I'm actually working at the moment, but feel free to distract me as long as you don't expect a quick response - it's a task I don't relish, so I would welcome the occasional interruption
@SirTechSpec I still haven't bought that - I keep thinking about it, and I'd probably buy it if I ever saw it cheap, but it never seems to be on special.
Either way, it's just weird. You should have seen my face the first time I attended a "retro gaming night" event and saw people pulling out Gamecubes and '64s.
@trogdor That's the original context of the image, but the meme refers to any obscure reference (despite the original reference being not obscure at all). Memes tend to slough context very quickly.
@trogdor Now I want to make a monster called a "meme" that can multiply and spread rapidly, and also probably shapeshift under the right circumstances, like Gremlins. :D
@kviiri on Fronts: I think a neat thing about having one or two more than the players can address is a good way to remind the DM to fill the players' lives with adventure and portray a fantastic world. It's not a world if the PCs are the only powerful force in it, and narratives are less forced when they're foreshadowed somewhat. I've found that having a front or two in the background helps me weave from one thing to the next more easily.
@BESW I think it's more to do with the idea that coffee is a subject of sufficient breadth and depth to require a SE devoted solely to it. It's like this.
@Miniman Honestly, I'm not tooooo worried about the saves... my DEX save'll not be as great as it could be, but that INT save is nigh-useless. (Except for feeblemind, which is just a complete destroyer.)
@JoelHarmon that too -- you have 1.75-2x the momentum against you, and all of it's being transferred to you as the bison-pikeman collision is far more elastic than the horse-pikeman collision
heck, having wrestled some humans I wouldn't want to run into one that fast
The alternative to the chest is probably softer tissue like eyes, nose, or mouth, on a bouncing bison with a dodge reflex. If you ever try that, let me know how it turns out.
@Shalvenay You caught me. Among several habits I'm not proud of that SE brings out in me (speculating about absolutely anything regardless of my background in the topic, getting obsessed with one particular thing to the detriment of other life activities, etc.), I'm not very good at going to bed. I'm off the computer and lying down, but apparently had to pull out my phone and open Firefox.
@JoelHarmon -- another thing I've been pondering lately is which of the modern steels would a modern-day smith choose if Aragorn (or insert your favorite fantasy swordsman in his place) asked them to make a sword :p
@trogdor that, and the bison skull is basically a big plate of armor coming at you -- there is very little in the way of soft target to aim a set spear at, unlike a charging horse
which I think is the key difference -- even a somewhat sloppy spear set with a not-so-great spear is likely to work on a horse because it'll wind up deeply impaled on the spear from its own momentum, reducing the energy transfer considerably
the bison case though seems to me like the collision would be much more elastic in nature -- most of the momentum would get transferred to the spear and wielder
as it'd be spearpoint vs thick skull, quite literally
All appreciation I have for it is purely satirical in nature, too.
Is the film a parody? Rumor has it Chick Publications gave their permission to the film on the condition that the original tract be played completely straight.
Then again, playing DD straight is parody enough for anyone not deranged or seriously misguided.
I doubt it'll do any serious damage, though. On the other hand, that's just my bubbly perspective - the Satanic moral panics have all but perished here.
The situation might be different in lands where moral conservatism is more entrenched.
I have conflicted feelings over Deadlands:Reloaded
Our campaign in it has been going fine, and the combat system feels both tactical and fast-paced, but oh man... -3 wound penalties make everything a pain.
The worst is the Shaken roll. The probabilities of even getting to act are not that great when wounded.
It might be realistic, heck, it might even be fun if I was controlling three or so guys instead of one who gets disabled for half the combat because getting free from Shaken is hard.
@BESW Yeah, that's it, pretty much. The Deadlands:RL rules are lifted directly from Savage Worlds, and they feel like a crossbreed between miniature combat and RPG. It makes sense miniature combat -wise, not as much as an RPG.
@Riley I should've linked this to you yesterday, but if you don't want to read the entire AW rulebook, you can just take a look at the character and move sheet here: apocalypse-world.com/AW2ndEdPlaybooksPreview.pdf
The book mostly explains stuff and philosophy behind things listed there in more depth.
Ideally, only the GM needs to know their way around the big book. The normal players just need their sheets, plus access to the basic moves sheets.
The Apocalypse World Engine runs on the idea of making lists of the tropes common to the kind of story you want to tell, and turning those lists into multiple choices sheets for the players and GM to pick from both before and during the game.
Most versions of the Engine are effectively just "I made a new collection of lists for this kind of story I like!"
**[Timely RPGery](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nKltjD1HJ954pS3QZZL-E_ckNaKEeedxMKn7XwdFiio/edit?usp=sharing "Click for full source doc; please suggest items to pin!"):** [BoH](https://bundleofholding.com "Buy RPGs cheap in bulk, support charities & indie designers!"); [Fate module](http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/191782/Good-Neighbors--A-World-of-Adventure-for-Fate-Core "In Good Neighbors, players take on two roles: a human who must deal with the politics of this new industry, and a fairy who feels the full spiritual damage of the Industry.");
Fate can be similar to AW in the "Just write down what's important about your chosen story/setting/characters and leave everything else alone" sense, but it's also VERY hackable at almost every level of its mechanics.
And its underlying concepts are pretty different, though not in the dramatic way that, say, they're both different from the d20 System.
Well I could start by checking if I understood aspects right. So I came to understand there are basically three ways they come into play: 1) I can spend a Fate point to invoke an aspect for a bonus to roll or reroll, or 2) I can receive a Fate point when accepting a complication caused by my aspect, or 3) Another player can spend a Fate point to make my aspect cause a complication.
Aspects are mechanical representations of things the story says are true. Fate points get spent and received when an aspect provides an extra benefit or complication above and beyond its truth, but by itself an aspect represents a thing in the story that might help or hinder without point expenditure.
eg, if I'm trying to do brain surgery while On fire I'm gonna fail. It's not a compel that I could buy off with a fate point of my own to ignore, and it's not a roll that the GM is spending fate points to increase.
If I try to do brain surgery while On fire the GM is going to laugh and say "That doesn't work out like you planned."
(In AW terms, think of it as triggering different moves when punching things depending on whether you're punching a puppy, a paladin, or a dragon.)
This may seem obvious, but the idea everything which is an aspect is true, and everything which is true can be an aspect, takes some time to wrap around.
@kviiri So: in addition to your three things, aspect are truth statements which automagically give permission for certain things to happen.
(And if something is true, you can treat it like an aspect whether it's been written down yet or not: writing an aspect down is just saying "I think this is or will be important enough that we need a mechanical handle to grab it by.")
The fate point economy can be boiled down to this: you gain fate points when things make your life significantly more complicated or dramatic in ways that you could spend fate points to avoid, and you spend fate points to avoid or resolve complication or drama.
This creates a narrative cycle of crisis and victory, where every crisis contains the seeds of your eventual victory (gain fate points to spend later) and every victory contains the seeds of the next crisis (having spent own you fate points you're now open to compels and invokes against you).
Fate point expenditure is tied to aspects to make sure the meta currency doesn't become a purely mechanical exercise detached from the story you're telling: you need to be able to point at a story thing (aspect) and explain why it's making things better or worse for the heroes, or the crises and victories would be random.
So what sort do the complications caused by compels tend to be in mechanical nature? "You can do that, but I'll compel you not to do it" or "You can do that, but I'll compel you to roll instead of just doing it"? Or even "You can roll to do it, but I'll compel you to increase the difficulty of the roll"?
@BESW In this particular mind-control scenario: The Nestene Consciousness attempted to assert mind control over Leela. The player gathered up a hefty handful of fate points, ready to dump them down on resisting the attempt. BESW said offered them a single fate point, saying they're going to have much more fun under mind control. Player put back all the fate points, and took the extra, and Leela was mind controlled.
Well, it's a general chat for RPG.SE. What's happening varies by the time of day and the mood of the crowd. And @BESW totally greets people by the door.
@kviiri In a conflict, you only take consequences as your own choice, as an alternative to losing the ability to continue to influence the outcome of the conflict.
@DerpfacePython You're welcome to lurk or chat as you like!
What happens with stress is, you catch it in your stress boxes until you can't anymore and then you have to make a choice: either leave the conflict or take some kind of lasting complication as the price of continuing to be able to act.
A common theme you'll see in Fate is that mechanics don't trigger mechanics.
Narrative triggers mechanics, which trigger narrative. In that sense, it's very AW.
"I snarkily insult his hat, hoping to make him back down." "Okay, that sounds like a Clever attack. He's not very good at banter so he'll just have to take it on the chin and keep going if he can; he's defending with Forceful." [rolls] "I succeed by five shifts! I compare his hat to a badly-plucked chicken and make everyone laugh. I'm spending one shift to get a free invoke, and I'll call it 'The crowd is with me.'" "He can't take four shifts on his stress track and he doesn't want to take a lasting consequence, so he'll throw the chicken-hat on the ground and leave amid jeers."
The nice thing about Fate is that it's a lot less... picky... than AW.
You can mess with it a LOT and it'll still work.
So long as you leave the fate point economy alone, keep the lines of communication open at the table, and don't deviate TOO far from the "competent/proactive/dramatic" PC triad, Fate will accommodate almost any tweaks or hacks or outright misuse you or I can think of.
@BESW Moreover, I find that you can play Fate withtout the fate paradigms of player contribution etc. without it failing horribly. It's not exactly Fate but it still holds OK as an RPG.
He's interested in a system which mechanises real-world truths, and the aspect system lets you do that to whatever extent the players understand the real world.
You don't have to invent mechanics for hydrochloric acid, you just write Hydrochloric acid down and whatever hydrochloric acid does, that's what it does.
You can use Create Advantage to leverage the acid to your favour and get free invokes, but there's no narrative cycle of crisis and victory because that's not "realistic."
One's character isn't (mechanically) good with guns, for example. They're good at being Hard, and that's used for a lot of things that might or might not include shooting.
And there's the "seduce of manipulate" move with a similar twist - one's character can be sexy, seductive, or persuasive, but it's all Hot, no matter how you do it.
@BESW True, I took a gander at Accelerated and the means of trouble solving reminded me of AW skills.
Skills are pretty straightforward "rank how good you are at doing a kind of task." Approaches are instead "rank how good you are at doing tasks a certain way." And then there's the aspect-only version where your character aspects give you dice modifiers directly.
The AW system is also an occasional source of annoyance though. For example, our Driver is a new player of AW. He's (understandably) quite miffed by the fact that using one's vehicle as a weapon uses Hard instead of Driver's best stat Cool.
Unless one uses the vehicle as a part of a special road war move, like "Shoulder another vehicle".
Use the approach which makes sense for how you're shooting at the time.
Approaches were a little difficult to wrap my head around at first. Unlike skills, they aren't about what I'm doing: they're about how I'm doing it. Any approach could be appropriate for shooting a gun, depending on the cont...
I think one of the things we need to break out of is the need to roll a lot. In AW, the GM should be fairly liberal in just letting stuff happen when applicable.
Aye, that's an important lesson I'm still struggling with.
Basically, you roll when all potential outcomes would be interesting enough to spend the time on resolving. Otherwise, point at an aspect justifying the logical thing, spend a fate point one way or the other, or say the interesting thing is what happens.
Oh, and a minor variant on rolling: sometimes we roll when we definitely want the thing to succeed, but are checking to see how much cost the success comes at.
AW comes with some of that pre-built, though - moves like "Seize by force" can't totally fail. There's no outcome like "You deal zero damage and get turned into Swiss cheese", there's always something good involved.
@kviiri The magic system in the Fate game Shadowcraft does something similar.
You can't ever fail at magic, but you always roll for big magic. If you fail the roll, you gain an aspect representing how your identity (physical or mental) is being overwhelmed by the magic you channeled. You have to do something to re-affirm your identity to remove the aspects. If you get too many at once, you become an NPC.
But it requires that you've collected, like, six magical fallout aspects.
There are three kinds of magic: earthen, ethereal, and natural. Earthen casters may gain stonelike skin, or lose their ability to feel urgency; ethereal casters may lose touch with reality or become intangible; natural casters may gain claws or the ability to speak with animals. The aspects aren't always negative, and in fact are encouraged to be somewhat beneficial.
So there's this temptation to ride the edge of your own loss of identity.
@BESW As usual with aspects, right? The best ones are double-edged.
I like handing out mental haze and mind screws to my players like it was candy. I dislike the works of Lovecraft somewhat, but I still swipe some ideas from there.
@kviiri Eeeh. Lots of people say that, and double-edged aspects are fun, but I've learnt the hard way that forcing complexity onto aspects makes them less likely to get used at all.
Character aspects are where double-edgedness is most useful, and even then it's not always helpful.
The most important thing about defining an aspect is this: it's a reminder to the group of a thing that's true about the story. If the aspect doesn't quickly and easily do that reminding (if people have to stop mid-scene and take a moment to remember all its nuances and complexities), the aspect isn't doing its primary job.
I find that complexity is best found in the tension between aspects.
> High Concept: I am Groot. Trouble: I am Groot. Motive: I am Groot. Relationship: I am Groot. Personal: I am Groot. +3 Groot +2 Groot, Groot +1 Groot, Groot +0 Groot Because I am Groot, I get +2 when making physical attacks with my body. Because I am Groot, I can interact with objects up to one zone away. Because I am Groot, once per session between scenes I can reduce the severity of a physical consequence I suffer by two shifts.
One of my one-offs had a player roll snake eyes on "open your brain" move. They suffered a really terrible vision that stuck in their brain. It started out really intense, to the point they completely lost control and hurt themselves for 1-harm. They also got a more lasting consequence of having that terrifying vision recurring in force whenever the subject of the vision (the PC's enemy) being nearby.
Sort of like Harry Potter's scar. It also had the same benefit of actually being a truthful vision, true to the "success at a cost ideology".
In Fate, I'd probably frame that first "open your brain--OMG what have you let in?!" scene as a contest, with an aspect (possibly filling a consequence slot) representing the fallout--and then I'd compel that aspect every chance I got.
Ah yes, I had forgotten about the consequences already!
...man, I really need to give the players more info when they open their brains. That way maybe they'll use the move more and I get more wacky insanity lurking in their heads.
@BESW In the social Fate game I felt the need to have a separate place for aspects that are persistent between scenes but not attached to a character or location and not really central to the story itself.
Say, the party has obtained access to a fancy car. They can now use it for a variety of purposes, it's available, even if they need to devote resources and/or time to its operation. It's not however anyone's possession and is just a tool, having a car is not what the game is about.
Heh. We've got a fancy car! Okay, done, you can use Create Advantage or spend fate points to trick it out as needed, and it gives you permission to do stuff like use Drive to track someone.
In the future, however, I think I'd take your advice and have "Party Stuffs" with aspects, skills and stunts and perhaps even stress representing how safe/well-maintained it is etc.
Grr.... Didn't meet any giants on night 1 of Storm King's Thunder. All that lunch-break practicing with my Norweigan Giantish phrasebook for nothing =\
A friend invited me to a 5e campaign where everyone'd get to GM. The players take turns mastering and designing short sections of the campaign, with the rough overarching plot decided in advance.
Middling to poor, mostly because hardly anyone except the prime GM and myself had any experience GMing at all and the GM offered no support or accompaniment.
@kviiri I do that in Pathfinder, although they're all one-shots with pretty much nothing from the old games except for the red line and a few things that were memorable.
Given that it was also our first ever epic-level campaign, it's surprising it went as well as it did.
What DID work was the campaign structure.
It was a "find the seven plot coupons and redeem them for an epic final battle" structure, which meant each segment to find a plot coupon could be built pretty much as its own independent "Find the thing!" adventure.
I think this might work as long as everyone commits to a roughly similar feel to the game - a action-heavy romp without too much drama or issue gaming :)
And since it was set in the generic D&D multiverse with epic-level characters, setting continuity was easily bypassed just by having us flit from plane to plane.
In my adventure they found the piece in a dragon's hoard that had been hidden from thieves by sticking halfway between the ethereal plane and a pocket dimension.
We didn't quite get the Spellcraft DC to stop exactly halfway through, though, which led to putting a 1/2-phased artifact into a 2/3-phased Bag of Holding.
@BESW Sounds kind of like the four-directors concept from Four Rooms. I'll have to remember that, as I've got a majority of players at one of my tables who are also rather-experienced GMs =)
@BESW Is that one-sixth of a BOOM? Or five-sixths of one?
No, the artifact didn't break. It just... wasn't all in the same place anymore.
3
We got about 1/3 of the artifact out of the Bag, and the other 2/3 were technically still attached but wouldn't leave the Plane of Extradimensional Article until we brought the 1/3 to it.
(The Plane of Extradimensional Article is, of course, an infinite honeycomb of varying-sized cubbies, all sealed off by deity-level force fields and each connected to a unique Bag of Holding, Portable Hole, or other magic item which leads to an unspecified extradimensional space.)
Sorry, Plane of Extradimensional Indefinite Articles. I think that's what it was.
@kviiri my knowledge from SATW suggests that Scandinavian construction starts with building a simple sauna which then can be upgraded into something with a wider purpose, like a bank branch, shopping mall or an airport.
