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Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

LatwPIAT posted:

I can't decide if I think this is literally unplayable or incredibly powerful.

Telepathy stapled to a darksteel golem that makes you skip your next turn is faily costed at 3-4 mana these days, have you seen questing beast? Nobody bothers with 7-cost creatures that don’t outright win them the game.

Starting back up my trail of cthulhu group with friends soon & I just want to say: my favorite thing about horror is watching sensible characters realize that if they can contact the police, then the police won’t help them. One of my players is retiring their character for a new one so one of the other players will get to light a cigarette and say “go ahead, call the police...for all the good it’ll do.”

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Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
The math just works out poorly for GMs for hire in most places, I think. A few years ago there was a news article about a guy that did it in Toronto and his price was like $100 a session, which just isn’t enough after paying taxes for most people to live off of if they do 5 sessions a week. It’s above minimum wage in the US, but that’s not exactly a high bar.

If you wanted to do that kinda thing you’d be better off setting up shop near rich techies and calling it an experience with discounts for repeat customers

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
I felt like getting through the tutorial on hacking in shadowrun returns was probably the nadir. The rest of the game is pretty standard one-shot storyline with good turn-based combat, but the first bit was rough on me for some reason.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

This was my first thought as well. The illustrations are very nice & the puzzle is engaging.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
There’s that one page rpg, NICE MARINES, about space marines trying to help normal people but their bodies are built for war. But yeah without a comedy feeling it would be exceptionally hard to convey that.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

hyphz posted:

As mentioned, unfortunately it seems that Legends in the Dark is up with Mansions of Madness as a mobile phone game except you reproduce what's on the screen on the tabletop.

I demo'd Mansions of Madness at gencon for FFG the year it came out (ask me how many "experienced" games I taught) so I'm probably one of the only people who enjoyed the process of setting up 1E MoM, but it was heartbreaking to find out that the second edition got rid of the keeper player and just had an app handle everything. I think FFG looked at their reputation for having a large number of fiddly bits and physical tokens to keep track of things then said "a phone app could reduce clutter and reduce the barrier to play," which is good but ended up with this style of game. It's a shame.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
I’m pretty curious now about other people with aphantasia who roleplay. I find that it trips me up when I’m running a scene off the cuff because I won’t even think to describe large swathes of detail, like what a character looks like or the knick-knacks on a table that should key the players in that the hovel owner is a magician. But on the other hand my scripted stuff is really fleshed out and detailed brcause I have to “write through” it to get the scene. This is mostly unfortunate because I like to play looser and with less prep, but whatever.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

Mr.Misfit posted:

The game in question is a solitaire strategy game called "Rise and Decline of a Galactic Imperium", inspired by GMTs "The Hunters" solitaire wargaming series, but other than the
most basic strokes, there's little similarity. Think of it as a 70s style SSI boardgame. Tha explains alot of the small interlocking bits.

The game can be found at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1oOP8ZA8mPa7BcuavmO-xPegLLCWvMosG?usp=sharing.

Any takers?

Quoting so I can take a look later, though I don’t know that I’ll have enough time anytime soon. I would also suggest crossposting to the solo rpg thread, unless I’m misunderstanding & just need to wake up.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
My online and meatspace friends have absolutely zero initiative and will not start groups or do any homework about the system or make a character in advance, but if I schedule a time they’ll all be there unless someone gets a flat tire. I have one friend who takes initiative, but he runs 2 weekly groups continuously and only plays DND so we can’t hang out much.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
I have played at someone else's table probably twice in the past 5 years, and it's because everyone I play with who doesn't GM says that GMing sounds fun but they'd be bad at it, and also they don't have the time. I really think most people view roleplay as a fun little way to spend a few hours with friends but they view the prepwork as... work. Folks who view prep as fun in itself end up GMing, but if you think about learning a system as work, you're not going to do it in your precious spare time as an adult. I have a friend who runs DnD exclusively because he's already taught so many people how to play that there's no friction for any of his regulars to roll up a character with little help, and he's got the new player spiel down pat. Hard to blame him, to be honest.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

SkyeAuroline posted:

Where do you fall if learning a system and preparing to GM is nothing but work, but you still end up in the "have to GM it, unsuccessfully every time" bucket because no one else runs the games you want to see?

... Asking for a friend of course.

I think we have a mutual friend. This is the same drive that causes people to go mad creating wonderful works of art, and I desperately hope that our mutual friend is able to find joy in the work or release from the shackles.

I was TRYING to glide over the feeling I have that often this is work for the GM because simply nobody else is willing to run the game idea I'm obsessed with, but I don't think I can do it justice or it's an idea I want to be a player during or whatever. The best real advice I have for this situation is to either do the work with a light heart, or forget about it by writing a vignette that you want to see and moving on. It's not perfect, but take heart that stone tools can still build houses.

e:

Covermeinsunshine posted:

For me, best way is to set up npcs and setting and avoid putting much work into plot since players will get of rails as soon as they can and I tend to slap things together n response to their initial actions.

Yeah, the hardest skill in GMing for me is keeping the world breathing after the players are introduced to a scene. I think a lot of the difficulty comes from not having the right tone set with the party to inform the motivations of the NPCs. If I can write a sentence about what each NPC cares about accomplishing, then I usually do pretty well.

Chakan fucked around with this message at 15:38 on Jan 10, 2022

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

hyphz posted:

is there any system where there's a traditional GM/player division but there's multiple GMs? I've never heard of that outside some unusual con situations.

There's a couple, Everyone is John works this way I believe? There's also examples of tables that rotate GMing each session or each substory/dungeon etc.


SkyeAuroline posted:

I'm watching for anyone who has an actual answer to "ok, you keep failing at your favored hobby, now here's a step by step on how to make it work". So far it's just Cannibal Smiley and Serf doing that. (And I appreciate it, you two.)

The flowery way that I wrote about this problem the other day wasn't a dismissal or vague platitude. The answer to the problem of "I'm terrible at this and it's immiserating" is one of these three:
-give up and be a player in other peoples games - hopefully learn their techniques,
-repetition of GMing till it's no big deal to screw up and start again or
-quit playing altogether.

Those are the three, and the nitty-gritty beyond that is whatever works best for each step you're in. I also want you to understand that every person who's run a table can sympathize with the feeling you're loving everything up all the time. Even with old friends I still have to ask if they had fun at the end of each story. I actually hated GMing at first but felt I needed to, to get through a story I wanted to tell and I'm glad I did because now GMing is (mostly) trivial - even as I think I've hosed it all up.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
I made a twitter bot that plays The Warlock of Firetop Mountain via twitter polls, and I figured some people here might be interested, considering I don't think we have a Fighting Fantasy thread.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

Halloween Jack posted:

The best version of this was probably the Ancestral Relic feat in the Book of Exalted Deeds, where you got a special heirloom that would keep getting more powerful if you keep sacrificing money/items to it.

BoED wasn’t the one with vow of poverty was it? A friend ran a 20th level short campaign and I gave up after getting 4-5 characters shot down for being too dumb of gimmicks/potentially too strong (almost everyone else was playing “cleric who can only really heal” and similar so I wasn’t trying to push power) so I looked into vow of poverty monk because then I didn’t have to think about items and apparently people were really aplit on whether it was wayy OP or just a nice way to not have to worry your DM wouldn’t give you a +dex item.

For those not in the know: vow of poverty was just “get no gold, but receive decent stat boosts and a couple specific feats every few levels.”

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

Tibalt posted:

But none of that really matters because the people currently steering D&D (rightly) see 5e as an overwhelming incredible success beyond their wildest dreams, especially when viewing D&D as a brand. While we can quibble about why that was (a working online tool, PDF sales, and more virtual-friendly rules...), since 5e was at least partially conceived as a reaction against and return from 4e that means that 5e's success is defined as 4e's failure.

I’ve been wondering about the next edition of dnd because I realized 5th ed is creeping closer to a decade since release. It looks like wotc is happy to ride this wave of popularity by putting out splat books and improving the digital side of the game, so do people think they’re worried an edition shift would lose a lot of momentum?

I’m also curious what they would do with 6th ed mechanically but that’s a different question.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
There’s chase mechanics in one or some of the gumshoe systems I believe? I’m almost certain Trail of Cthulhu has a chase system revovling around dice struggles, making it one of the crunchiest things in the system.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
XCOM 2 does a good job of working through both of those issues, pods feel more fluid and you don’t conga line around like in 1 (because you usually start stealted) & most mission types have degrees of success or secondary objectives that often pay out as good or better than the primary reward depending on your campaign status.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

Tuxedo Catfish posted:

back in the day legacy / vintage tournaments on the east coast used to permit up to 10 proxies per deck. the thing is this was back when WotC was completely leaving the eternal formats to rot and nothing was really "official", i imagine that fell off pretty quickly once they started actually updating the banned/restricted lists and paying slightly more attention

It almost fell out of favor, but prices are such that people allow 10-15 proxies just to have in-person events fire. At least, that’s how it is in my local area. Naturally, almost all of the proxies I see are lands.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

habituallyred posted:

Twas Niven. There was a story about how magic was from the sun but some Greek Deity had decided to block it. But I can't remember more than that premise.

It got made into a magic card as an homage to nevin yrral.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
I’ve been mulling over starting a group with friends to play through some old dnd modules, like a tour of cool old stuff and discuss what’s good/bad about it. The big roadbump is that there are so many and I don’t really have a good idea of the landscape, so I’m asking here for some help: what modules should I look into? Want to generally stick to dnd but I’m not afraid of doing some homework for another system if it has the endorsement from people here.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
Thank you all! A buddy of mine ran Tomb of Horrors converted to 3.5 when we were in HS, and each player showed up with 5 characters that were put into a pile and if you died you just pulled the next character from the pile. I think there were a total of 5 deaths because we wanted to really explore things and weren't particularly cautious. I'll report back at some point with how things are going.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
Let's say you were having three friends over on Friday the 13th to play Wicked Ones, but then you thought about it and decided it was Friday the 13th so maybe you should run something else, like a fun horror one-shot maybe? Let's say you were thinking these things, what might you prep to propose to the group?

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

Absurd Alhazred posted:

I wanted the Ducks to join my Tribe and they just laughed at me. :smith:

For the best, if they do join then there will be strife between the clans because of their strange practices at some point. I think they always end up leaving.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011
I had a player once that was wholly disinterested in participating in anything other than combat. He wasn’t rude about it or anything, he just didn’t have anything to say - like he wanted to watch a little live improv before he played his tactics game. It was real frustrating, but I just had to keep reminding myself that he was happy and the others were happy.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

sebmojo posted:

has someone done nights black agents? alternatively, against the darkmaster (essentially rolemaster but with a few of the edges filed off).

NBA has been done a couple years ago. Looking this up reminded me to read through the dracula dossier f&f.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

Thank you, I didn’t know if I could find this but I really wanted to respond to that post with it.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

gschmidl posted:

Sorry to bumble in mid-derail, but Leperflesh has indicated that I might find some help here.

I'm trying to sell some miniatures at a fair price, but I have no idea how to figure out said fair price. Some of them are on eBay at :eyepop: prices, but that they're still there tells me the prices may be too high, so I'm hoping someone here can help. The second part is finding somewhere to sell; I'm open to SA Mart, but I've never used it. eBay is usurious with its 11% fees and I'd like to avoid it. To boot, I'm in Austria.

#1 is a box of Reaper minis, unpainted, from their first Kickstarter in 2012.



This seems to be this pledge, minus the weird biker lady.

#2 is a ton of the original incarnation of the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings tabletop game. German rulebooks.









Any help much appreciated - thanks!

I could not begin to help on this, but I want to say "those look good and I'm jealous."

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

Redezga posted:

Sort of coming around to accepting my main tcg is probably done in my country and feeling kind of melancholy about it.



That’s tough, but it looks like you’re learning a lot about organizing around the game and that can help if you want to stay at it. Just being known in a local area as someone who puts in the time can make a big difference if you move on from this tcg to other games.

Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

mellonbread posted:

I had a similar thought about Dungeon Bitches. The dev posted the preview materials on RPGnet and all the replies were "wow this is cool, I'll never play it!" as though that was supposed to be a compliment.

There is a game I thought that about : Hungry Desperate and Alone. It was absolutely a compliment, but I can’t imagine thinking it about anything else.

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Chakan
Mar 30, 2011

Lemon-Lime posted:

e; oneshots are anywhere between 2 and 10 sessions, depending on whether or not the people playing want to keep playing longer.

What… hmm.

I’ve never seen anyone refer to a oneshot and not mean “meet once and play a scenario, sometimes we go really slow and have to do it over two days.” What do you call those?

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