hey there @nitsua60, almost done with my char for tonight. do need a bit of cantrip selection advice though -- got 1 cleric cantrip open, and 1 druid cantrip I'm kinda sketchy about
Yeah, that's why we played it last night--our scheduled GM hadn't had time to prep, so I offered to do a one-shot in a system I can pick up without prep, which includes LB, and LB was on June's want-to-play list.
@Shalvenay so I'm a big fan of AL's rule about allowing "character rebuilds" until level 4. While it goes all the way to the level of class and race ("I thought playing an ____ would be cool but I hate it"), it can be as minor as "I thought ____ would be a useful cantrip but I hate it."
@nitsua60 -- for AL, can you use any FR deity without having to go and use SCAG as your +1 book, or are you limited to the deities in the PHB unless you drag the SCAG in as your +1?
@OPLOVELORN @charliejane You can make sense of interstellar travel with artwork, performance, even tchotchkes. Elements and minerals, not so much. Have you read @paulkrugman 's paper on the economics of interstellar trade? It's a hoot. http://fermatslibrary.com/s/the-theory-of-interstellar-trade
My post about my interview with @ann_leckie is now up! We had a fascinating, in-depth discussion about her universe. http://dive-into-worldbuilding.blogspot.com/2018/02/ann-leckie-and-imperial-radch-trilogy.html
@BESW Why do they narrate the interview (“I asked her…”) instead of just giving the (possibly abridged or streamlined) interview? That writing style jars me. No transcript except for a few notes, so it feels more true to describe in indirectly? But the video is on the bottom??
@BESW Just a quick thank you for your efforts in assisting with the audio snafus were were having last night. Do you know what the final root cause was in Discord?
@fredhicks I teach my students the FATE system for my 8th grade RPG unit. It works so well because its universality lets them craft all kinds of interesting gaming experiences.
@KorvinStarmast I'm guessing Troggy's laptop settings for his microphone were at odds with his browser's, and some form of turning it off and on again forced something to re-check its synchronization.
That's what's happened with me in the past, anyway.
The best historical artefacts are the accidental ones that freeze a moment in time forever.
I thought I’d try to find all the times pets have ruined their owner's day & recorded that instant for all of history.
I'm sitting on some half-formed ideas for a revision of Great Ork Gods to use a conceit that has less baggage, and also looking at various attempts to reverse engineer Lady Blackbird's character creation guidelines.
It's a free and very small game that takes inspiration from many sources to create a pick-up-and-play experience with pre-made characters and an interesting setting.
The really cool bits are in how the mechanic pushes a certain kind of play.
Character advancement is based on "keys," which are short descriptions of a character trait like being loyal to a friend or wanting vengeance on an enemy or being tempted to steal things.
When you "hit" a key by acting on it during play, you get currency to advance your character. If you instead defy your key dramatically enough, you can "buy it off" and remove that key from your sheet in exchange for a LOT of advancement currency--enough to get a new key and still have some to spare.
So that forces a very solid character arc dynamic in which you establish a character trait in play before confronting it and making a hard decision about it which may change the character permanently.
And action resolution is based on banks of word clouds related to different competency modes your character has--roll more dice the more relevant words are in the cloud related to your current action--which means that between keys and the word clouds you can get a solid sense of the pre-made character just by reading their mechanics. Each character's sheet is just half a sheet of paper, with the rules on the other half.
The Lady Blackbird setting is kind of a cross between Firefly (in broad physical/aesthetic strokes), Star Wars (in tone), and swashbuckling romantic adventure (in plot).
There are a lot of "hackbird" fan-made alternative versions, and I'm looking into Blackbird Pie which tries to be a generic "make-your-own" but I'm skeptical about the implementation.
@Shalvenay I'm thinking about a GOG modification where the hapless aggressors are some kind of programs loaded into disposable robot bodies, being used to test algorithms (the different kinds of action) being presided over by competing programmers who made them (the gods).
If the "orks" are mindless, I think it removes some of the game's essence, but they also have to be disposable and disposable sophonts aren't really... cool.
I actually had a D&D 3.5 campaign similar too this concept, it was a pocket plane were the "gods (high level Psionics) build the world to test theories and interactions!
So I'm thinking maybe have the bodies be disposable prosthetics for digital consciousnesses that are frustrated but unharmed when their prosthetics are destroyed.
Does anybody know of RPGs where slapstick violence really works, aside from Toon and Paranoia?
The primary motif of Paranoia is that you can have terrible, horrible things happen to your character for nonsensical reasons, but it's okay--you've got five backups and the consequences are humorously exaggerated anyway.
i'm a sucker for the old school D&D settings, Planescape, Ravenloft and Dark Sun, i miss the AD&D realms books with tons of info and almost no additional rules!
I'm really unsure on Ravenloft mostly because I normalize the supernatural so much. werewolf line: "It's not like the stags have learned to silver their antlers!"
had some fun playing in Greyhawk even though Oerth is cosmologically useless :P so I wouldn't ever DM in that setting
I don't like Greyhawk either, Forgotten Realms too! They all look to "fantasy generic" for me! And today writing on those campaign setting is getting sooooo lazy!!
ah. I tend to do a lot of worldbuilding myself, but my tinkerings are less in core conceits of the world and more with the occupants of it, at least when it comes to fantasy stuff
so things will start off looking generic, but then you find yourself scratching your head at just who the monsters might be
@RafaelSantos do you play anything outside the D&D lineage of systems?
Oh yes, i have played tons of stuff as a 35 years old nerd who started playing RPGs at age 10 hahaha! In fact, D&D and friends are not even my favorite game (it is GURPS), but i have really hard time finding players outside the d20 scope around here!
I had campaigns of Storyteller (even the infamous Street Fighter), Mutants & Masterminds, GURPS, Star Wars (from the West End Game to Fantasy Flight Games), Call of Cthulhu and others...
There are so much interesting RPGs out there and so little time... i really want to give it a try on Lamentations of the Flame Princess and Shadows of the Demon Lord
ran 3.5e and 5e D&D, as well as Fate. want to try running DW sometime, but will need some coaching. longer term, want to run Fate again at some point and hack Burning Wheel for a disaster-relief campaign I want to run
I'd like @JuneShores to run something Powered by the Apocalypse for me, to see if it's mostly been the groups rather than the system that haven't worked for me.
System really does matter. While it's true that a group with a coherent vision and good social dynamic will make a game something more than it is on its own, if that "something more" runs counter to what the game supports and encourages then the group is expending energy that could be used more productively in a system that's already supporting and encouraging the group's goals.
And system does a VERY good job of pushing groups in directions that they aren't sure how to go on their own; my group is a great example of this. We've had play experience goals that we weren't sure how to make happen until we found game systems which taught us those skills.
I can agree with that! Here in Brazil we have a RPG called 3D&T (Defenders of Tokyo) and is stupid and broken as f-! I can't play that! Even with golden players!
In some cases we can internalize the skills and bring them to other games later, but even then it's still about finding games where those goals are compatible but not supported. Systems that actively fight our goals are not worth fixing.
eg, we wanted to do a lot of intense social storytelling and resolve things through modes other than physical conflict. Fate supports that! But doesn't encourage it. So we started playing Bubblegumshoe and everything fell into place because that's a system where social conflict and social resolution are the core of the mechanics and physical conflict is sidelined to the point of being mostly just window dressing for social conflicts.
System always matters. Being able to fix or ignore a system that doesn't work, doesn't make it less important; it just (often invisibly) siphons off group resources that could be put to better use otherwise. That's why I stopped playing D&D: it wasn't a system that supported the kind of game I wanted to play, and I burned out forcing our games to work our way anyway.
Even systemless free-form games are just replacing explicit mechanics with systems of often unspoken social conventions that encourage and discourage kinds of play in their own way, creating barriers and pathways through social friction.
@Shalvenay it's the kind of game that it's all about combat, and even the combat is unbalanced since only 1 of the many attributes matter, it was made to be a funny parody of japanes series and cartoons, when it was that worked fine (like a dumbed down version of Big Eyes Small Mouth) then they tried to make it into a serious RPG and it didn't work....
@BESW very much so -- it's a lot harder to discern what's going on, though, when you have to sort of learn the conventions on the fly, especially when they contradict cues you're getting from other sources
Though some of our sessions, especially in D&D, have come close when we just dropped all the skills and roleplayed: because D&D doesn't really have good social mechanics we'd often naturally drop into freeform for that kind of scene.
@BESW yeah, I tend to get fairly mechanics-light in social scenes when running D&D as well. it's mostly freeform, punctuated by the occasional skill roll to determine reactions or sense motives
I don't like the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games, but i like the concept that they use that a failure in a skill check doesn't mean a failure in doing "the thing", you may be able to do it but with complications!
I'm using this on D&D game, because i also dont like how skills work on those games
For example, Natasha was trying to calm down some NPCs and keep from running away, by speaking reassuringly to them and emphasizing that she was in charge.
It would've been kinda boring to just have it be a check to see if the NPCs broke and scattered, so instead the stakes were whether Natasha would blow her "just a commoner" cover and reveal that she's nobility.
Which meant she rolled from an entirely different set of traits.
It was funny! It also re-focused the scene on the core themes of the story we were telling, and reinforced her core competence as a leader.
Cthulhu Dark really hammered the value of that home for me: there was no question she'd fail at the primary objective, but what else might happen?
(For those who haven't run into it yet, Cthulhu Dark is a horror game where characters almost never face even the possibility of failing anything that it's possible for them to try and do... instead you roll to see how well you succeed, and what else might go wrong.)
(It's great for horror because you know that it's not the random luck of the dice that keep you from defeating the monster/enemy: your opponent is just that terrifyingly unstoppable.)
