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Alien Rope Burn posted:Whenever Inklesspen catches up to archiving this thread would be a good cue to start anew. I can archive multiple threads simultaneously. Now that Kurieg has finished Changing Breeds, I say we close this thread for quarantine. (I'm also almost completely caught up.)
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Jan 4, 2016 02:59
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| # ¿ Apr 18, 2024 03:11 |
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 Even computer-ghost Jedis are assholes Last time, we unboxed the beginner game and looked at the "Read This First" flyer. It had a one-paragraph "What is Roleplaying" section, an example of play, and a nice opening scroll for the players to look at. The Adventure Book opens with the same "What is Roleplaying" section, along with the obligatory "pick one schmuck to be the GM"; all non-GMs are abjured not to read past that section, while the GM is instructed to just dive in; the Adventure Book is designed to teach everyone the rules. As a consequence, it is railroady as all get out. The next page shows everything in the box (except the catalog of fine FFG merchandise) and also demonstrates three sidebar styles. Red sidebars contain text to be read aloud to the players; beige sidebars contain summaries of the mechanic being taught, and brown sidebars contain lore, stat blocks, and rules reminders. These sidebars will make up nearly half the book.  quote:The available dice should be placed somewhere within easy reach of all players. The map can also be placed in between all players (with the Valley side showing), so everyone can easily see where the action is taking place. Each hero player should find the appropriate character token from among the available cardboard character tokens and keep it nearby. The hero players might wish to use these to represent their characters on the game map later during fight scenes! It would also be helpful for each player to have a pencil or pen and some scratch paper to take notes. One thing I do like about the adventure book is the way it explicitly spells out some things that seem obvious to you or me, but which a group playing their first game might not think about.  Then the GM is instructed to play the Star Wars opening theme and read aloud the crawl text (provided in a red sidebar) while the players look at the crawl text on the back of the "Read This First" flyer. I like a bit of ceremony as much as the next person, but this seems like it would get old pretty fast. The scenario is set during the Rebellion era; a handful of people have learned about the Force from a scholar named Romund, who has now been captured by a Dark Side user named  Malefax. The PCs have all gotten to this planet to rescue their friend, but somehow climbed up a mountain instead of taking a shuttle ride or something. As a result, they take 2 strain. Strain is the non-lethal damage type; every character has a strain threshold, above which they pass out. Players are instructed to mark down the strain on their character sheets; sure hope they have pencils, or these are going to become hard to read very soon.Encounter 1 begins! Guess what, the climbing isn't over. This provides the game an opportunity to teach us how to perform skill checks, which means I should probably show you a character sheet. The game comes with four pregenerated characters. Each one has a bit of backstory provided.
The website provides two additional character booklets for download.
Tarast's backstory also says he's spent 15 years on the run from the Empire, which is the closest thing we get to an actual date for this scenario; if we assume he went on the run right after Order 66, this puts us four years before the Battle of Yavin. (An alternative reading of his backstory gives 18 years, which pushes the scenario closer to Yavin, but eh.)  The character booklet puts the sheet in the center of a two-page spread, with each section numbered to correspond to explanatory text on the left and right. Where something is too wordy to put there (like skill definitions), it refers you to the reference pages at the back of either the Rulebook or Adventure Book. We also have a handy reference guide to the dice types and the symbols on them (more about this later) and the kinds of actions you can take on your turn. Ok, back to the adventure. quote:You stand at the bottom of a steep stone rise clad in snow and ice. It's not especially tall, but you will need to brave the elements and exert yourself to reach the top. The path continues upward in a tight switchback exposed to the howling winds. To your left, several tall evergreen trees brush against the cliff face, where smaller trees cling to cracks in the rock. A more direct route would be to scramble straight up the rocks and ice to the valley above. In any event, you have to go up if you're going to rescue Romund. What do you do? Going back to town and borrowing a light aircraft is not, unfortunately, one of the options. Whatever the PCs do, they'll need to make a skill check. Heading up the path is a Resilience check. Climbing straight up is Athletics, while "leaping from tree to tree" is a Coordination check. You can also "search for another path to the top" (Survival) or rig makeshift climbing gear (Mechanics). No matter which skill the PCs choose to use, the difficulty is Easy. Now it's time to build a dicepool.  Let's say we're playing as Sarenda, since I already showed you her sheet above. If she climbs the cliff, she'll need to roll Athletics, which means three green Ability dice. However, if she somehow rigs climbing gear out of fallen branches and vines, she'll roll Mechanics, which is two Ability dice and one yellow Proficiency die. The dicepools are already calculated here for us, but if they hadn't been, they're fairly straightforward to figure out. You look at the character's stat (Intellect is the stat for Mechanics), which is 3, and the skill rating, which is 1. You start out with the larger number's worth of green Ability dice, then upgrade the smaller number's worth of them to yellow Proficiency dice. If her skill rating was 2, she would have ended up with one Ability die and two Proficiency dice. Then you add in one purple Difficulty die, roll them, and count up the symbols. There's six possible symbols, three good and three bad. Each one can cancel out one of the other kind. If you don't happen to have FFG's special dice on hand and you don't want to pay $5 for their smartphone app, the full game provides a table to convert regular polyhedral dice into FFG symbols; this table isn't included in the beginner game.  The green Ability dice will generate Success and Advantage symbols; hereinafter Ⓢ and Ⓐ because gently caress if I'm going to embed their silly symbols all over the place. Ⓐ symbols are positive side-effects, and you can get and use them even if you don't have any successes. The yellow Proficiency die can also generate a Triumph Ⓣ, which is basically a critical hit. The purple Difficulty die generates Failure ⓕ and Threat ⓣ symbols, which counter Ⓢ and Ⓐ, while the red Challenge die is the negative equivalent of Proficiency and can generate a Despair ⓓ symbol. Luckily we won't be seeing any of those right now. I just rolled Sarenda's Mechanics check; she got 2 Ⓢ, 3 Ⓐ, and 1 ⓣ. The ⓣ cancels out one of the Ⓐ, leaving her with 2 Ⓐ. Since she got a success, she managed to climb the mountain using her makeshift gear. The Ⓐ symbols can be cashed in for various benefits, but the text only explains one of them right now; every non-canceled Ⓐ can be used to heal 1 strain, while every non-canceled ⓣ makes the character suffer 1 additional strain. Even if we fail our skill checks, we still make it to the top, because this is a railroad, but we're in poorer condition and we'll take a penalty going into the next check, so the GM is instructed to note down who succeeded and who failed. Encounter 2 teaches opposed checks. A Jedi holocron (which is explained in a sidebar) reveals itself to the characters and will either welcome them to the ancient temple (if at least half the players succeeded on their climb check) or be an rear end in a top hat. quote:"The climb seems to have nearly killed you, and the valley may finish the job. You are of no use; turn back. What possessed you to attempt the climb in the first place?" Anyway, now the PCs get to interrogate the Gatekeeper for a bit and then try to convince him to help. This allows the players to learn opposed checks. The basic mechanic is you figure out what the defending character's dicepool would be, flip the dice to their opposites (good dice becoming bad and vice versa), then add them to the active character's dicepool. The Gatekeeper has only a few skills: Cool, Discipline, and Knowledge. The book lists several arguments the PCs might try to convince the Gatekeeper to help them out; they're allowed to try each of them once, unless they roll a ⓓ which would represent running out of time. Each strategy lists the Gatekeeper's dicepool in the "bad dice" format. The players must also add a blue boost die if they succeeded on their climb check, or a black setback die if they failed; these dice have two blank sides and a mixture of Ⓢ and Ⓐ (or ⓕ and ⓣ) on the other four sides. They add these dice only on the first checks they make. For each strategy, only one player can make the roll.
Depending on the tactics the PCs choose, they'll have to add at least one Difficulty die and at least one Challenge die to their pools. They may need to make a couple of tries. If the PCs roll a ⓓ, this means a group of hostile NPCs have approached. Otherwise, if they succeed at one of these rolls, they secure the Gatekeeper's help for the future. Next time: combat rules! inklesspen fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 05:55
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My archive is now (to the best of my knowledge) completely caught up with all three threads, with two exceptions: at some point Evil Mastermind rebooted the TORG review and I skipped the reboot because I would like EM to tell me what to do about that (merge it with the previous one, delete the previous one, etc), and also I skipped the fanskin writeups for Monsterhearts and Apocalypse World because they seemed to require a lot of back-and-forth conversation posts to make sense. I have a few requests going forward:
I will generally aim for the archive to be no more than a week behind the thread; my software downloads new posts every hour, but I probably won't add posts into the writeups more than every other day. (I also intend to change "ongoing" writeup status to "abandoned" if they go two months without a post. Probably nobody will care, but I figured I'd mention it.) inklesspen fucked around with this message at 05:24 on Jan 5, 2016 |
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Jan 5, 2016 05:21
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I think the only question is whether or not it's possible to double-credit some reviews? There are the ones occams and I have done together (the Rifts Conversion Books 1 & 2) and I don't want to take all the credit for them. If not, we can have one credited to one of us and one to the other, perhaps? Yeah, should be possible. Right now it just lists the author of the first post as the author of the writeup; if you click through you'll see each individual post is attributed to whoever wrote it. I can just add an actual 'author' field on the writeup as a whole. The URL itself for the writeup won't change, though; people are already linking to things and I don't want to break the links.
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Jan 5, 2016 14:41
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Gerund posted:Hey inkless my last ten or so entries in my habitually delayed C:tL review, all in this thread, don't seem to be archived. Not sure why. When I click the little question mark to show only your posts in this thread, the most recent post I see from you is in July, subtitled "That which makes you just as special as everyone else here, chump." That one is in the writeup, here: http://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/gerund/changeling-the-lost/#23 So are at least the three posts before it. If you're referring to other posts, please PM me with the links to the posts or something and I'll get them in.
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Jan 6, 2016 02:13
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| # ¿ Apr 18, 2024 03:11 |
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Gerund posted:I think it might be an issue in my phone's browser then, as I see the text in the link but not the table of contents. Nah, that's an issue in my lovely CSS design; in order to keep the table of contents from spilling all the way down the page like with Mors Rattus's 221-post Ars Magica writeup, the table of contents is in a "scrollable" content block. unfortunately there's no good UX showing it's scrollable, but if you try to scroll the TOC itself on your phone, it should work. Improved page layouts would be greatly appreciated, if anyone here is good at webpage layout.
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Jan 6, 2016 02:39
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