll on scattered throughout dozens of blogs

# ¿ Mar 31, 2021 06:24

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Cicero posted:

Slightly unusual advice ask: My wife likes puzzle video games like Kami, Gorogoa, Baba Is You, The Witness, etc. Does anyone have any recs for puzzle books that are along similar lines? Searching for puzzle books in Amazon just brings up a bajillion sudokus and crosswords, that's not the kind of puzzle I'm looking for.

This one is a classic;

Maze: Solve The World's Most Challenging Puzzle

# ¿ Apr 4, 2021 23:20

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

theironjef posted:

Consistently the hardest problem I have with getting people into a supers game is that something seems to be broken in a lot of my friends regarding their ability to just earnestly make a superhero. You know, costume, powers, codename that references those powers. Can be a little silly, no problem. But every time it's like "Make a regular superhero" "I made an angry broken man with no powers and a terrible disease." "Make a superhero without deconstructing the genre." "I made the ubermensch but he's a terrible goblin it turns out." "Make a guy named [something] lad, where something is the kind of powers he has." I made Gangrene Lad, he died of gangrene some time ago."

Maybe they're just loving with me, who knows.

I'd probably just have them hit random page on the Public Domain Superheroes wiki about a dozen times each and have them pick the one they find most interesting, that way they have a name and basic theme/aesthetic sorted out(and they'll probably get some laughs out of some of the more ridiculous things on there)

As for avoiding stupid edgy crap, just tell them to come up with stuff as if they were designing characters for a DCAU series so something that would be acceptable on a kid's show

# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 06:58

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Doing an evil campaign I feel requires a healthy dose of comedy and/or satire mixed in, so more along the lines of Caleb from Blood or Crypto from Destroy All Humans than say Spec-Ops: The Line*

*which leads into another thing, you need to be upfront about it being a bad guys campaign, not something you spring on them halfway through the fifth session

# ¿ Apr 21, 2021 09:53

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Seems to me the simplest solution would be just chopping off the rotted leg and going with a pegleg

# ¿ Apr 22, 2021 08:21

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Lemon-Lime posted:

There's 40 pages of core rules, 40 pages of player options, 15 pages of GM advice, 65 pages of pregens and scenario seeds, and everything else in the book is setting information.

Yeah sometimes a system can be simple yet the book is huge because they include a lot of stuff, the various Microlite compilations are often enormous not because the game is particularly complicated(indeed it comes about as close as possible to the most simple you can take the D&D chassis while still remaining recognizable as being D&D derived) but because it's so simple it's easy to make a ton of content and variant rules for it

# ¿ Apr 22, 2021 22:29

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

From what I can remember back when I first encountered him over a decade ago(probably around 2009 or 2010) was that he's always been an edgelord(I mean the name alone is a clear giveaway) but at the time it felt more in a charming B-Movie or Death Metal way, probably helped that initially he was mostly doing DCC content at first, it wasn't till later that he switched over to LOTFP and he gradually became the douchey kind of edgelord you just hate, though since it's the internet it's hard to tell whether it was him becoming that way or him just revealing his true self

# ¿ Apr 26, 2021 04:42

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

To be frank you have to be a really huge idiot and/or a really huge douche to get permabanned from RPGnet under normal circumstances, though I do think the admins on that site are way too quick to throw out any other form of punishment like threadbans or temp bans, like I've gotten those for REALLY silly reasons in the past

# ¿ Apr 27, 2021 01:28

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

Plutonis posted:

One of my favorite books, Baudolino, had a small party of Crusaders visit a city in the Kingdom of Prester John inhabited by dog faced people, pygmies, blemnyes and all sort of medieval bestiary freaks and after the initial shock they were nore unsettled by the fact they followed all sorta of pre Chalcedonian heresies (and the races themselves bickered just because of those) than by their actual appearances.

That sounds like a fun read

# ¿ May 3, 2021 06:44

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

drrockso20 posted:

That sounds like a fun read

Also made me remember this setting;

The Lands of Adventure by Irondoors

Which is still one of my absolute favorites, basically everything about it is pure gold

# ¿ May 3, 2021 11:41

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

moths posted:

How about something medieval and peasant-punk? Like the all the weird crap from old texts and illuminated manuscripts that you play with 2D stand-ups inspired by old woodcuts.

So the setting I linked to a few pages ago then?

drrockso20 posted:

Also made me remember this setting;

The Lands of Adventure by Irondoors

Which is still one of my absolute favorites, basically everything about it is pure gold

# ¿ May 11, 2021 21:33

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

moths posted:

Close! Pretty much just mash up Pliny the Elder stuff with the book of Revelations instead of Warhammer.

Not sure where you're getting any Warhammer bits in that setting?

# ¿ May 11, 2021 21:51

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 21:56

drrockso20: May 6, 2013; Has Not Actually Done Cocaine

moths posted:

I just read the summary.

Well guess I forgot that part of the description, doesn't really show much in the actual Gazetteers from my recollection at least compared to the other influences

# ¿ May 11, 2021 22:07

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

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