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p1138 said:
That's the problem with most of these horror stories, is people not just leaving to telling people immediately in plain english to just knock it off.
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i agree you simply dont continue playing with these, but you still have at least one partial session to tell the horror story
p1138 said:
So no matter what bullshit contrivance you come up with the "inspired" modifier can never be as impactful as the "risky" modifier once you get above a d6.
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thats not much of a problem because the player can influence when to take risks
generally a smart adventure party will always try to get an edge somehow, without playing smart 4 idiots shouldnt be able to kill a dragon, or take 20 npc's head on (this why i dont like d&d and its insane level scaling, the system doesnt work properly below level 3 because one bad roll and a pc is just dead, and pc's become way too powerfull above level 6)

p1138 said:
so you're still doomed to be dumber from that easy "roll to calculate pancake dough ratios" 1/4 of the time.
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soy.png

>i always thought the best moments in a game where the funny ones
>dont we all love these WACKY moments when a bad roll causes a hero to slip over his shoelaces in the worst situation
>with SHIFT you can have EVEN MORE of those
>if you fail once, you fail even more in the future
>imagine a game with a ballerina that trips once, and then again and again
>all those insane RUNNING GAGS this will create
>WAHOOO
soy.png
 
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In most cases that the fail conditions in d20 systems usually only apply to where really bad things can happen. Like for example in the depths of combat, or using powerful artifacts, a crit fail condition makes sense (it's also probability wise a lot rarer than the 2d6 BS, and it also affects the enemy). It also only applies to saves since even iron wills can break. You never can crit fail a skill.

There's a reason it has a DC, the bar you have to hit.

d20s hit a good niche of rollability (the dice), complexity for elaborate battles, and simplicity to get people in. Especially since the older games do have a lot more crunch than crap like 5e and DnDone. It's unbalanced, but tbh all systems have jank and ways to break them so I don't really see this as an issue, especially if you just balance the fight to match their abilities. If you think they're plowing through your encounters too easily, it's probably because you aren't accounting for their abilities and should rebalance your fights. Reminder that CRs were designed for groups of four with set roles that has only one active fighter, and one blast caster. And if they're retarded and try to yolo into fights without thinking? Just punish them for it. They'll either learn or leave.

As for other systems? I can tell you that Shadowrun also has that sort of jank and it has the winning d6 pools; luck builds for example can just fuck over difficulty since you have so much edge to burn, and that's not getting into spirit usage as a Technomancer or Mage. Or how certain wares can break the game. In the World of Darkness, you have pools that both reward you and punish you (unless you use the Chronicle's raised difficulty and get rid of successes removed by botches). WEG's venerable system also has some jank due to how many dice you can slam into things.

I mean shit, even Chaosium's d% has this, because if you ever touch a game of Runescape, you will know how fucking scary a Humakti is in combat out of the box; they are going to fucking hit you and you will feel it. Call of Cthulhu also has a bad habit of causing bad sanity spirals, which was made into a feature.

All systems have quirks, it's just how you parse them.
p1138 said:
Hell, if you want to see an absurd statistics failure in gaming look at any game that involves rolling 2d6 for anything and the droves of people that can't understand the average is a 7.
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There's a reason I prefer d6 dice pools over the 2d6 bs, since most of the time these "simple" systems suck due to these designers not getting this. Mainly because they just ape Powered by the Apocalypse. That's not to say this can't work out; Traveller figured it out like 45 years ago for fuck's sake and it still is better than the average new slop.

D% or dice pools tend to be my favorite systems of the lot.
 
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Adamska said:
d20s hit a good niche of rollability (the dice), complexity for elaborate battles, and simplicity to get people in.
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i dont have a problem with d20's themselves, but adding the digits of a few dice aint exactly complex, and you just have way less outliers, which is just my personal preference
Adamska said:
it's probably because you aren't accounting for their abilities and should rebalance your fights
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yes, just throw in more dragons (i know i can just make up my own dragon stats, but there are official books with stats for dragons & bandits)
d&d is just not a system that really pushes the party to get creative in their tactics
 
Smoltine Kiminal said:
the problem with inventory-management things like tracking arrows is that its tedious and takes a lot of time on the table, this implementation increases the problem even further, you still have to keep track of the number, but also roll each time
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That's exactly the thing the "inventory dice" thing is to solve. You have 3 quivers, so you just track the dice-size on each quiver. Roll to see if the quiver you are using degrades. If not, you retrieved enough arrows after the fight to keep it topped up.

There are issues, but as I said I like the idea.

Anything 3.5 and over I don't bother tracking ammo as long as the player isn't running economic or system-breaking fuckfuck games because the cost & weight should be low enough that "I have 3 quivers in my inventory" "Ok, rad." suffices and they are making enough treasure they can just be counted as having bought 3 more before any encounter and it'll be a rounding error on wealth.

I usually track/have players track ammo in my B/X one-shots because 1, it builds good muscle memory for attention to detail and 2, its almost a given ammo is limited and in small quantities. In a campaign, if a guy builds his fighter into a ranger and rolls in with 200 arrows, I'm going to probably going to declare he's got enough ammo for the delve and we work out how many arrows weren't recoverable when they get back to town, but I'm unlikely to give a pregen more than a single quiver and that isn't too much to keep track of. and 3 that coin matters much more.


Adamska said:
D% or dice pools tend to be my favorite systems of the lot
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D20 is D% just with gating at 5% marks, which what I'm going round shit to for the most part and would only care about the trailing <4% in very extreme edge cases.

I don't like dice pools simply because I can't adjust the math to do what I want on fly in my head like I can with flat probability d20/d%. Even 2d6 I can't do it quite as naturally as I'd like but when running 2d6 systems I have a laminated card I'll pack that has the probability of each result with pips for how many of the 36 possible outcomes there for the number, and the probably adjustment going up or down between each 2-12 result... so I can at least fake it.
Also helps the 2d6 I usually just run the most is Maze Rats and really raw odds of success are all that matters since bonuses cap out at +1 and advantage. With less to fiddle with and situations spelled out, there is less I need to adjust so I don't even really need it for MR.
 
Smoltine Kiminal said:
i agree you simply dont continue playing with these, but you still have at least one partial session to tell the horror story

thats not much of a problem because the player can influence when to take risks
generally a smart adventure party will always try to get an edge somehow, without playing smart 4 idiots shouldnt be able to kill a dragon, or take 20 npc's head on (this why i dont like d&d and its insane level scaling, the system doesnt work properly below level 3 because one bad roll and a pc is just dead, and pc's become way too powerfull above level 6)


View attachment 8015686
>i always thought the best moments in a game where the funny ones
>dont we all love these WACKY moments when a bad roll causes a hero to slip over his shoelaces in the worst situation
>with SHIFT you can have EVEN MORE of those
>if you fail once, you fail even more in the future
>imagine a game with a ballerina that trips once, and then again and again
>all those insane RUNNING GAGS this will create
>WAHOOO
View attachment 8015750
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Why do they all look like this?
 
Smoltine Kiminal said:
is this system supposed to be used for a looney tunes campaign?
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Actually a cartoon style RPG where your failures are perhaps even more likely than successes could be interesting and fun.

As long as the system was called ACME.
 
Loose Goose said:
Looks like the vibe coding school of system design: no understanding of what the mechanical chassis actually does and how it interacts with the players in an actual game session, only vague aesthetic decisions based on feels. Fortunately, nobody will play the game extensively, and it will mainly be bought by people who are looking for their Kickstarter fix. It's a perfect product for that, and the design team looks almost like it was engineered for diversity: slightly older soy looking bugman, gay Asian, unconvincing troon. They couldn't get the sassy ethnic brown token, so the project will only do moderately well.

View attachment 8012474
"I am a walking, talking red flag!"
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Mixed Korean, yeah mixed with what plastics. Label yourself properly Koreans! Think of the environment!
 
Trench Crusade folks posted their October Kickstarter update and it's causing some serious rage. The book has been delayed again because the printer told them to use a different printing method and apparently forgot to mention that it was going to significantly darken all the images they sent over, so they've had to fix every single piece of art in the book and send it back.

Meanwhile, Only-Games is now pushing their delivery deadline back to the end of October. A lot of the most recent orders have been arriving in unmarked packaging without a checklist or order slip, the incidence of missing parts and broken, uncured, or warped models seems to have gone up significantly, and they're being rude and unhelpful to backers who are trying to get more info on their order. A lot of the Beast and Heresiarch backers who are commenting are pissed. One guy just commented a few minutes ago saying that his $1100 order arrived without several of the biggest models and all of the terrain he paid for, plus what was there is mashed up into a broken jumble. Several comments agreeing that they're never going to back another KS where Only-Games is involved in any way. At this point I'm expecting the worst from my order, which is finally on the way.
 
Purple fur Pomeranian said:
Your thoughts?
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Suffer not the furry to live.

Second Missing Primarch said:
Trench Crusade folks posted their October Kickstarter update and it's causing some serious rage. The book has been delayed again because the printer told them to use a different printing method and apparently forgot to mention that it was going to significantly darken all the images they sent over, so they've had to fix every single piece of art in the book and send it back.

Meanwhile, Only-Games is now pushing their delivery deadline back to the end of October. A lot of the most recent orders have been arriving in unmarked packaging without a checklist or order slip, the incidence of missing parts and broken, uncured, or warped models seems to have gone up significantly, and they're being rude and unhelpful to backers who are trying to get more info on their order. A lot of the Beast and Heresiarch backers who are commenting are pissed. One guy just commented a few minutes ago saying that his $1100 order arrived without several of the biggest models and all of the terrain he paid for, plus what was there is mashed up into a broken jumble. Several comments agreeing that they're never going to back another KS where Only-Games is involved in any way. At this point I'm expecting the worst from my order, which is finally on the way.
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Surprised Pikachi
 
Purple fur Pomeranian said:
Mantic is releasing 4th edition Kings of War along with a new Faction named the Xirkaali Empire. Your thoughts?
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wtf is this weird furry jungle mongolian shit?

They had 2 factions of dwarves, knights, elves, tomb kings, some druids with elemental monsters, 2 factions of hell demons, goblins, halflings, vikings, ogres, orcs, knock off skaven, knock off lizard-men, underwater elves, dark elves, undead monsters... just knocking off what GW was doing, so GW releases their chinamen faction for the old world, and Mantic responds with cartoon fursuit mongolians or something? Sure they've had the skaven and lizard men knock offs in the past but those weren't cartoony fursuit things. Is this what Mantic thinks might finally get this game to take off in North America?
Ghostse said:
Surprised Pikachi
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Seriously, the company with a bad reputation working with the company with zero business-sense is having issues like this? Who'd have imagined.
 
p1138 said:
This is a system that discourages dice rolls. I'll roll dice at anything in most games, fuck it let's see what the dice say the result is, could be fun, could be dumb. But when you've got such a cascading failure of something so fucking basic applying penalties that make no sense depending on what the trait is even for? This is worse than PF2Es early(at least I know this was the case early on, it might have been fixed) profession skills where a crit failure that was a 5% chance to just be permanently fired from your character's job, imagine you're at work and you run the risk of failing so hard you haven't just lost your job but your career once every 3 weeks?
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Pendragon 5e has this. If you fumble a passion roll, your character goes mad and is out of the game for as long as the GM says. And you really want to roll passions, since a passed passion roll gives you +10 bonus to a skill in a d20, roll under your skill system. (Skills above 20 have increased chance to crit, so the extra points are not wasted.) The extra kicker? If your passion is 16 or more, you have to roll it when you're in a situation it applies. As in, if you have passion Loyalty (King Arthur) of 16 and you're in a battle against Arthur's enemies, you have to roll. But Pendragon is a pretty high lethality game and a player is encouraged to keep one or two backup characters around at all times. (Though we once had a player ragequit the game after he lost three characters in a single session. Understandable, really.)

Adamska said:
d20s hit a good niche of rollability (the dice), complexity for elaborate battles, and simplicity to get people in.
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My main complaint about d20 is that it's a bit too swingy.

Flexo said:
Actually a cartoon style RPG where your failures are perhaps even more likely than successes could be interesting and fun.

As long as the system was called ACME.
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That reminds me of a Japanese indie horror ttrpg I read a while back (Castle in Gray). It is a heavily structured, but rules light narrative game and it really only has one mechanic, though it's 100% used to push the story in a desired direction. A character's only stat is a clock face. At the start, half of it is white and the other half is black. As the game goes on, more and more of it gets colored black. If you want to help someone or be nice, you have to roll a white number to succeed. If you want to be aggressive, violent and so on, you have to roll a black number. Extremely simple, but it pushes the game into a horror direction and it's a game designed for oneshots, so the lack of depth isn't a significant issue.
 
Henri Barbusse said:
That reminds me of a Japanese indie horror ttrpg I read a while back (Castle in Gray). It is a heavily structured, but rules light narrative game and it really only has one mechanic, though it's 100% used to push the story in a desired direction. A character's only stat is a clock face. At the start, half of it is white and the other half is black. As the game goes on, more and more of it gets colored black. If you want to help someone or be nice, you have to roll a white number to succeed. If you want to be aggressive, violent and so on, you have to roll a black number. Extremely simple, but it pushes the game into a horror direction and it's a game designed for oneshots, so the lack of depth isn't a significant issue.
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that's an interesting mechanic. It makes me think of a one-page rules game (I believe posted here) where it was to a Sci-Fi mission-of-the-week simulator and you picked a target number 2-5. You tried to roll under your number for Talkies and over your number for Blasties.
Edit: found it. Lasers and Feelings. And I had the over/under reversed

Its not all that much better than a PbtA but at least its not always 7's, and leans hard into its premise and with only page there is only so much retarded woke & fags the creator could cram in. I could see it being a decent zero-prep thing to have around.
 

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