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

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Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

fozzy fosbourne posted:

If a game has never been played, is it still a game?

Yep.

# ¿ Jan 6, 2021 02:49

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 12:09

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

It's not entirely that the biosphere is hosed so ecofascism is the moral good. Like yeah the earth is hosed up but the real problem is the fact that the melting ice caps have released a prehistoric super-bug that acts as a nerve agent and gleefully thrives in the changed biosphere and the presence of the super-bug has the elite rich folks scrambling to get the gently caress off of Earth. So, like, it's not just "let's fix earth", there just needs to be this other stupid threat where murdering all of the people trying to avoid dying to it still doesn't loving fix anything because it requires either terraforming earth or figuring out a cure but I'm pretty sure that the world is just post-apocalyptic supercities on stacked levels to avoid the rising waters so good luck with the antiviral infrastructure. It comes off far more as "well, let's all just loving kill each other out of spite".

# ¿ Jan 21, 2021 00:01

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

I use Foxit, dunno if that's on tablets.

# ¿ Jan 28, 2021 04:35

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

An official Avatar universe game will at least be a deterrent from more nerds trying to recreate it using 5e and who knows, maybe they'll actually learn a new system for it. That said yeah god I agree I wish it wasn't Magpie.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 18:46

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Magpie also made Cartel which is a PBTA game that should just be some kind of agnostic crime syndicate framework for you to build on and not just about Central American narcocartels written from an outsider perspective that has the kind of ad copy where it's "This is REAL poo poo!" with Spanish words peppered in "in italics" for emphasis/flavor. I saw someone reskin Cartel to be about playing Hutt cartels in Star Wars and ever since then I just thought "y'know that's a neat use for that system and better than its original intentions".

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 21:23

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

She also found out about his infatuation towards her and her response was, rightly, "ew, no, creepy".

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 01:28

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Lancer's backstory is pretty rad but that's par for the course for having KSBD talent behind it. The aliens are even the least interesting things going on in the universe when you consider the Aun Ascendancy, Harrison Armory repeatedly offending the setting's god with its quest for true immortality and the fact that all AIs are extradimensional godlike entities that cannot interact with us if they're not squished into a third-dimensional box.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2021 01:11

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

You could pretty easily do that in Reign.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2021 02:32

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Libertad! posted:

So, I'm in the process of writing up a FATAL & Friends for Supers & Sorcery, that "5e medieval fantasy but superheroes!" thing. I am a sample size of one, so my question to you goons is what exactly would you want out of a tabletop superhero RPG? I know that 5e is a terrible fit regardless, but I want to make sure I can nail discussion of the genre conventions as well as the mechanics in terms of grading its emulation.

Have a concept of scope and scale not be a universal system to play every sort of hero. For the love of god if you're gonna do a hero thing pick a type of hero setting, stick to it and tailor the mechanics and powers to that setting, which should be way more specific than just "comic books the RPG".

# ¿ Apr 6, 2021 22:47

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

CitizenKeen posted:

Can you expand on this, please? I think I agree with you, because "comics" is a broad medium, but there have been good systems that cover "all of Marvel" or somesuch and that's pretty broad. I wouldn't use, say, MHR to raround to Walking Dead, but it can probably do anything in the 616.

Sure, I feel it's better to make a supers game that openly states tone and feel of the setting while also limiting the kind of powers/power origins to stuff that is appropriate. That helps get the players on board with the thrust of the kind of adventures they'll go on while also helping group cohesion and avoiding choice paralysis while helping them all be on pretty even footing. Like, for example: Mystery Men the RPG, you're all a bunch of quirky and weird street level heroes with some power squaring off against the odd forces of evil, or Kieron Gillen's Uber RPG where all powers stem from Nazi super science, inequality in powers is a thing in setting for players to be smart about and there's pretty high lethality. Narrowing scope keeps players interested in the world around them and makes their actions matter, and it also means that the designer doesn't have to give every sort of possible power lip service and rules so they can focus on polishing abilities that are appropriate and making them better mechanically and in game feel.

# ¿ Apr 7, 2021 18:57

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

It's pretty amazing how he keeps trying to court the Horny And Online demographic for an audience and does not manage to stick that landing at all, and considering how rich the vein of d20 OGL erotic shovelware is and how that endures really says a lot about how bad he is at what he does.

# ¿ Apr 26, 2021 01:33

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

EverettLO posted:

It's gonna be six weeks before I stop clicking on Private Games Server out of muscle memory.

# ¿ Jun 1, 2021 20:56

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

PerniciousKnid posted:

Thinking about it more, I think what's interesting about combat in DnD, Lancer etc. is the team aspect. Combining your characters and abilities to overcome the enemy team is interesting. One fighter pounding on a single enemy isn't really any more interesting mechanically than rolling a persuasion check.

I'm watching a regular stream of it and by far Lancer's greatest combat mechanic is that it's "whichever side has the numbers disadvantage goes first and then the advantage goes" so it's more often than not players go then GM goes until it becomes GM goes and then players go and because there's no initiative players nominate who they think should go next and this allows for great synergy between player units and just setting up combos and then finishing them between them. It keeps everyone paying attention to the tactical map so they serve up the ball to each other so the others can spike and it makes the players feel so good and satisfied to come up with plans organically based on situations and then execute them.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2021 05:05

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Bumper Stickup posted:

Hey does anyone have any experience with mongooses Paranoia series? Trying to get a more in depth answer to what differentiates regular Paranoia and Acute Paranoia. Like I know that you can blay as bots but are there any mechanical/rules/etc differences or is it just an expansion?

When you say Mongoose's Paranoia do you mean the most recent White Box or do you mean XP/25th Anniversary.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2021 19:19

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Bumper Stickup posted:

I had no idea there was a white box. I was talking about this vs this.

Phone posting so I hope I linked those correctly.

Acute's fine. The latter is the bad one from Mongoose. Acute is just d20s and then the new Red Clearance/White Box one has dice and also cards for environmental/actions/narrative twists/equipment. In short they are very different on a mechanical level but Acute/XP has way more support and variety in missions and books and the latter...doesn't and has many problems.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2021 21:01

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

BNW itself was a really stripped down Deadlands before it became Savage Worlds. It really wasn't anything special and BNW itself was supposed to ultimately be the stepping stone into a unisystem that Savage Worlds later became.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2021 19:49

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

potatocubed posted:

Currently reading Gubat Banwa and it looks pretty cool if in need of an editing pass. Other recent favourites of mine (although not new games) would be Band of Blades and the Sentinel Comics RPG.

Yeah, my partner got his hands on it and fell head over heels in love with the ideas behind GB.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2021 16:12

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

BRP d100, probably something lighter in the vein of Delta Green's mechanics, where you can just loving die to a dinosaur, be good at a few things with a fun chance for failure and also maybe unload a shotgun into a pack of velociraptors if things go your way, and then just quickly make a new character.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2021 18:43

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Yeah, Dread, Slasher Flick and the new Alien RPG would be good picks.

# ¿ Jul 13, 2021 18:56

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Wendys is also more or less responsible for the proliferation of parasocial brand relationships on Twitter that started with being sassy to randos and then courting the chan market a bit to get a following going and that's why there's now brands on Twitter being like "I, Twinkies, suffer from depression and an anxiety disorder and sometimes things aren't okay but I have to remember mindfulness and cognitive behavior exercises to ground myself so I can continue to make our great products possible".

# ¿ Jul 13, 2021 23:01

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

DressCodeBlue posted:

Sorry if this is too off topic for the thread, but does anyone have any favorite game-scheduling tools?

Our group is starting a campaign where we each take turns DMing/hosting (not always the same person) for a few sessions and Google Calendar is kind of clunky for what I want to use it for.

A time-release poison and being the one in charge of the antidote.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2021 01:28

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Coolness Averted posted:

I guess in the era of online games having the antidote in one of those pet feeders that only recognize 1 collar is also required.

Wish I thought about that because man online shipping prices add up.

# ¿ Jul 14, 2021 01:50

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Gubat Banwa is also, like, explicitly critical about violence as a solution to your problems and the fact that you're exceedingly good at weaponizing a variety of crafts (metalworking, cooking) and spiritual activities (fortune-telling, exorcism) for violent ends. One of my favorite ones is the one for the Pirate whose class I forget but the gist is you're a raiding pirate and your character prompt for why they use violence is "you were a pirate for a reason, and lately that reason is just worn way too thin to justify hurting people, what is it".

There's also the mounted crocodile cavalier that fights atop their mighty crocosteed and harangues enemies with polearms whose prompt is "you raised a loving crocodile as a riding mount, you know why the gently caress you're violent and don't need a reason".

# ¿ Jul 20, 2021 01:09

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

CitizenKeen posted:

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

Metaplot is most enjoyable when it's building things up to a singular point where the PCs will start play and then start loving ruining everything. An Exalted AP I follow has more or less taken the basic framework of where Exalted begins and just uses all of the various political factions' past histories as where they would start leaning when the wind blows and the PCs nudge and push things in a variety of directions. Basically as long as it's flexible and is set dressing but the PCs can start decorating and making their own changes.

# ¿ Jul 23, 2021 23:20

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

senrath posted:

So it turns out that Pathfinder Online is finally shutting down.

Here Lies PFO. It Never Finished Development.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2021 03:12

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

fool of sound posted:

Really, a SCP game that emulates the direction of the site for the last like 5 years would basically just be Esoterrorists. It's moved away from monsters and to some extent horror in general towards in-depth narrative investigation of unsettling weird things.

Yeah, strong agree, Gumshoe is more or less in line for a good way to explore these things you don't understand.

# ¿ Aug 10, 2021 20:03

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Daniel Fox (Zweihander Guy) is a jerk and a metaphorical cop, I really wouldn't recommend giving money to him. I also have no idea if he'll put a quickstart or rules preview up for this Kickstarter or just demand you buy Zweihander to learn more and there's a nonzero chance it's just Zweihander again with no changes.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2021 14:57

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

LatwPIAT posted:

What�s a metaphorical cop?

He's not an actual cop but uses his power and place of business in the publishing world as a badge in addition to being a garden variety narc.

# ¿ Aug 12, 2021 17:59

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Leperflesh posted:

RIFTS

is extremely aged and wildly unbalanced but I've basically played what you're describing using it so it's possible at least... but mostly I'm joking, do not dive into RIFTS

Savage RIFTS...is a better game but also not entirely what they're looking for.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2021 03:43

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Halloween Jack posted:

Solid ruminations.

I've gotten to the point where whenever I want to work on a wild future setting I just automatically try and steal the character generation system from Gamma World 7e because god drat does that let you get invested in your character by trying to figure out what exactly they are.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2021 19:23

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Farmer Crack-rear end posted:

I'm thinking of doing a one-shot RPG session in October that's basically going to be "hey let's play an RPG version of Vampire Hunter D", any suggestions on best system to use for this?

I think it's gonna be important to clarify just how serious of a game you want this to be.

# ¿ Aug 21, 2021 02:34

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Infinity Gaia posted:

I have a sort of weird need for help, that I don't even know if anyone CAN help me with. I'm planning on starting a game of Fellowship soon, following a lot of hype from this thread and others, and a big piece of advice I see nearly everywhere (including in the core book itself!) is that the Fellowship is incredibly powerful so the Overlord player NEEDS to be willing to play extremely gloves off to present a reasonable threat. The problem is I'm... Kind of a very soft touch DM most of the time. Does anyone have any tips or tricks for how to play more brutal, especially within the PbtA framework or Fellowship specifically?

If you have the fourth book, Generous Fellowship, there's an advanced version of Pay the Price that can give you a good framework to follow to cost the players things whenever they need to PTP. Also it's not so much "play brutal" as it is play mean (but not, like, too mean that it just becomes cruel or spiteful, you want to be a fan of the characters and narrative and just kicking them repeatedly gets old quick). There's a lot of versatility to playing mean depending on the cut you want to make ("reveal an unwelcome truth" has some great range for adding a complication that needs to be dealt with) but at the end of the day you want to just be consistent with following soft cuts with hard cuts if they don't succeed or don't bite on opportunities they need to take care of. The Overlord has plans. It will pursue those plans, and the Overlord will pursue those plans pretty regularly to bolster their forces and security. Just keep in mind that things are happening off-screen and will keep happening if they aren't interrupted, or that things they've secured may not remain theirs if they don't defend or aid it, but that doesn't mean the moment it's theirs it will immediately come under siege, y'know?

# ¿ Aug 22, 2021 23:57

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Golden Bee posted:

So I was in a game of �the circle� in fear itself second edition, and the GM declared my character randomly tried to commit suicide at the start of day two. Is that in the module? It seems like a bizarre thing to declare without any roll, any abnormal mental trauma for my character, or any abnormal behavior on my part (Reading weird books, taking drugs, etc.)

Obviously quit because that�s bullshit, but is that part of the module?

(Weirdly enough, there�s a module called the seventh Circle� Which is completely different.)

Yeah, sort of, but the short non-spoiler answer is your GM should not have been rude about it and hit you that hard and that fast with that.

The point of The Circle is that one of the previous drug testers died while on the drug and due to Outer Dark influence from his lovely abusive dad became a psychic ghost bound to the drug and bound to the people taking it. He wants to pick off the people who are doing the current trial because he wants to get a body back, but he's too spread out across multiple people. He can possess people for a bit, as can other users but because they're not hopped up on eldritch mojo their ghosts fade and they pass away, but the less people are alive the longer he can possess folks and the more control he has. The PCs are supposed to delve into the previous test's data where the guy died and figure out what's killing the previous and current testers and have a show-down where he keeps hopping from person to person, and the cure to the problem is for everyone to stop taking the experimental anti-depressant/try and banish him/trap him in a viable body and off him. One of the big ways to tip off people of what's going on is for the players to just loving lose time somehow or find themselves in weird and precarious situations at first and give them the Stability hit, and he's really only supposed to push for the suicides later in the game or put people in situations where they could die but could also escape. One of the examples is "you have blacked out for god knows how long and woke up hand-cuffed to a bed in a lovely motel, there's an empty gas can and you smell smoke" for something you can escape with expenditure of resources. Because it's Fear Itself the point is that you really didn't do anything wrong or take any questionable actions to invite the doom, you've just been unfortunately t-boned by a truck full of doom while minding your own business. That said while it is a tool in the horror game hardware store, your GM should've use a lighter touch that early in the scenario.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2021 02:10

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Golden Bee posted:

thanks for the swift response!
It didn�t feel viable to continue a character who has done that and then be like �Oh well, time to go to my 1 PM police interrogation covered in bandages at 1hp.� Or �I�m going to skip it and get arrested during our next investigation scene.�

The pre-made adventures in FI2e are pretty solid and I'm fixing to steal Glass Beach at some point.

# ¿ Aug 30, 2021 04:31

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Yeah it's probably something along those lines especially because this is just an absolute dogshit time to open a store that requires foot traffic and attention like that.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2021 04:22

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Tulip posted:

BitD TV show is a pretty easy sell, seeing as BitD is, above all else, "Leverage set in Thief" so it's a pretty proven formula. What other systems would you want to see get a screen adaptation? My gut says Paranoia but my brain says that the things that make it fun to play are more about improv than anything else. I would watch the gently caress out of a melodramatic Polaris.

AW doesn't count because we already got Fury Road, though I guess "More Fury Road" is an extremely good thing.

Over the Edge but you give it to some motherfucker who isn't a JJabrams so the mystery boxes actually get picked through and solved as you get immersed more into Al Amarja.

Alternately, Feng Shui.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2021 16:34

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Splicer posted:

Getting dangerously close to The Film of The Novel of The Game of The Movie

The serpent can and should devour the hell out of its own tail if it makes good entertaining content.

# ¿ Sep 1, 2021 16:45

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Also if you use CoC for a detective game you should steal the rule from Delta Green of "having a high stat in a thing means you shouldn't have to roll for basic info, just more info". Like if you've got Anthropology at 70% you're just generally on the ball with that but specific nuance and details should require chance.

# ¿ Sep 9, 2021 13:46

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

For all you anime lovers, Bonobo Bo Bonobo.

# ¿ Sep 20, 2021 19:52

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# ¿ May 11, 2024 12:09

Vox Valentine: May 31, 2013; Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Leperflesh posted:

drat, how long ago was Ape Fights? The thread. Am I the only one who remembers that? It was a TG thread, right? Ape Fights???

ZOOFIGHTS, ZOOFIGHTS, ZOOFIGHTS

# ¿ Sep 21, 2021 01:01

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

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