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

Thousandislandstare said:
You could call it that. It's a bit a easier than AD&D or even DCC (from the little bit I've played of it) it's much more difficult than 5e or anything like that. What's ur preferred system if you don't mind me asking? are you an OSR guy?
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He's really enjoying his DM taking him through the magical realm of Gorge World currently

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Its a "surprisingly solid rule system"
 
Judge Dredd said:
Instead, OSR is obsessed with this, exclusively.
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It's grognards with rose colored glasses and, sorry but the word applies in this case, contrarian chuds who have a distorted view of what the Long Long Ago was like. Yes, there's very much a place for working class adventurers relying on luck and insane planning to not die horrible deaths in the depths of a dungeon, but a lot of them forgot the whole "Heroic" part of heroic fantasy/sci fi. I've done the gongfarmer thing, I'm glad I did, but I'm in your camp on wanting to be, you know, heroic.
 
Sayer of the N-Word said:
I recognize that from the DCC CRB, and DCC is absolutely abysmal when it comes to this stuff.
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Yes. There's that and another piece of art I can't find that OSR fans hold up constantly as the essence of OSR.

It's of some living statues fighting some PCs. In the foreground, the statue is overpowering or strangling the PC, and in the background a goofy looking PC is holding a sword up with an expression of dull surprise.

Traveller was an interesting one discussed a few times in the thread. Supposedly the intended tone vs the common fan interpretation are wildly different.

Henri Barbusse said:
It's a really robust system if you reskin the extremely detailed vore mechanics as combat and throw out the actual perfunctory combat rules.
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I never encountered the vore mechanics. I assume the DM edited them out.

How is the combat rules RAW? Said in the review that it's a bit flat, but the DM tends to have bland combat anyway.
 
Sayer of the N-Word said:
The core fans actively discourage DMs from starting a game at a higher level, too. You're just a 5e fanboy if you think your players might want characters who do more than fall on their face for the first five or six sessions, just go back to watching Critical Role and leave the gaming to the real gamers!
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That's some real grognard shit and not in a good way. If you're an adult it's hard to get anyone together to do anything fun. Try "but it's going to be a miserable slog for twelve hours or so because the 'core fans' think it should be that way" they'll go do something else. Fuck the core fans.
 
(There is an old board game thread, but would be a necro, so will post here)

Just had a real frustrating game of Beast. It's a Fury of Dracula clone. Or as it should be called, "Beginners trap: the board game."

Everything the hunters tried to do, there was some rule that meant it bit us in the arse.
  • Track the monster? Fuck you, you triggered a trap and are now stunned, miss a go.
  • Monster can choose to move an extra space in swamps, but fuck you, half of the board is swamp.
  • Attack the monster on the space? Fuck you, you need to do a search action to reveal it before attacking.
  • Play a search card to reveal the monster? Monster is revealed! But fuck you, monster is next in turn order, so disappears and moves in one of 4 directions.
  • Equipment card that triggers on ruins? Fuck you, no ruins on the board so that shop slot is wasted.
  • Want to attack the monster? Fuck you, attack cards are so rare they might as well not exist.
So yeah, a game so shitty I half suspect the guy didn't know the rules and was playing it wrong.
Not helped by the other hunter, who was so risk averse as to be completely useless in the first half.
Eventually the monster player started to throw the game, telling us to break well established rules like "you can't play two blue cards on a turn" and changing "zone" from the space I'm on to a large area of the map. Further adding to the feeling on the guy not knowing the rules and making them up as he went.
By the end the monster player was just playing solo, telling us what actions to take and we were just moving the pieces for him. Complete fucking clown show of a board game.
 
AnOminous said:
That's some real grognard shit and not in a good way. If you're an adult it's hard to get anyone together to do anything fun. Try "but it's going to be a miserable slog for twelve hours or so because the 'core fans' think it should be that way" they'll go do something else. Fuck the core fans.
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I had a GM for a 5e game start everyone at level 3 with max hit die for all their level ups since its not until level 2 or 3 that you get to pick your sub-class and start doing fun things.

That and even in 5e PC's are squishy as hell for the first couple of levels. Even with that the Paladin only barely made it out alive from the first boss fight after he got a few lucky crits in on the poor bastard.
 
Judge Dredd said:
(I'd include an image of Traveller here, but the official art all shows exciting things, not rusted ships and crippling debt)
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I've made characters who ALONE owned a whole ship by random chance. Mongoose 2nd is probably the most forgiving with ship ownership from character creation, as it made shares have absolute value of 1 McR , rather than be 1% per share, and rolling on [ship category] gives you 25% of a ship, which is cumulative with other players. That's not even getting into the other styles of play, like Naval where you are in his Imperial Majesty's Navy (or whoever you're working for) or playing an adventure that just gives you a ship like the straight up recommended introduction adventure High and Dry. As for debt, unless you pop out with just dogshit stats and skills, NOT making a good profit on operating your Freetrader is stranger. There is a reason the core book includes a passage in the Referee section on getting your players to actually adventure instead of just operating the ship legitimately, moving around cargo and making money on that.
 
Zhores Medvedev said:
I GM'd my first 3.5e game in years, it feels good to be back. I forgot how much fun this hobby can be.
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What kind of setting/adventure/campaign?

LovisXVI said:
There is a reason the core book includes a passage in the Referee section on getting your players to actually adventure instead of just operating the ship legitimately, moving around cargo and making money on that.
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How do they recommend you do that? As much as I like Starfinder, they have no built in way to stop that. Well, you've got drift shenanigans, and the plot of the campaign usually gives them motivation to not do that, but if it's a sandbox, I do wonder about that.

LovisXVI said:
I've made characters who ALONE owned a whole ship by random chance.
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LovisXVI said:
NOT making a good profit on operating your Freetrader is stranger.
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I had no idea it was that forgiving with ships. I'd been told by the thread that RAW traveller is at odds with the internets idea of the one-true-way-to-play, but I didn't know it went that far.

This raises the obvious question. Where are they getting this idea that Traveller is all about crippling debt and losing money each job until the debt collectors come and things get real? I assume it's an attempt to run Firefly?
 
Judge Dredd said:
This raises the obvious question. Where are they getting this idea that Traveller is all about crippling debt and losing money each job until the debt collectors come and things get real? I assume it's an attempt to run Firefly?
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I'd guess a combination of players who aren't engaging wholly in the Freetrader economy of getting shipping contracts, speculative trading and taking on passengers, and are approaching the game like D&D in space, and stingy Referees who are excessively tightfisted with money, failing to recognize that money can go really quickly in Traveller. Or maybe they're constantly getting into space fights, repairs are very expensive so if they're that kind of dumbasses, I could see that being the case.
Judge Dredd said:
How do they recommend you do that? As much as I like Starfinder, they have no built in way to stop that. Well, you've got drift shenanigans, and the plot of the campaign usually gives them motivation to not do that, but if it's a sandbox, I do wonder about that.
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I'm away from my house this month, and thus my books, but iirc its offer them things that you can't buy, like contacts, good will, favors, social standing, or unimaginably expensive goods like implants, ship upgrades, and ultra high tech items. All else fails, offer them even more money, just keep increasing the number.
 
Snekposter said:
I had a GM for a 5e game start everyone at level 3 with max hit die for all their level ups since its not until level 2 or 3 that you get to pick your sub-class and start doing fun things.

That and even in 5e PC's are squishy as hell for the first couple of levels. Even with that the Paladin only barely made it out alive from the first boss fight after he got a few lucky crits in on the poor bastard.
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Sometimes I have to wonder what the point of even having levels 1 and 2 in the game is since it's almost practically a given that a DM will start off their players at level 3 minimum. I guess it's more newbie-friendly to have the option to start players off with less stuff to have to learn right off the bat, but is it really that much more at level 3? Like you said, most classes barely have anything useful or fun those first couple of levels, even to the extent of not even coming close to how they play once they have all the core components of their toolkit. A lot of the time, your options are to do a basic attack and not much else, to say nothing of things you can do outside of combat. And any adventures you go on have to be of the absolute lowest stakes to avoid dying in the first session (insert debate about the morality of throwing mudfarmers into the meat grinder here). Even then, it's not impossible to get knocked down that early; I remember one level 1 character nearly dying to a single giant rat in our first combat encounter.

I suppose it's best to have an established low baseline that can be worked from instead of having a bunch of stuff by default, but it's funny to think that the number of players that have played both very high and very low level characters might not be too far apart from each other. Generous of your DM to let you all get max HP for that level, though.
 
King Dead said:
Sometimes I have to wonder what the point of even having levels 1 and 2 in the game is since it's almost practically a given that a DM will start off their players at level 3 minimum. I guess it's more newbie-friendly to have the option to start players off with less stuff to have to learn right off the bat, but is it really that much more at level 3? Like you said, most classes barely have anything useful or fun those first couple of levels, even to the extent of not even coming close to how they play once they have all the core components of their toolkit. A lot of the time, your options are to do a basic attack and not much else, to say nothing of things you can do outside of combat. And any adventures you go on have to be of the absolute lowest stakes to avoid dying in the first session (insert debate about the morality of throwing mudfarmers into the meat grinder here). Even then, it's not impossible to get knocked down that early; I remember one level 1 character nearly dying to a single giant rat in our first combat encounter.

I suppose it's best to have an established low baseline that can be worked from instead of having a bunch of stuff by default, but it's funny to think that the number of players that have played both very high and very low level characters might not be too far apart from each other. Generous of your DM to let you all get max HP for that level, though.
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I think the idea is so new players can have time to think about how they want to develop their character instead of being locked into a specific gimmick that they might realize isn't fun for them, but as you said levels 1 and 2 are just so bare bones that I'm not sure how the Fighter is supposed to decide if they want to do maneuvers or crit on 19s since the value of those things probably aren't super clear to a newbie. And to make it even dumber, the other Fighter subclasses require stats Fighters typically don't need so you have to lock in on them during character creation anyway.
 
Buckaroo said:
I think the idea is so new players can have time to think about how they want to develop their character instead of being locked into a specific gimmick that they might realize isn't fun for them
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This.

I know it's unpopular to say around these parts, but DnD is a complex game. It's easy to see if you compare it to board game with a similar theme. And even those board games are a bit much for normies.

King Dead said:
And any adventures you go on have to be of the absolute lowest stakes to avoid dying in the first session (insert debate about the morality of throwing mudfarmers into the meat grinder here).
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Oddly enough, it's the opposite.

For all the complaints that 5e has too much healing or is fantasy super heroes, at low levels they become benefits. A heavy crossbow is dangerous, and even if the NPC rolls great damage, the death save system gives the PCs lots of time to fix the problem. As a DM, I still have to be careful, and I guess the stakes are lower, but to use super hero language, you can do street level adventures.
 
King Dead said:
Sometimes I have to wonder what the point of even having levels 1 and 2 in the game is since it's almost practically a given that a DM will start off their players at level 3 minimum.
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Speaking for B/X the reason for lvls 1 and 2 is mostly for henchmen and apprentices - both the party and their opponents.

Also because a lvl 1 character is a punishment for dying.

The other reason for the low levels is to make taking the dip of that level of wizard or w/e actually hurt. There are a lot of Le Reddit builds that would just simply not work at all until they hit their magic synergy, and as a DM if you see what is coming you can just crush their minmax munchkin before he turns into a demigod.
 
Ghostse said:
Speaking for B/X the reason for lvls 1 and 2 is mostly for henchmen and apprentices - both the party and their opponents.

Also because a lvl 1 character is a punishment for dying.

The other reason for the low levels is to make taking the dip of that level of wizard or w/e actually hurt. There are a lot of Le Reddit builds that would just simply not work at all until they hit their magic synergy, and as a DM if you see what is coming you can just crush their minmax munchkin before he turns into a demigod.
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Shows how little multiclassing comes into my line of thought that I hadn't even considered that. It would certainly make shenanigans all the easier to pull off if taking a single dip into another class gave you a half dozen things at once.

Of course, I'd just ban multiclassing as a DM and sidestep the issue entirely.
 
Do people actually multiclass though?

I've only seen it a few times, and usually it's when a capstone skill is shit or there's a very specific concept for a character. I've never seen people do exploity stuff like the mage/fighter dip to have a heavy armour caster.
 
Scream Aim Fire said:
Can't disagree there. Just seen plenty of retard fights on the internet about how the different DND settings should "never mix" because it would be "too much work for the DMs" or some shit.
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Yeah that's just a case of people who are mediocre at their job as a DM.
Judge Dredd said:
And every time I get over that criticism and am told OSR isn't like that, something will come along and return me to factory default, like the near TPK stairs story.
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Ah the good old torture hobo DM. You have to remember that for everyone that knows about something on the internet there's 10 absolute retarded mother fuclers that think they're an expert on the subject.
That's the osr torture hobo DM.
These people don't keep groups for any length of time.
They're typically self proclaimed geniuses as well.
Their peak gaming is rolling on random charts, getting lost during hexploration and 2-3 sessions of the players meandering about starving to death and stabbing wolves.
They'll ignore TSR articles literally from the era telling you to not be "that guy" or you won't have players.
Plus dozens of articles specifically about balancing things.
Tldr they're just autistic. Or trying to shill their shitbrew.
I lived and played through the 80s and 90s.
I can assure you it wasn't the norm.
Tournament material didn't count. They were meant to be played with 8+ people plus a full roster of henchmen.
 
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