TRPG General Chat

Ben

12:06 AM

Morning all

doppelgreener

12:17 AM

o/

Ben

Hows life?

doppelgreener

pretty good!!! just did some overtime to get something finished for a major release deadline, and am stealing a couple of hours of free time before sleep

but i should do the sleep very soon

how's things?

Ben

Busy as heck for me. I'm finally back in the office for the foreseeable future.

RevenantBacon

1:16 AM

@Ben Was there much rejoicing, or has there only been wailing and the gnashing of teeth?

Ben

Not much of either lol. More rejoicing though.

trogdor

1:26 AM

@Someone_Evil lol

RevenantBacon

@AncientSwordRage I think this would be slightly improved if they were all like "The attack missed, and you feel a bit disappointed" or "The attack misses, and you're slightly embarrassed"

AncientSwordRage

1:46 AM

@RevenantBacon you mean like...

RevenantBacon

precisely

Peter Cooper Jr.

2:17 AM

Honestly I should probably grab a few tables like that to help me narrate combat

Hot RPG Questions

7

Q: Where can I find more lore on the Lady of Pain?

D&D 5e lore has precious little to say about the Lady of Pain. A search of DNDBeyond yields only 3 references in the entire 5th Edition corpus. From the Dungeon Master's Guide: The city is the domain of the inscrutable Lady of Pain, a being as old as gods and with purposes unknown to even the sa...

BESW

3:25 AM

World Champ Game Co. is discounting many of their physical products to make room for new inventory.

A Dragon Game by Chris Bissette. A game about dragons and subterranean adventuring

"Lasers & Feelings: Updated License" I've updated the license for Lasers & Feelings to allow for commercial hacks. This means you can sell your L&F-based games!

street magic anniversary sale! A sale hosted by Caro Asercion. This Saturday, March 13th, is the two-year anniversary of the date I first published i'm sorry did you say street magic. This week is also my birthday! To celebrate both events, i'm putting street magic on sale at 25% off for for the rest of the week!

BESW

3:52 AM

Power Goons! by Ray Olsen. A radical adventure game for heroic people

KorvinStarmast

4:20 AM

@AncientSwordRage number 9 is the correct answer

Bardic Wizard

4:58 AM

@AncientSwordRage is there ever evidence against?

@doppelgreener glad things are getting better for you, whatever “things” are. I’m less alive than last week cause I’m anxiously watching the mail for a Really Important Thing From College Board

Adeptus

5:34 AM

@BESW Combat sounds deadly... stats are 3d6, health is 1d6 + half your Brawn stat, you can take up to 20 damage per attack: When an enemy attacks you, say how you try to evade it and roll under the relevant stat. Take the difference between your roll and your stat as damage. If you roll equal to or over your stat, take the result of your roll as damage.

> Class: You're an adventurer. Race: No.

BESW

@Adeptus I believe the phrase he used on Twitter was "welcome to my OSR."

I do love the entry on race.

Adeptus

@BESW I don't remember old-school RPGs being that deadly... but maybe I just don't remember old-school RPGs well enough...

BESW

A common element of OSR (which is Old School Renaissance, meaning it doesn't recreate old school games precisely but more tries to recreate a set of design principles and remembered experiences) is that combat is deadly enough that you're encouraged to avoid it. Creativity is found in discovering roleplay and logic which allow you to skirt the lethality of engaging with the combat mechanics directly, especially at lower levels.

Adeptus

I was re-reading Dragon Warriors earlier (an 80s British fantasy RPG), and I'd completely forgotten the combat rules... first you roll to hit, then you roll to bypass the target's armour, and if they have a shield, they roll to block... Damage is a fixed number determined by weapon.

BESW

I know that A Dragon Game's damage mechanic is partly inspired by this thread:

yesterday, by BESW

Ordoalea Publishing wrote a twitter thread about "why all weapons in a #ttrpg should deal the same damage."

Adeptus

5:56 AM

Interesting.

Powerdork

@AncientSwordRage Credit?

AncientSwordRage

8:01 AM

@Powerdork this tweet twitter.com/ThinkingDM/status/1369009091985674240 and this tweet twitter.com/optionalrule/status/1369011297082281990

No idea if that's the original source though

@BardicWizard only before coffee and after bedtime

trogdor

lol

Powerdork

11:00 AM

@BESW If I wanted to learn more about this, without dropping the information you didn't want to drop here, what are some key words or phrases that i could use in my personal dig into this topic?

(if it's the kickstarter for the game I'm thinking of, the one that's crossed my feed more than a dozen times this week, i'm VERY curious)

BESW

@Powerdork Search the phase I put in quotes, on Kickstarter's own in-site search engine. You'll get one result.

Powerdork

yes, but i mean the allegation

BESW

I don't have a publicly shareable source on that, it's artists talking to each other.

Powerdork

thank you

BESW

You can see the patterns I'm talking about in the KS, though.

Powerdork

11:09 AM

That I can.

Thomas Markov

1:03 PM

delete dis

AncientSwordRage

@ThomasMarkov Can't, but I did the next best thing

Thomas Markov

@AncientSwordRage DV? :P

It should be in review queue

AncientSwordRage

oh yeah, review queues

doppelgreener

1:43 PM

@BardicWizard thanks :) i was dealing with brainfog for like a week prior

KorvinStarmast

2:49 PM

@Adeptus In my experience, they were quite so. (To include Traveller, the original)

RevenantBacon

3:31 PM

Traveler for GURPS?

Also, while I'm here, a quick reminder that the Pixel Dice Kickstarter goes live in about an hour and a half

Apparently, the guy doing the project has worked for Bethesda in the past on some of the Elder Scrolls and Fallout games

Thomas Markov

I posted a new answer here as the old one was very brief and undercited.

RevenantBacon

@ThomasMarkov I disagree with your assessment of it being undercited.

The relevant page number of the book is citation enough

Thomas Markov

But do you agree that my more thorough answer is generally more useful in that it lays out all of the relevant rules that are, in the book, spread throughout several pages?

RevenantBacon

No

The rules directly relevant are the rules on whether a critical hit is scored

The bit about saving throws is also entirely superfluous

AncientSwordRage

3:49 PM

@RevenantBacon agreed

the only thing undercited is this: Attack rolls for spells are attack rolls

which is probably ok, for the same reason I'm ok with the sentence 'Long cat is long'

KorvinStarmast

@RevenantBacon No, the original GDW black box Traveller that came out in 1977 before GURPS was a thing.

AncientSwordRage

Traveller goes WAY back

KorvinStarmast

And there was a mini game where you made a bunch of characters so that you had one ready if one died - I always came to our sessions (which were too few, it was hard to keep a traveller game going in our gaming group) with two or three back up characters who the GM could insert if we ended up fighting and died, etc. (we initially did have a lot of D&D habits that turned out to not work as great for Traveller scenarios)

AncientSwordRage

character creation is it's own game in Traveller

KorvinStarmast

@AncientSwordRage Yep, and it's good fun in its own right.

GcL

4:02 PM

Hopefully more fun than in Shadowrun

AncientSwordRage

@KorvinStarmast almost too much fun

KorvinStarmast

@AncientSwordRage snort it really helps if there is beer involved, in my experience. YMMV

AncientSwordRage

@KorvinStarmast it's plenty of fun even without lubrication

I've definitely planned character creation with a group, then run over and had to come back and either finish, or start the game another day

KorvinStarmast

@AncientSwordRage Also true, however, at the time we were college aged and liked to add beer to our games. Where I lived at the time (Maryland) the drinking age for beer was 18.

AncientSwordRage

4:18 PM

I think I played Traveller in my late teens and early twenties, but I've been tee-total since... 2009?

must have been after that I think

KorvinStarmast

@AncientSwordRage One of my most memorable (for perhaps the wrong reasons) sessions when I GM'd Empire of the Petal Throne was when a few of the players went out back and consumed a number of hallucenogenics (much stronger than weed) and then came back in to play some more. Things went kind of weird that night ... that one session still comes up now and again in casual conversation. (three decades ago, and a bit more)

RevenantBacon

Imagine being objectively correct about something, then being told by multiple people that "that's actually just like, your opinion man"

GcL

@RevenantBacon All the f-ing time.... it's the worst.

AncientSwordRage

@RevenantBacon imagine... hah! I've been there

@GcL well, not the worst, that's just like your opinion man

3

RevenantBacon

4:34 PM

XD

RevenantBacon