Belated hi back.

What's new?

Very little, sadly.

Aw.

:P

so, what brings you around here @Longspeak?

The Chat? Just to see what's up. The exchange? I honestly don't remember. I think I was searching for an answer and stumbled across the place.

ah, things are kinda quiet right now

Yeah, weekends are quiet.

Seems to be that way everywhere.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, a little peace and quiet.

hmm... so my strategy of spacing tag-edits on meta over a few days is mooted by the pace of other meta-activity. Just gonna rip off the band-aid, then.

Yeah, I wouldn't worry too much about that sort of thing.

@nitsua60 so, how're things going over there?

Wife's all better, kids are having sleepovers, it rained today so I don't have to water the fruit trees... living the life =)

nice, always a good thing to be able to take it easy

One member of my Monday night 5e group will be away for the summer; I'm thinking abut whether he and I might try to do some virtual play so he's not completely absent from the story-progression for months. @Shalvenay would you possibly be interested in making it a three-person go, and joining into our RL game after a fashion?

@nitsua60 nice. got my druid in NWN multiplayer up to L21 -- first epic char xD

@nitsua60 I could entertain that, yes

@Shalvenay alright--I'll keep you informed.

that'd mean we'd be doing 5e for the summer game, I take it?

Late 80s synthpop. Ahh... how I don't miss you, late 80s.

@Shalvenay yeah, it'd be working you into an existing 5e campaign

"Hey guys, we just figured out how to make weird noises on our Casio keyboards!"

@Longspeak c'mon, late 80's were great. I got my first ten-speed, made my first mix-tape for a girl, went to my first (and last) crappy-basement New Year's Eve party....

Wait...

Actually, come to think of it, literally none of those things were good =)

crappy basement New Year's Eve party??

I thought you looked familiar!

The fake wood paneling really sealed in the dank, eh?

It really did. But the band was... enthusiastic.

Anyone here plays OpenQuest? how is it?

I have never heard of that.

Anyone remember ElfQuest? (Speaking of the 80s...)

The comic or the game or both?

Because no.

:)

@Longspeak OpenQuest is a clone of (IIRC) RuneQuest II (1980).

I have never heard of those, nor of Wendy or Richard Pini, the creators of the comic.

@d7: Ah. I've heard of that, of course. Why do people play clones instead of the originals?

Take a more well-known example for study: Why did people move to Pathfinder from 3.5 instead of still playing the old 3.5 material?

PF tried to improve on 3.5's flaws without losing the things people liked about it, and perhaps more importantly PF had a constant stream of new material.

@Longspeak There are a lot of minority reasons that roll together into a set of reasons a bunch of people might play them. For OQ, I believe the original reason to make it was to have a published game that the author could write adventures against; since all the d100 derivatives are mostly inter-intelligible, that makes for adventures that can be used by any RQ/BRP/etc. fan. Some people apparently like OQ itself because it's a nice presentation of the rules.

After a supplement-driven game is dropped by its publisher, clones provide new material for the community.

I think in OQ's case it was more that RQII/III are hard to acquire, but they're still excellent games. That's changed now that Chaosium have reprinted RQII though!

i just asked because i wanted to see your favorite supplements

@xChapx My favourite supplement for a d100 game is the setting of Glorantha. ;) But to each their own cup of tea.

That, too; we often lose sight of how important physical access was before the Age Of Digital Publication.

That makes sense I guess. Like how I'm using the Star Wars REUP for my game instead of the old R&E.

[that was stupid]

[was amused anyway]

@xChapx What kind of supplements are you looking for? There aren't really a whole lot of d100 supplements I'm aware of. There are a few alternate magic systems floating around for d100/BRP, but the rest of the non-core material is mostly adventures or setting material. As a rule system, each flavour of d100 tends to be fairly complete.

hit location and criticals

@Longspeak I'm eager to see a full compilation of the Faith Corps hack for Star Wars Rebels.

I don't know what that is. Either of those things. :P

@Longspeak come to think of it, what systems do you play?

Mostly lite, indie games these days. Dogs in the Vineyard, Powered by the Apocalypse, Some older non-indie, like Everway, Over the Edge.

My kids play Pathfinder.

ah. I've dabbled in FAE and RFS

but I tend to find myself at a loss in lightweight, narrativist systems

as I'm a world-over-story person vs. the story-over-world view that is common in narrativist RP

The Star Wars game I'm just beginning with my group marks the first time I've used a heavier system in ages. Though even then, that's not a very heavy system.

yeah -- heaviest systems I've played are AD&D2e and D&D 3.5e

I'd like to give GURPS or Burning Wheel a shot

but it's hard to find someone who runs those

Gurps is lite if you want it to be, but can get crunchy. Burning Wheel is... crunchy. But well done crunch.

yeah -- another issue is that there are quite a few settings that actively turn me off

I don't do supers or laser-fantasy at all, nor am I at home in settings that radically manipulate a modern world (like MtA's)

@Longspeak Faith Corps is an amalgam hack of Fate Core and Cortex Plus, designed to support storytelling in the style of the contemporary animated TV series "Star Wars Rebels."

@xChapx Those are usually part of the core rules of a d100 game. What didn't you like about RQ6? It's got a robust hit-location combat system that's tactical without being grid-based, built around getting/avoiding special effects (aka criticals).

I can do firm-to-hard SF and most Western-style fantasy (although I do raise some hackles at the far ends of murderhoboism), as well as urban fantasy type stuff (although I take a different tack to it than many I suspect)

IIRC you have to check weapons sizes and both attacker and defender critical/fumbles idk it seems slow

@Shalvenay This is the same trouble I have with setting-agnostic light systems; I feel untethered, like I could make up anything, so making up anything becomes hard. I need a reliable environment to riff off for my improv.

@SevenSidedDie yeah -- me as well -- I can work with setting-agnostic systems but it means that the DM has to go to great lengths to define the setting

@xChapx Have you played it though? Reading a game isn't a great test of how well it performs, same as how a car looks won't tell you how fast it goes or well it handles.

(I found it as fast as D&D 3.5e combat, and that was being a newbie to RQ6. It's faster with experience. We're not playing it now due to wanting a less nuts-and-bolts interface to Glorantha, but I'm still a fan of RQ6.)

@SevenSidedDie This is when it's up to the GM to provide the anchor in the form of a good setting.

@Longspeak That's me though. :)

If the system doesn't provide, the GM must. Or if the group is just beginning, a collaboration can form the basis for the setting.

@SevenSidedDie Ah. Then that makes it more complicated. :)

@SevenSidedDie just readed it

@Longspeak Indeed. :) My attraction to rules-light is to have minimal prep, and minimal barrier between “we do this” and having it happen. But I've found that rules-light moves the onus onto the group's knowledge of the setting: without a lot of shared knowledge or at least assumptions, they keep wanting to do things that the system says they should be able to do, but that don't mesh with the setting's reality/constraints. Aligning our ideas of the setting becomes a lot of the session overhead.

@Longspeak I've taken to using a combination of collaboration and influence maps for my current long-form campaign.

@SevenSidedDie That's part of what makes a lot of indie games great. Especially (IMO) earlier ones, where setting and rules often were tied together.

@xChapx Well if you like what you see in RQ6 but think it might be too heavyweight, it's definitely one of the heavier d100 games.

@xChapx What kind of campaigns/adventures are you imagining playing with the game you're seeking?

@BESW I did that with the game I am just ending/putting on hiatus to play Star Wars. We've run a supers game for 10 years with collaborative world building and player-input for influence mapping. We're setting it aside because it's time to play something new for a while. :)

You might find influence maps to be a useful concept at some point.

This is one I made toward the beginning of our current campaign (I really should make a new one, as the world's quite different now):

@BESW whereas, I'm more of someone who needs things laid out explicitly due to my lack of cultural reference points

@SevenSidedDie mid fantasy, like any osr campaign but with less combat, i want my players to feel that they are risking their lives with every dice roll

@Shalvenay I don't think the cultural references are too necessary. I don't think I know any of the referents there, either, but I still take away at least "human talking to alien, airship, energy-powers, mind-tech, ancient mysteries"

[also, "@BESW's much better with GIMP than I am"]

@xChapx When you think about “OSR adventures but with less combat”, what's filling the space? Is it social drama, political powerbrokering, exploration, quiet character development slice of life, character motivation drama, something else?

@nitsua60 perhaps not

@nitsua60 Photoshop, and yes, I did show off more than necessary. It was a good chance to brush up on some of my training.

that's a lot of setting conveyed in a very dense space

[grin]

@SevenSidedDie Mostly Exploration/Character Development and a bit of politics

@xChapx Okay, so it sounds like maybe wanting combat to be nastier is part of making it less appealing, so lethal force is only used when it matters for some other goal. Is that about right?

yes

@SevenSidedDie yes*

@xChapx (if you mouse over a chat message, there's a downward arrow on the left that gives you a menu with an edit option, until a message is a few minutes old)

@xChapx Hm. That's a tough balance to strike for a game system. …

@SevenSidedDie Sounds like Princes' Kingdom to me.

@SevenSidedDie Right now i think i am going to use Openquest System with Runequest rules for hp for hit locations and warhammer combat criticals

@BESW Typically such systems are more deadly. :)

@xChapx Yeah, that might do it. But whether it works will mostly depend on the players. If they want to smash face, they'll just be frustrated and die a lot. Are the players on-board with having a more normal-human relationship to violence?

@SevenSided

@SevenSidedDie Well, PK actively asks "Are you okay with making things deadly?" instead of expecting players to figure that out on their own.

@SevenSided We used to play Dnd 5e, everyone was very cautious when fighting except one dude that always wanted to show off, but i gave them a poll after 30+ sessions about what they liked and what not, the top answer about what they disliked was combat, asking more profoundly they said it was slow, ac is stupid, you cant hit someone in the face or cut limbs , they mostly want exploration and social interaction

@BESW Ah, that kind of thing. There's a big experiential difference between stepping out of the character to contemplate that sort of thing though, and having it arise organically from the way injury is handled by the combat system. Either work for me, but for different reasons, and I've known players who strongly prefer one and not the other.

@xChapx Cool. Yeah, your mix of OpenQuest, RQ6 per-location hit points, and WHFP criticals would probably be quite serviceable for that audience. (The nice thing about d100 family of games is that they graft together really easily.)

@SevenSidedDie Yeah, I mention PK because it's sorta straddling the edge of that divide.

By default, conflicts begin socially and only social fallout can be inflicted. If you're losing the conflict, you can get more mechanical resources on your side by bringing in some new feature: a friend, a weapon, etc. But each new thing expands the scope of the fallout which might get inflicted on anyone in the scene.

If you start waving a gun around, somebody's liable to get shot, so make sure winning the conflict is worth that risk.

@BESW Oh, that's right, it's a variant of Dogs in the Vineyard. So IIRC, it's less a Director Stance choice and more an option that's always implicitly available, but has to be explicitly invoked by the player.

Right.

That's what I love most about Dogs. The player has to decide, and to drive the conflict. What are you willing to risk? How far will you go?

I have a lot of problems with Dogs, but the way the mechanic drives the themes is not one of them.

I'd really like to figure out a way to hack it so I'd be able to focus on the stuff it's supposed to be about.

In OpenQuest PC have from 6 to 21 HP ,if they take half their HP in damage they take a Mayor Wound, and when their HP reach 0 they die, I decided that i am going to use separate armor location(legs,head,body,arms) but not a different HP pool, and when my players take half of their hp in damage they will roll hit location and the critical wounds in WHF2E, how does it sound?

I'm inevitably reminded of Once Upon A Table's critical hit table.

@xChapx Sounds like it would work at least! To see if you like it, you'll just have to play and find out. Lots of things look straightforward on paper but reveal their true effects only during play.

Changed that players die when they have their hp in negative value so if your max hp is 20 you will die at -20

Doesn't that just make the difference between PCs' hit point values bigger? The squishies remain squishy, and the heavies are heavier.

In my experience, that sort of variance just makes it harder for conflicts to challenge the whole party; either the heavies are bored or the squishies are dead.

Max hp is 21 for humans iirc, lets say you dont have armor and a cute beastman hits you in the head with a club doing 1d6+1d4 dmg, he rolls an 8 and because it was a hit in the head it is multiplied by 2, for a total of 16 dmg, and that is 1/2 of your total hp so roll for a mayor wound

This kind of systems are made so it doesn't matter if you are a the most skilled warrior in the world if a old farmer strikes you a critical you are dead

Yeah, there's not much variance in human-sized HP in the d100 family. It's mostly based on your CON and SIZ and unless you're a T-Rex, it doesn't get very high.

Not getting hit, or wearing a lot of armour, (but preferably not getting hit) is how to not die.

'morning.

Good nigth

So Paizo is pulling a Blizzard-style move, translating Warcraft Pathfinder to Starcraft Starfinder?

Makes sense, seeing as how they've been pushing Pathfinder towards magitek for years now.

@lisardggY Huh. Yeah, and it seems like sci-fi is the second most popular genre for RPGs.

Sounds interesting, bad thing i dont longer run d20 games i play in some though

@SevenSidedDie But still way, way behind fantasy, I think. Haven't seen any market statistics, but it feels like a distant second.

Traveller and EotE nonwithstanding.

@lisardggY Yeah, definitely a distant second. Maybe Paizo figures they can leverage a lot of their existing fanbase into Starfinder and grow the fanbase for sci-fi?

@SevenSidedDie I'm thinking the same. As I said, they've been acclimating their audience to magitek and departure from classic medieval-ish fantasy for years.

@lisardggY And it's pretty much explicit in that ad copy: “Starfinder is designed to integrate easily with the Pathfinder roleplaying game, meaning your power-armored marine can still go toe to toe with orcs and dragons.”

Sounds kind of like they're aiming to eat Shadowrun's lunch, even.

Shadowrun has kind of been begging to be competed with, too. Even its fans complain about how much a mess the system is.

@SevenSidedDie There's this trope that's been with D&D since Expedition to the Barrier Peek - the fantasy heroes who explore strange ruins and find a crashed spaceship.

It looks like they're planning easy integration points there.

2e kept it in the magical world with Spelljammer, which explicitly encouraged integrating it into existing campaigns via "adventurers find a crashed spaceship, restore it and take it to space" adventure hooks.

Final Fantasy and Might and Magic also played this trope extensively.

Ok, I think there's a blog post it in for me. :)

@lisardggY Yep. Science-fantasy as a gaming thing has been fading for a while now outside the OSR, except for steampunk. I'm not sure how much existing audience there is for it now that the generation that grew up on fantasy/sci-fi mixes is less the market focus. But maybe Paizo will recreate it?

It's very Vancian.

@lisardggY Actual Vancian, not D&D Vancian, yes. ;)

I write shorthand notes for myself to blog about later, but if I delay for too long they become a jumbled stream if consciousness mess.

@SevenSidedDie Yeah. One of the earlier Dying Earth stories had a fantasyish guy exploring a technological city. I remember it because it was the first one not to star a psychotic murderhobo.

@lisardggY Not to mention the whole “our Earth millions of years in the future” part.

@SevenSidedDie That, along with "magic is just ritualized remains of math and science", works well for me as pure fluff. But this was actual scifi artifacts littering the landscape.

Mixing sci-fi into “standard” fantasy seems to be lumped into “gonzo” these days, along with Gygax's Wonderland modules and Planetary Fantasy.

But seriously, reading the original collection of Dying Earth stories today is interesting. And somewhat disturbing.

@lisardggY The whole cycle-of-civilisation thing? (I haven't read Dying Earth, so I'm guessing.)

@BESW The whole rapey, murdery feel to it.

I've only read the first collection of stories, but all of the protagonists, but one, were total murderhobos.

One in particular, Lianne the Wayfarer, is a torturing psychopath who feels no compunctions over murdering an old man on the street who gave him directions, on the off chance that he might be working with his enemy.

Which is classic D&D murderhobo "no consequences" mentality.

@lisardggY Ah. That's... unfortunate.

Fortunate in the sense that it gave me enough material for a 90 minute talk at a convention about the Vancian roots of D&D murderhoboism. :)

But yeah.

I haven't read any further stories, though. Don't know if it improved in his later works.

I'd love to be able to consume all those talks you give.

Curse you, language barrier!

I try to have one in each one of our large conventions, on in April, one in September/October.

Last one was about concepts of canonicity in fandom. Next one is about sf/f elements in Bowie's music.

[waaaant]

@lisardggY wow that is pretty freaking horrible

@trogdor Yes, yes.

The justification for it is that the setting for the Dying Earth is, well, a dying earth. Set millions of years in the future, the world is decadent, run down, and nihilistic.

none of my characters have been that bad, arguably even the evil undead one

But that, of course, is the author's choice.

indeed

if you spin it so that is a thing in your world, it is still your choice

you weren't "stuck" making murderhobo protagonists

@Ladifas [wave]

A brief tutorial on making cool RPG maps with Photoshop

@doppelgreener that was... really underwhelming until I found the tiny "load 13 more images" link. Cool stuff--thanks.

@nitsua60 and then it went voom like you put ten thousand volts through it.

yeah--bookmarked for now, may try this week.

@nitsua60 Hi. You said you could send me your quick reference page.

Where should you ask questions about featuers of rpg.stackexchange itself?

@Momonga-sama Meta.

@Momonga-sama specifically, meta.rpg.stackexchange.com

@Ladifas I dropped a copy of it over in the Not A Bar.

hey there @nitsua60

hiya

how're things going?

(great fun on a 90-degree day)

@Shalvenay I think your answer on the druid/metal/agency question is falling afoul of the unspoken and unanswered that's hovering around that user's recent series of questions: "what happens to a druid encased in metal?"

@nitsua60 hrm -- I was trying to explain why that would be a useful thing to rule on since it seemed like the OP was doubting that the situation would ever come up.

A lot of answers are saying things about "druid will suffer the consequences" without specifying the consequences. ('Cause they're not laid out in the book, and I think we're all holding our breath waiting for someone to say "a druid encased in metal isn't a druid and [nuclear option] loses all class features until not in metal.")

You implicitly point to a subtlety about the wording of "will not wear" and the idea that "will not" has to do with whether the character even has the choice.

@nitsua60 yeah

But the bugbear in the room is "does the druid stop being a druid?" And I assume the spectre of robbing a character of all class features is influencing answers and votes.

@nitsua60 they're also making the assumption that the druid's a PC

what if you were some lawman trying to restrain an evil NPC druid you caught trying to poison the village well?

@nitsua60 haha -- in previous editions, that'd simply be a set of metal bracers

[exactly]

About Druids stuff, you could get inspired from 3.5

@Momonga-sama yeah -- but 5e doesn't come out and state that.

ikr

There are just 3 books, lol.

And no erratas.

@Momonga-sama correction -- there are erratas, but none of them do anything

regarding the topic at hand

Oh, I didn't even know o.o

5e errata

@eimyr Wat

300 werewolves, of course

Oooooooooooooooooooo

@nitsua60 and thus the mystery of the school fire was solved

@PremierBromanov not as scary as the time there was a sub in shop class and one of the bags came off the dust collector

and then the fire alarm was set off by the dust

....that could have been way worse.

submarines are not well suited to teaching what I hope is science class

@PremierBromanov substitute. :P

ahh yes!

those people :P

We either hated or loved them, there was no middle ground

I'd bet experiments are among the hardest things to substitute for, yes?

@PremierBromanov well, this was woodshop

ahh, right. nitsua60 was the one doing science. I hope

@Shalvenay Do schools wherever you're from still have woodshops? That's amazing.

@eimyr yes, at least at a STEM magnet like the one I went to

but yeah -- it'd have been really bad had the fire alarm not gone off and that knocked-off bag not been discovered

because eventually, you get enough dust in the air, in a confined space, finding an ignition source, and KABOOM!

@Shalvenay I've had some minor technology classes, but these were more electrics-machinery oriented.

@eimyr ah. I did some of that as well

Morning all

@Asteria Morning

@Miniman how are yooou

@Asteria Eh. Didn't really sleep last night, so that's going to make for a fun day. You?

@Miniman also functioning on a lack of sleep :P the little one decided to party all night

@Asteria Ouch. I at least have the comfort of it being my own fault :)

Haha. Theres always that

ah, people saying it is morning when it is actually morning

XD

@trogdor I was suprised, too.

it does seem to be somewhat of a rarity

despite the fact that we actually have plenty of people from Australia in here, off and on at least anyway

plus the two people (including myself) from Guam XD

@trogdor Maybe it's a cultural thing?

maybe

I can see that

@trogdor I can, too, but I might just be projecting my own tendencies on to the rest of the population :)

there may be way more people from Europe and the Americas who like to say good morning I guess

@Miniman well some little things like this could be explained by something like that

I personally don't tend to say good morning to people online unless they already said it themselves because I was taught it is polite to answer people

as a kid I had a habit of ignoring social things like that XD

@trogdor I'm also unlikely to randomly announce good morning to the room, but I have no idea why.

Just not something it'd occur to me to do, I guess.

Which is a shame, because it's a good way to start a conversation.

for me I definitely know why, I am just not the kind of person who starts stuff off, in a social way

shy is the word for it, among other possible words XD

not so much so anymore that I won't respond to people though

though that was a problem I used to have XD

@Asteria how little is the little one?

@nitsua60 she's a funky four

Four? You've got some fun times ahead.