@BESW @trogdor just saw this KS for an RPG that made me think of you: playing schoolkids sussing out mysteries in their town. More Stranger Things than Nancy Drew, but still. (In fact, blatantly evocative of Stranger Things. But the art-project that forms much of the visual content predates the show, so perhaps it's just serendipitous bandwagoning?)
Quote of two days ago: Me: alright, kids, I'm going to steal mommy away to go to dinner. 6 y-o: Hmm. It's not clear to me that you *can* steal her. I mean, you *are* her husband.
@doppelgreener And the soundtrack for the promo video... That's the part I'd call "blatantly" evocative.
@doppelgreener I mean, if someone wants to make a product that appeals to those with childhood nostalgia time-located in the 80s, I don't think you can look at kids on bikes with walkie-talkies trying to solve a mystery and say "they ripped off Stranger Things." I mean, that's de facto shorthand for fictional depictions of the 80s.
I'm cautiously interested in Tales from the Loop. The art sure is amazing, but RPGs aren't played with art. I'm told a bit about the game but not much to judge its quality by. They appeal to their previous games, and by all means their previous games have some impressive reviews (and awards) but e.g. Coriolis had a mixed review from RPG.net on being very flashy, but quite average in substance. From the summary at the very end:
> First a word on editing and typos. Generally the book is at least average, with a few scattered typos, but there are a few major errors that really should have been caught before printing. The rules for firing at a distance aren't complex, but the explanation is completely impenetrable. The hit location table is about to be revised, as the designers apparently momentarily forgot about the bell-shape probability curve of 2D10. There are a few references to rules that have been changed or moved. In this Internet age, I won't let this detract from the final score, however, as Jarnringen have…
@doppelgreener I've recently had my head turned on this point, though. Kingdom Death: Monster is a three-phase board game/RPG whose mechanics don't really stand out too much from other good games. But the writing and art are astoundingly evocative. (And achieve a lot in very little space. It's not silly sidebars or quotes from Elminster, it's just suffused through the whole presentation.)
@nitsua60 Oh, yeah, that can count for a lot. Masters of Umdaar is a wonderful setting, but its mechanics are just Fate Accelerated with specific aspects and a de-powered stunt economy. But the setting is just so unabashedly fun and they deliver it so well through all the material they provide for character creation that I love it.
(which is to say, the mechanics may just be a slightly altered fate accelerated, but they provided a lot of material to plug into fate accelerated which helps make the game what it is)
Though the hypnotic pattern question seems more nuanced
I mean, the effect is pretty much you take a glowstick or a sparkler and draw swirls in the air
so yeah, can you see it in the dark? It doesn't say it emits light, but it does say "Each creature in the area who sees the pattern..."
It's a good question, as DM I'd say they are affected by it (color is light, after all). You should ask it here, I'm interested to see the responses we get here.
@LegendaryDude I feel like playing that literally would be some pretty top-notch rules lawyering. Could be fun if your group's into that sort of thing.
@UrhoKarila Yeah, that's why I'm such a fan of 5e, because it's really designed around not being rules-lawyer-y and when you try to lawyer in it the game kinda stops working
I've heard interesting stories of people taking 3.5 and turning it into an almost legalistic meta-game that requires intimate knowledge of how to abuse the rules. Never played with a group like that, and not sure if I want to, but I think it could be an interesting game.
A legalistic metagame, at least. Probably not so much of an RPG.
@UrhoKarila Oh sure, definitely. One of my players loves that kind of stuff. He also loves that 5e doesn't require him to come up with some ridiculous combination of rules to do something crazy and over the top, he can just do it because 5e doesn't restrict you in that way most of the time.
@SevenSidedDie May I ask for reopening this question for a moment? I want to add my experience from LARP in Russia. Clearly not mentioning any particular sellers. :) rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/77237/…
This related question on prop coins inspired me to revisit an old problem we're having at a fantasy LARP I'm co-organizing.
So far we have not yet found a currency which we can use throughout the LARP and which is cheap enough to be able to get our hands on a fairly large amount of coins.
We ar...
Notably, it wasn't closed because of suggestions of particular sellers. It was closed because it became obvious that it was just collecting an endless list of recommendations for what to use.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy That's still a list question. List questions aren't a problem because they break voting, they're a problem because they cannot have a definitive answer.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy In theory maybe, but I can't see how it can be fixed.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy Not if it's really just the same question, asked to get around the close. That would just restart the process of endless new answers, because it wouldn't actually avoid the problem of everyone thinking they just have to add their 2 cents.
@Baskakov_Dmitriy Not everything has a home at RPG.se.
5
One day, some new user may ask a similar question, but from an angle that somehow is different enough to make it work and not generate a recommendation list. That would be great.
@AbrahamRay The other thought I had would be to ask a player with some "trivia" skill/background feature for the related skill check and grant "trivia knowledge" on a natural 20. That is, even if you aren't trained in medicine, maybe you just happen to know a lot about the spleens. (Then again, I wouldn't model a trivia NWP in the first place; just another thought as to how one might.)
@DForck42 You going to use all of them? 5e covers all the planes previous editions mentioned so that DMs can assemble a cosmology à la carte from the menu, but previous editions didn't feature them all. It might be a bit crowded. Or lead to creative details of how they all fit together. :)
@DForck42 standard planes? Material, 4 elementals, magic, those I can come up from the top of my mind. Add the various "alignment" realms (nirvana, hell, abyss... iirc 9 in sum)
For the listing of the sixteen alignment planes: take the sine of position in the list to get your good-evil value, cosine of position in list to get law-chaos value. (suitably-scaled, of course)
@DForck42 You can check out this article on The Great Wheel that lists most of the major planes, descriptions of them, and how they relate to each other
@LegendaryDude Depends on edition. Prior to 4e (where Shadowfell was invented), Ravenloft was just a very large demiplane, and hung out in the Astral along with the rest of them.
@DForck42 if you go go for more than 4 elementals, you might need to tell your players what those elements or concepts are. Earth Water Air Fire are platonic, exchanging earth for wood and metal you get the chinese 5-elements. Other variants might be more difficult diamettral sets: Fire-ice, Stone-Air, water in the center and all in some harness of the 'life spark plane'... all up to you.
@SevenSidedDie It's an idea I've played with myself. I have a homebrew world and the campaign we were running was going to venture into the Underdark from there; my plans were for the PCs to eventually emerge not in their world but on the Sword Coast. It didn't pan out because Curse of Strahd came out and so we just moved everything right into FR.
@NautArch Please see my update– the rules differentiate when a creature is or isn't blind outside it's blindsight radius. Bats are not. — LegendaryDude30 mins ago
@LegendaryDude Bets on how soon someone builds a character that hinges on bats having infinite 20/20 vision because RAW doesn't say they see poorly…
so, I'm thinking 3 "material" planes, shadowfell, feywild, and the main plane (haven't named it properly yet), then 4 elemental planes, and then 8 alignment planes (not including NN, cause why would they care enough to create a plane and ruin my symmetry?)
(I've really got to stop. I'm developing a problem. If only this platform were somehow designed to subtly but constantly produce behavioral prompts....)
and then everything else will kinda just get slotted in
as part of the time line there will be a cataclysmic war with magic, and the fallout from that will cause a lot of the natural beasts to obtain magical abilities
I tried that approach for my homebrew setting but it got complicated so in a lot of places I just started renaming things instead of actually coming up with new stuff
I'm surprised none of the answers there include mention of the table from the DMG that includes pistols, rifles, and laser weapons. :\
It's a very small section of the DMG, only granted about a quarter page of text, but it is there... and doesn't require all the "why this is a bad idea" pretext. Maybe he just wanted to know how to rule using a pistol?
@LegendaryDude Hmm... OP says he wants to run a Walking Dead campaign, which would imply more than just a single ruling on a pistol.
@Miniman First line of each, for that matter. (And only line of answer #2.)
So I want to slap a link to the "frame challenge" meta onto the 5e modern weapons question. Do you think it belongs on the question or on nvoigt's answer?
So that readers/voters have a better context when they read a Q&A that says "how do I do this?" "Don't." They see that and think it's good practice, when it's... sometimes good and often fraught with pitfalls which we know well and have produced meta with good guidance about.
I'm not confident of the usefulness of comments saying, effectively, "btw this is how and why this answer is useful within our policy framework and don't get any funny ideas".
they can learn useful qualities from it and be corrected later if they are lead astray.
Leave a comment on the question phrased as advice to incoming answers advising them on good frame challenge practices should they wish to advise the asker not to take the course of action they're seeking advice on.
Ordinarily it may be useful to leave that comment on the answer itself but, as you've just said, there's already a lot of argument busy-ness going on there.
your comment would get lost amid the noise, i think, which sort of defeats the point.
either way's valid, but one way is compromised by the current state of affairs.
