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SkyeAuroline posted:Someone else will be along to write in more detail, I'm sure, but quick notes before I go to bed: I agree with you about dice pools and modifiers right now, but I didn't when I was younger. In something like Shadowrun 3E, I actually liked the way increasing target numbers and exploding sixes meant that the same task might be routine under optimal circumstances but drat near impossible in combat conditions. I'm too busy today for a game where one firefight can take up the entire session. If Ilor and I ever end up in the same old folks' home, then who knows what might happen?
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Feb 9, 2021 16:17
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Evil Mastermind posted:Wait, this released? I vaguely remember backing it back when DW hacks were popping up like weeds and forgetting all about it. I'm glad I'm not the only one.
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Apr 4, 2021 00:34
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I am not a lawyer, and I am normally pretty hard-line on copyright issues, but I have vast disdain for the rights of people who don't fulfill their Kickstarter obligations.
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Apr 4, 2021 06:36
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Superhero game chat is funny to me because I was in sixth grade when I first played Champions and it left me with Hero System brain damage. I watch Avengers and I catch myself thinking "that was a hell of an energy blast" or "wow, that scepter is a focus for a whole multipower." When I strip away all the dross, I have to agree that it's more like a miniatures game for superhero combat than a role-playing game. It got two specific things right, though. One, character creation included coloring in your superhero's costume. Two, the rules for knockback made combat feel superheroic. You hit someone with a strong attack, that someone is probably going flying through the air, often into a wall.
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Apr 7, 2021 15:51
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I take game logs on my laptop and keep them in a wiki with the semantic extensions, so I can easily cross-reference which NPCs showed up in which sessions.
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Apr 23, 2021 01:28
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It's a bit of a labor of love for me, and I used to be a UNIX sysadmin, so it starts with getting a web hosting provider that will either let you hop in and install your own software, or a MediaWiki hosting provider that includes Semantic. https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Hosting_services has a few links. From there it's all about careful use of MediaWiki templates and queries. It's, um, kind of a learning curve, and having set it all up many years ago, I tend to just copy/paste old code into each new campaign page. I've got poo poo like this: code:code:
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Apr 23, 2021 02:06
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Here's the wiki page for my favorite of all the AW games we've played: https://aafnrp.cipul.com/wiki/index.php?title=Brink
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Apr 23, 2021 04:13
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I never played SR4 but I admit I really liked SR3 for firefights. It's very modifier-heavy and that can be cumbersome until everyone develops fluency. It makes it feel realistic, though. I've never been in combat but in general, most things are very easy if things are calm and quiet and you have time to get it right, and rapidly become very difficult when you're on the clock and the light is bad and that gunfire you're hearing keeps getting closer. On the other hand, depending on what kind of WWII game you want, a high-crunch system like that might utterly suck. Figure it takes 2-3 hours to get through one firefight, so if you want a game where you spend a lot of time in fights, awesome. If you want each session to feel like an episode of Band of Brothers, nope, SR3 is not gonna give it to you.
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Jun 17, 2021 16:17
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The power of a Force Point to turn you (for a moment) from "guy who is slightly better at <x> than the average movie extra" to "legendary badass who noscope 360'd that challenge" was huge. In combat, it paired really well with the multiple target rule. Horribly outnumbered and out of ideas? Everyone spend a force point and take out three bad guys at once!
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Jul 16, 2021 05:40
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I've never actually played Dust Devils (https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/83481/Dust-Devils) but I've always thought there were some interesting ideas in it, and certainly some hard thinking about the genre. It's not a fantasy, it's straight Western, but it does at least have passages like this:quote:There’s plenty of reason to recognize that America has a collective Devil, and the best Westerns point directly at this issue. America and its citizens have to reckon with this violent history, and forget any romantic notion that Gene Autry and Tonto represent the Western.
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Jul 21, 2021 15:44
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Depends where you are in the game.
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Nov 19, 2021 05:56
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hyphz posted:The problem is that it'd be perfectly reasonable for the players to infer one from the other, unless it is normal in this group for the GM to warn the players in a meta fashion about combats that are within the "challenging but fair" scope of the combat system ("are you sure you want to advance? the dragon might be in the next room!"). I wouldn't die on this hill, but I think that, "If you attack the baron, the guards will kill you," can be read as a warning of obvious consequences in the fiction, but it can also be read as a GM directive, as in, "I do not want you to kill the baron, and I have ensured that doing so will result in a TPK." "Are you sure..." makes it clearer that the GM is open to it but wants to make sure you know that "the guards" are not a couple guys paid to look pretty, they are a formidable fighting force.
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Nov 24, 2021 15:33
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Dawgstar posted:It's a fun game if people make the buy-in. Post-apocalyptic fantasy isn't super common, even now. I believe this is where I plug The Shadow of Yesterday.
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Feb 8, 2022 03:15
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"Trying to find what joy they can" makes my thoughts turn to The Shadow of Yesterday / Solar System.
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Feb 13, 2022 21:38
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Hero system is a beautiful attempt at a rules-as-physics engine superhero game. It's also often a proof that people don't enjoy playing such games.
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Feb 16, 2022 03:12
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I already had a go at 007 a ways back: https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3421366&pagenumber=371#post410136351 I just did a 007 one-shot with a few friends in late 2021, on a night when our normal group couldn't meet. I hadn't run the game since back when it was in print, and I didn't do a strong job of setting the toughness of the opposition. We had fun though.
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Feb 16, 2022 04:51
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I played so much Champions as a kid that I can't watch a superhero movie without reflexively building powers in Hero. Across multiple movies, the inconsistencies in power levels, as needed to make the story works, really highlight the way superhero stories aren't based on consistent physics. I love Champions but I cannot claim it's going to provide the experience people want in a superhero RPG today.
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Feb 16, 2022 22:41
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Halloween Jack posted:Hey this segues neatly into something I was talking about in the podcast thread--what are some games where each PC controls a team of characters? The examples that immediately come to mind are hirelings in D&D, Ars Magica, and Albedo. A long time ago, I ran a Battlestar Galactica game using Solar System, and since I knew the PCs would probably not form an organic party, we did chargen in stages. Everyone made a primary character, then thought of two more characters who would likely be around that character a lot. The President got a chief of staff and a bodyguard, the hotshot pilot got a best friend and a landing signals officer she hated but couldn't avoid, etc. Then everyone introduced their secondary characters, and we passed them around to try to balance out everyone's exposure to different aspects of the fictional universe (bridge, fighter squadrons, politics, religion being the major ones). It seemed to work pretty well. I only made any effort to plot for the original primary characters, but the secondary characters ensured that people got a lot of playtime. There were a couple cases were surprise intersections of the different milieus forced people to play multiple characters in the same scene, but we got through them OK.
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Feb 21, 2022 23:00
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I've run a few DiTV one-shots and enjoyed them. I played in one and it was pretty weak, because the GM didn't bother reading the GM advice. It's frustrating because I think Dogs has the most direct and straightforward advice of any game I've played.
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Mar 24, 2022 01:16
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As a springboard for future development, I think Dogs suffers from the way it links mechanics to the fiction. You have the stakes of the conflict, and then the need to keep the fiction aligned with the way you're using the dice with each exchange, and then you have the fallout. You end up having to have a certain amount of side conversation just to keep things running. AW's more straightforward concept of moves and "to do it, do it" just flow better. That doesn't mean AW is better than DITV, but I think choosing Dogs only makes sense if you really want to spend a lot of time thinking about escalation and fallout. I think Vincent once said something about how DITV is a game about the social consequences of violence. I've also heard people say the game really shows peak potential if you save copies of the original character sheets, and then compare them to the final versions of your characters after five or six towns' worth of fallout. Those are very cool ideas but much more specialized than AW, which in turn is itself more specialized than some other story games.
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Mar 26, 2022 20:30
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(back in Dogs chat)SkyeAuroline posted:I have to agree, as well as where it doesn't link mechanics to the fiction - anything outside of "interpersonal conflict, whether verbal or physical" is pretty much up in the air. Arbitrate it however, the mechanics only really work if you have sentient opposition that you have some interest in not immediately escalating with though, and there's no support for anything else. Main disappointment out of the system for adapting it to something broader. Baker's Star Wars version is supposed to fix that, but I'm still waiting on him to actually give me the access to his Patreon drafts that I already paid for before I can even see how it's managed. I think there's something valuable in Vincent's guidance on this. The idea that a mountain, or a storm, or a natural disaster is only interesting if you can frame it as an adversary closes the door on a lot of tedious activity. I agree with SkyeAurolinev that it's just not sufficient for general purpose games. One wants a simpler way to adjudicate minor obstacles.
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Mar 27, 2022 22:23
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I did some writing for the original Star Trek RPG that was released by FASA in the 80s. My module was canceled by Paramount yanking the license six weeks before it was published, at least I still got paid. The Paramount Star Trek writers' guidelines were a loving nightmare to follow to 'keep the brand on target'. Man my high school friend group played the poo poo out of that game. Wait. No. We made characters using those rules, decided we hated the system, and played those characters free-form and then played a lot of the FASA Star Trek Tactical Combat Simulator thing. The FASA starship recognition handbooks were great, although maybe not entirely recognizable as Star Trek at the edges.
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Apr 28, 2022 21:35
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Tulip posted:My hypothesis is that the sex moves are not really Vincent's contribution but Meguey's. Partially this is based on Vincent himself saying that he finds sex at the table to be uncomfortable and that he's unwilling to RP sex with other players, but also by comparing writing credits - consider Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack which has Vincent but no Meguey writing to Mobile Frame Zero: Firebrands, where Meguey has primary writing credits. And for all the blatant transgressiveness of Poison'd, sex plays a very minor role in it. The group I'm in (which includes BlackIronHeart) has played many, many campaigns of AW by now, and while dozens of characters have used sex moves, we have never, ever role-played the sex. The GM might ask a question or ask for a Seduce roll to determine if sex is what's going to happen, but once we establish that it is indeed sex and not just flirting or hanging out, we just skip ahead. I admit that in my youth I was in other campaigns with other gaming groups where different choices were made. In my 20s, I was a lot more into talking about sex. I'm a couple decades older now and just don't think I have much to say about sex that hasn't already been said. 
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Jul 7, 2022 15:17
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I still use Graphviz. It takes some trial and error to find the syntax that will give me the result I want. Once I have it, though, all the hard work is done.
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Aug 10, 2022 05:05
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Diaspora has a social mini game. It relies heavily on maps and participants' positions on them, so it might be more prep-happy that you'd like. The example given is a group of PCs trying to resolve a labor dispute by negotiating, manipulating, and countering dirty tricks. Actually the dirty tricks may have been on both sides, I'm not sure.
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Oct 21, 2022 06:08
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thotsky posted:Burning Wheel and Diaspora have social minigames that are kind of interesting, but Dogs in the Vineyard is kind of the granddaddy of them all and makes it the entire game. I love Dogs but the conflict resolution mechanics always want you to ask whether you're going to escalate this, words to fists to weapons to guns. In the context of the game, it's fine. Transplanted into other settings, it could be inane or worse.
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Oct 21, 2022 15:50
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Countblanc posted:a met someone on Tinder a few months back who cringed when i told her I played in a 4e game and said that she hadnt played it but that it "sounded like a misguided but functional game, like the star wars prequels". she also lamented that 5e made designing encounters too hard, specifically too hard to reliably kill players. Depending on whether or not she meant player characters, she's either crazy stay the hell away, or crazy fun.
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Dec 16, 2022 06:21
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gradenko_2000 posted:Do we have a thread for scale model building/painting? I have a bunch of questions but I don't know if that's germane to the miniatures thread since I'm not going to be gaming with a Tamiya 1:48 Zero fighter Have you considered playing Bag the Hun in 1:48 in your backyard, though?
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Dec 28, 2022 17:58
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PurpleXVI posted:I've been juggling on and off with the idea of a card-based RPG where you just play the cards with the results you want, though you may not have a "success" in your hand, or you may lack the metacurrency to play a "success" without also playing a consequence of some kind. Otherkind dice work this way. I don't own Otherkind, but I own Psi-Run, which uses the same idea. You have a dice pool and a set of boxes into which you put the dice after you roll. The player decides where to put the good and bad dice, but one way or another, must live with the way the dice came out.
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Dec 31, 2022 02:19
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This is all starting to remind me of Eric Wujcik's essay about diceless gaming. He played a first level thief in some old version of D&D, and quickly realized that if he rolled for a thieving ability, he'd probably fail. Instead of stopping to say, "Hey, RAW seems to doom me to play an incompetent thief, I don't like this game," he decided to stop engaging with the system. He then decided that any system with dice must be a fail state and wrote Amber DRPG, which replaced dice-related fail states with social fail states. My experience was the the social fail states happened less often but were orders of magnitude harder to get over. Anyway. I sympathize with the Killer's player realizing his archetype didn't do what he wanted and wanting to play a better game. Too bad he couldn't skip the temper tantrum over it.
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Jan 5, 2023 20:02
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theironjef posted:When I first heard the term, this is what I thought "metagaming" was. Recognizing that a system sucks, and just using enough keywords and social manipulation to talk your way past the DM instead. Like instead of rolling Climb Walls you just waste everyone's time "inventing" a pulley-based elevator system or some poo poo so why would you need to make a climbing roll? And also ignoring any role-playing information built into the system. Yeah, having a thief who sucks at stealing is a huge flaw in a game, no argument there. On the other hand, if you're playing an actual good game, and the RAW says your character sucks at something, the right answer is not to avoid engaging with the system and find ways to do it well anyway. That is actually very bad role playing. The right answer is to embrace the suck.
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Jan 5, 2023 22:03
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Nuns with Guns posted:"Think of the interesting roleplaying potential" of low stats was a sorry excuse when randomly rolling stat arrays and getting a lovely spread in D&D. It's still a bitter vinegar especially in a game where other players and the GM are regularly shifting your stats around. Maybe that does accurately emulate an impressionable teenager, but it sure stinks to have someone move a point into another stat just because two characters bonded in a session. Pushing your stats into a range where a best-case scenario is a partial success and a full failure is more likely doesn't feel good or fun. This conversation is making my bitter than the one Masks game I was going to be in never launched. Some of the people I have gamed with have strong opinions about wanting total control over their characters' internal lives, and others think it's absurd to let the player just decide that their character isn't going to be impacted by the things happening around them. The way Masks asks you to play someone who is still emotionally immature and then reflects that by having your attributes more around on you is interesting, if nothing else.
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Jan 15, 2023 17:43
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Indie vs trad obscures the distinction I care about, which is whether a game is actually advancing the state of the art, or just iterating.
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Jan 22, 2023 21:07
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:iterating is fine, i'm just sick of the "one step forward, two steps back" shuffle that every non-indie TTRPG seems to go through between editions I can't globally slam iteration, because it often fixes the little problems with an original idea. On the other hand, people often iterate without understanding the thing they're iterating on works. To pick on the example that besets our gaming group, very few of the PbtA games work as well as AW does.
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Jan 22, 2023 21:15
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MonsieurChoc posted:Reading the actual cards, the Kraken has the drawback that it can turn on you and become an Epic Foe. This makes the Kraken / Parrot decision something of a reflection on your relationship with the rest of your gaming group. Edit: To be clear, I think it's a U-shaped curve. Bad group chemistry? Let them fight my kraken, I don't care. Excellent chemistry? Let's fight the kraken, this will be awesome. In between? Scared to deal with the repercussions of the kraken.
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Feb 21, 2023 20:14
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PurpleXVI posted:I don't think there's anything wrong with it being calculated risk, though. Magic that may just turn you into a turnip when you're trying to light a candle isn't interesting or dramatically appropriate. On the other hand, if you have a spell that works within expected parameters 90% of the time, and goes into the realms of "oh poo poo, what happens now?" if you overcharge it for a big important battle or whatever, or during a crisis situation where you have to cast it at half speed or some such, then the randomness and risk can add a sense of drama to things. Ever since I read this, I've been imagining an app-assisted magic system. Break spells down into grammar, plot the grammar on a wheel, and put modifiable bell curves all around it. When you're doing something that's well within your established skill level, the modifiers mean that if it doesn't work, you might get not exactly what you wanted, but it's going to be pretty close. The farther out of your comfort zone you get, the more the curve spreads out, and the app explains the nature of your grammatical mistake. Inexperienced caster who can reliably summon a 10cm sphere of fire and throw it decides it's time to try to summon fire to incinerate the entire dungeon hall? The app does the heavy lifting and generates six different random numbers and comes back to tell you that you got fire, but lost your cadence when you came to the part of the incantation controlling the center point of the fire, and also failed to perfectly ground yourself against the flow of thaumaturgy, so you take increased energy drain from the spell, and the midpoint is 3m closer to you than you intended, so also take light fire damage." Or maybe the random numbers have totally turned against you and you inadvertently use a word that sounds almost the same as fire but isn't, and now instead of being incinerated, the bad guys are covered in mud.
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Feb 26, 2023 23:56
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mellonbread posted:I love the Alien comics, they took the series in a much better direction than the movie franchise did and came a lot closer to recapturing the horror element of the original film. My concern would be with longevity of the campaign. There is only so many times you can be hunted by the same creature before it starts to get a little repetitive. My group has played a couple fun one-shots of Mothership, but I would never attempt campaign play. That poo poo happens to my character once? I'm out. I'm retired. I'm not going into space anymore. I'm moving to the bottom of a gravity well and sleeping with the lights on.
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Mar 8, 2023 18:30
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Megazver posted:There is a surprising amount of PbtA grogs, who simply vibrate with outrage at the thought of anyone enjoying D&D. I don't post and yet I feel seen.
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Mar 23, 2023 23:47
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Megazver posted:Do you have a special folder filled with prewritten pages-long templates of "try these PbtA games instead (instead of the trad poo poo you were asking about)" for every conceivable system recommendation request, as some of these folks do? Pre-written templates interfere with the authenticity of my loathing.
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Mar 24, 2023 01:11
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Diaspora is a Traveller heartbreaker written in FATE. Never had a chance to actually run it because my group doesn't like FATE, but if you can get past that, I think it's pretty cool.
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Mar 25, 2023 16:47
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