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Do you guys think the greater druid community would be for or against nuclear power plants? I think the relatively low footprint of uranium mining compared to fossil fuels means that fey creatures with any intelligence ought to be on board.
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May 29, 2018 02:33
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Pham Nuwen posted:I would think the elemental plane of fire should be able to power steam turbines quite handily.
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May 29, 2018 03:20
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I've definitely seen the topic come up in the industry thread, I think it'd be nice to keep it there instead of here or the 5e thread.
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May 29, 2018 04:56
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Saguaro PI posted:I keep hearing that OSR adventures are amazing but every one I've read is garbage and boring? They all seem to fit in the category of A) boilerplate sword and sorcery poo poo with maybe a dash of Lovecraft if you want to call your game "weird"* or B) A classic children's tale but with violence and loving. Like, the OP asserts that the OSR's adventures are way better than WotC stuff but I haven't found an OSR adventure that's even close to engaging as something like Tomb of Annihilation or Red Hand of Doom or whatever. Even Paizo's overblown adventure paths have a bunch of ambition. The only adventure I've seen that even had mildly engaging elements was Better Than Any Man with the broad Wurzberg setting even if it was slathered in Raggi's wannabe artist provocateur bullshit. I think modules like deep carbon observatory are 100% brilliant at being evocative and interesting and not wasting my time at all. If you read that and don't at least "get it" I don't think you will find what you're looking for - it floored me that a module could be that concise and that interesting. I think tomb of annihilation is pretty good as far as wotc adventures go but they don't really compare.
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May 29, 2018 15:35
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I've been trying like hell to be a player in a game but my schedule is hard to work around and I'm thinking of just accepting my forever-DM role and running something here - I'll let you know? It'd definitely be, uhh, moose head style with either labyrinth lord(BX/1e) or shadow of the demon lord. (Which I think actually fits the OSR ethos well despite not being a retroclone and having more complex character building.)
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May 30, 2018 19:59
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Lol it's a little tongue in cheek because it's referenced way too often(see a few posts ago) but basically if the DM says there's a moose head in the room, you don't just say "I search the moose head", you say in what manner you interact with the moose head. If you don't think to slide it and pull on it and reach your hand down its mouth and all the things you might do, you won't find hidden things that require that, while in a more "modern" game, you might roll investigate and move on.
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May 30, 2018 20:56
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Yeah I'm assuming you want them to feel fantastic, but being overrun with ray guns and laser swords sounds a lot like being overrun with bows and metal swords. You could have them be fundamentally fragile or something if you wanted the party to constantly switch them around. (Limited ammo or a failure chance each round they are used might do it.) I would probably just let the party have and use them because they're cool.
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May 31, 2018 18:45
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I assume that means patrick didn't like what he made and doesn't want people thinking of that when they think of Veins of the Earth.  I can imagine being pretty sensitive to that, especially when that book is like, a cross-section of someone's very bizarre headspace like Veins is.If I wanted to speculate I'd guess that skerple's style is too mundane for him. Maybe I'm projecting since that was how I felt reading through that hexcrawl - it softened the bizarre hair-raising edge of that book, which was one of its defining features.
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Jun 4, 2018 15:42
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drrockso20 posted:Which is mostly because a lot of the people in the OSR threads on /tg/ these days are petty little assholes, cause most of Skerples stuff is good He still links to a different veins article on skerples's blog on his other page, and also to one of the other complete hexcrawls (a mashup of veins and his other bestiary). It sounds like he didn't like this one in particular, to me - I'm not sure how you can fault him for that even if you like it. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 21:41 on Jun 4, 2018 |
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Jun 4, 2018 21:38
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Yeah I think the idea is that you care about your little dudes and have to see some of them get murdered. It's not about having a lot of buttons to hit - combat in a level 0 adventure is more like, roll a dice to see who lives than a game of x-com - it's uncomplicated and mostly gets out of the way.
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Jun 5, 2018 21:33
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The others can stick around in some capacity as part of the troupe and replace characters who die. Presumably they all still have shared purpose to some degree, makes sense that they'd keep working together. It'd probably depend on how they met - if they banded together when their settlement was destroyed they could work on building a new settlement and act as town NPCs and the like. They manage to save the blacksmith? The town has a blacksmith once he can build a forge, etc.
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Jun 6, 2018 01:51
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Pollyanna posted:I was under the impression that BX/BECMI was less complicated and more streamlined than AD&D, hence “basic”. Did I get that backwards?
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Jun 13, 2018 18:53
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lol I mean it's good to give some personality to your pawns, that will make it a little funnier or more horrifying when they're brutally killed
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Jun 25, 2018 15:16
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gotta look forward to that sniveling baker getting his just desserts
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Jun 25, 2018 15:17
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Maybe one day the RPG community will collectively invent an RPG book that teleports you to another plane if you try to steal it. Getting back your stolen self-made in-universe map/guidebook to the deep carbon observatory sounds like the start to a good sequel adventure though so at least there's that.
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Jun 28, 2018 03:12
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lol it's not like the absolute time amounts matter anyway...making distances anything other than abstract tiles was a mistake
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Jun 28, 2018 20:18
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Elephant Parade posted:
1 square yard, hereafter referred to as 1
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Jun 28, 2018 20:29
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I really like the maze fwiw. Most of that criticism seemed pretty fair, though I think the issues are worse in WotC modules. At the very least, Storm King's Thunder is really weak in the hook department - I basically had to write my own stuff to get players to care to take up the giant issue "in the large". The "main story" opens with a single encounter and a couple of weak quest hooks and just throws the DM off the deep end with a huge list of locations, just like MotBM. At least in the latter, the locations are interesting. SKT feels like it has paragraphs and paragraphs about the inane history of some tavern in a mountain town with no reason to go there, let alone anyone to tell the characters the pointless stuff you just read. It's bad. Meanwhile, at the very least the maze doesn't waste my time, it's terse in all the right ways to evoke a specific mood for a given area or room and gives me enough to work with and nothing extraneous. It feels like, in SKT, 1 in every 10 sentences is useful or interesting, and I don't know the ratio for the maze, but it's much better. I do think a lot of the issue could have been relieved with a little bit of text up front. Would a page explaining "you go here for the treasure" have made the reviewer stop and run something else? I don't know, but it couldn't have hurt. *I* certainly had different expectations of the two going in - SKT promises a grand world-saving narrative and I feel it doesn't deliver particularly well, while the maze is a dungeon with cool stuff in it. That said, I also don't think generating hooks is very hard compared to interesting NPCs or encounters or rooms or whatever - the part the maze leaves out is the easy part. I could never write NPCs or encounters like patrick stuart does, that's the thing the module provides to me that I could never do on my own. I didn't really feel like there was anything in SKT like that - the maps and art save time but are not exactly mindblowing, and the encounters are kind of a snooze-fest and again - the first major section, spanning two milestone levels, doesn't really provide any maps anyway. I agree that the almery is the weakest part. I'm curious what he made in lieu of it if I ever end up running more of the maze. (I did it as a side thing on a couple absentee days.) It's weird that he quoted Zak as a way to point out a contradiction from a post that was literally Zak copping to that very criticism and providing an additional random monster table to use in lieu of chameleon women. His game would have been better if he had used the rest of the post! I'm fine with some of the complaints, like running away from monsters being a solution to most of them - that's kinda my jam tbh. PS please do not buy anything that gives money to zak, pirate this if you want to see it
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Jul 18, 2018 17:01
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thefakenews posted:The backstory to B2 is thin, but there's a clear hook of finding a place that holds various treasure, and also wanting to hold off the forces of chaos from the Keep (and civilisation generally). There's also a rumour table that generates additional hooks for the PCs, and that interact in potentially interesting ways with the reality of the keep. There are various NPCs in the keep, in the wilderness and in the Caves who have established motivations when interacting with the PCs. That includes the various faction based motivations of humanoid enemies, which in my experience leads to interesting roleplay encounters. There are also various Dungeon encounters that have interesting setups and interaction opportunities (like the ogre and the medusa). Those are all story elements to me.
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Jul 21, 2018 16:52
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thefakenews posted:I mean, the review might be totally inaccurate when it says MotBM needs more story; I haven't read, and likely never will, enough of the module to say how much story it contains. But I do think B2 does contains meaningful story content. I don't think it's invalid criticism and I don't think they're asking for a linear plot, I'm just guessing from the review that they wouldn't like B2 either. I think the maze could have used more interactions and things that happened with or without the players than it had, but that doesn't mean they weren't there at all. To compare with the author's other work, deep carbon observatory had a (compelling and dark) section on what would happen if the characters do nothing and there truly is no answer there in the maze... I think they'd continue waiting for someone to interact with them? The two are very different styles of module and I'm 100% okay with pure sandbox adventures existing but I understand not liking it. Like I think a lot of his criticisms would apply to other sandboxes also, hot springs island comes to mind. There's more stuff that interacts with each other there but I don't think the hook for PCs is very strong either. An internet community based on liking certain things getting defensive when those things are criticized is... unsurprising. I don't think it'd be that hard to get that reaction from some folks here.
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Jul 21, 2018 22:08
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Yeah I honestly I doubt I'd ever roll on that last column - In my game I've been using her as a way to turn stuff into gold, and gold into xp. My players were telling everyone they meet that "this place is scheduled for demolition".
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Jul 22, 2018 13:32
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Deep Carbon Observatory
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Jul 26, 2018 23:21
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remusclaw posted:The OSR exists solely because people decided that the dead supplement mills for ancient games needed to be brought back into working order. It has resulted in a glut of publishing near equal to the D20 boom.
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Jul 27, 2018 20:13
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dwarf74 posted:It's like, I'm trying to imagine a situation where I'd present my players with a petrified penis of any kind as a treasure item. *the monks lead you down a well-decorated corridor, through an ornate set of doors* "This is our most sacred altar" the abbot says deliberately. "Be respectful." DM: Here's a picture of what you see *shows photo of what is obviously a large gold-laden stone penis sitting on a decorative altar* The abbot describes it's history and creation myth and all that but never acknowledges that it's a penis at all. He acts flustered and offended if it's brought up and has some other explanation for why it looks that way. The penis has the power to "turn" small size humanoid males as a level 4 cleric or something. The abbot explains this power but once again, does not acknowledge the metaphor or phallic nature of the thing.
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Aug 10, 2018 18:18
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I don't think that kind of hyperbole serves anyone.
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Aug 11, 2018 07:44
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Yeah I think your best bet is accepting that the title of the book/pdf is "dark dungeons" or "labyrinth lord" instead of dungeons and dragons. You can explain that they are indeed repackaged dnd and still call it dnd in your elevator pitch if you want.
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Sep 6, 2018 22:16
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Yeah that's pretty overtly offensive to me - why would you have to roll for that? How could it fail?
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Sep 12, 2018 20:01
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Lumbermouth posted:These Super-Simple Combat Maneuvers. Disarming or knocking people down in RPGs should be just as easy as trying to kill people. If it was "you do the maneuver on-hit instead of your damage" or "you do the attack plus the maneuver and roll at a penalty" I'd be okay with it but on-crit-only seems...constraining.
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Oct 15, 2018 20:51
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The set of adversarial DMs form a third team and if no team manages to finish the dungeon, they win the tournament.
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Oct 15, 2018 20:54
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Impermanent posted:this seems like a misreading? They're explicitly on crit UNLESS the given enemy or player would rather take the maneuver than the damage. So you can't get extra damage out of the system, but you could disarm someone or grapple or push someone if they're afraid of taking your damage for one reason or another.
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Oct 15, 2018 21:16
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Memnaelar posted:After reading Blue Medusa, Veins of the Earth, and Deep Carbon, I gotta say...
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Nov 8, 2018 22:46
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New Patrick Stuart kickstarter out, sounds as bizarre as can be expected. Into the Odd rules are baked in, presumably with a custom chargen table for the module. Titans are awakening and will destroy the world unless you go into their minds and put them back to sleep. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pandesmos/silent-titans
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Dec 10, 2018 18:21
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I backed patrick stuart's silent titans kickstarter, which sounds like the most bizarre trippy module imaginable. I'll pay for anything that guy makes. I've also been reading Ultraviolet Grasslands, a trippy module where the party does a point crawl with a caravan over a massive steppe. It's like oregon trail on acid so far.
Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 21:13 on Dec 28, 2018 |
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Dec 28, 2018 21:08
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It's okay.
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Jan 22, 2019 04:51
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I ran the start of Anomalous Subsurface Environment tonight in BX. It went great! Only got two players on superbowl sunday so I gave them scarlet heroes fray dice and damage rules. The module, or at least the upper floor, was super easy to run and the map is pretty condusive to adding roll20 dynamic lighting. The party found a group of 10 badly jury-rigged robots, who initially were inclined to turn the PCs' bones into replacement parts. Instead the party managed to convince them to join together to take down a big abomination robot with like, 4 legs and many arms all swinging blades. The robots have now outfitted themselves with his parts, including thick armor plating and extra arms, and they can count on the PCs as friends, which is the most important power of all. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Feb 4, 2019 |
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Feb 4, 2019 07:25
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andrew smash posted:Anybody backing the ultraviolet grasslands Kickstarter?
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Mar 21, 2019 17:31
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Helical Nightmares posted:Has anyone seen an Actual Play of Scenic Dunnsmouth or Ultraviolet Grasslands? I'd love to hear them. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB5UGJn1L98 One more week on the kickstarter for anyone who wants in. Jeffrey of YOSPOS fucked around with this message at 10:00 on Apr 6, 2019 |
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Apr 6, 2019 09:34
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Silent Titans is bizarre as hell, digging it so far! Ran the starter dungeon and it was quite weird but went over pretty well. Dunno if/when I'll get a chance to run more. My players are confused by titans, have no clue what's going on, and love the character creation.
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Apr 8, 2019 22:17
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alg posted:This looks like probably the best B/X clone, at a good price: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/necroticgnome/old-school-essentials
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Apr 14, 2019 01:44
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The Gate posted:So has anyone else in this thread played Forbidden Lands? My group has run through a few sessions now, and I've been digging it. Definitely has an old school survival bent, though the mechanics are nothing like D20. It's built on the same system as Coriolis and Takes From the Loop (to my understanding, I haven't played either), and it's been a fun survival and exploration hex crawl with terrifying combat so far!
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Apr 25, 2019 01:05
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