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Everyone underestimates the halfling until rosy-cheeked pastry chef Beatrice Butterbrook or whatever flips out a balisong from her apron and cuts a bitch.
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Jun 1, 2015 20:44
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Meanwhile, a good GM listens to the party's kind of stupid but also neat zipline idea -- I mean, they got all that rope and used a flying party member to make it happen! -- and tells them that they make it across just fine but their arms are probably gonna be sore as hell tomorrow, then moves on. Christ, what is it with some dudes and harmless inconsequential fun? They're going to the dungeon, guy. Either way, they'll get there. By boat or by rope doesn't matter even by your admission, so why the gently caress not?
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Jun 5, 2015 20:14
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Kai Tave posted:And if we're talking stuff that's actually published, Eberron doesn't explicitly call out venturing into dungeons for treasure and adventure and monster-killing but it does downplay to straight-out ignore Alignment and establishes a setting where someone going around killing orcs because they're orcs isn't a noble adventurer, they're a serial killer. I kind of like Pathfinder for having a few gems like this lying around too, like the huge city-state that's like 85% orcs and has a rich trade industry, or the ogre nation, or the coastal republic of civilized undead. It's just a shame that these places aren't really seen as they are: totally cool places to set a campaign. Instead I've only heard 'em talked about by players like mythical superdungeons instead of, y'know, cities full of sentient creatures living their lives.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:15
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This guy who played Chaotic Neutral dickholes in literally every game I've heard about once told me he wouldn't allow True Neutral in his game because "real people aren't True Neutral."
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Jun 21, 2015 21:55
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I really like Reynolds's stuff, personally. Maybe it's stylized and impractical, but I feel like it's talking of both sides of one's mouth to object to stodgy quadratic wizards complaining about the audacity to fight with two weapons or have a rope attached to a knife, then look cross-eyed at an artist having some fun with character design and style without regard for practicality. I would rather play Pathfinder's iconic fighter with his gold breastplate and ridiculously over-prepared tank trap of a backpack than have someone show me another Dude In Nondescript Platemail (see also the 3.5 'iconic' Fighter) or Skinny Dude In Nondescript Leather Armor, or Old Man In Robe with the expectation that it's supposed to sell me on the game or setting. I don't think intricacy is a downside just because it's difficult to preserve in repetition. Adding to that, even though I know it's a luxury for most if not all companies, having a regular artist for book covers and most official art is a really big deal in making me feel like there's a consistent visual design for the world; Roman Perez's excellent covers for Mutants & Masterminds and the fantastic nation murals for 7th Sea are two other great examples of this.
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Jun 22, 2015 21:06
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All this discussion of monsters or aliens or whatever that weaponize or mutate the general shape of a vagina make me wonder how the 2edgy audience for fighting bomb-farting toxic wombcannons would react to a horror setting where every goddamn thing in existence is some form of lethal phallus instead.
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Jul 17, 2015 17:36
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Wait, so dudes who get huffy and protective of an alignment system are mad about the idea of using Detect Good/Detect Evil in the job interview for "most powerful guy?"
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Jul 19, 2015 21:44
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The discussion of in-character versus out-of-character knowledge and the Common Sense merit(s) has passed, but I just wanted to add that making players pay a tax for playing in a fictional setting they know little about is super messed up. However, Vampire the Requiem had one good application of it: a Daeva bloodline known as the Asnam, who genuinely believed they were gods manifested on earth, and had the best clan weakness ever. If you play an Asnam, once a session, the GM is obliged to completely lie to you about the wisdom or your chance of success with a course of action. Because your character is just that fuckin' egotistical. "He seems tough. Could I take this guy?" "Definitely. Piece of cake." "Can I make it to that other rooftop?" "With a running start? Easily." "What an rear end in a top hat. I want to heckle the Prince's speech." "Oh, man. Everyone will think you're so funny for doing that."
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Aug 5, 2015 17:52
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Guys, there's already a much better World of Darkness game about how blurry the line between man and monster is. Not a joke -- Slasher is one of the best nWoD books they ever came out with. Past the gruesome aesthetic it has a lot of consideration for what makes someone "good" or "evil," with well-reasoned moral discussion and mechanics where you hold onto the decency that's left in you as best you can. It combines the modified Morality systems from Hunter and Dogs Of War (mostly just reprising them, actually) into a system where a character can replace sins with 'tells' -- rules they have to obey or compulsions they have to carry out. For example, Dexter would be an example of a lower-tier Slasher with a Morality chart that's chock full of tells but still maintains a high Morality overall. The principle theme of Slasher, if there is one, is that the only difference between a Hunter and a Slasher is often just their chosen quarry, if that. Slasher is really meant as an antagonist (and protagonist) book for Hunter the Vigil, but it's always fun to throw the vampires for a loop by seeing how they fare against someone more like Jason Voorhees or Hannibal Lecter. If anyone thinks Beast sounds kind of neat for its brief brush with moral analysis even though it's horribly flawed and hosed up, read Slasher. Seriously, it's a good book.
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Sep 10, 2015 10:11
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Yeah, Pathfinder doesn't really fix the balance issues as much as they need to be. Seems to at least put some effort in to make martials marginally less goddamn boring, though. See below: 
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Sep 14, 2015 20:51
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Esser-Z posted:EDIT: Elbent, that's basically just BIGGER NUMBERS, rather than anything more to DO, sadly. Core PF isn't much better than Core 3.5. Oh, totally agreed. It is literally just "I care less about being hit and am better at hitting others" and the class is still "I hit and am often hit" while other classes get to have fun and mechanics, I just wanted to give an example of the lip service paid.
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Sep 14, 2015 20:58
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Dumb Plebian Shitfarmers now have broader shovels, bigger buckets Omniscient Flying God-Kings must now manually aim Greater Laser Apocalypse to negate save for half balance achieved
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Sep 14, 2015 21:04
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From what I know about 7th Sea, John Wick wasn't even that big of a fan of the setting to begin with. The way I heard it, Wick pretty much just wanted Vodacce: The Roleplaying Game for maximum intrigue and betrayal and such (which he later semi-attained with Houses of the Blooded) and the rest of Theah sort of grew around that as a setting. In the same way the Scorpion were his baby in Rokugan, Vodacce was his baby in Theah, and he didn't really care a whole heck of a lot about the rest, what with their Heroes and honesty and ... good people.
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Sep 23, 2015 05:14
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Playing up to player's expectations can be super fun. I ran a Vampire game where the characters were discussing mysterious events, and got the idea in their heads that two otherwise unrelated vampires who really didn't even like each other were orchestrating some grand and sinister plot together. I mean, it wasn't true in my notes, but it sure as poo poo became true because this conspiracy they made up sounded rad.
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Oct 2, 2015 07:58
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For context re: gear porn, this is just the pistol section of Spycraft 2.0 -- the equipment chapter is about 120 pages.     Each also has a description blurb later in the chapter.
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Oct 20, 2015 08:11
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Lurks With Wolves posted:So, Fantasy Craft does have the kind of meaningfully differentiated giant table of weapons people are talking about in this thread, with daggers and dirks and straight razors all having unique reasons to be used and with knife-fighters playing meaningfully different from axe wielders and all of that. But Fantasy Craft is also a giant mess of interconnected subsystems that would explode into a million pieces if Crafty Games didn't spend a ton of time balancing it, and I don't see anyone getting that level of differentation without that mechanical depth. In the first printing of FantasyCraft there were so many balance issues that the second print came out almost immediately. One of the most glaring was their decision to make any bleeding-focused weapon (straight-razors, whips, scourges) deal stress damage, which meant if you had a really nice meal or got laid the night before a fight -- which gives you flat DR against stress damage -- you could be completely immune to them, or any spell or effect that made you bleed. The first printing of FantasyCraft had an errata document verging on 40 pages. Crafty Games does not spend a "ton of time" balancing anything.
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Oct 21, 2015 05:07
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Yeah, 7th Sea had pretty much the same approach as Warhammer. In 7th Sea there was Fencing, and there was Heavy Weapon. In Warhammer there's Hand Weapon, and Great Weapon. Any further granularity is entirely fluff. In 7th Sea, some schools specified that you had to be using X weapon -- say, a smallsword as opposed to the rapier -- but X weapon wasn't actually statistically different at all. A saber, broadsword, harpoon, and axe were all Heavy Weapon. That covered about 80% of schools, the other 20% having niche weapons like stilettos and panzerhands. The schools were only real distinguishing features between weapons. My personal favorite was a Montaigne (French) school that was fighting with a rapier in one hand and a stool, ladder, club, cask, or other improvised piece of junk in the other.
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Oct 21, 2015 05:31
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FoolsGambit posted:The best schools were the one where you use two Panzerhands to suplex dudes and the one where you could throw any axe. The most ludicrous funny thing was if that if you combined both Panzerhand schools (which did take a pretty ludicrous amount of experience points) you could grab the sword of anyone who attacked you instead of parrying and then immediately snap it in your armored hand like a pretzel stick. There was absolutely no defense against this whatsoever, the difficulty was flat and not adjusted by your opponent's skill, and could even be done to the game's equivalent of mithril (at a higher but still totally doable difficulty).
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Oct 21, 2015 07:02
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