OK here, a bit annoyed that I had to take a miss on running my normally scheduled session this week, but I was simply scattered like hashbrowns from sysadmin@home issues
Yeah if something like that happens then something has probably gone horribly wrong and the pc was probably dead anyways. I’d make sure to have sufficient chances to escape the situation before outright killing the character
Isn't that how D&D does it anyway? When a huge-sized giant swings a giant steel hammer at a little halfling, the damage will say XdY+Z, not "instant death"
Right, and I'm saying that even though it seems inordinately large in the narrative, most systems model this using numbers that are appropriately scaled
It’s a space opera type game set within A galaxy ruled by a corporate elite, I’ve started my players on the edge of the frontier so they’re in pretty lawless territory
The Sea Sorcerer's Curse of the Sea features states:
[...] Once per turn when you cast a spell, you can trigger the curse if that spell deals cold or lightning damage to the cursed target or forces it to move. Doing so subjects the target to the appropriate additional effect below, and then t...
@trogdor Technically SG1 uses Spycraft, not d20 Modern, but they're both d20 System drifts that think the biggest difference between D&D-style fantasy and urban pulp-realism is massive lists of extremely unbalanced stats for every kind of gun they can think of.
I had the song Nocturne about the beauty of Summer nights running in my head all Winter, and when Summer came, the Swedish Höstvisa ("Autumn Song") took over
Then Nocturne came back and now Höstvisa is back as Fall has come
Ok, finally cut off permanently from the DnD campaign (as opposed to just "skip today")
One of the players was like "are you okay?" which suggests a bit of "who in their right mind would not like this" although it makes more sense in context I guess.
Whatever it is you're talking about. I've never played any of them, don't pay any attention to them, don't plan to. My reference above is derived purely from accidental cultural osmosis.
@BESW A friend pressured me to play one of them and I didn't like it much. I guess it's one of those things where you need to be in the right, impressionable age when it came out :P
Ah yes, because it's impossible that somebody might just not personally enjoy a popular franchise; there must be something wrong about how they experienced it or they'd love it too.
Sure. But that's still like saying "Oh, you'd love Star Wars if you'd seen them in the right order," but with an added dose of "and I will say that with a reference you'd only get if you already loved Star Wars."
I maintained my "haven't seen Star Wars" status until my Great Semester of Slacking (2014-2015) when I saw all of them. I have conflicting feelings about them.
Whether or not anyone in this chat likes Star Wars is immaterial. My point is that liking things is not mandatory, and people who don't like a popular thing aren't wrong, or were introduced to it badly, or are broken.
I chose Star Wars because it's a common one for people to act shocked and incredulous about, and immediately speculate about how the person must have seen the wrong one, or didn't get it and needs it explained.
Or, an example I saw a couple months ago, a friend mentioned that they "couldn't get into Dune" and got dogpiled with people who assumed that meant it was "too complicated" for them.
But no, they're quite capable of reading and understanding Dune, it's just really boring to them.
@kviiri I saw something recently which postulated that endless references to a very small subset of media material served as a shibboleth for "undercover" enthusiasts to identify each other clandestinely; it would make sense, from that origin, for them to metastasize into passcodes which are definitional of membership, rather than indicative.
@AndrasDeak As for DnD, I have a lot of personal experience of being the "dislikes DnD guy" of our TTRPG group, which is otherwise fine by me but I get a bit weirded out when that manifests as people acting incredulous when I express preferences for non-TTRPG activities over DnD
Weird, I'd never assume that someone likes DnD. But I'm very much not a gamer of any kind, and neither are most of my acquaintances, which probably matters a lot.
Yeah, I get people who assume that I don't play D&D for <insert only reason they've ever thought of to not play D&D>, and start telling me why that's a bad reason not to play without checking if that's my reason.
@AvnerShahar-Kashtan I will always treasure with fond flabbergastedness the time I told someone "Fate is a very different system from D&D" and she responded "You mean like Pathfinder!"
I've got a friend who felt very badly about Star Wars because the only opportunities she ever had to watch it were with people who stared at her intently the whole time, expecting her to be enthralled.
@AndrasDeak Ironically, I found that the crowd most likely to assume a person is a D&D fan . . . is a non-D&D crowd IME. In my case, it's reading explanations starting this 'well, you know D&D? Well, this system is un-D&D-like' in the FATE communities.
So I added it to our Saturday Night Double Feature viewing, pairing each Star Wars film with a complementary feature rather than marathoning the one franchise, and we'd already established that Double Feature nights were a place where it was totally okay to mock and deconstruct movies as well as applaud and celebrate them.
For the record, in order: Forbidden Planet + A New Hope + Hardware Wars Legend + The Empire Strikes Back Flash Gordon + Attack of the Clones Richard III (1995) + Revenge of the Sith Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country + Return of the Jedi Ryan vs Dorkman 2 + Yeelen
yeah, Fate's weird. I'm increasingly thinking of it as less of a system and more of a toolbox--though the more a particular game is based on an externally visible set of shared parameters (like a novel franchise) the more it can become systemlike.
It's most certainly a toolbox, but then again that seems like a standard leaning for generic systems. Not sure about the rest of the conclusion (maybe I just don't understand it).
But, for example, Fate is one of the most flexible, versatile systems around in terms of content--but it pushes really hard for a particular kind of pacing, and for valuing the influence of subjective qualities on objective outcomes.
"Setting" is pretty vague too--some people use it to mean specific lore, others specific genres, others particular playstyles commonly associated with a given lore or genre.
@kviiri Urrrgh. Hello, "generic" d20 System materials that somehow all wind up giving me a half-dozen subsystems just for these giant lists of poorly balanced firearms.
@kviiri This...is why I can't participate in Worldbuilding.
@BESW I haven't come up with a better English solution (I mean, I think it's vastly superior to the downright misleading "generic") but my elective lit classes in primary school show up and I use fancier terms in Finnish for that
They tend to focus on making a world that's internally consistent with regards to physical logic, but they aren't very interested in designing worlds to support the themes or concepts of the story, to push certain kinds of storytelling, or to posit universal truths.
not that I actually have any experience with it, but my impression was that it had a lot of bits you could attach/detach depending on what kind of game you were trying to run.
And it has specific genrebooks that add a few more things to better GM a specific genre, such as Mysteries (a book I think is flawed but helpful) or Horror.
Another bit about generic systems is that they shouldn't try to force the narrative into specific shapes, or else they become genre/narrative-specialised.
FATE is often accused of enforcing genre, but interestingly, Rob Hanz seems to state that experience indicates this isn't necessarily as strong an effect as assumed.
As in, I ran into discussions where people would say 'all FATE games look the same story/genre-wise'. But of the campaigns I played in, I do not personally have such an impression, and similarly Hanz seems to believe in more space for variation too.
@BESW Otherness in form or function seems to be a staple of scary stories. Probably because it's easy to express and leverage. What other mechanism would you like to see more of?
(As something of a belated tangent on goodguy5's comment, I too am still yet to play a good FATE game. So far all campaigns were hit-and-miss and ended too quickly, more with a whimper than a bang.)
As for the system enforcing pacing, as a GM, I'm finding the biggest intrusiveness due to the way Refresh works. See, the way I GM, I have a singificantly varying ratio of roleplaying to gamemechanical playing. Sometimes there's multiple sessions of nothing but roleplaying.
SW is one of my prime examples of games that have are commonly described as generic at least in our local RPG circles --- I'm always miffed when the largest national RPG forum's regulars recommend it for everything.
@vicky_molokh That means the pacing mechanics don't work for you, but it reinforces the fact they exist--or you wouldn't feel awkward about your game's pacing not matching the mechanics' "subtle' incentives" which are the way it enforces that pacing.
So far my solution is to tie Refresh moments less to meta time and more to pacing of the story, turning one of the major features of the system on its head.
@vicky_molokh ...yeah, you keep talking to us in this chat as if we're intimately familiar with of all these other conversations you've had elsewhere, or even as if we're the ones who said those things.
Does the caster know when a spell with a variable duration ends?
I'm looking for a RAW answer (answers based on Pathfinder or D&D 3.0 are ok if there is no info on this in D&D 3.5); I haven't found one here, nor in the rules.
For example, time stop has a duration of 1d4+1 rounds.
Does the cha...
@Gwideon You are relatively new around here, but I will say, shouting is something that happens very infrequently. I think here, it was important to get people to take notice.
PSA: Anyone can ask for a conversation to be moved to the Not A Bar (or other chat room) at any time and I or one of the RPG mods will re-locate it as swiftly as possible. This does not reflect poorly on the topic, the conversers, or the asker; sometimes there's just a need for stuff to not be in the main chat and we'll never ask for justification.
@Rubiksmoose Echoing this, I have honestly never seen BESW shout here before (although reading back it seems warranted) and I've been here for almost a year
Also for myself: people who know how to contact me in other channels like Discord can tell me they want something moved that way, if they don't feel like saying it here, and I'll make it happen without revealing their identity. I know we say it doesn't reflect poorly on anyone but that's not always going to make it feel so.
@Gwideon Honestly, thank you for letting us know about that though. I think it is very good to know, and I will definitely keep an eye out. Please never hesitate to point out when something is making you uncomfortable in here.
@BESW True. And anytime any user says something like "This is making me very _______ and I need to step away" that is a pretty clear indication the convo needs to stop and/or be moved off to a different location.
The important thing is that we [as in all of us here] should have stopped and (those with the ability to do so) moved the conversation much earlier in the process. When people are getting hurt and feeling uncomfortable, that conversation needs to cease in the public room. Ideally we [as in all of us here] should have handled the situation before it resulted in shouting being necessary.
@AndrasDeak That's actually really nice to hear. HNQ comes with positives and negatives and getting more wonderful people like yourself is definitely a positive!
@DavidCoffron I looked for where the "bwonk" came from for like 25 seconds. It wasn't immediately apparent which message it was, because it was out of window.
@NautArch It is generally nice to know what context a problem came up in. We just also have to be clear about question scope comes in :) After all, we almost certainly would have left a comment asking what problem they were trying to solve if they hadn't said that bit at the beginning right?
@Rubiksmoose Except that they keep referencing themselves and not the general question. I guess we'll wait and see what OP says, but we may need to clean up the question so that it is clearly general if that's their goal.
um i'm using the basic drift drive sort of thing to get between systems and using jump gates to travel larger distances. kinda what the ftl system in the sojourn is
um I've only had one session in this campaign. The players started on this colossal ship with a domed city on top of it. It was basically a mobile colony. They got a ship at the end of the first session so i've atleast got to flesh out the starting cluster
probably more in case they decide to head off to a different cluster instead of exploring the starting cluster
Oh i don't put in that much work. I don't do anything that won't apply to players. The conlang was actually a side project that i just happened to incorporate into the world
I have vague memories of a lot of videos about playing around with the parameters of a planet by Worldbuilding Irish Guy or creating libraries of flora/fauna by Worldbuilding Polish Woman
The Sea Sorcerer's Curse of the Sea features states:
[...] Once per turn when you cast a spell, you can trigger the curse if that spell deals cold or lightning damage to the cursed target or forces it to move. Doing so subjects the target to the appropriate additional effect below, and then t...
