@waxeagle I read about a system (may have been a Kickstarter) that used AR goggles & RF miniature bases... the idea was you could have virtual miniatures, spell effects, etc. Like a 3d virtual tabletop. Sounded cool but expensive.
@JoshuaAslanSmith There are Pathfinder-branded battle mats. I think they're laminated cardboard. Instead of rolling up like the Chessex mats, they fold up to about A4/Letter size, so you can put them in a folder or just stack them with your books & papers.
Must be this kickstarter with the not quite yet released 350$ goggles https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/technicalillusions/castar-the-most-versatile-ar-and-vr-system
Deadpool is a joke character who's gone so far he seems to have come back around to being funny again. His backstory is: accomplished assassin Wade Wilson, diagnosed with terminal brain cancer, is recruited by the same organisation which gave Wolverine his adamantium skeleton; they want to give Wade a regeneration factor like Wolverine's. It works, and he's got one of the strongest healing factors in the Marvel universe.
However, it doesn't cure his cancer; it just constantly heals the damage. His brain is scrambled eggs with a hefty side order of lesions, driving Wilson utterly insane. He has multiple voices in his head, a totally unpredictable moral compass, and is convinced that he and everything he knows are just part of an elaborate fictional world--that is, he knows he's a comic book character.
He's a murderous foul-mouthed Quentin Tarantino character in a world that usually self-censors itself. That dissonance, and the fourth-wall-breaking, make him a comedic character more often than a tragic one. It doesn't hurt that one of his longest storylines had him paired up with a nigh-omnipotent egomaniac dictator; Deadpool works best when he's the better of two bad options.
While Dark Knight drew on The Killing Joke and a few other storylines, it created its own story with a solid ethos. Ledger's Joker wasn't very Joker-like, but he was a solid internally consistent character who drove the story and provided a focal point for the film's themes.
Dark Knight Rises draws on too many other storylines--the graphic novel of the same name, Vengeance of Bane, etc--without either staying true to their themes or stripping them enough to infuse them with its own theme.
The result is a film with too many competing ideas, less a single story and more a collection of references to stories.
Its central figure, Bane, is in the end too weak in motive and agency to provide the pivot which Ledger's Joker did.
They define Bane too little, too late, and when they do it's in a way which reduces his narrative influence rather than strengthening it--not least because there are so many other characters competing for time and attenton. By contrast both the Joker and Ra's al Ghul had defining character moments relatively early in their respective films, and then they are the pivotal characters around which the films turn.
Defining "law" as an objective characteristic is contentious even within a single system like D&D 3.5. Additionally, Stack Exchange needs to be able to provide answers which aren't all equally valid, or the voting system breaks. Can you give us more specifics and details so this isn't an open call for unbounded brainstorming? Otherwise this would get better answers at a more traditional RPG forum or in the Role-playing Games Chat. — BESW11 secs ago
...I think Mystery Incorporated is parodying power metal songs, but I want the whole song anyway.
> The Captain said, "You'd better take care;" And all the fish are crying. The gardener is clipping The Wicker Man's chin Because the flowers are lying...
> ...And what will you do If you see a caribou? Better run and Get some hunters...
@pet if you're free tomorrow night, and want to see what 5e is about, we're doing a game via hangouts. You can play, or we can do the youtube broadcast thing. (if I figure out how to turn that on)
@ESR.MourningDove Hi! You'll need at least 20 rep on any one Stack Exchange site before you can type in chat rooms, but you're welcome to hang out until then.
@JonathanHobbs Do you know if Daniel's hoping our online games will become regular?
'cause I'm not sure I can carve out another weekly chunk of RPG time, but we might be able to finagle a semi-regular Skype/IRL hybrid for my Saturday night group....
Recursive aspects--either uniques referencing other characters, or aspects shared by multiple characters--can help provide mechanical impetus to group cohesion.
You can get cute with it, too, like the DFRPG premade teenager PCs who all have I'm not a kid anymore.
I just ran my first game of Fate Core and I ran into a question I can't seem to find an exact answer to.
Basically at one point I used a situation aspect "Wanted by the city guard" to compel all players so the guards would show up at a bad time for them. Now 5 of them wanted to pay the fate poin...
Give them shared or mutually referential aspects!
There are a couple ways to do this, and Fate Core suggests one of them already, so I'll talk about it first.
The default character generation guidelines have players creating relationships between their characters as part of establishing backsto...
An Area51 proposal I supported is entering into the commitment phase, but Area51 is buggy and I can't log into my account there from half of my computers. :(
Another question that came up in discussion of our game: why isn't initiative rolled in Fate? It's a trivial house rule to implement, obviously, but I'm curious as to the reason. It kinda sucks to always be the last to go (out of the party, at least).
We had a big fight at the end of the last session, which only lasted 2.5 rounds and about an hour. While there was some unfamiliarity with the rules still, most of the time was spent describing cool things and discussing aspects and whatnot. Things happened!
At the same time, one of the players felt they didn't get to do much, as they've created an aspect in the first round only to immediately spend the free invoke on a defensive roll, spent the second round on surviving as well (that was actually my stuff up, I can go into more detail in a bit), and the action wrapped up before her third turn.
Is that sort of combat length, in terms of rounds, what you're experiencing as well? I thought I threw plenty of opposition at them, but they nuked it.
If you've got a number of players and they do at least as much attacking as advantage-creating, stress gets thrown around like it's going out of style.
Mmmm. That's actually something that's probably specific to the genre we've picked, but when PCs heard they'd be dealing with a known supervillain, their first reaction was "ok, we're gonna do research, their powers/weaknesses got to be public knowledge". They ended up with two free invocations on both the guy's high concept and trouble.
@BESW One thing I did was have a couple of the mooks hang back and Create Advantage of Sonic Suppression from their sonic cannons while the rest charged in. Seemed to work out fine.
@Adeptus We have Powerbook (like Facebook, but for supers) as one of the setting aspects. Superheroes as celebrities!
You can also give them incidental advantages. If he was testing his New Einstenium-Utilizing Tension-Racheted Almost Legal Ionizing Zed-Energy Raybeam when they attacked, he might have a few aspects and invokes from that.
@BESW Perhaps even things like "the longer you take to get there, the further along the villain will be in their plans, represented by more free invokes".
Absolutely. DFRPG has a scale for that, let me see...
The ladder of time has you start at the average time a task takes. You can spend extra shifts to make it take less time, or have it take longer to decrease the difficulty (if appropriate).
Notice that it's not a directly 1:1 shift-to-time-unit scale; the longer it takes, the more time each shift represents.
Ah, speaking of universes. My Apocalypse World one-off to introduce people to roleplaying is going well, but I think the game is normally geared towards long-term progression. So I'm going to replace it with a rich adventure with a clearly defined objective.
I'm hoping a new edition will spark people's interests, and the lack of bloat wont scare off my players that dont have the time or inclination to dig through dozens of books of options or feel like they're missing out
The current 3.5 game I'm playing in, the DM is fairly new to 3.5, so he has said, Core books only so as not to unbalance the game with unknowns. The one I'm DMing, most of the party are newbies, so it's easier for them if I don't complicate things beyond the core books.
@BESW I will. Running a single-session adventure with most or all players being new might be tricky, but at least Apocalypse World is an easy game to learn.
Usually, people know the rules well enough and have the courage to roll and do stuff by the second session - but there's not going to be one, so I'll have to accelerate stuff somehow.
Especially if you're looking at round-robin GMing, which triples the necessary reading for an average core-only D&D participant up from "one or two hundred pages."
@Adeptus [amused] Let me know how "using Core keeps things balanced in 3.5" fails miserably works out for you.
(Most of the fundamental balance problems in 3.5 are inherent in the core manuals, and adding more material from expansion books serves to, if anything, dilute the issues.)
[pats Tome of Battle on the head like a good doggy]
"Who's a fumbling precursor to 4e's power system, hmmm? You are! Yes you are!"
@BESW Oh believe me, I've tried introducing new systems. My players want to play D&D, and again, I'm not sure I blame them. We'll probably hold off for a while on round-robin DMing, given one of our players is pregnant (my wife, incidentally)
@BESW "Balanced" may not be exactly the right word... but the DM doesn't want to get blindsided by an obscure rule/class/feat/etc from an expansion he's less familiar with
My hope is that by all of us starting a new system together, it'll be a much easier point of entry, and we'll get to take in and learn each new feature as a group, and decide whether each one works for us or doesn't.
@kviiri It's elegant at its core; my big problem with it is that most of the developers who use it (including its own designers) seem fundamentally unconcerned about or ignorant of the nature of goblin dice, so they commonly misuse it.
I like the "miss, soft hit, hard hit" -levels of Apocalypse World. Particularly because "miss" is dependent on the narrative - it often winds up being a successful action with a severe cost.
D&D 3.5, D&D 4e, Spycraft, Star Wars, and other games are built on the d20 System engine. I see similar fundamental "using goblin dice for non-goblin effect" problems in most of them.
@kviiri Fate can do something similar, which pleases me as well.
(I now approach d20 System games and its offshoots with a skeptical "prove to me you're overcome the failings of your brothers" attitude.)
But since most d20 System style games also feature a host of gameplay elements my group can't really support right now--like a very high chargen length and the assumption of long-form campaigns--it's mostly a non-issue.
@kviiri Yeah, I'm enjoying "one roll resolution" systems which build the complexity into the roll rather than using multiple rolls to build complexity over time.
In that sense even Fate can get a little overburdened sometimes.
@agradine I don't dislike goblin dice as a concept; they're a tool like any other.
I think they're often used to create effects they aren't designed to support.
That is, the narrative importance of the outcome doesn't always match the swinginess of the roll in ways which make coherent sense within a game's paradigm.
Basically: the degree to which a PC's individual stats influence the likelihood of a roll's outcome is decided exclusively by the subsystem the PC is using, without concern for the nature of the outcome, the action's dramatic import, or even the PC's aptitude with the chosen activity.
In D&D 3.5 non-combat-focused bard gets more ability to have his action outcomes reflect his stats--IE, be non-randomised--in combat situations than he does in social situations.
He rolls the swingy dice more in combat and so he gets closer to average-plus-stat results over time, while in social encounters he rolls the swingy dice fewer times so the swing of the dice matters more--making his personal modifiers matter less.
If a group enjoys swingy randomised outcomes, then the d20 System fails them in combat situations. If they don't like 'em, then everything except combat fails 'em.
@kviiri Oh, aye. At the time we loved it (having come from 3.5, it was a breath of fresh air).
I've moved on since then, but I still really appreciate that 4e chose a playstyle to enable, and stuck to its guns. The result is one of the best RPG tactical combat simulators around.
Most other D&D editions I've looked at feel like their primary flaw is in trying to do too much at once, to please all playstyles simultaneously.
Do Not Go Gently is a level-agnostic (I'd fill in the DCs from the skill challenge chart as appropriate for the party at the time I used it) skill challenge designed to let me be really REALLY mean about my encounters in a Shadowfell adventure.
("Bold" means you can spend a healing surge for a re-roll; "Helpful" means you get an extra bonus if you're using it to aid another on another roll.)
(I specify that successes and failures on rolls create only successes and failures in the challenge, because in other challenges I've had them also grant bonuses, deal damage, etc.)
It could be 6, but I don't really know so I can't honestly correct you. besides which, I might need to go home and shower and or change clothes before heading over
My main problem is that the list of people I know is quite limited, I'm in the UK, so my timezone is off with a lot of English speaking gamers and I don't play PbP
I'm in two games at the moment. One of them starts this evening (Pathfinder, level 2, three players. "evil" game. ), the other is a western marches game that is starting to feel a lot like work, rather than play. Combat is taking far too long and management of what we are doing is taking up more time each week than the sessions.
Give them shared or mutually referential aspects!
There are a couple ways to do this, and Fate Core suggests one of them already, so I'll talk about it first.
The default character generation guidelines have players creating relationships between their characters as part of establishing backsto...
