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

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Just got a hold of a bunch of PDF's for RECON and I've been reading them over again.

Honestly, I am thinking of writing some quick homebrew rules for zombies in RECON for a Dawn of the Dead scenario.
 
I used to dm in person but a gf of a player got involved and ruined it all. I know damn well I did not play by the rules but I didn't care I just wanted us to have fun. I haven't really fucked around with online play I mean I've dmed two games on roll20 but I kind of want to be a player and maybe even do something that's not dnd (although I'm not opposed to dnd)
Are there any open groups/people patient enough to show me a system and let me read up and learn it to play online or in person (Chicago suburbs)? I miss rolling dice. Forgive me if this is the wrong place to post this request.
 
I shared this story on 4chan, sharing it here too.

I play Pathfinder. We were discussing a future adventure path and what characters we were playing. To give a little backstory, the DM has a rule about the Diplomacy skill: Roll, then the DM applies modifiers based on what you say (in theory, sounds reasonable. In practice, the Diplomacy skill just fails every time no matter what you say or roll). Because nothing I say matters, I'm planning on playing an orc with the Feral racial trait (get a few bonuses, but lose all language skills). I jokingly ask the group if someone wants to be my character's tard wrangler.

Several players started looking up "tard wrangler" in the pathfinder SRD to see what prerequisites it had.

I hate the d20 system sometimes, especially it's "everything needs to be a feat" mentality.
 
JektheDumbass said:
I shared this story on 4chan, sharing it here too.

I play Pathfinder. We were discussing a future adventure path and what characters we were playing. To give a little backstory, the DM has a rule about the Diplomacy skill: Roll, then the DM applies modifiers based on what you say (in theory, sounds reasonable. In practice, the Diplomacy skill just fails every time no matter what you say or roll). Because nothing I say matters, I'm planning on playing an orc with the Feral racial trait (get a few bonuses, but lose all language skills). I jokingly ask the group if someone wants to be my character's tard wrangler.

Several players started looking up "tard wrangler" in the pathfinder SRD to see what prerequisites it had.

I hate the d20 system sometimes, especially it's "everything needs to be a feat" mentality.
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It's why I stopped playing 3.X, I felt like I wanted to do anything I needed a prestige class or a feat. It's what ruins a lot of Pathfinder games because people don't realize it doesn't play like that. Those types of players would never be able to play a game of AD&D, hell I doubt they could play a game of CoC or Traveler.


When I look for groups I find ones that want to tell a story, and don't care so much about the game play. Like if you want game play, play a video game. If you want a role playing game, play a role playing game. The first thing in old school games you'd see in the books was a description of the setting and what the players could expect to see and do in the world, it wasn't all about crunch.
 
Anonymus Fluhre said:
It's why I stopped playing 3.X, I felt like I wanted to do anything I needed a prestige class or a feat. It's what ruins a lot of Pathfinder games because people don't realize it doesn't play like that. Those types of players would never be able to play a game of AD&D, hell I doubt they could play a game of CoC or Traveler.


When I look for groups I find ones that want to tell a story, and don't care so much about the game play. Like if you want game play, play a video game. If you want a role playing game, play a role playing game. The first thing in old school games you'd see in the books was a description of the setting and what the players could expect to see and do in the world, it wasn't all about crunch.
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It's not that hard to mix both Roleplaying and Rollplaying together. I'm sure everyone on here that I play D&D with me can say I know most of the crunch-related stuff for D&D 3.X, but that doesn't mean that I can't roleplay or even have a character do stuff that, mechanically, they should be completely terrible at doing.

One of my characters is a Ranger that has below average charisma for his race and no ranks in any social skills, but still is the one that does most of the negotiations, often successfully since all I need to do is respect the other party and try to reason with them in a manner that makes sense to them. He even mixes the crunch in when he uses spells to negotiate with animals and plant creatures via spells rangers get.
 
Dunsparce said:
It's not that hard to mix both Roleplaying and Rollplaying together. I'm sure everyone on here that I play D&D with me can say I know most of the crunch-related stuff for D&D 3.X, but that doesn't mean that I can't roleplay or even have a character do stuff that, mechanically, they should be completely terrible at doing.

One of my characters is a Ranger that has below average charisma for his race and no ranks in any social skills, but still is the one that does most of the negotiations, often successfully since all I need to do is respect the other party and try to reason with them in a manner that makes sense to them. He even mixes the crunch in when he uses spells to negotiate with animals and plant creatures via spells rangers get.
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Around here it was more about the crunch, it's why 3X, 4th and 5th editions were so popular followed by other d20 games. The last time I had a more role playing game game was with my old group I was with from the 1980's
 
I like myself crunchy game mechanics, but I'm also a guy who plays for the story. Using FATE/FUDGE isn't a bad idea though.
 
Dunsparce said:
It's not that hard to mix both Roleplaying and Rollplaying together. I'm sure everyone on here that I play D&D with me can say I know most of the crunch-related stuff for D&D 3.X, but that doesn't mean that I can't roleplay or even have a character do stuff that, mechanically, they should be completely terrible at doing.

One of my characters is a Ranger that has below average charisma for his race and no ranks in any social skills, but still is the one that does most of the negotiations, often successfully since all I need to do is respect the other party and try to reason with them in a manner that makes sense to them. He even mixes the crunch in when he uses spells to negotiate with animals and plant creatures via spells rangers get.
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I should mention that one of the best games I've been in in the past 10 years was when I was in a group where our GM was the Narrative Director for a major gaming studio so he could tell a great story. The other GM's I've had in the past that wanted to be a good storyteller never actually gave any real lore about their world before I arrived. Like one had nearly 30 years worth of lore, like great! Can I see it? No? Then why tell me when it only matters to you? (that same GM did the whole attack roll vs AC roll which doesn't work with Pathfinder because a +9 for let's say a melee hit isn't going to do too well against a +14 defense roll.)
 
I've never seen a home brew adventure or campaign world that wasn't garbage. YMMV, of course but my anus reflexively clenches when any DM describes their campaign.
 
JektheDumbass said:
I've never seen a home brew adventure or campaign world that wasn't garbage. YMMV, of course but my anus reflexively clenches when any DM describes their campaign.
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Usually cause they are really not that special or creative but everyone thinks of themselves as JRR Tolkien.
Knew a girl that came up with a setting (in her case it was for a Larp-group) that must have been the most one of the most ridiculous and poorly thought out settings in the history of worldbuilding.

The first thing that struck me was that it mentioned the island was populated by 70+ Million people, which is an instant giveaway that the creator wants to emphasize how "big and powerful" the setting (and thus their characters) is, sort of like a dick-measuring contest for idiots. "My imaginary nation is more powerful than yours, since it has much more imaginary people! Therefore, I am more important than you!" It's usually just an excuse to pull off ridiculous amounts of so-called "telling" and to give their characters a thin veneer of status and influence.
And if you think that's stupid check out the rest:
The "island" was so large, compared to our Earth, it would reach from Stockholm to South Africa and from New York almost all the way to Japan, while covering all of Eurasia. And this was supposed to be only one of several islands. There was supposedly another, larger island to the north.
Considering the number of inhabitants, this would mean that Alaska (ice and sea area included) would have at least ten times the number of people per square mile compared to this super-continent-sized wasteland. Traveltime by land would be measured in months, even between small hamlets; years, if you wanted to travel from one capital to the next.

And that's before we even get into lore.
There were like 7 nations with wildly different techlevels (reaching from early middle ages, where mail armor was state of the art) up to a place with steam engines (that based on its general techlevel should have been fielding early machine guns and repeating rifles). Every nation had its specialty that no other nation would be allowed to copy. According to the lore, this system was recently started after a prolonged, bloody, several centuries long war, which was concluded by dividing responsibilities and this supposedly helped consolidate peace. That means there would be one nation that would train soldiers, one nation would train healers, one nation would train hunters, one nation would train merchants and so on. I think there was one nation that trained librarians for some reason. And if Nation A needed an army, they would be forced to buy it from Nation B. How this is supposed to work is anyone's guess. Just the idea of going "Yup, and no one is allowed to train soldiers except our nation" and everyone going along with it right after several generations of war is making my head spin.

Mind you, all this for a group of 5 players that wouldn't even play in this setting, since they were essentially exiled.
 
So in the FATE campaign I am in, I punched a guy so hard that his head exploded, an iron giant appeared in front of a military base, got shot in one eye by a French smurf, and got impaled in the eye with a rifle with a grenade launcher attachment (which actually did explode). Two enemies managed to bounce off said giant, and a third one almost bounced off but collided with a six foot mace with the gravity of a small star. The battle ended after I embedded myself into the giant's half exploded head by doing a cannonball, and the temporally displaced space pirate used a heat ray on it. At least we got the truck into the military base so, mission accomplished. Oh, and a villainous speedster got intercepted by Astra and probably got his ass handed to him on a silver platter.
 
We went through a different game this Saturday, a little game called Fuckworld...


Sorry for the technical difficulties that ate a third of the actual video; we were testing and overhauling our setup and we had some shakedown issues that we didn't expect. Next week we go back to Sigmata and I can happily state that errors like this won't happen again.
 
For some godforsaken reason I want to GM a oneshot using FATE or Everyone is John in the Filthy Frank universe. Are you a bad enough dude to take back Lord ChinChin's stolen chromosomes before he becomes Azathoth? More seriously, I also want to run SOMETHING using the Velvet Book (Monsters and Other Things hack by Persona fans). Failing that, a basic D&D 5e campaign set in not-medieval Belgium. Notebook is filled with many a shitty campaign setting idea.

Currently in a weekly D&D 5e game as a player. I can smell the nervousness off our GM but I believe in him.
 
Grimoire Canthari said:
For some godforsaken reason I want to GM a oneshot using FATE or Everyone is John in the Filthy Frank universe. Are you a bad enough dude to take back Lord ChinChin's stolen chromosomes before he becomes Azathoth? More seriously, I also want to run SOMETHING using the Velvet Book (Monsters and Other Things hack by Persona fans). Failing that, a basic D&D 5e campaign set in not-medieval Belgium. Notebook is filled with many a shitty campaign setting idea.

Currently in a weekly D&D 5e game as a player. I can smell the nervousness off our GM but I believe in him.
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Well don't leave us hangin', what are you roleplaying as?
 
So, I've been reading about a small company back in the 80's and early 90's called Leading Edge Games and I must say it is rather interesting.

For those who don't know, these were the guys that made the infamous Phoenix Command RPG, a modern military game that had an insanely complicated and math-heavy combat system (seriously, there's no way I could play that game rules-as-written without using a scientific calculator) and became a minor meme in the RPG community because of how complex it was. Apparently, the guys who ran Leading Edge Games were actual physicists who graduated from MIT and one of them later worked as a rocket scientist.

Well, aside from Phoenix Command, the company also made a series of licensed RPG's at the end of the 1980's and very early 1990's based on popular movies, most notably Aliens, which was still mechanically complex but not quite as heavy as Phoenix Command.

They also made a licensed RPG based on Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1993, presumably as a way to cash in on the popularity of both the Coppola film and Vampire: The Masquerade, which would've been at the height of its initial popularity around that same time.

The Dracula RPG is kind of rare (Amazon doesn't even have any copies in stock at the moment) and the same company also made a board game tie-in, which complicates matters even further.

However, based on what I can find on Google, the game itself used a system that completely different and much less complicated than Phoenix Command or Aliens, and allowed for campaigns in both the Victorian setting of the novel and movie as well as campaigns set in the modern day and medieval periods. Amusingly, this game predated White Wolf's own Dark Ages and Victorian settings by several years.

Players could be either hunters in the vein of Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker or you could actually play as a vampire as well. I've even heard someone online mention a possible supplement for werewolf characters, but I have found no corroborating evidence of such a supplement existing or even being announced.

According to some of the reviews and forum posts I read, vampire powers were a lot like D&D spells, you could only use a power once per night and had to sleep in a coffin to regain the powers used.

Interestingly enough, Leading Edge Games also had planned to make licensed RPG adaptations of Army of Darkness and even Lawnmower Man but I can't find any real information on either game other than the company having the licenses at one point, which makes me think Leading Edge Games folded before these games could be released.

Honestly, I wouldn't mind trying out the RPG adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula if I can actually find a copy of it anywhere. Could be good for a quick beer-and-pretzels one shot game, which is more in my style.
 
REGENDarySumanai said:
Well don't leave us hangin', what are you roleplaying as?
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I'm a 3rd level human rogue, assassin archetype. Sucks in comparison to arcane trickster but former shady back alley doctors aren't magical, they are shrewd opportunistic faggots regardless of their morals. Getting the right voice is a huge bitch (Expectation: Low, smooth, buttery voice with a slight rumble and minor Slav accent for flavor. Reality: Inconsistent 'male' voice) but he's still really fun to play. With the new bard player, part of his primary role in buttering up NPCs is probably gonna be less prominent but you can't stop the RP train.

Incidentally, picking him over the Germanic village girl wizard has probably cockblocked the thirsty mong at the table. lol git fukd homo
 
Grimoire Canthari said:
Currently in a weekly D&D 5e game as a player. I can smell the nervousness off our GM but I believe in him.
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He is doomed to failure. Best put him out his misery quickly and do as much damage to the campaign world as possible...Unless you like the guy, then explain to him what he did wrong. Still fuck up the world though.
 
Anonymus Fluhre said:
He is doomed to failure. Best put him out his misery quickly and do as much damage to the campaign world as possible...Unless you like the guy, then explain to him what he did wrong. Still fuck up the world though.
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He's giving this shit a honest shot, plus I like his cute face especially when he is getting baited but bait is for out of game, I am merciful I've been the one trying to influence more RP out of the newbs (success...?) and (attempting) to teach them rules like flank the stupid niggers you get advantage on your attack rolls if you do, come on now. I reserve my cuntery for real fuckers like Greg.

Making some gay ass shopkeeper give out his stock for free and run off through a rockslide-blocked tunnel that we can't get past? Hilarious in hindsight ngl, but faggy. Putting a Sans statue and auto-killing a player for making an OOC insult to undertale?

At least he was a good sport about everyone derailing near the end.
 
Grimoire Canthari said:
He's giving this shit a honest shot, plus I like his cute face especially when he is getting baited but bait is for out of game, I am merciful I've been the one trying to influence more RP out of the newbs (success...?) and (attempting) to teach them rules like flank the stupid niggers you get advantage on your attack rolls if you do, come on now. I reserve my cuntery for real fuckers like Greg.

Making some gay ass shopkeeper give out his stock for free and run off through a rockslide-blocked tunnel that we can't get past? Hilarious in hindsight ngl, but faggy. Putting a Sans statue and auto-killing a player for making an OOC insult to undertale?

At least he was a good sport about everyone derailing near the end.
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My very last Pathfinder game I played a Magus who was more like a bard who could get out of the majority of fights just by talking. Due to how broken d20 rules can be no mater the game I had a +20 plus on my blue rolls so I just went around telling everyone I was god. An unbelievable lie I think is a DC 30 so I had no problem getting people to believe me (my high bluff was only good for lying, typical bluff was a +10 or so). I also found it fun to use deaf/ blindness spell on bosses and choose blind due to all of the bonuses you get on a blinded target. I was looking forward to getting the ability to use coup de grace people with a standard action later in the game but never happened.
 
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