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Kai Tave posted:It turns out that when you're playing a game, being able to take more than one turn at a time is really handy. I'll just mention that I hate, hate, hate games where initiative uses exploding dice. If yours don't, it's your turn to make a snack run.
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Oct 30, 2014 06:44
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Tollymain posted:Scion u prick I will kill you. Wait poo poo is this imp zone chat or not.
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Oct 30, 2014 07:00
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mllaneza posted:I'll just mention that I hate, hate, hate games where initiative uses exploding dice. If yours don't, it's your turn to make a snack run. I'm trying to think of games I've played that do this and I'm coming up blank. Like, I've played plenty of games where initiative and multiple actions were all kinds of hosed but I can't think of anything that use exploding dice on initiative specifically.
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Oct 30, 2014 07:33
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Kai Tave posted:I'm trying to think of games I've played that do this and I'm coming up blank. Like, I've played plenty of games where initiative and multiple actions were all kinds of hosed but I can't think of anything that use exploding dice on initiative specifically. Humbug knows. It was an alt-history supers game, something to do with a crater where half of Chicago used to be. Unfortunately for the group, I didn't actually do a snack run.
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Oct 30, 2014 07:53
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Wait, hang on...are you talking about Brave New World, that superheroes game that Pinnacle put out? Did that actually have exploding initiative? I mean, it's a pretty bad game all over so it wouldn't surprise me if it did.
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Oct 30, 2014 08:01
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Benagain posted:u prick I will kill you. Maybe the real imp zone was inside you all along.
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Oct 30, 2014 08:34
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Kai Tave posted:Wait, hang on...are you talking about Brave New World, that superheroes game that Pinnacle put out? Did that actually have exploding initiative? I mean, it's a pretty bad game all over so it wouldn't surprise me if it did. I… think it was. At least based on a quick Google research run. Yeah, exploding initiative is great for speedster characters, or anyone that the dice can't possibly gently caress over two turns in a row. I think it was designed to mess with anyone who thought it shared any logic with Champions, where someone with extra points in Speed still had to be effective, and there was a fixed ratio to how many extra actions you got. When it's all up to the dice, you sit and watch a lot. Exploding initiative, not even once.
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Oct 30, 2014 08:38
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Technically L5R initiative dice can explode same as any other roll, but you don't have multiple passes.
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Oct 30, 2014 08:52
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I actually owned a copy of Brave New World but never played it, so I guess that's why I don't remember that particular system quirk. Yeah, that's incredibly stupid, even other games that use exploding dice for various reasons virtually never let initiative dice explode. BNW was a hot mess of a game top to bottom though. There's nothing inherently wrong with someone trying to make a class-based supers game, most supers RPGs that let you build your own character using a pointbuy menu have a tendency for chargen to become a gate to actually playing the game, but BNW's classes ran the gamut from "about on par with one of the X-Men" to "not as interesting as any of the X-Men," the setting was some really weird alternate history with JFK as tyrannical President for Life and no-poo poo old west style gunslinging duels being in vogue, and of course being a Pinnacle game published in the 90's it naturally had a metaplot to boot. It had a few interesting ideas but, yeah.
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Oct 30, 2014 09:00
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Benagain posted:Actually slightly different spin on that question. I've got a group of novice roleplayers who I've run a couple of very successful dungeon world games with, some fiasco and dread, but that's it. Nobilis is weird and confusing, but also incredibly cool and flexible, and absolutely fantastic for letting you be a powerful god of whatever you want to be a powerful god of. So if you can wrap your head around it well enough to explain all the weird bits to your friends, I'd highly recommend it. I don't know anything about Part Time Gods though.
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Oct 30, 2014 10:42
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I did a F&F review of Part Time Gods a while back, but I'm on my tablet so I can't like right now. I liked it; the system is a bit on the crunchy side but the divinity powers were broad enough to support most concepts.
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Oct 30, 2014 12:11
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Kai Tave posted:BNW was a hot mess of a game top to bottom though. There's nothing inherently wrong with someone trying to make a class-based supers game, most supers RPGs that let you build your own character using a pointbuy menu have a tendency for chargen to become a gate to actually playing the game, but BNW's classes ran the gamut from "about on par with one of the X-Men" to "not as interesting as any of the X-Men," the setting was some really weird alternate history with JFK as tyrannical President for Life and no-poo poo old west style gunslinging duels being in vogue, and of course being a Pinnacle game published in the 90's it naturally had a metaplot to boot. It had a few interesting ideas but, yeah. The Lost Causer poo poo in PEG games is ridiculous. They actually made it worse in DL:R and HOE:R
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Oct 30, 2014 22:38
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Brave New World was pretty much the apex of every single terrible 1990s RPG trend. Hardcoded setting class/factions. A core book that just barely has enough rules and setting info to start playing. Wonky dice system. Metaplot. Supplement treadmill. Iconic NPC characters driving the narrative and doing all the important things. Tons of fanfic-level fiction. Having to buy a new $25 book every month for two years before the GM was allowed to understand what was really going on in the setting that he was supposedly running. When the Big Secret is revealed it's actually a bait-and-switch for the entire setting. It's all there. I keep waiting for someone to write it up for FATAL & Friends, because it's seriously some of the most headshaking garbage ever produced as a full-line professionally published RPG. There was much to hate about D&D3E/D20/OGL but I'll always appreciate the way it shifted the entire industry away from the godawful metaplot/supplement model that WW pioneered.
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Oct 30, 2014 23:16
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FMguru posted:I keep waiting for someone to write it up for FATAL & Friends, because it's seriously some of the most headshaking garbage ever produced as a full-line professionally published RPG. There was much to hate about D&D3E/D20/OGL but I'll always appreciate the way it shifted the entire industry away from the godawful metaplot/supplement model that WW pioneered. I think that would require someone to actually own it.
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Oct 30, 2014 23:18
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Evil Mastermind posted:I think that would require someone to actually own it. I'd do it, but theres no way I'm spending money on it on DTRPG Perhaps we could do a more YOSPOS version of Secret Santa this year with a D&D red box full of cockroaches or Cthulhutech.
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Oct 30, 2014 23:42
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You just reminded me that it's almost TradGames Secret Santa time! 
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Oct 30, 2014 23:47
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I have a soft spot for BNW despite how terrible it was because it was part of my "holy poo poo, there are games that aren't D&D" awakening period. But yeah, even at the time I thought the whole "what is the answer behind x? Buy the next supplement to find out" thing eye-rolling.
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Oct 31, 2014 00:08
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ErichZahn posted:The Lost Causer poo poo in PEG games is ridiculous. They actually made it worse in DL:R and HOE:R What is DL:R and HOE:R? Lost Causer poo poo is Confederate Apologism, yes?
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Oct 31, 2014 00:13
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Deadlands: Reloaded and Hell On Earth: Reloaded.
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Oct 31, 2014 00:23
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I never got what people saw in Deadlands. The setting always sounded kinda like a pile whenever my friends would describe it to me.
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Oct 31, 2014 00:31
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Evil Mastermind posted:You just reminded me that it's almost TradGames Secret Santa time! Yessssss! Also I can't believe it's been a year since the last one already. 
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Oct 31, 2014 00:37
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ErichZahn posted:The Lost Causer poo poo in PEG games is ridiculous. They actually made it worse in DL:R and HOE:R How could they possibly make it worse than "villain goes back in time, retroactively undoes PC victories, bad things happen anyway?"
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Oct 31, 2014 01:10
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One other 90s thing about BNW: the books themselves were padded like an underwritten term paper. Big typeface, lots of whitespace, page borders, generous margins, bad line art (full page), lots of space-filling in-character narration and fiction, and so on.
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Oct 31, 2014 02:30
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Night10194 posted:I never got what people saw in Deadlands. The setting always sounded kinda like a pile whenever my friends would describe it to me. The setting itself had some vague promise, but just about everything they put out for it setting wise or metaplot wise was kind of poo poo. When I played it, I cut out a lot of the setting- the chinese taking over the west coast, steampunk mormons, secret agent ghost lincoln--etc. Also the aforementioned confederate apologism and honestly pretty racist portrayals of native americans. I kind of just wanted to play a horror/western game, and liked the idea of what amounts to the four horseman of the apocalypse descending to earth, the dead rising back up at Gettysburg, etc. I wanted a setting that was not quite so gonzo. So why not play a different game/system? Good question, I eventually did. Also my opinions are super contradictory because I backed the Shadows of Brimstone kickstarter which is a dungeon crawl game set in the old west, basically Deadlands with the serial numbers filed off, and includes zombie cosmonauts and all manner of weird ridiculous poo poo Evil Mastermind posted:You just reminded me that it's almost TradGames Secret Santa time! Last year was great and I can't wait to do it again!
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Oct 31, 2014 02:38
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Deadlands is a neat concept but the metaplot is maybe one of the worst ones, with the books straight telling you 'if your players try to kill (writer's pet bad guy) sit them down and tell them they can't' and poo poo.
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Oct 31, 2014 03:44
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Man, Secret Agent Zombie Lincoln was hilarious. As was his archfoe, Demonic Ninja John Wilkes Booth. But yeah, Deadlands is a neat premise ruined by metaplot, racism and Confederate apologism.
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Oct 31, 2014 04:49
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Night10194 posted:I never got what people saw in Deadlands. The setting always sounded kinda like a pile whenever my friends would describe it to me. Deadlands, if you pare away all the unfortunate bits, is basically Army of Darkness: Old West Edition. I mean I dunno, maybe that's not your cup of tea, but I can absolutely see the appeal in that. (Of course there's also the officially licensed Army of Darkness RPG by Eden Studios which supposedly wasn't half bad, so I guess you could use that, but Deadlands predates that by a number of years.)
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Oct 31, 2014 05:25
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Kai Tave posted:Deadlands, if you pare away all the unfortunate bits, is basically Army of Darkness: Old West Edition. I mean I dunno, maybe that's not your cup of tea, but I can absolutely see the appeal in that. So can I, just it feels like it's pretty much 90% Unfortunate Bits by volume.
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Oct 31, 2014 05:26
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People like cowboys and magic.
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Oct 31, 2014 05:36
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Wild West games have been around since the literal dawn of the RPG hobby yet not a single one had ever had any kind of success (for the usual reason that straight historical games fail - realistically deadly combat with no easy healing, and not a lot for characters to do). Deadlands was the first (and only) successful western game because they added a poo poo-ton of zombies and werewolves and vampires and Lovecraft and steampunk gadgets and evil Injun spirits (and healing magic) to the mix. Unfortunately they added all the metaplot and railroading and god-NPCs and everything else 1990s to the mix as well, and you get the current mess. If it had just been a semi-generic Weird Western with a whole bunch of possible things to drop into the game, I think it would have aged a lot better. But no everything exists all at once, and in a particular order, and the whole setting becomes this huge continuity swamp unless you start hacking things away - at which point 1) is it even Deadlands any more, 2) you players might have a different idea as to what the game world is compared to yours unless you print up a document with all the differences ahead of time and oh boy yay homework! and 3) there's nothing like throwing away a whole bunch of material that you paid for. I think All Flesh Must Be Eaten did it right: a generic Zombie Game core, giving the GM a bunch of different kinds of zombies and ways to run a zombie apocalypse, and the supplements just adding more settings and options. I'll always have kind of a soft spot for DL because Pinnacle didn't let a single IP exploitation opportunity pass them by. GURPS version? Call of Cthulhu crossover? Miniatures game? CCG? Disk Wars adaptation?!? I think they even had a line of Button Men playsets. Plus comics, fiction collections, branded poker card decks and everything else. I'm going to assume the lack of computer game or animated series or TV or move adaptation wasn't because of a lack of trying. I'll also always kind of hate it because it has the worst kind of neo-Confederate apologism baked into its core and in my experience if you bring that up to a real Deadlands fan, you're all but guaranteed to get an earful about the real causes of the Civil War (hint: turns out it wasn't about slavery!). Plus, the whole noble savage/witch doctor treatment of Native Americans (although that's par for the course for the genre and gaming in general).
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Oct 31, 2014 12:53
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Kai Tave posted:
Weirdly enough it was also written by the guy who wrote Deadlands, because apparently he's old friends with Bruce Campbell, and yeah, it was a solid enough Cinematic Unisystem adaptation.
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Oct 31, 2014 12:56
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FMguru posted:you bring that up to a real Deadlands fan, you're all but guaranteed to get an earful about the real causes of the Civil War (hint: turns out it wasn't about slavery!). Plus, the whole noble savage/witch doctor treatment of Native Americans (although that's par for the course for the genre and gaming in general). This is always the funniest poo poo to anyone who does any actual study of the civil war. Considering the Southern states pushing poo poo like the Fugitive Slave Act (and later, the stronger version in 1850 that tried to basically say no, there are no free states, we can send up slave raiders whenevs) and the actual debates leading to the war, yes, it was, in fact, about slavery. I remember once, I did a paper on a guy named Patrick Cleburne, an Irish-American immigrant who would go on to become an important guy in local politics in his town in Arkansas, which lead to him being elected a militia officer when the South seceded and he felt he had to protect his new home. He was a hell of a remarkable guy, brave as hell and having to be pulled off the battlefield by his aides after being wounded several times over his career as a Confederate general. I tell you about him because, as an outsider to the Southern culture, he really bought the whole 'stop northern aggression, states' rights' thing. The biggest proof of this was the time, when they were losing the war, that he got a bunch of his fellow generals together to give them his proposal: We desperately need men, and this isn't just about slavery, so why don't we offer freedom to every black man who will join the army? The others were so aghast that a war hero would suggest this that not only did they deny his proposal, they buried it to 'preserve his reputation'.
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Oct 31, 2014 13:45
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FMguru posted:I'll always have kind of a soft spot for DL because Pinnacle didn't let a single IP exploitation opportunity pass them by. GURPS version? Call of Cthulhu crossover? Miniatures game? CCG? Disk Wars adaptation?!? I think they even had a line of Button Men playsets. Plus comics, fiction collections, branded poker card decks and everything else. I'm going to assume the lack of computer game or animated series or TV or move adaptation wasn't because of a lack of trying. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deadlands#TV_Series
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Oct 31, 2014 13:46
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FMguru posted:I'll always have kind of a soft spot for DL because Pinnacle didn't let a single IP exploitation opportunity pass them by. GURPS version? Call of Cthulhu crossover? Miniatures game? CCG? Disk Wars adaptation?!? I think they even had a line of Button Men playsets. Plus comics, fiction collections, branded poker card decks and everything else. I'm going to assume the lack of computer game or animated series or TV or move adaptation wasn't because of a lack of trying. Shane Lacy Hensley was involved with trying to get an MMO off the ground with an unknown publisher that closed - since Hensley worked on City of Villains, Paragon Studios seems like a likely suspect. There was also a recent attempt to get a Deadlands TV series going with Xbox Entertainment Studios, but the near-closure of that seems to have spelled the death of that notion, too. I never got into Deadlands even though I liked the idea, because the tone was all over the place and it never could decide if it was serious or silly, the system was fiddly and had too many elements to juggle (dice, cards, three different ways to take damage, etc.), it required too much of a financial investment (like, if you wanted kung fu, you needed to buy a boxed set, miracles were their own supplement, shamanism was its own supplement, etc). I actually got into it through the Doomtown CCG, which I think actually got the tone and feel of the game better than the actual game it was based on, with a wry, self-aware quality to writing that the core game was missing. It was also amusing to see all the elements of the core game jammed into a single town, with mad scientists and fallen angels battling over a china shop. FMguru posted:I think All Flesh Must Be Eaten did it right: a generic Zombie Game core, giving the GM a bunch of different kinds of zombies and ways to run a zombie apocalypse, and the supplements just adding more settings and options. It's probably the better way to present a game design-wise, but there's solid marketing reasons the 90s supplement drip feed worked the way it did, too. It would have been more consumer-friendly, but I'm not sure Deadlands would have been the success it was if books had been optional. (I mean, they really weren't- entire sections of the game were closed off to you unless you had the appropriate books.) Not saying it was a great or honest idea, but these are the sort of dumb tricks that have historically kept game lines alive.
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Oct 31, 2014 13:50
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I'm so glad Homestar Runner is a somewhat regular thing again:
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Oct 31, 2014 23:12
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In general, is it a good idea to roll damage simultaneously with rolling for hit? It's just one of those "common sense" sounding things that seems like a good idea intuitively.
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Nov 1, 2014 20:40
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As long as you as reroll the damage if you use an ability that let's you reroll the attack.
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Nov 1, 2014 20:50
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LongDarkNight posted:As long as you as reroll the damage if you use an ability that let's you reroll the attack. Yea my group rolls both but with the assumption that a to hit reroll means both do, so no 'oh ok I missed but did max damage so let me just redo my hit to get that' stuff.
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Nov 1, 2014 21:50
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Mostly I don't bother to reroll damage, but I don't look at it intil I've worked out whether the attack hit. And playing D&D 4e at Paragon/Epic, damage dice are nearly irrelevant anyway, unless you're rolling enough of them that it would be quicker and nearly as accurate to use averages anyway.
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Nov 2, 2014 01:19
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Nobody else did, so I posted the November chat thread!
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Nov 2, 2014 21:03
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