well...I'm currently pondering just how hard someone who has never seen anything other than your typical castle drawbridge would boggle at some of the stuff I deal with at $work
Asteria: This is the kinda thing PC's just do in my system. Well what I hope they will do. One rule we are toying with is a notion of "Heat", of how much the men is suits want to catch you. A suggested rule was that if your Art (eg the water pistol), kills 2 or more people in a day, double your reputation for purposes of drawing heat.
Killing a single person in a day is just what you do. Art for Art's sake.
@Asteria it's pretty wild, yeah. watches the entire Lannister family's heads explode in unison at trying to grasp a drawbridge of that size that's opened by a button several thousand miles away. of course, there are also drawbridges that are completely automatic if you can believe it.
@Shalvenay The train one is a bit worrying, we've had a lot of issues with train sensors in my local area lately. I just imagine a train going 'splat' against a raise drawbridge. Yikes
@Shalvenay I can't decide whether 'splat' or 'AHHHH sploosh' would be worse
@Oxinabox That sounds pretty interesting, how is heat measured? Star system? Point values? Or isn't it really known to the player. "He's pointing a baton at me, not a gun. Guess my heat isn't very high"?
@BESW it did, at one the cops couldn't even shoot at you, at 2 they could and cars would chase you, at 3 I think they jumped to helecopters chasing you
@BESW ⋆ they try to grab you for a minor crime ⋆⋆ They start shooting to kill ⋆⋆⋆ Roadblocks happen! Spike strips are also annoying} ⋆⋆⋆⋆ Swat coming to ruin your day ⋆⋆⋆⋆⋆ Amy's here, Swat is everywhere, next town is empty of traffic bar cops
Heat is more "There are a lot of people out their looking out for people like you." If you are familar with SCP, then this includes The Foundation, GOI, the FBI UIU etc. But heat also covers the more mundane, upper tier, law enforcement/Spooks. Eg CIA, FBI, DEA.
I haven't yet nailed down the mechanic,
but I was thinking something like (if this was a d100 system, which it is not): Your heat rating is a number (Possibly limitted to 100), at the start of the session, roll a d100, if it rolls under your heat, then 1d6 agents are dispatched to your location.
I gather you're talking about later GTA games? I only ever played the first two. Got to the 2nd or 3rd city in GTA1, and maybe the 2nd or 3rd mission in GTA2...
One fun thing to do when the cops were after you in GTA1, was to go on a footbridge. Cops jump out of their cars & run about on the road below you, then more cop cars come screaming through and wipe them out (and then your threat rating goes up...)
not the absolute latest one, though I have looked at it, as I expected it seems like it just follows the formula of "gets a bit crazier than the last one"
@Adeptus that seems sort of unfair AND irresponsible of them XD
...[sigh] This is why I want other chat folks to tell me what they want to see in the pin; if I go hunting myself, it's either almost all Fate stuff, or it looks like this:
**Cool RPG stuff:** [BoH](http://bundleofholding.com "buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!"); [200Words](http://schirduans.com/david/2016/04/200-word-rpg-rough-results.html "winners of the 200 Word RPG Challenge"); [Ankur](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1191819023/ankur-kingdom-of-the-gods-rpg "Based on Sumerian mythology & the ancient alien theory -June 14-"); [Threadbare](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mortaine/threadbare-rpg-a-stitchpunk-tabletop-role-playing "Play a jury-rigged toy in a broken, stitched-together world. -June 09-");
**RPG stuff:** [BoH](http://bundleofholding.com "buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!")/[200Words](http://schirduans.com/david/2016/04/200-word-rpg-rough-results.html "winners of the 200 Word RPG Challenge")/[Ankur](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1191819023/ankur-kingdom-of-the-gods-rpg "Based on Sumerian mythology & the ancient alien theory -June 14-")/[Threadbare](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mortaine/threadbare-rpg-a-stitchpunk-tabletop-role-playing "Play a jury-rigged toy in a broken, stitched-together world. -June 09-")/[Murder&Acquisitions](https:…
...yeah, no, it's not gonna fit no matter what I do.
What kickstarter needs is a way to make a shortlist or collection that you can share. From memory, it doesn't have a RPG-specific category, does it? It's just "games" or something?
Yeah, I've gotta search "RPG" and "tabletop" and filter out all the bogus hits manually.
So far as I can tell, this is every currently-active Kickstarter dealing with RPGs in a relephant way:
**Cool RPG stuff:** [Bundle of Holding](http://bundleofholding.com "buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!"); [Ankur](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1191819023/ankur-kingdom-of-the-gods-rpg "Based on Sumerian mythology & the ancient alien theory -June 14-"); [Threadbare](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/mortaine/threadbare-rpg-a-stitchpunk-tabletop-role-playing "Play a jury-rigged toy in a broken, stitched-together world. -June 09-"); [Murder & Acquisitions](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1582756696/murders-and-acquisitions-rpg "Espionage, subterfuge, i…
Ordered from longest to shortest.
Maybe I should just order them the other way 'round and let stuff creep up into view.
Alrighty, testing.
**Cool RPG stuff:** [BoH](http://bundleofholding.com "buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!"); [Noirlandia](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hannahshaffer/noirlandia "A tangled murder mystery in a bizarre, corrupt city of your own design. -May 20-"); [Rifts: SW](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/545820095/rifts-for-savage-worlds "The gonzo Megaversal adventure of Rifts® teams up with the Savage Worlds system! -May 20-"); [Realm](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/125782340/realm-first-edition "Fantasy and Science Fiction collide in this quick & easy to learn …
From now on the Cool RPG Stuff pin will have soonest-to-expire items at the top (after BoH, of course), and longer-term items will just fall behind the ellipsis. I've added expiration dates to the mouseover description on each item.
Feedback on what's actually interesting to people would be appreciated. Also, I'm only scouring Kickstarter; tell me about events outside that site if you want them on the pin.
The pin got started after several people in chat expressed sadness they'd missed Kickstarters which the chat folks who'd pledged them thought had been well-publicised.
@BESW Players requested a Western where they're "the good guys". But apparently I've been making the nomadic peoples with whom they come into conflict far "too reasonable." As one player put it after tonight's session, "it's like instead of fantasy-adventure, it's like 'let's go commit the crimes of our forebears, but on another world.'"
I don't know if it's a bad thing or not.
I don't mind the moral ambiguity of culture clashes...
As is, when you start out you can only succeed at FOREIGN interactions (and thus increase your coins, making it easier to succeed at FOREIGN interactions) if you roll at least one 1.
> To resolve a tense interaction, roll 1d6; +1d6 when DIFFERENCES are relevant; +1d6 if your FRIEND or RIVAL narrates their involvement (if that involvement actively defies the FOREIGN power, they lose one coin). - Interacting with LOCAL things (e.g. your customs, technology, geography)? Dice showing OVER your number of coins are WINS. - Interacting with FOREIGN things (e.g. their customs, technology, bureaucracy)? Instead dice showing UNDER your number of coins are WINS. One WIN means you SUCCEED; more means extraordinary success! (If you SUCCEED on a FOREIGN interaction, gain one coin.)
I'm designing a microRPG and need some help calculating probabilities so I can make an informed decision about how many coins to start with.
Here's the dice mechanic, simplified to just the situation I'm concerned about:
You start with 2 coins.
To resolve an action, roll 2d6.
If at le...
@BESW It's simple enough to simulate a single roll at any point in the game, but I'm having real difficulty persuading anydice to keep rolling until it meets a condition and tell me how many rolls it did.
Since I'm looking at this being a fast and brutal game where defying the FOREIGN power is mechanically desirable, 3 sounds about right. Especially since 2 means that even if the players do nothing LOCAL, they'll be sitting around for 3 or 4 rolls apiece before anything mechanically interesting happens--and those are all failures, which is frustrating.
Yeah. But an average of two failed FOREIGN rolls before things start cascading? That seems a lot happier. Also it immediately tips the balance from LOCAL to FOREIGN when you start successfully dealing with the FOREIGN power.
@AshleyBirkla Hi! You'll need 20+ rep on any SE site to type in chat, but you're welcome to hang out until then.
I'm skimming through the revised SRD to update my index. They've added a few spells, so I had to renumber most of that section - finishes 3 pages longer. They removed or reformatted some of the content between spells & magic items - that now starts 3 pages earlier. And the formatting of items has been changed - still the same content but not the same pagebreaks. Now I'm up to monsters, which seem to have the same pagebreaks, but are all 3 pages earlier...
any idea how to automatically update the numbers to n-3?
I also got "the mean to go from 2 to 6 is simply the sum of each mean or 7.434," although that was then translated into throws in the middle of an aside on how dice rolls are memoryless, which is also where the second part of my question got answered.
@AlbertMasclans Hey! Waiting for a meeting to start, so will vanish suddenly some time soon. Until then...
COLONYPUNK: a resistance & assimilation game. Its mechanics draw inspiration from All Outta Bubblegum, Cthulhu Dark, and Dog Eat Dog. The themes are inspired by gaps in Dog Eat Dog when applied to my island's pericolonial situation.
As you can see, the mechanic is a little more complicated than the stripped-down singular instance I used for my question.
My question is trying to figure out the average minimum duration for a game (and the average minimum for the first coin gain).
@MrLemon If you ever play it, please let me know how it goes! It's still in beta, really. I'm pretty sure (based on the answers I've gotten) that I'll change the starting coins from 2 to 3.
That's part of the reason I lease. When the warranty expires, I replace the car. Sure, I never own anything and I'm constantly spending the money, but I do get a new car every three years.
I am responsible for nothing but gas and tires. If there's any issue with the car, it goes back to the dealer and it's their problem.
And honestly, if I didn't drive like a lunatic, the tires would last the whole three years.
@eimyr I dunno if I'd call it a luxury. It's actually cheaper than buying on a monthly basis, there's just no end to it.
Though converting the lease to a purchase is always an option. Then, you're basically buying a three-year-old used car where you know the driver history.
@eimyr I noticed that I'm the only one bringing pinnables to chat lately, and I know I only come across a tiny slice of them organically. So I went and did a Kickstarter dive.
The CRPGS pin now has every current RPG-specific Kickstarter, soonest to expire first.
The pin got started after several people in chat expressed sadness they'd missed time-sensitive RPG events, like Kickstarters, which other chat folks had known about but not everybody saw their mentions of 'em.
Yeah, I haven't had much luck with Kickstarters. There's a lot of "Well, that'd be cool if I had KNOWN." Though it's getting better lately; I have a new quasi-friend that seems to have a lot of disposable income for gaming Kickstarters, and I get a notice every time he supports one.
@T.J.L. I hope the Cool RPG Stuff pin is helpful to you.
But yeah. The Cool RPG Stuff pin is only as cool as the folks who find things to put on it, and I'm not nearly cool enough on my own. If I only used my own RSS feeds and other sources, the pin would be filled with Fate hacks and prop tutorials.
I kinda like the idea of the Rifts setting in a system-that-doesn't-suck, but I know Palladium will be getting some portion of the proceeds. They're not getting another dime from me until I get the rest of the Robotech minis I already paid for.
I picked up Exploding Kittens a few months back, which is hilarious. I've got one out for these magnetic mat tiles; they're behind, but they're good and honest about updates. The guy sold his house so he could keep the project moving while dealing with escrow to get the money back because the first factory totally screwed it up.
The first factory (in China) sent some great looking samples, but the first production run was nothing like the samples. He's now working with domestic US factories. It'll still be another four or five months before I see anything, but he's at least keeping people up to date.
I also dumped entirely too much money on Changeling 20th... but I own every scrap of CtD material ever published (including the non-line books that had CtD-specific material). Gotta maintain that status.
Yup. I convinced the client to go with a different printer.
(They also wanted outlined text, which tends to not play nice with diacriticals and other non-standard-English characters. On a publication with five different Pacific and Asian languages.)
Yeah, I have some publishing and typesetting experience. That sounds like a nightmare.
I'm in on DP9's Heavy Gear minis Kickstarter, too. That one is moving along, too.
I did the Reading Rainbow one, 'cause hey... kids+reading is good in my book. They sent me odds and ends, like a tee-shirt and mug (in fact, the mug is on my desk holding pens). They kept saying do-you-want, do-you-want, blah-blah-blah. I was all "No, keep the money for the kids. I don't need an account."
I watched LeVar on "Reading Rainbow" long before I knew what Star Trek was, and I first knew James Earl Jones from "Long Ago and Far Away."
@AlbertMasclans Hi!
@eimyr How about: I'll list the non-KS stuff first in the pin, and let the KS flow off the end in reverse chronology afterward.
That way the most about-to-expire KS stuff should be visible, but the non-KS stuff won't be mixed into it. (Previous, I basically just listed everything by date regardless of type.)
Also I'll add a link to a gdoc where everything can be found and suggestions can be added.
Sweet Jiminy Cricket, "Popular Question" badger on my stats Q already.
**[Cool RPG stuff](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKltjD1HJ954pS3QZZL-E_ckNaKEeedxMKn7XwdFiio/edit?usp=sharing "Click for Cool Stuff source doc."):** [BoH](https://bundleofholding.com "buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!"); [200Words](https://schirduans.com/david/200-word-rpg-challenge-2016 "Winners of the 200 Word RPG Challenge."). **KS:** [Noirlandia](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hannahshaffer/noirlandia "A tangled murder mystery in a bizarre, corrupt city of your own design. -May 20-");
(@Momonga-sama all I did was type "fencing" in the search box at top-right. On a computer and in a browser. If you're on mobile I'm not sure for which apps how you'd achieve the same.)
@SevenSidedDie oh, I just discovered from where you copy that particular link for answers in the "LaTeX posts for..." wiki. My life continues to get better and better =)
(I'd been manually cobbling together your format from looking in two or three different places.)
When searching for advice on a more general topic is asking for best practices for gming to broad. Examples like Combat encounters with lots of participants, Social combat, Murder mystery investigations, or even a specific system. There is no specific scenario the asker would be trying to deal wi...
@Momonga-sama The chat is not the best place to start asking questions, unless your particular topic is unfit for mainsite or the chat is teeming with activity (usually 10-14 are the busiest times).
Asking on mainsite also has the added benefit of drawing people in with tasty, tasty rep they can get. Chat has no such feature.
in the past we had such "shopping" questions and answered them, but people started recommending unproven system, obscure ones and GURPS, Fate and AW for every question
and so, we (well, that was before my time here) banned them
Me too--I hadn't thought of it that way. Good point.
@SevenSidedDie sorry about the meta edit--I included that one thinking how much I'd want to format that table of numbers in TeX rather than in ASCII. I lost track of which I'd put in or not, so didn't realize you'd already removed it.
(plus the notation for the column headers put me over the top, as it were.)
A gentle reminder that there's a 200-point bounty out there for anyone who wants to try their hand at it. (Even though it's tagged dnd and osr, I feel it's pretty agnostic and could be answered by anyone.)
@Momonga-sama And our beliefs--correct or not--are really important in lots of "function on this planet" sorts of ways that have served us well for millions of years. Changing them is a learned behavior that, for much of history, was more likely to get you killed than just staying with the tried-and-true would have been.
@nitsua60 Oh yeah, that makes sense. I would love to see better table support at Se. Unfortunately I'm pretty sure MathJax doesn't provide LaTeX table formatting, only $$ delimited equation formatting. :(
@eimyr Oh hey, you're Polish? Uczę się polsku, albo nie jestem jeszcze dobry. (See? ^^)
@SevenSidedDie That was very good. Podobno język polski jest jednym z najtrudniejszych na świecie i dopiero po siedmiu latach nauki można się nim swobodnie posługiwać. Jak długo się już uczysz?
@Momonga-sama The most dramatic change from 3e to 4e is in point costs for basic attributes and skills. "How stuff works" is otherwise the same - the main reason for publishing a fourth edition was to make the "power-with-modifiers" system more logical, consistent, and universally applicable (but you don't need it in a normal-humans-only campaign), and to bring together and standardize a lot of useful rules and ideas that had gotten kind of sprawling with the number of 3e books published.
So in short, a worldbook like Swashbucklers should be almost compatible right out of the box, except for point costs for given NPCs. Maybe a few fiddly things with martial arts techniques, but I don't remember even that much.
Disclaimer: the last time I read Swashbucklers was almost a year ago, and it was for a section of a larger fantasy campaign rather than a whole campaign by itself, so I may have missed something.
Whether or not you should buy it depends on what you're interested in, though - I would start with the 4e Basic Set and see if you still want more. Swashbucklers is mostly focused on the setting and style, not rules (though it does have rules for ship-to-ship combat).
What are the significant differences between GURPS 4th edition and earlier editions?
The recent spate of GURPS questions have piqued my curiosity, and the system looks like it would suit a campaign I'm planning that would start with a world-generation session using a game of Microscope. GURPS lo...
If that doesn't help, you can ask about converting Swashbucklers to 4e; that's a very specific problem with answers that can be backed up. We've got other questions in the same vein, most of which are much broader than converting a specific supplement.
The Fate More KS will start shipping product in about a week, though Worlds Take Flight had a printing error which will complicate/delay orders containing it.
@SevenSidedDie ahh... that makes sense. I've not actually used MJ, so have just been going off the meta title 'what would be better with LaTeX?' I'll restrict my thinking to \[...\] constructs.
I'm designing a microRPG and need some help calculating probabilities so I can make an informed decision about how many coins to start with.
Here's the dice mechanic, simplified to just the situation I'm concerned about:
You start with 2 coins.
To resolve an action, roll 2d6.
If at le...
