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I've taken a page out of Spectaculars and basically stopped running with PCs. It's all GMCs for everybody.
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Jan 4, 2021 21:51
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SkyeAuroline posted:Troupe play with shared characters is somewhere up there at the top of "things I never want to see in an RPG" and it leaves a very bad taste in my mouth. I can't speak to BoB, because "bleak story about mercenaries running away from a dark god" is not a campaign RPG that I want to play. However, "troupe play with shared characters" can be awesome if done right. The one-two punch of Spectaculars and Legacy: Life Among the Ruins did it so well I've been folding it into pretty much everything I've run since.
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Jan 5, 2021 14:45
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SkyeAuroline posted:I don't think Legacy is an example of that at all, though. If I'm playing my Riders with the "last old world officer left standing" Elder as my character for the age, nobody else is going to come in and play that Elder. There's room for incidental characters to be used and/or reused, but they're explicitly disposable and lightly statted, and it's just as easy to roll a new and separate character if desired. True. Some characters are reserved for individual players. But I've had Quick Characters get used for back-to-back sessions by two different players. Legacy was just the next game I queued up after Spectaculars, and Spectaculars only has shared characters, and watching my players in my Legacy game put their takes on characters somebody else played the previous session really reinforced the lessons learned. It was also an underlying assumption in the design of Marvel Heroic adventures Since then, in my session zeroes, I've been talking about how I'm less interested in running games where one player controls one character, and that I find the game more fun if the table approaches the game as a writers room, where each player has a favorite character for a season, but season to season "who" might change.
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Jan 5, 2021 15:39
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Splicer posted:Are there any games that lean heavily into this with an explicitly enshrined in the rules B team? Your guy dies or is in recovery or just isn't suitable for the mission so you pick up a guy from the B team, but also there's rules and tables for what the B team gets up to on their missions? Not quite what you want, but Star Trek Adventures has some good "background character steps up" rules. Basically, if Troi doesn't make sense on the Klingon/Cardassian stealth/battle mission, then you grab Lieutenant T'Kar from the lower decks. T'Kar starts out as a subset of a character with just enough stats to sneak around and stab some Cardassians, but each time you take them on a mission, they progress toward becoming a full character. It's nothing terribly novel on its face, but its implementation is pretty solid and rewards fleshing out the crew of a big ship.
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Jan 6, 2021 16:41
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I find "chain of command" works best with more narrative games. PbtA, Cortex, Blades. If there is a mechanically superior option with a real risk of resource loss, getting bossed around sucks because another player might be making a suboptimal choice, and now you're going to get -2 whatevers and in a crunchy game the whole point is to get +2 whatevers and I don't wanna. In my Legacy game, we regularly play groups wherein one person is clearly in charge, and they decide what happens, and it's chill because it's all narrative faffery anyway.
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Jan 7, 2021 06:14
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Whether you care about "houserule A solves problem X in Game" comes down to why you're talking about Game. If your goal is to discuss system design and games as art, it's irrelevant. If your goal is to find a fun game to play, the houserule solving the problem might be exactly what you're looking for.
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Jan 7, 2021 16:30
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If I make my cats goons, are they on topic for the thread?
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Jan 8, 2021 04:08
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Legacy owns. I love it. Running a rock solid campaign right now. I find some of the math a little uneven, so it can break in places. I think this comes from the family game kind of incentivizing "board game think", really strategic non-narrative play. I don't think Legacy's rough-math-corners are any worse than other PbtA games, but I think it encourages a thinking style that drives players into those corners.
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Jan 8, 2021 20:58
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Running: Legacy: Life Among the Ruins 2nd, and Cortex Prime emulating Marvel Heroic
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Jan 9, 2021 07:04
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I remember the first time I read Broken Worlds, I remember thinking "Oh, someone made a generic PbtA hack of K6BD!" It wasn't until months later that I realized it wasn't just a fan of K6BD who wrote it.
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Jan 11, 2021 01:17
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I would love to play an RPG about sports (any kind of sports) with the tactical goodness that could allow, while still allowing the stakes to feel real. I've never found that, but it's on my short list of games I'd love to play.Blockhouse posted:After being busy since like Christmas I'm finally getting a chance to sit and read the Sentinel Comics RPG Core Book Sentinel Comics has a lot of cool tech, and its character generation is the best of them. It's so cool. The system didn't end up working for my group, but I still use the character generation to come up with cool outlines for characters and then I port them over.
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Jan 16, 2021 17:05
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aldantefax posted:GURPS has combat sports as part of their skills and also technical grappling, so you absolutely could run that as a semi-realistic sports drama about a luchador trying to make it back into the ring after being disgraced by their rivals and now they must do one last moonsault before the shadow organizations have their way to destroy the sport Yeah, I don't know what it is, but the few sports games I've come across, the stakes always feel... not there. Even with games like Dream Park. I'd play a GURPS game if a good GM was running it, but I wouldn't run it unless someone paid me.
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Jan 16, 2021 18:37
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Xiahou Dun posted:The King’s Dilemma is probably my new favorite board game. Just so much hilarious arguments and backstabbing. I bought it right before Covid, and it is taking most of my board game-related self-control to not play it on TTS. I really want to enjoy it with wine and bourbon and dinner, but every day my grip on that dream slips a little.
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Jan 16, 2021 23:05
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Well, if nothing else, that reinforced my resolve.
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Jan 17, 2021 01:41
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I'm logged in to itch. None of those links give me anything.
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Jan 17, 2021 17:31
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Well, there's clearly a market demand for not-Shadowrun. Time to whip something up in Cortex.
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Jan 20, 2021 18:19
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I put about 11,000 words into a cyberpunk Resistance game before realizing that wasn't a game I was going to run in the near future. I think there's a ton of low-hanging fruit for a good game there, and I don't think adding magic would be at all difficult. Resistance is fundamentally about badasses who are in over their head who are probably going to die, but hopefully they fulfill their mission first. I think a cyberpunk Resistance game would essentially play iteself. Also, if you're into cyberpunk, I read a playtest draft of Ascendancy and it's a good project to follow. It uses a d6 variant that I'm not fond of but the writing and ideas are rock solid.
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Jan 27, 2021 16:09
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aldantefax posted:Hello thread friends. I have made a new thread, and while I will also post it in the thread for threads, I shall share it here because I will post where I may please. This is madness, but I would like to offer positive reinforcement of that kind of high-effort posting.
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Jan 27, 2021 17:11
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What is wrong with the Android version of Acrobat? Am I the only one who uses it?
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Jan 28, 2021 14:12
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I do not and I would love to hear about Monte Cook.
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Jan 31, 2021 01:28
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Magpie Games posted:Together they might protect local merchants from the Triple Threat Triad in Republic City, travel through a spirit portal to rescue a child taken into the Spirit World, negotiate peace between feuding communities within the Earth Kingdom, or pursue mysteries (and villains) that arise throughout their adventures! It tickles me that the two most evocative adventure ideas they propose are to be found in the supplements.
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Feb 3, 2021 16:29
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aldantefax posted:We totally don't have a Frosthaven thread, I think, but it might be in the "miniature games too small for their own thread thread". Frosthaven is just Gloomhaven, right? https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3840191
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Feb 4, 2021 18:45
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aldantefax posted:Anybody playing any games recently? Currently doing a biweekly Cortex Prime / Marvel Heroic game, which is loving singing. Just put a pin in my Legacy: Life Among the Ruins game until I wrap up paternity leave from life. Going to take some time from the supers game as well.
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Feb 5, 2021 18:55
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bbcisdabomb posted:Are you saying you had a kid and are temporarily dead because of it? All I'm saying is if I'm living my own personal version of BSG's 33, then I'm not going to have the wherewithal to GM. Or be friendly. Or engage in conversation. Paternity leave ain't just for work. Sometimes you need a month off from everything else, too
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Feb 5, 2021 20:29
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I'm probably never going to run Sentinels again, and yet, it's a good book with good production values, so I'm going to pick it up anyway. drat this hobby.
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Feb 7, 2021 01:55
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Coolness Averted posted:Just because of time and stuff? Or because it's actually a game you burn yourself out on? I like tactical combat and am interested in a supers game. So far the pandemic has been great for me actually getting my money's worth out of RPGs I've bought, so I'd be interested in getting it if it's a great rules system. The game didn't do what I wanted from a superhero system. The goods are great, but I also think it has some actual flaws and some for-me flaws. The Good
That being said, the first two I'm porting over to my current supers system easily enough (Marvel Heroic but different), and the third is something I miss, but not enough to ignore what, for me, were the flaws of the system. The Bad
At the end of the day, I can steal the good parts and the bad parts are intrinsic. People on rpg.net and some of my Discords seem to like it. I think if you're going for Silver Age action/violence it's got some bells and whistles that feel novel. I'm excited to see what the forthcoming supplements look like, but the system just doesn't let me play out the stories I'm accustomed to reading in Image/Marvel comics.
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Feb 7, 2021 05:43
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I'll write more later, but I'm playing Marvel Heroic Role Playing, the Cortex game, not Marvel Super Heroes, the TSR game. I can't speak to the TSR game, but MHR (by the same Cam Banks who designed Sentinels) is in my mind a better balanced game.
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Feb 7, 2021 18:23
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I'm fascinated with the rise of "not-people" character sheets in role playing games. I don't know if it's novel, or a cohesive piece of tech, but I'm fascinated with...
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Feb 8, 2021 20:59
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What game had dueling grids where you could "move" to spaces orthogonal to your current action type? It was different sword-fighting styles or something like. Was it Spellbound Kingdoms? I think "state machines as ability trees" might have juice.
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Feb 9, 2021 14:44
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Nuns with Guns posted:I've thought for a while that a Dark Souls-like game in pen and paper format would really suit Spellbound Kingdoms' fighting style trees really well. It's a good way to capture the "plan around potential outcomes, dodge, and attack appropriately" you get in the real-time combat of those types of video games, but in a more static format. The appeal, to me, is that it allows for some decision making with lots of varied options, without all the options presented at once. (I misspoke earlier by calling it a state machine, since there's some decision making by the user.) But by having a connected graph, you have tons of cool abilities. But only some of them are available now, which for many people would limit their analysis paralysis. "Here are the three cool moves I can do right now." Then you have the next level of "Here are the three cool moves I can do right now, and I want to vaguely move toward the upper right corner of my ability graph". So you can get into the strategy, etc., if you want. Also, a graph like that could bundle abilities. I like bundling, because it makes there be a reason for "less optimal" mechanical abilities.
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Feb 9, 2021 21:54
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Gort posted:I had a vague idea of doing something Dark Souls-ish by having characters level up each time they die. https://www.phoenixdawncommand.com/ Phoenix Dawn Command plays this game, by Keith Baker of Eberron fame.
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Feb 10, 2021 17:35
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Gort posted:I cringe a little harder every time someone comes up with a new version of the term "Game Master" I appreciate that more games seem to be moving on to Game Moderator, but I do dislike system/setting-specific terms for the role, absolutely.
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Feb 11, 2021 00:20
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Pathfinder Online Open Enrollment v2.4 Release Notes posted:
These two bullet points from the release notes of the most recent patch tell me literally everything I need to know about the game.
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Feb 12, 2021 21:39
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My weeknight group is 4/5 dads from across the city. The commute time just isn't worth it to us, so we were meeting online before pandemic. The ideal is to meet fortnightly online, and then about once a season do a long weekend session so we get that elbow-rubbing human interaction. Best of both worlds, in my mind. My weekend group will move back to in person as soon as it can, but we're a somewhat food-driven group, so that probably informs our decision.
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Feb 18, 2021 17:17
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Just placing the request here to plant a seed: If you've got a Sentinel Comics' campaign that's running into 15+ sessions, please report back! I baled on two campaigns as GM because I couldn't make it work for me, and I want to hear about successes. The character generation is some "best in class" business, and I love its pacing, so I'd love to chat with someone who has run it a lot. (If there are already people out there who have run a long campaign with it, I am ready to talk now.)
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Feb 25, 2021 19:43
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drrockso20 posted:I'm still kinda mad about The Forest Hymn & Picnic getting derailed so badly, it seemed like it was going to be such a wonderful game too Spill the tea, goon
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Mar 2, 2021 14:31
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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.
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Mar 2, 2021 20:49
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I had a baby girl. Now I'm sitting in a chair for four hours a night brainstorming adventures for when my campaigns start back up (taking a break due to aforementioned baby). Plus side, I've got so much content prepped I can probably wing it into 2022. Downside? Writing entire adventures with your thumb is wildly unpleasant. Thanks to whomever for Star Wars Alien Archive recommendation. My son will now tell anybody who will listen why Tuskan Raiders hunt Krayt dragons, but he doesn't know who Han Solo is.
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Mar 13, 2021 05:26
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I have a personal knowledge base (Obsidian.md) for my campaign, which affords me the ability to go to a random page of my campaign. Might be a GMC, might be a location, might be an abandoned plot line. After I write-up a plan for a session (or sometimes before), I'll grab 3-5 random pages and try to work them into the campaign. (I'll cheat and keep randomizing until I get 3-5 I want.) By ensuring that the plot is constantly bringing the past to the present, I find there's always more to do. I feel like every session ends with more hooks than it started. Don't leave good ideas fallow in the past.
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Mar 20, 2021 23:09
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Xiahou Dun posted:As someone who deeply, fervently does not care about playing in WWII, I now really want a squad-level WWII hack of Reign. That sounds tight as hell. 
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Mar 28, 2021 03:28
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