alright here, although things are quite slow. kind of wishing my campaign ideas weren't so annoyingly hard to wrap my head around completely, for that matter...
Idea: Muscle Wizard subclass. Can substitue Intelligence for Strength in all spell related rolls, including Arcana checks. Can only takes spells from a dedicated "Musclewizard" spell list.
@Asteria yeah, if I can figure out what zoom level to deal with some of the issues one of the subplots raises at -- it's a balance between "having it all done for the party" and "throwing them in the deep end of legal-beagling, trying to make sense of a decree full o' gibberish"
@trogdor for me I put those all to the side in a list of things I could grab, and decided to see how little I could actually need. It was pretty refreshing!
@Asteria hahaha. part of the issue with throwing them in the deep end is that it could easily bore the party to death, having to deal with motion practice, process, and statutory interpretation vs. anything that came up in Ace Attorney or DanganRonpa
Having a low INT also means that things that are normally given to a Wizard, like Bonus spell damage with INT and more spell slots, aren't given to the Muscle Wizard, which means they have to pick carefully at a long rest.
@Miniman Yeah... also, the whole point of the game is "you're a wizard!" so there's not a lot of need to balance your wizardry against what non-wizards can do?
@Shalvenay When I have trouble balancing gibberish and hand-holding, I tend to bounce a "diet" version of someone that isn't playing in the group. I don't know if thats applicable to your situation or not
@Asteria part of me actually wants to listen to the oral arguments in the Cyan case, because that's the question SCOTUS is up against in that case at the moment....
@Asteria part of it is I'm not sure what to look for in a group as part of the tailoring process, if you will
@Asteria it's not territory that most folks cover in a story because it's almost arena-story-esque in a way most courtroom dramas aren't -- the party's basically in tgere with a pair of tweezers trying to pull out what might as well be a grain of sand blocking up a bunch of the workings
Playing #FateCore by @EvilHatOfficial on @roll20app?
Check out this album of assets you can use to make a great looking play area for your games: https://imgur.com/a/44MoW #roll20 #FAE
@Shalvenay I've been arguing most of my adult life that the courts should construe the unholy trifecta of tax code, appropriations bills, and debt ceiling as the gibberish that they add up to and then hold Congress in contempt of Congress.
I mean, I know I'm a simple sheep, but if you write a law that says how much money you get, and write a law that says how much you spend, and write a law that says how much debt you can have, and they all don't add up... you fail my math class =)
> Feygeld. You can succeed with style at any Resources roll, provided you place the consequence Imminent economic collapse on the community in which you make the roll.
Unicorn: "You lied through your knife-like teeth during that oath, A THOUSAND YEARS DUNGEON NO TRIAL!" Dragon: Fire breath
Atleast the Gynosphynx metro only offers riddles. The Androsphynx metro demands context appropriate battles. "TO GO TO WASHINGTON, YOU MUST SLAY 9 RATS!"
"You have FAILED to slay nine rats! Your punishment? TO THE NINE HELLS WITH YOU!"
Stunning LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) images of the hidden lava caves currently running under #Auckland http://www.noted.co.nz/currently/science/an-incredible-perspective-of-aucklands-underground-lava-caves/ via @vomlespringford @NotedNZ
> There are no red lights in a car chase. When rolling Drive, you get +1 for each traffic rule, law, or posted instruction your action blatently violates.
So, currently out of town (obviously with internet access so @Miniman @daze413 I should still be good for the game!) and all I have to keep me company after hours is building my diablo game
Not sure I'd go that far in a timeframe which also included things like Avril et le Monde Truqué, and Kubo and the Two Strings, but it's definitely a very fun film.
But in Numenera they have an enemy called "Maegr". Basically mutant Goatmen. And more importantly, Numenera had a "mob" rule that I really liked. Basically, it would create one single entity, one "challenge" higher than a single enemy. Less rolls, but harder to pass
@Miniman Maybe. I kinda wanna give them a "free" disengage... cos they were always so annoying in the original... they'd always run away after one hit haha
@Ben Oh wow I just realised, that rule is actually so perfect for Fallen. Because that way, you don't have to track them being resurrected, you just give the mob creature regenerating hp.
@Miniman It has some very amusing Frozen references. If you're at all familiar with it (from cultural osmosis) you'll get most of them, but there's some that my daughter had to explain because I hadn't seen it.
@Adeptus look,... I was on a plane flight and having a horrible time based on everything except the movie,... I was not in a position to catch that one XD
That being said, watching it did do a tremendous job of making me forget how much I hate plane flights, so big endorsement there
@trogdor Run Fatboy Run? Simon Pegg, deadbeat dad that decides to compete in a Marathon to try and impress his ex, but ends up changing his behaviour for the better
Well, yeah. I enjoy pretty much any movie with JC in it. His skill is always impressive, and as a fan of comedy, (most) of his movies always have a level of humour to them as well.
But in this situation, the suggestion was purely a suggestion for "another movie to watch" on the playlist you had (even though you didn't have the time - but anyway). BESW pointed out something that made me realise that on a Japanese airline, an actor from Hong King would not likely be on the same playlist as Godzilla
So, I think in this situation, everybody was right :P
@Miniman So I've planned out the 1st level, I just need to create a list of encounters for the dungeon (the two I used were pretty hap-hazard and half-planned). The second level is what I'm working on now.
I also want to build a "corruption" and a "fear" system. I have some preliminaries in place, and I was discussing how the corruption would affect the PCs with @Nyoze a little while back
So @Miniman, when are you available? I'll be available every afternoon from around 6pm to 10pm
I'm honestly not too knowledgeable on his film history - I was a 90's kid (born in 89) so the only delving I've done is Drunken master and Police Story
Police Story is Maggie Cheung; Drunken Master is Anita Mui.
But do delve! Twin Dragons (also Maggie Cheung) is great too: Jackie plays twins separated at birth; one of them becomes a street racer and martial artist while the other is a concert pianist.
The Armour of God series is super weird but totally worth it; it's basically Hong Kong kung fu does Indiana Jones.
I'm a big fan of Miracles (Anita Mui gets to sing!).
Really, I'm not sure I've ever seen a Hong Kong-era Jackie Chan film that wasn't worth watching. Even the most boring ones still have Jackie Chan in 'em.
And if you've got Mui or Cheung too, well. Any one of them can carry a movie in their back pocket.
His Hollywood stuff mostly doesn't have the same spark, sadly.
A thread on the Babylonian & Assyrian epic of creation, the Enuma Elish: How the world began, how ancient people imagined their gods, & how stories were used to build national identities.
Meanwhile, our players are discussing how the clockmakers of the land all take a level in abjuration magic, so as to ward off the distorting effects of haste and of flying really high.
Some scholars (incl. Robert Graves) argue that the epic represents the ascendancy of newer masculine gods over the primeval feminine fertility gods worshipped in earlier times.
The epic depicts the establishment of patriarchal society, figured as order triumphing over chaos.
I mean, heck you don't even need em to be male gods overthrowing female ones to imagine that exercise happening (though it adds a whole other layer for sure)
@MikeQ I've got a decent amount of experience running Mythos-style campaigns, but almost never in the Mythos setting itself and never with either of those systems.
Exploring the themes of cosmic fear using the styles and practices pioneered by Lovecraft, but without the specific trappings of elder gods, shoggoths, fungi from Yuggoth, and so forth--or the many prejudices he labored under.
For example, a lot of my Cthulhu Dark plots are just "Take a classic earth-bound Doctor Who story and put ordinary humans in place of the Doctor so they don't know what's going on and don't have the proper tools to deal with it."
I draw on the advice of Nightmares of Mine and Lovecraftesque a lot.
Yeah that's probably the best way to deal with it. Even if you're running a story that fits the "canonical" mythos, you don't want the players to apply any sort of meta-knowledge.
@MikeQ It defeats the whole point, anyway--like everyone quoting along with a Monty Python skit when the humor lies in its surprise, the Mythos has become too familiar to evoke real Dread (in the Nightmares sense).
Yeah, Cthulhu Dark really helped to teach me that dread isn't about knowing impossible things; it's about your imagination filling in the dark spaces where you know you don't know something.
My best horror games have finished with the players still having big unanswered questions about what was really going on, even if they came out of it with a definitive success.
it was essentially about a guy who got shipwrecked, he was alone out at sea and afraid he would die of starvation or thirst, and out pops a thing worshipping Dagon, very breifely I might add, and that was it
@trogdor As a fan of the guy's writings, I'll admit - It sometimes makes sense to compare HPL to a timid puppy who growls at various household objects, because he doesnt know what it is, and even if there's nothing scary about it, he thinks it could be threatening
and yeah, the idea of that Mythos stuff is existentially scary on some level,.. but you need more than just the concept to hold people's attention and keep them scared
@MikeQ If you're interested in designing horror campaigns, I can't recommend Nightmares of Mine highly enough.
It's not just a Mythos guide, it breaks down the whole multifaceted horror milieu and analyzes how its various parts work in RPGs vs in film or novels or whatever, and how to fit them back together to create different kinds of horror.
@BESW So I've been throwing ideas around not for a horror campaign, but for a romanticized wild west action campaign that has weird eldritch horror elements to it.
It'd be a great boon in figuring out exactly what and how much you want in your game.
Most Call of Cthulhu editions have some good pages of advice too.
Lovecraftesque is more focused on using structure and theme to recreate Lovecraft's original story formula (but with a lot less bigotry and hopefully less boring).
I'd be very careful about anything that starts out with "romanticized wild west" in its bones, though, because that can very quickly get more ethically dicey than anyone intended.
Dogs in the Vineyard turned First Tribes into noble savages, for example.
The whole "Which monster will be fighting against today? Let's spin the WHEEL OF MYTHOS to find out!" model is too overused when people construct eldritch horror campaigns
Yeah, Lovecraftesque is explicitly NOT set in the Mythos, and part of the play experience is that nobody, not even the GM, knows what the eerie element is until it's played out.
(There's only one player character, and everybody takes turns running the PC, being the GM, and playing NPCs and adding tone details--rotating roles each scene.)
Well, see, my idea was to have the upbeat and heroic wild west "attitude" be prominent for the most part. Then when the weird eldritch horror comes up, it should seem especially out-of-place. Because that's the point.
Horror is more surprising and disorienting when you don't have the obvious foreshadowing everywhere.
So how are you going to deal with the fact that, to modern sensibilities, the very foundation of the wild West concept--violent expansion into territory occupied by demonized and dehumanized indigenous peoples--is rather horrific?
Well, yeah, as you said, that's toeing a strange line. Which is why I had originally considered using 40k, and framing it as a mining settlement on an alien desert world. But I don't know if that's better or worse.
Personally, when I think about telling a wild west story, I'm usually more focused on the microcosm of a single town, like in a western movie.
I shy away from the genre as a whole, because I've yet to see any way to responsibly return to the pretty lie that its original novel-and-film progenitors peddled and I'm not really interested in recreating the responses that come out of confronting the lie.
Ah. I see. Well, I think that if I was writing a story and was struggling with "How do I make this not racially insensitive" then perhaps I'm dealing with the wrong story.
Kinda like the romantic speakeasy Prohibition stories that ignore all the mob hits, people who died from bad alcohol, and sexual abuse which came with sending an entire consumable industry underground to be unregulated and run by gangsters.
Yes. I was hoping to stick to the easier-to-digest tropes: horsebacked gunslingers, saloon brawls, unregulated alcohol, quick draw duels in the street, buried treasure, some sort of action sequence on a moving locomotive.
It's like... yeah, I can see how it'd be nice to have such a light and fluffy romantic story, but I don't want to contribute to erasing the real victims, and I don't know how to balance it.
It's like--you may never have seen a film that claims to be historically accurate, but you probably think newspapers from the 1850s to the 1930s had big, bold headlines on the first page. They didn't, they were covered with tiny-text advertisements. Prop departments make newspapers with big headlines because that tells the story better, and audiences accept it uncritically.
It's a matter of making choices, and making those choices deliberately. And don't call me Shirley.
I did not actually think that, but solely because I've seen historical newspapers.
But I see what you mean. So if there's really no way to ignore the historical truth, what if I tried to recreate the Hollywood version of wild west by placing it on an uninhabited desert planet?
I ask because if you have an objection, then it's very likely that other people would have similar objections, putting me in a position where I've inadvertently pushed or reinforced some idea that's insensitive or otherwise harmful
It needs to work for your group. I can't say if something will or won't.
I'm guessing that my group would be more comfortable with explicitly saying "We're going to ignore all that nasty stuff and play in a sanitized film version of the Wild West" than trying to figure out how to transplant the Wild West to another setting in order to preserve an innocence it never had to begin with.
We do best when we're straightforward about what we're doing and why.
...but, well. The last time I played a Wild West style game with anybody, we wound up with a town that had a Chinese blacksmith, and a synagogue instead of a church.
I don't think my group would be able to stick to the film version of the Wild West even if we wanted to.
@BESW I'm kicking myself a bit (gently!!) that I forgot about this entirely and didn't mention to the author how well some Doctor Who stories, sans Doctor, can work for Cthulhu Dark :)
(The rabbi went on a spiritual journey across the Sephirot to gain divine power he could wield against the vampire who was living in the town's silver mine.)
@doppelgreener Aw. Maybe you'll see him again! ...or you could contact him on social media.
@doppelgreener For reference, I've had most success with "The Abominable Snowmen" and "Horror of Fang Rock."
@MikeQ You can ignore the historical truth, to whatever extent your group is comfortable with. But make it a conscious, deliberate choice or it'll get away from you fast.
well, yeah most people who have a terrible idea and then implement it
maybe not most people who have terrible ideas
because I have plenty that I catch first that never get done
and of course some that happen anyway because I didn't
I can only imagine that is similar for many people
I don't exactly agree with the way we illegalize certain substances now either, but I don't know exactly how to fix the way our drug laws and enforcement work
even the hard drugs that I do think should be illegal,.... maybe we could be doing something a little better to help people who get stuck addicted to them?
@trogdor a lot of countries have found that legalizing LSD and marijuana works pretty well, since they're pretty much harmless and in no way a gateway drug.
@doppelgreener yes, some drugs I don't agree with being illegal, I have no personal idea about LSD though I have been told it is relatively harmless at least compared to a lot of worse drugs
but I know for a fact that Marijuana does not mess people up to nearly the degree a lot of people seem to think it does
@BESW yeah don't just legalize something without putting regulatory laws in place, I did not mean that at all XD
@doppelgreener also, I did always wonder how someone could make the logical leap that a less harmful drug could lead to a more harmful one, but not make literally every drug ever illegal
and not literally every drug ever is illegal, just certain ones that people don't like because of some kind of stigma
@BESW I just wonder man, like I know there is no way of arguing them down on it
it's just a reaaaaaaaaly weird thought process that still effects our country today
and I know it also won't change anything, but as someone who stays away from alchohol for many reasons (cheif among them the problems some people have when they get addicted to it and such like that) I am perplexed how it can be considered as ok as it is while some less destructive drugs, most namely Marijuana, can be,...... seen as some horrible demon weed
I understand that part of that stems simply from me not being part of the Alchohol Culture though
I am outside that bubble so I just don't get it
(and I understand there are plenty of people who consume Alchohol and don't have huge life altering problems from it, I just mean the literally cultural way many people consume it, and often don't even notice how it has become a "cultural" thing on some level during social activities of some kinds)
my family is still to some extent confused that I continue to not consume any real amounts of the stuff
they accept it, but they still offer it to me on occasion like I am going to just turn around on that because,.... why wouldn't I or something? I don't even know
I have tried some on occasion just to see what different drinks taste like, but I don't ever turn out to like it (and even if I did, my curiosity would be done on that occasion anyway)
@trogdor I've heard rumors that the whole war on drugs was motivated by a desire to suppress activists in the 60s and onwards -- it was often groups like hippies, and since they commonly used recreational drugs like these, making those drugs illegal meant law enforcement could target them. Naturally propaganda had to follow to excuse the drugs being outlawed.
> Washington (CNN) -- One of Richard Nixon's top advisers and a key figure in the Watergate scandal said the war on drugs was created as a political tool to fight blacks and hippies, according to a 22-year-old interview recently published in Harper's Magazine.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.
(This kind of tactic could be a useful plot tool in an RPG story.)
