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What I mostly understand about poker is that Ash is bluffing literally all the time even when he isn't.
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Jan 13, 2021 13:35
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I feel a theme that needs to be in cyberpunk more is what we're constantly reminded of in real life: the megacorps are not all-powerful and invincible, they are are hamhanded, unsustainable feudal oligarchies run by thin-skinned drug-addled useless failsons, managed by petty, incompetent nepotistic bureaucrats, and the people actually keeping them running are overworked, underpaid and constantly being cycled out to replace with desperate new blood. Corps WILL gently caress you over and stiff you just to save some more on the quarterly reports and assume you cease to exist the moment they stop being attention to you, especially since that money likely went to their ultra-cocaine budget. The fancy computers are all running on the equivalent of Radium code and fancy new technologies are rushed to market and abandoned when the CEO gets bored. If you want poo poo that works, and isn't bloated to the gills with spyware and likely to start playing ads at you, you gotta make it yourself. Any supernatural agencies offering deals with the devil has every line of communication chock full 24/7. Make sure you're getting paid at least twice on a job, because at least one client is probably going to stiff you. Be nice to the receptionist, night janitors and code monkeys, because they are not being paid anywhere near enough for this poo poo.
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Jan 24, 2021 10:08
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Dr. Sneer Gory posted:I'm getting into the Palladium Fantasy setting, and one thing I like about it are the Wolfen, your basic anthropomorphic dog, kind of fit the "human role" that's in bog standard FRPG settings. They are the species with the young, imperialist but multi-cultural/multi-species civilized empire, who differ from human kingdoms because the Wolfen method of conquering is either to assimilate by force or treaty, whereas humans go in, kill everyone, take everything, and gently caress off back home. The humans have the usual big decadent empire with slaves and whatnot thing going in comparison. Isn't this basically the backstory of the Sonic the Hedgehog Archie comics? (before the retcon clusterfucks obv)
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Jan 27, 2021 05:32
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Vadun posted:Pendragons base building is mediocre at best, even with all the add on books. It outright says iirc it's designed to be more personal expression and customisation than a major mechanical impact. I'd probably nerf bees. Key thing I think is that building a base or organisation shouldn't really be that different from building a character.
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Feb 12, 2021 15:17
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The Wild Man of Yolo I still say I picture Unknown Armies as basically Venture Bros. Probably doesn't help that the supernatural bumfights based on bizarre obsessive interpretations of social constructs and ideas is something very familiar to anyone who's spent long enough on the internet. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Feb 21, 2021 |
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Feb 21, 2021 09:45
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Unfortunately taking unprovoked shots at communism and anarchism could also be just bog standard centrist liberal, hard to tell.My Lovely Horse posted:In my new D&D game my prospective Skaven player adjusted his concept towards being more party-friendly but still a rat person, mechanically simply a reflavoured halfling, and we said what the heck, halflings in our world are just ratfolk now, makes it all a little more unique. Then we hashed out the details and I got a sinking feeling as I realized we were making a race of literal rat people who were facing prejudice for their association with disease and pestilence, and who were, in a society modelled after medieval Europe, also traditionally that society's merchants and traders. Had some ideas a while back for what basically Skaven from a non-broken society would look like; rats are quite clean, extremely social and physically affectionate creatures. Maybe also throw in some propensity to inventive mad science, creativity and curiosity in a more benign context, because that's always fun.
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Mar 18, 2021 13:45
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I feel like a superhero RPG may end up indistinguishable from Nextwave.
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Apr 7, 2021 07:46
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I think it's come up before possibly in this very thread, but Howard had a more nuanced take on race than most pulp, especially in later stories. A description of Conan matches up a lot with Native Americans, besides the blue eyes. Apparently he grew up in Texas around when the old cattle ranchers were being displaced by the oil industry, and had the insight to draw comparison to how the First Nations people before them had been driven out and disenfranchised in turn.
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May 15, 2021 09:54
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Plutonis posted:Thematically you are right but the Cimmerians are pretty much a Celtic stand-in iirc They can be more than one thing. Honestly, easy mode for making fantasy cultures is to mash together IRL ones.
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May 16, 2021 14:55
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Well, that figures. Almost gotta keep in mind there's more than one way to be racist. Actually that does dovetail with a lot of white supremacist and fascist ideology that goes on about decadence and degeneracy more than savagery.
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May 17, 2021 08:02
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Warthur posted:In the Conan stories the Picts if anything are even more Native American-coded than the Cimmerians, despite the name "Pict" - again probably playing on the aforementioned crank theories about Also makes sense considering Lovecraft identified as upper-class despite pretty much dying of poverty, given he'd grown up in a once-wealthy family. (dude needed universal healthcare for both physical and mental reasons) While iirc Howard killed himself the day after his mother, who he'd lived with all his life, died. There's a lot to unpack here.
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May 17, 2021 16:05
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Plutonis posted:You had Bulldog Drummond stories during that period where he wears blackface as a disguise but claims to be unable to imitate the "smell of a n-word", Howard and Lovecraft are only singled out because they were thr ones who kept popularity after a century. And Golden Age comic books, hoo boy.
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May 21, 2021 08:28
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Pendragon's a bit funny there, since one of the key things with making knights is that they are by definition professional elite soldiers, and thus tend to come with at least decent combat skills and equipment for it even if they're poor, while everything else they can do is a crapshoot. Which is also one of the many ways it's pretty accurate to the stories and meant to provide some potential comedy. (advancing your skills is also a literal dice roll, though it does have a bias towards increasing your lowest skills so you can end up fairly well-rounded if you give everything a try) But yeah, there is a problem that most games that don't have a heavy combat focus, or at least have a well fleshed out system for socialisation and other challenges, are heavily focused on something else.
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Jun 1, 2021 17:23
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I think for ideas of non-combat mechanics and themes, you need to look at other media. I'm still working on a light-hearted anime-inspired system with robots and AIs where they have all kinds of potential issues that count as a challenge- throwing a party on short notice complete with catering, entertainment and guest management; tracking down a lost child in a city or wilderness; performing a heist on a shady animal experimentation facility to rescue some pigeons that aren't exactly normal pigeons (and the rest while they're at it)... Also going for Battle Network levels of Internet of poo poo, one encounter I have in mind is a smartfridge that's been left ignored for long enough that both its contents and its OS have gone dangerously rotten to the point of being weaponised. Also, it's mobile.
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Jun 2, 2021 08:21
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Discussions about Paranoia tend to turn into impromptu games of it for a reason, I think one of the books itself specifically says Alpha Complex is more of a frame of mind than a setting. That said, come to think of it, it'd probably work well in PbtA. Just have 'failure', 'success' and 'catastrophic success'.
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Jun 2, 2021 19:29
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We gotta go to Bendigo to get me cube
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Jun 3, 2021 06:35
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Tulip posted:That's great, I love it! Keep in mind that, as ever, fantasy authors are terrible at numbers.
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Jun 5, 2021 02:34
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KingKalamari posted:It's honestly amazing just how decentralized the population was prior to the industrial revolution, it's something I still have a hard time wrapping my head around. And before modern sanitation a lot of cities are really awful places to live. Not that even ancient cities couldn't necessarily have good and hygienic infrastructure, but a lot don't, especially ones that blow up in population bigger than the local government cares to keep up with infrastructure. I read somewhere it's theorised Rome had net negative population growth, between disease, fires and general unhealthy lifestyles, but bouyed up by immigration.
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Jun 5, 2021 06:19
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KingKalamari posted:Oh definitely. The fact that humans and animals lived in such close proximity probably made good sanitation that much more of a struggle even in cities that could afford proper infrastructure: I used to work in Toronto down by Exhibition Place where they sometimes had horse-drawn carriages and mounted police on the streets and the amount of poop even that small number of horses left lying around was astounding, never mind how much waste would be produced when horses were our primary means of transportation. I heard somewhere, possibly on these forums, that the old 'slipping on a banana peel' gag was a censor-friendly version of the much more common slipping in horse poo poo. Coolness Averted posted:Magic is a good hand wave for this stuff in d&d type games as other people have pointed out. You have clerics and paladins who can cleanse disease or even summon food. That has been refreshing, though it raises other questions as to how common that magical stuff is, and also other things. Standards of cleanliness likely can be a cultural thing too, one where it's typically the Europeans who are filthy poo poo-ridden plague bearers who think baths are the devil's work and are suspicious of healthy, clean foreigners who insist on bathing almost daily and practice actual medicine. Ghost Leviathan fucked around with this message at 09:09 on Jun 5, 2021 |
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Jun 5, 2021 09:06
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Charlz Guybon posted:The dirty medieval Europeans are a myth. Wasn't it the Renaissance, post-plague where hygiene standards plummeted since everyone who bathed got sick? I do know that conditions aboard ships at sea were horrific.
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Jun 5, 2021 12:14
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Those structures are common for a reason, one suspects. Three is a number that the human brain seems drawn to. Of course, sometimes you get the problem where you want to present things being 'normal' and wait for the players' antics to pull the first thread, but that happens to be when they've decided to try to behave themselves for once.
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Jun 6, 2021 09:01
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You were the one in the webcomics thread inspired by OOTS right? Pathfinder 1e would be familiar given, again, it's basically a barely legally distinct use of D&D 3.5, which isn't a great system but is still a popular one. That said, I'd suggest going with simply whatever you're able to get people to play to start with, and don't consider yourself limited to any one system or style. There's a lot of bad and toxic attitudes with RPGs that I feel are easily avoided; they're like video games, you don't play just one and try to cram every sort of experience into it.
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Jul 11, 2021 14:55
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Am reminded that a friend of mine went from following the usual '4e is the the devil's work' line back in the day to actually wanting to play it after watching Let's Play D&D that I had casually mentioned.
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Jul 11, 2021 15:55
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Plus I think they retconned a ton of stuff a while back after the original lore writer left.
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Jul 16, 2021 03:26
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There's been a couple of video games about firefighters. I remember one arcade game with the big hose prop, of course, and The Firemen on the SNES. (which got a Japan-only sequel apparently)
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Jul 19, 2021 16:07
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I ran a pretty obviously colonialism-themed D&D game with the rub that most of the PCs are representative of the native and local cultures dealing with attempts to colonise them. Also it's a ludicrously deadly post-apocalyptic setting with dinosaurs and robots and such.
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Jul 21, 2021 10:16
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Publishers never seem to realise that when you have a big fantasy setting you encourage people to create characters for and get invested in, burning the whole thing down because you want to sell new books and toys isn't going to go over well.
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Jul 25, 2021 15:16
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Imagined posted:Making an entirely new game on the spot out of half-remembered nonsense and bullshitting the whole thing seems actually incredibly appropriate to the setting. I mean, this is much of the RPG experience in general.
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Jul 29, 2021 12:42
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Magnetic North posted:You joke, but when my friend told me there was an Avatar RPG, I had to ask "Which Avatar?" because I was afraid he meant the bad one and he was one of those people. Fortunately, from everything that I have read (which is nothing), we will be repelling those humans back onto their spaceships where they certainly won't just bombard us from the air. Something about combining the two.
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Aug 10, 2021 04:11
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You can't have a game set in Vegas and then remove the Luck stat.
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Aug 17, 2021 10:26
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Asterite34 posted:This line of discussion is straying dangerously close to the premise of the Gex the Gecko games Reminds me how I describe the Elemental Chaos as basically Super Mario Galaxy.
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Aug 20, 2021 09:02
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Inevitables were a mistake to drop for 4e mind, they're an awesome idea; divine Terminators enforcing laws and edicts no matter what, and more likely to cause trouble than end it. Like that one in Elder Evils who's out to free a universe-destroying abomination simply because the gods broke a promise they made to it. (this is why your archetypical divine tricksters are the type who don't need to lie to be deceptive, because otherwise they might face consequences)
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Aug 20, 2021 16:51
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Leraika posted:The mechs are refluffed as weapons known as 'regalia' that are extremely powerful and extremely anime - mech size is refluffed as the size of the FIGHTING SPIRIT AURA they put out. Actually, regalia is basically the catch-all term for any sort of magical tool - my character's regalia was originally a tool for civilian use (mapping out leylines and magic currents, extremely important in magical urban engineering) and awakened into a combat form that does Vague Bullshit concerning probabiltiy mapping and divination (her version of the Emperor's overshield is basically surrounding allies with a bubble of 'no actually that missed', and overlaying the possible futures where the enemies got their asses kicked on the present for 1d6 AP energy damage). You kinda turned it into TTGL there.
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Aug 26, 2021 12:50
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Gatto Grigio posted:Rich Fail-son really should be some kind of subclass in a game. 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.
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Sep 1, 2021 11:39
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I got a set of lapis lazuli dice that came with a matching bag and tray.
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Oct 7, 2021 09:49
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IronicDongz posted:the people I have had issues with flaking on games in my life have been people who are just terminally flakey regardless of what we're playing and we sort of just need to stop inviting them at some point despite them being otherwise fun people because they absolutely will not commit consistently to a game It's this. These people exist at every level who have simply no concept that others value their time.
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Oct 10, 2021 11:21
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I think the bigger issue with RPG flakes is the ol Geek Social Fallacies in play where nerds are used to putting up with drat near anything just to have company where more confident people would have drawn a line a long time ago.
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Oct 10, 2021 16:04
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Most games barely function as 'hit the mens with the swords' dice games let along trying to branch out into feudal life simulators.
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Oct 21, 2021 17:46
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Coolness Averted posted:That is a pretty funny concept, just some slightly short pleasant folk with hairy feet with the twist that they're not human they're dire halflings. Hardcore Halfling. A joke in the r/relationships thread comparing the strict roles of Asian boy bands to a D&D class system has made me wonder how that'd work as an RPG, and I realise, shockingly well considering they inevitably end up driving across the country in a van/the universe in a spaceship solving mysteries.
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Oct 29, 2021 05:48
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PerniciousKnid posted:Star Trek CCG was kinda like each player playing netrunner hackers and corps at the same time, setting up mission disasters for your opponent while you tried to clear your opponent's disasters. Not really asymmetric, just a weird form of interaction. ...for some reason, this reminds me of PvP Tetris and Panel de Pon type games.
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Nov 15, 2021 18:13
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