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

[Henri Barbusse]

The idea of a spell called Fireball that just shoots a ball of fire is so dull.

Quoting the Ars Magica core rulebook:

When inventing new spells, try to give them creative names that will add color to the game.
“Fireball” is not interesting; “Ball of Abysmal Flame” is — you get the idea.

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.

I do think it's closer to satire of fascism than moral quandary. Here we have a setting where fascism is 100% justified and is the best choice available to prevent complete destruction of humanity at the least, complete destruction of reality as we know it at the worst. The setting is a complete hell where millions if not billions die every second, planets are regularly destroyed to prevent untold horrors leaking from them, and so on. It might not be exactly satire, but needing the setting to be like this for fascism to be justified is a pretty strong condemnation of fascism. But tell that to the 'depiction is endorsement' crowd.

 

[regalterry]

It might not be exactly satire, but needing the setting to be like this for fascism to be justified is a pretty strong condemnation of fascism.

A different interpretation is that when things get really tough, the only people that you can rely on to hold the line are fascists. What does that tell you?

But regardless, the Imperium is not fascist, it's a feudalistic theocracy.

Warhammer merely highlights the same aspect of the human condition that forced the Romans to come up with the concept of a dictatorship.

Also, I despise how leftists have brainwashed everyone to use "fascist" to mean any kind of authoritarian regime, just so they can pretend the mass genocides conducted under their banner ackhsually wasn't true communism.

 

[Henri Barbusse]

Also, I despise how leftists have brainwashed everyone to use "fascist" to mean any kind of authoritarian regime, just so they can pretend the mass genocides conducted under their banner ackhsually wasn't true communism.

It's possible to argue that Soviet Union switched to Russian nationalism (minorities are allowed to be elevated into Russian status) as the main force holding it together during WW2 as communism failed to be unifying enough, but a) that still doesn't show communism in good light and b) Soviets already committed genocide before that.

 

[Overly Serious]

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.

Spot on. I have used Foundry and there are some pros and cons of it vs. Fantasy Grounds (which I have also used) but its fundamentals are more modern. You can spin up your own virtual server on Amazon or on your home computer if you're okay with exposing some ports and having people connect, and write add-in functionality for it in a relatively clean and modular way. But I've only used it as an occasional stand in for RL sessions. I don't want to GM from a room in my house, I want to meet up with people and hang out.

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.

In the spirit of 'the exception that proves the rule', Free League posted the Kickstarter for their 1.5 edition of the Alien RPG yesterday:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1192053011/alien-rpg-second-edition-and-rapture-protocol

They exceeded their £38,000 goal within a few hours and currently have £1.1 million in backing. The difference between the original edition and the new one is they've changed the page background from black to white (thank fuck!) and they've revised a few bits of the rules to do with stealth and stress. A conversion document should be available.

I'll repeat: £1.1 million in a couple of days. A couple of years after the previous, not very different, edition. So that's some level of recurrence!

 

[LovisXVI]

In the spirit of 'the exception that proves the rule', Free League posted the Kickstarter for their 1.5 edition of the Alien RPG yesterday:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1192053011/alien-rpg-second-edition-and-rapture-protocol
They exceeded their £38,000 goal within a few hours and currently have £1.1 million in backing. The difference between the original edition and the new one is they've changed the page background from black to white (thank fuck!) and they've revised a few bits of the rules to do with stealth and stress. A conversion document should be available.

I'll repeat: £1.1 million in a couple of days. A couple of years after the previous, not very different, edition. So that's some level of recurrence!

I would say this is the strength of a highly specific and purpose built rpg. Alien rpg is made to play a game in the Alien setting, nothing more, nothing less, and it's garnered a strong following as a result. Generalist games simply need to try harder to stand out and most of the time, they don't.

 

[Overly Serious]

I would say this is the strength of a highly specific and purpose built rpg. Alien rpg is made to play a game in the Alien setting, nothing more, nothing less, and it's garnered a strong following as a result. Generalist games simply need to try harder to stand out and most of the time, they don't.

Definitely a big factor here. From top to bottom the game is very well-designed around one specific feel. That has some consequences, like there's not much scope for long-term character levelling up because your character should never become able to slug it out with the xenomorphs and the system is designed to play quickly and not get too bogged down in complex skill systems, etc. But on the whole you gain a lot more than you lose because people will just swap to another system when they want to play something different.

Free League is very good at tailored games like this. Their One Ring RPG is similarly closely coupled mechanically with the feel they want for Middle Earth roleplaying. It has detailed travel mechanics and downtime mechanics (called the Fellowship Phase) for when you want to hike a hundred miles through the wild to Rivendell and hang out with Elrond. Who will you appoint your Guide? Do you have maps, ponies? What is your Hunting skill? Frankly it's fantastic for capturing the feel of Tolkien's stories or the Peter Jackson movies (for the heathen). It would be a really bad fit for generic D&D style fantasy with its Shadow mechanics that directly tie to Sauron's rise, etc.

 

[Ghostse]

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.

Games workshop might be overrun with leftie trannysuckers, but the main-run vidya was pretty kino.

it's garnered a strong following as a result.

I mean I guesss getting 1.1 million in funding is proof, but from what I saw it had a good start and then sort of dropped off as everyone sort of enjoyed playing Aliens and then stopped as all you could really do was play Alien.

I think the boost has more to do with them about to ruin the franchise with a TV series and people wanting their shelf-decorations they missed out on with the first Kickstarter.

 

[Snekposter]

Games workshop might be overrun with leftie trannysuckers, but the main-run vidya was pretty kino.

The DoW 2 Retribution Exterminatus vid is pretty sweet too.

And to go with what the other guy said, also has its own kickass quote.
"But the Inquisition merely performs the duty of its office. To further fear them is redundant, to hate them, heretical. Those more sensible will place responsibility with those who forced the hand of the Inquisition."

Arguably that game was Relic's last hurrah.

 

[The Ugly One]

But regardless, the Imperium is not fascist, it's a feudalistic theocracy.

To libtards, literally every form of government in which rules must be followed to maintain the physical security of society against those who mean to destroy it, and those rules occasionally require you to not indulge some immediate pleasure (such as taking a shit on the subway, or cross-dressing in the ladies' room) is "fascism."

 

[GhastlyGhost]

To libtards, literally every form of government in which rules must be followed to maintain the physical security of society against those who mean to destroy it, and those rules occasionally require you to not indulge some immediate pleasure (such as taking a shit on the subway, or cross-dressing in the ladies' room) is "fascism."

Except of course, when they're wearing the boots they shove up your ass when you wrong think.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

Without spoiling too much, the premise of the big bad Bast is neat and very mindbending; and then becomes an excuse to strip away player agency for the sake of the narrative with the classic window dressing blanket statement that it's the "theme". The actual themes of the campaign are child abuse, religion le bad, fascism being depicted as secular satanism, and a spattering of the typical self-hatred and fatalism you tend to get with I FUCKING LOVE SCIENCE SJWs.

The central theme is child abuse and that the system doesn’t fix the trauma caused by the abuse, ultimately furthering more abuse.

Caleb certainly had a political point to make about the Trump administration, although the sad truth is that you could swap in any administration and nothing would change.

Put the last segment of the campaign in 2022 at a migrant child care facility and there wouldn’t be a damn bit of difference. Teeth still get chipped.

 

[AnOminous]

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.

You really need those bread and butter spells like magic missile. El quirkerino isn't going to get rid of a gobbo or three at the start of a fight. You can branch out into more niche strategies later but just like your fighter is going to start out with a beat-up sword and leather armor, your kit in the early game is necessarily limited.

(I discouraged reckless use of fireball making it of limited use indoors and kept track of volumes of rooms so if you chucked it into the dark into a 10x10 room, that shit is coming straight back at you.)

Quoting the Ars Magica core rulebook:

That's the kind of goofy thing that was in that rulebook. It's just a damn fireball whatever you call it. Something that impressive should do something more, like it is demonic flame that causes PERMANENT HP loss. I mean why not just call it MAHALITO like in Wizardry?

 

[Henri Barbusse]

That's the kind of goofy thing that was in that rulebook. It's just a damn fireball whatever you call it. Something that impressive should do something more, like it is demonic flame that causes PERMANENT HP loss. I mean why not just call it MAHALITO like in Wizardry?

It is an impressive spell. It's at the upper limit of what a newly-made wizard can cast (if they're cripplingly overspecialized) and it's the lowest level spell that can somewhat reliably kill or at least incapacitate an armored knight in one shot. (a bit simplified, but it does 30+1d10 damage; a normal human in strongest armor known in the year 1220 soaks 9 to 12 + 1d10 of that damage. At least 16 damage is incapacitating wound, At least 21 damage is one hit kill)

A spell to kill a person at the same range would be 5 levels higher. It would be 100% reliable, but also more limited. It would kill a person. It wouldn't do anything to a non-humanlike faerie, a magical beast, a raging boar, etc.

Most Ars Magica spells have long names like that. It says something about the world and about wizard society. A Hermetic Magus would not be caught dead casting Fireball. Curse of the Ravenous Swarm is a spell of limited utility, but it's cooler to say than Summoning a Lot of Locusts.

 

[2LtMashengo]

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.

Waiting for the "MJ-12 are actually heccin wholesome" supplement to explain why selling American citizens to the greys is actually a good thing.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Tonight's Dice Scum will be a review of the Bubblegum Crisis RPG. A classic anime turned into an rpg by none other than Mike Pondsmith. Expect guns, robots, and the dark atmosphere of a cyberpunk Tokyo!

I'm curious what you thought of it, but Bubblegum Crisis is near and dear to my heart so I don't want to see torn to shreds even if it deserves it (or doesn't). I assume it's just cyberpunk.

 

[Henri Barbusse]

I'm curious what you thought of it, but Bubblegum Crisis is near and dear to my heart so I don't want to see torn to shreds even if it deserves it (or doesn't). I assume it's just cyberpunk.

I haven't watched the video, but from what I remember from when I was reading the book some time back, it was pretty surprising. I remember nothing about the mechanics, but it statted up pretty much everything that appeared in the anime. It certainly didn't feel low effort.

 

[Adamska]

I'm curious what you thought of it, but Bubblegum Crisis is near and dear to my heart so I don't want to see torn to shreds even if it deserves it (or doesn't). I assume it's just cyberpunk.

Character creation is fun, combat is mostly fine, but there's one issue that came up over and over again that was ass: how it tried to handle scaling damage.

Rather than doing a base 10 damage dice pool equalling the next level of for this damage and defense, it does it at 14, with each and every additional die raising the scale by one.

So a 14 die pool weapon is treated as 1K, or kill. 15 die pool is 2k. That sounds fine, until you get to how you have decimal based armor. So you have scenarios where you have to divide a d6 into fucking 10ths when you cancel out the armor, just to determine the flat number you add.

So like let's say you have 90 armor, which translates into 1.8 K worth of it since 50 = 1K. You get douched with a 2K weapon. You now have to recalculate what 0.2K damage is, which is like 2d6+5 damage... roughly.

It's annoying as shit, and would've been fine if it committed to using d10s for everything, or did not force decimalization to be a factor.

Also ironically, despite needing to use irrational numbers at times for hacking since it uses a third of your computer's stats in calculations, I'd argue it handles netrunning better than Cyberpunk and Shadowrun, simply because it's done as a quicker set of actions.

 

[AnOminous]

Most Ars Magica spells have long names like that.

A spell's name shouldn't take longer to say than actually casting it would because if you had to say all that shit to do it you'd already be dead before the spell was chanted.

 

[The Ugly One]

Quoting the Ars Magica core rulebook:

Monte Cook is such a fag.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

I'm curious what you thought of it, but Bubblegum Crisis is near and dear to my heart so I don't want to see torn to shreds even if it deserves it (or doesn't). I assume it's just cyberpunk.

I really loved the character creation system. The system is designed to be played at any level, so you can start out with characters that have normal skills or start out with superhuman stats.

There are a lot of skills that seem superfluous such as “wardrobe & style” or being an expert in a hobby. However, it makes sense given that the characters of the anime come from a variety of backgrounds that would come into play outside of mech combat.

There was some unintentional hilarity in separating the research skill (finding information in libraries and databases) and the scientist skill (doing lab research and writing academic papers). You could make a scientist that can make a thorough scientific research paper but have no idea how to find it in an online journal database!

Another somewhat hilarious character creation aspect was the various complications you could take as well as the frequency and intensity of those complications. You have the pop culture understanding of mental issues like severe bipolar disorder making you suicidal. You also have ability to be an enslaved paraplegic racist being hunted down by Yakuza for bad gambling debts.

The book had a good primer on the story of the anime. I felt like I understood it without having ever seen the show.

One final unintentional hilarity is calling the androids “boomers”. I couldn’t help but image the protagonists having to fight a bunch of psychotic robots complaining that no one likes their Facebook posts of AI-generated cats or that politicians are stealing their Medicare.