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

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mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Is there a "tell me about your character" thread somewhere on this board, and if not is it something anyone's interested in?

# ¿ Jan 3, 2021 00:20

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 09:59

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Tell me about your character, Trad Games Chat.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2021 18:32

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Drone posted:

This is a great idea for a thread but it leaves out those of us who perma-GM

Have you ever created a pregen, or group of pregens, that you were proud of, or that a player did something interesting with?

# ¿ Jan 4, 2021 19:07

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

fozzy fosbourne posted:

What are they gonna do, start GMing themselves?

"Inflict a DMPC on the players so one of them picks up DMing" is definitely a tactic.

# ¿ Jan 4, 2021 21:08

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Jimbozig posted:

Could you tell me more about what BoB does poorly in practice, or point to a write-up about it? It was doing a lot of stuff I've also being thinking about, and clearly has a lot of similar influences to some of my games, so I'm very curious to know.

I can't speak for the poster you're replying to, but if you're interested in critiques of BoB the Indie Game Reading Club did a cool writeup after taking his group through ten sessions of the game.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2021 05:32

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

SkyeAuroline posted:

IGRC's writeup is probably going to be a much better summary than mine.

Nah, there was some overlap but you brought some new stuff to the table.

"XCOM, but it's The Black Company" is definitely a major selling point of the system for everyone I've heard talk about it. But nobody I know has ever made the jump to actually running it - the logistical effort always proved too much to rope any players in.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2021 07:56

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

fozzy fosbourne posted:

Is Agricola OSR?

Own Some Resources

# ¿ Jan 6, 2021 19:34

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

aldantefax posted:

- Does someone need to necessarily use an agreed upon language for some to criticize something and learn that vocabulary as a prerequisite for delivering an opinion?

I think on the last question, there doesn't need to be a rigorous vocabulary to talk about why people do / don't like a game or its components, at least, but I get this impression from the thread that for others, that point is more important than the criticism or opinion being delivered, which seems to stifle discussion.

I don't think you can get people to agree to a consistent terminology. To everyone else, it's always going to look like the guy presenting the definition is trying to auto-resolve the argument in his favor.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2021 00:42

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

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

In my Rogue Trader campaign, we gave the captain role to the guy with the most rules/setting knowledge. Which has worked out great, since it means the guy in charge of space battle strategy is also the one who knows what actually works in the game system. Similarly I've had scenarios where I gave the squad leader/sergeant pregen to the player who was a real world military historian or veteran or what-have-you. This approach can backfire though. In Delta Green we tried a game where the player who had read the books was the Agent, while the others were "Friendlies" who had a lower level of setting knowledge both in and out of character. In practice it devolved into "the Agent plays the game, while the Friendlies follow them around".

The other approach is making the players scouts/guerillas/partisans or some other unit that operates independently, without strict adherence to a chain of command. I think this is the easiest approach to make work, but there are settings/scenarios that don't permit it.

The third option I've seen tried is where the leader is an NPC who takes input from the player characters, then decides what the group will do. In cases where not everyone agrees on a course of action, the decision is based on how well everyone argues their case. I saw this used in a playtest game of Star Trek Adventures to good effect - imitating the part of the show where the captain has a ready room discussion with all the main characters about what to do next.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2021 01:34

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Leperflesh posted:

We've got a bunch already. "Rules-lite," "PbtA game," "GM-less," "Indie game," etc. are terms that an outsider to the genre might not understand but most everyone in this thread does.

I don't think there's as much agreement on this as there might seem, even just in TG chat. See for example the brief discussion of "dungeon crawling" and whether 4E supports it in last year's thread. For some people dungeon crawling was just "anything that happens in a dungeon" while for others it referred to a specific play style.

Another example was the discussion about "GNS" taxonomy. Some people felt it was a useful vocabulary, while others saw it as an attempt to smuggle pointed opinions about game design through the back door as neutral terminology.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2021 03:01

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Evil Mastermind posted:

Honestly I feel the biggest obstacle to good RPG reviewing is getting people to accept that it's okay to criticize an RPG.

The thing I find super draining when doing reviews is posting a very specific criticism of a game, and immediately getting replies saying "Wow, what a poo poo game, I can't understand why you would play it. I can't BELIEVE anyone would play it. Don't you know that [pet system] exists? Just play that!"

I used to think I was communicating poorly, but I suspect that feeding frenzy behavior where people immediately assume the worst based on one problem is some kind of human universal. Now that I recognize it, I'm trying harder not to do it myself.

mellonbread fucked around with this message at 06:44 on Jan 7, 2021

# ¿ Jan 7, 2021 04:27

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Jimbozig posted:

Hey chat thread, I'm writing some wizardy stuff involving divination and in particular prophecy. This is fairly in-depth, so there's going to be tarot stuff and crystal ball stuff and mystical trance stuff as different modalities of prophecy. But I'm hoping to learn from the successes and failures of those who went before me, so can anyone point to any detailed rules for prophecy from other games and even better, info about how they worked well or poorly?

I found a free Dungeon World playbook called the prophet, but the rules there are basically that the GM has to do all the hard work of coming up with something. The player gets to pick if it's got a lie in it, or if it's something they don't want to hear and can't repeat, or if they take psychic damage from it. That leaves so much for the GM! If I was a GM, I'd hope that the player used that move sparingly because it's so much mental effort deciding exactly how much of the mystery to reveal, especially if it keeps being used.

I have my own priorities: I want the moves/rules to really support the GM. I want it to be useable in a mystery without completely solving things. I want the more difficult modalities to be able to do some things the easier ones can't do, but without completely superceding them. Ideally I want it to be self-limiting, giving a reason why you won't just deal out tarot cards over and over looking for more info, or say "well the cards were vague so I'm going to look in the crystal ball and ask the same question."

Any examples good or bad of how to run player prophets would be greatly appreciated!

5e Divination Wizard has an ability called Portent where once a day, you can roll a couple D20s and write the values down. At any point during the day, you can use one of those recorded values in place of a D20 roll - whether it's your own, another player's, or even a monster's roll. It's a cool way of mechanizing "seeing the future" without actually forcing the DM to give the player a prophecy and then make it happen.

There's also the Hades approach. The game has a list of "prophecies" (stuff like using every weapon, collecting every boon, etc) that the fates have woven for your character. Each time you fulfil a prophecy, you get a payout of resources you can use to improve your character. So if the players are getting prophecies from the future, you can give them a payment of XP or some other meta-resource for acting in such a way that the prophecies actually come true.

I realize neither of these help with the mystery solving element. My advice there is to design mysteries that are robust enough that they aren't automatically "solved" by the players getting clues out of turn. I realize this is easier said than done. So if you want to find out who the murderer is, and the arcane cards tell you it was guy X, that's a useful clue, but that's not the end of the story. You need to know whether the guy acted alone, whether he was being mind controlled, the motive, what he did with the contents of the safe, etc. And you might have to prove all that to the satisfaction of a third party, who isn't going to believe "the cards told me so!"

Leraika posted:

e: I would leave the actual mechanics of divination to player preference, though; I wouldn't say that one type of divination is harder or easier or more or less accurate compared to another one because that makes what should be a cool player choice ('I use tarot cards' 'I gaze into the flames' 'I go birdwatching' etc) into a mechanical one.

Yeah I remember this coming up with bards. You want to see accordion bards and cello bards and bass guitar bards, but everyone makes a singing bard because it leaves your hands free to hold other stuff while performing.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2021 18:46

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

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: Delta Green, my own OSR homebrew system
Playing: Rogue Trader, CP2020, Esoteric Enterprises

# ¿ Jan 9, 2021 06:45

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

SkyeAuroline posted:

Five games at once, I wish I had that kind of time freedom (and that many people to play with). What's the homebrew based off of?

I use the spell list and monster manual from the Old School Essentials SRD, but the system itself isn't directly based on anything. There are pieces taken from various blogs, but I wanted a game that catered to my exact preferences, meaning

No separate ability scores and ability score modifiers
No huge tables of saving throws
No differential XP advancement
No prime requisites
Only one die for everything (no D6 for surprise, D100 for thief abilities, etc)
No redundant ability scores (combine STR and CON, combine WIS and INT)

After a certain point it was easier just to make my own heartbreaker, rather than write a huge list of hacks to an existing game (and therefore force the players to read both the base game AND a book of houserules).

The latest version is here.

There are some balance problems. SKILL is much more popular than the other ability scores, because it providing immediately useful and fun benefits that always apply. I'm trying to buff the other abilities, rather than nerf something everyone enjoys.

Alignment XP is kind of busted at the moment, but I haven't changed it too much because I like the way it affects player behavior. Lawful characters are sanctimonious assholes obsessed with converting people to their alignment, Neutral characters are psychopaths who only care about money, and Chaotic characters are unpredictable hotheads who lash out and start fights. And somehow it works, without the players stomping on each others' toes or getting pissed off out-of-character. Though that might be down to having a group that already plays well together, rather than a strength of the system. Definitely going to need further playtesting. The XP advancement rates in general are in need of tuning, which might be a better fix than fiddling with the alignment rules.

I'm trying not to change too much between playtests, partially so that I can observe the effects of each revision in relative isolation. I wrote up (some of) the games here.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2021 08:58

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

I read A Dirge For Sabis on the recommendation of a poster from the 2020 thread. It's a fantasy story about a guy trying to invent a cannon in time to defend a medieval city state from a barbarian invasion. It's a relatively quick read with an interesting setting and some cool characters. At times it goes a little too in-depth on the exact details of every action the characters take. And not in an exciting or immersive worldbuilding sense, but more like giving a blow-by-blow of a cart ride to transport materials from a manor house to a workshop. Toward the end of the story things pick up, with the characters escaping the city and traveling into the "settled" barbarian lands to live as priests given a jump cut rather than presented in torturous detail.

Dirge ends on a high note, but I'm about halfway through the sequel Wizard Spawn and it's a letdown. The protagonist is a carbon copy of the guy from the first book, except he's a doctor instead of a chemist. The city state where the book takes place might as well be the same city as the one from Dirge. And worst of all, the book is set 500 years after the original, but nothing has changed at all. The entire first book is about the characters making transformative technological discoveries - they invent a cannon and use it to blow up a cult that tries to extort them. They invent a steam ship and sell the technology to a pirate kingdom. This is the focus of the book, and yet in the sequel, nothing has changed. Literally enforced medieval stasis by the author.

I understand that a central theme of the first book is how bureaucratic and social inertia can inhibit progress, but that's no excuse for retroactively making the entire first book into a shaggy dog story

There's still time for Spawn to turn around. And even if it's not great, I might still read the third book in the series.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2021 01:52

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Tenik posted:

It sounds like they'd be good with any system, mechanically speaking. You just need to find out what type of story or genre they want to play, or you want to run.

This.

The other question is whether they want to create their own characters. If they're fine with using pregens, or telling you a concept and having you crunch the numbers and present them with a finished character sheet, that opens up a wider range of possibilities. Many complex systems are actually quite simple to play once you get past chargen.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2021 21:53

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

There's a similar thing going on in the Rifters setting. The internet became so infested with self modifying viruses that nobody does any networking outside of airgapped, walled gardens.

In the third book of the trilogy, a character makes the mistake of briefly plugging her post apocalyptic survival van into the global telecommunications network. It's immediately hijacked by a murder virus that activates all the weapons systems and kills everyone in line of sights.

I don't remember if it's ever addressed why the network even still exists at all - who is maintaining the routers and transmitters whose only purpose is to transmit turbo-worms.

# ¿ Jan 23, 2021 00:30

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

"You can get soft locked in an unwinnable state, forcing you to start over and grind through the tedious early game again" was a common complaint about the base game. Supposedly this has been fixed in updates and expansions, which add more encounters to mix up the low level game, and also the option of starting at a later stage in order to skip to the midgame content. But that's just what I've absorbed through osmosis, I also have never played it.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2021 18:06

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Yawgmoth posted:

French peasants managed to make delicious food just fine, as did the Germans, Polish, etc. and they didn't pillage half the planet. Britain has no excuse.

France for sure did pillage the world

# ¿ Jan 27, 2021 20:29

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

# ¿ Feb 3, 2021 01:30

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

aldantefax posted:

Anybody playing any games recently?

Playing Esoteric Enterprises and Rogue Trader weekly.

Recently ran a couple Delta Green games. I thought I had squeezed most of the juice out of that system, but every time I run it I remember why I like it.

And I'm running a playtest of my Fallout: Two Sun game on Sunday. If it goes well, it could become a recurring game.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 21:26

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Helical Nightmares posted:

Delta Green is great. You don't have to make up dumb hooks why a party of wildly diverse backgrounds (in the 1920s usually) will want to get together and solve Mythos mysteries when they really should be running the gently caress away from anything that even hints at the gribblies. In Delta Green you are part of an illegal (or quasi-legal) Conspiracy that is probably embedded in the US government to shut down supernatural phenomena, that if left unchecked will lead to a worse situation. Therefore you can plausibly have a professor of archeology tagging along with a couple of law enforcement officers and a cryptographer out of Quantico because everyone has had experience with the unnatural and has been tapped by the Conspiracy.

Melonbread (and I think Elendil004) run a yearly "Shotgun Scenario" contest on the Fairfield Project wiki (DG wiki) where authors submit a short Delta Green scenario and there are prizes given for the top three. In 2020 there were 75 entries the judges had to wade through. Some published RPG authors, including our own goon Clockworkjoe (of Roleplaying Public Radio and Base Raider fame), submit every year so the quality of submissions are pretty good in my humble opinion.

http://fairfieldproject.wikidot.com/

https://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/category/systems/call-of-cthulhu/delta-green/

Also Caleb Stokes, a goon of Roleplaying Public Radio and Red Markets fame, has been tapped to write some official Delta Green material. One of his first (?) Cthulhu inspired adventures, Lover in the Ice has been translated to the DG system. He is currently writing the series God's Teeth for DG and has been tapped to finish off ARCHINT and add to The Labyrinth. I think his goon handle is Cthuluzord? Not sure.

Lover In the Ice
Actual Play : http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/2011/05/systems/call-of-cthulhu/call-of-cthulhu-delta-green-lover-in-the-ice/
Game : https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/184098/Delta-Green-Lover-in-the-Ice

God's Teeth Actual Play: http://actualplay.roleplayingpublicradio.com/gods-teeth-a-delta-green-campaign/

Caleb working on ARCHINT and The Labyrinth: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/arcdream/delta-green-the-role-playing-game/posts/3072517

I'm sure I'm missing other DG authors that are goons too.

Hey there!

I don't run the Shotgun Scenario contest. In previous years, it's been run by Ed Possing, and in 2020 it was run by Elendil004. Maybe you thought I ran it because of my FATAL and Friends series on the winning entries?

I have never written a published Delta Green adventure. I write a bunch of stuff for myself though, which you can find here.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2021 23:31

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

dwarf74 posted:

So for those who have moved from in-person games to remote via roll20 or whatever... Who's considering keeping it that way even post-pandemic?

I have got to admit, I'm considering it. Just being able to plop maps and tokens in without printing is kind of amazing. I'm still not sure - but it's a real question when I didn't expect it would ever be.

I like playing online, but I strongly dislike the way maps and tokens work in every virtual tabletop I've used. Nothing has ever come close to the ease of just drawing on a chessex grid with a wet erase marker and throwing down a couple random objects to sub for miniatures. I've tried hooking up a graphics tablet and using it in roll20, but you still have to wrestle with the clunky web interface. Tabletop simulator gets you part of the way there, but adds a lot of friction with the physics simulation - pieces falling through the table or ricocheting off each other and flying into space, an undo function which doesn't work because it's trying to remember the position of every 3D object.

All of this gets easier if you're working from pre-baked material and planned encounters. It's when you try to improvise that things get rough.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2021 19:36

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Text based RPing definitely lets you inhabit a character better. It also erases issues with voice connectivity, having to repeat things multiple times because people couldn't hear or weren't listening, etc.

The tradeoff is how much longer it takes than just talking. In addition to the amount of time it takes to type up a response, being able to revise before sending means everyone will fiddle with their reply until it's perfect. I started playing RPGs online through text posts in the roll20 chat, and I was amazed at how much faster my first voice game went.

Farg posted:

never played an rpg session in person. how would you even handle the tokens and the music. weird boomer poo poo imo

Obviously you hire a band or orchestra to play the music live at the table.

# ¿ Feb 18, 2021 20:16

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

I ran a Fallout mini-campaign campaign for a handful of my favorite open-table players. I'd had the idea in my head for maybe 5 years, but the heavy content lift of building a whole city filled with factions and quests and so on put me off. Then the New Vegas Randomizer came out, which renewed my interest in the game, which got me to revisit the old design document I wrote up.

The players were Exiles from Vault 24, kicked out into the wasteland outside Two Sun for bad behavior, or just bad luck. They got a conversation with a veteran "wasteland scout" who had been booted from the vault three times already, but always bought his way back in by finding something the Overseer wanted. Then they got the boot. Up to them whether they wanted to find something in the city to get them readmitted to the vault, or explore until they found something else to do.

They found something else to do.

Highlights include:

Every player building an exiled scientist who had no idea how to survive or fight, counting on their high skill gain from INT to carry them after the first session
The Exiles doing a job for the Legion to get some cool loot, then feeling guilty about it and resolving not to do it again.
The Exiles using their jacked Science and Repair skills to make jury rigged combat identification panels and juke the IFF on the infrared targeting systems of some sentry bots, letting them sneak into the Pima Air and Space Museum and befriend the super mutant IT guy who lived there.
The Exiles getting a totally bitchin' ACAV to drive around the wasteland in, then almost totaling it when they narrowly missed a gila dragon sleeping in the road.
The Exiles retrieving weapons of mass destruction for a guy they'd known for a day, because it seemed like a fun quest.
The Exiles nuking the city and killing everyone because it was a quest objective, then feeling guilty about it and resolving not to do it again.

Father Elijah was right. Pip Boys were a mistake.

It was a great three sessions. A couple of the players asked me to write up the sandbox I used, so they could run it for people in the future.

If you're interested, you can read the play reports, the rules we used, the map and the GM sandbox here.

Bonus image from 2015, back when I first had this idea:

I think I lowballed his weight a little.

mellonbread fucked around with this message at 22:11 on Feb 23, 2021

# ¿ Feb 23, 2021 22:07

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

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.

The Wildlife of Star Wars: A Field Guide

# ¿ Mar 2, 2021 20:55

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Being evil is fun.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2021 19:43

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Leperflesh posted:

Do you guys feel there's a way to roleplay an evil character who does bad things, in a realism-feeling game, but still be a healthy leisure-time activity?

Yes

Leperflesh posted:

How do you feel about it afterward?

Honestly pretty great. Creating the villain is one of my favorite parts of scenario design. Asking "why do people still like this guy" and "why hasn't anyone just killed him yet if he's doing all this bad stuff" is not only fun, the answers will also illuminate other aspects of the game world, the factions, etc. And it's extremely gratifying afterward to hear the players talk about how X NPC was memorable or their favorite, despite all the trouble he caused them.

You have to know when to quit, though. If you make the bad guy too likeable and sympathetic you risk accidentally stripping all the conflict out of the scenario. The players deciding "he's got a point, let's leave him be" is fun once or twice, beyond that it gets tiresome.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2021 00:01

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Whybird posted:

Evil antagonists tend, unless the story derails, to get their comeuppance. The story is set up to implicitly criticise the stuff they do.

Sometimes. I don't run RPGs according to the Hays Code, where good must always triumph over evil.

# ¿ Apr 21, 2021 16:18

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Tulip posted:

PBP is basically a whole major tradition of roleplay that I at least mostly associate with livejournal RPs. There's definite success stories out there (one of my exes was in a few that lasted years) but from what I can tell the disposition to do synchronous RP and to do asynchronous RP do not necessarily appear in the same person. The Magpies Podcast talked about it in one of their behind the scenes episodes, that some (maybe all?) of the actors learned RP from PBP.

I started with text based free-form RPs, but they were on IRC or other live platforms rather than play-by-post. The first actual RPGs I played was done via text chat. In the end I swapped to voice exclusively for the reasons other users have identified - the text based games tended to wither and die with greater frequency.

# ¿ Apr 28, 2021 01:41

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

I can confirm that A Wizard is super fun. I ran it as an endcap to my Esoteric Enterprises series and it went great. You can read about it here and here.

I didn't notice any instant death traps. The big flaws I found are

There are a lot of places where the text says the wizard is watching the players "won't allow" something to happen, or will "punish" the players for something. There's no description for how he actually does this - as written he doesn't interact with the players at all until they reach his layer.
There's basically no treasure. Which isn't a problem with a system like DCC, which awards XP on a per-encounter or per-adventure basis, but is a big issue if you're using a conventional treasure-for-XP system. It's an endgame level challenge and the total reward is less than it takes to level up a single level 1 character.

The abyss is worth removing if you want to get through the whole module in a single session.

# ¿ May 25, 2021 21:29

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Coolness Averted posted:

I also read "if the characters slaughter [the wizardling] the wizard will do the same to them" as an instakill on whoever does it (if not a tpk).

So... don't read it that way.

Coolness Averted posted:

But yeah if you fudge all of those to not be as deadly, interpret the stuff I read as game overs as just creating new complications, and decide the mutilation traps have no mechanical effect it stops being ultra lethal and just becomes arbitrary -or gets to the point that really you're not running A Wizard, you're running your own adventure that just used the concept as a jump off point.

But yeah, if you go out of your way read everything in the module as an instant kill, the module is full of bullshit instakills.

# ¿ May 26, 2021 03:26

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Skyarb posted:

What do you mean by wooden sets?

Probably a wooden marble run.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2021 19:32

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Godlike has a cool setting but I think the mechanics aren't very good. The skill and dice system make it hard to achieve a decent success chance in anything. The choice between tall and wide results is mostly academic since you're lucky if you get any matches at all, let alone two matching sets. In practice we found the optimal chargen strategy was to spend your superpower points on boosting your primary statistics, since that made your skills better across the board. Investing heavily in powers wasn't a smart decision. Besides the aforementioned heavy armor, which was much cheaper than the other powers relative to its usefulness, and didn't disappear when you used up your pool of metacurrency. The combat system where everyone declares and resolves in different orders depending on the speed of their characters and the speed of their actions is a fun idea but slows the game down to a crawl in practice.

We played the mission where the mysterious dome appears on Okinawa, and some Marine talents get sent inside to investigate. I don't remember the name of the module, or if it was something fanmade. I only played a couple sessions of it but they left me with no desire to continue using the rules. I've heard Wild Talents is mechanically better, but discards a lot of Godlike's more interesting setting elements.

# ¿ Jun 23, 2021 17:10

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

CitizenKeen posted:

Because they're just doing lore it's not getting archived with the other F&Fs, yeah? There's no way just to see their posts in isolation?

Pretty sure the other F&Fs are also not getting archived.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2021 16:28

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

I thought it was acceptable to include discussion posts in the review posts if they were a direct response to other people talking about the game, and added something to the review.

If it makes it harder to archive I'll do those replies as separate posts from now on.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2021 20:16

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Hel posted:

It's been a while but I think the point was that you have to start the post with the review and then have discussions/ answering questions etc. afterwards because otherwise it won't look like a review at first glance.

Okay good, that's what I've been doing. Also starting every review post with the same header image and some bold text. I was just imitating everyone else but it appears that was the correct choice.

Leperflesh posted:

And as a tangent to that: whenever we retire a thread in TG we should consider whether it's a candidate for goodmine/goldmine, so please don't hesitate to speak up to a TG mod when that happens if you think a thread deserves that honor.

I'm struggling to think of top-tier threads that should be archived, because so much discussion ends up focused in megathreads/generals. You might have a great conversation but that's one page in a hundred page discussion going back years.

It is a helpful reminder that I should post more in the smaller threads about specific topics.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2021 21:14

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

potatocubed posted:

Yeah, I was thinking something as simple as 'every writeup post starts with GOONREVIEWS on a line on its own' (or something) so the scraper can automatically recognise them. It's not a perfect system since it a) relies on people remembering to put that in place and b) has exactly zero protections from hijack or abuse, but something along those lines?

Asking people to append an easily recognizable tag to their post would be a good thing to put in the OP of a new F&F thread. I don't expect abuse would be that common, but I can understand the mods not wanting to constantly deal with reports every time someone misuses a tag.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2021 22:35

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

When we debate whether the show is "scripted" are we asking if the story beats are planned ahead of time, or if they actually memorize lines?

# ¿ Jul 10, 2021 22:44

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# ¿ May 10, 2024 09:59

mellonbread: Dec 20, 2017

Would help to know what tone and mechanics you're shooting for - a DCC style bloodbath with a troupe of expendable characters? Something more like CoC where the characters are fragile, but can spend "luck" or other metagame resources to divert death?

# ¿ Jul 13, 2021 19:02

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

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