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Is this the right place to vent about my frustrations with restructuring the Invisible Sun TTRPG?
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Mar 4, 2022 00:53
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:04 |
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Hostile V posted:That sounds legitimately interesting, what are you trying to do and what do you feel needs to be fixed? So, I have been incredibly frustrated with using the four books in the Black Cube for our actual play, particularly with locating rules for play as opposed to GMing resources. So, I’ve been collating the books on a Notion as two separate texts: one for players focused on play, basic setting overview, spells and spell systems, common equipment, and character creation (the “Vislae Handbook”) and one for GMs focused on making NPCs and creatures, interpreting Sooth deck pulls, secret setting info, and additional adjudication ideas. Where i’m struggling is the sheer number of systems and cruft in play here: in order to make this resource complete, i have to transcribe so much *fluff*, over 900 spells, and a whole host of Warlock invocation-like Secrets. I kind of want to go over everything in the text once I’m done copying and pasting and take a scalpel to everything and take another crack at all of the magic sub-systems. It’s just so galling because I read something like Heart: The City Beneath, which is super elegant in its rules and so evocative in its setting and Invisible Sun has a ton of the latter without much of the former. Edit: For more frame of reference, check out Wapole Languray’s write-up. Gray Ghost fucked around with this message at 01:26 on Mar 4, 2022 |
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Mar 4, 2022 01:18
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Ettin posted:Alright folks: who here has run a scenario (ideally in a fantasy setting, but I'll take any) set in a fancy party? How did it go? I'm currently running a score for my Blades in the Dark group and I could use some stories for inspiration. So for my own BitD game, I had the party go to a Tycherosi banquet celebrating Doskvol war veterans. While drinks and entertainment (Tycherosi carnival performers) happened downstairs, members of the party raided the office of the host upstairs. Halfway through this operation, Lord Scurlock (a powerful vampire in my game) arrives to patronize the event and support the veterans he commanded. The event became a test of avoiding both Scurlock and a Tycherosi blade-dancer and dashing across rooftops to avoid being seen.
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Mar 19, 2022 14:22
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I’m curious: is there any room for a new simulationist system that uses dice pool mechanics? I’ve been struggling with both D&D 5e and Invisible Sun’s respectively incomplete and baffling sub-systems and I’ve really fallen in love with Heart’s “Knack” and Difficulty dice pool mechanics. I feel like there’s gotta be a way to marry streamlined dice mechanics to a really engaging combat and skill system. Ideally, I want to be able to make both those skill and combat systems intertwined rather than separate like 5e.
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Apr 8, 2022 04:47
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Xiahou Dun posted:Is there a specific reason you want it to be dice-pool based besides that's what Heart does and Heart is cool and good? One of my friends really struggles with math at our D&D table and I wanted to minimize such a struggle by keeping the sums lower than something like in PF 2e. In some ways, Invisible Sun is a much more elegant iteration of the Cypher System’s roll-over system in that it uses d10s and allows players to add dice to give a potential advantage against a challenge when taking the highest number (instead of 3 x a difficulty vs. a D20 + Edge + Effort + Assets). I honestly feel like if you scraped the cruft out of IS’s systems it could be a really great replacement for the Cypher System. Heart’s use of Knacks really reminds me of what I think you could accomplish with that kind of streamlining. At the same time, I find a whole lot of value in chunky combat systems and skill challenges and I was wondering if there was a way to thread that needle while keeping the amount of math low.
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Apr 8, 2022 05:07
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So the heist game successfully funded and is on track to deliver. As a bit of a MCG expert (have run Invisible Sun for 3 years now and started GM’ing with Numenera), I feel like Cypher System is well-suited to horror settings because you are spending your vitality as a limited resource. Cyphers really aren’t all that different from potions and other items in D&D, but their magnitude can really vary (but you could say the same thing about magic weapons/armor in other games). Where Cypher System really struggles is in making different classes/character types equally interesting to play and having the other things that affect your abilities (the “adjective” and “verb” of your character) differ significantly rather than just yield stat bonuses. It’s also hung up on using a D20 when you could really just use D10s or D12s to make the abstracted math less of a pain in the rear end.
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Apr 28, 2022 03:54
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Ghost Leviathan posted:A shitload of modern game design is basically re-examining the basics and realising how much unnecessary complexity was piled on to make the system look fancy. This actually made me think of a reddit thread I read last night where someone was looking for a “crunchy game that felt more modern” than most traditional equivalents. I’m starting to wonder how possible it is to thread the needle between meaningful crunch and crunch for crunch’s sake. I used to be able to look at something like Pathfinder 1e’s core rulebooks and get excited, but now anything above 400 pages makes me tired and frustrated just thinking about reading them.
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May 3, 2022 13:55
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Xiahou Dun posted:I'd argue even the hippiest-dippiest of narrative storygames (of which I'm an avowed and constant fan) needs to have good math underneath it, just because you can't run away from math. It's just a lot of storygames, the math is so easy that if it's borked you can see it from a mile away (or the math is abstract enough it's a game theory thing not a probability question). The problem is that badly made high-crunch games can obfuscate their lovely math behind a bunch of moving parts so it's harder to tell how hosed up they are. I would love to get a primer on or better understanding of statistics primarily for this reason. Vaesen has a fantastic table in its corebook outlining the probabilities of success depending on the size of a player's dice pool and I think that's spectacular from a game design standpoint. Having those in Game Master sections and handbooks should be required.
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May 5, 2022 13:45
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CitizenKeen posted:Anybody know what the deal with the Alchemy VTT is? Why it's the new hotness? It’s expressly built for Theater of the Mind. Picture an animated image center screen for scenes (or a battle map if you prefer) complete with dice roller log, AV chat, and built-in music control with a well-supported 3rd-party marketplace. Hit Point Press and Free League are building all of their digital supplements to work natively with Alchemy now and the VTT also supports a “streamer mode” for capturing all of the action in a single window for OBS. The UX is intuitive and straightforward to boot; it’s probably precipitated singlehandedly all the UI updates Roll20 is supposed to be rolling out soon I absolutely love it. Gray Ghost fucked around with this message at 15:39 on May 11, 2023 |
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May 11, 2023 15:36
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CitizenKeen posted:How gated is it? Able to add your own art assets? Can you add new abilities / feats / magic items? Can you craft your own homebrew system? There’s definitely support for all of that. It’s limited I think (i.e. you may not be able to create a push-button action for an ability or item), but their roadmap implies that will become more robust over time.
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May 11, 2023 16:22
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hyphz posted:Have they got a better place to go with it, though? I tried it and it seems like it just lets you pay for art and then display it or pay for music and then play it, plus a simple talker with a dicebot. It just doesn't seem to be doing anything that other things don't already do. Which is a shame, as a ToTM VTT would be a great idea, but it runs into the same upstairs/downstairs problem that other VTTs have with assets. I don’t know. To be honest, probably anything you can do with this you can also do in Foundry, albeit with a bunch more legwork — but that will be true for every VTT except One More Multiverse and the Wizards one coming with oD&D. I’d like to see a lot more flexibility and usability with homebrew for sure, but there does seem to be support for game prep and world building with Alchemy that’s missing from Roll20 and Role.
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May 11, 2023 16:34
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Well Played Mauer posted:Anyone else back Old Gods of Appalachia? They distributed the PDFs a week or two ago and looks like they’re about to start shipping physical books. I got the PDF and am pretty impressed that they provided regional settings for different parts of Appalachia. One of the settings is Boone, NC, which is a nice surprise as someone who moved from near there.
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Jul 21, 2023 02:26
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Weird question, but are there any formal guidelines (in Fatal & Friends or elsewhere) for critiquing an adventure path? I’m finally clearing out my collection an adventure at a time and felt inspired to write about what I thought constituted good and bad modules.
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Aug 16, 2023 05:26
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Attorney at Funk posted:Like Ferrinus alluded to, I think there is a real gameplay problem (of variable significance depending on the game) posed by attributes where the "you get to keep playing" stats compete for resources with the stats you actually use to play. You could do a loose triad of Hard/Fast/Precise that doesn't have that problem, though it's also easy to deal with just because we've all had so much experience with systems that have Constitution or Stamina or Willpower or whatever I actually think Cypher System’s Might, Speed, and Mental pools might be a good system for a compromise… if you house-ruled a discrete player life bar into the system and streamlined the Edge mechanics.
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Aug 23, 2023 05:30
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So lately, I’ve been seeing a lot of discussion on MCDM’s Patreon and YT channel about combining the To Hit and Damage rolls in combat for their new RPG. They also found that adding Armor as a flat damage threshold the players have to beat also helps keep tougher enemies from becoming big sacks of hit points. I’ve been thinking a lot about more and similar changes to find ways of speeding up D&D combat while maintaining tactical complexity. Has anyone seen a dice-based system that does this effectively? i already know that Gloomhaven uses this really effectively…
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Sep 27, 2023 20:00
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Has anyone who backed it played around with the Broken Weave PDFs yet? It’s an interesting take on D&D 5e as it removes the spell list and Bonus Actions while using a lot of their Uncharted Journey and Lifepath supplements to shore up the Exploration mechanics. I really want to run a session of it soon.
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Apr 12, 2024 18:15
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 14:04 |
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I’ll also add Alchemy and Role to the list.
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Apr 25, 2024 02:00
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