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Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.
Why do people have these pointlessly complex dice pool mechanics when most people (including myself) cannot accurately tell you how much harder it is to get two successes with 7 dice against TN 6 vs TN 7. If the GM can't work that out then he doesn't know what he is doing when he sets the difficulty.

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Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

I mean a generalized implementation with advice on its use like Dramasystem gets in Hillfolk. As it is, if you want to use GUMSHOE for your own settings, you have to reverse-engineer it from an existing implementation AFAIK.

There is a SRD: https://pelgranepress.com/index.php/the-gumshoe-system-reference-document/

It's just a technical manual though

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Simian_Prime posted:

Keep poo poo Together.

Yves dirty secret is that his supernatural calm and contentment is an illusion; he's seen the signs (at least the part that God lets him see) and the ultimate destiny of the universe, and it all tells him that Everything is hosed and We're All Going to Die. But he holds out hope that, if he stays positive, if he remains an ocean of calm amongst other the maelstrom of the War, that maybe at least *something* will work out.

So he and his angels do what they can to maintain that calm. Reduce infighting between the Archangels. Make sure that signs of prophecy are fulfilled and that people think everything's ok, even when it's not. Power of Positive Thinking. Keep poo poo Together.

I was starting to wonder if Yves personally was god (or some aspect of god) and part of the reason for this passivity was a desire for his creations to have some free will.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.
Is this going to tell us if Valefor and Janus are the same dude? I feel like it's a lock given that one of them is literally called Janus.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Mors Rattus posted:

In Nomine's default position is that while Heaven's not perfect, Hell is much worse. The GM's guide talks about running In Nomine Backwards, which is 'Hell is the good guys,' and low-contrast In Nomine, which is 'both sides are roughly equal, morally speaking.'

And if you thought any book was going to come out and canonically say Janus and Valefor were the same person, ahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Doesn't In Nomine Satanis/Magna Veritas actually say exactly that?

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Simian_Prime posted:

Saminga's a dude who knows how to party!

Some asked earlier what people would do if they knew for sure that Heaven and Hell were real. I think if Hell was as bad as presented, and you knew damnation was going to last forever, you'd try pretty hard not to get there.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.
The other thing with Civil War alt history (and this annoys me the most) is there are lots of other endings other than the South survives! that are never explored. For example, say the compromise of 1933 was never passed so they tried it on when Jackson was President and he responded by turning the south into a post apocalyptic wasteland, which considering the temperament at hand was not even that unlikely.

Given they all end up with this bizarre white washing (the south survives then liberates the slaves for reasons!) it ends up looking like apologia.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

unseenlibrarian posted:

I just love the idea that the Hammer Dracula movies were made to cover up the attempt to re-activate actual Dracula as an asset in the seventies. At least I assume that's what Agent Cushing is a reference to. Which means that Christopher Lee may have been one of Dracula's handlers.

Given the nature of Lee's WWII service that isn't even particularly implausible

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.
Recommending that fighters don't get a better to hit bonus in 3.X has to be the ultimate in gently caress you fighters. Does he then recommend wizards not get better spells? That poo poo is demented

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Actually, he says flat out that this makes spellcasters more useful, because Bless is one of the only ways to increase your to-hit rate, and Wizard offensive spells don't need an attack roll to hit!

Does he have any justification at all for making wizards better? If not this surely demonstrates his level of awareness of the systems he plays.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.
Someone mentioned Kobal was trying to get Haagenti to redeem as a joke, is there any further expansion on that?

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Kavak posted:

That sounds like a mark against 3rd edition and onwards. I'm already crazy enough to consider checking out 2nd Edition because of Planescape and Baldur's Gate, don't make me think that's a good idea!

There are clear pros and cons. 3.5 has a much better unified mechanical framework sitting under it. It has some huge downsides: casters are way to good, the caster thing, they completely broke casters, the nerfed fighters pretty hard, they changed the experience curve to decrease the time spent in the mid game (aka the good bit) and increase the time spent at the start and the end (aka the irritating bits)

It's not really terrible - there is a good chance that if you make THACO count normally 2nd ed is a pretty solid edition. Just get a clear eyed view of what the strengths and weaknesses of it are, and go from there.

You could convert to another system though as suggested above

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

gradenko_2000 posted:

Honestly you're better off just playing old-school D&D as-is. As long as you find an elegant way to deal with THAC0 (there are several), they're very well-designed, if not necessarily very well formatted and explained.

You could play a heartbreaker - like Spears of Dawn reads great and played fine in a one shot./I have every reason to believe campaign play would work.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Black August posted:

Yeah. It lends some weight and meaning if time passes slowest/'normal' corporeally, meaning that time in the ethereal and celestial needs to be spent wisely, or create situations like that, or just cases of angelic/demonic disconnect when mortals remind them "I haven't seen you in 3 years" when it was just, say, 3 days topside.

Kronos being Yves evil twin feels forced to me - if Yves is a unique being from the higher heavens, where did Kronos come from? If he's not why does he have these weird abilities no other angel does.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

quote:

That’s pretty much how it goes. It has a lot of Wickisms built into it. It conflates player action with character action, it minimizes the character’s agency, and totally ignores the system the game is built on in favor of whatever John Wick wants to happen. All of it is there to force your characters into a situation where trying to be honorable is a bad choice and following bushido is a mistake that leads to bad outcomes. If I had to describe Play Dirty era John Wick’s GMing style in a nutshell, it would be that scene. It specifically annoys me because who cares if he’s a 38 year old samurai with experience killing? You have samurai, too, and they probably have their weapons already drawn. The man isn’t magic.

That is amazingly terrible. If that happened at the table I'd just leave never to return. What the hell?

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.
Disintegrating belts are a real thing. If you think of the belt as a chain of pockets each containing a bullet, a conventional belt the bullet gets taken out and the belt gets fed through, but in a disintegrating belt when the bullet is removed the pocket comes apart completely.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Monathin posted:

If you do this, I think Kingmaker is the one most ripe for review, considering it inspired a whole set of secondary rules and was kind of a beta test for Ultimate Campaign, which remains pretty cool.

Kingmaker is interesting because the ideas are good and the execution is poo poo.

Cthulhu Dreams fucked around with this message at 13:58 on Jun 4, 2016

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.
Reagan running Delta Prime is so terrible. In 1999? What an amazingly wasted opportunity.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Selachian posted:

I do think most of the encounters sailing north are filler of the sort that infests Pathfinder APs. At most, they establish that Captain Kargeld is an rear end in a top hat and you shouldn't feel guilty about backstabbing him (if you even would, since.

I think it's quite telling that all the APs (For 3rd, 4e and 5E) that I have tried that feel the need to shackle themselves to the XP chart have broken pacing when run as is.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

LongDarkNight posted:

Because it's part of the system and it's tradition. :v: My group tends not to mess around with side quests so we've run into trouble a few times with being under leveled by the end of the AP and struggling with encounters. For this AP I ended up doing what The Lone Badger suggested and just leveling up when appropriate based on the Act. Not tracking experience improved the flow of sessions and changed how we play D&D type games. I don't think we'll ever track experience again.

Oh yeah definitely but if it's broken literally 100% of the time across three/four editions how did it survive playtesting?

Jokes aside I actually think because most post 2e D&D games are about the transformational journey of the heros that narrative pacing is more thematic than XP tracking as well as a lot easier and should be the default recommendation in the book.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Wapole Languray posted:


Also it's hilarious seeing this thread's reaction to Kevin Crawford. Stars Without Numbers and Other Dust are rock solid, then when he wanted to make a non-western fantasy game he converted them into Spears of the Dawn, Silent Legions is basically OSR Delta Green, Scarlet Heroes is D&D but designed around super-fast solo gameplay with 2 people or a GM Oracle if you want. Then he made Godbound extrapolated from Scarlet Heroes rules. He's not some nobody, he's got a solid track record of really good games with lots of support (Stars Without Numbers has TONS of supplements) and a rock solid release and work ethic. The OSR label doesn't apply to mechanics so much as it's a compatibility layer (Just take any D&D dungeon and find-replace SWORD with LASER) and is familiar to most people who play RPG's.

I think Kevin Crawford is the best and most professional RPG author in the game today and I wish he'd do something outside of the straight up OSR real because it could be amazing. It might also suck but I'd be willing to give him money on the chance.

I'd also be fascinated to see someone else give him a shot. I'd love to see D&D 6E as designed by Crawford - and I have literally no idea why anyone would hire Mearls when you could presumably get Kevin.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Young Freud posted:

Core Earth is revealed in the Delphi Council sourcebook, which is all about Core Earth. The Three Laws for Core Earth are:

Law Of Prodigy: Starting Core Earth characters can start with the Prodigy package which gives them a tag skill of +6 (meaning they can start with a skill higher than other characters)
Law Of Hope: Characters not from Core Earth have a decreased difficulty to resist Transformation. :confused:
Law Of Glory: Core Earth characters have a +2 bonus to Persuasion when planting story seeds (which allow them to convert Realms back toward Core Earth)

These are terrible - isn't the objective of the laws to define a genre? And how is there nothing about how earth shits out probability energy?

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Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.

Glazius posted:

Ooh! Let's try and think about this like a sensible person.

The rocket weapon is the top one with the shoulder brace because rockets have recoil and lasers don't.

A rocket launcher shouldn't have much recoil - but where does the back blast go?

If there is no way to vent back blast it must fire the middle like a ballistic round which then starts a rocket motor gaffer it's been 'fired' from the 'gun' but that makes even less sense.

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