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grassy gnoll posted:Blades in the Dark. Plenty of fluff in the book, easy to run and play, several kits and actual plays out there to get you started. You can easily run a session on the fly, as long as you understand clocks. I will second blades in the dark for being narrative driven, a good mix of easy to learn and run with or without prep, and just enough lore, abilities and gear to ground you in their setting. I'd also add for consideration two light hearted games that shift the emphasis away from fighting. Ryuutama emphasises wanderlust and the challenges of pre-industrial travel. It outsources a number of responsibilities to individual players via character-class-agnostic roles, like being the quartermaster and tracking food and trade goods, or the mapper who records the world as it comes to life during the game, or the leader whose responsibility it is to keep things moving forward and help with disputes. Monster Care Squad does away with the killing altogether. You're a team of emergency medical specialists, treating afflicted monsters with whom humanity shares a cordial, symbiotic relationship. Strong environmentalist, post-scarcity, post-nationalism themes. The world has a strong core of lore, but the details are flexible, as its a big place and many different peoples live there, and the line separating magic from technology is fuzzy if it exists at all. Be prepared to add your own flavour to your abilities and be given examples for skills rather than an exhaustive list. I'm about to start playing with part of my regular group and I'm excited. The monster of the week nature and the GMPC rules also lend themselves to a rotating GM schedule.
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Nov 1, 2023 13:37
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Jaws of the lion is definitely a good way to learn Gloomhaven. Playing that was the first time we didn't bounce off the game. It's also forgiving enough with sub par tactical decisions that you don't need to agonise over every move.
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Nov 13, 2023 17:16
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We're playing a weekly Avatar Legends game for a little over a year and a half now. About 25-30 sessions in we switched to using mutants and masterminds instead, with one player also changing characters. We're still going strong, seeing seeds develop that were planted at the very beginning, and having only missed maybe 10-15 sessions in that time.
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Nov 14, 2023 12:17
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Whybird posted:Probably the longest-running game I did was a weekly 4e campaign that lasted 3 years and took the party from L1-L5. I'm still pretty proud of the near-total reskinning of 4E I did for it, building pretty much every enemy the players faced was a ton of work but it paid off. Reflavoring powers and classes is a lot of fun, what setting did you turn it into? I once made a character for a 4e based mech game that sadly never took off. Frankly not something that's likely to ever happen again, since LANCER has cornered the "4e, but mecha" market entirely, but it was a lot of fun to turn the arcane into technobabbel.
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Nov 17, 2023 11:47
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Our GM, Luis, has been running an avatar game in the Kyoshi era for us for about a year and a half now. I talked very briefly about it a bit earlier in the thread, but here's a few highlights. We started with a session where we bounced ideas around to establish a "how did we get here" shared history, motivation and situation, decided we had These shenanigans have taken two seasons to get entangled with a war of succession and a separate but related uprising in the Earth Kingdom, worrying cultural trends among the air nation, and Kyoshi herself looming like a terrible sword of Damokles on the horizon. After season one we were fairly fed up with the mechanical system, so much so that one player dropped out and another switched characters as we retooled and started using mutants and masterminds 3 instead. I don't necessarily recommend that system in general either, but it worked fine for our particular group and didn't run into any of legends' issues of uneven character advancement for some playbooks, lack of longevity, and plodding combat that wants to put the emphasis on narrative but is too mechanically involved to really pull that off. We also found ourselves a bit adrift with the balance system granting xp for not letting your character develop radically but rather staying perfectly static.
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Nov 23, 2023 01:31
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Splicer posted:Those are pretty good ability scores. Genuinely interested now. DalaranJ posted:Yes. The abilities appear to be relatively 1 to 1 with D&D. Looks like you're going to have to go to Ryuutama for the str/dex/int/cha spread. (it's Spirit instead of charisma, though, but still)
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Dec 27, 2023 13:02
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Splicer posted:https://nitter.net/mattcolville/status/1615254083165908993 so 3x3=9 classes? Guess how many classes you get if you allow any 2 picks from 4 stats, including repeats? A cool ten.  I have some fundamental misgivings about this strict "1 class per stat combination" thing. It'll both eliminate the in-class variability that A and V classes were bringing to the table in 4e (like how both your sorcerer's secondary and your ranger's primary stat could be either str or dex), as well as put a damper on the fun character customization you could have with hybrids and power swapping by never having both of your stats align with any option outside your starting wheelhouse. And it being stated so explicitly as a design principle, it'll make it a lot weirder for new classes with the same stat combinations, like they're committing identity theft. On the other hand maybe we should appreciate it as an on-boarding tool, to say to first time players "hey, if you want your character to be both really charismatic and dexterous, then this system does not support you playing a wizard. I don't need to see any more people asking about character generation advice for their robe-wearing paladins with unconventional stat spreads who did not take anyone's word for it that 4e puts so much emphasis on combat that handicapping yourself so severely in fights sets you up for a poor first experience in the system and will actually end up running counter to you realizing the cool character you imagine. Splicer posted:Spirit is good. Give me nice broad stats over "this is the talking stat" every day. I agree. What's more, having only one stat for all the vagaries of one of the more important activities in the game is really one-dimensional and can be quite limiting, if not mechanically, then at least in player's minds.
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Dec 27, 2023 14:02
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Tarnop posted:As far as I can see, classes seem to use two ability scores for combat and both start at +3. So it should be pretty straightforward to separate the ability scores from the combat if someone wants to make a muscle wizard From my exposure to the 4e community I had the impression that a lot of people there were cool with wildly changing the flavor while diligently adhering to the mechanics of classes, powers, etc. This is not encouraged but still facilitated by the system through the strict separation of flavor text and rules text. I wonder what micdim system's stance on that is, but from the emphasis on attributes and the strong link to classes, it's not looking promising.
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Dec 27, 2023 18:58
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"2/3 of the attributes are passive and 1/3 is active" is such a horrific condemnation of the system and the lack of core principles that went into making it. So, to talk about something fun instead, Kamigakari also has four (plus one) attributes, and only half (plus one) of them are passive. (luck is a gratuitous addition to the line up with a comparatively marginal mechanical impact). The game also has rules writing that will make you say "yuck, is this code that's being parsed by a really inflexible algorithm?". It also has a wealth of character options that easily brings it into the ivory tower zone, with how potent the strong abilities and the strong combinations are. I say all of that, and yet that game is some of the most fun with tactical combat I had in a long while. In our last session we fought a huge leaping fish thing and the
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Dec 28, 2023 03:55
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theironjef posted:the 25% chance to crit off a D4 was higher than the 17% chance to succeed off a D12. Sadly Ryuutama shares that issue to some extent, crits happen when both the dice you rolled show a 6 or the highest number. But dice scale from d4 to d12 (and in some extreme niche situations d20). So as your attributes improve from 4 to 12, the chance goes (assuming both attributes are the same for simplicity) 1/16, 1/36, 1/16, 1/25, 1/36. It's completely silly. And crits are quite a big deal, too, as a lot of abilities come with very fancy critical effects. I've considered house rules for it, but haven't come up with anything elegant yet. You could just scale it up by one extra die face per size, but that does bring you up to greater than 1/5 crit rate at the far end of the scale. Maybe that's fine, though.
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Dec 28, 2023 16:03
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Leraika posted:6+ and doubles? e.g. 6,6, 7,7, etc. It would help, but it doesn't address the drop in going from d4 (25%) to d6 (17%), if I understood you right. To further complicate matters, remember that you can also go from something like d4+d4 to d4+d6, and that actually decreases your odds of doubles. Griddle of Love fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Dec 28, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 16:34
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Bucnasti posted:There is a popular house rule in DCC where you get a crit on a 20 AND the highest number on the die. So if your attack goes to a d24 you crit on a roll of 24 or 20, giving you a 1/12 chance to crit. It already kind of does work like that. You roll two dice, determined by your attributes, scaling from d4 to d6, and if both of them show either their highest face or a six, it's a crit. This 'or a six' clause is like the 'or a twenty' that you mention, and what it does is bump up the crit rates for d8 through d12, but they still drop sharply at every attribute increase other than when going from d6 to d8 specifically.
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Dec 28, 2023 16:52
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Angrymog posted:What about if any max value counts - so 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12? Yeah, that seems like the most elegant way to put into practice the option I describe above as Griddle of Love posted:You could just scale it up by one extra die face per size, but that does bring you up to greater than 1/5 crit rate at the far end of the scale. Maybe that's fine, though. The way you place the extra crits is much better than what my brain defaulted to which was: highest n faces on the dice, with n=1 for d4 scaling up to n=5 on d12.  That's a horrid thing to ask players to remember and resolve for every site roll, and I'm grateful you suggested a better way!
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Dec 28, 2023 18:06
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weast posted:I've been reading through Fabula Ultima and this is what that game does, I wonder how that maths out.  Fabula Ultima does not have d4, so the (6+) line is applicable to vanilla FU, where the 4+ line would be one adapted to the stat spread of Ryuutama critting on all doubles of 4+. "House Rule" is a crit when both dice show an even number of 4+, even if it's not the same number on both dice. Ryuutama's crit chance is all over the place. Fabula Ultima is quite stingy, boasting the lowest numbers but getting consistently higher as both stats are raised. Uneven stats on the other hand decrease the chance to crit even as one stat goes up. The house rule ends up being a lot more generous with crits across the board (except for the case of rolling 2d4). EDIT: Actually, looking over the numbers again, Fabula Ultima vanilla peaks at 2d10 with a 5% crit chance, and goes down from there on out (not far, as it stops at d12s). Adapted to Ryuutama dice ranges, it peaks at 2d6 for a 8.33% crit rate. EDIT2: Turns out I was misunderstanding Ryuutama's crit rules: When you roll something like 2d8, only results of 6, 6 and 8, 8 are crits, 6, 8 and 8, 6 are not, cutting higher end crit rates in half. Table updated correspondingly. Griddle of Love fucked around with this message at 14:20 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 28, 2023 22:08
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Silver2195 posted:Not sure this is the right thread for this, but: I remember "Death to ability scores!" being a common catchphrase here at one point. What I find odd about it is that I can't actually think of any tabletop RPGs (aside from maybe some ultra-rules-lite ones) that don't have ability scores. I can think of a few systems that superficially don't have them, but actually have them in disguise. What are these ability-score-less systems that people were calling for D&D to imitate? Both LANCER and Strike! RPG are heavily 4e inspired and don't have anything that comes with nearly half the baggage of the big six. Blades in the Dark also does it so very differently that I would struggle to call insight prowess and resolve ability scores in the d&d sense.
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Dec 29, 2023 02:37
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A real Gundam RPG, and I say this with love in my heart for Gundam, would need rules for monologuing someone to death. LANCER is more like a magical girl or other type of Super Sentai RPG, where after Tuxedo Catfish posted:also you can literally ask the dev on discord what his influences are lol I believe it spells it out in the (free) book as well. But the only influence I remember listed is d&d 4e. EDIT: I think I was hallucinating that actually. Maybe it was twitter posts I was thinking of? Griddle of Love fucked around with this message at 18:37 on Dec 29, 2023 |
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Dec 29, 2023 18:32
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ActingPower posted:I've wondered myself if there's space in the design world for a game where the primary stats are things like DPS, Tank, Support, etc. It always seemed to me like "wizard who hucks powerful spells" and "Fighter who cuts guys innhalf" should have the same stats, and "wizard with utility spells" and "rogue with utility skills" should too, etc. Pillars of Eternity, TTRPG edition! Tbh, LANCER's 'attributes' are a bit like that, only less thematic.
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Dec 30, 2023 03:07
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claw game handjob posted:Just asking here as a final place since I don't really have a tabletop presence anymore to be aware: any value in, or place that, folks would be interested in some old near-mint 4e books from up and down the line, or should I just bonfire the bastards tonight? Ebay seemed to suggest that I'd basically be losing money on shipping based on the ones that sold, so that seems out. I know some places that have people who are still active 4e enthusiasts. I can drop a few lines there for you if you like.
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Jan 1, 2024 02:23
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claw game handjob posted:That'd be swell, thanks. Lemme get home and I'll take down a listing of what I found cleaning up. Hadn't seen the edit until now, let me hammer out a few more details: I guess you're US American? How'd you handle the contact and transactions, and what sort of costs can people expect? Griddle of Love fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Jan 1, 2024 |
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Jan 1, 2024 22:10
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I also recommend the "system specific discords" route. Still it's very much a gamble, so don't be disheartened if it takes a few attempts. As much as there are great people out there, there's also going to be tons of folk who you probably won't have a great time with, and there's not that much you can do to make the former see you when you yell into the void and not the latter. But an easy way to turn away at least some of the less great candidates is to specify something among the lines of "LGBT friendly" or even just stating your pronouns. EDIT: We pretty much met everyone we play ttrpgs with today via one guy that joined a rotating GM game I once started on the LANCER discord.
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Jan 5, 2024 02:16
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Leperflesh posted:They should have demanded the sphinx explain why the property was apparently overinsured for fire, since it gains value when burned, and ask whether it considered the deductible, and also point out that property can fall in value over time depending on local economic conditions Do you want to get eaten by the Sphinx? This is how you get eaten by the Sphinx.
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Jan 15, 2024 18:55
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If the CRPG had given you some nostalgic hankering for TTRPG Rogue Trader, what kind of ruleset would you use nowadays?
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Jan 18, 2024 15:38
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Yeah, ship customization and asset/organization (colony) building are pretty high on the list of desirable features, I feel.
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Jan 18, 2024 16:44
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Subjunctive posted:I’m in the market for a Shadowrun 2nd Edition heartbreaker or five. Have you heard of Eclipse Phase? I think it might qualify. Equally heisty, more sci-fiy, less (but still a bit) magicky, plenty of gear porn even though there is only one stat line per type of weapon, and instead of an elf, dwarf or Kenku you can be an AI, a pig person or a raven. Eclipse Phase 2 is out, and it's so open source the writers just publish it for free. And despite all this there is still next to no one playing it. Griddle of Love fucked around with this message at 18:00 on Jan 18, 2024 |
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Jan 18, 2024 17:50
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disposablewords posted:Eclipse Phase 1e is overcomplicated, I haven't heard much to the contrary about 2e, and also it's got a bit of stain by association with people who think its particular Torment Nexus future is a good thing. I'm sure there are people into it who don't think that, but it's a social game and that's my only exposure to actual Eclipse Phase players. EP presents Torment Nexus users as the baddies, along with different flavors of fascists, hypercapitalists, and other libertarians. Sadly despite this there's still a regular need for push-back against the people who post fan made 'hacking flowcharts' that include 'extract credentials under torture' as a viable node, and people who think the warrior-poet fascists may be onto something. 2e is definitely easier to use, I'd say easier than the Shadowrun editions I am familiar with. Switching bodies doesn't alter all your stats & skills anymore, and the advice to be mobile and not hoard gear puts a soft cap on how complex characters can get.
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Jan 18, 2024 18:51
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TheLoneAmigo posted:I wrote a PbtA Rogue Trader hack years ago, you can find it here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0B3c8gGVv-YzVTHQ3M0ppWFhKOEE?resourcekey=0-qUXRwBHqe5AT8-qvreQ0LQ&usp=drive_link. Reading through a lot of it, absolutely dope, showing it to people, they think it's dope, too. Some stuff has me thinking to myself. "Wait, how does this work?" quote:Warning: requires some assembly.  Right. drat nice anyway!
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Jan 23, 2024 21:10
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Splicer posted:Curious why the male character is in cool action poses while the female character is shot from an upskirt angle alongside some real interesting symbolism going on with that staff. Chiming in to confirm this poo poo is weird, and makes me want to check out of the conversation. Especially when the framing is always that the non-martial looking cheesecake will be subject to martial violence. It's only a step and a half shy of the piss wizard. But, you know, cheesecake posting gets crazy engagement, double digit posts every time. This is of course gratifying, even if some of it is people voicing their discontent or discomfort. So I can see the appeal in doing it. It's not going to stop on it's own.
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Jan 26, 2024 22:09
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I'm the petrifying oatmeal skin.
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Feb 12, 2024 15:50
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Sorry to quote-post here, but I do agree with pretty much everything on that list. The rather short list of exceptions being: - Keep the damage mitigation reactions, those are fun! (instead of higher damage, at higher levels they could be accounted for by enemies simply throwing more attacks, or having a few situational re-rolls). - Have more feats to pick from, rather than less picks. Possibly roll this into one thing with boons / blessings / loot / gear / augmentations / secret techniques etc. Optionally acquire all of them narratively, maybe capped to a number of active traits dependent on your character level. Optionally have them grouped by tiers and / or upgradable. - "seizing the reins from the GM" can be great for some groups. Whether it's activating complications or introducing new facts / elements to a scene. It's the kind of thing that can put a straight up multiplier on available creativity at the table and makes many players pay more attention to detail, to look for hooks and opportunities to join in with their own little moments and ideas. But of course it's not for everyone, and if you have a more top-down style of gm-player relationship, maybe action points work better as a "devil's bargain" where the GM prompts players. - I don't personally need traps. Take this as an indication of just how strongly I agree with all the points Gort made that I'm not bringing up.
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Feb 14, 2024 02:50
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Tarnop posted:Hmm. Might as well play d&d then, I guess.
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Mar 13, 2024 15:45
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Silver2195 posted:Some RPGs do have ways to apply Intelligence or similar stats in an "avoids doing dumb things" (Common Sense in GURPS) or "able to deduce things quickly" (Idea rolls in Call of Cthulhu, IIRC) way. Though yeah, most don't, for good reason: it means the GM is playing your character for you. This line of thought is probably why there's no Intelligence stat in Into the Odd. I have long used (and vaguely disliked having to pay resources for) Common Sense traits in a number of games. To me they provide information that should be given freely unless the point of the game / setting is that it isn't free, for example in an eldritch horror campaign: A communication tool to get on the same page about how the fictional world operates, what sort of outcomes are desirable for characters and entertaining to the table at large, etc. It boils down to this: players failing to achieve something they set out to do is sad and boring unless you want to point and laugh at your friends. Characters failing to achieve something can be actually funny, dramatic, tragic, even iconic, and all other sorts of entertaining and interesting. The difference between those two is context and framing. Is the failure because of, or in spite of something in the narrative? That's going to make it more engaging. Is the failure due to a disconnect between the player and the narrative? That should be fixed, rather than punishing the character in effigy of the player.
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Mar 18, 2024 05:49
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AmiYumi posted:This reminds me of a thing I've seen a couple of games do which I go back and forth on liking, having a skill or two on the list that's just "hobby" or "pub trivia" or "pop culture", usually with most characters getting one or two free A lot of this probably comes down to group dynamics and "how does the GM write/prep adventures?" Some GMs might have an easier time remembering / incorporating character abilities / skills / traits that are structured broadly, and generally, others might more easily latch onto something really specific to make individual characters shine, and yet others will think up the adventure more or less in a vacuum and leave the integration of the characters to be solved later as a group effort.
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Mar 22, 2024 22:01
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Silver2195 posted:Wait, I thought people here hated 13th Age now? Why, exactly?
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Mar 24, 2024 23:16
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Halloween Jack posted:Actually, I know of a group where they helped the casual player build an archer Ranger, thinking that was easy enough to manage, but a few levels in she'd get overwhelmed with options and just do Twin Strike every round. Honestly, Twin Strike trumps an outrageous amount of the available encounter powers, to the point that someone struggling to decide between them, and developing the mental shortcut that Twin Strike is always a reasonable thing to use, doesn't surprise me. A player that doesn't like making a decision about which is "the right" power on their turn is IMO served very well with the reactions and interrupts in the roster. They keep the player engaged and watching out for trigger conditions, but they don't have to weigh options so much. The fact that twin strike trumps a lot of higher costed powers, on the other hand, is a bit of a design flub. 4e also has a crazy high ceiling on how fiddly you want your character to be. Even a ranger that just makes very plain attacks can staple on some wild effects via gear and talents, sliding, proning or worse. I've seen rangers with flails, bolas or nets, adding a lot of control to the repertoire.
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Mar 26, 2024 01:27
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Ferrinus posted:If I remember right, some monk powers had the weapon keyword and some had the implement keyword so you technically always knew what was being struck with what by a strict reading of the rules. Except that it was more likely you enacted weapon powers by kicking or elbowing people in order to use your unarmed strike [W] while holding your ki focus as an empowering talisman. Rather than being a ki focus, daggers are their own type of implement (just the way a sorcerer might use one), and monks don't get any weapon powers whatsoever. The fact that they get features and feats that let them use their fists as weapons is a horrible design flaw that only serves to confuse and mislead first time monk players. To further confuse matters, their attacks are generally not psychic energy, they are for the most part just physical melee strikes. Monks can be pretty good, mostly due to ready access to burst powers and extremely strong minion popping, lots of mobility and staying power and appreciable battlefield control. But getting a handle on them in the first place is no small feat.
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Mar 26, 2024 22:32
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Subjunctive posted:Would a variant approach of “how much of your resources do you have to expend to get away”/“to prevent something bad” not fit into LANCER or 4e? LANCER has an entire section outlining how "reduce all opposition hp to 0" is only one possible success state for an encounter among many. Getting away from an overwhelming force, breaking through a defensive line, smash and grab, capture and hold - there's many viable ways of adding some transformative narrative seasoning to the default baby formula if you're a gourmet encounter chef.
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Mar 29, 2024 01:09
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Premise rejection should happen before characters are drafted up.
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Mar 31, 2024 21:02
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ninjoatse.cx posted:Yes, the bad guy escaped by jumping through an opaque portal. I am jumping in after him. What did he do, again? I considered doing this once, because I was a bit sick of the (premade) character in an extended campaign.
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Apr 2, 2024 13:28
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Leperflesh posted:I've been thinking about crafting the last day or so and I think you've hit on one big reason that I very much agree with, but I think there's also a second one. Kamigakari has a simple gear customisation system that relies heavily on monster drops. I'm not sure everyone would readily call it crafting, but it does hit that spot of "no competing alternative to using this system" and it's not obnoxiously complex nor does it ask for character resources (skills, perks, etc) to be invested before you can partake in it. I like it decently enough.
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Apr 16, 2024 01:58
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Panzeh posted:However, in a combat-focused game, is knowing the outcome of a combat before actions are even taken actually an interesting thing to be able to do? Hey, now, hey now, no need to take nuance behind the shed and mercy-kill it. We are talking about a genre of games where the outcome of a combat encounter is not just pass/fail like Tuxedo Catfish points out. It goes further than that, even the degrees of success, the details of the outcome are still largely expected to fall within a narrow band of variance. You expect player characters to win most fights, but you also expect the cost / threat to them to be such that they don't accrue large numbers of character deaths per encounter. To clarify, I think 0.2 would be a very large number per encounter. You expect to largely pay your "overcome combat tax" in regularly replenished resources like %health, actions, daily power uses and more or less affordable consumables. The bedrock conventions (one character per player, emotional investment in character's narrative and mechanical development, regularly occurring, lethal fights etc) of the genre conspire to make completely unbounded outcomes of combats run counter to the desired and expected experience for this fun group activity. That's not to say you can't have fun with high body count TTRPGs, but that's a different genre.
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Apr 16, 2024 13:46
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