We faced low level critters. Due to having a better initiative and a better speed, the barbarian was on each target faster than me. Result, I did 0 damage.

Nice

@doppelgreener are you here?

I'm sure he's here in spirit

:D

He's putting the finishing touches on his new PC for tonight's game.

We're hashing out exactly how his brain-in-a-box's robot body is powered.

playing in chat?

Nah, he and a friend Skype their living room with mine for my IRL Saturday game.

cool--is it Saturday where you are?

Aye. About noon on Saturday. We start our game around 730pm.

We'll be down a player or two because of the typhoon, but I expect enough attendance to play.

Having two folks on another continent helps with regularity.

hmm... never thought of it that way

Well, different continent but same time zone.

many of my students from Beijing, Seoul, Bangkok, Hong Kong, have family meals via Skype--they're eating breakfast while parents are eating dinner.

Different time zones usually makes it harder to coordinate schedules.

Because of miscommunications, or that ol' sun-thing?

Both.

"Saturday night" is a time most people can clear reliably.

But if they were in the mainland US, my 730pm Saturday start time would have them starting around 330am Saturday morning, give or take a couple hours depending on coast and DST (which I don't observe).

Sounds like a great follow-on to my Friday night (eastern US) game.

=P

As it is, they've been able to commit very reliably to attendance, and that's stabilised my group a lot.

So you're in Australia?

No, they are.

What're you playing? (system)

(And feel free to tell me to shove off--I'm just staring at a stack of term exams and looking for ways not grade them.)

Our primary system these days is Fate, specifically a slightly homebrewed variation on the Atomic Robo RPG, with occasional forays into Accelerated and other Fate iterations. But we also play short adventures in other systems like Roll For Shoes, Great Ork Gods, Lady Blackbird, Cthulhu Dark, Monster of the Week...

(And confined to a room of students looking for ways to not study.)

@nitsua60 i am

We recently played adventures in our Atomic-Robo-ish campaign setting, but using Monster of the Week and Don't Rest Your Head. I'm about to bring the Fate Accelerated setting of Umdaar into the campaign too.

@BESW I really, really like that we're comfortable doing this. It's been pretty successful.

I like that we can have sessions that need a different mood than Atomic Robo provides, and say "yep let's use a completely different game we've never even played before for this" and just all jump on board and do it

@doppelgreener I'm still not sure if our existing Umdaar storyline is in the same Umdaar that we're about to visit on the Icarus II.

@doppelgreener This pleases me, yes.

So does the southern contingent get projected on your wall, BESW, or do you set up a monitor Max Headroom-style? Or is it all laptops at the table?

@nitsua60 I've got Skype hooked up to a smallish TV, so it's basically Max Headroom And His Friend.

cool

...The graphics card on that computer is failing, though. Some time soon I need to fix that.

would hate to have them start flickering and stuttering... too much flashback/nostalgia!

@BESW Right now I'm thinking it's best if they aren't; I'd like that to be its own thing.

@doppelgreener Agreed.

so are you saying you continue your storyline across systems as the mood strikes?

yeah. Mostly we play in Atomic-Robo-style Fate, because that's the system which best fits the general tone of the campaign.

But if we want a scary episode, for example, we can bust out a system that supports more horror-centric storytelling.

We used Don't Rest Your Head for an episode that focused on the characters' internal struggles by making them manifest as external powers, making it impossible to ignore their problems.

I'm jealous of your cohort with such multi-system competence.

It's not competence; neither of the last two systems we used for this campaign were ones we'd ever used before.

But I think it's (general roleplaying) competence to head into an unknown system and just go for it

It's having a group that's interested in trying new things and being okay that sometimes it won't work out perfectly.

of course

my most-regular game is with high-schoolers

We've also been picking systems that are relatively easy to just jump into. Cthulhu Dark, Great Ork Gods, and so on are pretty mechanically simple. BESW took a week or two of studying Don't Rest Your Head (so let's not discount the effort he put in, it was a lot!), but the system itself is mechanically very simple and we could just hit the ground running with his guidance.

He still had to put in that work, but it's a system where we can generate our PCs the very same night we expect to be playing.

(contrast: any edition of D&D since Basic)

I think the biggest element is that my group has the united vision that the reason we're playing is to have fun playing games with friends.

I think their urge for new-and-interesting tends to be satisfied by the frequent player turnover

We don't have a lot of pressure to master the systems perfectly, or to get the story exactly right, or anything like that.

yeah, player creation's always been a little...

(in D&D)

So long as we're having fun playing games with friends, jumping systems is just another way to do that.

And yes, I have been actively avoiding high-complexity systems (especially ones with lots of independent subsystems) for the last couple years.

My favourite games have core rulesets that take less than two dozen pages to explain (often less than one page!).

Part of the reason I can do that is because we're okay with jumping systems depending on the kind of game we want to play that week, so each system only has to be good at one kind of game.

sure, so a minimalist ruleset that's good at a few targeted things can cover a session pretty well--is that what you're saying?

I'm attracted to elegant, simple systems which do one kind of gameplay really well and don't bother with unnecessary extras.

@BESW i agree.

rather than the D&D et al model of "well, anything that can do we can do too"

eyes on the prize: fun & relaxation with friends

(teenagers are soooo different)

@nitsua60 Exactly. And this doesn't mean they aren't good for long-form games either; Lady Blackbird in particular is better as a long-form game because its mechanics are largely focused on developing character arcs.

what'd the 'elevator-pitch' for Lady Blackbird be?

@nitsua60 I wouldn't necessarily say it's "teenagers." I spent the first six years of my RPG experience with a laser focus on D&D 3.5, and the next year and a half was just one edition jump.

not following

@nitsua60 Lady Blackbird is a pre-made aetherpunk scenario with heavy Star Wars influence. The system mechanics (which use a dice pool running off descriptions of a character's personality and capability traits) fit on half a sheet of paper, and the pre-made characters fit on the other half.

It's available for free, as many of the games I play these days are.

...wait, does that tag wiki not have a link to the game? That's scandalous. [fixes]

Link to download page.

(skimming it now)

Cyrus Vance was a student at my school =)

(the US Sec'y of State, not the LB character)

Heh.

So do you just sanitize the story and pregens and lay on top of the LB mechanics your story/characters?

Sounds like 10 minutes of fun: look at this character I've known for months through a completely different narrative lens

Switching characters between systems is very interesting.

We haven't yet done anything with the Lady Blackbird setting outside of its own pre-made characters and starting scenario though.

We'd have to learn the Solar RPG to really be able to make that hack.

In DRYH, I took my dryad character (who was a plant turned humanoid) and gave her powers of quick deduction and druid-strength plant summoning & manipulation. Previously she could do this but only in small ways; this time she materialised an entire oak tree through the middle of the ship. It's kinda the start of a story arc in which she's going to keep those powers and learn to develop them. Also, she got nabbed by a nightmare creature and got left with some emotional scars and to work out.

and how 'bout Don't Rest Your Head? Elevator-pitch? (If you don't mind--I don't mean to make you sing and dance for me)

@BESW although I'm sure some characters would pose a greater challenge than others -- about the only system that could probably capture all of what my EVE chars have to offer (both in mechs and RP) would be GURPS...

"EVE"?

@nitsua60 EVE Online -- very notable MMO, mostly due to its sandboxy, PvP-centric gameplay

exams are graded, study hall's over, and I've got a commute ahead of me. Have fun tonight, all. Thanks for the food for thought.

@Shalvenay Yes, not all characters fit in all systems. We've picked systems that are compatible with our story, and that includes being able to carry our characters into them in some way - otherwise it wouldn't be compatible with our story, it'd be a side game, like Great Ork Gods.

@nitsua60 Don't Rest Your Head is about people who have stayed awake so long that they gain the ability to shift reality in impossible ways... but in doing so they attract the attention of Nightmares, which were once people like them who used their power too carelessly until they were consumed by it.

Systems like Don't Rest Your Head can still operate with the same character, but you're going to forget just about everything mechanically about them, and think about what that system considers to be important about them. Stellata's character was still the same, but now entirely different sides of her were being brought to light by the game.

@doppelgreener agreed. what other systems (besides the GURPS-mashup that's already been suggested on this Stack) would be able to deal with some of the scale/scope issues involved, at a minimum?

@Shalvenay schwa? what scale/scope issues?

brb.

@doppelgreener example: last I checked, precious metals in the EVE 'verse are worth 1500 ISK/m3, spot. considering that my main character has 6 billion ISK of liquidity to play with...

@Shalvenay I don't play Eve, I can't tell you anything about recreating it in its entirety.

(now brb for realsy)

back

further though i don't think there's much point to trying to make a straight conversion and replicating all the fiddly bits

(1) video games are strong at certain things, weak at others. RPGs also have their strengths and weaknesses, and they're in almost entirely different places. RPGs are great for fundamentally different experiences.

A lot of systems "handle" that kind of thing by just not caring.

(2) RPGs aren't good at fiddly bits. in an EVE RPG we'd probably just give you a resource cap and call it a day, not go into the minutae of funding.

(3) if you want a game that feels just like the MMORPG, just play the MMORPG. if you want a tabletop RPG, use it to explore its own thing.

In Cthulhu Dark a multibillionaire would probably have that as his Profession, meaning that he'd get a d6 when doing things where being obscenely wealthy would help.

Similarly a Detective would get a d6 where that profession would be helpful. Issues of scale don't matter.

You've got a thing that you're good at and you get a d6 when that's helpful.

@BESW yeah, the other thing EVE chars sometimes develop is a lack of specialization.

On the other hand, a system like Lasers & Feelings doesn't do specialisation beyond "lasers" and "feelings."

@BESW very true

Great Ork Gods represents capacity as a function of how much the gods in charge of each thing hate you.

DRYH has "one normal thing you can do abnormally well" and "one impossible thing that's possible for you."

Because you roll to fail instead of succeed if I recall, and everyone is conspiring against one another

Something like that.

Each player controls an Ork, but also controls at least one of the Great Ork Gods.

Your Ork is your PC, but as a God you set the difficulty for any action any Ork takes that falls into your portfolio--and even if it's not in your portfolio, you can spend Spite to increase the difficulty if you don't like that Ork.

@Magician ....are you an intellect devourer?

I think he might also be a tree.

@BESW Perish the thought.

@BESW Or, in the case of an orc choosing to attack a pony when there was a perfectly good halfling within stabbing range, you can spend Spite if you don't like what that Ork's doing. :D

(And when an Ork succeeds on an action, the god who controls that action gains Spite.)

@BESW Meaning in Great Ork Gods, success spells out future doom, and failure... also spells out near-certain doom, more likely than not. Basically, all of the orks are doomed, so it's a good thing character creation can be pretty quick and painless.

@Magician but then what will you eat?

@trogdor Do you not cook your meals before consuming them?

of course I do, even the ones I probably shouldn't cook

touche

Its always good to roll up 20 or so orcs

"Stir the intellectual debate for at least 10 minutes to get the brain juices flowing. You may find that certain topics spice up the meal." - intellect devourer cookbook excerpt.

eh, I don't get the impression you should roll any orks more than the ones you play

@Sandwich Great Ork Gods expects you to roll them up as you need them, and penalises you if you take more than five minutes to do so.

It's part of the game.

once the one you are playing dies you roll another and it shouldn't take very long

@Sandwich in GOG i wouldn't roll any up in advance; it'd be tiresome

during character creation, you name your ork and roll up a stat for how much each of the gods hates you.

Your name can be a challenge or insult to some god. or it might just end up offending some god. The player who controlled Flailing Limbs, the God of Movement, decided he was insulted by an Ork called Fists the Immovable. When a god decides this, your Ork gets +1 Oog, but also cops +1d6 Hate from that particular god.

In Fists' case, he went up to 9 hate, which means: he has a 10% chance of actually moving successfully, a 90% chance of failing horribly and probably putting his life at risk in the process.

So, I would rather just roll on the spot, and name them, and we can talk about that midgame and have some laughs.

(I'd also rather not just roll a vague cloud of base stats either. I could, but it'd be a chore and it's more fun just to do that midgame while other orks are getting up to fun nonsense.)

GOG is very much a process game.

Fists specifically got 3 hate from Flailing Limbs in the beginning, and rolled 6 extra hate on the +1d6 from challenging Flailing Limbs. I am very lucky he did not have 4 hate in the beginning. :D

Ooh, Unwritten has some very interesting worldbuilding collaboration notes and guidance.

Oh yeah, thanks for reminding me. [picks up bundle]

It's also got a palette phase!

It's gonna take a while for me to digest this book.

are you excited that maybe this could be,... a lot like Microscope but more useful?

oh snap

this is just a question based off of what you just mentioned

it isn't really a system I have looked into

Maaaybe. There are a lot of ways I might use some of these ideas.

Right now I'm reading Investigation, which is basically Brainstorming but for puzzles. Which I experimented with last year, remember?

I seem to recall that to some degree yes

but brainstorming has some small facets that we did not implement

@BESW and me I'm going "this might be perfect for this sci-fi game..."

hmm. Investigations are "The GM has something up their sleeve; let's find out about it."

Deductions are "There's something going on here, we get to decide what it is!"

Iiiinterestink.

@BESW I am not the only one that does this. Thank god

General question - In combat, if a player wants to change weapons, it usually takes a full action to sheathe the current weapon, and draw the next.

@Ben if you're going strictly by 5e RAW, I think so -- but many GMs don't bookkeep that closely -- @waxeagle certainly doesn't, and nor do I when I'm DMing!

But what about quick weapons like throwing knives for example. If I wanted to throw a knife, what would be the cost of drawing the knife, then throwing it? And does it require me to sheathe my current weapon?

In the editions I'm familiar with, there are separate rules for drawing ammunition, and weapons intended to be used like ammunition (EG, throwing knives) get to use those rules instead.

@Ben I'd treat throwing knives as ammo myself -- also, what all you need to do to free a hand depends on your weapon of choice

both of my 5e chars wield two-handers of some flavor or another -- this means that taking a hand off the weapon to say cast is perfectly fine

@Shalvenay Ok cool... I'm thinking I might invest in some...

@Shalvenay Yeah, that's what actually made me ask about it haha. I just saw you had some and due to my experience (in my own games) with switching weapons, how is that usually treated?

Hmm.

Hmm?

I'm not very interested in using D'ni as a setting--not least because I'm not fond of the DRC and its associated plot arcs--but there's a lot of tools in Unwritten that I'm definitely going to add to my quiver.

You lost me at D'ni

Are you aware of the video game franchise Myst?

I am not

Which clearly means I am unfortunately not the person to discuss this with. Apologies haha

@Ben @waxeagle treats it as a freebie, basically -- and I've seen it done that way in my 3.5e experience as well

I'd say that in my game it might cost a bonus action at the very least

@BESW is this what Unwritten's referring to when it talks about adventures in the ages of MYST?

@doppelgreener Yes. "Ages" are what that franchise calls the worlds or universes that are accessed through Books written using the Art.

"Myst" was the name of the first game, so called because it's the name of the primary Age that game took place in.

So the whole franchise took on that name.

The people/civilisation/language that spawned the Art of writing Books which become portals to Ages is called D'ni, pronounced DUH-NEE or dunny.

Unwritten takes place after most of the games in the franchise, three generations after D'ni fell. People from Earth and other Ages are working to explore the thousands of Ages written by the D'ni, learn from them and accomplish various goals like exploit them or revive the culture.

> If you are familiar with Fate Core, you will see a lot here that you recognize. You will also see some significant changes here and there, in order to capture the unique feel of the D’niverse.

(page 4, What is Unwritten?: For Veteran Role-players)

but which changes where!!

This PDF is 372 pages ;_;

[keeps reading]

@doppelgreener They've removed the Attack action entirely, along with stress tracks, and changed how consequences and getting taken out ("overwhelmed") works accordingly.

@BESW Oh wow.

Like I said, this book's gonna take a while for me to digest.

So, they've removed conflicts as a scene mechanic and added Investigation and Deduction.

@Shalvenay and @Ben worth a mention that mearls said that the action economy was not designed to be punitive in that way, so even though it's not RAW, that's how he plays too, and he designed the thing...

@waxeagle Not sure what you're referring to..?

But on another topic, I just wanted to double check something: In 5e, are Crit Fails a thing?

Or no..?

@Ben Nope.

A lot of people add them, but...

Note: Pretty much all of this applies equally to 5e.

Ok fair enough. Just wanted to check :)

Hey @WaxEagle! Are you familiar with D&D 4E Essentials?

Do leaders there still get twice per encounter minor action healing power at level 1?

Nevermind

@Zachiel yes,but they played around with it some, see skald (essentials design principles, not actually essentials)

@waxeagle well I hope my leader tag description fits

AARPG Meets Umdaar was a rousing success.

The session was dominated by one of the better, more engaging conflicts we've ever had in Fate.

@Zachiel it does, leaders heal and buff, its what they do,

I'm just curious has anyone considered a bladesinger with a 1 level dip in barbarian?

@Miniman also -- I think there's a common theme in many of the objections people have to crit fumbles -- the crit fumble tables vastly overexaggerate the consequences of screwing up

it's not like a L20 fighter is going to slice an ally in two or commit seppuku 1 time in 20

dinging up a sword, busting a bowstring, or drawing an OA from an overshoot? now that's a more sensible interpretation...

@SolidusVerum For Unarmored Defense, you mean? Yep, a lot of people have been talking about that. It's probably the best longterm source of AC for a bladesinger.

@Shalvenay You might want to read the question I linked - most of the reasons why fumble tables are a bad idea apply regardless of how light you make the consequences.

@Miniman yeah -- fumbles and multihit/turn interact rather terribly as well -- but I've played games with and without crit fumbles, and I don't find their mere presence to be a huge deal as long as the consequences are kept manageable

(then again -- I haven't gotten into multihit BAB in my 3.5e game, and I play a Wizard in 2e :P)

@Shalvenay The thing is, if they're just a bit of background noise like that, what's the point of having them? I'd contend that for a mechanic to be worth adding to your game, it should be meaningful and have a significant impact - but if fumble tables have a significant impact, it's almost invariably going to be a negative one.

@Miniman whereas, I tend to value that detail at least to some extent -- it's a Gam/Sim divide, more or less.

@Shalvenay Well, we've been down there before and probably shouldn't again, so I'll shut up at this point.

@Shalvenay I will point out, though, that the answer to the question I linked has some great and entirely non-contentious arguments about why fumble tables are bad for simulation.

@Miniman which are exactly what I am addressing -- it's possible to build a critical fumble system that isn't out of line from a simulationist standpoint, and do so more simply than most tables as well.

@Shalvenay Unless you tailor it to every situation (not simple) you're still going to end up with nonsensical results.

now, if only @Ben would turn up :)

Right on tme

ah, I was the one off by an hour xD