Kickstarter in its final hours: "Power Outage - A TRPG for Kids and Adults." Power Outage is a kid-friendly, kid-focused Superhero roleplaying game, that focuses on accessibility, learning, teamwork, and fun!

Some of it looks like reinventing the wheel, but other bits are driven by praxis I've never seen applied to an RPG before and that's exciting!

cool

@ACuriousMind Oh, man--been there. And now every time my son's out breaking 1" dry branches over his knee for fire-building I'm nauseated by the sound =\

hey there @Caldrun, welcome to the RPG.SE lair :)

@Shalvenay Hello. Thanks for the welcome.

Howdy folkses

Is anyone still up? I've got a D&D 5e conversion document to complain about. :P

I'm recently up

Good morning(?)!

Half past nine in the morning in the magical land of Arabia :) (the other Arabia)

@SirCinnamon Hanabi has been incredibly fun and it's interestingly showing a lot about who I am on the same wavelength with

But anyway, that document - fire at will!

Here's the downloads page that has the specific ruleset I'm talking about: uestrpg.wixsite.com/home/downloads

It's a fan-made conversion using the D&D Basic rules to make an Elder Scrolls game.

I've got a friend who is planning on running an Elder Scrolls game soon, and I'm trying to convince him to run it in another system. First, because he wants a game that's mostly roleplaying and he doesn't care about combat, and second because this particular conversion is so bad.

The very first rules text I read was the Altmer racial description. They get +2 to Int and Wis, extra spells per day (up to a 3rd level spell at 10th level), and +1 to spell attacks and save DCs.

That... certainly sounds bad.

And I can agree on the sentiment regarding the system choice. I would personally try Dungeon World there

Does DW work for a static setting?

Everything I've heard here makes me believe that DW doesn't work super well when the GM/everyone else has a really rigid vision of the setting, and that you need to be able to create the world on the fly for the system to work.

Reasonably well. It doesn't make many assumptions about the setting. I think it's not a problem if everyone has the same idea of what setting they're playing in. Pre-planning the story doesn't work out well there, though.

Ahh. He's got a story already planned out.

Yeah, in that case I'd recommend against DW.

I'm not honestly a big fan of DW anyway, I think it's a mix of DnD and AW that misses important parts of each. But I think someone else might find it more enjoyable than I did.

There's definitely a lot of folks around here that enjoy it.

I've never played DW or AW. No one around here plays indie RPGs, and I'm honestly too intimidated to run a system with such strict rules for GMs.

UESTRPG highlight: The Mage class gets both Wizard arcane traditions and sorcery points.

Like, 100% of both features.

Sounds a bit bad x)

Occasionally I'll find something that's actually unique and interesting rather than just super OP or laughably weak. Like the Sorcerer class gets 50% of the normal spell points, but whenever they pass a save on a spell, they get the spell points that were spent on that spell.

The thing with AW is, the GM rules are largely ones that make sense for the genre anyway. "Be a fan of the players' characters", "Look through crosshairs" and stuff like that. The GM moves can feel rigid to those who are used to being allowed to do absolutely anything, but they also give a lot of stuff for the GM to draw inspiration from whenever there's a pause in conversation.

And the other part where the GM is bound by the rules is in the players' playbooks: there's a lot of moves that simply say that "<X> happens" on a success or otherwise - and it's not negotiable by the GM. The PCs simply can do a lot more stuff without being subject to arbitrary skill checks - the GM has to improv their way around that.

I think my reticence to run *W games might be partially because those aren't really problems I have. I don't have issues with running out of stuff to happen when there's a pause in the conversation, I'm actively a fan of the players' characters, and skill checks only happen when failure would have interesting consequences.

So I see that rigidity, but I can't see much benefit to me.

It's a sentiment I've heard before, but... why not give it a try then ;)

Well, mainly because it would take a lot of work to actually read a whole rulebook, and why do that when I can just run the game I want to run anyway?

It's a good rulebook though. I've learned a lot of stuff from it

On GMing in general as well as for AW.

Same here, but if I were to run it, I'd have to re-read it and actually absorb the rules, rather than just mining it for lessons to take to my other games.

I also have the problem where the only games I can ever get people to play are games where it's in an established setting and I have an interesting story idea.

Even then, I have issues with groups dissolving after six months or so.

Campaign fatigue :|

Less campaign fatigue and more just keeping six adults' schedules aligned.

i'd suggest just playing whenever possible, regardless of possible absences

My rule is that at least half the group has to be there for me to run.

It's been years since I've had a session where everyone came.

Have your players accepted that or have there been murmurs? My main group is still trying to live the ideal where everyone makes it, everytime, which means we play very seldom.

Typically I'll get 10-15 people who are interested, 5-10 who actually respond to my "what nights are you free" request, and 5 people who actually have the same night free. If it's just me and two other people, it's just not a satisfying experience to run or play.

So you have a pool of 10-15 players when starting a campaign, or do you bring in new players over the course of the game?

I have 10-15 people who tell me in person that they'd be interested in the game. I have ~5 that actually follow through to the start of the campaign.

And I've never had success getting other people to play.

I sometimes have the luxury of hand-picking players for my games, but they tend to be a very apprehensive lot when anything that departs from their usual stuff is concerned.

Particular no-nos include anything that's combat-oriented or not DnD :>

I've been able to do a lot of not-d&d, but that's mostly because most of the people I play with have never done TRPGs.

Or at least, hasn't done much.

I do occasionally start people up with TTRPG running simple combat-heavy scenarios with premade DnD 4e characters.

Oh, man. I love 4e.

It's far and away my favorite system to play in.

It's my favorite system for running DnD :> although I've long since stopped trying to find a one system to rule them all so I can't really call it my favorite

I hear you, but for the specific things that I like doing most in RPGs, 4e works the best for me.

But no one plays or runs it anymore, so I have to make do with other games.

I've been mostly running Fate and Savage Worlds for the past few years.

One of my players is one of those "system doesn't really matter" people despite us playing Savage Worlds before. I think it was a hideously unfun game largely stemming from issues in the system.

(we played Deadlands: Reloaded, which is basically Deadlands re-implemented on the Savage Worlds engine)

4e gets a lot of bad rep, it saddens me

Among my players it's partially because we played an otherwise bad 4e game earlier, and well... "better combat" works poorly for people who ostensibly want to play a non-combat focused game.

Oh, for sure. If detailed character creation and tactical combat aren't near the top of your personal list, 4e will fall flat.

What problems did you run into with SW?

@DuckTapeAl Where should I even start... character creation was an annoying game of minmax, characters got frequently stun-locked in combat especially when wounded, the wound system frequently interrupted the game for n-tuple checking of the rules because it's unintuitive and requires consulting a roll table...

Also some of my pet peeves like having to divvy up your char-building resources for combat and non-combat, gives one too much leeway to shoot themselves in the foot either way.

I'm also not a fan of the critical fail thing, but our GM largely neglected it anyway.

Definitely agree about character creation. I do a very heavily guided version of it, to help alleviate that issue, but that needs a lot of individual attention to work well.

One question though: What wounds require a table? Isn't that just incapacitation?

Yes, but it wasn't uncommon in our games.

Also, I hate the bennies.

"Hey have these points you can spend to overcome some really tricky situations but we'll totally reward you with more exp if you manage without!" have the developers of SW even heard of the concept of fun? Or the strong getting stronger?

Huh? How do bennies affect XP?

You roll a d6 after every session for each Benny you have. +1 XP for every 5 or 6 you roll.

I think we played different editions.

That's definitely not in my book.

Which edition do you have? The one we played was Deluxe Edition and it was definitely in there.

In this edition, XP is static, and entirely based on how much the group got done.

Savage Worlds Deluxe Explorer's Edition.

^ The entirety of the XP section in my copy.

Hm, could it be that it was a Deadlands addition then? I must double check now

urgh, of course my scan is on my old phone's files

Yeah, that's a Deadlands thing.

Well, TIL.

And based on the publish dates, DL:RE is based on SW:2nd ed, where SW: Deluxe is more like a 3rd edition.

I don't know a lot about that edition, but I do know that they made a lot of changes around how Shaken and Wounded work.

DW:RL doesn't really have many SW rules in it, it's all "refer to your SW book".

So it's definitely SW:Deluxe rules that got me there :>

Did you have the Shaken errata?

Yes, from about halfway on. It did alleviate the problem, but didn't really remove it.

It's still annoying as heck to have poor chances of even getting to try doing stuff on your turn with big wound penalties... "Fast, Furious Fun" yeah right.

Man, this must be how mxy feels when he talks to KRyan. I've run two different SW games, and none of what you've described ever happened.

Like, an average combat would end up with something like 2-3 wounds total over the whole group.

And I don't think I've seen someone fail a Spirit roll to un-Shaken themselves.

And I've never seen an incapacitation.

Do your players use their Bennies to soak rolls?

Maybe once or twice? Not typically.

I mean, our group had the aforementioned incentive not to. (And I guess not everyone even remembered those rules)

Sounds odd to me though... seemed to me wounds are rather easy to get.

How big were the fights? Like, how many enemies, how many rounds, that kind of thing.

Can't really remember, sorry. It's been a while

Yeah, I'm pretty much reaching at this point.

I guess it's also related to the experience of the players and the GM... none of us really figured Spirit and Vigor were so important.

Ahhh. That would do it.

Which is not to say we had them as dump stats either but still.

Did you have armour?

Not that I recall - IIRC in Deadlands:RL there's some special rules concerning armor, mainly that it tends not to work.

(yay for firearms)

Okay, that makes a lot more sense now.

If you don't have great Vigor and you don't have armour, then wounds are super common.

I guess we can safely agree that DL:RL makes the wound/stunlock issue far worse at very least.

Yeah, for sure.

Then again, even the original Deadlands --- what little I've seen of it, anyway --- had this huge "how do you expect people to enjoy playing THIS?" factor for me.

Looking at some numbers: If you have a d6 Vigor and no armour, you've got a 5 Toughness. If your enemies are using 2d6 guns, which seems likely, then they're doing a shake/wound with most hits, and can easily get a raise if they roll high or are using a bigger weapon.

Oh, one more thing (this is PURELY on DL:RL) - Fanning the Hammer. It's absolutely inane.

In the Mass Effect game I'm running, most weapons are in the 2d6-2d8 range, but all the players have +4 armour and 8-9 toughness, so it's pretty common to not take a shake from a hit.

That rule sounds familiar.

Is that just doing six shots at -4 to hit on each?

It basically allows one to treat their single-action revolver as a Full-Auto weapon with a RoF 6. You do incur a -4 penalty per attack, but SIX attacs, c'mon.

And you have edges that reduce the penalty to -2 and then to zero.

O.O

I'm not sure if you do settings with full-auto weapons, but they typically make something like 3 attacks.

They haven't come up much.

Oh, looks like the bennies-as-xp thing is in the core rules, but was taken out in the latest version of the rules: rpg.stackexchange.com/a/16279/3195

So the Deluxe Edition has it, but the Deluxe: Explorers Edition doesn't.

I'd still probably pick SW for something like an elite team of mercenaries clearing out an insurgent base. Mostly because I don't know any other system that does tactical combat with a decent amount of realism in modern setting

With the aforementioned caveats though

Does GURPS not fit that?

I don't have experience with that

Ah.

Or rather, I guess I kinda do, because I once did a bit of poking around at the source code of a FOSS game based on its engine.

It bills itself as a generic system, but my experience with it is that it doesn't do much outside of some very specific, highly controlled game types well.

And one of those is gritty modern tactical gunplay.

@DuckTapeAl The classic :)

Lol.

This is why I don't really use the term "generic system" - it's a misnomer in all cases that I've encountered so far. Usually people mean that it can do any setting, but setting is just a small part of the overall gameplay experience.

A detective game in an early 1900's setting probably shares a lot more with a detective game set in a cyberpunk future than it does with a WWI combat game.

Yeah.

Well, it's like 5AM, so I should probably get to bed.

G'night!

Nitey

@nitsua60 Aw man :/. I actually didn't hear it happening, I was distracted by the ground coming at my face :P

hey there @KorvinStarmast

@Shalvenay Hello, was sad things didn't go as planned last night. :(

yeah, that was a disappointment

Heh, we are ready for next time. :)

hey there @DuckTapeAl, how've things been?

Hey, @Shalvenay! Things have been pretty alright. Started a new job recently. How about you?

@DuckTapeAl doing alright here, good to hear that things have been well on your end. did get a DW short wrapped up recently, and also have been slowly but surely chewing through ToA with nits

"chewing through ToA with nits"?

oh, ToA = Tomb of Annihilation = recent 5e campaign book

Oh! Is it related to the old mod?

I remember the 3.5 version being kind of lackluster.

@DuckTapeAl I am not sure since I never played any prior versions :)

Just looked it up. Yeah, that's the one. They remake it a lot, because of it's reputation.

having fun with the module though, even if the FF really do get under my skin

The 2e version was supposedly like the hardest dungeon ever, or something. It would arbitrarily kill you if you looked at it wrong.

FF?

@DuckTapeAl I've heard that it tends to be a bit of a meatgrinder, and of course you have the whole thematics issues (playing the module as a Chultan is interesting though)

FF = Flaming Fist = rather annoying LE merc band

Ah.

my character is a Chultan-born (far SE of Chult, even, so part of his backstory involved hiking up to Port Nyanzaru from his hometown) Tabaxi shaman (Nature domain Cleric, all the way) of Gwaeron Windstrom

@Shalvenay Tabaxi as in the guys with cat ears and tails (basically neko) or as in the dark-skinned human ethnicity from Maztica?

@Zachiel in 5e -- Tabaxi are full-on catfolk (a la Khajiit) vs. ears-and-tails nekojin

@Shalvenay I like this take. Also: "Khajiit stole nothing. Khajiit is innocent of this crime."