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It's a slightly modified version of Mentzer's Basic D&D, as far as I can tell. If you like ascending AC, terrible editing (layout? important rules are just loving hidden) and grindcore album cover art, that might be the game for you.
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Feb 4, 2017 17:41
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Also if you want to bother trying to set D&D in "the real world" aka "what I thought the Middle Ages to be like".
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Feb 4, 2017 17:44
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Man just go play WHFRP2E and say you're actually setting it in the HRE. It'd be about as realistic and less creepy.
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Feb 4, 2017 17:46
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ZeroCount posted:So I've never looked at LotFP, why would you run it instead of D&D 2E or whatever? Because you believe it's about ethics in game journalism.
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Feb 4, 2017 17:49
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No that's Adventurer Conqueror King. 
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Feb 4, 2017 17:53
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ZeroCount posted:So I've never looked at LotFP, why would you run it instead of D&D 2E or whatever? Because you want a game that pretends at being outsider art while still being the same familiar pablum you played as a kid.
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Feb 4, 2017 17:55
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Also all these Old School games that have tons of 'You failed anyway' adventures annoy me. For all the problems I have with the Path of the Damned adventures that form the 'official' campaign for WHFRP2e? If the players get through them all, they save the southern Empire from a serious threat and likely get rewarded with riches and status as heroes. They have to go through some serious poo poo to do it and there's especially a bunch of balancing problems in the first adventure (It expects the party to take on a bunch of full-plate clad Knights who are 2nd/3rd tier career characters. In a 1st tier adventure. A single one of the knights is actually significantly stronger than the demon who serves as the 'boss' of the adventure) but if they win, they win. Strike a great blow against Chaos and make a grim and perilous world a little better in their wake. The hell is with peoples' hard on for 'Haha, no you failed' in Old School stuff?
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Feb 4, 2017 17:57
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For the same reason that people still talk in hushed tones about the time their high school gaming group actually beat the Tomb of Horrors. The default assumption back in the day was that an RPG was a zero sum game, the only way you won was if the DM lost, so the DM was encouraged to put in a bunch of gently caress-yous to make sure that never happened.
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Feb 4, 2017 18:09
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Well, by no means do you need LotFP to have arbitrary TPK adventures, those are common enough. I feel its main point of differentiation is its pretensions at being mature and challenging art for adults.
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Feb 4, 2017 18:21
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That stuff even spreads beyond the old school. The adventures I have for Pathfinder are very fond of that. You guys killed some Kobold King and saved a bunch of kids in the process? Turns out all these kids are now messed-up. Expect them to become prostitutes, criminals or necromancers! They will probably try to murder you when they've grown up! Some evil fey having fun turning a carnival into some kind of Rob Zombie movie? Villagers will be slaughtered all throughout, there's really nothing you can do against that, and the final boss is so strong that you probably need the help from that Drizzt clone we put in here for some reason. Doresh fucked around with this message at 18:56 on Feb 4, 2017 |
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Feb 4, 2017 18:23
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The problem with mature and challenging adventures for adults is that most people who spend their time writing RPG modules are not very mature.
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Feb 4, 2017 18:37
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Too many hadn't grown out of the Hot Topic "Everything's bleak and pointless" nihilism stage or "We're finally allowed to see all the blood and guts without our parents getting mad." Grim, dark is fine, but after a point it's just a fun-sucker.
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Feb 4, 2017 19:06
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Alien Rope Burn posted:My knowledge of Shadowrun is puddle deep since every game I tried to play of it was awful. Long story short, Shadowrun Japan is at least as unpleasant a place to be in as the corp part of RIFTS Japan, and maybe even worse. Robindaybird posted:the Harebrained Games really is a good translation of the setting and puts the annoying mechanics in the background so they're not in the way of fun (for the most part - fans were split on the changes in the Matrix between Dragonfall and Hong Kong), I found Shadowrun's tabletop rules to be way too unwieldy and there were massive issues like deckers having an almost different game running and the inevitable arguments over tone (Mirror Shades vs Pink Mohawk) RocknRollaAyatollah posted:What edition? First edition would be best for maximum dated predictions about the future and complex math.
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Feb 4, 2017 19:12
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Count Chocula posted:Rahl Dahl's kinda the opposite, where 90% of his stuff people just kinda pretend isn't full of stuff that would give Clive Barker nightmares even when people are getting morphed into grotesque forms and eaten. What's the actual difference between Matilda and Carrie, after all?
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Feb 4, 2017 19:35
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Darth Various posted:What's the actual difference between Matilda and Carrie, after all? Matilda lives.
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Feb 4, 2017 19:37
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and the lack of Religious Fundamentalism that lead up to Carrie's particular issues. EDIT: now I think about it, Carrie is if Mathilda hadn't gotten any sort of support until her late teens. Robindaybird fucked around with this message at 19:42 on Feb 4, 2017 |
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Feb 4, 2017 19:40
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Fossilized Rappy posted:To explain, then, until very recently in the Shadowrun timeline Japan had an entire concentration camp island where they shipped off their metahuman population because they hate them that much. There's also a megacorp whose enforcers are samurai that are a sexist men's club willing to (covertly) kill women who attempt to push into their ranks even though it's now almost 2080; this same megacorp also funds mass charity efforts in third world countries while simultaneously talking about how inferior all the non-Japanese are in their backroom talks when the mics are off. IIRC, they go into full Imperial Japan territory. Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere and all that. I think I also remember the Emperor dying and the new one trying to quietly reform things at some points.
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Feb 4, 2017 19:42
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wiegieman posted:The problem with mature and challenging adventures for adults is that most people who spend their time writing RPG modules are not very mature. It's certainly for mature readers, but not really maturely written. It's challenging in an arbitrary sense, not in an intellectual or emotional sense. Its ambitions are only skin-deep.
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Feb 4, 2017 19:49
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SirPhoebos posted:Someone needs to cover Shadowrun, either here or on System Mastery. Can I call dibs on a F&F of Shadowrun 4e (and general Shadowrun Lore, I guess)? I've been waffling on doing it for a freaking year, publically calling out that I'm gonna do it might be the push I need to actually write the drat thing.
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Feb 4, 2017 19:55
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Edited the earlier post to make the writing suck less.
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Feb 4, 2017 21:34
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Crasical posted:Can I call dibs on a F&F of Shadowrun 4e (and general Shadowrun Lore, I guess)? I've been waffling on doing it for a freaking year, publically calling out that I'm gonna do it might be the push I need to actually write the drat thing. Shadowrun is such a cool game, it's a shame you have to play Shadowrun to enjoy it (I kid, but the clunk takes a bit of getting used to.)
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Feb 4, 2017 21:39
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The weird part about LOTFP is that The God That Crawls and Better Than Any Man show that Raggi can actually occasionally write decent set pieces and have interesting ideas (even if he can't stop himself from raggifying them with stuff like the mutilated children in the Mound). He just Can't Stop That Edge and is balls deep in PC vs GM game design. If you really want to see Peak Raggi, read Death Love Doom. But, don't. Please. For your own sake.
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Feb 4, 2017 22:41
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wiegieman posted:Shadowrun is such a cool game, it's a shame you have to play Shadowrun to enjoy it (I kid, but the clunk takes a bit of getting used to.) Shadowrun seems to share the problem with Rifts where it's very much about toys and trying to shift the setting to another, less gear-heavy system would lose some of what makes it appeal to the fanbase. Fiddling with dozens of little widgets to create the optimal Street Sam loadout seems to be a very integral part of the experience that friends of mine who have enjoyed Shadowrun remember. Of course, trying to churn out huge pages of mechanically meaningful but still-balanced gear is extremely hard, and support for ongoing gear upgrades would require continuing to write that kind of crunch. Some of the Murphys people have posted about SR have been amusing, like the Face with the uber-pistol that fit comfortably in a sleeve or the many faces of the Physical Adept.
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Feb 4, 2017 22:42
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wiegieman posted:Shadowrun is such a cool game, it's a shame you have to play Shadowrun to enjoy it (I kid, but the clunk takes a bit of getting used to.) From what I've heard, the explosion rules are just nuts, having you figure out how often the explosion waves or something bounce around and stuff. DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:The weird part about LOTFP is that The God That Crawls and Better Than Any Man show that Raggi can actually occasionally write decent set pieces and have interesting ideas (even if he can't stop himself from raggifying them with stuff like the mutilated children in the Mound). He just Can't Stop That Edge and is balls deep in PC vs GM game design. His Save vs Edge is abysmal.
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Feb 4, 2017 22:44
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Fossilized Rappy posted:Long story short, Shadowrun Japan is at least as unpleasant a place to be in as the corp part of RIFTS Japan, and maybe even worse. The weird part is that the Republic of Japan is actually... okay to live in! Mostly! Kinda! Certainly better than most cyberpunk settings! I don't get the impression that Patrick Nowak understood the actual themes of cyberpunk and instead a lot of the cyberpunk stuff just ends up being window dressing.
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Feb 4, 2017 22:52
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Doresh posted:From what I've heard, the explosion rules are just nuts, having you figure out how often the explosion waves or something bounce around and stuff. The old rules for a grenade in a small room were called the Chunky Salsa rules.
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Feb 4, 2017 22:53
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wiegieman posted:The problem with mature and challenging adventures for adults is that most people who spend their time writing RPG modules are not very mature.
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Feb 4, 2017 22:52
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Doresh posted:From what I've heard, the explosion rules are just nuts, having you figure out how often the explosion waves or something bounce around and stuff. I don't know about newer editions, but when grenades came out in the 1E Street Samurai Catalog they had a rule where the concussion wave would do damage on the way out based on distance from the explosion. If it hit solid scenery, it would bounce back and do commensurately less damage on the way back in, and so on and so forth, like an old-school lightning bolt that lost energy on each rebound. The 2E Catalog was almost identical to its predecessor, with the only differences being revised damage codes, and the word 'BANNED' superimposed over the grenade entry.
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Feb 4, 2017 23:09
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Kurieg posted:Then BOXD released a bunch of Poisons and Diseases that good people could use because they only worked against Evil people. So it's okay to foul their water supply it's only going to hurt the evil people. Also it's perfectly fine to toss someone into a magical oubliette and torture them for a year until they come around to your moral point of view because you're increasing the net amount of good in the world. This is a few pages back, but if I'm thinking of the same spell you're thinking of, the evil person isn't locked in a magical oubliette of torture. The evil dude's soul gets sealed in a gem of "NOW SIT IN THE CORNER AND THINK ABOUT WHAT YOU'VE DONE!" And if the soul manages to stay in there for exactly one year (even one day less and the spell fails), their evil alignment shifts to the good equivalent. Basically it's a more expensive and time consuming helm of opposite alignment, but still the same level of lazy bullshit systemizing what should be a significant shift in morality without having to take the time to bother with a compelling redemption arc
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Feb 4, 2017 23:28
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Yea, I do think it's meant to be a reform prison on steroids, but it's written so clumsily - while BoVD is full Edgelord nonsense, BoXD has just flatout "Did not think this through"
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Feb 4, 2017 23:32
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I don't know why you'd go for the nice oubliette when you can just give them a helm of opposite alignment.
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Feb 4, 2017 23:52
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The thing that always annoyed me about the good vs evil poo poo in 3.5, there's always a giant pile of feats for selling your soul to the gods of evil and getting rewarded for your increasing depths of devotion. But there's no equivalent feat tree for being devoted to the guardinals or whatever. But there ARE tons of really dumb prestige classes, though, like being a "Good assassin but not really an assassin but really actually an assassin".
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Feb 4, 2017 23:52
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Bieeardo posted:I don't know about newer editions, but when grenades came out in the 1E Street Samurai Catalog they had a rule where the concussion wave would do damage on the way out based on distance from the explosion. If it hit solid scenery, it would bounce back and do commensurately less damage on the way back in, and so on and so forth, like an old-school lightning bolt that lost energy on each rebound.
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Feb 4, 2017 23:58
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Gobbeldygook posted:Those are still the 5E rules. 5e rules explicitly say the floor counts as a barrier for those rules and grenades now require a static number of hits by the attacker to guarantee they land exactly where the attacker wants, no dodge allowed, so grenades are unbelievably lethal now. You won't believe how effective a vampire with immunity to toxins and a bandolier of 100 nuyen gas grenades can be.
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Feb 5, 2017 00:17
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I have no idea what the appeal of shadowrun is. The setting is a mess of stuff that doesn't work together and everyone hates the system. Is cyberpunk 2020 that bad?
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Feb 5, 2017 00:57
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rumble in the bunghole posted:I have no idea what the appeal of shadowrun is. The setting is a mess of stuff that doesn't work together and everyone hates the system. Is cyberpunk 2020 that bad? I really like the setting but I also have unironically read crossover fanfiction and liked it so maybe I just have bad taste.
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Feb 5, 2017 01:07
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rumble in the bunghole posted:I don't know why you'd go for the nice oubliette when you can just give them a helm of opposite alignment. You know, the helm of opposite alignment is actually more optimal in every way since it's instantaneous and doesn't require a 10,000 gp diamond and the sacrifice of one character level like the spell does. Kurieg posted:The thing that always annoyed me about the good vs evil poo poo in 3.5, there's always a giant pile of feats for selling your soul to the gods of evil and getting rewarded for your increasing depths of devotion. But there's no equivalent feat tree for being devoted to the guardinals or whatever. But there ARE tons of really dumb prestige classes, though, like being a "Good assassin but not really an assassin but really actually an assassin". The BoED tried to do stuff like that... sort of, with the Vow feats. Except it turns out that things like the "Vow of Abstinence", "Vow of Chastity", "Vow of Nonviolence", "Vow of Obedience", "Vow of Poverty", and "Vow of Purity" really, really don't work well in Dungeons and Dragons. (It didn't help that the only one which was halfway decent was the poverty one, but even that didn't make up for giving up all your gear.) Robindaybird posted:Yea, I do think it's meant to be a reform prison on steroids, but it's written so clumsily - while BoVD is full Edgelord nonsense, BoXD has just flatout "Did not think this through" Oh god yes, the Book of Vile Darkness was so horrific. I wonder what could have possibly made people think poo poo like the "lichloved" feat and a sample villain whose entire gimmick is walking around with half-starved children chained to him that die when the PCs start hitting him were good ideas? Wait...  ....  Motherfucker
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Feb 5, 2017 01:10
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Nuns with Guns posted:The BoED tried to do stuff like that... sort of, with the Vow feats. Except it turns out that things like the "Vow of Abstinence", "Vow of Chastity", "Vow of Nonviolence", "Vow of Obedience", "Vow of Poverty", and "Vow of Purity" really, really don't work well in Dungeons and Dragons. (It didn't help that the only one which was halfway decent was the poverty one, but even that didn't make up for giving up all your gear.) quote:
DO YOU HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE TO GRASP THE
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Feb 5, 2017 01:15
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Kurieg posted:The vow feats punished you. The evil devotion feats just rewarded you straight up because they're evil only feats which means PCs don't have access to them. I think, in theory, the bonuses provided by the sacred vows were supposed to weigh evenly against the thing you're giving up, but it this failed because of how wrongheaded the execution was on every imaginable level
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Feb 5, 2017 01:21
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What did Chastity and Abstinence give you?
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Feb 5, 2017 01:30
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