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Exile/Stoker: Dr. Octopus Exile/Solaris: Dr. Octagon
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Dec 19, 2018 22:36
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Black Dog + Neumann seems a great way to do the Gadgeteer thing that Neumann doesn't do on its own. I praised Double Cross for not trying to be all things to all people, but it's extremely versatile. What makes it work so well is that, like Marvel Heroic, it has a firm model of how play will proceed.
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Dec 24, 2018 14:25
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Speleothing posted:Eww. Rifts. The thread was so nice without it
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Dec 26, 2018 03:36
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Strange Matter posted:Is Rifts actually mechanically broken though, or just conceptually broken? The lunacy of MDC damage coupled with Simbeida's complete lack of understanding of real-world numbers and statistics is such that what you're doing makes hardly any sense, but is it still playable? If you're willing to engage with the madness does it result in a fun experience? Rifts is an AD&D heartbreaker that tries to be able to model absolutely anything. That's why so much Palladium material is paper-thin ripoffs of other stuff, it's a bucket of stuff homebrewed into AD&D.
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Dec 27, 2018 02:13
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One thing I don't quite get about Double Cross is how it's implied a lot of the action is secret from the public. I don't know how that's possible given the scale of power involved. I know this is common in a lot of anime as well as in WoD and its followers.
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Dec 28, 2018 02:25
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It's funny. Burroughs was not a good writer, and the Mars series has at least the baseline of race science and sexism you expect from pulp fantasy. But at any given point in history, some of the more interesting stuff in roleplaying has come out of that science-fantasy branch of the tree. I recall there was a very early game, one of those neither-fish-nor-fowl things between a wargame and a roleplaying game, where final victory was determined by adding up "Princess Points" to see which hero had done the most brave deeds to win the hand of a red, nude princess. ZeroCount posted:why does 'ugly old witch' need to be a distinct creature type I do like that thing in Eberron where there's a nation full of sentient monsters run by (I think?) harpies, and the idea of a diabolical grandmother hag as a major player in a setting is more interesting than your typical dark lords and insane high priests of the snake god.
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Jan 2, 2019 20:21
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I assume she was also mad online.
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Jan 2, 2019 20:23
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OvermanXAN posted:I believe it was medusae. Regardless, Eberron also has the goblinoid nation which is cool as hell too. It does a lot to subvert a lot of the "OH LOOK MONSTER KILL IT KILL IT" standard stuff and make the various intelligent monster species have some nuance to them (though the orcs are a bit too on the nose?). Also to subvert alignment though it's still shackled to the drat thing because D&D
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Jan 3, 2019 02:46
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I've always assumed that Goblins/Orcs/Hobgoblins corresponded to Misty Mountain orcs, Mordor orcs, and Uruk-hai in the Lord of the Rings, and were there so you have multiple types of Orcs of ascending difficulty. At least that's how it works in AD&D: Pool of Radiance for the NES.
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Jan 3, 2019 03:46
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One thing I don't quite get in Double Cross: is it a good idea to split your offense between two skills, or are you a fool not to focus entirely on Melee, Ranged, or RC?
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Jan 3, 2019 16:27
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 Circle of Hands Chapter 1: Original Metal Chapter 2: Iron Folk Chapter 3, Part 1: Forging Steel The third chapter is about both character creation and setting up the first session. A character’s stats fit on a single sheet of paper, and that’s by design. Everyone (including the GM) creates two characters, and it’s assumed that you’ll play one of your characters for the first session and start trading characters around after that. There’s a lot of random rolling in character creation, so some characters will be flat-out stronger than others--but not overwhelmingly so, and again, you’ll be trading characters around. First you roll up Attributes: Brawn, Quickness, Wits, and Charm. You roll 1d6+1 for each, except Brawn, which defaults to 6. (Spellcasting drains your Brawn, so for both narrative and game reasons, all PCs are hardy Muscle Wizards.) You get to raise some Attributes by taking two of the following Traits. Brave (+2 Quickness): When in danger, fleeing is not your first choice. Cunning (+2 Wits): You prefer to operate through deception. Romantic (+2 Charm): You believe the world operates according to a narrative. Ambitious (+1 Quickness/Wits): You’re determined to rise in social class. Brutal (+1 Brawn/Charm): Physical and emotional bullying is just a fact of life to you. Traits aren’t just descriptors or aspects that you can draw on when needed. They’re fundamental parts of your personality that anyone who knows you is aware of, and major cues for anyone to play that PC. Your home region is determined by your highest attribute: Tamaryon for Brawn, Famberge for Quickness, Spurr for Wits, and Rolke for Charm, or if there’s a tie, just to round it out. Next you choose your Professions. You get one Profession for each 4 points of Wits, rounded up, so you could have as many as 3. Professions are the only skills in this game. If a task is complicated and you don’t have a relevant Profession, you just can’t do it. This means that the PCs will have to work together, and build trust with the people that they meet, and not treat scenarios like a stealth/action game. Artisan (choose something specific): making, fixing, and inventing stuff; appraising materials Entertainer (low): Dancing, juggling, joking, working a crowd, dirty fighting. Entertainer (high): Literacy, history, fancy high-class singing, dancing, and playing. Fisherman: boating and shipbuilding, survival at sea Martial (low): making camp, animal care, first aid, robbery Martial (high): strategy and tactics, command in and out of battle, parlay, horses Merchant: literacy, finance, management, geography, varying customs, appraisal Outdoorsman: hunting, swimming, wilderness survival, natural history Priest: theology, counseling, leading discussion, making hashish Sailor: running a ship, navigation, organizing labour, survival at sea, swimming Scholar: literacy, philosophy, language, natural history, maps Wizard: sensing magic, knowledge of sorcery and magical creatures, all the spells You can’t be both a high and low entertainer, nor high and low martial, nor can Wizard be your sole profession. Your social class is determined by your lowest-class Profession. Class is immediately visible to everyone, and determines how people see you and how you see the world. When a session starts and PCs come to a new community, those of the peasant class will see whether the common folk are happy, or starving, or fearful. Those things are beneath the gentry’s notice; they instead perceive things like fortifications and how well they’re received at the longhouse. Peasant: farmer, fisherman, low entertainer Freeman: outdoorsman, sailor, martial (low), priest Professional: scholar, artisan, merchant, high entertainer Gentry: Martial (high) You get weapons and armor according to your Professions. "Adventuring gear" is ephemeral. You’re knights, and you’re traveling with a small retinue of animal handlers, haulers, and guides. You don’t have to keep track of torches and ten-foot poles. You're also assumed to have some gear relevant to your Profession. Peasants and freemen know how to use weapons relevant to their jobs such as hatchets, knives, and staves. Outdoorsmen also know the bow, sling, and hand axe, and low martial characters also know the spear, crossbow, and round shield. High martial characters can use shields, mail and gambesons, helmets, bows and crossbows, and specialist weapons like the flail, francisca, and great axe. Gentry have expensive gear like a sword, spangenhelm, and a horse, and can fight while mounted. But they’ll only fight with a warrior’s weapons--sword, spear, bow, and the specialist weapons. Even if your Profession gives you no martial training, you get training from the Circle. You can wear mail, a helmet, and a round shield, and get training in a single weapon of your choice. Every Circle knight also knows Magic. There are 84 spells; I won’t go over them here. Spells are either black or white and rated 1-3 points. Wizards know all the spells. Other knights have spell points equal to their Wits, and must have a mix of black and white spells. The game provides some handy starting packages for non-wizards. For example: All-purpose: Bless, Curse (4 points) Forest Walking: Vine, Trailtwister, Forward (6 points) Magic Sword: Blade, Envenom, Righteousness (5 points) Master of the Dead: Walk, White Light, Black Speech (5 points)  Circle of Hands began life as Ron’s D&D heartbreaker, and like early D&D, there are some interesting implications in the rules that aren’t always spelled out. For example, if you want to maximize your Charm, you are probably playing a domineering narcissist. (One interesting bit that is noted: because gameplay is only concerned with Ventures and never with the internal politics of Rolke, an Ambitious character can never realize the goal of raising their social class.) Playing a member of the gentry is attractive for obvious reasons: you get fighting skills, the best gear, and you’re at the top of the social heap! But that means having a narrow skillset and a massive blind spot when it comes to getting along with people in unfamiliar territory. The last randomly-rolled bits are your Demeanor, Feature, and Name. For the first two, roll a d6 and add your Charm, then consult a chart. Higher results are more favoured traits, giving you an idea of what most people in the Crescent Lands value without thinking about it. For Demeanor, the results range from traits like Shy, Friendly, and Blunt to Fierce, Stoic, and Serene. Ill-favoured features include tattooing and a thin build (remnants of the primitive Pananthuri people) while impressive ones include bright clothing and metal ornaments, neat grooming, and facial scars (presumably earned in battle). For Name, just roll 1d6. There’s a big list of Germanic names, and the result tells you what kind of name to choose, based on the meaning of the name: martial, positive (bright, beautiful, happy, etc.), sacred, or long multisyllabic ones. Name is also modified by social class: Peasants have no surnames and are called by diminutives: “Ric” instead of “Emmerich” and so on. Freemen use both forms and may have simple surnames based on place and profession. Professionals always claim surnames, and gentry are always called by a full impressive name like Brunhild Eckhart, denoting both themselves and some famed ancestor. The final step in creating a character is the Key Event that prompted you to join the Circle. It should be brief (150 words), almost certainly a shattering experience, and probably involves magic. One given example is a gentrywoman finally defeating the mob of pirates who killed her husband and murdered their way up and down the coast, only to find that the last raider she killed is her undead husband. There’s one last thing to do in the transition from individual character creation to setting up the group. Divide the PCs into two groups based on their total Attributes. The less-lucky half all get +1 to an Attribute of their creator’s choice, and the weakest overall character gets a supernatural Gift. I’ll go over them along with spells in a later chapter. Next time: In the second part of Chapter 3, I’ll go over creating ventures for the Circle knights. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Jan 4, 2019 |
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Jan 3, 2019 23:50
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It's hard to see the appeal in Palladium products to people who didn't play them early and thus have nostalgia for them. As near as I can tell, in order to justify buying Rifts books, I would have to follow a chain of logic like: a. I need a game where I can play literally anything. b. The rules have to be "simulationist" in a way that measures every punch and gunshot, and exactly how much a dragon can bench-press. c. I'm too lazy to homebrew anything, or I think homebrew is illegitimate It's an extremely clunky system, with a huge amount of low-effort, derivative content. The only way I can see their product lines as useful or necessary is if you're extremely preoccupied with Properly Earned Fun which doesn't allow for homebrew or rules that aren't that specific kind of virtual world simulation. Night10194 posted:I also forgot to mention something else about Scenarios because there wasn't one in the Tutorial Scenario: Master Scenes are the funniest goddamn thing. They're literally JRPG cutscenes where the GM is meant to act out a situation with no PC involvement to have a cutscene about what the bad guys are doing. They are silly. gradenko_2000 posted:
Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:11 on Jan 8, 2019 |
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Jan 8, 2019 18:04
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It's not possible to write a universal system that encompasses everything while remaining balanced and playable. You can have a universal baseline, so to speak, that you hack in dozens of different ways to make an actually playable game. But those games won't be fully compatible with each other. D20 taught us this. The stuff that was good threw the goal of compatibility on a pyre to get there.
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Jan 8, 2019 18:38
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I had this vague ill feeling against Myriad Song I could quite place, and then I realized I'm confusing it with that Hc Svnt Dracones game.
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Jan 10, 2019 05:00
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Stolze's Out of the Violent Planet.
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Jan 10, 2019 20:46
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As far as I understand it, Gary created Chainmail because his whole group was bored with playing the same historical minis scenarios over and over. People thought Arneson's "Egg of Coot" was a potshot at Gary, but it was actually at a wargamer named Greg Scott who hated fantasy wargaming.
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Jan 11, 2019 15:55
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A weird little thing I recall is that Goblins and Kobolds are always mentioned together. They are exactly identical in all respects. In original Brown Box D&D the kobolds are slightly weaker. I had assumed D&D came after Chainmail. If they were developed side-by-side, I guess Gary decided that they were close enough as makes no difference for wargaming purposes.
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Jan 11, 2019 16:14
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There's nothing wrong with writing a game where space combat just isn't part of the narrative. Works just fine for The Gaean Reach. I believe the rationale is that planetary defense uses warp-drive projectiles more effective than anything you could mount on a ship, and because of warp drive, there's no reason for two ships to meet and fight in the void of space.
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Jan 11, 2019 18:32
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If that's the case, I'm surprised there isn't a small but fanatical cult of Harn wargaming.
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Jan 13, 2019 17:50
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By popular demand posted:Game developers, stop with the kitchen sink attitude and follow Myriad Song's example: PurpleXVI posted:I think part of the problem is that there's more or less never a game that runs the vehicle/space combat on the same rules as the character-to-character combat, it always has to be some elaborate subsystem or board game, and it never gets as much love as the rest of the game and as a result usually ends up really shallow or really broken/easily gamed. Plus usually the way it ends up working is that it also requires specialized skills that only work in space, so either everyone only has one button to push or one guy plays while everyone else ooohs and aaahs over how good he is at doing the space thing. Speaking as somebody who isn't wowed by cars or planes or giant robots, and has little interest in vehicle combat: the space combat in Edge of the Empire and Fragged Empire is just fine.
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Jan 14, 2019 16:35
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Night10194 posted:That mindset has always been completely baffling to me. Like, we're sitting around a table, talking with friends. Who the gently caress cares if we feel like piledriving Stone? Or writing a plotline in the setting so that maybe tons of people don't die for no reason for once, or we actually stop the villains, or whatever? quote:Like this is the game that specifically has the invincible teleporting magic zombie gunslinger whose entire job is to kill your players if they try to stop the metaplot at all, right? That was Deadlands?
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Jan 17, 2019 04:09
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To paraphrase Gary, "The big secret we have to keep from our customers is that they don't really need us to sell them more rules." Same with the metaplot.
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Jan 17, 2019 05:06
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Just Dan Again posted:It seems particularly silly to me now, in 2019, to cling to the sourcebooks as if there is some one True Licensed Game World that your group's stories mustn't betray. The idea that anybody ever bought that line for the big metaplot games is pretty wild to me. I wonder if it ties into the tradition of gatekeeping in the hobby- "REAL fans know exactly what happened during the Avatar Storm and how it affected the Kiasyd's kinfolk Fianna allies, and if you're not a REAL fan then you can't play rock-paper-scissors with us at Denny's on Friday night."
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Jan 17, 2019 16:07
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The D&D branding and merchandising was a very good strategy that should've been done years sooner. Unfortunately, they were indeed far too profligate and careless in how they went about it.
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Jan 17, 2019 17:03
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Deptfordx posted:Is that the weirdest or was there even more improbable stuff?  I've read that during Lorraine Williams' administration, she was interested in selling D&D quilts, so TSR just acquired a quilt company. I don't know if they produced any product. But most of the collectible products from her era seem to be more of the "sad nerd" variety, like collectible plates and calendars with chainmail bikini babes.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:12
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Found it! TSR actually bought a needlepoint company at the behest of Kevin Blume's wife. Lorraine Williams is the Vince Russo of D&D. She gets blamed for all kinds of poo poo that didn't happen or happened before she got there. 
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Jan 17, 2019 20:48
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DalaranJ posted:Did D&D even have any “famous fantasy figures” at this point?
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Jan 17, 2019 20:53
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If your players make sparkling wine anywhere outside northeastern France and call it champagne, sicc Stone on them!!!
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Jan 18, 2019 18:17
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more like Prosucco
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Jan 18, 2019 18:24
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Dawgstar posted:What's sad is most attempts I've seen at 'fixing' the CSA mostly revolve around turning the south into a blighted hellscape or completely decimating it in what I assume had good intentions, but none of them actually help black people in the setting very much.
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Jan 22, 2019 03:39
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It would be neat to get a good hexblade class, and fold soulknife into it. Did anyone take Spring Attack for any other reason than to get Whirlwind Attack? Ugh, the more I remember about 3e the less I miss it.
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Jan 23, 2019 17:42
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Did psionics in D&D begin as an attempt to break away from Vancian casting without actually slaughtering that sacred cow? I feel like psionics didn't really make sense (how is manipulating reality with your mind not magic?) until 4e introduced a simple structure explaining how all these different power sources are magic, but channeling energy from different sources.
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Jan 23, 2019 23:21
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Brown rice also takes loving forever to cook. IIRC, Beriberi was a scourge of the IJN because a diet heavy in white rice was put out there as a sort of "king's shilling" to join up. The peasantry was so oppressed that they didn't even get to keep any of the rice they farmed, subsisting on millet and barley.
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Jan 25, 2019 15:54
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Ethics in L5R are hard to adjudicate because this is a universe where the gods and the Cycle of Heaven objectively exist. The Kolat seem to go through a boom-and-bust cycle where they slowly accumulate power for centuries, then get found out and massacred. From their point of view, they've accomplished a great deal. The Emperor is no longer a descendant of heaven, and at one point mortals ascended to replace the Sun and Moon.
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Jan 25, 2019 19:54
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Didn't the Kolat play a pivotal role in defeating the Lying Darkness, for which they were promptly rewarded with another purge? And they have a sect devoted to taking out blood mages and demons. Because finance is one of their main strengths, and they actually invented the Rokugani unit of currency, I tend to see the Kolat as an incipient bourgeois. Which is hampered by the fact that the divine right of kings literally exists in L5R. (I have no idea if any of this is still true in the new timeline.)
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Jan 25, 2019 20:20
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I will not quote Engels in the tabletop thread I will not quote Engels in the tabletop thread I will not quote Engels in the tabletop thread I will not quote Engels in the tabletop thread
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Jan 25, 2019 22:17
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Libertad! posted:The samurai are the bourgeoise, the Kolat are the lumpenproletariat, and the peasants are the true proletariat. The Kolat have many elements of a bourgeois revolution, but Marx had a whole poetic rant about how there's less difference between that and the lumpenproletariat than one might think. sexpig by night posted:Mantis are so fuckin good. They literally got their status as a proper great clan when Mantis and the other minor clans showed up to the second day of thunder and said 'alright fuckboys, give us the great clan status we deserve or we're all going to suicide attack you. You're gonna kill us, but we'll take so many of you out you'll lose this war and we'll all go to hell together.' Every clan but the Crab was all 'loving hell you guys suck' but Hida was all 'aw yes this is the good poo poo you guys rule'. So now that Wick has been out of the picture for a long time and they're rolling back the timeline, do the Lion have more of a distinct identity? I like the Lion. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 02:44 on Jan 27, 2019 |
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Jan 27, 2019 02:34
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Crane duelists will beat anyone in a duel, but in a skirmish...oh, wait, they get probably the best straight-up fighter school, too.
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Jan 27, 2019 19:51
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Circle of Hands Chapter 1: Original Metal Chapter 2: Iron Folk Chapter 3, Part 2: Ventures The third chapter covers both character creation, which I went through in the last update, and creating Ventures. Remember that in Circle of Hands, play is concerned entirely with a group of Circle knights going to investigate some problem or issue they’ve heard about, and never with courtly intrigue or other matters that might be part of “downtime” in other fantasy games. Edwards advocates a low-prep method where you use random rolling to generate a location, some problems, some named characters, and some “tripwires”--more on that later--and let the adventure emerge from the PCs playing off of those things. Like character creation, Venture generation involves rolling three dice, then combining, matching, and subtracting them in various ways to generate a template. It’s all very simple, but I’m not going to go into the tedious details about how you take the lowest die and then add it to the red die to blah blah blah. I’ll focus on the building blocks of a Venture. To start, I roll three dice: black, white, and red. They come up 6, 2, and 2. The first step is Location. Because two dice match, the Venture isn’t in Rolke. It’s in Tamaryon, the large inland pastoral region. I also need to come up with a name for the specific community where the Venture takes place. The options are all Germanic names, based on names and geography. If I were being cheeky, I’d go with “Altdorf,” but instead I like Luttenbruck, meaning “little bridge.”  At this stage, you’re also meant to imagine this community’s daily life and struggles, and as many little details of its culture as you like. I’m thinking of a farming community, not of particular strategic or economic importance to the surrounding region, somewhat backward and insular because it suffers mightily ever couple generations when the floods are bad enough to surmount the bridge. The second step is Components. These are the problems the Circle knights will be dealing with, and the method generates 1-3 of them. Some of them are crises that the knights will try to resolve in order to build goodwill. Others are opportunities the knights will try to take advantage of. And Amboriyon and Rbaja are forces the Circle opposes on principle, with no expectation of reward. Humanitarian crisis: War, oppression, famine, disease, or natural disaster. Edwards wants you to focus on human agency in causing or responding to it. Social tension: Conflict between the social classes has reached the breaking point. Poverty, clan feuds, and humanitarian crises play well into this. Circle knights confuse social rank just by being there, and knights from the region will have some insight into the conflict. Opportunity: The Circle sees a chance for peace, trade, or any other kind of cooperation with the community. This should be a milk run, but it’s easy to screw up. Knowledge: Some foreign or lost technology, a map, a revelatory fact, or something similar is in play. The fact that the Circle knows about this at all means it’s being actively contested. Monster: A creature of Amboriyon or Rbaja, or other fantastical beast. Such creatures are never just out in the woods waiting to be hunted; they’re fixated on a community or more likely, connected to it. Knowledge: Some valuable knowledge in the form of a strange technology, a map or book, a secret, etc. has come to the Circle’s attention. It’s not just sitting there; someone is using it or people are struggling for it. Monster: Circle knights fight such things to earn goodwill for the Circle. Rbaja: A Rbaja wizard, demon, or magical zone. A living nightmare. Amboriyon: An Amboriyon wizard, eidolon, or magical zone. A light that seduces and destroys. The dice method works out so that Ventures in Rolke are more likely to be low-intensity, and both humanitarian crisis and Amboriyon never occur by themselves. The only result I get is Rbaja. I’m imagining a vile sorcerer camping out near an isolated community. The third stage is a quick one, using a die result to set the tone. Harsh: Hardship, tough decisions, personal loss Grim: Injustice, oppression, desperation Squick: Gore, agony, atrocity My results give me Harsh. I’m thinking of a blasted wasteland beyond the pastures, where people go and don’t come back, that the knights will have to enter to deal with the influence of Rbaja. Next I need to determine the total number of Components. My dice give me two Rbaja components. I decide that Luttenbruck is troubled by both a Rbaja zone and the wizard who created it. Finally, create named characters connected to each component. Since I only have Rbaja, I need three characters connected to the problem. Each character needs an 8/5/4/2 stat spread, their profession, and their social rank written down, but that’s the easy part. Baron Heinrich Sieghild is the de facto leader of the community by virtue of his family connections to a prominent clan chief up north, and his possession of a quaint and perpetually undermanned guard tower by the old bridge. Though it occasionally wounds his pride, he’s content to do “what’s best for everyone,” i.e. what’s best for his wealthier and more powerful cousins. Ingeborg is the spiritual leader of Luttenbruck, one of the first people to resettle after the last bad flood. In her capacity as priestess and midwife, she’s universally respected for the sheer number of people she’s mothered, grandmothered, godmothered, delivered, and/or married. Ingeborg feels like Luttenbruck still hasn’t really found its feet, and is pressuring Heinrich to make the community more well-defended and self-sufficient. She’s wise, but impatient to see big change happen in her lifetime. Gerhard Sigvald is the town’s only skilled metalsmith. That wouldn’t be the case, but a month ago, Gerhard’s son Lambert went into the dark wood with one of Ingeborg’s granddaughters, Gerda, and didn’t come back. This has strained their lifelong friendship, and they are both pressuring Heinrich to “do something” about it.  Edwards recommends maps, though they aren’t necessary. Not a big map of the whole community, but smaller-scale maps of dangerous and important locations. The last step is tripwires. Tripwires are events with a specific trigger, with shocking and game-changing consequences. They’re not traps, or tricks, or goals for the PCs to achieve or avoid, since they don’t know about them. If anyone else goes missing, Heinrich will be goaded into leading a search party into the woods, with disastrous consequences. If the wizard’s lodge is disturbed, she will flee back through the woods to the village, with the intent of making a big mess, kidnapping Gerda, and fleeing. If the PCs or anyone else interrogates Gerda, Ingeborg will close ranks and shun the Circle knights. Edwards tells you right out that you should be aiming for “soap opera.” The NPCs just have their own lives and agendas, which get bound up in the Components and lead to action and drama. No one has to be a diabolical villain, or a lunatic, or part of a secret conspiracy in order to move the plot along. (Except wizards. loving wizards.)  Beginning Play A Venture begins with each player picking a knight to play. Don’t play the same knight twice in a row, but when you play a knight, they’re yours. Honor what’s been established about the character through play, but you don’t have any obligation to their creator’s original vision or anything like that. Your roleplaying prompts are on the character’s sheet--Traits, Profession, and Key Event. The GM only tells the players what region they’re going to, and some sketchy details about the most obvious Component. You aren’t summoned to the king’s chambers and sent on a mission; the Circle doesn’t work like that. You heard about a problem and a group of you decided to get involved. Another important thing to remember is that a great deal about your characters is immediately visible, and the people you meet are no fools: they recognize your regional accent, your Circle badge, and probably know your social rank and profession from your manner and dress. A group of people different from each other, showing up armed and with a retinue, perhaps showing evidence of being touched by both black and white magic, is something these people have never seen before. Next time: GMing individual scenes, rolling dice, and a bunch of little stuff.
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Jan 28, 2019 03:29
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Big Mad Drongo posted:Thanks for reviewing this! I really appreciate a game that tries to do "gritty" without meaning "you're a shitfarmer who sucks at everything and will probably die of infection." (Like, it's a cliche in fantasies and westerns for a laconic hero to wander into town, refuse to make conversation with anyone, get prodded into a fight by clueless jerks, and brutalize or kill a bunch of them as a result. Edwards tells you flatly that doing this just makes you a psycho._ Anyway, it has that in common with L5R, and it's something that always takes a lot of buy-in from the players. Hite and Laws have joked that D&D and Warhammer are analogous to periods like the Thirty Years War, when there was sufficient dislocation to create wandering murderhobos.
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Jan 29, 2019 04:23
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