Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

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Do you think clerics of evil religions ever get whitemailed with evidence proving that they aren't living secret double lives of debauchery?
 
Corn Flakes said:
Go look at Dark Heresy and the other 40K RPG games. You're going to find plenty of lasting injuries there.
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See that's my problem, I'm very familiar with WFRP (the system the 40K games are based off of) and they still have HP, they just call them wounds. WFRP 4E improves things dramatically over the WFRP 2E/40K model by allowing you to deal injuries even while your opponent still has wounds remaining, but you can still usually take a couple of sword strikes to the face before having to worry about it.
AnOminous said:
Chaosium's general system involved damages to particular parts of the body with particular effects
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Neat, I'll look at that.
 
Scream Aim Fire said:
Meanwhile, I... really can't fathom how in the hell you'd even run a Drake character, given both the insane cost and the disadvantages, both narratively and gameplaywise, that they have.
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There's no real, practical way I've ever found. One of my current characters has the regular Wanted quality because the Yaks are pissed at him for wrecking up a bunraku parlor. He had to make some Triad connections, and move to Chinatown to have a safehouse, and he still has to be careful when traveling alone elsewhere in the city lest a chancer try to cash in. I can't imagine how much worse it would be if literally everyone was out to get him, with no way to remove it like the Drake version.

Of course the real kicker is even if you just ignore/handwave away the Wanted shit, Drakes are utter crap anyway. What powers they do get are reliant on shifting into Dracoform (which given the whole perma-Wanted thing is the equivalent of a giant neon "Free Nuyen here" sign. and even if you do it you get the most underwhelming selection of powers imaginable:
Dual Nature - situationally useful at best, active hindrance at worst.
Elemental Attack(Fire) - Not terrible (assuming you have a semi decent magic rating, sucks to be you if you don't) but not exactly lighting the world on fire either (heh)
Hardened Armor 2 - Could stop a streetline special round, maybe
Hardened Mystic Armor 2 - Not sure what the magical equivalent of a zipgun is, but even if I did you'd be lucky to stop it
Vestigial Wings - Slightly less fall damage, and slightly better jumping. whoop de doo
Then you also get a minor boost to a couple of stats, and a natural weapon

Every other power is yet more karma, and not much better. Why waste karma on Enhanced Senses when upgraded glasses/contacts/earbuds are cheap and readily available?
Your original natural weapon is shit, more natural weapons is just more shit. Fly might be nice in theory but less so in practice because you're limited in how long you can stay in drake form at anyone time. Transcendent Form lets you use your powers without a full transformation but at the cost of potential drain. Dracoform Mastery removes the time limit on your shift but is another absolutely massive chunk of karma, and even then spending more time in your very, very obvious drake form is just asking for trouble.

Then we get to the ultimate problem with dracoforms mechanically, the cost is absolutely batshit for what little you get. 75 karma at chargen is bad enough, but 140 if you go the latent dracomorphosis route later on is fucking eye watering. As a comparison if you instead played the stereotypical gun-bunny physical adept with a single essence worth of 'ware you could get the first 5 Initation Grades(and the attendant metmagics or power points that comes with) + buy yourself back up to Rating 6 magic and still have 15 karma left, even without using the potential 10-30% discounts on the initiations.

Scream Aim Fire said:
Makes you wonder why they're even an option.
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1)SR writers are shit
2)SR writers want to be super special Mary Sues
3)SR writers are shitters who want to be super special Mary Sues

Pick one tbh.
 
Fantasy Flight's Star Wars system has a fairly small pool of health and when you hit the end of it or get critted you start rolling for specific wounds. As mentioned, Savage Worlds abstracts health a good deal too. I can't think of any game that is completely devoid of any kind of health bar, but those two at least don't have health pools that go up consistently over time; getting hit is always bad.
 
Shadowrun 1E and 2E had a good damage system.

Sure, it's 10 boxes, but even a light wound starts fucking with you.

It's a good balance between HP and "I was grazed by a bullet and my legs flew off."
 
Tenra Bansho Zero has an interesting wound system. Each character has multiple "hitpoint" tracks for vitality, light, heavy, critical wounds and dead box. Any damage you take can be placed in any track. If you have any wounds on the critical track, your vitality will drop each turn until it hits 1. Your character is out cold if vitality hits 0 or less, you can choose to place any damage you receive on the vitality track after that to be knocked out.

Since this game is anime inspired, you get more bonus the more seriously wounded you are. You get +1 dice roll for heavy wounds and +2 for critical wounds. The dead box is special, it's a single wound but it can be used to soak up any amount of damage from a single source, all your rolls are now +3 bonus. This is where most boss characters "turns red", but once vitality hits 0, the character is dead, not just knocked out. For PCs, it also signals to the GM that "YES THIS FIGHT IS IMPORTANT ENOUGH TO RISK MY CHARACTER'S LIFE". The game is otherwise pretty low on the lethality side.
 
Pendulous Dong said:
This is going to sound crazy, but I don't like hitpoints. I'm looking for a system where getting shot in the arm might break your arm or give you a painful flesh wound instead of doing 1d10 damage. As of now the only system I'm aware of that does this without devolving into an autistic nightmare is Burning Wheel, but which ones do you guys like?
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Ars Magica has stacking abstracted wounds that give penalties to all rolls, including Soak. So while at the start of the fight, you're dealing fatigue damage or light wounds, once the enemy takes enough damage, they start taking heavy wounds and eventually taking damage will kill them. It has the effect that whoever inflicts actual wounds first usually wins.

It does become an autistic nightmare at the recovery stage, since unless you blow a lot of magical resources on healing rituals, it'll take a lot of downtime to heal and that's in ideal conditions. And every season you spend recovering is a season you can't spend on training and research, so it's better to never get wounded at all. I'd say it's not a big downside, since why would you be playing Ars Magica if you're not autistic and don't enjoy a ton of downtime bookkeeping?
 
Henri Barbusse said:
It does become an autistic nightmare at the recovery stage, since unless you blow a lot of magical resources on healing rituals, it'll take a lot of downtime to heal and that's in ideal conditions. And every season you spend recovering is a season you can't spend on training and research, so it's better to never get wounded at all. I'd say it's not a big downside, since why would you be playing Ars Magica if you're not autistic and don't enjoy a ton of downtime bookkeeping?
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Ah yes. "The downside to devil's food cake is the cake is rich chocolate and so is the icing"
 
Henri Barbusse said:
Ars Magica player: I steal the devil's cake to get my hands at chocolate so that I can introduce it to 13th century Europe and break the setting.
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I mean more in the sense that someone who likes Chocolate will not see any downside. And if you don't like chocolate, the fuck you ordering a devil's food cake for?
 
How fun is Pendragon I've read the 1d4chan article and it sounds like fun but it also sounds a little railroad-y how does that balance out?
 
JJLiautaud said:
How fun is Pendragon I've read the 1d4chan article and it sounds like fun but it also sounds a little railroad-y how does that balance out?
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It's intensely railroady and that's part of the appeal. Sure, you can fuck off and just go on random adventures around the land (and there's lulls in the story where you are more or less expected to do that with the Grand Campaign providing adventures for years where not much is happening like in the interregnum between Uther and Arthur and at the peak of Arthur's reign), but the best part of it is the huge and incredibly detailed Grand Campaign that is likely to take several years of weekly games to finish.

The player knights are not likely to be the actual protagonists of the story: finding the Holy Grail requires rolling four crits in a row on stats you are not likely to increase to levels where crits are expected. If my high school math hasn't failed me, an individual knight has a base chance of 0.000625% to find the Grail. But it's still possible to join the Round Table and in general be a great hero.
 
Henri Barbusse said:
It's intensely railroady and that's part of the appeal. Sure, you can fuck off and just go on random adventures around the land (and there's lulls in the story where you are more or less expected to do that with the Grand Campaign providing adventures for years where not much is happening like in the interregnum between Uther and Arthur and at the peak of Arthur's reign), but the best part of it is the huge and incredibly detailed Grand Campaign that is likely to take several years of weekly games to finish.

The player knights are not likely to be the actual protagonists of the story: finding the Holy Grail requires rolling four crits in a row on stats you are not likely to increase to levels where crits are expected. If my high school math hasn't failed me, an individual knight has a base chance of 0.000625% to find the Grail. But it's still possible to join the Round Table and in general be a great hero.
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So like a couple of months of adventures could be like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the next adventure be slaying some Giant etc. and then Lancelot betrays Arthur and now you have to hunt him down? Sound unironically super-kino.
 
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JJLiautaud said:
So like a couple of months of adventures could be like Sir Gwain and the Green Knight, the next adventure be slaying some Giant etc. and then Lancelot betrays Arthur and now you have to hunt him down? Sound unironically super-kino.
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Kind of, but a lot of it is being called to battle by Uther or Arthur. (There's a very long sequence of several battles during Arthur conquest of Rome at the end of which you're stuck in Rome and have to pay your own way home). And all the big name knight go on their own adventures. Gawaine will go on the adventure of the Green Knight and it's not necessary for the player knights to get involved.

But in general, player knights want to be adventuring or fighting battles and taking captives all the time. While the knights are fabulously wealthy by peasant standards (an upkeep of one ordinary knight for a year is roughly enough to feed 600 peasants for a year), they're poor by standards of nobility. You need to take captives to ransom them, slay monsters for treasure and rescue damsels to get a wife (because wives tend to die in childbirth distressingly often).

It's also a generational game, so it's not unlikely for your knight to die before their heir is old enough to be knighted. Heirs inherit one tenth of their father's glory at the time of death, so dying gloriously in battle to get an extra 1000 glory is always worth it to help out your next character. A lot of these bookkeeping aspects have options for the GM to just declare what happened and the Grand Campaign has guidelines for that, so you can always just focus on adventuring. The simplest way is not playing a landed knight, but a household knight of some noble. All your expenses are paid for by your direct liege, but it's harder to get married (you have no land to provide for a family) and have to follow your liege's orders even more.

The game also demands that player characters adhere to a code of conduct they're not necessarily familiar with. For example, performing manual labor is an automatic loss of Honor and if your Honor falls too low, you become an outlaw or even an NPC. And there are points in the campaign where the GM will try to trick the knights into performing manual labor. It's the same sort of ethical traps like Lancelot in Knight of the Cart where there's a dilemma between dishonoring yourself by riding a cart or riding a cart to reach and save the queen faster. The introductory adventure for new players is just going on a hunt and then meeting some bandits. Knights are actually expected to kill them on the spot, since if they accept a surrender and take them to their liege to get judged, the bandits just get hanged on the spot and everyone looks weird at the player characters for accepting surrender of a non-noble. A good, quick lesson in the game's code of behavior. Also, asking for big rewards from kings is totally good, since if you ask for a moderate reward, you're insulting them by calling them poor. Basically, you should not act like stereotypical boring DnD paladin, but still be chivalrous.
 
Henri Barbusse said:
Kind of, but a lot of it is being called to battle by Uther or Arthur...
-snip-
But in general, player knights want to be adventuring or fighting battles and taking captives all the time. While the knights are fabulously wealthy by peasant standards (an upkeep of one ordinary knight for a year is roughly enough to feed 600 peasants for a year), they're poor by standards of nobility. You need to take captives to ransom them, slay monsters for treasure and rescue damsels to get a wife (because wives tend to die in childbirth distressingly often).
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So its basically High Medieval knight simulator in an Arthurian milieu, fucking kino now I really want to play.
 
Ghostse said:
I've learned to stop worrying and love the hitpoints, treating them as the abstraction they are meant to be. Its that mixture of toughness and luck that has you avoiding the worst of a blow.

In my OSR/OSR/Mazerats games, 0HP is "out of the session" but not necessarily dead. If they can get help in 1d6 rounds, they can be trauma stabilized and maybe survive. If they are evacced to a proper (enough) doctor/temple, there is a chance they'll pull through with consequences.
I haven't found a good system for wounds (don't tell my players) so I just have them roll a 1d100, look at their con-mod, remember what took them down, and make up consequences while making it look like I'm consulting a table.

Its not what you're looking for, but I saw someone who did a write up a while ago on a Spy system that had "Hit Points" be a pool that was reduced by not just combat but also non-combat as well (it was a conversion of some heist game). When you reached zero, something bad happened, and sometimes that something bad - as well of the negatives - gave you some HP back.
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The ACKS system for 0 hp and wounds is very good. Basically, the further you get walloped below max HP, and the longer it takes to get your wounds treated, the more penalties you accrue on the mortal wounds table, increasing your probability of death or being maimed beyond the ability to fight.
 
Secreta Secretorum said:
Now in an attempt to make this post in any way related to tabletop games, if you had to pick a system to be your daily driver what would it be?
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It's been a few pages since I shilled Savage Worlds.

It plays just about any setting very well. It has issues, but those can be worked around.

No one plays Savage Worlds though, so it would have to be 5e or PF2 just so I can find players.

Ghostse said:
WMPRPG 4e
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What game is that? Google just brings up Windows Media Player.

Shidoen said:
Any have an overpowered character you felt shouldn't have graced your tabletop?
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In a super spy game. One person dumped int and put all their points into strength. The result was like setting loose the incredible hulk whenever they got into melee range.

Ghostse said:
I hate subclasses
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Subclasses are one of the things about 5e I like. They allow people to play different flavours of stock classes without having to deep dive into autism and hand wave certain rules. You can still do that autistic re-interpretation if you want (I had a "sorcerer" in one game that was essentially using the spellgun from Outlaw Star) but if you want to play a samurai, just play samurai subclass.

It also means you can double up on classes or play the same class in multiple games without it being the same thing over and over.

Acrid Alchemist said:
I'd also pirate the Savage Worlds books if you want to look into it since the devs are shitters and don't deserve your money.
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What did they do? Aside from not releasing physical books in the UK.
 
Judge Dredd said:
What did they do? Aside from not releasing physical books in the UK.
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Lots of kowtowing during Summer of Love and purging their communities of anyone who dared even go "How about putting out the Genre Companions instead of politisperging please?". They also censored the most recent version of Deadlands because any mention of the Confederacy as anything other than proto Nazis is bad and letting players play as Confederates is a mega nono. Iirc they've also featured some freaks in their real play livestreams.

That said I do still like Savage Worlds. I ran a dinosaur cowboy game for my friends in it that they loved it and I intend to do a Stingers and Spores one shot at some point soon. I just won't give PEG a red cent but I will support the third party people like the S&S guys.

Also I'm still mad that they spent like half a year shitting out Rifts books and then another like 8 months shitting out Pathfinder books when we still didn't have the genre companion books that matched those games. We do have the Fantasy companion now but I am really waiting for the Sci-fi one which is the only one missing.
 
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