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Kwyndig posted:Yeah at least Dark Sun got around that by having common weapons not made of money. I like Dark Sun's reason though. Steel/Iron was seen as a quality that could both cut really easy AND will not shatter frequently like the more common bone weapons. Gold was also seen as worthless since it just deforms quickly after using it. One thing that always stuck to me is that you could come across a cave full of gold and silver, but you would be prying the iron scones since those are worth well more.
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Jan 18, 2015 22:07
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Kwyndig posted:Yeah at least Dark Sun got around that by having common weapons not made of money. It also made for hilarious campaigns when the Fighter got their hands on a steel sword/set of armor and the campaign turned into "Every chump bandit for a hundred miles is hunting you because you're wearing a money suit."
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Jan 18, 2015 22:10
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Although this even goes back to standard DnD, where I'm told it existed in an old original module but even sort of popped up in one of the boxed 'starter sets' for 3e - the relatively low-level party comes upon heavy doors made of adamantine, barring entry without undoing the complex lock, or completing the puzzle, or maybe even just to look imposing or whatever. For savvy and unscrupulous players this immediately turns the game into "how do we get these doors off the walls and to the market" because it's a good bet that that much adamantine is worth a crazy amount and much easier to get to than whatever's lying behind them in the trap-filled, monster-infested dungeon.
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Jan 19, 2015 01:48
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bewilderment posted:Although this even goes back to standard DnD, where I'm told it existed in an old original module but even sort of popped up in one of the boxed 'starter sets' for 3e - the relatively low-level party comes upon heavy doors made of adamantine, barring entry without undoing the complex lock, or completing the puzzle, or maybe even just to look imposing or whatever. See also: "A pool of deadly acid" which might as well have a sign next to it that says "The contents of this small pool are worth more than you will steal in your entire adventuring career". EVIR Gibson posted:One thing that always stuck to me is that you could come across a cave full of gold and silver, but you would be prying the iron scones since those are worth well more. Traditional home-forged iron scones just like mum used to hammer out on Moradinsday are worth far more than their weight in gold. Elector_Nerdlingen fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Jan 19, 2015 |
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Jan 19, 2015 02:51
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bewilderment posted:Although this even goes back to standard DnD, where I'm told it existed in an old original module but even sort of popped up in one of the boxed 'starter sets' for 3e - the relatively low-level party comes upon heavy doors made of adamantine, barring entry without undoing the complex lock, or completing the puzzle, or maybe even just to look imposing or whatever. I think was the starter adventure in the Eberron book.
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Jan 19, 2015 03:22
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Yeah I have said book and that's probably what he means.EVIR Gibson posted:I like Dark Sun's reason though. Steel/Iron was seen as a quality that could both cut really easy AND will not shatter frequently like the more common bone weapons. Gold was also seen as worthless since it just deforms quickly after using it. Dark Sun sounds kinda cool, where's a good place to find out more about it?
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Jan 19, 2015 04:09
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Anatharon posted:Dark Sun sounds kinda cool, where's a good place to find out more about it? 4E got its own Dark Sun campaign book, which has a good balance of both fluff and crunch for the setting. I'm sure there are places online that have more info about the setting, but hell if I know what they are.
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Jan 19, 2015 04:20
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Maleketh posted:4E got its own Dark Sun campaign book, which has a good balance of both fluff and crunch for the setting. I'm sure there are places online that have more info about the setting, but hell if I know what they are. I've only ever played DnD 3.5, never tried any other tabletop games.
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Jan 19, 2015 04:25
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Anatharon posted:I've only ever played DnD 3.5, never tried any other tabletop games. A quick Google search tells me you will probably want to look at https://athas.org.
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Jan 19, 2015 04:30
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There were some mithril/adamantite doors in the Tomb of Horrors as well. When they adapted that dungeon to 3.5 they added something along the lines of "the doors are actually just enchanted to look like adamantite/mithril and once removed from the dungeon the enchantment fades and the doors become worthless" to the description.
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Jan 19, 2015 04:38
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That's a shame. I'd like to play American Pickers: D&D Edition. Gangs of adventures stripping old temples and abandoned lairs.
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Jan 19, 2015 06:02
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Tardcore posted:There were some mithril/adamantite doors in the Tomb of Horrors as well. When they adapted that dungeon to 3.5 they added something along the lines of "the doors are actually just enchanted to look like adamantite/mithril and once removed from the dungeon the enchantment fades and the doors become worthless" to the description. Only because the tournament players kept nicking the doors. From what I recall, the anecdote was that one tournament, Gygax ran the tomb of horrors for the winners, who proceeded to steal the adamantine doors and leave the dungeon. The following year, he changed it to adamantine-plated doors, which given the size of the doors, would still be worth a sizeable chunk of cash, and were promptly stolen. The last year he changed them to enchanted wooded doors that just look like adamantine.
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Jan 19, 2015 06:14
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Randalor posted:Only because the tournament players kept nicking the doors. From what I recall, the anecdote was that one tournament, Gygax ran the tomb of horrors for the winners, who proceeded to steal the adamantine doors and leave the dungeon. The following year, he changed it to adamantine-plated doors, which given the size of the doors, would still be worth a sizeable chunk of cash, and were promptly stolen. The last year he changed them to enchanted wooded doors that just look like adamantine. Since back in the day your XP was directly linked to your cumulative gold obtained (1:1, IIRC), I guess this actually gave you a way better shot at winning the Tomb, too.
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Jan 19, 2015 06:34
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SolTerrasa posted:Since back in the day your XP was directly linked to your cumulative gold obtained (1:1, IIRC), I guess this actually gave you a way better shot at winning the Tomb, too. Well I'm guessing the tournament metric was who got the biggest haul from the tomb. If the rest of the treasure doesn't beat out the doors then that's that.
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Jan 19, 2015 06:41
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Anatharon posted:Yeah I have said book and that's probably what he means. It got a fairly detailed writeup in the Fatal and Friends thread a while back, if you have archives.
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Jan 19, 2015 07:27
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PJOmega posted:Well I'm guessing the tournament metric was who got the biggest haul from the tomb. If the rest of the treasure doesn't beat out the doors then that's that. Not dying before ending session was probably also a necessary qualifier.
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Jan 19, 2015 08:01
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There was a game someone mentioned earlier where the best starting strategy was to roll and reroll characters until you got the 1 in 100 chance of someone who could afford a spaceship from the start, rather than work for an NPC corporation. Then a team mate would push you out an airlock and you'd roll your actual character. Anybody remember the name or have a link to the post?
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Jan 19, 2015 18:34
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Heffer posted:There was a game someone mentioned earlier where the best starting strategy was to roll and reroll characters until you got the 1 in 100 chance of someone who could afford a spaceship from the start, rather than work for an NPC corporation. Then a team mate would push you out an airlock and you'd roll your actual character. Anybody remember the name or have a link to the post? Wasn't that just Traveler? Or was it Rogue Trader?
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Jan 19, 2015 19:04
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deadly_pudding posted:Wasn't that just Traveler? Or was it Rogue Trader? That would probably be Traveller. The party starts with a ship in Rogue Trader. A lesser Murphy, but you can basically win Traveller if your GM lets you start with six terms. In Mongoose Traveller (the more common modern-ish edition) character generation follows characters through their professions from the time they turn 18 in four-year increments. If you're get decent stats and go into a good profession for your character, it's fairly reasonable to make the rolls to not get fired and get promoted every time it comes up. This means that with six terms, the party will uniformly be 42 years old, and can potentially be high-ranking military officers, successful diplomats, and global celebrities -- before randomly deciding to become outlaw space During that process, players can get "Ship Shares" which are worth 5% of a ship of a specific type or 1% of a ship of any type. But, if you go into the Scout Service, make all your rolls, and get lucky when you cash out, it's not unreasonable to start with a whole Scout ship. Of course, since the rest of the party has a severance package of hundreds of thousands in cash its pretty moot. Because now everyone is old, has a family, and would be far better off retiring, rather than going on any badass space adventures. ZorajitZorajit fucked around with this message at 02:40 on Feb 4, 2015 |
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Jan 19, 2015 19:54
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ZorajitZorajit posted:Of course, since the rest of the party has a severance package of hundreds of thousands in cash its pretty moot. Because now everyone is old, has a family, and would be far better off retiring, rather than going on any badass space adventures. Traveller: Midlife Crisis IN SPACE
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Jan 19, 2015 20:35
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Problem:ZorajitZorajit posted:Of course, since the rest of the party has a severance package of hundreds of thousands in cash its pretty moot. Because now everyone is old, has a family, and would be far better off retiring, rather than going on any badass space adventures. Heffer posted:Then a team mate would push you out an airlock and you'd roll your actual character.
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Jan 19, 2015 21:59
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Splicer posted:Problem: That just sounds depressing 
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Jan 19, 2015 22:02
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ZorajitZorajit posted:That would probably be Traveller. The party starts with a ship in Rogue Trader. A lesser Murphy, but you can basically win Traveller if your GM lets you start with six terms. That's the one. Thanks.
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Jan 19, 2015 22:16
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Heffer posted:There was a game someone mentioned earlier where the best starting strategy was to roll and reroll characters until you got the 1 in 100 chance of someone who could afford a spaceship from the start, rather than work for an NPC corporation. Then a team mate would push you out an airlock and you'd roll your actual character. Anybody remember the name or have a link to the post? I don't remember the game, but there's an earthbound version of that, set in a post-nuclear-apocalypse thing. Twilight 2000 maybe? You started the game with some equipment, based on the time you'd been operating in the wasteland before joining the party, and you could keep rolling and rerolling for more equipment, at the cost of spending more and more time getting irradiated in the wasteland. At the end of it, you'd have a lovingly restored tank and a character who would keel over from rad sickness immediately after giving the party his tank, and then you'd roll a new character to actually go adventuring in. ETA: Yep, confirmed. Also, VV Or the kids take dad's ship and have grand adventures, fighting pirates and discovering lost treasure. VV darthbob88 fucked around with this message at 09:48 on Jan 20, 2015 |
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Jan 20, 2015 09:23
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Davin Valkri posted:That just sounds depressing No way, it's the adventurer's kids coming together to find out just what happened to their parents!
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Jan 20, 2015 09:44
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I've always liked the idea that gold is just the baseline physical manifestation of magic.
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Jan 20, 2015 18:45
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VanSandman posted:I've always liked the idea that gold is just the baseline physical manifestation of magic. That would explain that old rule from 1e (and 2e, I think?) where at the end of an adventure a PC could elect to convert their gold into XP at a fixed gold:XP conversion rate. Not sure about original AD&D, but I don't recall 2e ever giving an especially good explanation for this. I suppose it's probably for off-screen "special training", but sometimes you only have a day or two between adventures in-game. Also I never once saw anybody take advantage of that rule because they were using their character's material wealth as some kind of scoreboard.
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Jan 20, 2015 19:23
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contagonist posted:Traveller: Midlife Crisis IN SPACE Even more so with Mongoose Traveller, which just has incredibly badly thought out rules for character generation. Say you do this, and start as a 42-year-old Captain of the Imperial Navy with 10-15+ ship shares. You pool your shares with whoever else is coming along and before you know it, you have about 100 ship shares. Well, ship shares are worth 1% of the cost of ANY ship, so you're free to spend your lifetime's vast wealth on an itty-bitty scout ship (100 tons) that people can get for free, OR on a mega-capital ship that makes a 40k cruiser look puny. Either way, no out of pocket cost to you. And then you get to play 2008 Mortgage Simulator, because the cost of owning a ship (maintenance, etc) is proportional to its size and you just bought a ship so big the Imperial Navy could hardly afford to keep it gassed up. Hope your GM reads BFC!
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Jan 20, 2015 19:38
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In the Warhammer Fantasy Battles wargame, units attacking a war machine (such as a cannon or bolt thrower) in close combat are only allowed to use 6 models, representing the difficulty of fighting a crew taking cover behind the machine. Larger units such as monstrous infantry or monsters take up 3 or even 5 of this allowance. However, chariots are not included in the list of unit types that "cost" more of your allocation, so they default to the same as infantry. This means that you can either attack with two ogres or SIX massive chariots, each with at least two horses and riders (and mounted on bases typically twice as large as the ogre's).
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Jan 20, 2015 19:42
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Kaza42 posted:In the Warhammer Fantasy Battles wargame, units attacking a war machine (such as a cannon or bolt thrower) in close combat are only allowed to use 6 models, representing the difficulty of fighting a crew taking cover behind the machine. Larger units such as monstrous infantry or monsters take up 3 or even 5 of this allowance. However, chariots are not included in the list of unit types that "cost" more of your allocation, so they default to the same as infantry. This means that you can either attack with two ogres or SIX massive chariots, each with at least two horses and riders (and mounted on bases typically twice as large as the ogre's). Clearly they're just running down the crew, this is working as "intended"
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Jan 20, 2015 19:49
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Chariots that I've seen are typically at least 4-6x bigger then a regular Ogre.
Admiral Joeslop fucked around with this message at 13:51 on Jan 31, 2015 |
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Jan 31, 2015 06:17
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deadly_pudding posted:That would explain that old rule from 1e (and 2e, I think?) where at the end of an adventure a PC could elect to convert their gold into XP at a fixed gold:XP conversion rate. Not sure about original AD&D, but I don't recall 2e ever giving an especially good explanation for this. I'm pretty sure the rule didn't require you to convert the gold; you just got XP for accumulating wealth in and of itself, and people in rogue classes got double. It was an optional rule in 2e, though I think it may have been standard in 1e.
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Jan 31, 2015 19:44
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Sefer posted:I'm pretty sure the rule didn't require you to convert the gold; you just got XP for accumulating wealth in and of itself, and people in rogue classes got double. It was an optional rule in 2e, though I think it may have been standard in 1e. Yeah I think that how they justified kings and emperors being like 15 badasses when they didn't have time to go out and kill things. Get money, get ripped
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Jan 31, 2015 20:01
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That and removing the disincentive for sneaking in and getting the treasureand fleeing. Without that rule, they'd get no XP for clever stunts.
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Feb 1, 2015 06:14
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Sefer posted:I'm pretty sure the rule didn't require you to convert the gold; you just got XP for accumulating wealth in and of itself, and people in rogue classes got double. It was an optional rule in 2e, though I think it may have been standard in 1e.
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Feb 1, 2015 13:41
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So! Let's examine GURPS tech, specifically the humble Class AA power cell. This is a little device designed to power medical implants and other micro-scale technology - two specific examples include implanted radio communicators and nightvision contact lenses. As recently as 3rd Edition printings, Class AA cells were specced not only by weight (1/500th of an ounce) but also by physical size (cylindrical, 1/16 inch diameter, 1/32 inch thick). A bit of units conversion and basic math produces a uniform density of upwards of 36 grams/cubic centimeter, which is normally only achieved by transactinide elements that are synthesized in high-energy physics labs and have half-lives measured in seconds. Class AA power cells are Tech Level 8 (generally available as early as 2000, definitely no later than 2050) and retail for about $2 each. 4th Edition rules no longer list explicit physical dimensions for power cells.
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Feb 1, 2015 18:57
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Bacon In A Wok posted:4th Edition rules no longer list explicit physical dimensions for power cells. The GURPS 3E vehicle rules probably contain Murphys of their own. But given the formulae for vehicles involve the weight of the chassis being proportional to the square of the cube route of the volume, and you picked the engine based on power not speed, I'm not aware many people got far enough through to work out what the Murphys were. I assume getting rid of power cell size also ditched that nonsense.
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Feb 1, 2015 21:36
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neonchameleon posted:The GURPS 3E vehicle rules probably contain Murphys of their own. But given the formulae for vehicles involve the weight of the chassis being proportional to the square of the cube route of the volume, and you picked the engine based on power not speed, I'm not aware many people got far enough through to work out what the Murphys were. I assume getting rid of power cell size also ditched that nonsense. I had a friend in college who literally told me that he'd gladly give me a copy of the vehicle book for GURPS 3E if I could figure out how the hell it worked. I never bothered trying to read it.
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Feb 2, 2015 06:24
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neonchameleon posted:The GURPS 3E vehicle rules probably contain Murphys of their own. But given the formulae for vehicles involve the weight of the chassis being proportional to the square of the cube route of the volume, and you picked the engine based on power not speed, I'm not aware many people got far enough through to work out what the Murphys were. I assume getting rid of power cell size also ditched that nonsense. GURPS Spaceships has sort of wriggled its way into being the de facto vehicle design system for 4E. It is not nearly as complicated.
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Feb 2, 2015 06:58
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Let's Break Traveller System Generation Traveller is arguably the first published science fiction RPG, and throughout all the iterations of its rules has had a fairly basic system for generating entire solar systems on the fly, just in case the PCs decide to go six parsecs the wrong way and the GM needs to extend the map on five minutes' notice. Roll 2d6 a few times, bounce the results against charts and modifiers, add some fluff to suit. Most of the time, it works fairly well. This is not going to be one of those times. I'm fixing all the dice to generate a system named Watdefuq, for reasons that will shortly be obvious. Step One is figuring out the system starport type - which is arguably a decent thing to start with when dealing with wandering adventurers who want to know where they can land their tramp freighter. This can go as high as Type A (excellent facilities, large shipyards, the works); unfortunately we roll 2d6=12, for a type of X (no starport at all) instead. Step Two is the world's size - rolled on 2d6-2 and compared to a table. A roll of 0 is an asteroid belt, a roll of 3 gets you Mercury-sized, a roll of 8 Earth-sized, etc. We'll go for a bog-standard 2d6-2=5 here. Step Three is planetary atmosphere; low results here are thin, high results are thicker/exotic. The roll here is 2d6-7 (standard) +5 (for our world size - larger worlds are more likely to have thick atmospheres). Snake eyes gets us an atmosphere of 0 - no atmosphere of all. Step Four is hydrographics, or liquid coverage, and we're rolling 2d6-7 (standard again) +5 (world size) -4 (no atmosphere) overall, so it's not too surprising we get a 0 again. Step Five is population, and we're back to 2d6-2 sans modifiers. Perfect near-Earths with enormous starports can have populations in the single digits, and near hell-worlds (like our airless, waterless, Watdefuq) can have populations in the tens of billions. Government type is 2d6-7 (base) +10 (population) and we get a modified 13 - which a small chart defines as Religious Dictatorship. Law type is 2d6-7 (base) +13 (government type roll) and the results arent that important. (Though they can range from high law - blade weapons controlled to Extreme law - legalized oppressive practices, for what its worth.) Final step is determining planetary Tech level, which is 1d6 base +/- several possible modifiers from the other world elements. The ones that apply to Watdefuq are -4 (type X starport) +1 (vacuum atmosphere) +4 (population 10+ billion) -2 (governed by a Religious Dictatorship), for a net 1d6-1. Modified roll of 0. Watdefuq's tech level is officially Stone Age. It has no air at all, no water at all, no starport to handle outsystem trade or technical assistance, and is somehow still home to more than ten billion neolithic tribesmen ruled over by a single planet-wide theocracy. When Traveller system generation breaks, it breaks hard.
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Feb 3, 2015 04:08
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