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Torg's "don't get too attached to your character concept" mindset reminds me of Monte Cook's The Strange, where two-thirds of your character's descriptors can completely change when they travel from one world to another. If your mystical dino-shaman gets turned into a tommy-gun-toting pulp adventurer in Torg, is that just what the game expects or do you have a chance to get back to the original concept at some point?
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Jan 6, 2015 17:18
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theironjef posted:We got a tweet like "I couldn't disagree more with their review of Stormbringer." then "Do you guys like ANY games?" then finally "Hey followers, is there a GOOD podcast that reviews the GOOD things about old roleplaying games because the NEGATIVITY of systemmastery is something I don't need in my life." I'm so confused by this. One of the things that always strikes me about System Mastery is how good a time you guys seem to have with it, even when you've clearly gone through two weeks of torment to figure out whatever the hell they're talking about in something like Skyrealms of Jorune or Prime Directive. You also aren't shy about talking about games you enjoy and why you enjoy them. Even tropes like Jef's fervent hatred of Advantage/Disadvantage systems have been offset by the occasional game that does them reasonably well. It's like getting mad at any of the dozens of youtubers who make reviews of bad movies. They review bad movies, so they don't like them. System Mastery focuses on bad/old games, so you generally don't like them. It's not rocket science.
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Mar 27, 2015 07:16
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Tasoth posted:If we're going to talk about fantasy literature that replicates D&D wizards, I'm surprised no one brought up the Malazan novels or the Three Seas novels. Both feature wizards as artillery and both have ways of dealing with it. Malazan magic has always struck me as something that would translate really well into a both mechanically sound and narratively interesting system. The high end of magical power is still present in that setting, but the Malazan world abounds with martial characters at that same ascended level who are by no means outclassed by a fireball or two. Low to mid-level magic doesn't just rock all over mundane solutions since unveiling a warren pretty much flat-out reveals your presence to every mage in the surrounding area, so you're not as likely to replace the rogue with a few knocks when the big bad warlock you're supposed to be sneaking up on can tell you're dicking around with his locked doors from a block away. The fact that even gods in Malazan can get dropped by a crossbow to the temple helps to even out the whole power structure in my mind, too, but you'd need to use a less D&D framework to make that feel right. Maybe FATE? 
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Apr 27, 2015 04:45
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I'm not sure how many Louises Porter Jr. there are, but I may have a mutual Facebook friend with the world-famous author of Haven: City of Violence. (this friend is a freelance author for various RPG supplements, most memorably having worked on some sourcebooks for the Babylon 5 RPG from Mongoose). Fake Edit: While writing this post I wandered down the LPJ rabbit hole and found out that Louis Porter Jr. Design is the company behind Neoexodus, a fairly popular series of Pathfinder supplements that I have skimmed but never read. The official site for Neoexodus includes a quote from LPJ that calls the line his 'fantasy loveletter to Babylon 5.' Conspiracy!  Unfortunately the links to the Haven pages on his site only lead to some custom 404 not found screens  Jon and Jef, has there been any follow-up from LPJ being linked to System Mastery a while back? I'm very curious as to what he thinks of his older work.
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Jun 14, 2015 04:45
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I'm not super plugged-in to the overall RPG community, this thread and listening to System Mastery being about the extent of my online RPG involvement, but from the 5e campaign I've been running I really don't get where the spellcaster supremacy resentment comes from. We've been running 3rd- to 5th-level adventures and I have yet to see a spellcaster totally chump the melee characters. I'm sure that will break down at higher levels, but I've yet to play a game that used linear advancement where high-level play wasn't off-kilter. While the base rulebook doesn't include Warlords or Avengers, the 5e system's apparent simplicity has led to a pretty enormous amount of homebrew classes that fit the vacant slots from 4e very nicely. I loved 4e and had an excellent time with it, but creating a whole new class always felt daunting to me since the sheer number of powers that had to be created and their CCG level of mechanical functionality felt like an awful lot of work. 5e, to me, is less of a big meaty set of rules that work really well like 4th and more of a D&D toolbox. It's easy to start with, easy to modify, and since the concept of the DM deciding whether to use optional rules or not is presented very clearly in the PHB it eases new players into the idea of RAW being a jumping off point rather than a holy canon.
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Jun 26, 2015 17:48
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I had a fun time reading everybody's explanation of caster supremacy, something that I'm thoroughly familiar with in 3rd, 3.5, and Pathfinder (not sarcasm, I really did enjoy the step-by-step, thorough analysis and elucidation of the concept!). My focus was on the constant cries of "Caster Supremacy Returns! All Hope Lost!" in regards to 5th edition. From what I've seen and read, the spells seem well-balanced to their level of play. For example, the Sleep spell in 5e will often make a big difference in a low-level encounter but won't simply wipe it. There are certainly still times where a cleverly-used or unexpected spell can turn an adventure on its head. That being said, I've been in plenty of non-D&D games where a player's bizarre decision changed the course of a game despite their complete lack of narrative-defying powers. This isn't an effort to say that my anecdotal experience renders any dissenting opinion moot, I just think that the response to casters having access to spells in 5th edition in a manners similar to 3rd and previous editions has been overblown.gradenko_2000 posted:
When I was a little kid learning about dungeons and dragons, I wanted to play a dragon. Dragonborn are pretty cool, but they're not dragons. Using 4e, if I wanted to design a class that was "Dragon" rather than "dragon-inspired warrior" or "dragon dude with a breath weapon and wings" I would have to create all of the powers from the ground up, providing options at every odd-numbered level for encounter and daily powers (not to mention Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies). I did that in 5th edition and it felt much easier. You'd be justified in saying that I could have just played a dragonborn fighter and reskinned everything, but this has felt more right to me. gradenko_2000 posted:
The game works fine RAW. It's simple, easy for a new player to learn, and the class progression from levels one through three introduces new abilities at a good pace for learning how the class and game work. A sidebar saying "this game is yours, play your game how you want to play it" is present in lots of rulebooks, but 5e really goes above and beyond to say "No, really, D&D takes many forms and you're encouraged to feel out how the game works best for you." I think that's great. They made RAW in the PHB in a way they felt would make the game fun and accessible, and I think that kids who start with this edition are well- positioned to be less grognardy than many of their 3rd-edition forebears since they will have been told, from the get-go, that they can make their games play like they want them to play.
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Jun 28, 2015 23:41
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Lurks With Wolves posted:5e still has the fundamental problem with caster supremacy: spellcasters get narrative control and noncasters get none. At level one, a fighter can roll to attack things and roll skill checks. At level one, a wizard can roll to attack things, roll skill checks, and three times per day say "these five goblins are asleep now" or "this person likes me" or "I do 4d4 damage to this orc automatically". That may be my big point of confusion- when I hear "narrative control" I hear "control over the story." These examples don't really sound like something that a spellcaster could do that a non-caster absolutely could not do. A charismatic rogue can roll to influence someone with a skill check, and in 5e the spells simply give a wizard an advantage on that check- the rogue will have a more steady bonus to every single attempt they make at influencing, intimidating, and deceiving every NPC they happen to meet, while the mage will expend resources to even make the attempt. At the end of the day they can both make friends, they can both turn enemies into allies or scare off weak-willed opponents. It's entirely possible that I'm grasping at straws to justify my own good experience with the game after the fact, but I think that the way that individual spells work in 5e is well-balanced and that the game provides a good framework. The damage spells aren't as effortlessly catastrophic as 3rd edition, and a lot of the metamagic and feat-based insanity that you could get up to back then with a finely-crafted array of abilities is gone. The game even encourages you to have character traits and personality flaws right on the front of your sheet to remind you that you're roleplaying a person rather than a set of spells. theironjef posted:Unless 5th level counts as higher levels, since that's when the Wizard gets Leomund's Tiny Hut and starts the "Every rest is a long one" game. Unless you're running something like The World's Biggest Dungeon or a Castle Greyhawk kind of thing, I'd think that if you stopped for a full eight hours between encounters you'd probably fail at whatever objective you're trying to achieve Sage: A horde of orcs has attacked our city and stolen off with the count's only heir! Please save him before they torture him to death! Adventurers: We'll do it, but only if we can get a good night's sleep between every group of orcs we run into on the way there. Also, a bulette or any other burrowing monster could totally get in there, so it'd be a pretty dangerous thing to rely on if you're underground in a 5th-level dungeon.
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Jun 29, 2015 04:15
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theironjef posted:Also it's a sphere, not a hemisphere. My book says "dome," sir, and this is the hill I will die on.  Kai Tave posted:At any rate, this is probably better served being hashed out in the actual Next thread. An excellent point. Time to head back through the wiki, read a Rifts supplement review, and remind myself what F&F is all about! 
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Jun 29, 2015 05:50
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Kurieg posted:Most of Ikd20's weirdness can be backtraced to trying to bolt the iron kingdom's mythology onto the d20 spellcasting system. I can imagine them getting to the magic item creation section, remembering the that orgoth existed and what that means for magic items, then throwing up their hands and going off to get shitfaced. I remember a lot of odd workarounds in that system to make it line up with what they'd written in the Warmachine sourcebooks. TONS of prestige classes to reflect pretty integral parts of the overall storyline (with all of the pitfalls of 3rd edition prestige classes), as well as some extremely weird healing rules to explain why people don't get healed all the time in the tabletop game. Nessus, I hope you'll be able to take a crack at them in the thread before selling them off (a quick look on ebay makes it look like they're kind of rare, though the copies that I can find are only priced prohibitively if they're coming from France). There's doubtless a goldmine of F&F material in any one of those books!
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Jun 29, 2015 06:05
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theironjef posted:The spell is in the game specifically and exclusively for the purpose of letting casters take long rests in dangerous areas. There's no other reason you'd need a force bubble that lasts as long as you sleep and houses your party. That means that the spell forces something I talk about a lot, the game of DM/Player Chicken. "Are you going to be an rear end in a top hat, DM? Or do I get to use the spell I spent resources on for its intended purpose?" There shouldn't be stuff in the game that puts players and DMs in that sort of adversarial position. There's just no need for it. My first thought on reading that spell is "We're going out into the woods. It sure would be great if we could bring a big house with us to live in each night so that a bear doesn't just wander into our campsite." The way that it's being talked about, though, sounds like players are going to just drop it in the middle of an adventure to the Plane of Uncalled-For Touches and assume their safety every time, time after time, and call the DM a dick for not going along with their own assumptions about what a single 3rd-level spell can accomplish. The spell has a use outside of abuse, and I think that it's incorrect to assume the extremely metagame usage of 'long rest every time' is the one intended by design. I'm a big System Mastery Fan and never thought I'd be arguing with you about Leomund's Tiny Hut, so I'm going to do my best to stop. I am going to say, though, that the spell itself isn't what puts DMs and players in an adversarial position- a player who wants to buck the intent of the rules (that short rests exist every couple of encounters to get back encounter-based abilities, and long rests exist to demarcate the end of an adventuring 'day') so they can get everything back between every encounter, has chosen to step outside of the game being played and attempt to force the table to play the game they envision. If the rest of the players agree that the pace should be changed and that the power level should be adjusted, then all of them should expect and accept that the DM will adjust the challenges they face to be in line with their enhanced abilities. I'm not talking about some kind of '90s-era player punishment, but a necessary shift in the NPC power dynamic to keep things interesting. If that's unacceptable to the players or the DM, then a different game system would be the answer. Every game has its limitations, and exists only as itself. Fake edit: Apparently I put way too much time into these posts, as there have been a half-dozen since I started typing this one
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Jun 29, 2015 06:57
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fool_of_sound posted:...5e makes it perfectly clear in the DMG that parties are supposed to go 2-4 encounters between Long Rests; it is part of the game design.If players are bullying their GM into allowing them to run roughshod over that design, that's their own fault. This is what I was trying to get at, only much more succinctly!
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Jun 29, 2015 06:59
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theironjef posted:It's all good. We aren't actually experts or anything, just players that are unusually loud about cheese. Plus this isn't an argument, it's a spirited discussion, especially after being so nice to my dumb show! I'm probably just over-sensitive, since I've been GMing all weekend and would be super upset if one my players was actually mad at me. To be honest I'd probably be a-ok with one or two Rope Tricks if somebody sprang it on me at the table, but if it was throwing off the flow of the game I'd have a grown-up talk with the player about what we were looking for in the game long before I brought out phase spiders or little-known zoological 'force field phobia' held by all woodland creatures. No hesitation on sending bullettes under the bottom of the dome, but that's more due to my love for those goofy landsharks than for any other reason 
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Jun 29, 2015 07:42
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That being said, preventing harmless encounters is way below the purview of 3rd level spells. It's practically cosmetic at that point. Honestly I'd say that the wizard just saying "Hey guys, I'll draw a circle to ward the campsite against bears" is the sort of cool character touch that the party should be throwing around without investing any resources of any kind. Like if the ranger said "Hey guys, I'll ward the campsite against predators by scattering this wolf urine I brought along."
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theironjef posted:Also Bullettes are rad. I always thought the game needed slightly smaller ones for hunter companions or exotic mounts. The Elemental Evil book for 5e let me down when it introduced bullette riders, then didn't include them as a player option. I'll write it up for somebody in a heartbeat if they want to play it, but it makes me wonder what I'm paying WotC for 
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Jun 29, 2015 07:57
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Green Intern posted:Harry Potter is a jock masquerading as a nerd. Holy poo poo this is as true as anything has ever been. Sure, there's some tragic backstory, but within the actual plot of the novels he's got super powers, natural talent, and about a million characters with their own super powers watching out for him every second of every day. His whole air of vulnerability is just an elaborate plot constructed by his various benefactors so that he can learn humility and be even more special.
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Jul 2, 2015 06:20
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theironjef posted:At the risk of overt self-promotion Another vote for this!
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Sep 13, 2015 19:55
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I enjoyed reading the early parts of that article where the author managed to track down a couple of the surviving writers, but they lost me when they started actually reviewing the book. It's hard to imagine a real person in the 21st century looking at that system, looking at every other game available, and thinking to themselves that there is anything worth saving in the text. One of my favorite parts of the System Mastery review was the laborious description of the modifiers associated with various actions. The copy I once read from my dad's bookshelf included letters to indicate modifiers' identities (A.Caster's star sign modifier, B.Target's star sign modifier, C.The current astrological season, etc.) and I vaguely remember a couple of examples where they hit modifier Z and had to start using double letters, up to modifier double-K. That was the point at which even RPG neophyte 14-year-old Just Dan had to stop and realize that the game was not actually playable without heavy modification and preparation. Looking back, it was an important turning point in my gaming experience. Reading FW at a young age helped keep me off of gateway heartbreakers like Rifts, though unfortunately it wasn't quite enough to save me from a dalliance with HERO system...
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Sep 22, 2015 05:04
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Night10194 posted:Oh god. I've both run and played an Aberrant d20 campaign. You are in for SOME poo poo. Really looking forward to this one too! I ran an Aberrant game using the original WoD/Exalted-derived system and there were some pretty serious issues. My players wanted to be cool four-color heroes who smashed stuff and saved the day, when the game seemed better suited towards a relationship-focused structure more akin to the drama of modern comics. That aspect isn't the game's fault, but for our beat-em-up adventures it had the same problem I've run into with most superhero games: the sheer variety of powers makes it next to impossible for a points system to properly balance things like super-strength and entropy-mastery against each other.
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Oct 15, 2015 01:16
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