I'm more into the concept of rolling to see what body section was hit, and then rolling to determine the injury

@SimonH. They do that in Dark Heresy / Rogue Trader. Sometimes it makes combat more interesting, sometimes it makes combat tedious.

@MikeQ Really? I might have to look into that.

Is rogue trader star wars or something?

If you're playing with D&D, the system doesn't really handle the granularity of body part damage. Which means you'll have to homebrew. Which means you might do something unbalanced.

@SimonH. (Warhammer) 40k, and all of its derivatives

I know owlbears like to dismember people and take their arms, but there's no general system for "I want to make a headshot".

@Yuuki Which is why it would be better to find a whole system that handles it in one complete package

@MikeQ Oh, I see. I guess Warhammer just does that. Cool...

Location based damage in the Fantasy Flight 40k games gets messy, fast.

It works well for creating stories with grotesque and horror elements. For example, a desperate shootout where your leg is crippled and arm has been chewed to pieces, and are fending off eldritch abominations from the 9th dimension.

It would work better for smaller, messier melees

The critical hits are a d10 table. For head, a mere 9 is your head exploding. A 10 is your head exploding with such intensity it demoralizes any allies who see it.

I could see where it could weigh down a large-scale war scenario

I think one of the other ones calls for bone shards flying out of you into a nearby target.

@MikeQ 7th-dimensional entities are much more frightening than 9th-dimensional entities.

Torso left a blood pool of such intensity it's now difficult terrain around your corpse.

@Maximillian A 10 is your head exploding with such intensity that your arm also explodes, out of fear

@Yuuki I'm not gonna say it.

@Maximillian That's really... over-the-top

@SimonH. You could adapt it. Instead of rolling for left or right arm, you roll for east or west battalion, etc.

I'm sad they didn't get to make a Space Orks game before GW pulled out of the licencing deal.

"Biggest, loudest player goes first." "If everyone thinks it's a good idea, it inexplicably works."

@MikeQ I'm gonna write that one down, that's pretty good

I'm imagining walls exploding in a chain reaction

roll for each one, roll a 10

Rogue Trader has an adventure arc that involves an Ork boss. He ruled that there are no more shootas on the bridge. Because the crew had a habit of shooting things on the monitor.

@MikeQ This smells of Rolemaster, game of a million billion tables.

For reference, in the game I'm in, at least half of the table requires some amount of alcohol to tolerate the shenanigans

One time, someone's character ran and tripped, and by a chain of reactions, various parts of their body had either exploded, detached, or transformed into new environmental hazards, which in turn caused other characters to trip

I can't recall which system it was, but you could die in chargen rolling random background traits.. Traveller, I think?

@MikeQ Orks?

@SimonH. It's actually a crowdmade module about mechas, loosely based on Neon Genesis Evangelion

@MikeQ So if you wanted to take out an army, just get a bunch of banana peels

@SimonH. Not really. It only happened once. But after a few minutes of consulting dice and tables, we were like, "Are all of these things happening at once?" because the whole chain of events was still on one player's turn

@MikeQ oH god that's hilarious

Also, the whole "AUGH I LOST AN ARM IT HURTS BUT I STILL HAVE TO KILL THESE SPACE BUGS!!!" concept synergizes well with the system's existing Insanity mechanic

what's it called?

@SimonH. The crowdmade game is called Adeptus Evangelion, and it's built on top of Dark Heresy

@nitsua60 Which one? I heard that there were three of them.

@MikeQ Thanks, I've gotta try that at my table sometime

It's manageable at low levels, but becomes ridiculous if the campaign extends to late levels. Our campaign has been going on for 4 years IRL, and we've caused several apocalypses and regularly summon various gods. Half of the party is virtually unkillable, and the other half is literally unkillable.

@MikeQ More than D&D does? Lvl 20 is insane.

@SimonH. It's kind of like starting DND at mid-levels, like 5-10, then continues into 20+

@SimonH. Mordenkainen was IIRC a 22d level wizard of OD&D/AD&D 1e vintage. (He got his start in Rob Kuntz' dungeons according to Rob Kuntz).

I like that Melf was Gygax's kid

@Maximillian Traveller is correct, though only the old edition.

@SimonH. Savage Worlds does, but only for major injuries, and I don't think it really serves anything but realism.

My distant memory recalls Runequest doing hit location and injury location associated with that, but it's been a lot of years.

Anyway @SimonH. DND tries to simplify stuff, in a good way, and I think a single HP pool is sufficient. If a monster attacks, beats your AC, and does some damage, it means that the monster was able to injure you in some location, and you're free to use the narrative to fill in the details.

Has anyone tried Dungeon Crate?

Also, AFAIK, DND doesn't really have anything that deals with injuries or statuses of specific body parts

There are a few specific things scattered across editions

What MikeQ says - the HP in DnD has remained simple by design.

But it's more "if you have this ability, you can stab someone in the arm" and without that ability, you can't even stab them in the arm

@goodguy5 What's that??

DND/PF are adventure emulations, not simulations. Some parts of physics and logic have been shaved off because they weren't deemed terribly relevant for play.

I wouldn't want a true simulator. I don't need sheets for my bodily nervous system, circulatory system, and other functions.

Don't really need physics. I've heard horror stories of over-complicated systems.

Save vs. The Common Cold!

@SimonH. dungeoncrate.com/about

@goodguy5 That sounds pretty rad. (Sorry for the late reply)

ugh more loot crates

Loot crates are fun

Like how claw machine toys are cheaper at stores, but it's better as a surprise

Yes, I would gladly pay real money for the excitement of not receiving anything

@MikeQ Then go by the 25 Masters box for Magic the Gathering

Oh snap

Ah yes, MtG, the game where you can read several hundreds of pages of rules, and still not understand the combo that made you lose before you started your first turn

There's an intro rules booklet. ... that they don't distribute with anything nowadays for some reason.

Because the rulebook is incredibly long now.

You almost have to be a programmer to fully understand the syntax of how 'The Stack' works

There was a guy in middle school who insisted that you could mulligan at any point in the game, because the rules didn't say you could not

They do

They used to not

They say you do things when the rules or a card allow you to, and they don't allow you to mulligan in the middle of a game

Right, but his argument was "the rules don't say I can't"

Not "the rules say I can"

His argument is dumb and his face is dumb and his deck is dumb

I just barely passed my first judge cert practice test. It is indeed a mess

There's a great card in the next UN set that makes the owner exempt from state based effects.

His deck was an Affinity/Memnarch deck full of rares that his parents bought him

With, for some reason, a bunch of Circle of Protection cards, and Phasing cards that he didn't understand

I got out of MTG right around the time they changed the face templates on the cards.

That deck is so annoying though. (In modern)

I'm just glad he didn't try to play Banding

Nobody understands Banding

Bands with other players who understand Banding

I understand banding. :)

@DavidCoffron You are a lying liar who lies

Most of the time...

Meanwhile I'm here with a semi encyclopedic knowledge of the rules 8l

We had a "put in a quarter, get a random old card" machine at the store

Er, mall

I was amused they took out manaburn and damage no longer goes to the stack.

You could get ice-covered lands from the original Ice Age, and Killer Bees

The manaburn thing confused me. Was it really a problem?

It was more expensive than buying commons at the card shop for 10 cents, but more exciting

We had the dollar grab bin. Junk cards from collection purchases went in it. You get to take one hand, put it in the box, traverse your hand to the other side of the box, lift your hand, turn your hand over. Any cards left in grip are yours.

@Maximillian Are you allowed to use your thumb?

@Maximillian I got out when I realized that each new block introduced a new game mechanic that effectively made all older cards obsolete, and I'd have to shovel up lots of cash in order to build a deck that was at least playable

Well yes.

Because if yes, that seems really easy

I could probably get everything in one go

You could scoop up quite a handful with good technique.

I also got tired of fellow college kids complaining how they had no money for food, clothes, or a decent apartment, but would consistently save up for MtG drafts

We also had glorious TRASH DRAFT. We made our own 15 card packs from junk cards. $3, for 3 rubber banded packs.

Isn't an MtG draft $15 for basically an entire Friday night of fun

Sure beats going out drinking

When everyone plays with awful cards, it's actually fun.

@DavidCoffron The problem was it was never relevant and nobody knew about it ... until that one time you played against someone who used it and got a rude shock learning about it. It just wasn't worth keeping in the game.

My friend had an awful cards deck, starring things like Tarpan

Grollub.

I had a random Red Deck Wins type deck with things like Form of the Dragon and Insurrection thrown in for funsies

It would do really well at school, so I never used it

I also had an affinity deck that won with Broodstar, that was fun

@SPavel I loved my blue and black affinity decks

I bought two MtG starter decks but I didn’t know anyone who played so I mostly just stared at the pretty pictures.

I didn't have the money to consistently buy competitive cards, and didn't have enough time to research all the new rules and nuances. So I would always lose and never understand why. Every game was like a very, very short episode of Yu-Gi-Oh, where I blink and then they cite possibly-made-up-rules to prove why they won.

Although red and black with disciples of the vault + atog won so easily

I liked trick pony decks. Parallel thoughts - make a minideck of 7 cards I may replace draw with. Shared Fate - when you would draw, instead remove a card from your foes deck from the game, you may play these as if they were in your hand. Your foe does similar. Leveller - remove your deck from the game, is 10/10. Because I use draw replacement, I don't die. My opponent is forced to use Shared Fate to draw from my nothing. This doesn't kill them as it's draw replacement.

Leveller finishes them off fast though

@MikeQ WHAT DOES POT OF GREED DO?

@GreySage I had that too

@MikeQ Yugioh is even worse than Vintage now. XYZ monsters are just dumb

And in the land of silly cards. Donate an Ashnods Coupon to your foe, then make use of Mindslaver to force them to use it to buy a soda you have sitting at the table for all the money they have on their person.

I also stumbled into the Myr Retriever + Krark-clan ironworks combo by myself, and had a combo deck based on it and random crap like Disciple of the Vault or Hair-Strung Koto or that one circlet that gives green mana when creatures come into play + fireball

I won only once with it but it was great

I also had fairly lousy ninja decks that were fun mostly because I got to say "I attack with four Ornithopter"

I have a friend who enjoys finding holes in MTGs game state. He has a deck that effectively blue-screens the game because he generates infinite, looping actions that are required.

I still think Mirrodin block was the funnest for me

Isochron Scepter.

That card was so much angry for Mirrodin block

@Maximillian All day, every day

My favorite thing is still the MtG Turing Machine.

I also got giggles from the Head of Urza in the new UN set.

I got addicted to Pokemon in High School

To figure out what his planeswalker powers are, you go to a website. They're randomized.

Still have some really cool cards in my garage

I gave mine away

@Yuuki What about the neural net that makes cards?

Still never did the Isochron scepter, Shahrazad deck

I unfortunately developed unhealthy OCD habits around MTG and got rid of my entire collection. I'm 11 years clean.

@Maximillian No way, really?

I gave away my Pokemon and Yugioh cards previously

Hundreds of dollars

I have a box of hockey cards somewhere

Maybe they are worth something

You should've ebay'd em

Ah, here it is. AskUrza.com

I would say "now I am a responsible adult that invests in a 401k" but the stock market just nosedived

@Maximillian I still have all my Mirrodin/Kamigawa cards in a box. I hate letting things go, but I know I'll never have time to play MtG in any consistent way

So the degree of responsibility is questionable

Did you have that one ultrarare charizard card?

Which one

That one that's like worth thousands

That'd be hilarious

@GreySage Most of my old collection was Mirrodin+Kamigawa+older. I tried rejoining the game in the mid 201Xs and realized that they're all obsolete. Something about "power drift", where the average card in each new block becomes progressively stronger.

Original foil Charizard.

"I'm a responsible adult who hands over thousands of dollars worth of cards because I'm OCD"

I worked at my shop for seven years. I liked my Pokemon TCG kids. Super well behaved.

crap, meeting time

@Maximillian They hire PEOPLE?!

No, I don't think I had any particularly rare cards, nor were they near mint condition

It had the Energy Burn Pokepower, 120 HP, and Fire Blast for 100 damage, IIRC.

I had a super scratched up 1st Ed Mewtwo

@SPavel Still worth something, though, right?

Fire Blast required 4 Fire energy and you’d have to discard one Energy to use the move.

@MikeQ I find that usually refered to as "Power Creep", its a way to make people want to keep buying new things when the older ones are still available

@SimonH. Non-mint cards are basically worthless

Worked really well with Venusaur’s Energy Trans Pokepower.

It's pretty common in all card games

@SPavel Awww, man... Maybe I should sell mine now.

MtG is actually fairly decent about power creep, given the huge stinkers they had in the early editions

You could bring an Affinity deck and drub most of the newer stuff

Or Slivers

@SPavel ...until they bring in their 13/13 that makes you instantly lose if it hits you on turn 3

Pokemon league rules state that cards older than a year are non-permissible in official play

@GreySage By the time you get turn 3, I already played 4 Time Stops :P

So they don't even deal with power creep, they just make cards obsolete on purpose

Official play is boring

Only formats where Unglued/Unhinged are allowed are good formats

They need to make people want to buy new cards somehow. Planned obsolescence is one strategy.

Otherwise I can't use my killer opening move, "play 1 island with 4 Cheatyface stacked underneath it"

Only formats that allow printed cards are good

@SPavel No match for my “Velcro card with swappable fronts”.

@Yuuki The standard cheat was extra cards in the back of the card sleeve

Then you slip out the ones on top when the opponent wasn't looking

No match for cards with different colored sleeves so you can put your best cards on top

Well that's obvious

@SimonH. Different medium, but I prefer Pokémon Showdown to in-game battles.

No match for my scented cards that I can discern which card it is by smell

It's more technical play, tbh

And it's good practice for real play

@goodguy5 I just bring a deck of Cards Against Humanity blanks to every tournament.

@Yuuki I don't know what weapons World War 3 will be fought with, but World War Four will be fought with Blue-eyes White Dragon

@SimonH. Eh, I feel like there’s enough effort in theorycrafting that card acquisition is just an extra burden.

@Yuuki that's true.

You try breeding a team of 5IVs without tearing your hair out.

lol that's the best part!

Go bald early, or your money back.

back during like... edition 3/4, I had a plan to get three, three head white dragons on the field

Especially if you need Egg Moves.

And you want Attract on a 87.5/12.5-gendersplit Pokemon.

I spent weeks trying to get a shiny

breeding

@goodguy5 didn't that happen in the show

I think I almost broke my 3DS trying to get a female Eevee.

I've memorized the bike theme

@goodguy5 I may be remembering the time that the bad dude (Kaiba's dad?) had a triple Blue Eyes and the gang had three of their own mega dragons

@SPavel oh yea. there was the blue eyes mega dragon, red eyes... and....

welp, just need to rewatch the show

@SPavel inb4 "you're a third-rate duelist with a fourth-rate deck"

Watch YGOtAS insteaad

@Yuuki Ironically, a "Third Rate" is a powerful warship

The third largest kind of ship of the line

And first-rates and second-rates ultimately proved too clumsy and expensive

A fourth-rate was still a ship of the line

Were there ships of the plane? Or was all naval combat two-dimensional?

Wait no, plane's still a two-dimensional object, right?

@Yuuki The "line of battle"

Naval doctrine had your best biggest ships in a straight line so they couldn't be flanked from the front or the back, where they didn't have guns

@SPavel You have to think ahead. What if the aliens arrive with the hypercube of battle?

Smaller ships such as frigates were used outside of the line of battle

@SPavel Shouldn't big ships have enough room for chase guns?

You can't really add extra dimensions to a line of battle, even in space, because space combat is lame and boring

The strategy was to broadside until you win, they had a few crappy guns facing forward/back but that was mostly because of cannon industry lobbying

Or to shoot smaller ships, but typically a gentleman did not fire on a frigate unless fired upon, and a frigate attacking a ship of the line was suicide

Space combat is usually justified more by rule of cool than any particular real life tactical or technological concerns.

The Hypermurdercube

@kviiri Minovsky particles!

Fictional space combat is awesome. FTL is awesome. Don't even try to convince me otherwise.

Paradox's Stellaris had a rather big issue with doomstacks until a recent patch, which somewhat alleviated the problem

@kviiri Were those laggy at all?

@SimonH. Not particularly laggy, just boring to play with and against.

@SimonH. Indeed. Realistic space combat would be "My computer locks on to their ship, their ship is now destroyed, back to coffee"

Other games by Paradox have a "combat width" style mechanic, with each unit having a limited range of targeting. Having an advantage in numbers is beneficial to a certain point, after which you'll have guys idling in the flanks knowing the enemy will be destroyed by the point they'd get to fall in.

I used to play Twilight Imperium with a group of friends, and they never followed the rules when building ships

They'd build as many as they had resources for, and an entire fleet would just pop into existence in the middle of nowhere

Stellaris, on the other hand, doesn't - there's no limit (or virtually no limit) to the amount of units engaged in a single combat. This means the one with numerical advantage is twicely advantaged: they kill enemies fast, and because of how fast enemies die, they also suffer increasingly minor casualties as the advantage grows.

like 15+ of those cannonfodder ships per fleet

@kviiri That's obnoxious. Fleets should need resources like food or water from nearby planets, a fleet that large would be detrimental to its surroundings

Furthermore, there's a cap on the number of Leaders (Governors for production bonuses, Scientists for science, Admirals for fleets and Generals for armies) an empire can have. Doomstacks used to be an effective way to save slots for scientists because you'd only need one admiral.

In the recent 2.0 patch Stellaris introduced a couple of those Obvious Rule Patch mechanics that made doomstacks not as dominant as a strategy. The underdog has a (capped) bonus to fire rate to make casualties more even in moderately lopsided engagements, admirals can only lead so many ships at a time.

Sublight speed (=the speed ships use to travel inside a stellar system, as opposed to FTL) was made more prominent, encouraging splitting smaller, faster ships from large battleships for cruising missions.

@GreySage No, realistic space combat is: Enemy ship detected on trajectory X, missiles have been launched, time to impact: 13 months

@SPavel That's efficient. There's 13 months to negotiate a peace treaty and disarm the missiles en route.

Assuming future space combat hasn't developed relativistic weapons.

@kviiri A message to the next star system takes years, good luck

@Yuuki Then it's days

@SPavel Well it ought to be faster than the missile wouldn't it?

Light speed from the sun to Pluto is 5.5 hours

@SPavel So... attach rockets to the Earth to speed up revolution?

@kviiri No, because your enemy's peace-making authority is behind the front lines, typically. unless they are playing some 4-D chess

@Yuuki Distribute arms to the proletariat to speed up revolution!

Wait until the enemy's decadent political system collapses onto itself

@SPavel No need for a front line in space though, you could just target the capital straight away.

@kviiri Yeah but you don't ram your own capital into the enemy's

@SPavel So wait for someone to claim that their leader is playing 4D chess?

@SPavel Can't lose your capital if you don't have one. taps head

If we have this setup: O2 < O1

Then the speed of communication (regardless of payload) between O2 and O1's ships will be greater than between O2 and O1

@Yuuki The Culture agrees

I like the Singularity Sky/Iron Sunrise mechanics of space combat

Missiles with an onboard guidance system are a different case though. You don't need two-way communication to send a disarm signal.

@kviiri You have no way to make peace with the aggressor before either the enemy's ships reach you, or your missiles reach them

@SPavel I'm talking about missiles vs missiles, not really seeing the utility of ships if you can have weapons of mass destruction

What do you mean? 99.9% of the cost is going to be fuel anyway, might as well have an intelligent, versatile actor

Then you can at least do "send this drone your bitcoin password or it eats your sun"

But intelligent agents are a bit problematic at times

They have a tendency to do things in self-defense that lead to all kinds of wacky situations.

If you didn't want wacky situations, you should not have declared relativistic war

Now that we're on the topic of remotely activated weapons, I recently noticed that Youtube doesn't have a 10h version of Säkkijärven polkka. How are the millenials supposed to jam Soviet radio mines now?

@KorvinStarmast el numero uno

@SPavel strawberry?

@nitsua60 Only one man would dare give me the raspberry.

I actually offered to buy a friend's 4ePHB and other books too

The transaction is currently on hold because I'm waiting for him to tell me what books he has for sale

@Derpy Wow, yes, you did. I did not get that at all from your question.

...Probably because you added that example two days later, along with a bunch of ridiculous hypothetical examples.

FWIW, I wrote the post you referenced with specific regard to link-only answers, which were triggering big nasty arguments on a regular basis on multiple sites... And provided multiple, real-world examples of the same by way of introduction.

If you want to get some consensus on X-Y answers, or frame-challenges or whatever, I'd strongly advise doing the same: use real examples from real sites, stuff where you can at least try to persuade your readers of the harm and work toward a shared understanding.

Don't try to establish abstract guidelines. They're mostly harmful, and tend to emerge anyway even when you're trying to be specific.

This is a good essay on what you should be aiming for

@Shog9 When it comes to guidelines people will bend or break them when they feel like anyway because well, my situation is unique so this doesn't apply so there is 0 harm in making them specific and strict.

> Ancient laws [...] were paradigmatic, giving models of behaviors and models of prohibitions/punishments relative to those behaviors, but they made no attempt to be exhaustive. Ancient laws gave guiding principles, or samples, rather than complete descriptions of all things regulated.

(emphasis mine)

working from samples gives you two very useful things:

Compare the guidelines "speed limit is 50" and "don't go too fast" - if someone is going 75, is that too fast? Only clear in one case.

But people will go 55 if it seems right, and cops don't stop them

1. A concrete demonstration of harm or value for others to agree or disagree with

2. A model for others to follow in cases where rules are applied too far afield from the original samples

@Shog9 Are you telling me that StackOverflow doesn't have a Supreme Court to adjudicate this kind of issue?

@SPavel nope. Just a bunch of people.

@Shog9 I mean, the SCOTUS are people too

Except Ruth Ginzburg, who is a wonderful unicorn

(aside: I have no idea why this discussion is/was happening in this room, but since it appears to have gone on for a while I figured I'd chime in too)

This is the best chat room

All the good stuff is here

@SPavel So... That's kind of an interesting side discussion: what power does the SCOTUS actually have?

@Shog9 I think Scalia had laser vision, but it didn't come in to play much

heh...

@Shog9 They are the main interpreters of the Constitution and make judgments that serve as precedents especially in cases related to it

I mean, when you look at how the federal courts in the US are structured, their power mostly comes down to influence. Other branches of government have agreed to abide by their decisions... to some extent and within certain scopes at any rate.

But... They don't get to make laws. They don't get to enforce laws. Their responsibility and power arise from the trust in their decisions when there's a dispute.

They might as well make laws, in some cases, or so I've come to understand. They definitely do break them. (as in, tear down, not disobey)

Sure... It's true that the legislative branch may be somewhat reluctant to pass laws they strongly suspect will lead to disputes that won't go their way... And the executive branch may be reluctant to take action for the same reason...

...but, this is mostly just good sense.

If the army decides to march on DC, it ain't gonna be SCOTUS taking up arms to block their way.

An awful lot of power is... Influence.

Well that's what holds the army together too.