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Who can forget that iconic scene in The Last Jedi where Luke teaches Rey how to give stormtroopers cancer.
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Oct 16, 2017 14:38
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Barudak posted:Who can forget that iconic scene in The Last Jedi where Luke teaches Rey how to give stormtroopers cancer. "I learned this from a blue, glowing guy." "Obi-Wan?" "Doctor Manhattan."
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Oct 16, 2017 14:43
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Barudak posted:Who can forget that iconic scene in The Last Jedi where Luke teaches Rey how to give stormtroopers cancer. that would have been a pretty cool direction for the new trilogy to take it though - the Force is accumulated background space radiation and the more you use it, the more cancer you get. sith lords don't look like moldy potatoes because they're "evil" they just have mega space cancer from using the Force so much. would you believe Yoda is actually a 32 year-old human male? Force cancer is a motherfucker.
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Oct 16, 2017 15:12
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pls stop sciencing the plot magic
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Oct 16, 2017 15:15
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I am really looking forward to a pathfinder adventure set on the sun.
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Oct 16, 2017 15:40
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Worshiping gods or nature confined to surface of planets is sooo primitive. Random interactions of stellar objects is where its at. *dies from his own radiation*
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Oct 16, 2017 15:48
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It turns out that the real cancer was the D20 design we learned along the way.
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Oct 16, 2017 15:57
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Starfinger is amazing. It gets more and more mathematically broken with each update. Working at Paizo must be boss as hell; all you have to do it get blitzed and fart out a first draft of rules and BAM! you're published.
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Oct 16, 2017 16:01
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OutOfPrint posted:Starfinger is amazing. It gets more and more mathematically broken with each update. Sometimes they have a beta test they completely ignore too. I think they stopped that though because they got tired of coming up with convoluted situations where a martial character would win a fight on their own.
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Oct 16, 2017 16:04
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Halloween Jack posted:It turns out that the real cancer was the D20 design we learned along the way.  If only we'd listened to the canaries. 
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Oct 16, 2017 16:12
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Barudak posted:Who can forget that iconic scene in The Last Jedi where Luke teaches Rey how to give stormtroopers cancer. Uh, spoilers?
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Oct 16, 2017 16:22
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Can I ask what "D20 design" is?
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Oct 16, 2017 16:34
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JcDent posted:Can I ask what "D20 design" is? Based on the d20 System, such as D&D 3E and Pathfinder, Mutants & Masterminds, Spycraft, WWE Know Your Role, and similar leftovers from the massive d20 glut of the early 2000s.
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Oct 16, 2017 17:24
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JcDent posted:Can I ask what "D20 design" is? Roll a d20. You have that many minutes to design your next gameplay mechanic.
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Oct 16, 2017 17:27
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Barudak posted:Roll a d20. You have that many minutes to design your next gameplay mechanic. We should have a forums contest.
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Oct 16, 2017 17:31
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JcDent posted:Can I ask what "D20 design" is? 1. Turning D&D into a universal system, so everything has to be statted up like PCs and their stuff. 2. Concomitant to the above, a Rolemaster-inspired skill system, badly implemented. 3. An "everything not explicitly allowed is forbidden" design sense built into the feat system. Things that you should be able to just do are gated behind feats. Stiff penalties are built into combat maneuvers so that you have to pay feats, not to be good at things, but to not be incompetent. 4. Preoccupied with a strict definition of "simulation" that means measuring the physical characteristics of a virtual world. 5. The whole point of this is compatibility. In order to actually make D20 suit any genre besides "D&D," you have to mess around with it until it's not actually compatible with other D20 games.
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Oct 16, 2017 17:31
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So would something like Runequest or Heroquest count as d20 design?
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Oct 16, 2017 17:35
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I think WHFRP2e is one of the only games I've ever played where the whole 'everyone uses exactly the same stat system, PC or NPC' thing actually works.
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Oct 16, 2017 17:37
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Josef bugman posted:So would something like Runequest or Heroquest count as d20 design? BRP was also not marketed with the rationale that it should replace every other ruleset, and that you should design whole games as supplements that you need a Runequest Player's Guide in order to play. They didn't, for example, crowbar Gloranthan magic into Call of Cthulhu. Or, to give an even more fundamental example of a D&D design feature that doesn't translate well into other genres: Runequest doesn't base its entire to-hit mechanic on what type of armor you're wearing. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Oct 16, 2017 |
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Oct 16, 2017 17:59
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Barudak posted:
quote:It unironically uses the word “metaplot” to describe its story quote:*For those wondering about typos, Gareth Michael-Skarka was the book’s sole editor, so presumably he planned to fix them about 7 years before the book went to print but never got around to it.
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Oct 16, 2017 18:05
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This is an interesting point that I hadn’t conceived yet. Do you think feats are emblematic of a change in thought from “Do what your GM says” towards “Do what the rules tell you”?
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Oct 16, 2017 18:11
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DalaranJ posted:This is an interesting point that I hadn’t conceived yet. Do you think feats are emblematic of a change in thought from “Do what your GM says” towards “Do what the rules tell you”? What you're proposing is a factor in D&D design, but it's an almost fundamental impulse that's been around for a long time. GMs get tired of making individual rulings for everything, and they get tired of making house rules for situations that come up repeatedly (that the players won't argue interminably about). So Brown Box D&D started as a set of rules for specific things, surrounded by a thick tangled layer of improvisation. Eventually a lot of improvised things became defined house rules, and the result was AD&D. Then 3e/D20 tried to rationalize it all. This is a lot bigger than the idea of feats, specifically. A feat system, in itself, can be a great way to add character customization to a game where, otherwise, every Elf Fighter 6 looks like every other Elf Fighter 6 but for the difference of a point here and there. My pet theory is that you don't see a lot of roleplaying games based on some very popular genres, like spy thrillers, because players like having more to their characters than ability scores and skills--magic powers, cyberware, etc. Feats get around that. Mostly, I think it's a product of two forces. The first is another one of my pet theories, which I call the Realism Attack. It's a medical condition that only affects game designers. You're sitting there writing a system, and suddenly some realistic detail occurs to you, and you can't let it go. "9mm shouldn't do the same damage as .357 SIG." "But, like, how do you trip an ooze?" It doesn't have legs." "Just because you can drive a car doesn't mean you know how to drive a motorcycle." And so on. Pretty soon, you've done something like pad out your skill list with skills no PC will ever take, or write a full page of sailing rules in a game about vampire gangsters, or write really complicated grappling rules for a setting chock-full of laser guns. You wake up with no memory of what you've done, and this godawful poo poo makes it all the way to print. This is why anything actually interesting in 3e combat carries at least a -4 penalty by default. The second factor and more important factor is just WotC and all the D20 bandwagoners needing to sell books and not having enough ideas--it's conventional wisdom that books full of player options sell, and it's impossible to make thousands of feats that are all equally good and desirable (especially when so much actual design space is reserved for spells). This is how you get feats that specifically allow you to do something that anyone should be able to do with a skill check. Best example I can think of at the moment is one that Jon & Jef of System Mastery pointed out in X-Crawl: a feat that lets you just dodge interview questions by spinning it into something else, Donald Trump style. That's neat, but anyone should be able to do it with a Bluff check. This continued unabated in 4e, by the way, because they needed to fill those pages of Dragon with PC options. They didn't have much in the way of unnecessary bullshit narrative feats, though. Instead they made a bunch of combat feats that only an extremely specific build would ever want, and usually not even then. They were mainly terrible combat feats like "When you do a specific maneuver that you rarely use, you get an insignificant benefit to a different thing until the end of your next turn." As a postscript, the idea of needing a really rigid set of rules, that covers every situation and that the DM shouldn't mess with, is something you mainly see at Frank Trollman's Gaming Den. They've developed this philosophy that sees any rules improvisation by the DM as a violation of "player agency," so the rules have to cover every conceivable situation, and the DM's role is reduced to setting up targets for the PCs to knock down, as I think Cirno put it.
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Oct 16, 2017 19:01
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FMguru posted:- They may have missed their target as far getting a game of pre-millenial tension out after the millenium, but don't worry - one of the future products announced was a series of scenarios set around the 9/11 attacks. Again, this was a game that came out in late 2001 while the rubble of the WTC was still smouldering. Ooooh, is that edgy enough for you? I'm almost positive that I got my copy of TLE at GenCon 2001, a month or so before 9/11, so the game design draws its terrible edginess from before everyone's brain was broken. I seem to recall that the Jaffes decided to lean into the skid after 9/11 and revamped what was going to be the metaplot and the publishing schedule to accommodate. Given that the creators are natives to the NYC area, that's not the most surprising development. For my money, The Last Exodus tries so drat hard that it almost wraps around to be fun in a self-parody kind of way. But then again, I'm a fan of the kind of deranged crypto-theology that shows up in anime a fair amount of the time so that may be a matter of personal taste.
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Oct 16, 2017 19:19
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Hey, I mention this in the next update, but if anybody has any notes on the metaplot as it was supposed to be delivered via the long defunct https://www.lastexodus.com that would be greatly appreciated. I almost genuinely need it to figure out the setting because that is how badly the book is put together, because I wasnt joking when I said product descriptions do a better job explaining the setting than its own story does.
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Oct 16, 2017 19:37
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kaynorr posted:I'm almost positive that I got my copy of TLE at GenCon 2001, a month or so before 9/11, so the game design draws its terrible edginess from before everyone's brain was broken. I seem to recall that the Jaffes decided to lean into the skid after 9/11 and revamped what was going to be the metaplot and the publishing schedule to accommodate. Given that the creators are natives to the NYC area, that's not the most surprising development.
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Oct 16, 2017 19:42
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FMguru posted:Yeah, TLE came out at GenCon, then 9/11 happened, then they announced a 9/11 adventure module, which struck pretty much everyone as tasteless and ghoulish. The book starts with a person longing for a world war to shake up the dull world we live in.
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Oct 16, 2017 19:45
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Halloween Jack posted:3. An "everything not explicitly allowed is forbidden" design sense built into the feat system. Things that you should be able to just do are gated behind feats. Stiff penalties are built into combat maneuvers so that you have to pay feats, not to be good at things, but to not be incompetent. This is one of those points where I think people (deliberately or unintentionally) blur the line between "D&D does this wrong" and "D&D isn't even trying to do the thing you want." Most of the time I'd rather play a game where you have an explicit number of permissible actions and that's all you can do than one that constantly requires ad hoc adjudication. I appreciate the function of narrative roleplaying as a way to keep you invested in your wargamemans but it's just that, a secondary feature that helps make the primary one more exciting.
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Oct 16, 2017 19:47
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Like if you were playing Monopoly and you said "I want to file for bankruptcy" people would rightly look at you like a lunatic. (Well, more of a lunatic than you already are for playing Monopoly, anyways.) It's true that narrative-mechanical flexibility is a potential upside of GM-plus-players game structure but it's not the only advantage, and it's not one that necessarily must exist in every tabletop game where one person designs the environment and encounters and the other people explore them and advance their characters. e: This is especially true in games with good siloing, where you can easily have a freeform narrative where things happen and you loosely share control via a simple resolution system and then when it's time to do combat (or whatever the main mechanics-oriented part of your game is) you zoom in to a closed, tightly balanced system. Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Oct 16, 2017 |
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Oct 16, 2017 19:54
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Also as somebody that was in the "amateur" d20 design community (as in I worked on fan projects, though one was officially licensed by WotC) working in d20 material at the ground level at the time was just as a formula; you followed existing design principles. You design a class, it should be comparable to existing classes. You're basically working from two angles: either doing tradeoffs where you take an existing class' structure and swap things out, and eyeballing abilities of comparative level and trying to match up what other classes have around that level. You add feats, those feats shouldn't exceed other feats of similar requirements or types. Same goes with spells. Which isn't to say you can't be creative. But there are dos and don'ts if you're aping WotC, you don't generally have character abilities muck with wealth, at least not overtly. Design should never be "fluffy" - that is, mechanical traits for classes and feats should provide mechanically relevant benefits. You generally err on the weak end of things rather than making anything stronger than already exists and treat existing classes at the high water mark. (Which is probably the real reason why fighting classes tend to suck, not because people are trying to sabotage them, but because the fighter was bad from the outset and people just treat that as the example to work from. It's also why people freak out when you deviate from that.) As somebody that probably wrote up over fifty classes and hundreds of feats, it's a formula and you just do cargo cult design without thinking too hard about the underlying design principles.
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Oct 16, 2017 20:08
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Literally all that's needed to make the Fighter a viable class is to go over feats and make them powerful enough to compete with spells -- which means that the 11-ish (plus bonuses) feats fighters get need to be as powerful and flexible as the 40-ish spells wizards get. That would be Changing Things though. Cleave, Great Cleave, and Whirlwind Attack should all be benefits of the same single feat and should unlock with your BAB, since that's the closest thing to a fighter caster level.
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Oct 16, 2017 20:13
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wiegieman posted:Literally all that's needed to make the Fighter a viable class is to go over feats and make them powerful enough to compete with spells -- which means that the 11-ish (plus bonuses) feats fighters get need to be as powerful and flexible as the 40-ish spells wizards get. That would be Changing Things though. But you would also need to allow Fighters to rewrite reality, break the action economy, change the fundamental way characters fight each other, and be so muscle-y that they can intimidate and seduce anyone they wish. Addressing the ultimate result of caster supremacy ignores the issue that D&D is a fundamentally broken property with no redeeming value, made worse by every fanboy's flailing attempt to fix it -- and usually just making casters better instead. 4e evaded this by dispensing with the idea that your character abilities and character's plot-actions are in any way connected, but was still a system of vestigial attributes and feat taxes that needed multiple relaunches even as it rotted on the vine. Ideally, your character sheet should be a single note card onto which you write your character's preferred name and, whenever anything changes or does not change about that character, write down a tag to incorporate into playing that character.
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Oct 16, 2017 20:26
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A note card? What the gently caress, you simulationist. NAME TAG ONLY. In fact, let's get this down to a tweet. If your character poo poo don't fit in a tweet, your game is poo poo.
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Oct 16, 2017 20:30
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Nessus posted:A note card? What the gently caress, you simulationist. NAME TAG ONLY. Im allowed to use all ascii characters, right? Get ready to learn how to read A$s££k6
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Oct 16, 2017 20:33
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Nessus posted:A note card? What the gently caress, you simulationist. NAME TAG ONLY. We have to have more than that, otherwise we're just doing freeform roleplay like animals. If I can't take strings on the other members of my clique and then use a Spend to roll +Unpleasantness to advance their Harm Clock two motes I don't even know how you can call yourself a rule set.
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Oct 16, 2017 20:41
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wiegieman posted:Literally all that's needed to make the Fighter a viable... The modern presumption that fighters are crap is not something that entered my mind at the time. It is orthogonal to how classic d20 design was done. Generally speaking, it wasn't considered. Granted, some folks caught on - BESM d20 correctly points out that spellcasters are overpowered (and then goes on to make its own flavor of design mistakes), and there's books like By the Numbers that posited Clerics, Druids, and Bards as the most powerful classes. Close, but not quite. But those weren't really part of the mainstream of d20 design. You may as well ask why an Italian of the 17th century wasn't eating pizza every day. "All the ingredients are around you!", you cry to some hapless peasant, and they look you in the eye, and say, "Eat tomatoes? Nobody eats tomatoes! Are you mad?!"
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Oct 16, 2017 21:05
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Nessus posted:A note card? What the gently caress, you simulationist. NAME TAG ONLY. 
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Oct 16, 2017 21:06
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Halloween Jack posted:My character sheet? @dril.
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Oct 16, 2017 21:15
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Joke's on you, I got those 280 characters.
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Oct 16, 2017 21:20
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Halloween Jack posted:No. Runequest, like D&D 3, measures most things in the game world in terms of their physical characteristics, but that's a feature of many RPGs and causes problems with genre emulation in many RPGs. Even the first edition of Runequest, which has D&D's fingerprints all over it as an unavoidable consequence of being designed in 1980, was self-conscious about avoiding D&Disms that didn't make "logical" sense. Have you never seen Worlds of Wonder? BRP doing superheroes, space adventure, and generic fantasy in the same box?
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Oct 17, 2017 01:27
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And then there's the Ringworld RPG based on BRP, with characters with skill levels at 5000 percent .
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Oct 17, 2017 01:32
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