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They last the rest of the encounter, yes. There's no limit but you explained pretty well why that doesn't really matter that much.
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Dec 9, 2016 02:33
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Completely unrelated other question: Is the Palladium Fantasy RPG Second Edition (the one that's compatible with Rifts) available anywhere on PDF? I picked up the First Edition on DTRPG but wanted to get this one as well. Roleplaying Public Radio's Patreon recently started a feature where they go through the Rifts books, but I think it had the opposite intended effect on me because I only became more enamored with wanting to play with these systems. Countblanc posted:They last the rest of the encounter, yes. There's no limit but you explained pretty well why that doesn't really matter that much. Thanks. I only very recently realized that it was a thing, and it seems like a nifty alternate solution to a "whiff-fests" besides the Escalation Die.
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Dec 9, 2016 04:02
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gradenko_2000 posted:Roleplaying Public Radio's Patreon recently started a feature where they go through the Rifts books, but I think it had the opposite intended effect on me because I only became more enamored with wanting to play with these systems. Imagine I quoted the worst gaming experience someone shared on RPGnet once that involved their unstable, abusive boyfriend. The person was trying to avoid naming what game system it was to keep the story more anonymous, but from the way the boyfriend was obsessed with his anime cyberninja everyone in the thread instantly knew it was RIFTS. Because reading that was enough to convince me that no one should be inflicted with RIFTS.
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Dec 9, 2016 04:18
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Elfgames posted:man you should have moved the game for the kid now he's going to end up playing vampire the masquerade on furcadia until some alaskan woman calls his parents trying to buy him because he has an "old soul" I've never heard this story, and now I sorta need to.
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Dec 9, 2016 08:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:Because I didn't want to derail the 5e thread any harder: How does Strike! RPG's Miss Tokens work? You pretty much nailed it here and Countblanc elaborated on it already, but there's one more interesting feature to Miss Tokens that ties into the combat resolution mechanic in Strike!: whenever you roll a 1 on an attack in Strike! you get a Strike, which is a bad thing. At the end of each combat Strikes are tallied together for each character separately (to see which Conditions they might get from the combat) and for the team altogether (to see how well they succeeded in reaching their goal; in Strike! each combat is supposed to start with the players declaring their intent beyond "We want to kill all the orcs."). Now, a 1 turned into a hit with a Miss Token still gives you a Strike. If you're thinking of adapting Miss Tokens into another system that already has bad things happening if you miss badly enough, I'd keep the part about bad things still happening on a miss you turned into a hit intact.
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Dec 9, 2016 08:33
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Drone posted:I've never heard this story, and now I sorta need to. The original post. As read by King Lou Fernandez.
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Dec 9, 2016 10:40
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sorry dude this is an SA original i think it was posted in the old gaming experiences thread.
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Dec 9, 2016 11:21
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gradenko_2000 posted:Completely unrelated other question: Is the Palladium Fantasy RPG Second Edition (the one that's compatible with Rifts) available anywhere on PDF? I picked up the First Edition on DTRPG but wanted to get this one as well. Palladium has always been a little behind on technology, and they were paranoid enough about piracy that they put off getting into doing PDFs for years (even though people had already scanned and  'ed practically their entire catalog). They have a decent selection of stuff on DTRPG now, but not the 2e Palladium Fantasy. Knowing them, it's entirely possible that this is because the original layout was done manually, by actually pasting things into place.
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Dec 9, 2016 14:23
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Ewen Cluney posted:Palladium has always been a little behind on technology, and they were paranoid enough about piracy that they put off getting into doing PDFs for years (even though people had already scanned and Thank you for the feedback! Looks like Rifts it is then (I'm kidding) And I am totally with you that it's really the setting that's attractive, but at the same time I'm not really in the mood to do a by-hand conversion to a mechanical system that I do know works.
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Dec 9, 2016 14:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:Thank you for the feedback! Looks like Rifts it is then (I'm kidding)
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Dec 9, 2016 15:58
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Nuns with Guns posted:Imagine I quoted the worst gaming experience someone shared on RPGnet once that involved their unstable, abusive boyfriend. The person was trying to avoid naming what game system it was to keep the story more anonymous, but from the way the boyfriend was obsessed with his anime cyberninja everyone in the thread instantly knew it was RIFTS. Because reading that was enough to convince me that no one should be inflicted with RIFTS. I remember the exact story you mean. 
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Dec 9, 2016 16:26
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Elfgames posted:sorry dude this is an SA original i think it was posted in the old gaming experiences thread. it is the one I was describing though, so thank you for finding that!  Arivia posted:I remember the exact story you mean. Is definitely the best way to describe it... but at least she got out 
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Dec 9, 2016 17:23
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quote:One day he admitted to me that he hadn't played in a campaign with other people in years (“not since I thought D&D was cool,” he'd scoff), but he made campaigns to play by himself, constantly. Not just brainstorming, not rolling up characters, not imagining storylines; he was actually creating a full contingent of players, NPCs, settings, and storylines and then playing them all by himself for months on end. He wouldn't sleep, he wouldn't eat, he would just roll roll roll, and then come over to my house in the middle of the night, stand outside my window while I was sleeping, and manically describe the battle his warriors had just had.
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Dec 9, 2016 17:54
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Yeah, Palladium Fantasy (and nearly all of its supplements) would have been one of the glue machine books, and from what I understand most of the Palladium PDFs of older books are just raw image scans for this reason. Mysteries of Magic is likely the only one that's been done using actual layout software, and ironically, it isn't on DTRPG either. I actually prefer the original 1e Palladium Fantasy in some ways because once they decided to make it compatible with other Palladium RPGs, enemy HP values ballooned to match, some by as much as ten times. But on the other hand, all the newer books are done with 2e as the presumption (I'd recommend most of the Bill Coffin's tenure on the line). Converting it to other systems is mainly just tricky if you want to keep the "feel" of Palladium magic, which is at least interesting because it has many completely different types of magic even in the core (spell magic, elemental magic, rune magic, circle magic, psionics, and priest magic). And they all run very differently. Ultimately, though, I think Palladium Fantasy is probably one of the better games for the "Megaversal" system just because it isn't overloaded with a bunch of lovely sub-systems and rules kludges, and the enemy design is relatively under control. Combat order is still a PitA but it runs a hell of a lot better than something like Rifts does, it's on the level of something like AD&D 2e. Savage Worlds Rifts runs fairly well so far, in my experience, depending on how much you like Savage Worlds to begin with. The balance is all over the place, of course, and there are definitely some design decisions I take issue with. But works competently and doesn't actually stand in the way of running the game like the Megaversal system does. Thinking about it, a Savage Worlds conversion of Palladium Fantasy wouldn't be too hard, you'd have to come up with new Arcane Backgrounds for a few of the power types and convert the races but that's relatively simple compared to what a lot of other systems would entail.
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Dec 9, 2016 20:34
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If you can play Palladium Fantasy 1e it is preferable. It's a straight houseruling of AD&D and includes a number of fairly decent fixes for 1983. The one that stuck out most is the combat gains for each class that provide some measurable difference in how each class fights. It's still a terrible game compared to modern offerings, but it is better than many of its contemporaries and better than its successor in my opinion. It is not really compatible with 2e stuff, though, and that's most of what you can find in the aftermarket.
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Dec 9, 2016 20:50
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The balance is all over the place, of course, and there are definitely some design decisions I take issue with.
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Dec 9, 2016 21:41
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It'd be possible with a lot of recent games where your concept doesn't play directly into your chances of actual success or failure (FATE, 13th Age, *World, etc.), but it would lose a lot of that unique character feel that Rifts Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Dec 9, 2016 |
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Dec 9, 2016 23:29
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It'd be possible with a lot of recent games where your concept doesn't play directly into your chances of actual success or failure (FATE, 13th Age, *World, etc.), but it would lose a lot of that unique character feel that Rifts As long as I can still play a game where the player's handbook presents "a man with a 12-foot tall invincible robosuit that shoots a shoulder-mounted railgun" and "a bum" as equally valid character archetypes, I'm in.
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Dec 9, 2016 23:45
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Dec 11, 2016 04:21
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Evil Mastermind posted:I really can't imagine a system for Rifts where balance wouldn't be all over the place. Like, imbalance is pretty much baked into the core concept. Before I was aware of the possibilities of stuff like Cortex Plus, I had the idea that Rifts could have power tiers, so if the GM really wanted to have a campaign about a bum with minor psychic powers and a city rat getting into trouble they could just say it's a Tier 1 game, or if they want total gonzo nonsense they could say Tier 5 and open up dragon hatchlings and demigods. Also the thing that despite the whole premise of Rifts being based on magic returning to Earth with unprecedented power, magic O.C.C.s tended to be kind of weak in terms of raw power, and Siembieda later wrote one of his trademark (  ) rants about how actually magic guys were supposed to be all tricky and stuff.
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Dec 11, 2016 04:41
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I wish I liked Savage Worlds, every time I've tried it I just didn't like it. I basically have grown to dislike any game that uses that sort of "wounds" system (Mutants and Mastermind being another one).
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Dec 11, 2016 07:40
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My main issue with Savage Worlds is that it's kind of bland mechanically, at least when it comes to building characters, but admittedly it's been a couple years since I last gave the system a serious look, so maybe newer expansions and system books have changed that up since then(also reminds me that I need to take a look at the Accursed setting since I have that lying around from a Bundle of Holding I bought a while ago)
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Dec 11, 2016 08:21
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i'm being made to play Seafall tonight and I really don't want to Trying to watch how to play videos and my eyes just glaze over ughhhhhh
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Dec 11, 2016 09:30
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On the latest blogpost for The Next Project, (now with handy-dandy link to the Core Rules on the sidebar) two new classes are introduced: - Warrior (d10) [Scout/Skald archetypes] - Guardian (d6) [Shaman/Warden archetypes]
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Dec 11, 2016 10:41
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Moola posted:i'm being made to play Seafall tonight and I really don't want to I'm four games into a Seafall campaign and the game itself is honestly pretty meh, but the campaign unlocks make it really cool. If you're only playing once though that's pretty poo poo
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Dec 11, 2016 14:49
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I think it's going to be a campaign, not just a one off depending on what we think of it I guess
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Dec 11, 2016 15:09
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Dec 11, 2016 20:43
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Savage Worlds is relatively bland but when you're measuring it next to the Megaversal system, it's got a low bar to hurdle over. Of course, a lot of it comes down to whatever custom mechanics you have for a setting and whether or not those impart a flavor or not, otherwise it is kind of generically pulpy.
Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Dec 11, 2016 |
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Dec 11, 2016 23:00
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Tendales posted:See, I kind of like the idea of a game where you you have to go carefully, avoid fights when possible, stack the odds in your favor when a fight is necesary, etc. That's a totally valid concept for a game. What gets me, though, is that D&D has never improved the tools it gives you for this play style. It's a play style that as far as I know is only incentivized in first edition D&D, as not only was it incredibly easy to die, that was by far the least efficient way to level up your character. Gold and treasure is where all your experience comes from, and killing monsters gave next to none. Even first edition's toolbox was heavily combat-oriented for all that, but I think 2nd edition onward discarded the whole idea of "leveling through exploration" in favor of making monster killing the primary means of generating experience, so it wasn't even really a pretense at that point. I share the disdain for the heavy emphasis almost every game system places on combat. Even when the game sets out to do something that isn't that, it inevitably hamstrings itself by filling half or more of the rulebook with rules about loving combat. The only system I've played that puts equal complexity and investment into social situations is Burning Wheel, and I'm genuinely undecided whether I count "making an argument feel like combat" as a point in its favor.
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Dec 12, 2016 03:19
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Reene posted:It's a play style that as far as I know is only incentivized in first edition D&D, as not only was it incredibly easy to die, that was by far the least efficient way to level up your character. Gold and treasure is where all your experience comes from, and killing monsters gave next to none. Yeah it's also important to remember that the "Fantasy loving Vietnam" mode of play maybe wasn't something that Gygax set out to do create specifically, but was a natural outgrowth of what it was like to play the game as-written. Sort of like how the original 1994 X-COM's intro cinematic depicts a small elite squad of soldiers beating back the aliens handily with automatic weapons fire, but the actual gameplay is more like a bunch of a redshirts groping in the dark while they're shot in the back with hot plasma and you overwhelm the alien invaders through sheer force of numbers (and lots of high explosives, drat the collateral damage). And it's not any sort of coincidence either that both early D&D and X-COM's high lethality gameplay creates a sort of "procedurally generated narrative" where you extract the personality, quirks and backstory of your individual characters from their in-game performance rather than a well fleshed-out pre-existing backstory, and that later games in the respective series then both try to make it more deliberately narrative, and later off-shoots also trying to deliberately capture the Vietnam-esque gameplay rather than stumbling into it by accident.
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Dec 12, 2016 03:31
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It's also extremely hard to tell now how much of the Gygaxian FFV gameplay ever actually happened as described at the table - as far as I can tell what what we know for real is that Gygax fudged and adapted and reworked his gameplay a bunch based on what his players were doing, but then wrote up the game as if it was a fixed ruleset. And D&D players absolutely love telling and retelling stories about their characters, and the stories about cunningly surviving dangerous situations are the interesting ones. So you have people reinventing True D&D as a backconstruction from what I honestly suspect are mostly fishing stories. Plus a lot of the stories that you see coming from people like Tim Kask are absolutely slanted based on the fights with Dave Arneson back in the day.
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Dec 12, 2016 03:59
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I want a goddamn FFV tabletop rpg, as in Final Fantasy V, the one with all the jobs which you could customize and modulate into insane poo poo.
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Dec 12, 2016 04:02
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That's what I had assumed they were talking about actually lol
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Dec 12, 2016 04:17
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Countblanc posted:That's what I had assumed they were talking about actually lol Well, that's what Strike! Second Edition is gonna be. Or else.
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Dec 12, 2016 04:20
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Reene posted:I share the disdain for the heavy emphasis almost every game system places on combat. Even when the game sets out to do something that isn't that, it inevitably hamstrings itself by filling half or more of the rulebook with rules about loving combat. The only system I've played that puts equal complexity and investment into social situations is Burning Wheel, and I'm genuinely undecided whether I count "making an argument feel like combat" as a point in its favor. This is why I love Ars Magica. It's rules-heavy as all hell, but all of the rules are about being cool-as-gently caress wizards, or for having fun playing as the staff while the cool wizards have their noses buried a book. Also Heroquest, which just strait up cuts to the storygaming bone and treats combat exactly the same as any other obstacle. I once played in a game where a sailor used his background as a mason to kill a giant living statue by collapsing a Hagia Sophia-esqe temple onto it.
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Dec 12, 2016 04:59
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Combat as typically modeled in D&D-inspired games tests a certain skillset: positioning, order of operations, target prioritization, and the math problem that is charop hidden underneath that. It's got a lot of layered systems interacting with each other and it's really interesting to solve. As far as I'm concerned roleplaying is just a way to give a little extra incentive not to lose at that game, and to get people who wouldn't play actual wargames involved in it. I don't really care what it models, either; it's easy to make it model combat because it started out as a combat simulation, but it's gotten well away from those origins in a lot of ways (thank god.) Any game that looks at D&D, sees the combat, sees the non-combat, and decides "everything should work the way the non-combat stuff works" is headed in a direction I don't give a poo poo about. Make a diplomacy or investigation or cook-off game as complex and rewarding as 4E D&D combat and you have my attention. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 05:39 on Dec 12, 2016 |
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Dec 12, 2016 05:12
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Combat as typically modeled in D&D-inspired games tests a certain skillset: positioning, order of operations, target prioritization, and the math problem that is charop hidden underneath that. It's got a lot of layered systems interacting with each other and it's really interesting to solve. Yeah most of my enjoyment of D&D comes from the combat, cause while you need a certain amount of competence at role-playing to get any enjoyment out of that aspect of the game(and I'll openly admit I'm mediocre at role-playing at best), it doesn't take as much effort to enjoy the combat or character building aspects of the game, just requires some grasp of the rules and a semi competent DM
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Dec 12, 2016 05:38
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I think it's fine to like those games. I think it's not fine, or at least really dumb, to try to sell (in the monetary or the to your pals sense) those games under the guise of something that is decidedly not that game, i.e. a roleplaying sandbox where the primary focus is developing a cast of characters and progressing a storyline of some kind. The latter is ostensibly what the vast majority of D&D players I've ever met are actually interested in despite D&D being a terrible medium for that kind of gameplay. We're old grogs, so we know what we're getting into if someone asks us to sit down for a game of D&D insert-whatever-the-gently caress-edition. Most people don't or won't. I sure as hell didn't when I sat down for my first game of 3.5. And I genuinely think that a lot of people want a more story-oriented system but they either don't know what their options are because D&D has been so good at becoming the only game in town in terms of general market share and popularity or because they don't want to seem like ~not a real gamer~.
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Dec 12, 2016 06:37
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Reene posted:And I genuinely think that a lot of people want a more story-oriented system but they either don't know what their options are because D&D has been so good at becoming the only game in town in terms of general market share and popularity or because they don't want to seem like ~not a real gamer~. I agree, even if it isn't my preference, but I don't necessarily think all of those people want a rules-light game. Most of the people I've played with in the hobby who got their start on video game rpgs with lots of customization. Not just because people like messing with numbers and poo poo, but because most people new to the hobby are really loving bad at roleplaying. I know I was, and I can only think of one person I've introduced to the hobby over the last 2 years who wasn't (and they had lots of acting/improv experience and were mostly RPing an existing character). Having lots of rules, abilities, etc. I could point to in a book was a great way to ease me into what seemed like a really overwhelming thing. People freeze up when told to act on the spot; a sheet that has a bunch of skills like "persuasion" or "climbing" is a good aide for people to fall back on when they're not sure what to do. I'm on the DTAS bandwagon but I think it sparks a player's imagination to think about what their low INT character would do in a situation versus the high CHA person to their right. These particular things aren't the only way to help people out but they're a comfortable one that people who come into the hobby from other nerd-game-things (tcgs, computer/console rpgs) expect and are used to.
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Dec 12, 2016 06:52
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Yeah, related to that... Ever notice how, with RPGs, "customization" means "having a lot of specifically defined mechanical doodads to pick from" instead of, say, a more freeform and rules-light system where you can literally make anything work?
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Dec 12, 2016 08:31
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