Atomic Robo and the Ring of Fire: THE HARDCOVER! Co-starring ULTRA Field Manual and THE HEAD OF ROBO (it’s a plush)
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/tesladyne/atomic-robo-and-the-ring-of-fire-hardcover-collect
@Shalvenay I don't know. Funny thing their laptop died too :) Double kill, I would say. Don't know anything about ETA for him. I hope it would be soon. I don't want to boost him up to party level, because he is not acquainted yet with his character and game in general. And opportunity to fall back more than for two levels doesn't look fun.
It's interesting and inspirational reading, but I found myself lacking experience to think about the ways for creating great game. Now, I'm just trying to keep it good enough.
And according to my players I've managed to do it.
personally -- I find his tone a bit off-putting especially re: Elevated Extras. I think it's mostly because I think in terms of worlds not narratives though, more or less.
and I will often do the equivalent of the Elevated Extra thing, but less to characters and more to bits of world machination
While you're used to mechanics defining how the setting works (rules = physics), AWE worlds work more like Fate in that regard: the setting's physical laws are simply whatever the group wants them to be.
Instead, AWE mechanics are limiters and prompts for actions and events within the world.
@RollingFeles basically -- I set out to immerse myself in the metaphysics of the game world, not the stories of the characters, when I'm shooting for immersion as a game goal
If an AWE GM is missing a move for something, that's not saying "This can't happen in this setting." It's saying "This shouldn't happen in this story."
From that perspective, AWE could perhaps be used as "training wheels" for helping you get into (or at least work within) narrative structures that many games simply expect the participants to grasp intuitively.
@RollingFeles A focus on physical challenges rather than social or mental ones, which frames play as a series of puzzles to be solved as efficiently as possible rather than a story about flawed people who are changed by their experiences.
My current favourite example is Luke going to find Vader toward the end of Star Wars VI: Luke's friends are going to destroy the Death Star no matter what Luke and Vader do. Luke's actions have no bearing on the physical objective. He does it purely because he wants to try and redeem his father.
So the major drama of the final confrontation on the bridge of the Death Star is totally irrelephant to the conflict between the Empire and the Rebellion.
The Death Star's fate is determined by entirely unrelated actions. The Emperor and Vader will fry or not based on the B cast's success or failure.
@RollingFeles I think that's an extreme dichotomy to draw, but in a way yes: Luke's dramatic finale is a social and mental one while everyone else is having a "accomplish physical goal efficiently" plot.
If Shalv were playing Luke, he wouldn't have gone after Vader. He'd've thrown his weight in on the fight against the Death Star because that's a tangible objective with measurable benefit.
But as a story, the destruction of the Death Star is just a backdrop to the real drama: Luke's naive optimism that his father (after two and a half movies of proving otherwise) might still be redeemable, which instead almost leads to Luke's fall to the Dark Side and nearly kills him, but concludes with Vader's true redemption.
As strategy, turning yourself over to the bad guy in the vain hope that you might be able to talk him into changing sides, when even if you're successful it won't change the outcome of the war? Stupid.
Ham-handedly, court-martiallably stupid: he's deserting his troops in the middle of a vital operation and, with a mind full of military secrets, turning himself over to a mind-reading enemy.
But from a personal perspective it was necessary because Luke is an optimist who trusts people. He trusts his friends to do their jobs and he trusts his father to do the right thing if given the opportunity.
And from a story perspective we couldn't just blow up Darth Vader without a final confrontation.
I wanted to ask a question. It's not fit for site, because it's basically shopping question and I want to hear opinions and expiriences, even without heavy argumentation. I play dnd5e and I love to roleplay combat. I find it very satisfactory to immerse into the fight and not only think about what actions I take, but also how. I like 5e lightweight mechanic, but it's focuses more on group tactics. I would like to try system with interpersonal tactics level, where "how" attack made matters.
Can anyone suggest or share experience with other systems where this achieved?
@RollingFeles At the risk of proselytizing, I'll throw out there any of the Powered by the Apocalypse games. I've only played Dungeon World, but I've turned to it for exactly those reasons, and the two groups I've run it with (both coming from 5e, both wanting more meaning to their descriptive combat) have both loved it.
@Shalvenay Say it ain't so, Shalv. Say it ain't so!
@Miniman Yeah--she's pretty boss at her one thing, and then it's easy to sit back an let everyone else shine most of the time. (Though I did throw my expertises into both performance and persuasion, so I imagine at some point there'll be a surprising second-side to her that everyone sees.)
@Miniman Right. I just don't get what they're clarifying. Is it that you must use the same modifier on each's attack roll? That you get a modifier at all on the bonus attack's damage? No matter what I think the modifier might be modifying, I don't see how the erratum actually clarifies anything =\
@nitsua60 Literally the only thing I can think of is that they thought people might be confused about whether the Monk could use Dex with the bonus action attack.
@Miniman I'm with you there. I just don't see how that one errata-sentence actually clarifies that. In any case, I'm done worrying about it. I'm off to bed. Another night of not having gotten around to posting the "when to sharpshoot?" Q&A =\
@Miniman Ugh. There are some seriously questionable statements being made in some of those answers. And nobody's differentiating between damage on dice vs. dmg mod, which turns out to matter. Or they're just taking simgle cases and extrapolating some generalization that's impossible to know when to apply.
Posting an answer there's going to be painful, as it's going to be choking on weeds =(
@nitsua60 Ceribia's answer looks pretty good. It doesn't go as far as AC ratings, but that can be calculated from the "roll to hit". (though I don't quite follow why "-3" is the bottom end)
@Adeptus She's missing crits, which change things more than I'd have expected. (Enough that you can't answer the question of "against what AC should I choose -5/+10 over 'standard' without breaking out damage from dice and from mods.) In an answer where the outputs are expressed in hundredths, that's bugging me.
@RollingFeles Fate Accelerated is definitively this; instead of skills with ranks according to what your character is good at doing, your character's roll modifiers are "approaches" that describe how your character is good at doing things: Careful, Clever, Flashy, Forceful, Quick, and Sneaky are the defaults.
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...
You might also want to check out systems like Lasers & Feelings, which is exactly what it says on the tin: whenever you roll for an action you define it as either "lasers" (science, reason, logic) or "feelings" (instinct, emotion, social).
@RollingFeles There's also games like Lady Blackbird, which combines both styles by having a list of things you're good at, and you get dice for each thing that's relevant to your action; and a list of things that are important to you, and you get XP each time you touch on one of those things.
And Bubblegumshoe, where your relationships with people are a resource that you can spend to use bonus skills or get into otherwise hard-to-enter areas, and spending on relationships unlocks other kinds of spends (eg, in a social conflict you have to draw on your relationships for emotional support before you can invoke your own coolness).
We've got a number of free one-shot games that we play when our long-form campaign isn't appropriate for a particular night.
@RollingFeles We've only ever done a first session with the starting scenario, but we've done that... at least four times, always with a slightly different group.
Compare Bubblegumshoe, where players are encouraged to strain their NPC relationships for mechanical benefits.
Or Fate, where players are bribed to make choices that complicate their characters' lives because it gives them currency to be more effective and awesome.
But the whole "Ask questions that incite interesting conflict" philosophy has no mechanical encouragement or support.
[shrug] Many/most RPGs don't have that kind of mechanic, and LB's keys do push the story in a way I like.
But, for example, the Apocalypse World Engine enforces forward momentum because every time someone fails a roll, something should happen that's interesting, dramatic, or problematic, or all of the above.
There's specific mechanical cues for "things get bigger/badder/awesomer" and the GM has mechanics that not only say when to do it, but how.
I don't feel like I need that particular setup myself as a GM, but I really value systems which do some of the heavy lifting for the GM and/or spread the load across the whole group.
(Especially for games that are supposed to be no-prep.)
I guess that's my big gripe with LB: it looks like a "pick up and play" game, but it's got a heavier creative load on the GM than I look for in the games I want in my "Suddenly let's play something unplanned" roster.
Well if that's the case, I may get it done in time. I'll be busy for several hours still but I can write it later today, or if there's an unexpected break.
That's an ancient definition. VRAM as such is no longer used from what I understand (and from its wiki page). It's all DRAM, just bolted onto the graphics card.
My underlying question is, "If I buy the 2.8GHz quad‑core 21.5in iMac, how much from the baseline do I have to soup it up to run ACC and Obduction smoothly?"
And so far most of what I've found out is that I'm hopelessly nebbish about hardware.
And yeah, I know it's not a great choice. But I need it to be a Mac for Professional Reasons, and once I have a baseline for how much it'd cost to soup up to minimum gaming standards I can compare that to how effective dual-booting might be.
Basically the Professional Reasons come first but I'd like to be able to game a little now that I have one of the rare just-came-out games I really want to play.
Currently I want to play Lovecraftesque, Danger Patrol, Colonypunk, Bubblegumshoe, Dog Eat Dog, Fate of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Surgadores, and Katanas & Trenchcoats.
Well, here it's difficult to find anybody at all to game with. My group usually grinds to a halt on session two with any game and we have a period of coffee-and-boardgame evenings until the revulsion wears off and I manage to offer something new that sounds fun.
My list of games I'd like to try sort of boils down to 'anything at all, really'
Yeah, I count myself lucky to have cultivated an atmosphere where I've got more than a half-dozen people who feel free to drop by any Saturday they're free, rather than feeling like they need to commit to regularity and so not come at all.
(Nearly all the games in that list are one-shots, or suitable for one-shots.)
I'm lucky to get a game every week. Our Deadlands:RL group has been inactive for over a month, AW group is active but we only manage to schedule for every two or three weeks.
@Nox It's a fan hack of the Fate World "The Three Rocketeers," with some nifty bits added.
I mentioned it to my group, and their immediate response was "What if I want to play Casey Jones?" and "Can I be Leatherhead?"
Which was... not what I expected, but got me thinking again about how to represent a dynamic group of characters with a number of players smaller than the number of characters.
(I think Bubblegumshoe has some key ideas toward that concept.)
@kviiri I think "fading away" is about the best fate a Call of Cthulhu group can hope for.
@kviiri Well, I'm not fond of it (the system's mechanics are something of a mismatch for the genre, I think), but I was mostly just making a Mythos joke.
@Nox Bubblegumshoe handles relationships with NPCs in ways I haven't seen before, which push for interesting, dramatic interactions without getting too bogged down in fiddly mechanics.
@BESW "Fading away" would be pretty cool horror. One day you notice you're ever so slightly translucent, all sensations are minutely muffled... at first you think you're just imagining it, but eventually you notice you don't actually exist as much... as well as before.
@trogdor I'm thinking now that, to use the inevitable SG-1 comparison, one or two players would play one team member each, with the other team members represented as Like and Love relationships with lots of ranks.
Shadowcraft is a Fate-based game about cold war style spy politics in a faerie world that was abandoned by the faeries long ago, leaving behind warring mortals whose ancestors were kidnapped and melded with the essence of magic, stone, or beast.
@kviiri So far as I can tell, it's a "speed of your connection ping" thing.
When a "Lost One" (as these semi-mortals are called) channels the essence they're melded with to create magic, they always succeed. But when they use magic for a really big effect, or under pressure, the player rolls to see if the character "fractures" and melds further into that essence.
A Stoneskin Lost One might gain natural armor as their flesh hardens, or be able to speak to rocks; a Glassborn might become slightly ethereal or be able to see through walls; a Sylvan might grow horns or gain a keen sense of smell.
They can only repair these fractures by undertaking activities that remind them of their individual identities, and if they fracture too much without taking the time to mend those fractures... they slip forever into the essence and lose themselves utterly.
In the last long-form AW campaign I GM'd, I tried to go for lots of sanity loss stuff, but I wasn't as good as the system as I'm now. The stuff I wanted to do could've called for custom moves or threat moves.
I had a Brainer who loved to mess with the maelstrom, but that means the maelstrom also messed with him.
Hey, chat. Been researching a little on some mechanics used in tactical battles. Kind of like the idea, that I think is used in the 13th age, of (my interpreation of general the rules) having distances between participants measured in terms general categories like [touching, near, far, very far,...] rather than exact measurements.
And the character can take an action to change that distance to another category.
Looks like it would simplify some of the mechanics when it's one fighter approaching another, but I am somewhat confused about what happens when there are multiple participants.
For example, if A is near B and C is equally far for A and B, then does C moving one distance category closer to A automatically do this for B as well?
Can't really ask it on mainsite, it seems, since I am not so much doing it for a specific game, as shopping for the systems that implement positioning rules in that way to see how they manage that.
Right. So I suggest you not look for hard and fast rules about how to measure touching/near/far, but rather assign those properties based on what's being described in the scene.
As the scene changes, the relationship properties change accordingly.
@nitsua60 Just a follow up on the mastermind question and answer, I've got SCAG but have not seen Mastermind in action. heck, have not played on a couple of months since wife vetoed a weekly Wednesday AL (the only one in our town) and the other game dissolved due to time zone problems and my nephew going off to Greece. Blah. Maybe I'll try one the next time we can get a quorum. Have not played a rogue/thief yet.
Compare Fate's zones: when it matters enough to bother with, the area of a scene gets divided up into zones based on their type (the clear end of a warehouse and the cluttered-with-crates end) and size (often zones are roughly big enough that someone in the same zone with you can easily come up and punch you if he wants, or whatever form of interaction is most likely for the scene).
@BESW No commonly used hard rules of this type, got it. :) In my imagination it just shift the games using this approach one tick away from the 'tactical' extremum of the scale.
You can move inside a zone freely so long as nothing is actively opposing you, and you can move from one zone to another for free once per round (again, barring active opposition), but moving more than one zone takes an action or special case.
@Nox This is where we start asking "what does tactical mean?"
Because in RPGs, it's often used to mean "lots of rules about how minis interact on a grid."
But it could just as easily (and perhaps more usefully) mean "Careful strategic planning is rewarded with significant and predictable mechanical advantages."
(En Garde! is a good example of a deeply deterministic game where strategy is everything but is formed in a semi-vacuum so it's more like a game of battleship where you both move your ships each round.)
("Maddening" is a word I would use to describe the effect.)
Nor I think that doing the 'distance categories rule' on the case-by-case basis completely invalidates planning. But it would certainly move it one tick away from "planning is god". These ticks may be very small as well.
mmm. It doesn't change the value of planning at all.
It changes the focus of planning.
If you make positioning a less valuable combat currency, that de-values the time spent on planning positioning and pushes some other element of strategic planning to the forefront.
The only way it'd make planning in general less important is if positioning itself was the primary form of planning the system offers.
