|
fool_of_sound posted:For real though, I've only glanced and Numanera. What's bad about the system? The tl;dr version of Numenera is Monte Cook made another game of Fighters, Rogues, and Wizards where caster supremacy is totally a thing and fighters eat poo poo, exacerbated by the fact that your attribute points are also functionally your stamina meter and maybe your hitpoints too? Which means that as your fighter does fighter stuff they actually start to hamper themselves and it's generally just a big example of "had an idea that sounded great on paper, is dumb in execution." There's some stuff in there that's like Monte Cook trying to do something similar to *World's character relationships except instead of "so-and-so owes me a debt and I intend to collect" it's stuff like "pick another player's character and when you fumble an attack it hits them instead," and also the GM Intrusion system is like if someone took a look at Fate's compels and decided to reinvent them as shittily as possible. Now I don't know how much of this applies to The Strange and how much is specific to Numenera, but Numenera makes a pretty convincing case that Monte Cook hasn't really advanced beyond "guy whose salad days were reinventing D&D with various caster buffs added and a great new idea called passive perception."
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2016 06:07
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:47 |
|
|
There's also a more extensive F&F writeup of Numenera itself that goes over its rough spots in greater detail.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2016 07:13
|
|
|
To be fair, Planescape Torment's gameplay was also kinda lovely to "just there" but that's not why it's fondly remembered anyway, so.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 17, 2016 07:23
|
|
|
oriongates posted:"White Bread Fantasy" is exactly what's best for a movie. I mean, unless it causes it to get written off as a cheap attempt to cash in on lingering LotR nostalgia three Hobbit movies too late.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 25, 2016 02:29
|
|
|
oriongates posted:Which is a risk any D&D movie is going to run. Greyhawk/Mystara vs. Forgotten Realms certainly isn't going to change that. Well you yourself point out that Eberron isn't beyond the grasp of the average movie-goer. To be frank neither is Dark Sun. I agree that Forgotten Realms is the obvious choice because it has the most pertinent mainstream exposure of all the various D&D settings, though I'm guessing that more people who played Baldur's Gate have no idea what the Forgotten Realms are than do, but I disagree that "whitebread fantasy" is necessarily what's best for a movie period.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 25, 2016 03:06
|
|
|
My Lovely Horse posted:Okay, Klaus, you can play a tiefling, if you accept that every town guard, priest and blacksmith will want to burn you at the stake on sight. Because for some reason society in this polytheistic fantasy setting is structured very much like a middle ages Christian village community. Actually I think we did stumble over one main reason German nerds are so uptight about this. You US folks have way more of a distance to European history, we can't leave the house without something that resulted from it getting in our face. Nah, American RPers can be just as uptight about this stuff, only the version of European history they go off of is generally more "what I think I know from a forum discussion and a book I read when I was 12 which makes me an expert on the subject."
|
|
#
¿
Feb 25, 2016 22:17
|
|
|
That reminds me. The other day I was at my game store playing Netrunner when a couple of gangly looking late-teens/early adults in full-blown vampire dress-up...like, one of them was going hard for the Bela Lugosi look if Bela Lugosi wore a glamorous red corset...came in and asked the store owner if he carried bezzum. "I'm sorry?" "Bezzum." "I...can you say that again?" "Bezzum. You know, Big Eyes, Small Mouth." I politely explained that BESM hasn't been in print for something like a decade and that the parent company was long out of business, and that they could probably find a pirated copy without too much effort. I also directed them towards Strike! and FATE if they were looking for something on the lighter side that promoted reskinning and such, they thanked us and left. And that's my vampire story.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2016 00:53
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:OVA would would be what they're looking for, almost precisely. At the very least, it's full of Niko Geyer art. Yeah, I should have. I completely forgot OVA was even a thing that existed tbh.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2016 01:39
|
|
|
Strike! has rules for using 2d6 instead btw, it's listed as an option in the rulebook. I'm not crazy about 1dX resolution either but that's because given a choice I prefer a distribution with a bit of a curve. Games that make you roll huge dice pools as an attempt to make you feel like your character is super powerful can gently caress right off though, been there done that.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 1, 2016 21:09
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted: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? A cursory Google search suggests that what Gygax and co. wound up calling "studded leather" was probably brigandine, which is a kind of armor that's basically two layers of cloth or leather with metal plates (wait for it) riveted between them. So to a casual glance it would probably look like the armor was some sort of studded leather (though really swanky brigandine used velvet for the outer layer) but it's not.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2016 10:45
|
|
|
oriongates posted:Who else is going through an utter gaming drought right now? Other than a lone PbP game it's been months, maybe even over a year since I've played or ran an RPG. Even more frustrating since I've got a ton of games I'd like to playtest and its hard enough to get my gaming friends to try new stuff even when we could scrape together regular gaming sessions. Who knows when I'll be able to talk them into trying out my stupid "lets play D&D with playing cards" ideas. I mostly do board- and card-games these days, with a work schedule that prevents me from being able to commit to any sort of regularly scheduled RPG session whether it's in person or via Roll20/Skype. Also I'm not really sure I'd be interested in sitting in on the local RPG groups since the choices seem to be a monthly Pathfinder Society thing or games run by a dude who I got to listen to rant about rules lawyers ruining his ability to "tell a story" the other day so I'm content with my small handful of PbPs and the fact that I can at least get some other tabletop gaming in on a regular basis.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 7, 2016 22:39
|
|
|
Countblanc posted:
I'm not sure whether that or Immortal Dad of the Body is better.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 13, 2016 06:25
|
|
|
"Fantastic" isn't the first word that springs to my mind when I look at that art.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2016 00:46
|
|
|
oriongates posted:aside from the resolution I'd say the art seems to be generally of decent technical quality, just with some awful design decisions, especially the unfortunately moldy woman in the second piece. I like the giant Playstation 2 era fish which reminds me that Seaman was a thing that existed.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2016 00:53
|
|
|
TheLovablePlutonis posted:Don't diss Yoot Saito's and Leonard Nimoy's masterful experience for the SEGA Dreamcast I agree, it was an uplifting experience listening to Leonard Nemoy talk about how to treat your Seaman properly.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 14, 2016 00:59
|
|
|
To be fair, Kevin Crawford attempting to do Exalted/Dynasty Warriors in old-school D&D is vastly more interesting to me than yet another OD&D elves-and-dwarves retread.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 16, 2016 06:37
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:I had an idea for a game. Someone's going to link to that one comic about adventurers going into dungeons to find monsters to eat, which I don't actually have on hand, but I'll also mention that S. John Ross' fantasy campaign setting Uresia: Grave of Heaven prominently features "battle-chefs" as a character archetype.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 19, 2016 20:33
|
|
|
oriongates posted:Conversely, I don't understand all the people upset over the "death" of 4e. It ran nearly as long as 3e, and produced a ton of books while it was out. I mean, not as many as 3rd edition did...but that should hardly be a goal. 3rd edition was bloated as hell and its not like 4e was short on material by a long shot. The fact that new material isn't being created doesn't diminish the stuff that's already out there, all the books are still available out there and many of them are even cheaper now than they were in the past. The crux of the issue is the enormous amount of misinformation regarding 4E has so thoroughly poisoned the well that a lot of people who actually liked 4E have trouble convincing their gaming friends to actually give it a try because they heard that 4E was a horrible MMO WoW on paper fighters and wizards are exactly the same no imagination board game that gives you cancer. I got to listen to this exact conversation more or less play out in person the other day at my local game store. You can look at this as "but someone is wrong on the internet!" if you want to but it's clearly not the case that 4E is treated as "just another game, who cares," it's become demonized as some attempt to dumb down/subvert/kill/insert-your-windmill-here D&D and is consequently treated as some sort of pariah in a lot of greater elfgame communities (see Arivia's example, or the DCC Kickstarter where out of the blue the guy running it paused to regale everyone with the funny story of how he really wanted the frontispiece showcasing some 4E books being burned). It's also pretty obvious that D&D Next was a direct reaction to this poison discourse surrounding 4E which is why it walked back virtually every interesting thing the 4E team did in favor of an extremely tepid, anemic, and half-assed 3rd Edition redux, right down to making some of the same mistakes all over again.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2016 07:44
|
|
|
Yawgmoth posted:Because clearly My Edition is the Right Edition and if you like anything else then you like bad games and are a bad person who actively hates happiness. I mean yeah, I guess if you ignore the actual point of contention it looks like 4E fans are salty for no reason, sure. Fwiw I've seen the whole "show up to tell you that the pop tarts you're eating are lovely" thing happen way, way more from people trying to tell prospective 4E players that they should ditch it and play a real RPG. I spent close to two years moderating RPGnet's d20 forum dealing with that brand of bullshit in fact, and while I did see the same thing happen in reverse I saw it a lot less frequently and without the sense of it being some sort of organized crusade against the besmercher of Gygax's legacy.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2016 19:20
|
|
|
oriongates posted:Did 5th edition basically ignore 4e? Yes, it did. So what? No one's obligated to play it, and if other people like it more than 4th edition that just means they've got different priorities when it comes to what they enjoy in a game. Who loving cares? People who'd like to play 4E with their groups but can't because someone heard it's an MMO boardgame, for starters. What do you loving care?
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2016 19:41
|
|
|
Let's talk about what it means when a game is "dead." A game being "dead" doesn't mean that all copies have been scoured from the earth or that it only received minimal support before being swept under the rug. Especially in this day and age of digital storefronts and file sharing, it's probably quicker and easier to list the RPGs out there you can't find a copy of somewhere if you're determined. I can go to DTRPG and buy a copy of FGU's Aftermath! RPG from 1981, that doesn't mean there's a thriving and vibrant Aftermath! community out there waiting for me to introduce myself. Star Trek Attack Wing is still being produced by WizKids and you can still buy it on plenty of store shelves. Meanwhile all of 6 people attended the STAW Regional Championship in New York, but I went to a local X-Wing store tourney in Vancouver WA the other day that had 21 people in attendance. So a game being "dead" doesn't have anything to do with product being available or in production or the amount of product available. 4E has tons of material and there probably isn't a 4E player who won't acknowledge that fact. However a lot of those 4E fans will also acknowledge that 4E wasn't a perfect game, it had plenty of flaws that it would have been nice to see addressed in some hypothetical revision or new edition and that isn't going to happen now because the people in charge of D&D have made it clear that they'd rather walk all that stuff back because of people who have to have dedicated subforums made for them to yell about Damage On a Miss. And this plays in with the whole "well you aren't obligated to play 5E or Pathfinder" business which also isn't as cut-and-dried as it sounds, because a lot of people who'd like to spend their recreational funtimes playing RPGs aren't swimming in open, accommodating game groups who are totally down to play whatever. A lot of RPG groups stick only with what they know and in a lot of cases that's some version of 3.X and, more lately, 5E. Which means that you often have the choice between playing one of those two or not playing anything. This isn't just a 4E thing here either, if you want to play FATE or *World or Strike! or FFG Star Wars or whatever then you have an uphill sell to make, even more so if someone in the group happens to have heard that such-and-such a game is for idiot fuckers (or they've never heard of it and thus it can't be that good, or it has funny dice, or) and therefore they're predisposed to be down on it. "My group and I play 3.X/Pathfinder/5E because it's all we can agree on" is a pretty common sentiment.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2016 19:59
|
|
|
I'm not sure when in any of this I said that people are obligated to play games they don't like, only that I pointed out that the amount of vitriol surrounding 4E makes it harder to convince people...not even rabid edition warriors, just "I read somewhere that"...to give it an honest shot, and also nowhere in there have I suggested that people ought to try and convince their friends by making GBS threads over what they like.
|
|
#
¿
Mar 29, 2016 20:38
|
|
|
The best 4E video game is the Firaxis XCOM reboot.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2016 06:43
|
|
|
Helical Nightmares posted:
One of the few enemies from early 4E which got outright errata was Needlefang Drake swarms which were supposed to be early low-level enemies (appearing in Keep on the Shadowfell most notably) and were absolutely murderous to the point where there were numerous tales of sessions where half the party died or a TPK ensued because they got eaten by swarms of piranha-lizards.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 2, 2016 07:38
|
|
I don't recally any enemy in 4ed being as memorably annoying as loving Thin Men, but then again I never played 4ed so what do I know?
|
Evil Mastermind posted:He pretty much invented crowdfunded RPG projects, and every Reign supplement was Kickstarted and delivered, so yeah. He's a safe bet. The Kickstarter page also doesn't have any of the Reign supplements which he "ransomed" through Fundable or whatever the KS precursor was called back when Reign was new. Essentially what Stolze did was he'd write 10,000 words of supplementary material for Reign and then put up like a two week Kickstarter-ish thing to raise $1,000, or roughly $0.10 a word. If they met their funding then he'd release the supplement not only to backers but to everyone for free in perpetuity, otherwise he'd just...well I'm not sure what the other outcome would have been because they never failed to fund and he never failed to deliver. He did this enough to compile three collected books of the stuff he ransomed. So basically if you ever decide that you only want to give crowdfunding money to one person, giving it to Greg Stolze is maybe the single safest bet you can make, followed by Kevin Crawford who hasn't been in the game as long but has a reputation for not just delivering on time but ahead of schedule.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 15, 2016 00:49
|
|
|
dwarf74 posted:So I played some game called Avalon this weekend. I'm not much for party games, but it was goddamn fantastic. People play Mafia/Werewolf here all the time so I don't see why it wouldn't work.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 20, 2016 01:17
|
|
|
Play Kemet, problem solved.
|
|
#
¿
Apr 23, 2016 23:26
|
|
|
Wasn't Star Trek actually for-real accused of having secret Satanic leanings because of Spock's pointy ears or am I misremembering?
|
|
#
¿
Jun 7, 2016 09:06
|
|
|
fool_of_sound posted:That horse has long since been reduced to glue, and the glue sniffed by the people who keep obsessing about this kind of thing. You can ignore that side of things completely and the Knight is still pretty underwhelming even for a 3.X martial class.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 21, 2016 23:38
|
|
|
Yeah, I can't really think of there being anything worth going through Dead Man's Switch for if you also have access to HK and Dragonfall. If you absolutely have to play it then do so first because going back to it from the other two is only going to exacerbate its issues.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2016 04:08
|
|
|
kaynorr posted:I've always wondered what would have happened if Shadowrun had decided to focus on being crunchy gear/magic/mechanics porn instead of going the streamlining route. "My" edition of Shadowrun has always been 3rd, which (probably not coincidentally) was the last one released by FASA proper. But then again, I love a good complicated system (as witnessed by my love of Exalted 3rd) and I know that taste isn't for everyone. SR3 suffered from the hacking being bad and certain comat builds being horribly unbalanced, but as far I know (I'll admit I haven't kept as much as I'd like) the latter is still a problem even now. I think you've sort of answered your own question here. It's not like you can't look back on three editions of Shadowrun to see what happens when a game decides to focus on those "crunchy" aspects and the answer is that unless the designers really know what they're doing you wind up with a game with higher barriers to entry on both sides of the screen and an increased tendency towards navigating a minefield of trap choices and dross in order to play out the charop minigame. Designing crunchy games, any sort of crunchy games whether they're RPGs or board games or video games, and doing it well is really hard. And given how many balance issues and outright errors can be found within the SR5 core rulebook alone, I'm pretty sure that the answer would remain the same if Catalyst decided to double-down on crunch, not that I'm expecting too much from their attempt at a streamlined version either.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 30, 2016 03:31
|
|
|
unseenlibrarian posted:The next step, go full William Castle, install mild electric shocks in the chairs at the table for more realism when someone's attacked by lightning bolt, and drop plastic light up skeletons from the ceiling. This reminds me of the time, back when I was an RPGnet mod, that I had to shut down some dude soliciting instructions from other people on the internet for how to administer electrical shocks to his players to enhance the roleplaying experience, then he goes and posts in the QCS equivalent wondering why I had shut down his perfectly reasonable request for information. He just wanted to know how to administer mild electrical shocks, what's the big deal? What I'm saying is that you're joking but someone somewhere has actually done this.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 6, 2016 04:07
|
|
|
paradoxGentleman posted:Genius the Transgression is good. Yyyyyyyyyyyyeah not really. Maybe in comparison to other really dire White Wolf fangames it's better than the rest of the pack but that's a low bar to hurdle.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 19, 2016 18:39
|
|
|
Hasbro will hold onto the rights to D&D for the rest of forever, that's how they do. Maybe 50 years from now someone will make a series of D&D movies that do as well as the Transformers films at the box office and make eleventy hojillion dollars, that's basically how they look at it. Even if D&D continues its steady decline into two guys working out of a supply closet they'll hang onto it purely for IP monetization purposes unless someone were to offer them a frankly ludicrous amount of money which nobody in the hobby has.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 22, 2016 07:07
|
|
|
I think saying that Strike! is "full of memes" is also a pretty weird and not entirely accurate criticism but I also don't really have enough of an investment in this particular race to go combing through the pages to gather an accurate assessment of its meme-per-page ratio (there's the thing that references Bender, and there's a BMX Bandit joke in the tagline for the Summoner class, that's all I can remember off the top of my head).
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2016 10:13
|
|
|
Nancy_Noxious posted:One thing the shift from 4e to Next taught us is that criticism of games with progressive design does not need to be accurate, a crass exaggeration will do. Arivia's rants about Strike! are a fine example. You are maybe the last person posting to the Something Awful Traditional Games Forum in a position to be calling other people out for innacuracies and crass exaggerations.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 24, 2016 10:28
|
|
|
Kestral posted:Aaron Sorkin just finished AMA in which someone asked him how much he knows about his characters before the show begins. His answer is a great thing to show anyone who's hung up on extensive backstories for their PCs or, more broadly, on the idea of characters being somehow distinct from their players ("I'm just doing what my character would do!"). This is basically how I've handled character backstories for years now, I can't imagine actually doing the "write up a two page history for a character I'll play for three sessions before the game folds" thing anymore.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 27, 2016 01:29
|
|
|
Also while I'm sure some folks will brush this off as irrelevant compared to gameplay it's worth noting that Sentinels of the Multiverse has unquestionably some of the worst art to be found in a contemporary traditional game. I'm talking sub-DeviantArt tier bad.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2016 01:36
|
|
|
unseenlibrarian posted:This is what has me dubious about the RPG despite otherwise looking forward to a new gimmick-y superhero RPG from Cam Banks with some of Marvel Heroic's DNA in it. There are so many superhero RPGs out there I can't understand why you'd want a Sentinels one. Like, the IP itself is nothing but a bunch of thinly veiled pastiches of extant superheroes all smashed together. Hey, here's a Batman-alike, over there is not-Jonah Hex, oh look it's Plausibly Deniable Green Lantern, together they're fighting I Can't Believe It's Not Ultron. Like Cam Banks is a cool dude and all but poo poo, just files Marvel Heroic, it's not even like you can legally buy it anymore so no one's even getting ripped off.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2016 01:53
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:47 |
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:Because some people like the setting and want a dedicated RPG? My point is there is no setting. The "setting" for Sentinels of the Multiverse, insofar as I've gleaned from the times I've played it, is "a bunch of legally distinct superhero facsimiles team up and fight random badguys, to the tune of awful art." Maybe I'm missing out on all the rich and deep Sentinels lore that exists out there somewhere, perhaps there's a thriving fanfiction community I'm unaware of, but somehow I doubt it so I'm going to stand by my question, thanks.
|
|
#
¿
Jul 29, 2016 02:45
|
|