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Oh look, we have a chat thread again! I've just finished reading David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand, and there's a lot of material there for a Night's Black Agents mini-campaign. Since I am totally full-up on schedules by now, maybe someone will profit from my fevered imaginings: The PC's can be a mix of field agents, active military, atomic researchers such as from the IAEA or Department of Energy, and also bio-researchers such as the US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases in Fort Dietrich, Maryland or from the CDC in Atlanta. You can start the game with a briefing in the Pentagon, or perhaps in media res with the team already in flight on a C-5 Galaxy, having just taken off from Dover AFB. The mission will be a retrieval: a former Soviet scientist has contacted the American Embassy in Almaty, Kazakhstan and wants asylum, and the team's job is to get them out. The bio-researchers are there because the scientist used to work on the old Soviet biological weapons program and they'll need their expertise to debrief the defector. The atomic energy researchers are there because the scientist has alluded to having knowledge of certain bad actors wanting to sell nuclear material to Iranians/ISIS/whathaveyou. The opening act of the game will be about spiriting away the scientist while he's being pursued by the Russian (Kazakh?) mob, who are trying to silence the scientist before he blows the whistle on the deal. Depending on how well the players do in successfully making contact with the scientist, they can either succeed in this mission, in which case the first vampire of the game shows up in a car chase through the streets of Ust-Kamenogorsk and even up to the airport tarmac, or they might be too late, the scientist gets killed, and they discover that vampires are real because they're chasing the murderer as he flees the scene of the crime and what the gently caress how is it walking straight up a concrete wall to escape. In either case, there's a bio-weapons twist when the mobsters are offed with anthrax for their failure, or the scientist is. The midgame would be about tracking down the nuclear and bio-weapons leads, taking the team to the heavily brutalist factory city of Stepnogorsk, where they can get embroiled with warring criminal factions, make nice (or not) with aged Soviet colonels, and find leads that'll take them to old research facilities in Leningrad and Moscow. Heists and networking may be required to gain entrance! The conspyramid will also be fighting back at this point, possibly by kidnapping the American Ambassador or framing the agents for causing a massive diplomatic rift between the US and Russia. The vampire's lair will eventually be revealed to be in Vozrozhdeniya Island, where the agents have a chance to destroy its source of Aberrance by blowing up the industrial-sized bacteriological machinery that the vampire uses to power itself. The endgame could be in the Ural Mountains, where the agents need to race the final vampire to a missile silo and stop him from launching a payload of weaponized smallpox into the atmosphere. And since this is a game centered mostly in Central Asia, there's really only one person that the vampire could be: the resurrected spirit of Roman von Ungern-Sternberg EDIT: You could also shift this into a Delta Green scenario, with a cult of Hastur worshippers trying to get Carcosa to spawn on the island for a wholly different kind of Rebirth. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 15:20 on Feb 5, 2016 |
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Feb 5, 2016 15:16
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I don't know why it never occurred to me before, but I just figured out today that I can use VLOOKUP and RANDBETWEEN to automate dice rolls and table look-ups for random generation tables.
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Feb 8, 2016 16:20
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theironjef posted:If it's too short for F&F, you know it's just right for System Mastery. I fully support this initiative.
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Feb 9, 2016 01:30
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Does SA/TG have a Discord thingy? I had the worst time with roll20's voice communications in a game today and I'd like to have an alternative open.
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Feb 12, 2016 10:37
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Helical Nightmares posted:RPPR produced a fantastic podcast on the Old World of Darkness. Their strategy was to have two veteran WoD players explain Dirty Secrets of the Black hand to a guy (Faust from the Third Wheel) who has no idea what he is getting into. This is like The Dollop of TRPGs  he just keeps going "what?!"
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Feb 14, 2016 17:20
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fool_of_sound posted:I was just pointed to The Strange, and I hope it's decent, because it's basically TORG minus the High Lords/metaplot. The Strange is like TORG in the sense that the setting is great, except it's tied to bad mechanics
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Feb 16, 2016 05:41
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I wrote a short series about Cypher system in F&F The short version is that it's Monte Cook's version of a "rules-lite indie game" if he never actually read any such things in the last half-decade. It continues to use the d20 just because, and works off of this base mechanic of "any given task always has an objectively-correct difficulty level, and it's up to the players to justify reducing it to zero" which means its not actually all that rules light, especially when it has all these d20-isms like defining the maximum distance that an Athletics check can let you jump, or the difficulty scale just stopping short of superhuman capability. A lot of the mechanics seems to be based upon houserules from his 3.5e home games, such as Cyphers as little one-shot bits of magic that you can constantly hand out to players, or allowing players to spend "effort" on rolls to guarantee success, and perhaps those things are fine in a vacuum, but when combined with a very D&D-esque class system, and an XP mechanic that both doesn't actually encourage exploration while also encouraging antagonistic GM-ing, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
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Feb 16, 2016 06:10
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Misandu posted:Anyone have any decent TG Podcasts they could recommend? I got a little under halfway through the first episode of The Adventure Zone and it's really not working for me. We have a thread dedicated just for that purpose! I'm personally a big fan of Roleplaying Public Radio and Oneshot for Actual Plays, and then System Mastery and Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff for general TG-related shenanigans.
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Feb 16, 2016 16:54
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ProfessorCirno posted:I cannot wait for that game to be loving awful. But but but my kickstarter pledge  I backed that game on the basis of "I know nothing about tabletop D&D and Monte Cook's design cred, but Planescape Torment was pretty good, right?"
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Feb 17, 2016 05:09
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ProfessorCirno posted:Tower of Doom, Shadow of Mystara Fantasy Empires 
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Feb 17, 2016 14:41
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LuiCypher posted:I backed it because I didn't have the funds to back Wasteland 2 the first time around but I did when Torment: Numenera came around. I pledged enough so that I'd get Wasteland 2 and a chance to see how my money burned. Other way around for me. I was already in for Wasteland 2 and adding a backing for Torment Numenera was at a discount, so why not, right? Why not indeed.
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Feb 18, 2016 17:03
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Serf posted:This is why no one talks about Icewind Dale. It was a combat slog with barely any story that I can recall. I liked Icewind Dale  I always considered it better than the BG series because "story? who gives a poo poo? where them goblins at?" was my mindset. Knowing nothing about the tabletop version, I had this impression that combat was the important part and you should be doing it 100% of the time.I don't know where I got that idea. It's also why I didn't have any patience for the Gold Box Series of games.
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Feb 18, 2016 17:10
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spectralent posted:Checked it but it looks like you need to download a mod per game? A mod in the sense that you need to download the digitized boardgame and its chits, for each different boardgame that you want to play, but yes.
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Feb 19, 2016 16:00
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http://collider.com/dungeons-and-dragons-movie-story/quote:This new Dungeons & Dragons will be a Guardians of the Galaxy-tone movie in a Tolkien-like universe. Because when you think of all the Hobbit movies and The Lord of the Rings, they have an earnestness to them, and to see something fun, a Raiders romp inside that world, I feel is something the audience has not seen before. quote:I think it will really be moving forward quickly, and I don’t anticipate it not getting greenlit this year, mostly because Warner Bros. has DC now, and LEGO, and the Harry Potter universe that’s being cultivated as their franchises. I believe they see Dungeons & Dragons as something that could be cultivated as a multi-universe movie where there will be spinoffs from the first movie being in Forgotten Realms and subsequent movies being in different worlds. quote:Lee also revealed that the movie will take place entirely in the realm rather than having people transported from our world into the realm. He also said that the Yawning Portal will feature prominently and “it’s going to be one of people’s favorite set pieces.”
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Feb 24, 2016 03:36
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Ominous Jazz posted:With special guest star, Vin Diesel as Drizzt! If it comes out before WoW that pretty much is going to seal it as the Olympus Has Fallen to Blizzard's White House Down.
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Feb 24, 2016 07:23
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MikeCrotch posted:2. D&D nerds literally turning themselves inside out in rag at the most mainstream presentation of D&D being Fixed for more nerdrage
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Feb 24, 2016 13:14
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Drone posted:So the newest Humble Book Bundle is a bigass stack of Pathfinder PDF's. I went all-in on the PDFs. Pathfinder wouldn't be my first, or even my second choice for a system, but its quite generous and goes toward charity, so eh. Shame they didn't include Pathfinder Unchained though - that one has enough variant rules to make it significantly less crunchy and more user-friendly.
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Feb 25, 2016 03:15
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Helical Nightmares posted:Hell, if they said "we are going with the Drow vs surface dwellers for compelling reasons" audences would respond. Assuming it's not as hamfisted and clumsy as Revenge of the Sith, I would be interested in a movie that tried to make a thinly veiled allegory for the current issues of multiculturalism and immigration through the lens of fantasy race relations, such as what Starcraft 2 did with Legacy of the Void. Though I don't think this movie is going to be it.
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Feb 25, 2016 05:28
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MadScientistWorking posted:I love how they somehow managed to combine the two worst classes in the game (Monk/Fighter) to make one of the most entertaining and fun martial classes in the game. Also, I wonder how bad Fighter's are given that the feat system is kind of overhauled just by sheer addition of content. Depending on the feat chain Int 13 is no longer required. Yeah don't quote me on this, but between all of the stuff added by the Advanced Class Guide, the Dirty Tactics Toolbox and the Weapon Master's Handbook, you can actually make a Fighter that's competitive against even spellcasters. It's just that it's all buried under a bunch of poo poo and the Pathfinder "Strategy Guide" only tells you how to create Fighters using the core rules, so Power Attack it is.
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Feb 25, 2016 05:50
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That's a good idea for NBAgents villain vampires, because the movies set them up as being capable of hitting baseballs hard enough to cause thunder, and that you need to tear their bodies apart completely in order to destroy them. They're supposed to be well-nigh-impossible to directly confront, much less kill, unless the agents have been waging a campaign against them for a long time and are willing to take extreme risks, but as the agents climb up the Conspyramid and start denying the vampires of their resources (such as a source of blood), you should be able to knock down their Aberrance levels and prevent them from restocking, which should make the vampires vulnerable, but again not without being all Big drat Heroes about it.
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Feb 25, 2016 06:43
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My Lovely Horse posted:Fun fact about DSA: it has a Courage stat and the way the game works, when you declare that your character does a thing it can literally turn out that he's too cowardly to even consider it. So there's 30 years of that as the bigwig RPG around to keep in mind as well. Twilight 2000 had a similar system, and it worked pretty well as far as showing the difference between ill-trained militia that would repeatedly hesitate while under fire versus Tier 1 Operators (oorah!) that could wipe out those scared-rear end mooks simply by shooting them all before they had a chance to really react.
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Feb 25, 2016 18:28
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Everblight posted:Is there a gumshoe game for alien invasion, "V" style/lizard people infiltrating the highest halls of power? Can I just use Night's Black Agents? NBAgents is perfect for the theme, just reskin the vampires into alien threats. The Conspyramid even fits really well: you've got escalating levels of threats from Thin Men to Sectoids to Mutons to Mechtoids to Red Mutons to Sectopods to The First Ethereal, and then the "counter-strike" mechanic of a cell against the players is thematically appropriate with things like Retaliation missons/XCOM base attack missions, and the fact that the 2013 game implied that the invasion was really just a striking force, that the aliens were pulling their punches until someone was actually able to punch back.
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Feb 29, 2016 02:44
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A couple weeks back, I actually did have one of my work colleagues come up to me and ask me about D&D and then further to teach him how to play, but that's because I was doing session prep at work and would regularly have the PDFs open on my laptop.
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Feb 29, 2016 23:49
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I do pretty much all my RPG-ing online, so I have zero sentimentality for the physical act of rolling dice. Part of why I liked Strike's design is that the chance to get a 3+ on a d6 is a 66.67%, which is just about the same as what you'd get with 4e's number math if you had done all your homework.theironjef posted:dogwhistle grog That's the name of my high school country band. Helical Nightmares posted:Mods please change thread title to something better than "March Madness". March Mechanics (credit to inklesspen)
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Mar 2, 2016 02:07
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Anyone have roll20 icon/token packs they'd be willing to share? Doesn't have to be anything fancy, s'long as the pictures are properly labeled.
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Mar 3, 2016 01:48
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thefakenews posted:What kind of things are you looking for? I don't have any packs to share, but I've made a few Photoshop templates for making my own tokens, so I can make 'em real quick. Just lots of generic monsters, really. Most of my tokens come from some random redditor's project that tokenized everything in the D&D 5th Edition Monster Manual, but as my players have discovered, there are some holes in my coverage on the scale of my skeleton warriors actually being a smiling skeleton emoji.
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Mar 3, 2016 09:49
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thefakenews posted:Well, I think I've fixed your skeleton problem. Whoah hey, those are nice, thanks! And since you volunteered: shoggoth and polyp (or other lovecraftian monsters) run-of-the-mill naturey druid giant bat dog halfling witch ogre beetle dark elves wraith gnoll
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Mar 3, 2016 12:26
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I've heard it often repeated, especially by the System Mastery guys, that Studded Leather was a mistake and wasn't really a thing that existed. How did the mistranslation happen? What did they think Studded Leather was, and what was it actually? Even Nethack and Diablo have Studded Leather.
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Mar 7, 2016 10:31
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Kwyndig posted:This whole discussion reminds me of something else from the old days that always bugged me, which was thief skills. Some of them just plain don't make sense, like move silently, which in reality in urban or dungeon environments is more dependent on what you're wearing and how fast you're going than any kind of training. Now in a forest I can see it, because it does take skill to avoid leaves and branches and move through brush without making noise, but it is laughably easy to sneak up on people anywhere the ground isn't covered in crap. Of course having hiding and moving being separate skills for sneaking was also dumb anyway. I think Thief skills are fine as long as you don't get too hung up on how they're being performed, that it's an abstraction on the same level as the Rogue being able to stealth in the middle of Tanaris. The bad part is, as you mentioned, that they thought Hide in Shadows and Move Silently as two different things, and that they always start so terribly low. In over three sessions of an AD&D game I'm running I don't think I've ever let the Assassin roll their actual skill percentages, because drat.
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Mar 7, 2016 14:03
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Can someone teach me how to import maps into roll20? If I had this: How would I make it line up to roll20's grid? I've tried following their guide multiple times and it never seems to line up correctly. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 05:07 on Mar 10, 2016 |
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Mar 10, 2016 04:59
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DalaranJ posted:Yeah, that guide is bullshit. If you know you have a perfectly square map, like the one pictured in your post, just determine the dimensions in squares by hand and right click>advanced>set dimensions. Set it to the appropriate number of 'units', which means squares, the pictured map is 29 by 29. thefakenews posted:I didn't get it perfect, but I got it close. Thank you both! The alt thing and just counting out the squares by hand worked.
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Mar 10, 2016 18:14
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I think people here should just chill and act like adults IMO. I'm an adult, the big guy on the room, I'm wearing my slippers and my nightrobe and smoking from a pipe while I read Plato's Republic, and I don't approve of this kind of bullhockey so the kids should stop with it and get in line or else there's a beltin'. So are you saying you're Currently Smoking: something?
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Mar 12, 2016 17:19
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I found this thing that generates names-for-levels for any given word you can throw at it: http://jimkang.com/namedlevels/ You can go standard:  Branch out in subtypes:  Try sci-fi  Or esoteric: 
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Mar 13, 2016 02:15
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http://www.geeknative.com/54978/cubicle-7-sophisticated-games-bring-lord-rings-dd/ Cubicle 7 and Sophisticated Games bring Lord of the Rings to D&D Cubicle 7 already have a successful Lord of the Rings RPG with The One Ring and Sophisticated Games already works with them on that while developing book-based JRR Tolkien games under license from Middle-earth Enterprises. The two companies have teamed up again and this time they’ll be making a Dungeons & Dragons compatible RPG series for Middle-earth. The One Ring RPG will continue as a separate line and Cubicle 7 are promising new announcements for the series. Dominic McDowall told press; We’re all very excited to be building on the success of The One Ring Roleplaying Game and bringing Middle-earth to D&D® players. Uniting two things very close to the hearts of gamers, me included, is very cool – I can’t wait for the summer.” Wizards of the Coast have offered up D&D and its mechanics to an OGL system. Publishers are encouraged to write for the Forgotten Realms setting, though, with access to the DMs Guild reserved for those who do so. Just last week a group of Indie publishers formed a consortium to launch TableTopLibrary.com as an alternative marketplace for 5e compatible, non-Forgotten Realms, products. It is likely the new D&D-meets-LotR RPG will make use of 5e rules but will stay entirely clear from Dungeons & Dragons settings.
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Mar 14, 2016 20:26
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Evil Mastermind posted:I can't wait to see how little they bother to put in evocative mechanics to bring about the feel of Tolkien. I too remember that scene from Return of the King where Tom Bombadil is better at grappling than Gimli. And the Fellowship takes frequent 1-hour rest stops in the middle of the Mines of Moria.
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Mar 15, 2016 03:31
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Evil Mastermind posted:"you can pull the stuff out of there and put it in a system you like" Don't take this as a defense of Godbound, as I largely agree that it was a "joke" game that has just gone way too far, but you get that quote a lot from Kevin Crawford's stuff because random generation via tables is kind of his schtick. I've used his Stars Without Number supplements to generate material for a Traveller game I ran, which is chronologically back-asswards, but it worked.
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Mar 15, 2016 17:55
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I don't mean it that the game isn't meant to be played seriously, or that Crawford isn't seriously developing it, but rather: 1. He made Black Streams Solo Heroes as a supplement to Labyrinth Lord to let you play full-party modules with individual characters without needing to rejigger the modules significantly 2. He used that framework to make Scarlet Heroes as a dedicated way to play OSR D&D with individual characters 3. He wrote an example of how to duplicate the inDesign layout of the OD&D booklets, but he needed some filler material, so he rejiggered Scarlet Heroes' mechanics of allowing players to kill off dozens of creatures in a single go to form a Dynasty Warrriors-esque mini-game in the form of Exemplars and Eidolons 4. Apparently enough people took Exemplars and Eidolons seriously as a wholly playable game that Crawford then wrote Advanced Exemplars and Eidolons 5. And that itself metamorphosed into Godbound. If you up the power level of a Dynasty Warriors character by a few notches, you'll end up in the demi-god-hood range, which is what Godbound supposedly depicts So yeah, it's a perfectly playable game, I'm sure, but the basic building blocks are still mired in the level 1 shitfarmer ethos that is Basic D&D, so it's a hell of a lot more of a stretch than any of his other work, and the progression isn't like anything he's done before where the design concept was invented out of whole cloth (Traveller -> Stars Without Number, Tasteful African Culture D&D -> Spears of the Dawn)
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Mar 16, 2016 06:25
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Risus? Roll a number of d6s equal to your stat/skill, the defender does the same. Whoever gets a higher result wins, and the loser loses a die off of the stat/skill that they used.
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Mar 17, 2016 05:04
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I had an idea for a game. The central conceit is that player-characters are all cooks, chefs or some other form of epicurean on top of being your regular fantasy murderhobo, and their raison d'etre for adventuring is finding increasingly exotic meals to serve up. At low levels you probably couldn't do much more than roast a particularly large and savage wild boar, with maybe a side of orc rinds, but eventually you can move up to chimaera steaks, ent kebabs and even fricaseed mindflayer. And meat isn't the only possible avenue of exploration, of course, for what do dungeons have if not very special mushrooms, and what do nautical travels result in if not discovering some strange new islands with strange new spices to season your palate with? Maybe a recipe needs ovens running at 1500 degrees for 15 minutes - how do you generate that kind of heat consistently, and what material would your oven have to be made of? And if ingredient-hunting becomes too rote, there's also the possibility of branching out to things like spying on/sabotaging a competing inn, or trying to spread rumors of a new fad diet that just so happens to need the one particular brand of magical flour that the party happens to have exclusive access to. Making and breaking trade deals and ensuring that that new tariff doesn't get levied would also be the concern of any group trying to establish a restaurateur empire (assuming the players are interested in such things).
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Mar 19, 2016 20:29
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Okay, so since it's been done before, I can only assume that my idea isn't radically bad, which is kind of good, I guess.
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Mar 20, 2016 01:50
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