ChampFantana
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jan 7, 2021
Shadowrun art has been utter dogshit for the last couple of editions now. It was at it's peak when the books featured Larry Elmore art and all of those great black and white art pieces.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
- Thread starter Surtur
- Start date
- Joined
- Aug 17, 2022
Found this one YouTube, remembered that conversation from a while back about how proper Paladins tend to force a party's morality, thought you guys might get a chuckle or two:
- Joined
- Apr 2, 2021
It baffles me how WOTC/Hasbro was able to fuck up yet another VTT in the year of our Lord 2025.
You would think making an official D&D VTT would be a license to print money, especially with the rise of online only groups, but what little marketing I saw of it, seemed like they wanted it to replace your actual table top, as in you and your existing friends get together at your house with laptops and play the VTT in person together at the same table which to me completely defeats the purpose.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
That almost reminds me of the idiotic touchscreen shit some casinos did (are still doing?) with poker tables. Bitch if I wanted to do this I wouldn't have driven somewhere, I could do that at home in my underwear.
- Joined
- Dec 20, 2018
There’s also D&D maps but it doesn’t provide anything you can’t get from owl bear rodeo except integration with the turn and HP tracker as well as the character sheet.
It doesn’t even have dynamic lighting yet.
Agent of Z.O.G.
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
lack man traced from San Andreas screenshot.
- Joined
- Oct 31, 2021
It is genuinely impressive that this guy is more libtarded than Detwiller. That takes dedication.
Running Iconoclasts for my kiwi gamers soon, thankfully haven't found anything this gay in the book yet.
Haven't been around a game store in a while but recently discovered one near me. I'm hoping to start and eclectic TTRPG group, with me as GM. For the first game I'd like to do a one-shot OSR thing just to make it very fun and fast and simple, considering I haven't run a game in years. I have a question: I like the rules for Lamentations of the Flame Princess, like the way it handles skill monkeys as a specialist class, among other things. How likely is that going to turn everyone away, considering how weird and edgy the creator and the adjacent content for the system is? Wonder if I'm going to be better off going with Labyrinth Lord or OSE or S&W... Probably.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
I haven't looked heavily into LotFP but I recall that its basically B/X with some extra rules, and LotFP has spawned spin-offs. IIRC Knave is one of them. So if you like LotFP bu don't want to deal with the edgelord taint of the creator, I would recommend either advertise you are running a "Homebrew version of [spinoff] and just take it back to vanilla" or just say its an OSR game, provide all the documents needed to players with no branding, and then if people like it come clean that this is LotFP and see if they want to keep going.
But really my experience is unless they are terminally online libtards you wouldn't want to play with anyway, they won't know about it.
But if I was you, this would be my play:
I'd do BECMI/OSE/whatever non-controversial system you like as a starter game to let everyone see you aren't an edgelord and also so you don't pick up edgelord players. After that game,suggest you want to run a game using LotFP because you like the mechanics and just see what the reaction is. If anyone mentions it, just say you agree the creator is a peice of shit but the game is good.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
It's already a saturated market. Roll20 is free and basically fine. Fantasy Grounds is a little clunky in some ways, but has some nice features. I hear Foundry is the new hotness, but I quit using VTT completely because to me, the real life connection is the whole point of TTRPGs.
Bingo. The whole problem with physical games is they're hard to monetize on a recurring basis. Nobody's going to pay a fee for organized play, so that's right out. Players have a limited appetite for new rules, which is why splat sales drop exponentially after the first two or three. And an adventure lasts a good long time, so while those 5e adventure books sold well and steadily, they didn't generate the oceans of money a battle pass on a B-tier video game does. So yes, that's exactly what they want. They want you to stop using books and start paying monthly to play with your friends.
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2019
At least the first time they had the excuse that the lead dev died, this time it was pure exec retardation.
It is a bit of a shock to me since, last I checked, they wanted it to be the next big thing. Nowadays I don't pay a lot of attention to D&D news so not like I would have noticed the lack of advertisement.
Also kinda sucks that with the quarentine long over a lot of people are still fully into online campaigns but it is understandable: I've tried to get an IRL game going but scheduling is a pain, next I thought that joining a "club" seemed ideal yet there are none in my city and thus I would have to spend +1 hour commuting just to play, then another hour to go back home. Lastly I floated the idea to a friend who's into TCGs and who often gets together with others to play board games but he shot it down pretty quickly saying "they aren't good for pick up games".
Might just put up a flyer at a store and see if anyone bites, I have met a few people who have shown interest in trying out PF2e so am sure there is a public for it out there.
Rapier Ape
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2019
So yesterday I DMed quite a few combat scenarios for my Becmi group. I was re-reading through my Gazateer collection and
stumbled across the optional combat rules in Dawn of the Emperors. It pretty much changes up how armor works and gives different armors damage soaking instead of AC bonus.
AC starts at default 9 and only dex, magical bonuses to armor, shield bonus and circumstances lower AC.
There's also some half decent rules for crits and combat maneuvers etc.
I had ran the idea by the group and we spent the session going through loads of old "boss battle's" and various stuff that they had done prior as a fast and loose test. Bumped up the enemies HD and levels on par with the players.
But everyone actually enjoyed it so we'll run with it. I suggest anyone that runs Becmi-2e to give it a look.
The downside was that I remembered that the rules were there somewhere buried in the Gazateers in a small write up of 3-4 pages. So I had to scan each and every one of them page by page visually. Dawn of the Emperors was literally the last one in the box.
@Farmholio You probably won't get much attention from the 5e kiddies. They've been utterly conditioned with OSR style gameplay = meatgrinder and dying from a papercut that they got from trying to read a heal scroll. You might get some interest though. It never hurts to try.
stumbled across the optional combat rules in Dawn of the Emperors. It pretty much changes up how armor works and gives different armors damage soaking instead of AC bonus.
AC starts at default 9 and only dex, magical bonuses to armor, shield bonus and circumstances lower AC.
There's also some half decent rules for crits and combat maneuvers etc.
I had ran the idea by the group and we spent the session going through loads of old "boss battle's" and various stuff that they had done prior as a fast and loose test. Bumped up the enemies HD and levels on par with the players.
But everyone actually enjoyed it so we'll run with it. I suggest anyone that runs Becmi-2e to give it a look.
The downside was that I remembered that the rules were there somewhere buried in the Gazateers in a small write up of 3-4 pages. So I had to scan each and every one of them page by page visually. Dawn of the Emperors was literally the last one in the box.
@Farmholio You probably won't get much attention from the 5e kiddies. They've been utterly conditioned with OSR style gameplay = meatgrinder and dying from a papercut that they got from trying to read a heal scroll. You might get some interest though. It never hurts to try.
I'm not necessarily married to OSR. It's just that OSR has really simple systems that let you make characters and content super quick, which would be good for a first game after a long hiatus from GMing. Also I want to avoid Current Edition because I want the group to be eclectic in nature, because there's lots of stuff I want to try besides regular standard D&D. Anyone who's willing to try OSR will probably be open to other things than 5e in general.
I've had little ground contact with the people who've been playing 5e. When I was still GMing a game 3.5 edition was still actively supported by WOTC and it was the edition I myself was using. Hopefully the folks around here aren't as terrible as all that....
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
Just run an old adventure like The Lost City using the Cyclopedia.
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2014
If I'm playing a fucking RPG for fun, the absolute last thing I need is to be reminded of >current year bullshit.
Rapier Ape
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Jun 6, 2019
There's plenty of interesting systems out there even from way back in the day. One I studied up on in particular was Dragonquest 3e. I have yet to run it but looking at the numbers and the way the system works you canport TSR era D&D stuff over to it. There's a fast and dirty write up on how to do it in I wanna say Dungeon Magazine. Maybe Dragon?
It get pretty damn Gurps level autistic though and you're basically free form building every aspect of your characters and monsters up. Including spellpower/level for each individual spell. There's PDFs over on The Eye. It's stat heavy AF though. My players wanted nothing to do with it and most of them play other systems with other people.
The only reason I'm running Becmi currently was because one of my old players now is perma DM for his group and wanted to play again. He got DM burnout from running 3.5 for the previous 8-9 years and asked me to run games for his group. He cut his teeth playing Becmi then 3.5 with me. I absolutely rejected 3.5 because yeah fuck all of that paperwork. The funny thing is though when I was running it I was bullshitting half of the statblocks and DC challenges. If said creature had it as a class skill? I just said yeah they're good at it. DC should probably be it's HD+ 10 + 2-4. Regardless at the end of the day they're going to be aiming for 12 - 18+ on their rolls. Hell all of my DM notes on monsters was what page it was on in the MM and feats I had added to spice it up a bit and some bulletpoint notes with HP,AC,Move and damage.
A lot of people hate Mork Borg for various reasons. Mainly political. But if you can ignore that personally it's pretty fast and fun if you just wanna run a game. There's a free text only version of the game over on their website. Just print it up and you're good to go. It's pretty much made for bullet point stats & some common sense rulings. The included monster manual portion is pretty sparse but gives you a decent general guideline on how to build things. You've got a non fleshed out continent to run things in for you to fill out besides a few major cities/rulers with a breaf description, A big bad antagonist and rest is up to you. There's also a short sample dungeon Rotblack Sludge with a very unbalanced boss if you wanna charge in murderhobo on him. It kinda sets the feel of the setting pretty well. It's a self aware tongue in cheek edgy grimdark setting.
So you can be as creative with it as you want and if you like to steal material and bolt it into settings it's easy to do that with as well. Hell I flat out lifted Necromancy and Chivalry spells from Ultima Online AOS and plunked them in there with 2 rival factions.
Nights Dark Terror and Horror on the Hill are pretty good too. There's also some really good fleshed out B/X - 2e adventures in Dungeon/Dragon Magazine from the TSR era. A few years back I used a level 1-3 Ad&d 1e adventure ported to Becmi and legitimately got 2.5 months of play out of the entire thing just building on that itself and how the players actions effeted everythiing. I just changed names of the city, areas and NPCs so they couldn't goggle-fu it. Scrawled out some maps on scrap paper and ran with it. I lied when asked if it was my work and they praised it.
It would be interesting to come up with a mechanical framework for all spells having a variable power level, much like how they work in the crpg Wizardry 8. Every spell could continue to be relevant as PC's level up because they can be super charged to greater potency at greater cost and/or greater casting difficulty, and/or perhaps the risk of dangerous backfires.
One of the things I'm very keen on doing is NOT relying on the out-of-the-box tediously long and generic spell lists that consume half of the rulebook for every D&D-like game. Instead, I come up with flavorful unique spells usually named after their creator and put them in the world as loot for magic-user PC's. Additionally, PC's have the ability to do risky and costly magical research to literally come up with their own spells. The idea of a spell called Fireball that just shoots a ball of fire is so dull. I want quirky situational and dangerous spells similar to the ones that were ripped off from Jack Vance's Dying Earth in the first place.
There are a lot of things about 3.5 that could be trimmed and streamlined. As you say, there's no real need to autistically track the individual +1 points in each and every skill at each and every level. It's more sensible to do it the way 4th edition did it, just selecting a couple skills to be good at and getting a substantial bonus to those at the start, while progressing all class skills in a regular predictable way, like +1 per 2 levels. And this goes double for monsters which should be easier to keep track of since the DM is always making new ones and keeping track of every single one by himself. It takes way too much effort to come up with a standard monster profile. There's a lot of needless information, since they're being generated and calculated in a manner almost identical to player characters. Still it can be fun using the autistic rules to theorycraft weird and complex monsters just for the hell of it. I have fond nostalgic memories of thumbing through the 3.5 edition monster manuals to see all the weird crap they came up with.
RE: old dungeon modules
Personally I've always preferred to write my own content. But I take heavy inspiration from the ideas and layout of the old Basic stuff. I'm fond of how B/X and 2e and retroclones make it really easy to drop statblocks right into the text that take up very little space and are sensibly formatted to be easily read. I wrote a huge unfinished sandbox module that's sitting at nearly 100 pages without maps. Probably break that one out eventually if I can get a group off the ground. I shudder to imagine how much paper it would take up if I had to compose a full 3.5 edition statblock for every new unique creature I made.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
When doing OSR, if players ask, I'll gladly let them burn a higher spell slot to cast a lower-level spell at a higher power. I'll let them describe their aims in doing so so long as they understand the results come at the discretion of the god of magic (the gm)
The best thing about 4e's skills is they are very easy to calculate.
The worst thing about 4e's skills is there is such little variation its all very samesy.
I like the idea someone posted a little ways back about allowing players to specialize their skills for a bonus at the cost of penalties to the non-specialized cases, and I think I'm going to see that when I do a new 4e campaign. Whenever that'll be.
One of the last things I was doing as a DM before the long hiatus when I moved away was come up with an Elder Scrolls mainland Morrowind campaign for 4e. It was surprising how well 4e fit TES like a glove. You could adapt racial powers to work with the power system. I believe I adapted birthsigns as feat trees. Unfortunately despite massive success in the initial session, the group collapsed right after. Also lost those documents with the campaign and houserules.
I have also begun the process of modifying 4e into a framework for a tactical Mass Effect rpg system. That requires way more overhauling though, it really just uses the most basic core mechanics. I wrote rules to adapt the various powers from the game into a quasi-4e style rules description. The tactics of using status effect combos a la ME3 sounds like it might be fun. Again this would be a more tactical combat heavy kind of game, not quite as much non combat adventuring stuff. Which fits 4e.
IMO 4e is a little underrated. Sure, it was a batshit retarded idea to push this radically different system onto the players of the biggest brand of the oldest TTRPG. But the system itself has merits that could be used for certain purposes. Just probably not straight up normie D&D...
Blarmed&Dangerous
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Feb 13, 2015
There's a quote in 40k, something like an inquisitor exterminatus-ing a planet saying "some question my right to kill a billion people. Those who understand realize that I have no right to let them live." In the tourist "40k is actually a satire of fascism" discourse, this is always a killshot. It's a reflection of the fact that central to the theme of the Imperium is that it understands that it must do horrible things, forever, to prevent even worse things. The setting itself is a moral quandry. Every cruel, wicked, unfathomably horrific thing the Imperium does is to prevent a specific, direct consequence that is even worse.
That idea is also present in Delta Green. The Conspiracy does horrible things on a regular basis to prevent the destruction of humanity as we know it. The agency's fucking motto is "SCIENCTIA MORS EST" - Knowledge is Death.
This conflicts with the Detwiler, Stokes, et al ethos that philosophy is a solved problem and every quandry has the obvious, objectively moral solution ("the solution to the problem of history, which knows itself to be that solution."). The very premise of Delta Green is that there can be good reasons to do bad things. This is the first count in which the authors are at odds with the premise.
Also core to the premise of Delta Green is that conspiracy exists - that groups of people within the United States government act against the will of the people, and often are corrupted by this power. This was essentially an accepted reality prior to 2015 but is terminally verboten to the BlueAnon brainrot crowd.
The people currently in charge of Delta Green hate its premise, hate its underlying assumptions, hate the questions it fundamentally makes you ask. And yet, they still produce it, still write and print books, still make money off it.
I understand that the ideology they've found themselves in requires that they subvert for the cause everything they can touch, but the sheer amount of cognitive dissonance they must feel... who am I kidding? Of course they don't.