Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

[The Rockafire Explosion]

what is your favorite version of dnd?

Either B/X or an OSR clone, or if I'm feeling saucy, ADnD 2e with the Skills and Powers add ons. They could add a ton of spice to a campaign, especially if you had players that were familiar with the system and wanted the challenge it provided. Of course, these options was generally superseded by 3.x and 4e, and I'm fine with those systems, but they come with their own set of problems.

Quick question; does anyone here know much about d20 Modern? I was trying to look a bit more into the setting, to get some ideas for characters; was looking for some ideas on firearms, in particular, which classes using what. Haven't found much so far, only thing I've found yet is this article from 2015 which has some very... odd rules on guns:

https://img.4plebs.org/boards/tg/image/1440/59/1440590549599.pdf

(I can get why Druids wouldn't like guns - hippies and all that - but why Sorcerer? Why does Rogue is forced to use only longarms or sidearms; why not both? You guys have any thoughts?)

Anyone got any suggestions on d20 Modern?

That looks like dogshit, but anything 5e related usually is. A friend of mine tried to run a pulpy 5e game and it was pretty much ass, guns were useless since every monster is just bags of HP and player options don't mean anything when the best thing to do is just increase your stats and wait for your class level ups. Somewhere in the middle of it he threw in some of the dragonmark stuff from the Eberron book just to give the players something extra to do, but even then 5e is just so fucking boring.

The original d20 Modern was actually an interesting idea. You didn't have traditional classes, instead the classes were focused on the primary stats: you had the Strong Hero, the Fast Hero, the Smart Hero, etc. However, you were encouraged to multiclass to make your own build and rush to a prestige class very early (like around level 4 or so) to start your actual career, becoming a Martial Artist or Bodyguard or Scientist. It also had a Wounds/Vitality system unlike the regular HP system, so that guns actually felt lethal. If you're unfamiliar with it, the way it worked was that you had Vitality, which represented your ability to brush off damage, turn it into a near miss, that sort of thing, and increased with your level like hit points. Wounds never increased and you only took Wound damage when all your Vitality ran out or you took a critical hit. Once your Wounds were at 0, you dropped and were bleeding out. In d20 Modern, guns automatically bypassed Vitality and did Wound damage, which meant they weren't fucking around.

Unfortunately, WotC either didn't want to push it much or didn't see a lot of money in it, as they took a very conservative approach and only released a few books for it, unlike the trillion or so splatbooks they put out for 3e at the time, and dropped it shortly after 3.5 came out. They took a few ideas from it later (Wounds and Vitality showed up in d20 Star Wars), and Spycraft used d20 Modern as a starting point as well; which, if you're looking for that type of game in the system, is where you should start.

 

[The Ugly One]

My big frustration with 5e was that the game makes it too hard for the players to die and the challenge rating system isn’t reflective of anything real. I solved this by throwing death saves out the window and making it so that you died after going to negative nine plus con modifier HP.

I solved it by having any multi-attacking monster use all its attacks on the same character, always. A hit on a downed character is an automatic crit, which counts as two failed death saves. This means if a dual-attacking monster downs a PC on the first attack, they get one death save, not three.

 

[Alabama Gamer]

The only player in my game who has actually read the Discworld books took a disappointingly long time to figure out who the scummy black-market techpriest called Reclaimator Dibbilius trying to sell them a "genuine Eldar laspistol" [NB: Eldar do not use laspistols] for "only 5000 thrones, and that's selling myself for scrap" was supposed to be.

 

[The Ugly One]

There is no escape. I started recruiting for Dungeons & Dragons and this is these are the characters a bunch of randoms from Roll20 made:
View attachment 6390659
Bland, disposable, what the kids these days call "freakshit".

I advertised the game on /tg/ since I popped in and there was a Gamefinder thread for the first time in 15 years. To honor the traditions of my forebears, I called the first poster a cuck and was told I'd "flagged myself as someone not worth playing with" for "randomly attacking people in the thread". Zero players from there. Joined the Gamefinder Federal Honeypot posted, advertised, got a single ladyboy from South-East Asia doing the laziest trolling I've seen in a while claiming to not be able to find or edit his sheet, which yes, I doublechecked it. His roll20 has way too many hours for it to be a real problem he's having. So I banned him and left the Honeypot. I got a swath of Roll20 Randos because my game at the advertised time is the only one that's free to play and not in chinese or spanish. Half of them randomly vanish and this is what I'm left with. No wonder so many GMs on Roll20 run Pay-To-Play. I can't imagine anyone looking at these characters and thinking it's worth even reading whatever pathetic tripe their players have fat-fingered into a "backstory".

Unsure if I should remove them, torture them or give in to my inner-jew and run Pay 2 Play myself. At least then they'd be fueling me with the alcohol and cigarettes I'd need to swallow the stilted, awkward, inattentive mumbling they undoubtably consider "role-play."

HATE. HATE. HATE.

Here's how you fix faggoty players: You kill their first three characters. Or rather, you let them get killed. Be fair. But disabuse them of the notion that a level 1 character is anything more than a nobody with a dream. You do this by opening up the early game with some harder encounters that they will eventually learn to run from. They will learn this by dying. After their third character dies, they will learn that your 3-page back story doesn't matter. Your character's story is their in-game exploits.

 

[Grotesque Bushes]

That was actually something I also should've mentioned; "Rules light" systems are suffering to run as a GM too. It's because each edge case is something they have to kludge a fix for since the design principle of stuff like this is "fuck it, the GM will fix it for the players". These systems are lazy, and expect the players to fix their unfinished shit for them.

Or, alternatively, you're not meant to have miles of autistic tables for everything and instead you make up a number and see if your player rolls high enough for whatever he wants to do. Same end result, sans flipping through books.

It also highlights the other issue in this same sentence: trying to turn these games collaborative.

Habibi they're collaborative no matter the design principles behind the rules.

It means the players have an incentive to bully the GM into allowing things they otherwise could either clarify or shut down in a crunchier system.

You're trying to fix personal issues with a ruleset. If someone is trying to make the weekend/afternoon fun into a struggle session you straighten them out.

In something like Pathfinder 2e, you had a far wider selection of skills and abilities you could draw on that would not require a debate or discussion to use for a problem. Same with Vampire. Same with Call of Cthulhu.

There's no debate or discussion, you state that you want to do X, the GM tells you if it's feasible, done. The DCC warrior's mighty deed is literally "do whatever in combat" - disarm someone, pin their cloak to the wall, blind them, stab them in the nuts, you name it. GM decides the effect, you're golden.
I'm in a pf2 campaign right now and I dread my character leveling up, cause that means more feats, more traits, more modifiers modifying modifiers and more piling bullshit onto a tedious combat system.

There are ways to make rules light systems work. There are ways to make crunchy systems work. The method is usually recognising what you and your group likes and picking accordingly.

 

[Ghostse]

There is no escape. I started recruiting for Dungeons & Dragons and this is these are the characters a bunch of randoms from Roll20 made:
View attachment 6390659
Bland, disposable, what the kids these days call "freakshit".

I advertised the game on /tg/ since I popped in and there was a Gamefinder thread for the first time in 15 years. To honor the traditions of my forebears, I called the first poster a cuck and was told I'd "flagged myself as someone not worth playing with" for "randomly attacking people in the thread". Zero players from there. Joined the Gamefinder Federal Honeypot posted, advertised, got a single ladyboy from South-East Asia doing the laziest trolling I've seen in a while claiming to not be able to find or edit his sheet, which yes, I doublechecked it. His roll20 has way too many hours for it to be a real problem he's having. So I banned him and left the Honeypot. I got a swath of Roll20 Randos because my game at the advertised time is the only one that's free to play and not in chinese or spanish. Half of them randomly vanish and this is what I'm left with. No wonder so many GMs on Roll20 run Pay-To-Play. I can't imagine anyone looking at these characters and thinking it's worth even reading whatever pathetic tripe their players have fat-fingered into a "backstory".

Unsure if I should remove them, torture them or give in to my inner-jew and run Pay 2 Play myself. At least then they'd be fueling me with the alcohol and cigarettes I'd need to swallow the stilted, awkward, inattentive mumbling they undoubtably consider "role-play."

HATE. HATE. HATE.

Assuming Roll20 wasn't total garbage I'd run prepay-to-play on that for the first couple sessions just by nature of "Either you show up or I get $20"

Anyway.
Tiefling looks ok. I'm more concerned about the chain border than the Bishi image.
Elf is fine (again other than bishi qualities. Other than the gosling chin that's fine though. its an elf.
Lizardman I'd take a long hard look at. Not jsut because he's got legbeard coomer pecs but because I look at anyone wanting to be a lizardman when there are dragonborn askance to put it lightly.
Dragonborn looks fine. I'd be concerned about the player because its roll20. but its not obvious fetish art.
Tengu the art is fine, but I have yet to meet a good Tengu player. TBF I've only met 1.5 bad ones (the .5 is one I told "no" when they asked, they changed race, but were still a garbage player) but they weren't even marginal and everyone on forums I've seen talking about their Tengu is always the most C H A O T I C N E U T R A L shit possible. like goblins and gn*mes with feathers.

I'd just move on. Time torturing them is time I have to waste. But maybe you feel different.

Or, alternatively, you're not meant to have miles of autistic tables for everything and instead you make up a number and see if your player rolls high enough for whatever he wants to do. Same end result, sans flipping through books.

I like having a good spread of common-examples to base my numbers on. Not only does it help but it makes sure I'm consistent - which is big part of the reason I dislike level-scaling DC in 5e (and in 4e to a degree; 4e module designers at least put a firm number regardless of level, usually did the ground work to explain what would be going on such that a lvl 15 would have hard time climbing a rope) - but it gives me a range to where I should put my numbers.

The 3.5 hardness tables are right around the sweet spot for me - a good spread of common materials and their hardness. the HP calculations are alittle spergy but they have common items pre-calculated. So even if the material I want isn't on the list they have enough examples to say "Smeltium is stonger than steel, but wouldn't be as strong as mirthral". If an item isn't precalculated and I don't want to calculate it myself, I can use the table to make a logical exstrapolation.

You're trying to fix personal issues with a ruleset. If someone is trying to make the weekend/afternoon fun into a struggle session you straighten them out.

You say the GM is supposed to straighten out the person using game night for working through the personal issues.
@Adamska and I are saying the game's rule set should make it so they never even attempt it.

The DCC warrior's mighty deed is literally "do whatever in combat" - disarm someone, pin their cloak to the wall, blind them, stab them in the nuts, you name it. GM decides the effect, you're golden.

The issue with this is that its too open ended for the average Disruptive Little Shit. They will continue to come up with more and more bullshit and elaborate JFK magic bullet shit their sword does.
"I slice their achilles tendons... IT SAYS DO ANYTHING!"

So now either you have violate the rule of "yes, and..." or you now have everyone else trying to turn every interaction with the NPCs into a 3 Stooges short. And again, god forbid you turn the tables on them...

 

[Adamska]

There is no escape. I started recruiting for Dungeons & Dragons and this is these are the characters a bunch of randoms from Roll20 made:
View attachment 6390659
Bland, disposable, what the kids these days call "freakshit".

Again, when I hear the words 'freakshit' I hear "I want to be a mud farmer that murderhoboes", since that's the source of where that comes from.

And honestly this is really tame, even if you use mudfarmer limits. The only real issues are the tiefling player might be an edgy blastcasting or knifehappy retard since that's the first assumption from Tiefling, so standard fare. You might have a possible coomery scalie with the lizardman, but that also can just straight up be a barbarian, so could just be fine, and a person who'd melt down when their character dies with the tengu/kenku character with their bird friend, since that's what I'm seeing there.

The elf and the dragonborn look fine.

I usually rely on how the players act tbh over race, since the player is the problem, not the race. Except Krynn races, all of them should be culled.

Unsure if I should remove them, torture them or give in to my inner-jew and run Pay 2 Play myself. At least then they'd be fueling me with the alcohol and cigarettes I'd need to swallow the stilted, awkward, inattentive mumbling they undoubtably consider "role-play."

HATE. HATE. HATE.

Turning a game into a job is suffering and would just make you hate gaming, and being a bastard GM drags you down to those guys' levels. Honestly the one taking an L here would be you IMO. No game is better than bad game.

-snip-

I'd rather a game with rulings for edge cases to be on hand than have to make the rules that should have been there in the first place.

 

[Lucky Coin]

But now that I've reached the level of internal stability I've wanted, I just feel burnt out by any and all human interaction on top of my own admittedly nitpicky weird autistic angle for this terrible hobby.

Just play some solo games. If you're autistic about how you want your game to run then play it in a way where nobody can fuck it up. It sounds like you don't really enjoy the social aspect of it anyway.

 

[#1 Hot Sauce of Kiwi Farm]

Idk I have not seen their character sheets and what they wrote I think this is more of a @zurncae issue than others I am not saying that Roll20 is not absolute trash though I do not know the perils of online first hand. (I am spoiled and have irl friends group).

Show us their sheets a picture can say a lot though maybe just maybe they were actually decent players. Acting all negative and coming in here complaining about things most people are already aware of does you no favors. Be more like Ghostse as most of the pictures seem fine though he is right about Tengu characters.

 

[2LtMashengo]

I advertised the game on /tg/ since I popped in and there was a Gamefinder thread for the first time in 15 years.

Did you make a proper ad in the thread format? Maybe it's changed since the last time I recruited off there, but I got an autistic internet racist to email me off my first or second post.

 

[AnOminous]

I had it down to a grueling science at one point. But now I think I lack the grit to push forward and grind out the bad randoms in pursuit of the few gems in the shitheap. I know I can run a good game. I know I can find good players.

That sounds kind of like tism. But I agree. I only could really play RPGs when it was with people I knew personally or in some formal setting like a pre-woke con specifically for RPGs where you'd see people GMing who had actually written some of the stuff you played. This was before this paid GM bullshit.

It was fun because it was with friends. Nobody would turn the game into a struggle session because they were somewhat invested in being friends.

I also had one game in high school where one of the younger teachers ran it (and had been playing D&D since Basic) and it was a school sponsored thing. The players were also basically the same nerds I'd always played with and it was nice to be a player for a change. As usual, I played an obnoxious character everyone else hated. You think the stereotypical Chaotic Neutral is annoying? Try Lawful Neutral. An obnoxious officious cunt who doesn't even have goodness as an excuse.

He also spoke with an affected, priggish, nasal voice, an affected accent, and obviously viewed everyone else with contempt despite being a complete loser and coward himself.

It was sort of an unofficial game trope that we all had characters that hated each other but had to cooperate even though we were all friends irl.

 

[Tom Bombodildo]

Do any of you niggers actually play and/or run games that you enjoy? Do you always hit your players up with this kek or cringe inquisition instead of trying to enjoy the hobby or find people to enjoy the hobby with? I hate theater kid tourists as much as the next guy, but damn, it seems like some of you guys are just incapable of having fun with a game.

 

[Road Work Ahead]

I've actually had pretty decent luck with finding random players even on Roll20. The key is to put something in your campaign description that will separate out the players that don't even bother to read it. This has the added benefit of weeding out the theater kids that just want to play their OC's. Also, be willing to play with only 2 or 3 players and take your time filling out the rest of the party.

 

[Alabama Gamer]

My players have started referring to the Navigator Sanctum as the "Navigoon Cave".

 

[#1 Hot Sauce of Kiwi Farm]

Do any of you niggers actually play and/or run games that you enjoy? Do you always hit your players up with this kek or cringe inquisition instead of trying to enjoy the hobby or find people to enjoy the hobby with? I hate theater kid tourists as much as the next guy, but damn, it seems like some of you guys are just incapable of having fun with a game.

Idk when I asked a question about spells I got a good answer and learned about things I forgot or did not even know about. Best suggestion would be for the people that are having trouble finding people maybe try to run a module with the other Kiwis which can either go great or crash and burn via uncheck tism if the latter happens please share it with the rest of us.

 

[Ghostse]

Do any of you niggers actually play and/or run games that you enjoy? Do you always hit your players up with this kek or cringe inquisition instead of trying to enjoy the hobby or find people to enjoy the hobby with? I hate theater kid tourists as much as the next guy, but damn, it seems like some of you guys are just incapable of having fun with a game.

We don't need to bitch to semi-anonymous stranger about the players we like.

 

[Second Missing Primarch]

We don't need to bitch to semi-anonymous stranger about the players we like.

I love my current players. They only cause me headaches when they latch on to some minor NPC and I have to do more work to actually give that character a personality and lines beyond whatever I had planned, and that's not fun to bitch about.

 

[Adamska]

We don't need to bitch to semi-anonymous stranger about the players we like.

I currently run a pretty fun dungeon-delve and safari game every other Friday. The reason it's not every Friday is because I share the day with another DM and am a player in that game (most of my players are too). That one's also fun as hell.

No need to complain and bitch honestly.

I've actually had pretty decent luck with finding random players even on Roll20. The key is to put something in your campaign description that will separate out the players that don't even bother to read it. This has the added benefit of weeding out the theater kids that just want to play their OC's. Also, be willing to play with only 2 or 3 players and take your time filling out the rest of the party.

In my experience, the best trick is to start off with shortie or one-shot campaigns. That way you can do quick games, figure out if any randos you pick up gel decently well, or if you think they're trash. Once you get a couple of decents and can hash a semi-regular schedule, you can do a lot.

 

[The Ugly One]

I play to make friends, not just to play, so my game is set up to filter out faggots.

 

[AnOminous]

Do any of you niggers actually play and/or run games that you enjoy? Do you always hit your players up with this kek or cringe inquisition instead of trying to enjoy the hobby or find people to enjoy the hobby with? I hate theater kid tourists as much as the next guy, but damn, it seems like some of you guys are just incapable of having fun with a game.

Dude it doesn't take an inquisition, most of these fucks will put their pronouns in their profile, talk a bunch of faggy troon/furry shit and otherwise make it really obvious they're not a good fit.