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Helical Nightmares posted:Azathoth aperitif's This is making think of a CoC scenario where the players are a news team / environmentalist group that sneak into a sealed and guarded livestock compound intent on blowing the lid on the horrible conditions for the animals due to the industrialized farming practices ... only to discover that the Ag-Gag security measures were put in place to guard against an entirely different kind of horror altogether ...
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Mar 20, 2016 18:52
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I was listening to an episode of The Game Design Roundtable, and one of their points of discussion was about how to playtest games. One of the main points was that you don't need to have a complete game from the get-go. The panelist was a boardgame designer, and of course boardgames tend to need top-to-bottom rulesets, and I largely feel the same way about TRPGS (*cough* D&D 5e *coughcough*), but even if you were aiming to do that, you don't need to have all your rules in place by the time you start a playtest session. It's supposed to be that it's the playtest that reveals what kind of edge cases are going to crop up, but your playtest document doesn't/shouldn't try to account for all the edge cases you think will happen while you're still designing in a vacuum. The other point was that playtests should be focused: if there's a trading part of your game, run a session where it's only about trading. Or only about combat. Or only about the first turn. And then of course playtests that are focused on the mid-game, or the lategame (insofar as you can predict what that is going to look like). Again, he was talking about boardgames, but I feel like the advice equally applies to TRPGs. I bring this up because I've often thought about sessions of play that are completely divorced from any sort of overarching plotline as a means of introducing players to rules-intensive systems. Make some pregens, create a battlefield, generate some monsters, and run a combat scenario, purely as a means of teaching the players (and yourself) how all this stuff fits together, rather than starting off at an inn (or at the entrance of a dungeon) and going through anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes of evasion, diplomacy, stealth, cajoling and negotiations before you get to the fighting part at which point everyone starts reaching for the rulebooks. Or the other way around, where you try to get a feel for how the skill resolution mechanics work. Here's a mansion, try to break into it, avoid fighting as long as possible. I was part of a short-lived PbP for a 4th Edition D&D-like game called Untitled RPG that did exactly this. Just a white grid with characters and orcs and we fought, because that was the core of the game that needed to be tested. I also bring this up because we have a few threads here for people writing their own games, and I thought it was a useful piece of advice that you don't need to have your entire corebook ready before trying to see how it plays out.
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Mar 26, 2016 12:55
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Fear Itself doesn't have the "pulp" option that Trail tries to throw in there. It's a "dedicated" horror game and comes off the better for it insofar as it plays into GUMSHOE's slow depletion of resources mechanic. I've not really played Esoterrorists, but my impression from a read-through is that having the players be dedicated members of a horror-hunting organization gets rid of a lot of the jank you'd get from a traditional CoC scenario where you have to somehow justify why these "investigators" are "investigating".
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Mar 26, 2016 17:18
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I'm actually wondering how Pelgrane is going to manage to differentiate The Esoterrorists from The Fall of Delta Green, considering the similarities in concept.
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Mar 26, 2016 17:26
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Math/AnyDice question: what do the probabilities look like for a mechanic of "roll a number of d6 equal to your skill. Your opponent does the same. Of all the dice you rolled, count only the single highest-facing die. Whoever has the higher one wins" Across scenarios of same dice, and if one player has 1 more die, and if one player has 2 more dice.
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Mar 28, 2016 01:38
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Arivia posted:I've been reading a lot of Dragonsfoot and other grog forums recently and they talk about 4e using the abbreviation TETSNBN all the loving time. It stands for "The Edition That Shall Not Be Named" come the gently caress on, 4e is a legitimate game, it's not a goddamn plague. Three Moves Ahead, a strategy gaming podcast, recently did an interview with the developers of Civilization 3, 4 and 5, and asked them what they would have wanted to take out of the game, had they complete and total free will. One of the responses was that they'd like to ditch everything after the Renaissance Era. The game is just too large in scope, and 90% of all games are just clean-up after Renaissance anyway, and it gets rid of a lot of the cruft with regards to trying to crowbar-in all of the mechanics like aircraft and espionage and nuclear war, etc etc etc. But the developers walked back their comment after they made it, saying that they could never do it because there would be riots and "blood in the streets", because Civilization is, by now, a set of expectations as much as it is a strategy game. They knew that no Civilization, no matter how good and feature-complete it is, could ever skip implementing religion, or culture, or espionage, or the 20th Century, because that's just what people think the the game should contain, regardless of anything else related to game design. I feel like 4th Edition largely fell prey to that mentality. It didn't matter that Profession (Agriculture) wasn't of use in a game about ... delving into Dungeons and slaying Dragons. It didn't matter that Come and Get It was a cool and thematically evocative ability. And it especially didn't matter that it made for a better group dynamics for the Wizard to no longer be able to dominate the pace of a campaign. People had this platonic ideal of what D&D should have, and by God 4th Edition didn't live up to it.
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Mar 29, 2016 06:21
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As Kai Tave said, the problem isn't so much with 4e "dying" (because every edition does) so much as the well of discourse being poisoned and the history of the thing being completely revised. Ok, so reddit link and this isn't grogs.txt so I'm going to delve into specific quotes, but take a gander at how many people go off with "4e was a miniatures game" and "you can't roleplay in 4e" and "Wizards and Fighters were the same" and "4e was designed from the ground-up tabletop WoW". And then multiply that by the same thread happening every week, every time someone asks about 4e. I mean maybe I'm the grog for being too invested in this, but that's the TRPG equivalent of "we live in a post-factual world now", and then as Elfgames said, the salt on the wound is that 5th edition comes along and basically forgets everything that was learned in 4e in favor of Mike Mearls' Houserules (TM), except again you get that revisionism like "healing hit dice are healing surges!" and "Fighters are interactive now!" and "it's the most balanced version of D&D ever made!" and people believe that the designers have totes learned their lessons from 4e just on the strength of their say-so. 4e had a bunch of legitimate problems, and I don't begrudge anyone bouncing off of it completely if they were trying to play it with the PHB 1, DMG 1 and Keep on the Shadowfell, and I acknowledge that I'm having a lot of fun with it because I came into this hobby two years ago after all the cruft had been sorted out, houseruled and solved, but at the same time those legitimate problems are almost never the ones that are discussed when people talk about 4e in retrospect over the pithy and false memes, and those legitimate problems were not the ones iterated in 5th Editions, or even in the Essentials half-assed revision.
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Mar 29, 2016 08:56
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remusclaw posted:I bounced off early 4e myself, thinking it very slow, and not liking the skill challenges very much. It took a while for me to get interested in it again but it was much improved system later on, too bad its rep never really kept up with its quality. It is also entirely too bad we never got an updated version of the game, as it would be nice to be able to play it with errata-ed books and such, perhaps with some of the more ridiculously overstuffed poo poo pared down, like feats. Aren't there like 30 pages of errata for the PH1? There was a random internet petition I came across to get WOTC to open up 4th Edition to an OGL, now that even 5th Edition has been OGL'd, which I thought was adorable, but also probably the only way to get an "updated" 4e that isn't Strike! Anyway, I don't like skill challenges too, even after giving them a direct shot, and I just use "regular" individual skill checks. I think it was a bit of a miss that it was never adequately conveyed that you could just do that instead. TheLovablePlutonis posted:lol is that why the developers hosed hard by releasing Civ5 as a barebones borefest that got shat upon and only became playable and close to good after the third expansion? Jon Shafer, in that same interview, insists that he didn't deliberately remove religion in Civ 5 just so he could sell it back to the players later, just that he considered the game "complete" without it, but both he and Soren Johnson agreed and admitted that every Civilization after #2 has been pretty poo poo on release and it was always the expansions that made them good. And as much as I thought vanilla Civ 5 was junk, I also have memories of buggy combat and George Washington being the uber-leader in vanilla Civ 4 too, so I'm inclined to agree. gradenko_2000 fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Mar 29, 2016 |
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Mar 29, 2016 14:43
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Yawgmoth posted:Forgetting all of the "WoW babby no roleplaying" horseshit that Paizo and pals put out about 4e, the biggest reason I haven't tried 4e after its initial release is that so many of the fans have a loving seizure if you so much as mention any other edition of D&D. And I get that it sucks to have your favorite edition smeared so, but on the other hand you are never going to win people over by engaging in the same bullshit on a smaller scale. 4e isn't the shining beacon of hope for all gaming born too perfect for this world; no edition if D&D is. And trying to get someone to like your edition by insulting the version they enjoy is like saying "ugh, I can't believe you like pop tarts, they're revolting!" then slapping it out of their hand and trying to jam a toaster strudel in their mouth while yelling "isn't that so much better?!" I admit that when I see someone say that they didn't like 4e because "combat was too slow", I get an urge to say "wait! no! give it another chance! If you just used this, that, and the other houserule 4e is actually really great!", but I grit my teeth and move on because that'd just make me sound like an rear end in a top hat. It's the same thing, really, as when someone asks for advice about 5e and people come back with "go play 13th Age instead". Unless the question was open-ended enough that recommend me a different system was implied, that's just being rude. And no game save perhaps FATAL is so irredeemably bad that you shouldn't give in-context help if that's what's being asked for.
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Mar 29, 2016 15:22
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Evil Mastermind posted:Like, the idea that the only thing capable of evoking that feeling is the original deal and nothing else. Yeah I was going to say that in the era of PDF re-releases, "the perfect nostalgia-evoking fantasy game" is just ... that same game, again, exactly as it was when you were 12. And if it's not possible to "recapture that same feeling", well, we just haven't invented the Eternal Sunshine of the TRPG Mind machine yet.
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Mar 29, 2016 18:37
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Paolomania posted:If Paizo is smart, they will release any significantly different play-style game/edition under a different product name and just use their brand recognition to market it. Pathfinder stays pathfinder 2nd ed gets to be its own thing everyone is happy. If WotC had done something similar for 4E no one would have batted an eye. Agree. This sort of circles us back to the Civilization analogy I was making: any second edition of Pathfinder is either going to have to be too orthodox* to really be different, or so different that it'll be nitpicked apart like 4e (unless Paizo also launches concerted effort to drive an "it's still the Pathfinder you know and love!" narrative) * you can sort of see this with Pathfinder Unchained, where half the book is just variant rules from 3.5's Unearthed Arcana from years back (insofar as Paizo has been very slowly draining that well over the years, see Ultimate Combat), and the other rules are never actually used or mentioned again outside of the one book. I mean, even things like the Unchained Rogue or Unchained Summoner weren't presented as "replacements" so much as "new classes, and you can still use the old ones if you like". They weren't really trying to upend the system any.
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Mar 30, 2016 01:39
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Arivia posted:@gradenko_2000: No, the unchained classes have actually been positioned as replacements. The unchained summoner was basically a giant piece of power-level errata, and is adopted for that reason in Pathfinder Society. Other books released after Unchained have placed a lot of effort on being Unchained compatible, with new monk archetypes and so on. Considering how much I like Pathfinder Unchained, I'm quite happy to be wrong!
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Mar 30, 2016 01:49
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Countblanc posted:it's insane how everyone is melting down, while i am as calm as a still lake Namaste
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Mar 30, 2016 02:14
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Arivia posted:They have also gone on the record as saying that by far the Adventure Paths are the majority of their sales, and that they cannot do anything to risk the Adventure Paths without risking the entire company. They have specifically, publicly said they will not make specific products (such as Adventure Path collections) because they would risk Adventure Path subscriptions. I think the salient point here is that Paizo being in danger of losing their ability to publish adventure paths for 3.5e through the Dragon Magazine was historically what motivated them to create Pathfinder (and engage in not-very-cool marketing against 4e) in the first place.
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Mar 30, 2016 02:39
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DalaranJ posted:Do you think that this is true? I've seen plenty of evidence that there are players and 'critics' that think this, but I don't think I've seen any game developers say something like this other than WOTC? I mean Pathfinder's a super-conservative iteration of 3.5e, and 13th Age, especially with regards to the Monk, has also fallen prey to not wanting to break with tradition too hard. Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition and Delta Green iterate enough on the original BRP/CoC formula that it might have caused some rabble-rousing, except I don't think enough people are grogs about idea rolls to care. Zurui posted:My big disappointment with the discourse around 4th Edition is that I wanted the streamlined, balanced, and customizable tactical fantasy adventure game that the naysayers insisted D&D 4e was. Drone posted:Have you heard of Age of Sigmar?
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Mar 30, 2016 03:10
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LuiCypher posted:I think the people who primarily play these games are just happy that they're getting new editions. For the most part, these games also tend to have a track record of not changing that drastically from edition to edition. In particular, DG is incorporating thresholds where you auto-succeed if you have the relevant skill at the appropriate level. No rolls necessary. Changing tack a bit, I really like what I see out of DG's character creation (and CoC 7e, to a slightly lesser degree) and I hope that the release of its core mechanics on a license means someone'll make a fantasy percentile-based game that's not as overwrought as RuneQuest 6th Edition.
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Mar 30, 2016 03:44
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Didn't some grogs flip out about luck? It helps make games less deadly if you use the optional rule where players can modify rolls with luck points. Yeah that's sort of what I was referring to: some grogs also flipped out over "storygame narrative fail forward mechanics", missing the point of CoC having idea rolls all this time, but as you said, the release/publishing of CoC 7e was disorganized enough that this narrative never really caught on in favor people just wanting to have the new books in the first place.
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Mar 30, 2016 04:00
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Kwyndig posted:It was... close? By the third core books they were pretty drat close to that ideal. You'd have gone through the entire level-spread of the game in 8 months.
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Mar 30, 2016 04:19
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Sword Coast Legends was so bad that it took out its developer along with it
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Mar 31, 2016 16:03
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Kwyndig posted:Top comment I got was 'I bought this game expecting it be 5e and it wasn't...' Sword Coast Legends not resembling the tabletop rules at all probably made it play better than if it did. Really the problem was the horrid netcode, the barebones single-player campaign and the "DM mode" being super-rudimentary (although at its core is an interesting concept that could probably be explored more, even in the TTRPG design space).
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Apr 1, 2016 15:55
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Loki_XLII posted:In what ways? I know nothing about it's DM mode, what about it's concepts interest you? The rough idea is that you can populate the dungeon with a certain amount of monsters and hazards "for free", but to put a fifth Dark Elf Sniper in the encounter in the third room, or to enable the Frostbolt ability on your Lich boss, is going to cost "DM points". To earn DM points, you have to place treasure in the dungeon, and when the players discover it, you get your points. Conceptually, it's a neat sort of push/pull where it's adversarial, but there are strict limits on how much of a dick you can be. It's also in a way self-scaling in that in order to be more of a dick, you have to give the players stuff that gives them a better fighting chance against your dickery.
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Apr 1, 2016 16:46
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So this might be a stupid question, but I'm going to ask it anyway: I've had some fairly good success scheduling weekly TRPG games with you good folk on the internet, and it got me thinking about doing the same but for video games. Like, let's play a game of compstomp Age of Empires at this time and day, or lets meet every week for 2 hours to slowly work through an RPG cooperatively. It never really occurred to me, but does that make sense? Am I just overthinking this?
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Apr 5, 2016 18:27
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A "best-of" collection of 4th Edition would include, at the minimum: Player's Handbook 1 - all the basics Player's Handbook 2 - the new armors introduced here are necessary for proper gear scaling, and the new classes are very good Monster Vault - has all of the iconic monsters and with a comprehensive level spread, but with the corrected monster math from Monster Manual 3 It gets a little bit more complicated after that. Dungeon Master's Guide 1 has great advice for running and managing games (any TRPG really, not even just D&D), but all of the mechanical stuff is out of date and needs to be disregarded. The DMG 2 also has some excellent adventure plotting advice (written by Robin D Laws of Pelgrane Press no less), but again you can't use most of its rules directly. Essentials Dungeon Master's Kit OR Rules Compendium has the updated mechanics rules like reasonable skill check DCs, and the easier to use, randomly-rolled treasure system, but its all dry mechanics and doesn't have the practical advice that DMGs 1 and 2 have. The advantage of the Essentials Dungeon Master's Kit specifically is that it also comes with the Reavers of Harkenwold adventure, which I'll get into later. The advantage of the Rules Compendium is that it's cheaper since it specifically only covers rules. The Dark Sun Campaign Setting book has the rules for Inherent Bonuses, which I'd consider critical to ensure that players are never screwed over on their gear. Player's Handbook 3 has the Versatile Expertise feat, which is a critical feat tax. Heroes of the Fallen Lands OR Heroes of the Forgotten Kingdoms has the Improved Defenses feat, which is a critical feat tax; they also have Expertise feats for specific weapons, as well as the Melee Training feat, which is a critical feat tax for several builds. Technically, those books in the preceding paragraph aren't necessary if you're going to use the 1-2 pages in them for the feats and inherent bonus rules and nothing else, but that's the specific reference. For adventures, you're going to want to do a cycle of: 1. The Slaying Stone 2. The Reavers of Harkenwold (which comes with the Essentials Dungeon Master's Kit, which is why the Kit is an option over just the Rules Compendium) 3. The Cairn of the Winter King 4. Madness at Gardmore Abbey That will take characters from level 1 all the way to level 8, which is arguably the sweet spot of the system, and while using the best-written adventures of the lot.
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Apr 6, 2016 09:29
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At the bare minimum, you still need the PHB 1 for the equipment lists, which aren't duplicated anywhere else except in the Heroes of ... Essentials PHBs.
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Apr 6, 2016 11:10
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Yeah as a DM I just use the Rules Compendium and the Monster Vault, and leave the players to create their characters however they want.
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Apr 6, 2016 11:59
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dwarf74 posted:I am not entirely sure, myself, that normal monster-building guidelines are sufficient to challenge an Epic Tier party. I mean, the math is pretty okay, but you need to get downright creative to challenge them. Yeah, you'd have to crank up the damage to something like a [5d12+16] danage at-will for a level 25, whereas an MM3 level Drow Archmage has an at-will for [4d8+15]. And even then you'd still have to be creative insofar as getting past all the interrupts and triggers anyway.
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Apr 6, 2016 18:27
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potatocubed posted:Questions for the Roll20 users among you: How normal is it to use it without video? And how about without video or audio, just communicating in the text chat? I've run all my games through roll20, and I've only had the webcam activated once, and only because the other users had it on. Every other time has been just through audio. I tried running games through text chat, and it's a lot slower and I'd avoid it unless my only other option was PbP.
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Apr 7, 2016 10:51
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Is it just me or can you not buy the original Apocalypse World anymore. I guess it's because the 2nd Edition is in production?
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Apr 8, 2016 08:23
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Is there a game for people who want to try miniatures wargame rules, but don't have the werewithal to buy/make/paint miniatures? I'm interested in the idea of pushing toy soldiers around and determining line of sight with rulers and string and resolving shots via dice rolls, but I don't actually have any minis and seriously doubt I could get any at a reasonable price where I live.
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Apr 9, 2016 10:24
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I've heard a lot of good things about One Roll Engine as an attempt by Stolze to create a dice mechanic that made sense and was mathematically sound after his experiences with World of Darkness, and that you could use the ORE's two-dimensional-ness to do things like resolve to-hit and damage in one go. The book is just a bit long, and I haven't really been able to wrap my head around how it would practically play yet.
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Apr 12, 2016 09:13
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http://www.wargamer.com/news/the-cold-war-begins-on-wednesday-with-the-release-of-twilight-struggle-for-pcmac/quote:Of all the board game ports we've been waiting for, none have created more anticipation than the card-driven Cold War title, Twilight Struggle. Published by GMT Games back in 2005, it became a huge hit and, until recently, was considered the #1 game over at BoardGameGeek (it's still ranked #2). It was in development hell until 2014 when it was announced that Playdek would be taking over the reins and over the weekend we learned that it's finally coming to our laptops this Wednesday, April 13.
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Apr 13, 2016 01:25
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The current Humble Bundle is a set of audiobooks by R. A. Salvatore
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Apr 14, 2016 02:25
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Now we know what the C in WOTC really means 
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Apr 14, 2016 12:29
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Can I just say that I'm glad I don't use webcams when playing games online because it hit 110 degrees today.
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Apr 15, 2016 06:21
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paradoxGentleman posted:I mean, is it written somewhere that an ability score must not be equal to the bonus it provides? Can't a game have a character that has Strenght +2, and does that not contitue an ability score? And it uses a saving throw/damage track system so that HP doesn't need to be calculated either: whenever a character is hit, the target must make a Toughness saving throw against a DC determined by the attacker's weapon and STR. Each failed Toughness save imposes a cumulative -1 penalty to further Toughness saving throws. Failing by 5 means you're Wounded and take a cumulative -2 penalty instead. Failing by 10 means you're Disabled and cannot take an action without going into Dying. Failing by 15 means you're Dying and must make CON checks to stay alive. Failing by 20 means you're Dead. Actually, thinking about it, I think True20 works out in such a way that you don't even need any dice beyond a single d20 for everyone.
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Apr 17, 2016 02:37
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Tunnels and Trolls and at least one version of GURPS ties spellcasting with strength/fatigue such that wizards also need to be big and burly so that they don't tire out after casting one spell.
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Apr 18, 2016 05:00
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On the topic of fun, RPPR did have a recent episode on the "8 kinds of fun", which I thought was really insightful as far as defining what a game actually provides, or spelling out to your playing group just what you want to get out of a game so that all of your expectations are aligned.
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Apr 24, 2016 01:50
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Lemon-Lime posted:Again, though, the GM should really be checking with their players what kind of game they want (RP-heavy vs. rules-heavy). Related to the post I made earlier, the way I would frame the question would be to try to find the kind of game not from a rules-heavy/rules-lite spectrum, but from a subject matter and theme POV. When I introduced one group of friends to TRPGs, I used Basic D&D but started emphasizing the combat rules and the tactical combat once it became clear to me that that was more what they were interested in, but for a different group I simplified the combat and played up the RP aspect when they kept wanting to talk to and negotiate with everyone and kept avoiding conflict. The former group would probably have enjoyed 4th edition more, while the latter group maybe could have a better time with DW or even FATE. chaos rhames posted:Just remember as a GM to use all that clunky-seeming stuff about threats and agendas because it's real hard to do everything on the fly without something concrete to fall back on. This was a mistake I made trying to run PBTA, so yeah, seconding this.
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Apr 25, 2016 01:13
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Lemon-Lime posted:While this is good practice if everyone has already agreed on a specific game they want to play and you're doing this to tailor that game to their tastes, I wouldn't recommend doing it over just picking a system that will do what your players want it to do out of the box, without requiring the DM to kludge it, especially if the DM is also new. But I think we do end up recommending "what's a good beginner game?" even when it's supposed to be a more specific question than that because you won't know what if a player likes until they start somewhere, and even then they'll probably play along with whatever you throw at them unless you go out of your way to find out what kind of fun they like, or it's completely unenjoyable.
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Apr 25, 2016 01:31
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There was a houserule I read once for playing Double Monopoly: you'd expand the board by overlapping them at the GO square, and then you'd make figure-eights around the track.
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Apr 25, 2016 03:24
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