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

[Alabama Gamer]

Any advices on running a Rogue Trader campaign? My players are like a herd of autistic, racist, megalomaniac cats, so I think they will find the setting and the freedom exhilarating, I just don't know if I will be able to DM it properly.

I just realized that I had this whole detailed thing and I never actually posted it. My bad. So anyway, here is Dr. Gamer's prescription for how to run a Rogue Trader game.

1) Rogue Trader is a game with a bad case of Main Character Syndrome. There is no way of avoiding this. Some character roles are going to be involved in anything (The Rogue Trader, obviously, but also the Seneschal) whereas other roles (such as the Void Master and the Navigator) have one thing they do and there is no character reason for them to be there for anything else. Especially not the Navigator, his job is to stay in his Space NEET Basement, eat snacks, and wait until the Rogue Trader orders a warp jump whereupon he gets to make half a dozen skill tests. If you can contrive a way to make sure that your most engaged player is the Rogue Trader and the least engaged is the Navigator, do it. In my group the Navigator is played by a guy who is regularly travelling on charity work and does not show up for sessions for months at a time. This is an ideal arrangement.
2) Have a bunch of "quantum troll" planets ready to go. Stars of Iniquity has some tables for random planet generation. Do half a dozen of those, and slot them in whenever the Rogue Trader points vaguely at the map and says "I want to go there."
3) Shower your players with goodies. In other games, "Monty Haul" is a pejorative. Here, it's the status quo from Rank 1. Half the appeal of Rogue Trader is the power fantasy, especially if your players have played Dark Heresy before and had previously spent months and risked their lives to acquiring a single item from a Rogue Trader character's starting equipment list. Use the tables for rarity and time to acquire, and if they fail an Acquisition Test they fail it, but don't be afraid to let them get hold of the good stuff. You can also "no, but" any failed Acquisition test. In fact, the book encourages this. If they try to acquire a thing and fail, you can give them options to do something to acquire it anyway that are more involved than a simple roll.
3.5) Make sure that you present them with overpowered challenges to counter their overpowered gear.
4) Always balance combat encounters to be at least 30% harder than you think they should be. It's hard to gauge unless you're very experienced with the system (which I am not), but generally, your players can always kick ass better than you predict them to.
4.5) The way that damage is resolved in the FFG 40k system means that action economy is far less impactful than in, say, 3.PF. You can't assume that more enemies is automatically a harder challenge. More enemies could just mean that instead of 3 successful hits on your players that do zero damage, now there are 10 successful hits that do zero damage. Go for quality of enemy over quantity.
5) Combat in Rogue Trader is a solved game. The solution is combat servitor with a multi-melta. Prevent your Explorator player from finding this out as long as possible.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

Does anybody remember this one TTRPG that was based off real world religions created by one of the original members of the fallout development team biggie's dead now

 

[WorldEaterChampion]

I'm going to give the Alien RPG scenario Destroyer of Worlds a run with some players.
It'll be my first time using the system, but I'm excited, it isn't particularly crunchy and so far all the books have impressed me with their depth. The other Free league games have all failed to interest me so far. I remember seeing the excitement when it first dropped but since then it's fallen to the wayside and I haven't heard anything about it since.

Does anyone have any tips for the system or scenario?

 

[Ghostse]

View attachment 6847016
I'm going to give the Alien RPG scenario Destroyer of Worlds a run with some players.
It'll be my first time using the system, but I'm excited, it isn't particularly crunchy and so far all the books have impressed me with their depth. The other Free league games have all failed to interest me so far. I remember seeing the excitement when it first dropped but since then it's fallen to the wayside and I haven't heard anything about it since.

Does anyone have any tips for the system or scenario?

From what I saw (having never read anything beyond a quickstart guide)
People liked the stress mechanic, but there's no/very limited character progression and so there is no way to really run a "campaign"; which given the source material makes a degree of sense - you RP your Aliens movie and then its over. Nothing else about the system seems like it made too much of an impression good or bad.

tl;dr: Its a less gay PbtA with a stress mechanic people liked.

 

[ZMOT]

Does anyone have any tips for the system or scenario?

I heard good things about chariot of the gods, but never ran it myself. might be worth a look.

So revisiting that idea for a Kiwi farms campaign setting I set out for some rules for myself.

you run that in FATAL or rahowa, right?

 

[AnOminous]

Are the Goblins all shouting MGTOW!! at the top of their lungs while wearing fedoras?

They'll speak in "dog whistles" and say absolutely insane things like "there are only two genders" and "Disney Star Wars sucks!"

you run that in FATAL or rahowa, right?

We actually had a couple threads where we "ran" F.A.T.A.L. tl;dr the system is so broken the GM has to cheat to get it even to work minimally.

 

[40 Year Old Boomer]

They'll speak in "dog whistles" and say absolutely insane things like "there are only two genders" and "Disney Star Wars sucks!"

We actually had a couple threads where we "ran" F.A.T.A.L. tl;dr the system is so broken the GM has to cheat to get it even to work minimally.

Worg Whistles

 

[Hepativore]

Alright, I have been looking around for guides on this, and I have not found anything specific for it, but are there any examples of tabletop games that do take sexual dimorphism into account in terms of PC creation and do a good job of it?

I am working on a setting that has a lot of different playable races, and I am wondering how this would translate stat-wise in terms of humans. Likewise, some of the other planned races would have very minimal difference between male and female while others would not even look like members of the same species. What would be a good setting as an example?

 

[JJLiautaud]

S

People liked the stress mechanic, but there's no/very limited character progression and so there is no way to really run a "campaign"; which given the source material makes a degree of sense - you RP your Aliens movie and then its over. Nothing else about the system seems like it made too much of an impression good or bad.

So its basically a less good SS13 Colonial Marines round.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Running a PF2 game via VTT, short notice. Dwarf NPC. No problem, just google image search "dwarf fantasy" and grab the first result.

Redhead woman, redhead woman, black woman, Gimmli, shitty AI, shiity AI of a redhead, shitty AI of a black woman, red head, red head, black woman, YouTuber. Tried other image searches, same thing. Even keywords like "pathfinder" or "dnd" didn't help. In the end, I just searched for specific games like Eberron and Oathmark and grabbed the dwarf art from those.

Also, I had my players encounter a 30x30 building on the road in the wilderness. What was supposed to be a quick fight to cap off the session was one of the longest elements of it. Spending almost an hour of them throwing stones at doors, peeking through windows, examining tracks, looking at rocks, turning over floor tiles.

Nothing else about the system seems like it made too much of an impression good or bad.

The consumables system got praise as well. Though I had seen it in other games. I forget the rule, but it was something like you roll d6 equal to the amount of supplies you have, and each nat 1 removed 1 supply.

Alright, I have been looking around for guides on this, and I have not found anything specific for it, but are there any examples of tabletop games that do take sexual dimorphism into account in terms of PC creation and do a good job of it?

Old DnD used to do that with male and female versions of races having different stat maximums. I don't know old DnD enough to know the details.

 

[The Bogwater Rises]

What was supposed to be a quick fight to cap off the session was one of the longest elements of it.

A tale as old as time.

 

[Ghostse]

The consumables system got praise as well. Though I had seen it in other games. I forget the rule, but it was something like you roll d6 equal to the amount of supplies you have, and each nat 1 removed 1 supply.

That sounds like the stress mechanic, but makes sense they'd over load it for supply.

I've seen that and I've also seen some OSR clone, might have be 5TD, where on stuff like arrows you roll 1dX and on a one your dice size is reduced a step. So d20 -> d12 -> d10 -> d8 -> d6 -> d4 - > d2 -> d1 with Initial die size is determined by a few factors. I've tried this a few times and its OK - it works a little less good in D&D because the uncertain nature doesn't factor well into D&D's more deterministic nature because the math is fucky. It also works better with things that are "found" not "brought" I tried with with the desert exploration game for supplies and the party didn't like it because they felt like random chance was fucking them too hard (when you added in the exploration deck) - two sacks of flour shouldn't run out at different times. They accepted that for water they'd feel different levels of thirst, but I think the variance was too great. So after a couple of sessions I just converted their supplies to solid numbers.
If I had it do do over again, it would have been good to use for something like oasises where the party couldn't be sure EXACTLY how much water there was. It could have been good for found supplies they brought back to camp, i.e. a sack of dates, maybe some of them have spoiled, but then you have the same sort of thing where they deplete at wildly variable rates (and shouldn't the ranger have been able to tell?). It also wouldn't be a terrible method of "You found some stuff, roll to see how much stuff you found" except that its a lot of rolling. But maybe you could do something like "you've found a lot of stuff, roll to collect for a [time period] and see if there is less stuff to pick up" but I feel like you'd need to add in some way of having the ammount of stuff you pick up variable.
Also it might have been good for abstracting out the journey to the desert base camp; the differing rates of depletion account for loss due to weather/vermin/travel mishaps.

I would imagine this or the A:RPG system would work very well in semi-narrative games like Cortex or would fit in fairly well with CoC except for that using all d10s, where the uncertainty and dealing with getting RNG-fucked is part of the fun.

 

[Judge Dredd]

They accepted that for water they'd feel different levels of thirst, but I think the variance was too great. So after a couple of sessions I just converted their supplies to solid numbers.

I had a similar experience with ammo in horror games. Counting rounds worked great for revolvers and double barrel shotguns. "You have two shots and one of them has to land" situations. As soon as automatics, or even semi auto pistols came into the mix, it was pointless because a combat never went on long enough for them to need a reload unless they full auto mag dumped everything, which they never did because they're not stupid.

I can see that kind of roll system working great for Aliens. "Remember, short controlled bursts".

 

[AnOminous]

Alright, I have been looking around for guides on this, and I have not found anything specific for it, but are there any examples of tabletop games that do take sexual dimorphism into account in terms of PC creation and do a good job of it?

At least in AD&D I just chucked sexual dimorphism for the main races because it did not add any fun. It really never even came into play.

In other games, Ringworld would be an example, the only serious cases of sex differences were Kzinti (the females are not even sapient) and the Puppeteers, who have three "sexes," but since they're parasitoids, the third "sex" is another species entirely that they implant with their offspring, resulting in the host's death, like digger wasps.

I have never seen a game that really treats the issue well because it's kind of a third rail. I never really thought much of Gygax's dock a STR point or whatever. Maybe it makes biological "sense" but it never seemed to do anything to enhance fun so I ignored it. I generally just assumed any heroes in a high fantasy campaign are going to be exceptional in some way. That's why they're called heroes.

And of the very small minority of females who took RPGs seriously, they seemed to fall into either the healer type or just played crazy berserker dudes anyway. One memorable one was a (male) half-orc assassin. I never really had this be an issue.

 

[Ghostse]

I can see that kind of roll system working great for Aliens. "Remember, short controlled bursts".

Agreed and (again, having never cracked the books) I assume that that's how it plays out for the pulse rifles & smart guns; make an attack, roll to how short your burst was. And given a magazine in the movie was something like 90 rounds, if you had an extremely lucky motherfucker who just rode the same mag all encounter, it'd just mean he's one-shotting aliens.

 

[AnOminous]

Agreed and (again, having never cracked the books) I assume that that's how it plays out for the pulse rifles & smart guns; make an attack, roll to how short your burst was. And given a magazine in the movie was something like 90 rounds, if you had an extremely lucky motherfucker who just rode the same mag all encounter, it'd just mean he's one-shotting aliens.

My CoC campaigns were pretty much like this. You had tons of guns. You had all the bullets you needed. When you were fighting other humans, well, you were going to win every time.

But then a shoggoth rolls up on you. Guess what? Your guns don't mean shit at that point.

 

[Generic Harem Master]

Agreed and (again, having never cracked the books) I assume that that's how it plays out for the pulse rifles & smart guns; make an attack, roll to how short your burst was. And given a magazine in the movie was something like 90 rounds, if you had an extremely lucky motherfucker who just rode the same mag all encounter, it'd just mean he's one-shotting aliens.

I've played some of it, and if I recall, that's pretty much how it works. There is some ammo counting in most cases, but if I recall rightly, rolling a 1 (the Facehugger on the official d6s they make) on a Stress die as part of a semi or full auto, it's an instant ammo check or something similar. Those Stress dice make it a lot easier to hit and do damage, but it's also far more likely you're gonna dump half or your entire mag into the hallway, the room behind it, and 30 or so into the twitching corpse of the thing which just jumped out the vents.

Which may or may not be a good thing, depending on just how many more there are. If you've played the Nemesis board game, it works similar; even juvenile and adult forms of the various 'morphs have some level of 'If this attack hits, character is instantly impaled on their tail, dying a slow, agonizing death'.

It's a very fun little dice system, which has just enough swinginess that can make pushing your luck hugely rewarding - or fuck up a mediocre roll. My favourite scene from the small taster game I played in involved one of the female scientists getting grappled, cue my drug addicted, tweaking pilot with a single shotty shell left trying his best to jam this thing into it's face. Miserably fail - push my roll with his talent to reroll the whole pool, somehow get a ridiculous roll and blast it's face off with a 'Get off her, you bitch!'

 

[EleventySeven]

Alright, I have been looking around for guides on this, and I have not found anything specific for it, but are there any examples of tabletop games that do take sexual dimorphism into account in terms of PC creation and do a good job of it?

I am working on a setting that has a lot of different playable races, and I am wondering how this would translate stat-wise in terms of humans. Likewise, some of the other planned races would have very minimal difference between male and female while others would not even look like members of the same species. What would be a good setting as an example?

I believe D&D 1e and AD&D had reduced maximum strength for female humans and dwarves but not for female elves as an example. I think maximum and minimum trait values would be more useful as the difference between the sexes than outright stat boosts/reductions, even if the latter is more accurate to reality.

And, of course, when D&D meaningfully tracked height and weight along with Pathfinder, they had different entries in the tables for males and females of the same species although that doesn't really ever come up in gameplay.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

We've got round 2 of Degenesis on Dice Scum, tonight at 9 pm ET. Come learn about how a bunch of rich fucks convince people to LARP as tribal warbands and how Africans can speak a primeval language through eating alien seeds.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Beating @Battlefield2142EU to the punch on this one. I guess he's in bed.

TLDW: One of the designers at Paizo complained about Vance playing Pathfinder. Before the election he was anti-gatekeeping, but now he's all for it.