|
So I’ve been doing some digging into how the idea of what a dungeon is has changed over time. It seems like TSR changed their definition from just some cave or underground place to just a generic sort of, “where the treasures and monsters are.” What is your favorite or most bizarre description of what a dungeon is?
|
#
¿
Nov 4, 2023 11:05
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 13:10 |
|
|
Magnetic North posted:You know, I'm gonna say it: there are too many trad games nazis to keep track of. Man, this is so true. It’s even more difficult than lol the TSRs.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2023 16:21
|
|
|
I don’t know that I’ve ever had a campaign go more than maybe 20 sessions where the system maintains dominance. By like session 5 or 6, the players sort of come to understand their characters and we end up just telling stories with occasional checks for dramatic moments. Probably also telling my most successful campaign was with Amber Diceless. For those of you who go dozens, hundreds of sessions, do you keep the rules in place?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2023 12:38
|
|
|
Lurks With Wolves posted:Correction: I meant Seven Samurai. Six Samurai isn't anything. (Other than a Yu-Gi-Oh archetype, but those don't count.) Excuse me, we wouldn’t have OctaNe without Six String Samurai. What a wild time that was back when GamingOutpost was live.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2023 00:11
|
|
|
nessin posted:If DriveThruRPG doesn't have a Print On Demand option, what's the best alternative to print a PDF? The only real option (see not insanely expensive) that I know is Lulu but wondering if there is another option. Ideally some place that offers a coil/spiral binding, but I can live with doing my own three ring binder if it's cheap enough. Lulu is fantastic. I’ll print custom PDFs to be used as dossiers of sorts for players in heist adventures in a perfect bound booklet. If there’s an easier way, I’m interested but every time I’ve looked, it’s been like 8x Lulu prices.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2023 12:50
|
|
|
busalover posted:The recent video by People Make Games made me curious about LARP in the US and elsewhere. Is there a book that gives a general overview, or maybe one system that's the most popular? Doing a quick Google Mind's Eye Theatre is or was really popular? This book is one I give folks who are interested. The article here: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qzart1lzv4vjjuo/We%20Hold%20These%20Rules%20to%20Be%20Self-Evident.pdf?dl=0 is probably the most telling of the ways LARP differs.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 24, 2023 23:00
|
|
|
Random question: What would stop a Session 0 game like Microscope or Quiet Year from keeping their schtick going throughout an RPG session or campaign? Besides like...One Ring or Double Cross, are their games out there that hand a part of your character to the GM? What about the rest of the players?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2023 01:28
|
|
|
MadDogMike posted:Hell, Cthulhu actually showed up in the Real Ghostbusters cartoon once, though because of some idiot "correcting a typo" in the script it was spelled "Cathulhu". Though I suppose the only thing more horrific than Cthulhu would be Cthulhu with cat traits. That ep was also written by the Chaosium crew so it was ultra weird it ended up that spelling. Totally didn’t follow sanity rules: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJilPgMqNM Also, if you haven’t gone through the ghostbusters rpg. It is perhaps the best rpg ever written. Someone put up some barebones of it: https://ghostbusterscities.com/media/ghostbusters-the-roleplaying-game/
|
|
#
¿
Dec 1, 2023 02:54
|
|
|
disposablewords posted:I'm not totally sure what you mean by this. As in, just take breaks in a campaign to revisit Microscope or Quiet Year for another turn or two? Nothing, really. A recent game had the GM start us with Quiet Year to get the setting going and then we took a break partway through to run a game of Microscope (or something like it, I don't quite remember) as a sort of interactive info-dump of some ancient history of the setting. The GM used his turns in that to set up the core stuff he'd planned the rest of the campaign around, and we added extra stuff and our own spins on his material to give him more to work with. Something like this. I’m more interested in a sort of organic back and forth among players with or without a GM where they begin with a session 0 game of sorts and it just sort of…melds with the game. I haven’t quite understood why session 0 games and like…Fate Tokens couldn’t be more robust in how they are used. Like at some point I get a reward and it’s room card or secret backstory to an NPC or even a card from something like Once Upon a Time that I can use to shift the story a bit. I suppose this breaks the sacred rpg foundation of systems mattering but I feel like it’s something interesting.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2023 00:41
|
|
|
DalaranJ posted:I guess what I'm trying to say is a major part of the 'fruitful void' in Microscope is showing that the myth of the great man is patently absurd. But most ttrpgs are about making a cool guy and telling stories about your cool guy. I think Icarus does an ok job with the Great Man but that’s neither here nor there. What I guess pushes me into this is that I’m more interested in a world everyone actually inhabits rather than a character immigrating to a new world with nothing and seeking everything.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2023 21:50
|
|
|
It’s been a while since I saw someone posting about rules they could just get rid of or change. The ghosting Gygax has lost its potency.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 5, 2023 00:33
|
|
|
trapstar posted:I didn’t intend to create lewd wank off material though. More than half of my commissions are male characters… I uh, well, how do I say this. It makes me sad that I, as a dude, can’t be sexy lewd wank off material.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 8, 2023 22:00
|
|
|
Kestral posted:If you were putting together a sort of RPG charcuterie plate for people who have only ever played D&D, and you wanted to provide a sampler for the modern landscape of the hobby, what would you put on it? I really like games that different kinds of players would enjoy. Take them on a tour of different approaches to roleplaying. Ghostbusters: International may be the best RPG ever written. Open up a Ghostbusters franchise in your town, see what happens. While folks with hesitate roleplaying a one armed dwarven rogue, they’ll totally be fine being Winston or Walter Peck…but a good guy. Amber Diceless is super unique. Grab a deck of cards, place everyone in their own rooms, and roleplay out a bunch of nobles vying for the throne. Fate is a game that really needs to be on this list. It just opens the door to so many other games and approaches to play. Stealing the Throne is a game that I think gets into a teamwork mood. It is also GM-less and all the prep you do at the table. It offers something different than Amber but also different than most other games in that you have to spend some time making the world and don’t answer to a GM. Dungeon Crawl Classics: Portal Under the Stars is leaning in to dnd and taking away all pretense that your character matters. Smash a buttton for 4-8 characters and watch them all die. If they like the game, their survivors suddenly seem interesting. I think you can learn a lot about how the ttrpg world works through one shots of these games. In fact, I think these (or similar equivalents) would probably make a good first step in an OKcupid for rpg groups.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 11, 2023 12:13
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:i think it would work okay as a one-shot, but i'd give them premades. character creation is pretty complex and like many high-crunch games the order in which it encourages you to do things doesn't really line up with the order in which you actually learn new subsystems I like Amber mostly because it doesn’t hinge on bible stuff. Being a spoiled noble kid seems an easier mental model than being the personification of something. Ymmv is always the case.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 13, 2023 14:18
|
|
|
Y'all making me miss the absolute battleground that G+ was. Now everyone's on their own islands instead of being forced to talk to each other on a forgotten Google product.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2023 21:53
|
|
|
Vulpes Vulpes posted:Looking at the Deadlands 20th Anniversary edition, it is extremely surreal to see all the same art pieces from the original books but redrawn and colored. I got into the hobby again when Deadlands and 7th Sea ruled all, just before the d20 flood. It is wild to see how high production quality has come (though I wish artists were paid far better given that quality).
|
|
#
¿
Dec 14, 2023 22:55
|
|
|
Plutonis posted:Give peace a chance. I would but they don’t like that game. They say the system is garbage. Well I say they’re garbage! Ha!
|
|
#
¿
Dec 16, 2023 00:22
|
|
|
Thirteen Orphans posted:I am have ton of TTRPG pdfs I’d like to download on my old iPad. I’m looking for an app I can make folders in for ease of reference that can download straight from the browser. Any recommendations? https://www.liquidtext.net/ owns. I mostly use it for vast arrays of PDFs I have in research folders for academic purposes. It syncs well with Dropbox and google docs.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2023 02:02
|
|
|
Benagain posted:Im trying to do this where do people recruit these days Really need to get an app together called Roll for adventure where you make yourself as a character and it assembles groups for online or local play with additional options for x-card preferences, content, system, and type of player. Sucks all we got is meetup, old forums, and forgotten social media platforms.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 26, 2023 14:58
|
|
|
mellonbread posted:The Industry Thread is currently ripping it apart, but it's difficult to say if the game is actually bad or if they just have a grudge against the devs. Is Colville that contentious a person? He seems your standard innocuous ttrpg guy and lot the toxic version that’s popped up the last 10 years.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 26, 2023 18:30
|
|
|
actionjackson posted:hi, does posting about jigsaw puzzles go in this forum, or somewhere else? I have been in the market for one of those table top things to do puzzles on. Would love a rec for “which one doesn’t suck.”
|
|
#
¿
Dec 27, 2023 02:55
|
|
|
Nessus posted:How tae gently caress do you roll a d24? Asking the computer to do it doesn’t count Welcome to Dungeon Crawl Classics: https://www.gamesandstuffonline.com/products/dcc-dice-chucks-lucky-dice
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2023 18:34
|
|
|
Got my copy of Cast Away today. Uses Mork Borg but in a way that isn’t the sort of boring way you often see. Love me some Mork Borg but it needs so much to feel like a deadly system. https://www.monomythgames.net/cast-away
|
|
#
¿
Dec 28, 2023 18:44
|
|
|
John Romero posted:are you guys getting a bunch of game shops opening up in your dead malls? one near me has a tabletop spot right across from one that only does Japanese card games Man. I wish. I’d kill for some boutique shops, especially a high end collectibles store. Every used section of every shop is the same 30 game in poo poo condition. Where’s my rare shop?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2023 13:03
|
|
|
theironjef posted:Well you've got a point there. I will change the subject as penance. I'm writing a book of RPG history trivia. Anyone got any really good stotoes or moments or stuff I should know about and go research? Dave Wesley almost never shows up. So, what was the name of the game Dave Wesley read and used in his extremely important Braunstein? Strategos. Braunstein was Dave Wesley’s free form game of players playing officers. What was the Western form? Brownstein. When did the first white box make it to Urbana Champaign, resulting in pedit5? 1974 gencon. Where did character sheets come from? They were based on the first edition of Don’t Give Up the ship from Guidon Games. In Lee Gold’s zine, Alarums and Excursions, how many pages did Gary Gygax say Dave Arneson sent him? 22. Dave Arneson wrote a manuscript that many believe was his version of what would be called dungeons and dragons. It was later found in MAR Barkers’ garage. Beyond this point be dragons. Why was the Dieties and Demigods from 1e dnd reprinted with fewer pages and was that reason actually the case? It had Cthulhu and Elric lore in it. TSR actually had permission but they didn’t want to deal with a lawsuit so they removed it in the next printing. When were players no longer able to play Hobbits in 0dnd? 6th printing when they got a cease and desist from the Tolkien estate? Who is the worst man in ttrpgs and why? Kevin Siembieda because he hooked TSR on litigation and passed it off to wotc resulting in who even knows how much damage to the industry. Any good?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 30, 2023 00:22
|
|
|
I would kill for a high end collectibles shop online that isn’t Noble Knight or one of the weird dudes running an old Web 1.0 shop from when they were in their 30s.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 1, 2024 03:54
|
|
|
Yeah. *moves in front of his boxes with dividers that have never been touched past getting everything in place*
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2024 02:47
|
|
|
I’ve been obsessing over dungeons and the lifespan of adventurers lately. Since factors in to the start of rpgs from Strategos, it is essentially the thing that the players in the Dave’s and Gary games riffed off of. It happened so much they named the game after it. So there’s an infinity of games about dungeon delves. We could go card games like Cardmaster or One Deck Dungeon. We could go full on board games like Dungeon! Or HeroQuest or Gloomhaven. And then there’s an infinity of ttrpgs on it with Dungeon Crawl Classics probably being the current champion there in spite of the OSR’s sometimes chudly status. You go in, beat up a baddy, get loot, win. Simple, tried and true, and we’ve found ways to keep it interesting. But then there’s the post dungeon or string of dungeons space. So you won. You defeated evil. Hurray. What’s next? Lord of the Rings gets in to the story of getting older, trying to deal with the aftermath and vacuum of the big bad’s death. But LOTR gets dragged for its 9001 endings. Rarely do we see the grey areas in a space where the darkness is repelled. I think the only game I know of that touches on this is something like Hero’s Journey Home which is mostly the walk home after beating the bad guy. So I’m curious. Are there games out there that shift from a tabletop game about amassing wealth and power to defeat the evil, walking home and starting a life, and then getting older and basically becoming Max Von Sydow in Conan?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2024 15:19
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:I'd call it three kinda? There’s also other appendices that are sort of endings for other characters. There’s the whole to do about what Gimli and Legolas get up to, making mithril doors for the white city, killing off the remaining orcs, and then both setting sail to the grey lands. Also where the Dwarves end up just sort of digging so far down they are forgotten. Aragorn’s life after RotK is mostly getting ready for the return of the Blues in the sequel trilogy Tolkien abandoned. Or the eventual end of all things in Dagor Dagorath.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2024 17:14
|
|
|
ohhyeah posted:Real George Lucas-y name here It’s elvish for Battle of Battles or basically, “the end.” But yeah.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2024 01:15
|
|
|
Alright, yall got off course on lotr and after a lot of looking, I couldn’t find what I wanted. Makes me sad. However, a shipment from Exalted Funeral showed up today and had my copy of Inhuman Conditions. https://robots.management/ 5 minute little rpg session mimicking the Voight-Kampff test. I’ve played like Once Upon a Time and other narrative driven games but this one seems to fill a hole I didn’t know existed…in sort of the same way that You Meet in a Tavern, You Die in a Dungeon does. Are there more of these little micro moment rpg/boardgames?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 9, 2024 03:06
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:Dragon Union. Thanks! I had mostly given up past what seemed bad mentioned. Folks get so hung up on domain play but like…that’s just part of it. Stoked to read this.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2024 19:48
|
|
|
Zorak of Michigan posted:It's the new sort of heartbreaker where a bunch of smart people try really hard for a long time to make something good, succeed, and then find that nobody cares because D&D's lock on the minds of the player base is true strong, and it breaks the authors' hearts. Every few years, the Brain-Damage dot Post comes back around. It seems we're back at it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2024 18:26
|
|
|
John Romero posted:so are we saying its a heartbreaker because it may be competition? d20 modern and Shadowforce Archer.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2024 20:49
|
|
|
Leperflesh posted:The person whose heart is broken by the heartbreaker is Ron Edwards specifically, and more generally, folks who appreciate what Ron is saying about these kinds of games. Ron’s an rear end but he wasn’t wrong here. I also liked this argument in: https://www.dropbox.com/s/qzart1lzv4vjjuo/We%20Hold%20These%20Rules%20to%20Be%20Self-Evident.pdf?dl=0 That essentially discuss the “immigrants dream” style of play wherein you walk in to a new world with nothing and eventually become a god.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 17, 2024 20:57
|
|
|
Been working on a bit of a history of Charisma as an attribute. Asked some colleagues for some Charisma examples from their campaigns but folks didn’t really have any outside of asking for a charisma roll and then demanding they rp it out the way it was rolled. One colleague stated they had been using chatgpt to make some programming examples and it decided when they were making variables based on the D&D stats that that if Intelligence exists then Outelligence does too. Who am I to disagree?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2024 00:48
|
|
|
ninjoatse.cx posted:You've forgotten Palladium In Beyond This Point Be Dragons, Arneson had it as, “Appearance: Seldom used, and it can be ignored, but it makes for some interesting situations when a male player is captured by a 'witch, for example - will she turn him into a swine or keep him for a lover? The reverse is also true. Loyalty: Optional and can be ignored, but it can cause for players some interesting and perhaps awkward situations. For example, how well a player can give or take orders and the reaction to a real or supposed insult, or the likelyhood that a player will risk his life for you in a dangerous situation.” Later, in the Holmes box, it was, “Charisma is a combination of appearance, personality, sex appeal, and so forth. It’s most important aspect is leadership. A character with a charisma below 13 can not hire more than 5 followers and their loyalty will be lukewarm at best - that is, if the fighting gets hot there is a good probability they will run away. On the other hand, someone with a charisma of 18 can win over a large number of followers (men or monsters) who will probably stand by him to the death. Also a female with a high charisma will not be eaten by a dragon but kept captive. A charismatic male defeated by a witch will not be turned into a frog but kept enchanted as her lover, and so forth.” …and so forth.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 20, 2024 02:46
|
|
|
JMBosch posted:Not too far off from a cool indie RPG I got to edit: Don't Die. Man, I just want to kill my adventurers. Lately I’ve been really wanting to play You Meet at a Tavern, You Die in a Dungeon. Premise is simple. You are an adventurer down on their luck. Maybe this last, impossible score will do the trick. And so you make a character and act out their last dungeon crawl.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 22, 2024 23:44
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:Anyone remember Dragon Dice? We just had this discussion a few pages ago. ASL, Netrunner, Dragon Dice, Spellfire, Overpower, Jyhad, and a bunch more games have been “rescued” and rereleased. Dragon Dice never really got a good run so I am happy to see it finding folks. A lot of the rights to old dead games like that are cheap if you can figure out who has the rights. For example, Netrunner was in rights hell for a long time due to five rings publishing and the cyberpunk ccg. Android: Netrunner was amazing at FFG but CD Projekt Red wrecked the Cyberpunk 2020 license five rings had had that wotc had buried. Edit: Oh hell, it was the other general chat thread about collectible games: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4006234&pagenumber=24#lastpost PuttyKnife fucked around with this message at 03:01 on Jan 27, 2024 |
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2024 02:59
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 12, 2024 13:10 |
|
|
Antivehicular posted:Goddamn, they kept Spellfire going?! As the one person in the world who really liked Spellfire (in my defense, I was like 11), I don't know how to feel about this. It's very suspect. https://spellfire.com/ They even have (had?) a cryptocurrency.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 27, 2024 03:02
|
|