|
Kurieg posted:Yeah, it's a super archaic word since fortune telling via cards is a big loving deal in the game. The hilarious bit is that Sortilege was the root word that turned into Sorcery, which is one of the other skills you can get. Yeah, I raised an eyebrow at Sorcery and Sortilege being separate stats. So, the physical pool basically breaks down to Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution, while the mental pool is Intelligence, Charisma, Wisdom, and some kind of magical aptitude? ("Sortilege" is one of those Gygaxian words you sometimes stumble over in extruded swords-n-sorcery product. Like "dweomer" and "thew.")
|
#
¿
Feb 20, 2017 21:14
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 19:31 |
|
|
AmiYumi posted:Thank you for this phrase, I'll be using it forever. Can't claim originality. The phrase has been floating around the 'net since at least 1999. The Sin of Onan posted:Gym culture and body sculpting died out in Late Antiquity and was only revived relatively recently, so it's actually pretty probable that a lot of the medieval cliches like knights and Vikings would have been a bit flabby over their (probably considerable) muscle. They wouldn't have been, like, hugely chunky - it wasn't an age in which you could get very fat, unless you were very rich - but if you see a modern depiction of medieval warriors as toned dudes with excellent muscle definition, it's probably wrong. Your image of beer gut dudes may not be too far off the mark, is what I'm saying. I think I've mentioned this before, but Orson Scott Card's Enchantment has a protagonist who's a super-fit marathon runner and who travels back to medieval times ... where he's dismissed as a useless wimp, because back then Real Men were massively muscular and fat.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 21, 2017 02:09
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:Jesus, finally I find someone who gets the Dying Earth. Does Sandman: Map of Halaal count? If we ever learned what the hell was going on, at least...
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2017 00:22
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Where do I get an 18-sided die Been done.  https://www.shapeways.com/product/6RZ7GGKNS/18-sided-die-large
|
|
#
¿
Apr 6, 2017 17:02
|
|
|
Covok posted:The writer of these article likely cannot lift more than 20 pounds and doesn't know how to pronounce the world "gym." 
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2017 20:45
|
|
|
Halloween Jack posted:They don't breathe ice cream? No, that's Todd the Candy Dragon.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 18, 2017 21:12
|
|
|
I find Talislanta pretty accessible compared to, say, Jorune or Tekumel. (It may help that I'm a big Jack Vance fan anyway.)
|
|
#
¿
Apr 26, 2017 05:32
|
|
|
Leraika posted:So I'm still not seeing where this thing isn't just My Little Pony with scales. Especially since it sounds as if you have to track which gems are yours and which you've gotten from other people.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 22, 2017 02:05
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:Is there a TRPG that "correctly" models suppressing fire to the point where fire-and-maneuver tactics is possible/the correct approach? Spycraft has a Suppressive Fire action but it's more for making it difficult for the enemy to move through a particular area than interfering with his/her attacks. Hostile V posted:WAVE ONE That's a Bizarro, dude.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 31, 2017 01:01
|
|
|
Kavak posted:And if she's an rear end in a top hat than that'd be the Rich Kitsch Lich Witch Bitch Mitch Ditch Witch Hitch Pitch! And if I secretly informed the authorities about all this, I'd be a Rich Kitsch Lich Witch Bitch Mitch Ditch Witch Hitch Pitch snitch.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2017 01:37
|
|
|
rumble in the bunghole posted:I'm listening MegaDumbCast, the podcast about Ninjas and Superspies someone shared earlier, and while it could really do with a cohost, I'm laughing hard about cyber blackface so it's doing something right. Wow. I'd totally forgotten that particular gadget from N&S.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2017 19:58
|
|
|
Inescapable Duck posted:Not like it doesn't happen in real life. See also: Zapp Brannigan.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2017 14:08
|
|
|
Robindaybird posted:so the Law of Savagery turns every woman into Raquel Welch from 1 Million years BC And every man into Doc Savage, presumably.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 7, 2017 02:17
|
|
|
Strange Matter posted:Has there been a Fatal and Friends on Invisible Sun? I feel like I've seen one and just laughed at how important and beloved Monte Cooke thinks he is. He's like the American McGee of tabletop games. It's not out yet -- scheduled for next spring.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 19, 2017 15:15
|
|
|
rumble in the bunghole posted:That starfinder operative's Schtick would be wayyyyy better set up in the same structure as spells. It's not unexpected they didn't do that but it's such an obvious way to represent a known ability you have a limited amount of that requires prep time and triggers reliably. It's an easy non-fantasy wizard alternative. But that might suggest that it's a good idea to give the other classes special abilities of the same general power level as spells, arranged in some sort of universal structure. And that would just be crazy.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 1, 2017 03:09
|
|
|
I actually liked the idea of weapons leveling up in Starfinger because when high level monsters have hundreds of HP, it's silly to be swinging the same 1d8 longsword at level 20 that you were at level 1. But this is probably the dumbest way they could have gone about solving the problem.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2017 15:01
|
|
|
Also, reading those weapons tables more closely, they look oddly lopsided. Most of them look like you'll only upgrade your gear once or twice at lower levels, and then you pass level 13 and you'll be buying upgrades every two or three levels. Most people don't even play up that far, and if you're going to bother creating all those weapons and trying to make them look and sound cool, what's the point of restricting them to high-level characters only?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2017 15:41
|
|
|
Red Metal posted:The traditional weapon of the vesk, the doshko is composed of one to four triangular blades arranged in a row and attached to a long haft. Ideal for devastating overhand blows and catching and parrying enemy weapons, its use is a highly respected art form in traditional vesk society, but it also sees use by creatures of other races as a variant axe. Traditionally, doshkos are made of steel, but in recent decades they have been crafted using advanced metallurgic techniques and even quantum technology to improve the stabbing edges. So how many players who wield a doshko are going to yield to the temptation to name it Eliza?
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2017 17:16
|
|
|
wiegieman posted:What is with these people, though? Are they all just houseruling everything, or playing all caster parties, or do they really like only half the party being important? Plus, based on my group, there's an element of "we don't want to learn another system." As for weapon design, I've come to prefer one of two methods: either make weapons super-generic (a la 13th Age or Gamma World 7E) or do the work to make weapons balanced and mechanically distinct beyond "this one does 1d8, this one does 2d6," so your choice of weapon actually matters and affects how your character plays. 4E does that, although it falls down in some cases (picks have always been worthless); so does BECMI with weapons mastery, or The One Ring, where there are actual trade-offs in choosing whether you want to use a spear, a sword, or an axe. Games like most non-4E D&D and Starfinger fall in the middle: lots of different weapons, but not enough mechanical differentation to make them feel distinct.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2017 21:41
|
|
|
Kurieg posted:We've run Pathfinder a few times with my playgroup, and we've kept the "Wizard runs away with the game while everyone else watches" in check by making sure the guy who wants to break the game over his knee and minmax isn't the guy behind the reigns of the full caster. Usually by their own volition. The game is more fun when everyone's having fun and we've got a guy who just likes blowing poo poo up with fireballs. Yeah. In my group the guy playing the wizard also just wants to blast stuff, and the DM plays enemy casters with an eye to making sure things don't get too rocket-taggy. On the other hand, the guy playing the druid is the kind of guy who does research and plays to win, and he pretty much wrecks poo poo when his turn comes around. Still, he's only one person (except when he's being half a dozen cyclopes, a kami, and a giant elemental) so he can't take the game over completely.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 5, 2017 23:36
|
|
|
FMguru posted:There was a recent fan remake (with all the Bond IP stripped out) of it called (I think) Confidential that came out a few years ago. Close -- the JB007 retroclone is called Classified. I keep meaning to check it out. I used to have a copy of the original, but alas no longer.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 11, 2017 23:43
|
|
|
JcDent posted:Can I ask what "D20 design" is? Based on the d20 System, such as D&D 3E and Pathfinder, Mutants & Masterminds, Spycraft, WWE Know Your Role, and similar leftovers from the massive d20 glut of the early 2000s.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 16, 2017 18:24
|
|
|
unseenlibrarian posted:It's been years since I read it so I don't remember specifics, but... Ringworld did have a kind of interesting system with what they called "root" and "branch" skills. You'd have a "root" skill like Physics that would be capped at somewhere around 30-50% depending on your stats, and then you'd put extra points into "branches" like Particle Physics, Astrophysics, High-Energy Physics, etc. It was pretty innovative back in the day for a system that wanted to be about exploration, experimentation, and science instead of combat. But as with many finely grained skill systems, you would frequently run up against the problem of "Okay, I have Theoretical Physics 200% -- now what can I actually DO with it in the game?"
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2017 05:50
|
|
|
Tuxedo Catfish posted:Teela's arc ends in tragedy and the creature that helped engineer her going "huh, I guess luck isn't genetic after all" though. The Ringworld RPG does try to mechanically model Teela's luck by making it possible for humans to have a POW stat much higher than 18 if they roll well during character generation. But it rarely has much effect on the game since it's still up to the GM when to allow Luck rolls and what they do.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 17, 2017 18:06
|
|
|
Mitama posted:It's extremely telling that they didn't even bother a sentence on how any of these things would inspire your Starfinger adventures. That would have at least forced them to think about the list, even narrow it down. Now I really want to challenge one of the authors of this book to come up with a Starfinger adventure inspired by A Wrinkle in Time or The Three-Body Problem or The Dispossessed.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 24, 2017 14:50
|
|
|
Not quite -- the scene Schreck was referring to happens a while after Harker's first arrival at the castle. Dracula, chapter III posted:I had hardly come to this conclusion when I heard the great door below shut, and knew that the Count had returned. He did not come at once into the library, so I went cautiously to my own room and found him making the bed. This was odd, but only confirmed what I had all along thought—that there were no servants in the house. When later I saw him through the chink of the hinges of the door laying the table in the dining-room, I was assured of it; for if he does himself all these menial offices, surely it is proof that there is no one else to do them.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 31, 2017 17:01
|
|
|
Note how the defects range randomly from minor cosmetological annoyance (albinism) to horribly crippling (boosterspice allergy). I'm pretty sure the only reason albinism is on the defect list is because Beowulf Shaeffer, the protagonist of some of the Known Space stories, is an albino. Also, it's probably worth discussing age in Ringworld. Your age is determined randomly by rolling d10 to see what range you fall in (d4 if you have boosterspice allergy), which can be anything from 17+1d6 to 259+2d100. And thanks to boosterspice, there is absolutely no advantage to being young. Even if you're cut off entirely from boosterspice, you just start aging normally -- you don't dry up and explode into dust like Mother Gothel at the end of Tangled. The number of pursuits and skill points you get are primarily determined by your chronological age. A 25-year-old explorer will probably have a few hundred skill points and one pursuit to work with, but a 400-year-old explorer will have several thousand skill points and a dozen or more pursuits. And since pursuits are determined randomly, it's entirely possible the 400-year-old will get the same pursuit the 25-year-old has, and be better at it. It's not quite Stormbringer where one player can roll up a Melnibonean noble sorcerer with half a dozen bound demons and the next player can roll up a sickly beggar with a stick, but that single d10 roll makes a massive difference in how effective your character turns out.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 9, 2017 04:20
|
|
|
unseenlibrarian posted:Questgiveritis being a magical affliction that causes people to stand in one place and deliver speeches and offer rewards for tedious murderhobo services. Well, of course it's magic. How else do you explain the glowing symbol that appears over the head of someone suffering from the condition?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 10, 2017 22:40
|
|
|
Barudak posted:How many Man-Kzin Wars were there by the time of this book being published? Because I read I want to say number 5 or 6 and it was just dire and wikipedia informs me tere are like 13 books in the series now. None. The Man-Kzin Wars books first appeared in 1988; the Ringworld RPG was published in 1984.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 12, 2017 14:44
|
|
|
Nessus posted:e: Also, if I were doing up a set of "alien races with obvious gimmicks" for humanity in a sci-fi RPG setting of original content, I would make humans enduring and unusually affable and peaceloving. The former is based on the cursorial hunting, good healing sort of things brought up before, and the latter is mostly to be difficult and tack against the zeitgeist. One of the things your author here enjoys about Known Space is that while it has military technology and battles and wars and so forth, it's not about them, or about how War is Inevitable, or People are Foolish, or whatever. By glopping together the setting for like ten different stories (each of which themselves DID have core themes and ideas), you end up with something weird and eccentric. Just like real life. That, btw, is the way the Master of Orion games went -- humans are the best at diplomacy and trade.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2017 00:58
|
|
|
Young Freud posted:Has to feature Dragonron or the great red dragon Burning Madov. Selling investments in Collateralized Dragon Obligations, of course.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2017 07:46
|
|
|
Niven has expressed the occasional horrible opinion, but I can't recall them ever finding their way into his work (at least, except for his collaborations with the late Jerry Pournelle, who was a walking flame war). Halloween Jack posted:Y'know, I think I avoided reading Ringworld because I flipped through one of the books, and almost immediately found a gross rape scene. And now that I think about it, that might have been a World of Tiers novel. I can't recall any rapes in the World of Tiers, although it's been a while since I read it. Could it have been PJF's A Feast Unknown, which was deliberately written to be sick, offensive, and over-the-top?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2017 19:15
|
|
|
marshmallow creep posted:If they just sent polite invitations instead of ultimatums, I am sure a lot of people would sign right up. I bet everyone's spam folder is full of friend requests and phishing from the Borg.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2017 17:32
|
|
|
unseenlibrarian posted:2020 also had a gang called "The Dead Presidents who all bodymodded themselves to look like Jack Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe and studied to mimic the Kennedy Accent. Well, that's what happens when you learn about gang culture from repeated viewings of The Warriors.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 26, 2017 08:32
|
|
|
Angrymog posted:I don't think they swim, just crawl. Like snails. Maybe they can use jets like squids do. The old Castle Greyhawk module had a level that featured a variant species, the horizontal jet-propelled piercer.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 28, 2017 19:15
|
|
|
Nessus posted:I'd think you could combine Bible Times with the Med basin Roman empire and have an interesting and robust setting with a lot of options that people might not expect due to being ignorant. Something like Testament, then?
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2017 05:09
|
|
|
Robindaybird posted:reminds me of all those older Star Wars games where you weren't allowed to be on equal footing with canon characters, and there was another I can't name where you just can't make canon characters RAW Isn't that "basically everything West End did"? Like, for example, in their DC Universe game, if you were playing at the Batman power level, you couldn't even create a character who was anywhere near as competent as Robin.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 10, 2017 22:05
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:It'd be funnier if the Lloigor were actually extremely depressed and hard to motivate. "uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh, just give us the medallion alreaaaaaady uuuuugh, i don't know why i even care, it's all terrible, maybe it'd be less terrible if you gave us the medallion, but it'd probably all still be poo poo. did i tell you about how i'm going to die alone? well it all started when i was an egg and my mom was too depressed to hold me..." Marvin the Android, except as a cosmic entity.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 29, 2017 00:19
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:I've been trying to attain a full collection. So far I have Dinotopia, The World Beneath, Journey to Chandara, Windchaser, River Quest, Lost City, Sabertooth Mountain, Thunder Falls and Chomper. I actually copyedited the YA books and wrote up a "Dinotopia Encyclopedia" of people, places, and things for our writers to reference. (James Gurney liked the idea and was talking about actually getting it published, but it never happened. Oh well.) Re Way of the Wicked: My players had a lot of fun with Jurak because one of the group was a druid and he was all "uh, guys, I really don't wanna fight a treant even if we're evil." Of course, this was a mistake, because Jurak eventually figured out what they were up to and came back with reinforcements, although I used a war-band of local elves instead of the lillend. The puzzle to find the way into the real Treasure Vault kind of stalled my players, though -- they had to resort to "praying to Asmodeus" for a hint. I didn't really like the lightning elemental in the top room because it seemed kind of boring and random, so I replaced it with a couatl who was there to guard the shrine. Couatls don't get enough love. And it is always fun to watch the players freak when they do the math and realize that they have to stay in the Horn for the next 222 days.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2018 20:09
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 19:31 |
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Oh, nice! They're honestly pretty well-written, on average, for YA. Certainly better than I was expecting. Is that encyclopedia something you can share or is it bound beyond the gates of NDA? I'd love to be able to drop some dramatic tidbit like "Peter David wrote in a hardcore Compsognathus-on-human gangbang scene and had to be forced to remove it," but honestly there was nothing unusual -- James Gurney is a heck of a nice guy, and the writers were all seasoned professionals who just wanted to do their work and get paid. As for the encyclopedia, I may still have it buried somewhere on my computer, but even if it's still there I wrote it in ClarisWorks (this was, uh, a while ago), which Apple no longer supports, so I may not be able to even open it.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2018 22:20
|
|