- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
No, like all rules, the X-card rule doesn't apply to genderspecials.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
- Thread starter Surtur
- Start date
No, like all rules, the X-card rule doesn't apply to genderspecials.
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
But does it apply to BDSM methods, since the X-card is basically a safe word, and the other "preventative measures" are literally just what you do before a wild time of degeneracy? No seriously, the consent forms and the light system you see are also ripped off whole sale from bondage shit.
Like could I X-card the entire system because I don't feel comfortable with treating gaming like a pervert session?
Trench Raider
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2025
Have any of you heard about system called crucible? It's pretty much a new thing, it was made for foundry VTT by their developers. It's kinda interesting because it has skill tree that looks like a video game which is kinda new, 4e tried to be more video game-like but due to that combat of that system became crunchy as fuck. We started campaing on this system a few days ago, my opinion about that is generally positive, I really like the magic system, it's simple and elastic. The problem is that you have to plan up your bulid from first level. And I think if you're not careful you character can become either hyper specialised or for everything but bad at everything.
Despite that it's generally alright.
Despite that it's generally alright.
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
I'm skeptical since it's using the sort of pie in the sky bullshit I hear in techbro kickstarter scams tbh. I also do not like how it is not remotely transparent on its system, which from what little I can tell looks like it's just Savage Worlds but described as a silicon valley scam start up. That and the one fucking time I see the dice on their very few images it uses the shrinking pool array it uses, and it uses the same fucking marketing too, up to and including crowing that it doesn't use classes.
More wheel reinventing bullshit it is.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
Its an interesting concept, building a bit on 4e where I started work on automating a lot of my players stuff in 4e, but the thing I discovered is that manipulating numbers and arrays in the program was extremely, EXTREMELY unrewarding and I stopped.
The best results I got was adding some buttons to help players with math and dump the results to chat (how many healing surges to full HP? How much HP do I waste going to full?) but let the players make the choice and just track HP, etc, outside of the program.
So going full digital first is very interesting.
But I see:
"
Guided "class-less" character-creation which emphasizes background and thematic choices
A "Bring Your Own Setting" experience for GMs, intended to allow Crucible to be used with any setting and story
A purpose-built approach to character skills with specialization options granting unique benefits
An expansive Talents system which encourages players to feel like their choices matter
"
And that shit triggers me. I've never seen a useable 'class-less' system. Either it is class-based just using different terminology (No see you don't have a Class you have a Archetype/Profession/Role/Job/Background) or characters are so generic and interchangable class doesn't matter.
BYOS just tells me the game will be a less good GURPs with all the GURPs issues. How do you have magic in a true 'setting independent' game?
"specialization options with unique benefits" just sounds like min-max bullshit.
- Joined
- Nov 26, 2018
- Joined
- Sep 3, 2014
So looking into Crucible/Ember more, it turns out that these were dude who originally did 5e modules, and then got spooked when the OGL bullshit happened. This "new and innovative" system is mostly what seems to be a panic build as they realized they can't rely on 5e anymore. They then realized just how much you can automate things in a VTT and went ham it seems.
Still have concerns over what they can pull off, since the scope of what they're seeking to do and their experiences in system design is based on a d20 system, and they're going to learn there's always going to be compromises that have to be made in design. Classless will eventually not work out, and spellcasting is a fucking nightmare to add on.
Also, whoever in tech or marketing for this system that's leaning on these guys and trying to lock them down for PR needs to back the fuck down on the lingo, since it procc'd all of my "this is a fucking scam" sensors when I read the post linked to it.
Trench Raider
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 3, 2025
It supposed to be this "generic high fantasy" thing rather than actual universal system. GURPS is really competent system at what it does but it could get crunchy (which isn't that big problem if you play it online and automate some of it)
When GURPS is really universal thing Crucible isn't. It supposed to be this heroic tier power level high fantasy DnD style system. It may be setting neutral but it isn't actual generic system.
I tried one of the early tests of crucible and it was utterly fucking boring. 2h weapons were basically a waste of time because any of the special actions you got from the skill tree basically made it so you'd only ever do 1 attack with it, while your damage output just doing 3 attacks with light weapons tripled it, or you could just do two and still have an action but having done more damage.
The magic system was a fucking joke. It's been a while but as I recall it used an MP type thing where you could spend an action to refresh points, and that was fine. The problem was that for the spells you needed the base element(fire, ice, earth, psychic, etc.) and then needed a template(single target, line, cone, emanation, etc.) but the problem was that they were both scattered all around the skill tree. Want to do an ice aoe surrounding yourself? Fuck you, you go all the way in one direction to get ice magic and then need to go in the opposite direction purely to get the template you wanted picking up a bunch of shit you didn't want along the way. How that worked in practice really meant you'd need to find the templates you want, and then just get the elements that were nearby and you were just never getting something on the opposite side of the poe style skill tree/sphere grid thing.
I know they fixed the 2h weapon vs 1h light weapon damage output. I don't think they ever fixed the longbow vs crossbow problem(had to do with range I think? like I said, it's been a while). But after probably a year they hadn't done shit for the magic portion.
Also to make matters worse, there were 2 health bars. HP, and I think fatigue was the 2nd? But the damage output was exclusive to one or the other. Say you're fighting a monster with 50hp, and 30 fatigue or whatever it was called and you're a "spellcaster" and wound up with psychic damage that damaged the fatigue meter while your other 3 party members all did physical damage to HP. Because your fatigue damage output wasn't significantly higher than the rest of the party's physical damage combined, you're just punching at a useless health bar while your party members take out the real one faster meaning you've contributed nothing to the combat.
Monsters could also have the reverse, a higher fatigue bar but the problem was the rest of your party doing physical damage would still out-pace what you were doing, and thus you were still wasting everyone's time. People brought this stupidity up repeatedly in the discord but Atropos(main foundry dev/owner) spent months telling everyone they didn't know what they were talking about so I eventually gave up giving a shit about his "system". I've heard that Ember supposedly fixed a lot of this stupid shit but I haven't had the time or interest to look into it in detail. The fact that so much of this nonsense made it into a public test version to begin with, and the writer just autistically screeching at people bringing it up was a turn off to the whole thing.
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- Joined
- Apr 2, 2021
"Though the original Conan stories are frequently lurid and occasionally veer into uncomfortable stereotypes of race and culture, there is no reason that the tabletop experience need to mirror these elements."
It actually truly does need to mirror them though. That's like saying "Don't worry if you don't like magical space ships, you can still play Spelljammer without magical space ships!". If you remove the slavery, the racial strife, the cannibal blacks, the desert people worshipping demons and the sexy babes from Conan, all you have is generic Sword and Sorcery, there's hundreds of other systems if you want to play Conan without the Conan.
I don't much give a shit about the X-cards, but that's why Conan the Barbarian(1982) worked as a movie and Conan the Destroyer(1984) sucked balls with its PG rating. You just can't sanitize Conan or his world, its meant to be savage and brutal. Its also to me what makes him such an amazing character, most people think he is this lunky womanizing barbarian but in all of the Robert E. Howard stories, he actually treats women very well in comparison to everyone else. I remember at least one story where a woman remarks that "civilized men" treat her like shit and the "so-called barbarian" treated her better than anyone.
strawberry15
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2023
Birthright setting could have been so much more. I hate to see it so half baked. I think it is my fav setting.
robobobo
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2014
Yeah, no. You don't need any X card for that, you need a DM who'll say, "Get the fuck out of that chair and don't come back until you've showered off the retardation." While obviously people in private games aren't going to opt to play with That Guy, if you're playing with randoms you need to be ready to be quick with the boot. I've played with plenty of socially-awkward people who are a little grating but overall decent people; there's a world of difference between that kind of player and the kind who wind up immortalized in 4chan memes.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
I can see what they're sort of going for with skill trees and "if its all VTT and automated it doesn't matter, we can do things P&P can't". But they seem to be missing that making the system P&P, even if its Foundry/VTT/Automation first, increases portability which increases audience which is going to vital for a niche unknown player trying to make their way into a shrinking and congested market.
The average person isn't going to be installing Foundry to demo this system. "I've got to install this program? fuck that, too much work". If they are hoping for ANY traction they need a mobile client - I hate it too, but that's how it works.
It also sounds like from the people who have played it it sounds like they have the PF1e (and 5e to a lesser extent) issue of "millions of possible builds, but only like 12 of them ever get played because the min-max is too hard"
The odd part is that if you take just the narrative beats of CtD its closer to a Howard story than CtB.
One of the big problems with CtD is when trying to make their make their PG rating they leaned too hard on trying to make it "funny" to get the violence passed the censors. In addition to having Akiro living in the woods now for no reason.
The Thoth-Amon fight (minus the dumb lizard-ape mask) is fucking kino though. Fight me.
Loose Goose
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2019
The original Conan movie was done by John Milius, one of the few Hollywood conservatives (who was mostly run out of the business after the 80s), which is the sole reason it is not generic 80s fantasy schlock. Milius gave you Conan the Barbarian, but what Hollywood really wanted to give you was Conan the Destroyer, if even that. Conan did well with the audiences, but the critics didn't like it all that much. Ironically, Gary Gygax hated it. From Dragon Magazine:
I hope that D&D movie will turn out better than Conan, Gary!
That's true for people running it(they also rent server space to do so) but for regular player access it's just browser based(the client is entirely optional other than the server needing to be hosted somewhere so even the DM can just manage it via the browser as well).
With that being said, another problem with some DMs using foundry is that they include so many fucking resources, background scripts for automatic things, animations, ambient tracks that change on different parts of the map, background music, sound effects, layered maps with teleporters(to handle someone going up a flight of stairs and being visible at some angles and not others to people below) that it causes anyone that has a shit computer to have a bad time which impacts the rest of the players as well. I've seen some really elaborate shit that some DMs have done that plays great, so long as you've got something like a recent intel core i7, a 2080, and 16GB of RAM or better equivalent because other people end up waiting 3-4 minutes staring at a black screen while everything loads in the browser once the DM switches to a new map scene or their browser just crashes entirely so everyone is stuck waiting for them to reconnect.
Is it cool when someone can use an ability that lets them select 3 targets and an end point and then their character on screen teleports to the enemies, swings with a weapon animation showing the correct weapon from their sheet, and ends at their destination with sound effects and bleed effects with the on screen virtual dice rolls timed as the attacks occur in sequence with all of the damage and any status effects being handled automatically including crits and everything else? Yes.
But unless everyone in the group has a decent PC, sometimes it's just better to just roll some dice and be able to play the fucking game with some tokens on a basic map.
edit: And of course ignoring that not everyone into TTRPGs has a computer that would have been considered high end at any point to begin with, if you've got a friend/player who just absolutely sucks with technology(doesn't play video games, barely uses a phone for anything besides a phonecall, etc.), they're just going to constantly get lost in the interface, forget which buttons to click, end up with 10 windows popped open within foundry and not know which one has what they need, and so on also slowing the game down for everyone else and giving themselves a terrible experience because they can't just say what they're doing and roll a die.
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strawberry15
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 20, 2023
Thankfully, Jeremy ırons saved the movie.
- Joined
- Nov 15, 2021
Traveller doesn't have classes, and careers aren't just classes by another name. They just automatically give you some skills that you could get via other means. The reason not every character ends up the same is you need the party to cover a wide array of skills, and obviously some have synergies.
Road Work Ahead
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2020
Another reason is that the player doesn't have a ton of control over what skills their character actually learns during creation. You might have an idea of what you want your character to be, but the dice might think differently.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
Also that you can die during character creation.
Traveller was one of the ones I was thinking about specifically; they don't need classes because firstly as you said, professions are just classes by another name, but the character build process is so deep and randomized you don't need classes for character differentiation/specialization.
Exactly.
- Joined
- May 25, 2024
That hasn't been a core rule since the first edition .
I think your definition of class is too broad to be useful. There is a difference between roles, archetypes and classes. Generally I understand classes as having discrete abilities tied to having that class, and without them, it is locked off, which can include arcane magic with wizards, divine magic for clerics, sneak attacks for rogues etc. but nothing in Traveller is locked off by your background terms outside of JoaT, which is an uncommon skill in some careers.