It's a predator attacking an old, weak Tundra-Dweller (Homo glacis fabricatus), about 2000 years in the future, as illustrated by Philip Hood in Dougal Dixon's Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future.
Somebody added "Season's Greetings" to it. Like it needed to be embellished.
@Ben I think what's missing from your point 2 is that the GM is beating herself for not counterspelling silence: the question is whether there was any way she/the NPC could have known that it was silence being cast, which ended up being so devastating to the wizard.
Potentially the scariest ability of this magic ring is that it can be used to duplicate any fruit. So I've been keeping an eye out for fruit with magical properties, and goblins apparently are in possession of healing apples.
The animated shrub itself is only mildly useful as a minion, as it only lasts 1 hour before deanimating, only has 10 hitpoints and deals 1d6 damage.
> Intelligence measures mental acuity, accuracy of recall, and the ability to reason. [It] comes into play when you need to draw on logic, education, memory, or deductive reasoning. Wisdom reflects how attuned you are to the world around you and represents perceptiveness and intuition. [Using it] might reflect an effort to read body language, understand someone’s feelings, notice things about the environment, or care for an injured person.
Reasoning and memory vs perception and insight. (source)
> Strength is being able to bench-press an owlbear. Dexterity is being able to hogtie an owlbear. Constitution is being able to survive either of those activities. Intelligence is knowing where owlbears come from. Wisdom is waiting until later to explain that. Charisma is not sounding like an idiot when you tell people how you got that scar from bench-pressing a hogtied owlbear.
The roller supports: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20. You can roll up to four sets of XdY using one of those dice, where X is up to 9. X defaults to 1, Y defaults to 6.
Although putting +2 into Dex would probably be better right now, as it's my lower stat and I've trash initiative, But I want to max my Con, for reasons.
Our DM, being new like the rest of us, has no idea how to make encounters much harder safely, so he's very much so intimidated by our party which is two levels higher than the dungeon.
[shrug] The prep time and system mastery needed to reliably achieve even very modest goals quickly became more investment than the payout was worth, given that there are games where I can design the exact same narrative encounters by writing a few lines of prose and not have to worry about spotlighting, gimmicks, balance, or anything like that.
The system mastery and balance gimmicks were fun for a while, but eventually just turned into a chore.
@BESW I get what you're saying, and do find it appealing. For me, however...this is just my personality showing through. Besides, by this point I'm finally reaching that stage where I don't have to think too hard anymore -- I can do a lot of my balancing on the fly (when I'm not deliberately testing out maximum optimization with PlanSheps :P)
Whether I'm using Fate or Cthulhu Confidential or Great Ork Gods or whatever system is best for the shape of the story we're playing... I don't need the designers to have thought of the specifics for me.
Barbarian is incredibly simple, but I'm enjoying playing it. I feel like the hero my team needs when I'm taking damage that would otherwise one shot them.
"Get behind my muscular dwarvern body and allow me to take this next attack!"
I stood infront of a goblin archer atop of its cover so it could only shoot me, but missed my attack roll against it. The war cleric then nailed a javelin between my legs and into the goblin's head. It was beautiful.
@BESW don't forget, though: for some the "crunchier" systems also function to describe possibilities and to spur creativity. If someone thinks of a new, cool thing they like to do in system X and writes it up as a feat, and lots of people do it and that gets released as a book... one man's "bloat" can be another man's "idea catalog."
@ATaco Depending on your way of thinking, the resistance you're often employing during rage either makes the con bump half as important or twice as impactful. Choose your rationalization as you like =)
@Alphaeus You mean freeform gaming? It's totally a thing. Some of our users had it as their primary RPG experience for many years before even trying mechanical systems.
Idea: Universe of Adventure for Fate. Start a campaign by making all "World of Adventure for Fate" material available for character generation, and figure out an amalgam setting based on what people want to use.
Adventures in Cooking Math: a bag of cornbread mix only gives directions for using the whole bag at once, but part of the bag has already been used. We know the total weight in grams of the original content, and the current amount in cups.
I asked Wolfram|Alpha for grams of cornmeal in cups, and grams of flour in cups, did some dirty math, and converted the recipe for the current amount.
Aquilops was a tiny prehistoric herbivore from the early Cretaceous that weighed just 1.5kg!
(Credit: Brian Engh)
All the systems I know that make it pretty easy to tell how long a session will be... it's because they're very strictly designed to tell a certain kind of story a certain way, and that takes a predictable amount of time.
Otherwise it's mostly in how much you zoom; that is, how much detail you give each element, in terms of mechanics and table time. In movie terms, it's the difference between having someone say "It took us two hours to find him," showing a 45-second montage of people searching for the guy, or making a whole two-hour movie about the search.
Well, it's for an introduction to rpgs, so I can take that strictly design. The main objective is making it short and fluid so the players go home with a sensation of success and having played a "full" adventure.
Some games, like D&D and WoD, tend to not really talk about zoom. They assume a pretty constant "level of focus" and it's up to the GM to fiddle with it on their own recognizance. Other games like Fate make it an explicit choice supported by mechanics.
What sort of tone are you looking for in your game? Light-hearted pulp adventure? Grim noir gangster? Superheroic save-the-world?
Do you want to run a specific adventure? With systems that support a high level of plot improvisation from the GM, I usually just come up with new threats for the player characters to deal with or defeat until the session is at its target minimum length at which point I let my imagination rest and the players deal with the remaining problems in the world.
(Aside: if you're curious about why we don't do shopping questions, well... we tried, even though most Stack sites don't do that kind of question. The effort to maintain minimal quality levels vastly outweighed the actual useful content it was adding to the site. After four years of trying to make it work, we retired the topic.)
So, examples: systems or adventures I've used where a session can be a contained adventure of moderately-predictable length: - A Penny For My Thoughts - Aeon Wave - Cthulhu Dark - Cthulhu Confidential - Danger Patrol: Pocket Edition - Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple - Dog Eat Dog - Golden Sky Stories - InSpectres - Lady Blackbird - Lovecraftesque
With "sense of success" as a criterion we can cross out Penny, Cthulhu Dark and Confidential, Dog Eat Dog, and Lovecraftesque right away.
DP:PE probably isn't an RPG in the sense you have in mind as an introduction to the medium.
@BESW I prepared one Light-hearted for the Adventure time rpg, who is really simple to play, but I am not sure if can be enjoyable if someone didn't see the tv show
I'd recommend Do: Pilgrims, Golden Sky Stories, or Lady Blackbird, personally. They're fun, strong systems that are easy to pick up and use to tell fun, satisfying stories with in a relatively short period of time. Pilgrims would probably let you tell several stories in the time you've got.
I've used Roll For Shoes to introduce people to RPGs in a loose, fun way that lets us play with all kinds of non-mechanical elements. But it's totally on the participants to tell and wrap up a story in a given amount of time, and the longer it goes the more unwieldy it gets.
Lady Blackbird has the added benefit of being totally free.
And all the rules fit on the same sheet as the pre-made character!
So convenient.
Roll For Shoes is free too, and its rules fit on an index card. But again, it requires a strong hand on the tiller to give it structure or it'll go careening wherever the group's whim takes you.
Aeon Wave is a fun (also free) pre-made adventure that I've usually been able to wrap up in a couple of hours, but I can see it taking a lot longer.
Lots of Worlds of Adventure for Fate come with short pre-made adventures in the back. Any of them could do you. I highly recommend Masters of Umdaar.
(And again, the Worlds of Adventure are all free, as are the Fate Core/Accelerated manuals they build on.)
Yeah, the thing with really simple systems is that they also tend to give the players less to rely on when they're feeling uncertain about themselves or about their characters. Might be hard for beginners who are unsure how this whole role-playing thing works.
Lady Blackbird makes it really easy to just start playing because it's got pre-made characters you can pick and play quickly, and a starting scenario that gives obvious hooks for "what's next?"
Roll For Shoes is easy to start because your characters are blank slates and you learn about them as you play.
Both require the GM to help the players find a stopping point, though; there's none built in.
Masters of Umdaar requires some simple character generation (or you could pre-gen characters for them beforehand), and its rules are a bit more complex but still reasonable to explain on the fly as needed. It comes with a pre-made adventure that's awesome and easy for a lot of people to engage with, and it has a clear end point.
Masters of Umdaar is probably also pretty close to the "kind of adventure you'd expect" without just being a D&D clone.
I'm sure other folks here have other experiences; I've never run a con game, so other perspectives may be more useful.
It doesn't have rolls in it. Instead you succeed at a task if you are able to succeed and if you can't succeed at it you use consumables called miracle points in order to succeed.
You regain your points when a handicap you chose hinders you. For example if you are unable to lie and a lie would be useful you get a miracle point
Naturally it is more complex than that but that is the gist of it.
It's a pretty unique system which is one of the reasons i'm nervous. I am used to playing/DM'ing D&D and WOD so i feel like i might cause my players to be unable to progress or progress too quickly due to being used to rolling dice.
I am making a variant human barbarian and I'm wondering If I should get Tough as my 1st or 4th level feat? Which gives more Hp overall?
