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Ratoslov posted:Yeah, I'll freely admit that Shadowrun has always been extremely fuzzy on the question of why you are Shadowrunning and why Shadowrunners exist rather than doing something more profitable like running small crime syndicates or selling hand-knitted scarves on Ebaybutfuture. Ah, I see you're familiar with Freemarket.
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# ¿ Feb 9, 2025 02:48 |
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PurpleXVI posted:Gnomes are now Tinker Gnomes, which largely means they've been infested by a terrible strain of lolsorandom monkeycheese 90's comedy. You see, because Tinker Gnomes build things, but sometimes they don't work, and it leads to wacky!!!!!! consequences! Rules for making gnomish inventions were added in the later "Dragonlance Adventures" supplement. I can't remember perfectly - something about a backfire chance that went down as you leveled and up with the complexity of the invention?
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DAD LOST MY IPOD posted:The Great Modron March Part 10: Way Under the Mountain Oh god the modrons remember random wizard bullshit! That was the only reason most wizard bullshit wasn't dangerous!
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Night10194 posted:For stuff that claims you want to avoid unnecessary combat, the published adventures sure do end in combat most of the time. It's one of the reasons I pay attention to characters' combat stats as much as I do; it's just going to come up. You can be more certain of it than anything else in a published scenario. Have you got access to a published adventure that does investigation well, or is that a general failing of the studio? It sounds like you might need a break after this one.
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So you talk about how there's all this travail and still no treasure, and I have a couple of questions: are there a lot of good things a big pile of treasure can actually get you in the engine, and is there any common adversary who's likely to actually have treasure?
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Night10194 posted:Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Plundered Vaults God save you, Night. You are credit to team. So did people just kind of assume that somewhere out there was a bog-standard fantasy adventure where the PCs help bail a hamlet out of its overwhelming problems that are nonetheless exactly as they seem? And then all go "well, that already exists out there somewhere, obviously, so let's change things up!"
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Night10194 posted:He's also talking to the angry ghost of his brother through the power of the evil cocaine cave, which is telling him to get the most metal possible revenge on Henri-Phillipe Are angry ghosts, like, a known thing in the setting? You'd think that would put a bit of a brake on the secret murders.
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Night10194 posted:It's a good work that engages well with the material and themes that already exist in Bretonnia. I think it's overall the best of the WHFRP published adventures, and I wish more of them were about you like it is. I wouldn't call it an investigation-based adventure as much as an adventure capable of being investigated, but it seems like a very good published adventure that respects what the PCs can do.
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Cooked Auto posted:But in reality there really is absolutely nothing worth salvaging from this adventure. The characters are atrociously bad, the plot is not there, the encounters are mean and spiteful, the resolution is atrocious and in the end the PC’s barely get paid too. What a great way to introduce people to this game and its setting and to make them want to play this, am I right? Ah, these are rules written by someone who doesn't use rules to play RPGs. They just make whatever happen and make noises that sound like rules being followed. This makes it hard for them to write down transmittable expressions of these rules, because when they try to match them up to the game as they played it, they have no idea how what they wrote down actually corresponds to what happened.
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Falconier111 posted:We get told +3 is the highest a stat can go. I can’t tell if that includes pluses on rolls. It does not include plusses on rolls; they go on top. This is why getting those plusses is kind of a big deal in original Apocalypse World - there are, like, two moves to do it spread across all the playbooks; Glitter Hearts is being a little too free with handing them out.
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That is much better put-together than I was expecting.
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Night10194 posted:It's also almost certainly after-the-fact rear end-covering. "Oh yeah we totally MEANT to design these to be dumb and bad!" is the kind of thing you say because not admitting you're just bad at designing them is somehow more important than how insanely dumb that sounds. No, Monte Cook really is that insanely dumb. He has no idea that mechanics actually mean things by themselves, rather than only meaning the things the game designer explicitly tells the players that they mean. This is why he tried to apply the Timmy/Johnny/Spike trichotomy for players of a competitive game to the options available to players in a cooperative game. Yeah, Timmy Fighter's real happy when his Improved Critical goes off despite it not even being 1 more point of damage on average, and Spike Druid is swinging for more as a giant ape and casting spells besides, but when they all get wiped out by giants because the GM was trying to take down a party full of Spikes and all the Timmys just got crushed, everybody loses equally! Nobody gets to come back next week with the same 10th-level characters and try again!
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Lemony posted:The game was published in 2001, and it is very evident. It runs on the BEER! engine, which I have never encountered before or since. I haven't actually played this game, haven't cracked it open in over ten years, and I don't remember how the rules worked, so I'll be figuring out if it sucks or not as we go! BEER is the engine behind the similarly forced-comedy game Kobolds Ate My Baby. Is there a large random table of horrible ninja deaths, by any chance?
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spider bethlehem posted:Thanks for doing this book, I've really enjoyed a vision into a very 90s transhumanism. It reminds me a little bit of the Expanse, where there's an aesthetic desire to look like hard SF, but then goofy poo poo inevitably happens because that's what the authors secretly want and doing orbital transfer calculations accurately to appeal to a vanishingly small population of nerds who will always check your work gets old real real fast. Honestly I think it's pretty sweet that the only thing people want from a sheep in the distant twisted future is more sheep.
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Quackles posted:
AW2E put the "be prepared for the worst" line at the end of most of its moves, including the perception moves. "On a miss, ask one anyway, but be prepared for the worst." I imagine to make it clearer that the GM has free license to come in and go wild on a 6-. Which is usually the case, though for moves that are happening in more constrained scenarios the 6- effect can get more specific. Like my own featuring Dante from the Devil May Cry series, the Style Gauge empties on its own so its 6- effects just relate to the move and don't give the GM a broader opening.
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Quackles posted:Like the GM principles, these don’t come with explanations. I would really argue that the main use of GM moves is to present things in the world for the players to respond to. Sometimes it's because they honked a dice roll and you throw in a threat or a loss, and the response to a threat or a loss is bloody obvious. But whenever it's the GM's turn to talk they should be throwing one or more GM moves in there, so the players have something to respond to when the conversation goes back to them. The GM makes a move that follows, of course, you don't go nearly as hard when Winnie the Pooh's gotten stuck in Rabbit's house again as you do when everyone's fallen into darkness and you're creeping along a cobblestone pathway from a forgotten world, lit by dying lights like distant stars. But if you don't give players something to respond to, they'll have nothing to respond to. But, wow, just principles and moves with no explanations? No threats, no locations? No sample threat/location moves? No fronts? I'm feeling GM abandoned. In games like Monsterhearts 2E they did tone down the importance of standalone threats, but that's because Monsterhearts is all about that synthetic teen drama and you don't need a big push to make that go. KH is way more a heroes-and-villains story, with the worlds operating on their own tempo for their own purposes. A threatdown would be huge, but... like, looking at the playbooks, were they expecting your playgroup to take all sides, have a couple people 'nort it up?
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Siivola posted:Super-Whizzard Class Hacker Hacking is really just rolling one stat, over and over again? Dang. I can almost understand why Shadowrun decided to have deck attributes play into things, just for variety's sake.
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Libertad! posted:Varasta, Handsome Idiot Dice Fox is perhaps the closest a deity can get to becoming a willful creature, for his portfolio of chaos allows him a wide domain of influence. He often takes the form of a tradewind vulpine in the Beast World, and unlike the other gods he can visit mortals and mingle among them, having a fondness for making various kinds of bets as a sort of cosmic bookkeeper. His three Divine Charges aren’t really edicts of conduct so much as explanations for his own behavior, where his only real edict has him act as someone earnestly willing to hear and negotiate the terms of any bet or contract. He becomes a deity of nature every day after 2 AM, representing the chaos of the wilderness and venerated by many (but not all) druids. Varasta holds in his breast pocket an envelope recording the odds of the bet between the sibling deities, and if any mortal were to read it it would collectively unravel the minds of every willful Beast. Sometimes he’s lost the envelope, but thankfully he managed to recover it each time. Please tell me that "Handsome Idiot Dice Fox" is an epithet flung after him on a hasty departure from one of his mortal sojourns that he reclaimed and turned into a bop, "My Stinkybones" style?
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Falconier111 posted:Speaking of which, the game sprinkles in a variety of rituals, complex actions that break from regular gameplay in a prescribed way (like minigames or cutscenes) throughout the text. I won’t describe all of them here, there’s not enough room and not all of them are terribly interesting from a reviewing standpoint, but I’ll bring up ones that have some direct gameplay relevance. Or I’ll bring them up if they’re weird; one of the rituals has the players go on to SoundCloud, use a function that lets them add comments at various parts of a track, and collectively narrate some climactic scene through those comments on somebody else’s music. What? [S] Cascade.
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Has anybody actually paid the PCs for services rendered so far? Aside from the coupon for ten free horsey rides, I mean.
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Payndz posted:There needs to be an RPG where you play 80s TV heroes who for some reason* find themselves dealing with the fantastical and treat it like it's Tuesday. Like the episode of Bergerac (long-running cosy BBC crime drama set on one of the Channel Islands where most of the bad guys of the week are wealthy tax-dodgers) where Bergerac was attacked by a Viking ghost. That's kind of the premise of Fate's Shadow of the Century. You're 80s TV heroes and occasionally things just kind of drift away from what we might call "consensus reality" thanks to a phenomenon called Variable Hyperdimensional Simultaneity. You may even have powers that can't be real unless you're operating at a certain level of VHS.
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Aside from the bit where the PCs are being pointedly kept away from the place they volunteer at, Weird Science seems pretty solid so far. Something intriguing to investigate, supportive but otherwise occupied local packs, productive investigation on a variety of fronts.
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PurpleXVI posted:Once again, let me repeat this: if the players fail nothing happens. So the players should just stay home and play cards. NO ONE REWARDS THEM, NOT EVEN loving ANUBIS WHO ASKED THEM TO HELP. "We wanted to put this in as a setpiece, but couldn't figure out where in the adventure it should go, so ENJOY YOUR lovely TWIST EPILOGUE" Has anyone paid the PCs anything for any part of this adventure, outside of whatever they looted from Orcus's sock drawer?
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Pakxos posted:I am sure there is better Pentex material out there, and I did like the W20 Book of the Wyrm, but I can't think of anywhere else that so thoroughly nails the vibe of 'Evil Dead meets Office Space' as Rage Against the Amazon. Though it does kind of make me wonder - how does Pentex, y'know, Pentex? It seems like the people in charge are a wonderful combination of amnesiacs, delusionals, and fugue states. Do they just pose as hard as they can in a boardroom all day and somehow vomit out steel and chemical precursors while they sleep, because Wyrm?
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Mecha_Face posted:Oh yea! Those Fuel Knuckles are... Not... Actually that interesting...? I mean, the concept of flamethrower gauntlets are rad as hell, but the actual product, not so much. The examples I picked above are probably the most interesting examples of each table, and almost all the other offerings are either "gives resistance to X" or "Does extra damage to X". This is what I meant when I say the game isn't giving much room for making anything really that cool or unique. Hell, the game's terror of bonuses means that all some Rare Items get is a +1 to Accuracy Checks. The GM can, of course, come up with their own ideas, and some of the Rare Items in High Fantasy Atlas or the playtest documents are a lot more fun, but in general this is what you have to work with regarding examples. As stated, the game's simplistic nature makes it tough to create interesting mechanical effects, because there's not a lot of mechanics to play around with. As much as I think the focus on feeling gamey on purpose is actually a good approach to this, it's a severe weakness here. A GM shouldn't have to be creative in the stead of a game, but that's really what's happening when it comes to Rare Items. That... sounds a lot like Final Fantasy, actually? I can't think of a whole lot of times where a character's story has been about a specific weapon, even for a little bit. Like, the nearest thing to it I can think of is Frog getting the Masamune. Cuts a goddamn mountain in half with it. That's the sort of presence you want a meaningful weapon to have in a story, yeah?
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A creator deity for whom the world was more of an idle fantasy that's now apocalyptically disappearing because it's coming to hate its creations is a pretty neat concept.
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So what you're telling me is that in the grim darkness of the far future, war has gone Moneyball? Always a joy to see those giant mech ransom notes, though.
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Thanks for your dedication on this. An editing error that bad I'd probably just have given up.
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I like that Lancer has a mech that's just a big Boston Dynamics dog; quadruped mechs need more love.
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Opsikion Themed posted:
...wow, yeah. I think I physically recoiled from that. That was the neatest part of Sorcery, how it tied into its culture of origin.
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I was wondering what they were going to do with all the globetrotting, and unfortunately it just looks like "not give it nearly enough consideration".
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My mind always goes to The Void when I'm thinking about game worlds without color.
Glazius fucked around with this message at 16:45 on Jun 18, 2024 |
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So if you get dealt a bunch of swords, you can make three attacks, one on your turn and two chipping in on somebody else's?
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What kind of cash are you expected to pull out of the dungeon? It can't be that much if 100 gold is a life of luxury.
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Asterite34 posted:Okay, now that we have our characters all set up, we can actually start playing this game in earnest after we briefly touched on it last post. First things first, take out the Jokers, we're gonna need those later. It is at this point the GP can broadly decide what sort of story we're telling this session, that corresponds to a single episode of a tv show. As you can imagine, there's random "draw a card" charts for this if you're short on ideas, or the GP can just wing it. It's a bunch of prompts ranging from "the local community center is gonna be shut down!" or "a love triangle with a Character of the Week" or "a superficially unpleasant person shows up with a weird hobby, are they as bad as they seem?" or "an enemy Commander is using a cunning and cowardly scheme to beat you," stuff like that. But this sort of plotting is less important than the Clear Condition. Do the numbers go all the way up? Like if the GP flips a king is everybody just hosed because they've got to win 13 tricks? Is the GP also trying to get the series canceled, in terms of their strategy in playing out cards?
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Asterite34 posted:Now, these don't happen all the time, thank God. So what sort of things prompt sponsor intervention? A drop in your Ratings. Remember the Unhappiness Gauge? Yeah, we're dropping the euphemism, it's just the Ratings Gauge now. It behaves a bit like the old paradigm, but instead of worrying about Unhappiness rising too high, you worry about your Ratings dropping too low. The formula works like this: Wait, hang on. Am I misunderstanding things here, or have you got ways to get the ratings up other than winning scenes with a particular suit? Because this just seems like you're being set up to fail. The net impact on your ratings is the total number of scenes you can win with a particular suit (at most 13, because you're playing through the entire deck), minus the sum of two random draws from the deck - one for audience expectation, a second one for the random ratings drop. So more than half the time your ratings are going to fall no matter what you do.
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The abbey's interesting. Do the PCs start out knowing where it is?
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I guess I have very different expectations of "a hex" from how this module stands things up. I'm looking at the overview on the itch.io page and those things are tremendous. I think of things like this, from the old Dungeon World guide:![]() and that's over 100 hexes but it's basically as many points of interest as one of the five hexes in this. I'm not complaining, it's just that I've been thinking of everything in "one hex" as all of a piece when obviously they're not supposed to work that way.
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EclecticTastes posted:You know, this is something that I haven't seen discussed much regarding TTRPGs, and that's roleplaying difficulty. Like, most discussions about difficulty playing a game revolve around the complexity of its systems, how well the math works, etc. But, as the enduring popularity of 3.5 and the past success of Palladium show, the system's functionality or lack thereof isn't that big a deal if the roleplaying is accessible. Games like D&D have a very low skill floor for roleplaying, basically anyone can show up and act like a wizard or an elf and they'll do an okay job, even if they're not the best to ever do it (and that's a good thing, you want most RPGs to be something anyone can pick up and play). But you get to stuff like Don't Rest Your Head, and, it's hard to even envision what "doing it justice" would even look like. I'll say now, Triangle Agency is a lot more accessible in that regard by my reckoning, but I think you'd probably want a table of fairly confident roleplayers who are used to collaborating even when their goals might conflict. If the group can do a really satisfying session of Paranoia or Fiasco without anyone feeling left out and with no fights breaking out at the table, that ought to be sufficient. Is it really that cutthroat? Everything's seemed a bit Happy Families so far, as far as PCs are concerned. Or are they competing for favor in an extremely office politics way?
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# ¿ Feb 9, 2025 02:48 |
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EclecticTastes posted:Whisper Oh, neat! I thought it was going to be all corporate minimalism.
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