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jadarx posted:DnD4 had cards during the tail end of its life (I think they started during the 'Essentials period). I remember having a few when playing in Encounters. They were weirdly packaged, too. I remember getting a new warlord At-Will from a box of miniatures.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:There's an ... Aliens Expanded Universe? Is this a particularly deep rabbit hole? IIRC, LEG also introduced a few original things that they might have wanted to keep from leaking back into the official Alien universe. I mean, you're right, this probably shouldn't have been a big deal. But big companies seem to worry a lot about the slightest possibility that a licensor might get to walk off with their IP due to a loophole. Lotta acronyms ITT.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:23
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There's an Aliens book set between Alien and Aliens where Ripley ends up showing up on this station because Ash virus'd himself into the shuttle computer, and there was an xenomorph outbreak on this mining station and he was still trying to fulfill his objective. In the end, Ash is removed from the shuttle, everyone else dies, Ripley's memory of the incident is wiped and she's set adrift again. I have never read anything so pointless.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:24
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gradenko_2000 posted:There's an ... Aliens Expanded Universe? Is this a particularly deep rabbit hole? There's a lot out there but there's not much attempt to have a consistent continuity. The main alternate stuff would be Dark Horse's comics continuity, but that's contradicted heavily by the movies at this point. The quality of the comics varied wildly. There's also the fact that the series blends into Predator continuity from time to time. Even the Aliens RPG makes stuff up from whole cloth, most of which is relevant to nothing else ever (except possibly - and ironically - Aliens: Colonial Marines). What that meant at the time AFAIK is that if you had the Aliens license you couldn't, say, have characters from Alien or borrow from the extended continuity the Dark Horse comics were doing at the time. Alien³ wasn't even out at the time of its publishing.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:26
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Leraika posted:Pathfinder had a bunch of packs of cards you could buy with stuff like crit effects, didn't it? Yes. It's a pack of 52 cards with effects like:  There's also a separate deck of fumble cards.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:27
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I remember reading an Alien novel I bought in a Goodwill in highschool that was about scientists getting royal jelly (??) from the xenomorphs using shields that made them invisible to them.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:28
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To bring this around, I'll just point out that Starfinger's devs not only think the game works great for Alien-style games, but are really excited at the idea of people doing horror Starfinger. I would be legitimately surprised if their 1st or 2nd Adventure Path didn't have some kind of Alien-styled scenario at this point.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:55
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How much do you want to bet they assume save or dies everywhere will constitute horror.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:57
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I mean Cease To Hope already covered their Horror supplement for Pathfinder, so just take the fear rules from those.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:58
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Alien Rope Burn posted:To bring this around, I'll just point out that Starfinger's devs not only think the game works great for Alien-style games, but are really excited at the idea of people doing horror Starfinger. The very first scenario of the very first adventure path has space zombies infested by alien slug-monsters, so they at least hit Night of the Creeps/Slither.
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Oct 6, 2017 17:59
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gradenko_2000 posted:I mean Cease To Hope already covered their Horror supplement for Pathfinder, so just take the fear rules from those. Well, I think D&D has a weird thing with horror where D&D, especially in its d20 iterations, is a power fantasy game, a Horatio Algier-by-way-of-stabs sort of fantasy. But a lot of the creatures are horrific - I mean, the aboleth legitimately chilled me sitting there at the front of the Monster Manual - and low-level D&D can resemble horror in just that death is sudden and quick. But the campaign play and increasing power level of PCs - and their general proficiency at combat - usually stands at odds with it being properly horrific. Of course, some OSR games lean really loving hard into the horror angle, but at the same time that's usually done though oppressive monster design and scenarios that hinge horrible fates on "bad" decisions instead of saves or combat. And while you can put a "save vs. helplessness" roll at the top of combat to try and make PCs more fragile and vulnerable, I'm not convinced d20 does it particularly well. I mean, in any campaign, throwing in a horror adventure can be a nice change of pace, like an Halloween episode of an ongoing show. But in d20, I feel like it's more thematic dressing than actually doing the genre any justice. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 18:36 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 18:31
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gradenko_2000 posted:Did the Living Steel and Aliens games from Leading Edge Games attempt to model/include melee combat? Phoenix Command separated the gun rules and the melee rules, and even acknowledged that they'd occur at completely different scales, so I was wondering if they tried to "merge" them for the settings-based games. Living Steel and the Aliens Adventure Game both have rudimentary melee systems. They function a lot like your usual 3d6-roll-under system except that it uses LEGs melee hit location system.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:32
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D&D Horror: the slow, creeping realization that all of your strength and your power comes from absorbing the souls of those you kill. They live within your flesh, empowering your every act with their eternal torment. You release them, bound and screaming, into the magic items you create. You gather more and more in your relentless search for power. The more potent the creature you kill, the more potent their soul, bound into your muscles, your mind, your very nature. Slowly, as you learn more of this, you begin to see them to hear them. At last, you feel them within yourself, screaming, crying, raging against you. All those millions and millions of experience points.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:38
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, I think D&D has a weird thing with horror where D&D, especially in its d20 iterations, is a power fantasy game, a Horatio Algier-by-way-of-stabs sort of fantasy. I was being kinda sarcastic in that I don't think Horror Adventures was particularly successful based on Cease's review, but that's not going to stop Paizo, and they're probably going to ape a bunch of it, and it's probably not going to improve much.
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Oct 6, 2017 18:40
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Alien Rope Burn posted:To bring this around, I'll just point out that Starfinger's devs not only think the game works great for Alien-style games, but are really excited at the idea of people doing horror Starfinger. Aliens tends to get cast as "they did for real Starship Troopers" and as an 80s action flick, but I re-watched it recently and its scarier than I had remembered. It gets there by creating a scenario in that the Marines badass gear and training is effective... and it just doesn't matter. They can slaughter aliens left and right and they just keep coming. It has a lot in common with a zombie movie, except the zombies are clever ambush predators instead of a shambling horde. The same sort of thing could work in D&D. The first few encounters are fine, the PCs crush the xenomorphs or whatever, but then more keep coming as the PCs resources drain away. Even better if they have to keep tightening their area of control until that last desperate run for the way out through territory they ceded to the threat. That could work where most other scenarios fall flat because either you have to contrive some bullshit reason PCs can't just murder whatever is threatening them lest it stop being a legitimate threat, or it really is something they reasonably can't take down but then what do you give them to actually do D&D stuff (i.e. combat) to? Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 19:22 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 18:56
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Horrible Lurkbeast posted:Has any RPG company ever sold DLC-like cards with extra rules?
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Oct 6, 2017 19:06
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I think one of the best ways to introduce a bit of horror into D&D is to emphasize that the party are adventurers as people through most of history understood it--wandering people with no obvious social ties, and therefore, probably degenerate criminals who'd kill you soon as look at you. Though I'm not suggesting you play through the plot of Flesh+Blood.
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Oct 6, 2017 19:18
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jadarx posted:DnD4 had cards during the tail end of its life (I think they started during the 'Essentials period). I remember having a few when playing in Encounters. As far as I'm aware those cards were just versions of powers you got in the books and in Dragon, rather than powers unique to the cards. AmiYumi posted:The best example I can think of is the one used by Pathfinder's Organized Play. You get cards from going to conventions (and/or?) running Organized Play games that, depending on the card, you can trade in for anything from minor effects like bonus equipment up to being allowed to make a banned/restricted splat as your next character. They found a way to do the equivalent of on-disc DLC with an expiration date! You can get tiny bonuses for going to conventions, the bigger bonuses (like playing a race that's normally banned) are restricted to running games at conventions. Of course you can always get one of these boon sheets from someone who doesn't want them as they're not tied to the person who originally got them (barring a few extraordinary cases).
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Oct 6, 2017 20:00
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I generally feel that if you want to do horror in D&D, you can't really do psychological horror since the system doesn't even come close to supporting it. You're better off using the idea that evil is some sort of noticeable corrupting force that seeps through the land, turning whatever it touches into monsters. That's a solution you can kind of punch/blow up, which is the type of problem that D&D does support.
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Oct 6, 2017 20:15
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I'm not really sure how to do psychological horror in roleplaying--at least in my admittedly narrow definition of psychological horror as one where the audience doesn't know what's real and what's hallucinatory. There are certainly some games that border that, like DRYH and Insylum, but AFAIK you always know when you're in krazy kookoo world in those games. You can all now post several obvious examples I didn't think of.
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Oct 6, 2017 20:18
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Chuubo's does have an Issue (basically a condition that you get rewarded for resolving) which is "Something about your situation isn't real, figure out what between you and the GM." IIRC it mostly comes up in the Road of Trials mode of play, too, which is pretty much the closest to horror it has (its main XP actions are Suffer Trauma, Suffer Corruption, Suffer Adversity, and Never Say Die!, all of which involve bad things happening to you).
Zandar fucked around with this message at 21:07 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 21:04
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Evil Mastermind posted:I generally feel that if you want to do horror in D&D, you can't really do psychological horror since the system doesn't even come close to supporting it. Thing is, psychological horror isn't something any sort of system is ever going to support, in my opinion, only good roleplaying and investment from the players and GM. Like, is there any system that does it as something more than a Brain HP track that eventually terminates in gaining some sort of mental illness rather than dying outright? Because I definitely don't feel like I've ever seen that.
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Oct 6, 2017 21:15
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm not really sure how to do psychological horror in roleplaying--at least in my admittedly narrow definition of psychological horror as one where the audience doesn't know what's real and what's hallucinatory. There are certainly some games that border that, like DRYH and Insylum, but AFAIK you always know when you're in krazy kookoo world in those games.
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Oct 6, 2017 21:17
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PurpleXVI posted:Thing is, psychological horror isn't something any sort of system is ever going to support, in my opinion, only good roleplaying and investment from the players and GM. Like, is there any system that does it as something more than a Brain HP track that eventually terminates in gaining some sort of mental illness rather than dying outright? Because I definitely don't feel like I've ever seen that. Isn't that what Delta Green does?
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Oct 6, 2017 21:18
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Aliens tends to get cast as "they did for real Starship Troopers" and as an 80s action flick, but I re-watched it recently and its scarier than I had remembered. It gets there by creating a scenario in that the Marines badass gear and training is effective... and it just doesn't matter. They can slaughter aliens left and right and they just keep coming. It has a lot in common with a zombie movie, except the zombies are clever ambush predators instead of a shambling horde. That's the thing to me, much of the system is wrapped up in the gear and training, and if that doesn't matter, do you need 400 pages of rules to adjudicate that? I mean, it could work as a bait-and-switch where you hand out character sheets for a one-shot or something and there's all this cool stuff on the sheets that ends up being ineffectual, but that's a very specific take. In addition, most D&D games are based around campaign play; at a certain point in something like Starfinger, a PC death is an expenditure of a spell slot to undo rather than a tragic situation, and actual PC death of a mid-to-high level character is just nothing the game handles well. I mean, you can simulate the similar situation of facing an unrelenting threat, but at the same time a situation where things are really hopeless and unit members are dying right and left... I mean, yeah, you can do that sort of thing with D&D, but why do it in D&D or Starfinger over any off-the-shelf generic system with less overhead?
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Oct 6, 2017 21:21
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Halloween Jack posted:By the time the Aliens Adventure Game out there were a few novelizations, a few comic books, and a few video games, and Alien3 was in development. So I can see why they'd want to carefully wall it off, ADB style. The Harvester aliens (giant murder moles) LEG introduced were pretty cool. I really like the Aliens RPG. It's an incredibly simplified version of Phoenix Command at its core.
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Oct 6, 2017 21:26
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Halloween Jack posted:I think one of the best ways to introduce a bit of horror into D&D is to emphasize that the party are adventurers as people through most of history understood it--wandering people with no obvious social ties, and therefore, probably degenerate criminals who'd kill you soon as look at you. Though I'm not suggesting you play through the plot of Flesh+Blood. not just that; if the party includes any kind of full progression caster, they're likely the most deadly thing in their immediate geographic region. we joke about druids becoming sentient hive clusters of hegemonizing bears, but how likely is the local king/warlord/mayor to be super excited that a walking atomic bomb has randomly decided to set up shop in his kingdom/province/town?
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Oct 6, 2017 21:31
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Alien Rope Burn posted:That's the thing to me, much of the system is wrapped up in the gear and training, and if that doesn't matter, do you need 400 pages of rules to adjudicate that? I mean, it could work as a bait-and-switch where you hand out character sheets for a one-shot or something and there's all this cool stuff on the sheets that ends up being ineffectual, but that's a very specific take. In addition, most D&D games are based around campaign play; at a certain point in something like Starfinger, a PC death is an expenditure of a spell slot to undo rather than a tragic situation, and actual PC death of a mid-to-high level character is just nothing the game handles well. Also I probably misrepresented the idea a bit in trying to get off a quick post. Basically, the Aliens models let PCs use all their cool toys and have interesting and victorious combat encounters. The horror aspect comes in with the fact that even they can't win enough to get a complete victory. So it becomes a matter of how much they can protect/save before they get a chance to escape. That's also where the threat/loss is - not primarily to the PCs directly, but to something they care about caught in the path of the aliens. It wouldn't work for a full campaign, but could for an adventure I think. EDIT: Basically it's setting things up so the cool stuff on the PC's sheets is effective in the immediate microscale and they can make a difference there. But on the macroscale the problem is too big and all they can hope to do is buy time and save as much as they can before the inevitable. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 22:00 on Oct 6, 2017 |
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Oct 6, 2017 21:57
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I think the thing I despise the most out of the 3.Path milieu is the insane idea that it can (and should) be the only RPG someone needs for any genre or story. It is in no way a robust universal system, no matter how much the OGL tried to pretend.
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Oct 6, 2017 23:34
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You can do anything*! *if you spend one of the 11 feats you will ever get on it
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Oct 6, 2017 23:45
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 Chapter 4: Divine Magic - Monotheism FX  Divine magic is another system that appears to be blatantly ripped from parts of AD&D because the very first divine power source, Monotheism, is just the iconic AD&D Cleric spells from the Good and Healing domains. It's arguably one of the more functional FX power sources because it has the lowest barriers to entry - you don't have to research your spells from arcane formula firsthand, you don't have to create a make-believe day planner to keep track of arbitrary oaths, and you don't have to gently caress around with No, my problem with the Monotheism power source is that the book is very explicit that this power source is only available to members of the Abrahamic faiths (Judaism/Christianity/Islam). Your character doesn't literally have to be a rabbi or priest or cleric, you just have to be observant, but by tying the power source to actual, real world religions, you potentially open a whole nasty can of worms into your Men-In-Black-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off RPG. My biggest objection is that this (along with some other things that we'll cover further into the book) create the explicit setting assumption that some combination of Judaism/Christianity/Islam is objectively correct - that's got some pretty unsettling implications for a lot of people that don't believe in those faiths or for people who have been persecuted by these religions. If the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob literally exists and is directly empowering his faithful with miraculous powers, what kind of aspersions does that cast on people that are homosexual or trans or adherents of another faith? There's a bunch of nasty conclusions you can draw if you follow this piece of setting logic far enough (was the mass slaughter of indigenous American peoples by Spanish mercenaries actually justifiable because they were acting at the behest of an omnipotent God that literally exists?) and it really doesn't add anything to the quasi X-Files setting vibe that the rest of the book tries to invoke. There's a ton of ways that this whole issue could have been side-stepped, but it's in the setting, so if you're going to play the game RAW just know that God is real.  I'm still amazed that the devs decided they wanted their sci-fi game about alien greys and the Illuminati to incorporate the literal existence of the biblical God. Anyway! Here are the Monotheism FX powers. It's a greatest hits album for AD&D clerics: Willpower: Monotheism - Blessing is just the first level cleric spell Bless. Willpower: Monotheism - Cure is Cure Light/Medium/Serious wounds, depending on the quality of success you roll. Willpower: Monotheism - Demon Ward is Protection against Evil. It creates a barrier that keeps out Demons and Diabolists (because they're objectively evil in a world where the God of the Old Testament exists). Pretty cool that the implementation of Monotheism completely eliminates any shades of gray morality you could have tried to wring out of Diabolism! Willpower: Monotheism - Exorcism is Turn Undead only there's no actual undead creature type in Dark*Matter, so it just turns or rebukes Demons or other possessing entities. Personality: Monotheism - Aura is Shield of Faith, and as an added bonus anyone that looks at the Monotheist while using the Aura power gets automatically shifted one step further towards Fanatic on the NPC reaction scale! Remember, Alternity doesn't have saving throws, so even the most black-hearted Diabolist that eats puppies and puts cigarette butts out on children will be just as swayed towards the Monotheist as literally anyone else. They should have named this spell "Poochy the Dog". Personality: Monotheism - Guidance lets you play "Mother, May I?" with the GM and ask one question about your present course of action and the GM has to answer you more specifically the better the level of success you roll. Personality: Monotheism - Signs & Portents is Charm Person but it's extremely potent. Essentially you get a huge bonus to any skill checks you make to persuade people when this spell is active; I'm talking up to a -5 bonus on an amazing success when casting Signs & Portents. For reference, the Alternity bonus die system skips d10 entirely, so a -5 bonus means you're rolling d20 MINUS another d20 on a roll-under skill check. Yeah. Personality: Monotheism - Vision is almost the same thing as Guidance above, except that if you get an Amazing success an actual Angel, or other heavenly messenger, appears to you and gives you tangible help regarding whatever problem you were trying to solve. Just in case you forgot that God is real and he is your friend. I definitely didn't recall the in-setting justification for Monotheism being that the biblical God was real. This is definitely a detail that my high school group of nerdy friends completely glossed over. My only guess is that none of us ever played a character with Monotheism FX powers? Otherwise, I feel like some of the angry teenage atheists that comprised said group would have had a lot more to say about this section of the book. Come back next time for
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Oct 7, 2017 00:27
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D&D horror would work inspired by Bloodborne. The idea that your character is slowly becoming less and less human as they devolve into a twisted monster as vicious as those they hunt would work right in.
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Oct 7, 2017 00:41
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I feel like the recent edition of Mutant Chronicles by Modiphius does a really good job with giving the GM the tools to create psychological horror. They get access to a pool of points that only grows when the PCs choose to do something that gives the GM said points, and the players are fully aware of the GM getting them. So pulling in extra die for a roll, rolling 20s or choosing to fail something that would probably end worse if they rolled all net the GM points in the pool. The GM then gets to use them to activate enemy special abilities, parry/react to attacks against their NPCs, jump initiative and act before players (all players not heavily wounded go before all NPCs), triggering environmental/player statuses, grant extra attacks in a round, summon reinforcements in a combat, forces players to roll a 'don't freak out' check or (the one that doesn't sit well with me but is thematically appropriate in setting) corrupt player equipment and make it unreliable/an actively hostile NPC. The GM gets to do all that with a known resource that will grow over time, so the longer the session is going on, the more likely poo poo is going to spiral out of control. And if your PCs are exploring an old space station, starship or abandoned facility, have some of the more bizarre entities show up is on the table.
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Oct 7, 2017 00:46
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The best horror game is probably going to be dread because its one of the few that really handles rising tension well. If you don't know you use a jenga tower and make pulls when you want to do something difficult. If it collapses your character is out, either dead or lost or somehow out of the game. Admittedly its only really good for one shots but its one of the few rpgs that really makes the players FEEL the tension that you kind of lose in other systems.
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Oct 7, 2017 02:49
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unzealous posted:The best horror game is probably going to be dread because its one of the few that really handles rising tension well. If you don't know you use a jenga tower and make pulls when you want to do something difficult. If it collapses your character is out, either dead or lost or somehow out of the game. Admittedly its only really good for one shots but its one of the few rpgs that really makes the players FEEL the tension that you kind of lose in other systems. 
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Oct 7, 2017 03:26
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Wapole Languray posted:D&D horror would work inspired by Bloodborne. The idea that your character is slowly becoming less and less human as they devolve into a twisted monster as vicious as those they hunt would work right in. Pretty sure this exists in the World of Darkness somewhere.
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Oct 7, 2017 03:28
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Cythereal posted:Pretty sure this exists in the World of Darkness somewhere. I mean... play Hunter: The Vigil, with a compact that specifically hunts werewolves, and you're like 2/3 there. If the Cheiron Corporation was a church, you'd be pretty much all the way there. Or, just play werewolves, they're also doing something similar it's just more natural for them. That being said, Bloodborne: The Vigil would need a better combat system. I've, uh, got a halfway-functional Exalted 3e Bloodborne hack in a cursed .doc file on my laptop, haunting me. EDIT: I think I read you as being more keen on Bloodborne specifically than you intended! "Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster" is basically Hunter: The Vigil in a nutshell though, so I think my post still stands. It just doesn't have to only be werewolves, it can be all sorts of things that you murder and steal their methods to murder better until you're basically an 'All of Their Strengths' character plus alcoholism and a deep sour feeling where your soul used to be. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 04:15 on Oct 7, 2017 |
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Oct 7, 2017 04:10
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One of the upcoming Fragged Empire expansions is exactly Bloodborne. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/wadedyer/fragged-empire-rpg-expanded
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Oct 7, 2017 04:19
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Lynx Winters posted:One of the upcoming Fragged Empire expansions is exactly Bloodborne. It even has nice hats, I see.
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Oct 7, 2017 04:25
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I went to look at that with a lot of hope, but... I'm really unconvinced by the setting of Aeternum as described. One of the great things about Bloodborne is that it has a really strong sense of place, in the city of Yharnam, which is just a city. Aeternum falls into a weird trap a bunch of fantasy settings seem to fall into, where instead of just having a city that is large, and assuming any number of stories can be told there, the city is infinite. Which means it can barely have history or change, and it feels incredibly hollow to me. There are a few 'infinite city' settings that work for me but only because they're significantly alien, and draw on inspiration from science fiction arcologies and similar megacity concepts. Aeternum's really stacked the deck against its setting working out. ...I have more nitpicks but they're inane; suffice it to say, Fragged Empire seems cool but Fragged Aeternum seems to have gotten its planescape in my bloodborne and I'm not enthused. To avoid being purely negative, Fragged Seas looks a lot more interesting to me. Ironically its description in the kickstarter feels more like Bloodborne to me than Aeternum did. Joe Slowboat fucked around with this message at 04:55 on Oct 7, 2017 |
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Oct 7, 2017 04:53
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