TRPG General Chat

Kaz_king

01:07

How do D&D Diseases work? Specifically this one.

Ghoul Fever (Su)
Disease—bite, Fortitude DC 12, incubation period 1 day, damage 1d3 Con and 1d3 Dex. The save DC is Charisma-based.

Is the 1d3 a penalty if so to the mod or the overall skill?

BESW

@Kaz_king It looks like you're talking about D&D 3.5. Is that right?

Kaz_king

Yes

BESW

So, I assume you've read the entry on diseases and the associated entry on ability damage, which is what diseases like that one inflict.

What parts of those explanations are giving you trouble?

Kaz_king

I was curios when it was talking about lowering ability if it was the full score or just the mod

BESW

Ahah. To find out, we look at the entry on ability damage.

> This attack damages an opponent’s ability score.

Shalvenay

01:16

o/ @Emrakul

user61230

'ello!

Kaz_king

Ok thanks BESW! :D

BESW

More about ability score loss can be found in this section.

doppelgreener

This means ability damage can lower any of your scores to 0 and thus render you comatose or crippled (rather than just lowering your modifiers and making you crap at everything)

Kaz_king

So how often do they roll saving throws?

To See if they lose more points

BESW

01:21

@Kaz_king First paragraph of the disease entry explains when saving throws start, how often they occur, and when you stop making them.

Kaz_king

Do I roll the d3 or does he

BESW

I don't think that's covered. Generally I'd pass the dice to my players as often as possible.

(I mean, the player's gonna know the result immediately anyway because he has to mark it on his sheet. No reason not to have him roll the dice.)

doppelgreener

01:42

> These Fortitude saving throws can be rolled secretly so that the player doesn’t know whether the disease has taken hold.

from the disease section

which suggests it can go either way, the default can be the player rolls, but you can be sneaky about it. (sometimes that will work well, sometimes it will not.)

BESW

@doppelgreener Yeah, but that's just for the Fort save, not the ability damage.

doppelgreener

oh right.

yeah that's true enough; if you tell them "you take 2 damage" they're gonna know something's up (and it's not like there's much support for tracking secret damage, unless you want your player glaring at you when they suddenly die whilst their sheet says they have 20hp left)

BESW

TIL that two comic artists claim to have met John Constantine in the flesh while working on Constantine story lines.

One of them is Alan Moore, though.

doppelgreener

02:02

Yeah, that kinda tips things in favour of he really did see Constantine, on account of he is a wizard. Kinda saps the mystery out of it.

The other guy remains to be seen!

BESW

02:13

@doppelgreener Jamie Delano's interviews give the impression that he's spent his entire life in a haze of psychoactive smoke.

(Like, seriously, after a battery of "What's your favourite X?" questions, they ask if he's got any categories of favourite things they missed, and he said "Drugs: hashish and psilocybin.")

doppelgreener

02:32

Okay, that makes it pretty plausible he would have met Constantine. (Albeit a hallucinated one during a hell of a trip.)

fyi I've just left a couple of comments on an answer:

You're addressing this D&D 4e question with the two-axis alignment system in mind. It seems you may be unaware: 4e doesn't have this alignment system; it has a different one from other editions that doesn't include alignments like chaotic neutral. (In my personal opinion as a player of both 3.x and 4e, this is actually an improvement.) The 4e alignment system can be replaced with the two-axis one easily enough (not that I'd advise it), but your answer doesn't appear to acknowledge this and assumes its the default. You may wish to do some research on this and modify your answer. — doppelgreener 7 mins ago

Additionally since you now have over 20 rep, you can come join some of us in chat; several of us have played 4e and can answer questions about it if you'd like to inquire with us about it. — doppelgreener 4 mins ago

so they may hop in here to ask about this stuff at some point.

Magician

Morning!

doppelgreener

@Magician [glances at clock, glances back to Magician, squints at clock, squints at Magician]

Magician

Always a morning somewhere...

The Squinting Squid, an abboleth bar.

As opposed to The Squinting Squirrel, a gnome bar.

BESW

And the Squinting Shibboleth, a paladin bar with a few very confused star pact warlocks.

...ninja'd by Brian. Again.

doppelgreener

closed in 21 seconds, i'm impressed

BESW

02:46

@doppelgreener ...I just noticed the comment on another answer to that question: the one that uses the Ferengi as an example of a nuanced and diverse race with layers and depth of motive.

doppelgreener

@BESW i wouldn't say they went that far, they just suggested Goblins can be treated as ultra-capitalists to give them a little more motive to be evil-ish than for its own sake.

Shalvenay

o/ as well @Pixie

Pixie

@Shalvenay Hello!

Iron Heart

[wave]

Pixie

@IronHeart Hey!

BESW

02:56

@doppelgreener I think we may have forgotten that evil capitalism looked like camp sexist chimpanzees who had electro-whips but fought with their teeth instead until DS9 got hold of them.

Pixie

Our Exalted GM just had to take a 10 minute break because we keep insisting on not killing things. In fact, we are asking the person we could have reasonably killed to have a jam session with us.

3

Quoth him, "I'm never prepared for you lovable goofs."

doppelgreener

That sounds like a wonderful problem to have.

BESW

I'm reminded of Splat, the comic-relief goblin who, through the kindness of the PCs, became patriarch to generations of benevolent spies dedicated to sowing the seeds of rebellion amongst their foes by making friends with the commonfolk.

doppelgreener

What, defeating their enemies' empires by winning the hearts of its people?

JohnP

03:11

BADA BOOM BADA BING BBAYBEEE!!

Pixie

We keep trying to recruit people, though the best we usually get is they decide they're tired of this hunting anathema business and just want to go do something else. Which is cool with us.

JohnP

oh, er uhm...hi.

doppelgreener

(Sun Tzu's Art of War has a passage on this, but I can't dig it up given other translations will use different wording...)

BESW

@doppelgreener Conga rats on your promotion to administration. How does it feel to be on the team?

@doppelgreener Yes, exactly.

doppelgreener

@BESW Thanks! It feels pretty good.

(And in truth I am on the administration team in a sense, by the design of community moderation!)

BESW

03:15

[blink] Why do I suddenly have Yellow Submarine playing in my head?

...oh. My brain picked up on the scansion. We're all on/ The administrative team/ Administrative team/ Administrative team.

Pixie

It's a pretty peaceful group that prefers not to have blood on its hands unless there's not another choice. We first try to recruit, but if we can't, we try to at least persuade people into our preferred course of action. Or just trick them. We're relatively non-violent but not especially moral. :v

We fooled a slaver into believing that he'd die from a curse we placed on him if he broke his promise to never involve himself with slavery again. Total lie. (This was after a three-pronged plan intended to free his slaves without a fight, though the last leg of it fell through. We let him go but took his stuff and let the freed slaves populate our manse.)

BESW

+1 for "manse."

Shalvenay

so @Pixie -- had some rather interesting stuff last night :P

Pixie

@Shalvenay Oh?

doppelgreener

@Pixie sounds like excellent work ;)

Pixie

03:28

@BESW It's a standard term in Exalted, though I like the word. :P

doppelgreener

Oh, is this an Exalted game?

Pixie

Yep.

doppelgreener

[checks, so it is!]

(unrelated, a question got asked yesterday on BGSE that used mana symbols. Now writing the mana symbols userscript feels 110% worth it. ;u;)

Iron Heart

nice

BESW

@doppelgreener Related to the unrelated: my Fudge dice script has been a little wonky lately. Sometimes the interface button doesn't show up, sometimes it's out of place, and sometimes there are two side by side.

Refreshing always fixes it, though.

Probably something on my end, maybe to do with my security extensions?

Thought I'd mention it anyway.

doppelgreener

03:34

yeah, that sounds really weird. if it's something that only recently started happening, it's probably another extension you've picked up or recently updated causing the issue.

Do you use the Stack Overflow Unofficial Patch? (Not that you shouldn't, it's great, just wondering)

Pixie

You can check that by disabling your extensions (some browsers have a "safe mode" you can activate) and seeing if the problem persists.

doppelgreener

@Pixie he can't use safe mode exactly, since then the Fudge dice script would go away too ;) but he could disable some of them, that's true

Pixie

@doppelgreener Ooh, right. xD But yeah, in that case disabling unrelated extensions could confirm the suspicion.

BESW

I do have a LOT of extensions, but not the Unofficial Patch.

doppelgreener

(it seems google has no shortage of fun image results for that word)

30

Q: Stack Overflow Unofficial Patch

The Stack Overflow Unofficial Patch (SOUP) is a project to collect various minor client-side bug fixes, work-arounds and usability improvements for Stack Overflow and other Q&A sites on the Stack Exchange Network into a single user script. The intent of SOUP is not to make any substantial o...

you may like to have it! it patches a whole lot of little problems that the SE development team hasn't gotten around to fixing yet

BESW

03:43

doppelgreener

:)

Pixie

It turned out the problems I was having with Pale Moon placing the focus into the URL bar over and over again was related to an extension I really liked. :c

doppelgreener

@Pixie D': oh no

Pixie

The extension that broke my setup was one that placed the focus in the URL bar when I opened a custom new tab; I use an extension that gives me a better speed dial on new tab. Without the offending extension, I automatically try to type when a new tab opens (and the focus isn't placed into the URL bar), so I wind up executing random keyboard shortcuts.

Now we are casually chatting with our enemy before we all play a song together over our magical loud-speaker.

Magician

03:58

IDOdds lives!

3

Well, it's been online for a few days, but now it's marginally prettier and even has a blurb at the start.

That said, I know next to nothing about webdesign, so any suggestions are welcome.

BESW

Your Intellect Devourer link seems.... odd.

Pixie

The link isn't functional. It leads to a dropbox version of the same website.

Magician

....dns redirects are magic

Iron Heart

Doesn't for me.

Pixie

Strange!

Magician

04:01

Killed it for now

Iron Heart

Distance to the nearest Underdark entrance doesn't specify units, leaving us to assume kilometres.

Magician

Fixed

doppelgreener

@Magician So one third of people with intellect 13 are going to be intellect devourers...

if i'm interpreting this well?

Magician

I did fiddle with the default Mandrake Equation values to make sure the average person meets close to 1 ID in a year.

But yes, given a chance encounter like that, you end up with more IDs than people.

Because IDs are terrifying, despite being CR2

Pixie

Quite an epidemic!

doppelgreener

04:08

That's impressive.

Anyone over INT 19 is safe from having their brain eaten, but will naturally be killed or controlled now that the population has an enormous number of intellect devourers.

Magician

John Rogers, who developed The Librarians tv show, on Fate aspects in it.

2

Which is about as long as the link description, but eh.

BESW

@Magician [flails in paroxysms of nerd singularity]

Pixie

I really need to watch that show. And the movies. My co-workers were talking about it recently, though not in depth.

BESW

@Pixie I'm still in the "Okay, show, you've shown potential and competence, now impress me with your consistency and innovation" stage of consumption for the show, but I dearly love the films.

Pixie

@BESW Heh. I don't watch a lot of serials because I can't keep up with them (unless they are streamable or I like them enough to buy DVDs), so the movies are more realistic for me anyway.

BESW

04:28

Hmm. @Magician this pdf says the relephant ability is called "Body Thief" rather than "Devour Intellect" as your site's smalltext suggests.

Magician

That's the pdf I tried to link to. The ability to take over is, indeed, Body Thief. But the ability that rolls 3d6 and compares them against creature's Int to see if the creature's knocked out is Devour Intellect.

And that's used as the basis for the takeover

Seeing as once a creature is incapacitated with positive hp and 0 Int, an ID can do whatever it wants with it, including Body Thief.

BESW

Fair enough.

Magician

Can you check if the link to the pdf now works for you?

Pixie

@Magician Yep, it works.

BESW

04:43

Success.

Pixie

Honestly, they are pretty cute critters.

Magician

Cool, thank you.

@Pixie I know a snirfneblin (am I spelling it correctly now??) who has a helmet to sell you.

Pixie

@Magician I think that's smurfmeblin.

Iron Heart

Snafublin?

Pixie

@IronHeart This is quite a snafu.

... a player's observation on our Exalted game...

> now that I think about it, "I know you want to kill me but you seem to really love performing and you could easily make a living doing that instead" is how Wonder Woman beat Cheetah the first time. we're Golden Age Wonder Woman. straight down to the homoerotic themes.

BESW

04:59

@Pixie ...[sniff] That's beautiful.

Dear Adobe: How have you managed to stay relephant AT ALL, much less remain top dog for so long?

Today's bizarre experience from AdobeLand ("The magical place where fun is work and work is impossible!") has them putting my order on hold so they can manually review it. The form letter I received makes it sound like this is now standard practice for the multibillion-dollar international corporation which makes almost all its money in online sales.

user61230

05:24

It takes a lot of money to ship Adobe to Guam!

user61230

...wrong adobe, isn't it

BESW

I'm buying a downloaded upgrade to my Creative Suite.

Pixie

That's pretty frustrating. :I

Iron Heart

06:15

Apropos of nothing...

BESW

(source)

Aspect: "That's just what they want us to think!

2

(Invokable for seeing through deception and plots; compellable for seeing deception and plots where there are none.)

Shalvenay

06:37

@BESW -- it's exactly that symmetry that gives me so much grief -- it does not come naturally to me

user61230

I've been writing literally all day for this LARP, and I'm still not done. Gods, this is complicated.

BESW

@Shalvenay That's why a system like Fate uses game currency and out-of-character negotiation (with the GM as arbiter) to provide checks and balances on this sort of thing: you spend game currency to reduce problems, and you gain game currency by increasing them, with the whole group working together to make sure both are reasonable.

Shalvenay

yeah -- part of the problem with me causing problems for my characters is that I tend strongly towards exogenous problems

BESW

Which is fine: you can have aspects like Hunted by the Red Court, and get game currency for suggesting that the Red Court's interest in your complicates the scene.

The only problem is, you're in a game without mechanical checks and balances, with a group that doesn't do out-of-character negotiation, with players who often have different interests than you.

Shalvenay

yeah. I have an easier time with OOC negotiation in my PbP :p

Pixie

06:52

That you have such a small player pool (for an MMO) is a double-edged sword, too.

Shalvenay

indeed

quite

the lack of diversity in the player pool really hurts

Pixie

Yeah... it allows you to know the style of the community since there are few enough people for that to be a thing, but it limits your options.

Shalvenay

yeah -- in EVE for instance, I don't have to worry about "what the style of the community is", I just have to find folks I fit in with ;)

Pixie

Hmm. Working on a private RP forum on my webspace (which has largely gone unused for a couple of years), but I cannot settle on a Wordpress theme. There are too many good ones.

Iron Heart

fun

> What elementos did D&D 5e bring from D&D 4e?

Elementos sounds like a minty treat.

Pixie

07:02

@IronHeart Come in five flavors.

Iron Heart

Is the fifth sonic or void?

Either way, hard to approach.

BESW

@IronHeart Don't drink it with fizzy soda.

Pixie

@IronHeart The fifth flavor is deliberately vague and changes depending on where you're standing.

Shalvenay

@Pixie -- also, being a RPer in a nominally non-RP corp in EVE isn't the kind of thing that'll draw a ton of eyebrows

Pixie

(Alternately, it's Heart.)

BESW

07:05

A drawing of a ton of eyebrows would probably look mostly like a giant, lumpy, slightly fuzzy, scribble, wouldn't it?

Pixie

@Shalvenay Ahh. That sounds nice, actually.

Shalvenay

@BESW :P

@Pixie -- it is rather nice. the weirdest part about it is RPing with Goons ;)

(yes, dear, the GoonSwarm Federation is alive, well, and kicking in 2015)

Pixie

I've been kind of leery to random in GW2 since they got rid of individual servers. Before, there was one server the RPers had chosen to convene on, but now you never know who you're with.

I don't mind if there are already RPers in the area, but I'm pretty shy about bursting into it, much more than before. Trolling is definitely more common.

Shalvenay

the funny part is that EVE RPers still troll -- its just that EVE players know how to handle trolling ;)

that, and "trolling someone simply because they RP" makes much less sense in EVE

Pixie

It's just not something I aim to deal with during my happy fun times, generally, so I often stick with friends. Limits my opportunities quite a bit, though, as my boyfriend's usually got guild things going on. I can't find a guild that suits any of my characters. I'm in the general RP guild, but I'm shy in it. So shy. TwT

Happy to be getting this forum set up, though. My friends and I are in the habit of casually discussing freeform games we want to play, laying the groundwork, not writing anything down, and forgetting what we were doing.

user61230

08:01

Game submitted. Gah, that was a stressful last minute and thirty seconds.

Shalvenay

LOL

we're picking on some n00bs in EVE

(they're incompetent trash talkers, that's why)

and they decided to unanchor the ship hangar inside the starbase we're hammering on

BESW

09:27

Random RPG Idea Of The Day: Hack ARRPG's brainstorming mechanics for a Dragnet-inspired detective session.

The hack is mostly to pull out each roll into a scene that's interesting in itself whether it yields info or not, making the brainstorm take the entire session.

user61230

Sounds like a more focused version of Microscope's world generation.

BESW

That'd be interesting too, but a very different kind of thing despite telling the same ultimate story.

user61230

Hm. What's ARRPG stand for?

BESW

Atomic Robo Roleplaying Game.

Fate engine.

Brainstorming happens when someone asks a question like "How can we possiby stop this thing!?" or "What on earth could do that!?"

Players compete in three rounds to establish objective facts related to the subject of the brainstorm, and then compete in a final round to be the one who gets to take all the established facts and form a hypothesis. Because ARRPG is that kind of narrative, the hypothesis is always right.

user61230

Hm.

BESW

09:36

For example, when examining a strange spherical brass-and-ivory computer, one player used Computer Science to establish that its ports and jacks were 1960s era upgrades while another looked at the systems it was connected to and discovered it had been subjected to Behaviour-modification subroutines.

Our final hypothesis was that it wasn't a computer at all: it was the living brain of a Victorian-era engineer, which had been upgraded by NASA to help with their moon landing computations.

user61230

It seems like there's a risk in that process, which is that someone introduces information that's not solid.

BESW

The rules basically say "don't do that."

Every fact which is established is true, and every fact must be phrased as an objective truth rather than a conjecture or theory.

The GM (doppelgreener) was very surprised by the result, but that's a necessary part of the process: to give the reins of plot agency totally over to the players for a crucial decision.

user61230

Yeah, that makes sense.

user61230

There's an art to declaring things to be true while also leaving room for others to push it around.

BESW

Yes.

In that way, it's very similar to Microscope.

But in Microscope you know the start and the end and are focused on figuring out how the one turned into the other.

user61230

09:43

From this frame of reference, I actually find Microscope rather limiting.

user61230

It's more so centered around the question "What's really going on here?" than it is neutral development of story.

BESW

In brainstorming you know the problem and are focused on learning enough about it to formulate a solution.

Also, I've tried applying brainstorming to D&D-style puzzle-solving scenarios:

Fate: BESW's Hack & Slash puzzle brainstorming experiment (1/2: the experiment itself)

Oct 21 '14 at 3:55, 1 hour 31 minutes total – 395 messages, 8 users, 4 stars

Bookmarked Oct 27 '14 at 11:37 by doppelgreener

Fate: BESW's Hack & Slash puzzle brainstorming experiment (2/2: reflection)

Oct 21 '14 at 5:26, 1 hour 21 minutes total – 181 messages, 9 users, 0 stars

Bookmarked Oct 27 '14 at 11:39 by doppelgreener

user61230

(Be back in a minute, sorry...)

BESW

No worries. I'ma wash dishes.

user61230

10:13

Back, sorry!

user61230

So much to do... reading.

user61230

Hrrm. Haven't read the reflection, but it seems like it got a little caught up in the mechanics rather than the story.

user61230

It seems very weird to me to describe what you did/found with an aspect as opposed to just describing what you did/found.

BESW

Mmm. That particular instance was rather awkward all around, as it's not what the mechanic's meant to cover.

In more... normal... brainstorms, we do describe what we find and then figure out the appropriate aspect.

user61230

10:28

That's fair.

user61230

Hum-diddly-umdumdum.

user61230

Something doesn't sit right with me about using this mechanic to build detective scenes, but I'm not quite sure exactly what it is.

BESW

Depends a lot on the effect you're going for, I think.

I'm specifically thinking of Dragnet style stories.

@Emrakul Rum-tum-tiddle-um-tum.

user61230

@BESW Dim-dum-bumble-umbumbum.

user61230

I can see it working.

BESW

10:32

> Tiddle-iddle, tiddle-iddle,
Tiddle-iddle, tiddle-iddle,

user61230

►

BESW

(For the record, I'm quoting Winnie-the-Pooh.)

BESW

10:51

I really need to learn how to not turn everything I see or hear into a Fate mechanic.

> Adobe Creative Cloud subscription (hardware)
Function: State-of-the-art design program service
Flaw: Impenetrable and exploitable
Benefit (2): +3 on all Computer Design checks, but you are vulnerable to online security risks and heart palpitations.

doppelgreener

@BESW D: say what!?

wow ;_; that's basically the only way to get Adobe in Australia now.

(they decided the solution to the royal inquiry into their software being too expensive was to stop selling physical copies of it)

BESW

Bah, I'm currently waiting for them to "review" my purchase of an downloadable upgrade to my physical copy of their software.

(It's rather difficult to get anything computery out here, as various stores/delivery services have strange and bizarre notions about shipping to Guam.)

But yeah, the Cloud is awful for MANY reasons.

doppelgreener

"We only ship to the USA." "We only ship to places I can't drive across in a couple of hours, it's not sporting for the delivery drivers." "Guam doesn't exist according to our atlas; Bob even has a magnifying glass out." "Turns out Bob was looking in the Atlantic, but we still can't ship to Guam."

BESW

@doppelgreener ...yes.

doppelgreener

@BESW are some of those pretty accurate?

BESW

11:05

All of them.

doppelgreener

Wow. XD

BESW

You may also remember the Adobe security hack of 2012, which at the time was the largest civilian security breach of all time.

doppelgreener

That's unfortunate.

@BESW Oh yeah.

> Although Creative Cloud was expected to curtail the piracy of Photoshop,[44] which is one of the most pirated pieces of software,[45] Creative Cloud was hacked and its applications made illegally available a day after it officially launched.[46][47] However, Adobe claims that Creative Cloud will be more accessible and provide better value: “We believe in fighting piracy of software by making the right software for the right people at the right price”.[48]

BESW

@doppelgreener Eh, it's not as bad as, say, the people from Kiribati who get told their country doesn't exist when they hand their passports over at immigration anywhere outside the Pacific.

doppelgreener

Ouch. "We made this thing to prevent piracy!" "We pirated this thing they made in a day!"

@BESW That's pretty bad.

BESW

11:09

Most places will eventually admit Guam exists, even if they aren't sure where, or what nation it falls under.

I'm also fond of the "We'll send it by UPS." "UPS uses trucks, that won't work. Send it by USPS." "We'll send it by FedEx, they're fast and cheap." "No, FedEx takes just as long and charges four times as much. Use USPS." "We don't ship by USPS, they're unreliable." "...fine, ship it by FedEx, but give me a written statement that you're soaking the extra shipping costs." "What?"

doppelgreener

You having two services called UPS and USPS is always momentarily confusing for me.

BESW

For me, too.

user61230

I have no idea why they did it that way, if solely to confuse people into picking the wrong service.

doppelgreener

There was that Java / JavaScript decision...

BESW

12:04

I need an adjective to describe someone with an Ahab complex.

doppelgreener

(could I suggest probably everything from this spot should be NAB'd?)

@BESW [looks up this thing]

BESW

It's not a technical term.

Ahab was obsessed with something to the point of destruction, not caring about the people around him, or himself, so long as he could achieve his goal.

I need an adjective describing that kind of destructive obsession.

→ 80 messages moved to Not a bar, but plays one on TV

doppelgreener

Single-mindedness is the neutral form (aka stuff like one-track mind; there's related terms like fanatical and hell-bent and inexorable which have some nice synonyms.

BESW

Inexorable might work.

I have this background project of tooling up Primeval as a subdivision of Amaterasu, complete with pre-made PCs, so that if we ever want to play on a Saturday but don't want to do main-plot stuff, we have the option of doing a session with one of Amaterasu's other teams.

doppelgreener

Like fervent, frenzied, narrow-minded, obsessive, (over-)zealous, vehement, emphatic, unequivocal, intransigent, mulish, obstinate, bullheaded, intractible

There's also pertinacious which may be striking gold

except that it doesn't imply self-destructiveness

BESW

12:13

It's also a ten-dollar word. Probably want to avoid words, however appropriate, which will send people for the dictionary mid-session.

I use enough of those by accident.

doppelgreener

I don't know if we have a decent single word, but we probably have a couple of words you could use in combination.

BESW

I'ma go with Bullheaded and give him another aspect about his destructiveness.

doppelgreener

That'd be good.

BESW

I'm using that "The [Adjective] [Role]" form for high concepts. It seems useful for quickly establishing character.

Team concepts: The Credulous Nerd, The Sensitive Zookeeper, The Skeptical Soldier, The Bullheaded Scientist, The Pragmatic Hunter, The Cowboy Cop.

doppelgreener

@BESW possible self-destructive aspect: "I'll sacrifice anything for X"

BESW

12:18

Where X = knowledge, perfect.

(It's a bit more specific in the show, but these are generalities inspired by the show, not specifically true to the show characters.)

doppelgreener

ARE YOU SAYING YOU ARE MAKING IN INACCURATE INTERPRETATION OF A CHARACTER

BESW

The general concept behind Primeval is that portals in time open up and creatures from other eras come through, often to disastrous effect. The ARC (Anomaly Research Centre) has teams which go out and try to catch the creatures non-lethally and return them through the portal, to avoid changing history. They also often have to set up cover stories to avoid public panic about the mammoth on the freeway.

It's a good fit for our game, I think: institutionalised teams working to quietly protect the public from very un-quiet Weird Stuff in a world that has no unusual Weirdness Censor.

doppelgreener

this sounds really nice.

an Amaterasu Portal-based chronistic anomaly resolution team

"what, like time travel?" "no, hold on, one sec" [neuralizes]

BESW

I wouldn't make it a long-form game, because "portals in time" is a bit too narrow of a focus for us, but it'd make for good asides.

...heh. A.P.A.R.T.: Amaterasu Portal Anomaly Resolution Taskforce.

Also interesting: I can approximate every single one of the main characters with different combinations of Action/Banter/Intrigue/Science. No Weird Modes necessary.

I will, however, give everybody hardware anyway.

doppelgreener

12:39

@BESW that is pretty cool. :)

@BESW i was hoping you'd have a bright idea for an acronym :D

BESW

@doppelgreener Not happy with it, will improve later.

doppelgreener

prolly 'cause APART isn't as meaningful a word as we could have?

BESW

Mhm.

Also I don't like using "portal."

ACORC: Anomalous Chronal Observation and Response Centre.

"We'll put ACORC in it."

doppelgreener

hahaha.

BESW

STOPPER: Serious Temporal Outbreak Protection and Patrol Emergency Response.

(Similar jokes as ACORC, obviously.)

...I have given someone +4 in cryptozoology.

Sample stunts:

> Your Pet Flying Lizard Rex: You can use Animal Psychology (with +2) to manipulate objects at a distance by asking Rex to do it for you. However, Rex is vulnerable to confusion, distraction, or misunderstanding because he is just a lizard.

> Portable Portal Sealer Prototype: You can use Computer Science (with +2) to Overcome anomalies, making them passable or impassable. However, it is vulnerable to malfunctions because it is extremely experimental.

> Goodnight Gun: You have +1 and weapon:2 when making Combat attacks with this high-tech tranquilliser gun.

> Portal Remote from the Future: You can use the Overcome action with Will to locate and manipulate anomalies, and you get +2 to do so. But since nobody knows how this thing works, you’re vulnerable to making mistakes while using it.

Fate: BESW's Hack & Slash puzzle brainstorming experiment (1/2: the experiment itself)

Fate: BESW's Hack & Slash puzzle brainstorming experiment (2/2: reflection)

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