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

[Jet Fuel Johnny]

The pitch for Spirit West is amazing. In the 1500’s, a Native American deity saw what the white man was about to do and whisked away a few tribes into a pocket dimension through a Rift. Now that the cataclysm is over, the Rifts are releasing the missing magical Injuns to Earth, now with the full backing of tribal magic and Native American gods to empower them and their goals. That’s a pretty solid elevator pitch tbh.

One of the other things was that they aren't just relying on magic and flint clubs or shit like that.

They completely armed up with high tech in many cases.

Hell, there's even Rifts Earth Lore in the book.

The SAMAS was produced by the US Army, and the USAF. The Native Americans found a factory, reverse engineered it all, and are producing Native American SAMAS suits and variants.

Hell, there's even enough foes and shit when you add in Vampire Kingdoms that you can keep your campaign largely away from the Coalition.

My PNW campaign I had the Enclave offshore in the Pacific. (I ignored that whole ALL OF THE WEST COAST VANISHED INTO ANOTHER DIMENSION!!!!!) and just went with my own stuff.

 

[Adamska]

He also mentions this game is before the prequel movies... so even at the date of this video he's basically a kid as that puts these games taking place before the summer of 1999. He also sounds like he never paid too much attention to the novels either. Yes, star wars generally boils down to some 1v1 duels, with the other heroes busy doing other shit even in the original trilogy.

He and the guys he gamed with very clearly was playing West End Game's Star Wars. I could recognize it the moment Spoony noted the dice pools, which makes it different to the D20 Star Wars that came out right about when West End died and the game shut down. I'm pretty sure he did try the d20 version, and I think that was when he had them run into Vader.

As for why it was horseshit, I vaguely remember that the Mike that ran that campaign was new to GMing. I don't remember if it was his first campaign, but I do know he was enough of a rookie that he asked Spoony for tips. So his mistakes I tend to interpret as him being new. I also attribute that the troopers were there to provide something for Spoony to fight.

Basically Spoony knew the system better than they did, edited his sheets privately, which is NOT the first time he's admitted to doing this (He did the same thing in a Vampire: the Requiem LARP, by adding shitloads of explosives to his char to suicide bomb the group), and just bullshitted his way into using tech to kill.

And he also low key humblebragged that he essentially did an HK-47, ignoring that at this fucking time Boba Fett was pretty cleaned up lorewise as a good bounty hunter, and he probably aped the tricks HE used in books or in the source books for the game.

Again, I like his Counter Monkeys, and younger and less experienced with systems me really liked them, but nowadays I can easily predict the type of player he is, one that tries really hard to metagame, and one who you can't fucking trust to not cheat on his sheet.

 

[p1138]

Basically Spoony knew the system better than they did, edited his sheets privately, which is NOT the first time he's admitted to doing this (He did the same thing in a Vampire: the Requiem LARP, by adding shitloads of explosives to his char to suicide bomb the group), and just bullshitted his way into using tech to kill.

Oh god, the vampire larp. Yeah, he got moderately hazed like any noob does when it comes to joining a larp group out of the blue, couldn't handle it, made up a bunch of bullshit that no one bothered to challenge him on, then fucked off never to return again so you know next session they just retconned everything he did and went right back to normal.

And yeah the editing his sheets for the ship and crap privately without notifying the GM? Clearly they were new to shit, but no that would never fly at my table. Secretly doing shit with the knowledge of the GM, sure. There's lots of interesting shit you can do there working with the GM as long as it makes sense. But the "before the game session I sealed an envelope and now I'm handing it to the game master" nope. If I'm the DM and I didn't see it on your sheet or know how it even got there, you don't have it. And even if I'm not the DM, I wouldn't want that shit from other people at the table either. It's fucking cheating in a TTRPG, who the fuck does that?

And he also low key humblebragged that he essentially did an HK-47, ignoring that at this fucking time Boba Fett was pretty cleaned up lorewise as a good bounty hunter, and he probably aped the tricks HE used in books or in the source books for the game.

Oh he absolutely stole shit out of comics and books from boba fett.

Again, I like his Counter Monkeys, and younger and less experienced with systems me really liked them, but nowadays I can easily predict the type of player he is, one that tries really hard to metagame, and one who you can't fucking trust to not cheat on his sheet.

And that's why he got booted from his groups, and couldn't keep one together once he was "famous".

 

[Snekposter]

After the Bomb is another fun SDC setting if you want to go around genociding furries.

So, I decided to see if I had a PDF handy (I did) and cracked open the book to read through it and it turns out there's an Empire of Humanity running around waging war against the mutant freaks. Perfect opportunity to host a Furry Crusade.

Memery aside, the art is as magnificent as usual for Palladium.

My PNW campaign I had the Enclave offshore in the Pacific. (I ignored that whole ALL OF THE WEST COAST VANISHED INTO ANOTHER DIMENSION!!!!!) and just went with my own stuff.

Look man, I've said it before but I'll say it again: you can't have a proper Enclave without Sgt. Dornan. Also, potential campaign idea when your CE one ends: pull a Fallout and have everyone write off most of the Earth thanks to their inability to fix things so they hunker down where they are and hope they can fix things at some point once the chaos has subsided down. And then they decide its time and they start taking back the West Coast of the USA village by village, fighting off all of the horrors that have taken over in the absence of anyone to stop them, liberating all the grateful humans.

 

[Sargon's wife's son]

Again, I like his Counter Monkeys, and younger and less experienced with systems me really liked them, but nowadays I can easily predict the type of player he is, one that tries really hard to metagame, and one who you can't fucking trust to not cheat on his sheet.

On the subject of cheating, I really don't care if my players cheat generally, as long as everyone's having fun, it doesn't bother me whatsoever. It's like people who constantly slap the wall book for people. forget things The purpose of this is to have fun. as long as they're not **** up anybody else's fun. I don't care.

 

[PhoBingas]

So, I decided to see if I had a PDF handy (I did) and cracked open the book to read through it and it turns out there's an Empire of Humanity running around waging war against the mutant freaks. Perfect opportunity to host a Furry Crusade.

Memery aside, the art is as magnificent as usual for Palladium.

Palladium system stuff is so slept on it's criminal. It's a shame a lot of tabletop people just turn their nose up at anything that wasn't published by Wizards or Paizo. There's enough settings books, conversion books and supplemental things that you can spin up pretty much any character concept you can imagine.

 

[Allied-Mastercomputer]

Palladium system stuff is so slept on it's criminal.

The Megaverse game system is absolute jank central. I still can’t find the rule that explains how to roll for parry. But it’s serviceable, and I don’t read them for the game system, I read them because the sourcebooks and lore are genuinely interesting and well thought out.

The writers have some great ideas in these books, like the Wolfen Empire which is just the Roman Empire but with intelligent wolves. It somehow comes off less as a furry thing and more like a “Humans have to deal with sharing a planet with abhumans” thing. It’s done pretty well imo.

 

[msd]

Sell me on trench crusaders.
I really like the setting, and the lore surrounding this tabletop, but I'm still wary because I don't know enough, and all the videos I do find about it mostly seem like advertisements.

 

[PhoBingas]

The Megaverse game system is absolute jank central. I still can’t find the rule that explains how to roll for parry. But it’s serviceable, and I don’t read them for the game system, I read them because the sourcebooks and lore are genuinely interesting and well thought out.

The writers have some great ideas in these books, like the Wolfen Empire which is just the Roman Empire but with intelligent wolves. It somehow comes off less as a furry thing and more like a “Humans have to deal with sharing a planet with abhumans” thing. It’s done pretty well imo.

I will admit the system is janky as fuck, and some older books errors with the wrong stuff being put on the xeroxer got carried over for years.
I actually broke down and went hunting for the rules for parrying. Found the best breakdown in Rifts Ultimate edition. Page 340 to 341 if you've got the book or PDF. If you don't here it is:

Apologies for the weird formatting, most Palladium books are formatted strange with two columns of text to cram more info into the books. Pretty spot on for how I remembered the rules working... After someone rolls a hit, you can either roll to dodge or parry, dodging uses one of your attacks / action and parrying doesn't.

So many interesting books and settings. Splicers is another good sci-fi setting with machines and tech being taken over by a strange like nanite plague and humanity fighting them off in symbiotic bio mechs and other symboite tech. Beyond the Supernatural if you want Call of Cthulhu, X-files or Twin Peaks-esque supernatural thriller... Nightspawn was another interesting setting they put out but I think Image comics and the Spawn people got at them and made them change the name to something else.

Edit: Holy shit, I don't think the book actually tells you it's a contested d20 roll adding your parry bonus to match or beat. Palladium is jank as fuck, but IMO that's part of the charm. Anecdotal, but the "jank" of the system has really filtered out weirdos, and I think the worst player I ever had to deal with running palladium games was someone who would throw cig butts off my patio and got my snarked at by the property manager, and they stopped when I asked them to use the ashtray I left out there for the smokers.

 

[Judge Dredd]

And when 2e isn't spinning out shitty adventure paths about running a circus or ending orc oppression, they're ruining actually good adventure ideas by making shit like Harry Potter Wakanda and French Revolution Brain Worms instead of doing the cool shit they would have done with those adventure ideas 15 years ago. And we're still rehashing shit in Varisia, which is a tiny corner of Avistan, over and over again when out of the ~40 Adventure Paths there have been like 5 in Garund, 3 in Tian Xia, and 2 in Arcadia (and most of those suck).

The circus adventure path was a nice idea, but ruined by wokeshit. Same with the space trucker campaign for Starfinder that was both wokeshit and editorial mandate about players not being able to use the entire book so branching paths were out.

But the campaign I remember being fucked over by the "everything in PF1 was canon" stuff was the desert/egypt style campaign. In PF1 a pharaoh comes back with his army of undead and flying pyramids with lasers. Bad arse. The sequel for PF2 was bad. Because there was no egypt themed big bads, you just wander about clearing up the last of the aimless undead from the crashed ships. I didn't bother seeing how the adventure progressed because why would you?

WotC's idea of settings books are thin garbage that's 30% tables for random nonsense compared to the fucking tomes you'd get from 2e-4e about a setting, it's history, locations, etc

Sounds more like the OSR problem.

I dont understand why settings struggle so much. 9/10 they are either a waffer thin with nothing of substance to latch on to (fill in the blanks yourself!), a dense list of kings, gods, and geopolitics that no one cares about and isn't gameable at all, or some overly weird "gonzo" setting struggling so hard to be original they fuck up their own setting. This is why I don't apologize for being an Eberron shill. Everything in that book is interesting and gameable.

As for what game gives nothing to do? Oh there's a list but the one I think of first is Our Travelling Home. It was a god awful Howls Moving Castle Rip-off that had no actual game mechanics and it was structured as a bad play and lesson plan.

What the fuck is this? I remember this appearing back in 2012 but then quickly being stomped out, but here it is again? Unless the game was released in 2012?

Woke likes playing teacher for some reason.

And when vehicle mechanics were actually important I'd actually just whip out SJG's Car Wars

That seems to have been intended, according to some videos.

Even the shadowrun DMSO wars bit, yes it works that way but why did the DM let them have access to all of this? Why did the security forces who became aware of this not just shoot to kill?

Fun. And he did try the whole "shoot to kill" thing with snipers and drones.


As for Spoony more broadly, I think you guys get too caught up in the nitty gritty of him getting rules wrong. I remember people complaining about his Legend of the Five Rings video because he (though in the story it was the DM) got the setting and details about Japanese culture wrong.

They are handy examples not as rules reference, but for general problems. Like his super hero game where everybody wants to play wolverine, or repetitive powers result in a game that gets boring after a couple of sessions because the strategy is the same, or the power levels being widely out of balance leading to unfun.

I've mentioned before, but to repeat it, I get requests to run a supers game occationally. But the problem is everybody wants a different system or power level. So even if I can herd cats and get a compromise on X and Y, it's Z that will cause people to nope out.

Sell me on trench crusaders.

Check the 40k thread.

I found the lore to be dumb so my opinion means little.

I can't speak to the rules as I've yet to see them talked about in any depth.

I can't sell you on the devs either because last I heard (dont quote me on this) they ran to Discord and BluSky to set up a criticism proof hugbox and go on safe edgy rants about Christianity being the bad guys.

 

[msd]

Well that sucks, its hard to find good tabletop these days. I cant reply to you. But thank you dredd

 

[Allied-Mastercomputer]

Holy shit, I don't think the book actually tells you it's a contested d20 roll adding your parry bonus to match or beat.

That’s what I’m saying! What the fuck am I supposed to roll for a parry? Are there modifiers? Which dice? What’s my target number?? I don’t think it ever explicitly says that.

 

[PhoBingas]

I found the lore to be dumb so my opinion means little.

I can't speak to the rules as I've yet to see them talked about in any depth.

I can't sell you on the devs either because last I heard (dont quote me on this) they ran to Discord and BluSky to set up a criticism proof hugbox and go on safe edgy rants about Christianity being the bad guys.

Fuck eh? Didn't know they were like typical twitter leftists. It looks cool, but that's like the only point in its favor, but in the age of 3d printers and indy artists, looking "cool" isn't hard. Every video I've seen feels like an advert they're really trying to sell me on, and it really just feels like they're trying to out grimdark 40k with their lore so I'm not a fan of it, but at least the mini's I've seen in the adverts look like they could be cool encounters in other tabletop shit.

That’s what I’m saying! What the fuck am I supposed to roll for a parry? Are there modifiers? Which dice? What’s my target number?? I don’t think it ever explicitly says that.

When I was first introduced to Palladium system games in the 90s, the contested d20 rolls for parry and dodge were explained to me by the GM running things. No idea if it was a house rule or they just assumed you put two and two together and used d20's like they talk about making attacks.
All of the hand to hand skills, other physical skills and some classes get their own bonuses to strike, parry and dodge so it's all pretty laid out in the skills sections of the books.
*Edit to not double-post.

 

[Tom Bombodildo]

I will admit the system is janky as fuck

That’s what I’m saying! What the fuck am I supposed to roll for a parry? Are there modifiers? Which dice? What’s my target number?? I don’t think it ever explicitly says that.

Yeah, I looked through Palladium's Heroes Unlimited and even the Revised Core Rulebook & 2e were formatted and written so poorly, I just dropped it. The last thing I need is having to fight the Rulebook to even understand the game I'm trying to run. Advanced FASERIP is clean, simple, and effective as far as I can tell, so that's what I'm sticking with.

 

[p1138]

They are handy examples not as rules reference, but for general problems. Like his super hero game where everybody wants to play wolverine, or repetitive powers result in a game that gets boring after a couple of sessions because the strategy is the same, or the power levels being widely out of balance leading to unfun.

None of us said they were supposed to be rules references, but they're problems that don't exist at tables run by adults who read the rules, don't openly cheat, don't take advantage of someone being new to DM'ng, etc.

Fun. And he did try the whole "shoot to kill" thing with snipers and drones.

If a DM decides they want players dead, they can kill those players if they're actually trying unless it's a system where the player needs to specify they're setting a death flag like Tenra Bansho, and Shadowrun is not one of those. It's just more examples of crappy players or a bad DM letting shit get out of hand.

As for Spoony more broadly, I think you guys get too caught up in the nitty gritty of him getting rules wrong.

It's one example after another of Spoony being both a shitty player and a shitty DM, repeatedly, with multiple groups, in multiple settings and genres, over many years leading up to a point where he's the asshole who cannot get a game together because he burned every bridge in his area in Arizona, and had been out of tabletop gaming for so long he didn't even bother to try in Illinois. Using Spoony as an example of anything is terrible especially regarding tabletop games as he would get himself booted from just about any normal person's table based on his own descriptions. It's not a nitty gritty thing, it's that he's a shitty player and DM.

Sounds more like the OSR problem.

I dont understand why settings struggle so much. 9/10 they are either a waffer thin with nothing of substance to latch on to (fill in the blanks yourself!), a dense list of kings, gods, and geopolitics that no one cares about and isn't gameable at all, or some overly weird "gonzo" setting struggling so hard to be original they fuck up their own setting. This is why I don't apologize for being an Eberron shill. Everything in that book is interesting and gameable.

Because it requires writers who actually give a shit. Their ravenloft book for 5e barely acknowledges that much else exists outside of Barovia, while the 2e book actually has descriptions of shit that players can interact with. SCAG barely adds anything to the sword coast area which is a tiny portion of Faerun(I'm still not sure if they ever bothered to publish a 5e map of Faerun that actually even has Thay on it because it was only a partial map for the longest time), the Spelljammer book was laughably stupid, and while I haven't looked at the 2nd Ebberon book for 5e, the first was worthless.

Sell me on trench crusaders.
I really like the setting, and the lore surrounding this tabletop, but I'm still wary because I don't know enough, and all the videos I do find about it mostly seem like advertisements.

It's a system created and run by people who don't know what the fuck they're doing, with a rabid small customer base of idiots who will likely never play the game, and a bunch of channels on youtube that just want to ride the waves of interest with content about it for the algorithm There's a general tabletop community watch thread that covers Trench Crusade better than the 40k thread(like their issues manufacturing minis, picking a notoriously shit vendor for it, their failures of appearances at conventions, the time they got called a bunch of racist euro centric bigots by their own stupid audience when they published a map because they didn't understand what it would mean if the middle east was overrun by demons until shown, abandoning twitter for bluesky where they get maybe 5% of the engagement...)

 

[msd]

It's a system created and run by people who don't know what the fuck they're doing, with a rabid small customer base of idiots who will likely never play the game, and a bunch of channels on youtube that just want to ride the waves of interest with content about it for the algorithm There's a general tabletop community watch thread that covers Trench Crusade better than the 40k thread(like their issues manufacturing minis, picking a notoriously shit vendor for it, their failures of appearances at conventions, the time they got called a bunch of racist euro centric bigots by their own stupid audience when they published a map because they didn't understand what it would mean if the middle east was overrun by demons until shown, abandoning twitter for bluesky where they get maybe 5% of the engagement...)

Thats genuinely disheartening to hear, because from the few things I saw and listened to, it sounded like it was something akin to tabletop forever winter.

But yeah, if its this bad, I'll just stick with forever winter, and trying to dip my toes into 40k

 

[Snekposter]

The writers have some great ideas in these books, like the Wolfen Empire which is just the Roman Empire but with intelligent wolves. It somehow comes off less as a furry thing and more like a “Humans have to deal with sharing a planet with abhumans” thing. It’s done pretty well imo.

The Albion book is one of the most horribly Britannic things I have ever read. The Southeast in general and London in particular are hellscapes only the brave or foolish dare enter, there's a section on social strata and proper behavior for the upper classes, and despite being replaced by talking animals the English still endlessly gripe and argue about the weather.

Oh, and there's a bunch of invaders from France intent on murdering and replacing the native Britons, but that's more of an unfortunate accident than anything planned.

The snail knight on the cover is pure fucking kino, too:

Kneel before the brand new King Arthur, losers!

Yeah, I looked through Palladium's Heroes Unlimited and even the Revised Core Rulebook & 2e were formatted and written so poorly, I just dropped it. The last thing I need is having to fight the Rulebook to even understand the game I'm trying to run. Advanced FASERIP is clean, simple, and effective, as far as I can tell, so that's what I'm sticking with.

Yeah, for all the talent at writing lore both the overall formatting and the crunch are positively abysmal to try and slog through.

 

[Allied-Mastercomputer]

When I was first introduced to Palladium system games in the 90s, the contested d20 rolls for parry and dodge were explained to me by the GM running things.

Fuck it, I’m just gonna write them into my copy of the rulebook in the margins.

 

[p1138]

Thats genuinely disheartening to hear, because from the few things I saw and listened to, it sounded like it was something akin to tabletop forever winter.

But yeah, if its this bad, I'll just stick with forever winter, and trying to dip my toes into 40k

The trench crusade discussion really starts about here on page 130, and is brought up throughout the next 20 pages as well. It's honestly not too much to quickly read through, but yeah TC is a shit show of faggotry.

Thread 'Tabletop Community Watch'

Dec 27, 2020

Tabletop Gaming: What is it?​

Tabletop gaming broadly refers to boardgames, role playing games, and miniature wargaming. There are forums, subreddits, and boards dedicated to tabletop or traditional gaming and even to specific games, factions, or strategies. On 4chan, the primary board for discussing traditional or tabletop gaming is /tg/ which has its own wiki called 1d4chan. Depending on the type of game, the amount of time, effort, and money that is required to get into the hobby can vary greatly. Board games such as Risk, Settlers of Catan, or Monopoly will have more...

• IAmNotAlpharius
• Replies: 3,116
• Forum: Games

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[PhoBingas]

Yeah, I looked through Palladium's Heroes Unlimited and even the Revised Core Rulebook & 2e were formatted and written so poorly, I just dropped it. The last thing I need is having to fight the Rulebook to even understand the game I'm trying to run. Advanced FASERIP is clean, simple, and effective, as far as I can tell, so that's what I'm sticking with.

The HU books are some of the worst laid out, least mechanically explained books that you almost can't use without a solid grasp of the system. I'll fully admit there's probably better systems out there to run capeshit games, but I'm not the biggest superhero fan either. I've only ever run one HU game at the request of a few people in a fairly large group. We never finished that game before the party got bored of and wanted to do another Rifts game. There's only so much you can do without stealing plotlines from comics, or you get through halfway making an adventure before you find out Batman, Teen Titans, X-men, or Spidey already did it; or maybe I'm just bad at writing game stuff for that genre.