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Rand Brittain posted:Modrons have always struck me as a good example of how D&D's take on law versus chaos is messed up. Modrons are effectively chaotic outsiders—they do random things for inexplicable reasons and refuse to explain themselves or behave like good neighbors. The only major difference between them and slaad, alignment-wise, is that modrons have a clockwork theme and insist that there's a logic to what they do. It kind of depends on DM. Most of the time I've seen modrons run like Apple 2s. Given identical stimuli two properly functioning modrons will always react the same, but the thing is that you don't necessarily know what all their stimuli are. If I remember correctly the only adventure they featured prominently in (The Great Modron March) the whole point was to figure out why they were acting weird. The difference is slaad really don't have reasons for what they do and as a consequence they are really hard to be made compelling. Then again this excuse making could just be me really liking nordom in Planescape Torment.
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Jan 11, 2014 07:07
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| # ¿ Apr 26, 2024 11:45 |
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Slumbering Tsar (technically pathfinder but started development in 3.5) and Rappan Athuk are both about as big. I haven't played either of them but they seem to have a lot of fans.
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Feb 22, 2014 03:51
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He wrote a terrible tabletop RPG? theironjef you know what must be done.
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Apr 17, 2014 04:31
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I just got done reading a LotFP adventure called Death Frost Doom. Wow is it full of bullshit. It has to be the most stupid screw the players over adventure path that I've seen in a long long time. I may have to post a full review here once I get some sleep.
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Apr 20, 2014 06:39
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Dang you're right. Guess I should refrain from posting before checking the wiki.
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Apr 20, 2014 15:07
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Okay I read through the Death Frost Doom review and Rulesbook Heavily did a good job but left out the second worst part of the adventure(nothing is as bad as the plant thing). In the high priest's room there is a pit that is apparently the nostril of a sleeping giant. If the party obstructs or travels down the pit this wakes up the giant who gets up destroying the entire mountain, killing everyone inside or on it no save. Yup a literal rocks fall everyone dies "trap" with zero warning or relevance to the adventure. The giant is never explained or elaborated on. In fact given the semi-explained giant in "Better than any Man" I think mysterious buried giants may be something Raggi has a fixation on. Another thing that has to do with Better than Any Man. Apparently the goblin hill section with the insect shrine was originally a separate adventure from the witch controlled town. It was stapled onto the actually interesting adventure to make a deadline.
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Apr 20, 2014 20:14
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I'd going to also go with Ancient Enemies. That way on the off chance that they actually get another metaplot book out you'll have two to do back to back. Also speaking of lost posts, what caused one of the Carcossa posts to get eaten?
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May 7, 2014 15:43
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Besides Death Frost Doom, and Carcossa sort of, have any of the other LotFP supplements been reviewed? I was gifted a large number of them and wanted to do something with them before burning the physical ones and deleting the digital ones.
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May 7, 2014 20:18
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Is it that good or that bad?
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May 7, 2014 20:31
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Kurieg posted:It wasn't a 3rd party book. This is literally the best sort of thing D&D does.
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May 23, 2014 00:41
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Those two books gave us six classes. Two were perfectly balanced. Two were kind of janky but their developers issued unofficial errata that fixed them. Then two were unusable pieces of poo poo. That's a much better track record than 3.5 core.
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May 23, 2014 02:16
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Halloween Jack posted:What I mainly remember from Binders is that the basic premise is pretty cool. It seemed kinda clunky in play (while the wizard is memorizing and the cleric is praying, the binder is doing a bunch of little rituals that he hopefully has the components for and making a bunch of checks). But the best thing is that a lot of vestiges were entities from D&D lore who weren't quite gods but were more than just NPCs or monsters. Having played one they actually work pretty well, and are right about the powerlevel where the d20 system can actually work. So you have a party of people playing bards, binders, and tome of battle characters everything works out pretty well. Though playing in such a powerlevel means having practically no iconic D&D classes, because when the main devs (SKR and Skip Williams in particular) focus on something they turn it to poo poo.
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May 25, 2014 00:15
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A booby prize your GM gives you instead of useful treasure.
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Jul 24, 2014 17:27
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OD&D was pretty good at emulating playing in Dying Earth. I mean that's a really narrow genre, but it does emulate it well.
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Jul 25, 2014 00:24
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Halloween Jack posted:Uh, er, hm. I wouldn't say that. Really? It seemed to have a similar murderhobo and random magic killing you for no reason. Unless I'm misremembering how the Dying Earth stories actually ran. It's been a long time since I read any of them. So if I'm completely misrepresenting them my bad.
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Jul 25, 2014 06:02
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Thanks for that rather thorough explanation.
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Jul 27, 2014 21:54
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Halloween Jack posted:Bear in mind that there are old-schoolers who would tell you that I'm an idiot and that they had many thoroughly Vancian adventures with OD&D. They will likely, in the same breath, tell you that they don't use the rules that often. I like the ideas present in the Rules Cyclopedia enough but a lot of the rules are dumb. Specifically the weapon masteries and strongholds I tend to port into other fantasy oriented games when possible.
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Jul 28, 2014 21:48
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Impermanent posted:This isn't an indictment of your personal preferences, but your title is literally from a work of simulated angst. It's also possible that it has less to do with masculine vs feminine fantasies and more why people game in the first place. Angsting through teen melodrama is something a lot of people did in real-life and found unpleasant. Also at its heart Vampire was mainly a power fantasy which doesn't really have much to do with Monster Hearts other than genre set pieces.
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Aug 20, 2014 22:15
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Kai Tave posted:Monsterhearts, by default, is a game about high school students. I'd say if people can't figure out "what's my motivation?" as a supernaturally empowered high school student that they aren't trying hard enough. What do high school students usually want? To be popular, to be accepted, to be respected, to be taken seriously, to get revenge, to impress someone, to score, etc. I think most people who dislike Monsterhearts do because it isn't murderhoboing "like most RPGs" as you claim. That also really isn't the source of people not getting the motivations. After all Call of Cthulhu is a fairly popular game and in it the investigators have no reason to actually go out investigating. As soon as the supernatural horror stuff starts they should just book it back home and call the cops. I think one of the biggest disconnects is that Monsterhearts demands that you be invested in your character from the get go for it to really function, as plots are primarily player driven and seem to be helped by spur of the moment emotional decisions. This is unfortunately at odds with how a lot of people play RPGs, only gradually becoming invested in the story and characters through the experience of several sessions. For instance you might not care if Bork the Barbarian dies in the first session of D&D because you haven't really done much with him, but would care if he died after a three month campaign. Monsterhearts is asking you to care right away and that takes a different frame of mind or less you end up with no motivation.
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Aug 22, 2014 19:44
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Kai Tave posted:I don't really think this is the case though, at least not to the degree you're describing it. Bork the Barbarian doesn't need to be a rich deep character for the player to say "Bork wants to slay powerful monsters and get rich, bam, motivation." Likewise you don't need extensive buy-in with a Monsterhearts character. "Molly wants to be the most popular person in school no matter who she has to step on to do it." That's all you really need to get the ball rolling. The thing is that I don't find the interpersonal relationships of high schoolers interesting in and of itself. If I care about an individual character I can get invested in their tribulations and relationships regardless of context, but out of the gate it lacks a hook for me. edit: I realize that this comes off as me just trying to justify my own disinterest in Monsterhearts, and that isn't really helpful to the continuing conversation. The point buried there is that for nerd things like Buffy the hook is already there as character that people latched onto first and then started caring about the melodrama because they cared about the melodrama. Whereas Monsterhearts needs you to care about the relationship for their own sake or become super invested at character generation. Though this is a bit projecting as I never actually watched Buffy. Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Aug 22, 2014 |
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Aug 22, 2014 21:45
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As SC's target audience, I'd say it's pretty good. We played it mostly as the A Team though. Every missions somehow involved us using a tank.
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Sep 26, 2014 13:37
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I'm guessing that it has more to do with Nexus being something they're selling from another company thus making their margins smaller.
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Oct 2, 2014 22:38
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Mono class wizard of equal level above 5.
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Oct 7, 2014 18:47
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I was fairly certain that Rogue Trader characters included rules for orks, kroot, and eldar. Though if I were to guess on reasoning it's just what FFG thinks will sell most based on player base from the table top game.
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Oct 9, 2014 17:38
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FFG in general is much better at handling Warhamms than GW both from a design persepctive and for their ability to actually make the game fun. I personally like super crunchy systems and enjoy that there are a boatton of options, but you are entirely right that it really doesn't gel at all with the life is cheap combat.
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Oct 9, 2014 20:47
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Is the parent supposed to be a joke skin? It looks pretty entertaining but also kinda against the spirit of the game. By taking it you're changing several core assumptions, like someone insisting on playing Old Man Henderson in a Call of Cthulhu game. That being said I haven't played MH outside of a one-shot, so I may be mistaken.
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Oct 19, 2014 17:27
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There is technically a way to make truenamer work. It requires use of item familiar, a feat that is otherwise so broken as to receive a blanket ban at all decent tables, and it comes from Unearthed Arcana a book of completely optional rules that are assumed to not be allowed for us unless specified by the DM. Item familiar does a lot of things but the part important to truenamers is that is lets them essentially double their truenaming ranks, but these bonus ranks come at a 3 to 1 price exchange with real skill points so truenamers have to spend 4 skill ranks per level on their class skill to function with while using one of the most overpowered feats in the game. Even this doesn't really make them good, just passable and able to hit an enemy more than once with a given utterance.
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Nov 6, 2014 05:05
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theironjef posted:It's on the recent request list along with the regular suspects you'd expect. Commenting listeners want FATAL, they want Bliss Stage, they want various flavors of D&D, Rifts, and GURPS. Also a surprising amount of requests for Twilight Imperium, which I'm sure we'll honor at some point. Well for what it's worth I really want you to review Bliss Stage and I know you'll hate it.
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Dec 22, 2014 20:19
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Speaking of our terrible sex princess rpgs. Someone should really go over everything wrong with the Lamentations fo the Flame Princess adventure NSFW. If no one else is interested I can work on some posts, but I'm not sure how funny they'll be.
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Dec 31, 2014 19:05
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Like most "fightery" wizards I'm pretty sure they could ignore it.
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Jan 1, 2015 17:50
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The only good thing to come out of the Prism Pentad series was it opening the way for Defilers and Preservers to add new power sources for wizards. They offered a sort of sidestep from the black and white defilers and preservers dichotomy, but almost always came with a cost to the wizard in quest.
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Jan 2, 2015 21:17
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Personally I think the swear filter enhances the humor of Purple's posts.
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Jan 10, 2015 23:45
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Well you can't really grow out of having a dead mom. You can deal with it and all but Marche did still murder Newt's new mother and Cid's new wife. She was pretending to be the old mom but she was an independent living being as well. You also in the process free five imprisoned beings that all bear heavy reassembles to lucavi from the original Tactics or Ex-death. These were the literal demons who caused several wars to revive their leader.
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Jan 11, 2015 06:23
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's nothing. I know it wasn't this way, but it would have been cool if something like that caused the cyber to become super advanced biotech prosthetic instead. In fact having strangely evolved biotech dinosaur equipment would have been a cool way to spice up the Living Land.
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Jan 12, 2015 17:26
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To be fair to warstomp daze is a really powerful condition, mainly due to bypassing the immunities to status effects creatures have. For one reason or another one of the unwritten rules of d20 is that nothing has immunity to daze. Undead, plant, ooze, construct, all can be dazed despite immunity to all similar status effects like stun. For some reason this is never communicated in any formal way though. As a result daze is valued super highly because it bypasses all the blanket immunities possessed by a startling number creatures. Edit: Come to think of it this would be a good feat for a paladin, if the game hadn't banned that class. Terrible Opinions fucked around with this message at 14:26 on Jan 13, 2015 |
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Jan 13, 2015 14:13
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Put me down for Living Land.
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Jan 13, 2015 23:07
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There are also archetypes from Pathfinder. Basically any solution that isn't prestige classes, is better than prestige classes.
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Jan 25, 2015 10:44
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Polaris is great, people who won't stop talking about how great Polaris is are terrible.
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Feb 5, 2015 23:37
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For the 3.5 framework you also have swordsages from the best book ever, and various flavors of warder, stalker, and warlord from the Path of War book.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:19
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I think adaptive style was put in as a last minute patch between design changes when they realized how terrible the swordsage was without it. Anytime I ran a game pre-Path of War I just gave it to them for free. Though now I generally prefer the Path of War classes with their more dynamic recharge mechanics.
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Feb 25, 2015 17:39
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