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

[Capsaicin Addict]

Boosting martial classes was difficult. Luckily, I play with people who are spergs or become spergs out of fun.

We did shit like change the amount of attacks by level (Fighters start getting multiple attacks at level 3 (+3/+1) and every 3 levels another (8th level = +8/+5+/+2) and if the casters and rogues and faggoty bards don't like that a fighter gets 7 attacks at level 20 they can eat shit with their spells and other abilities as a spoon. Specialists get extra attacks at the +5, but casters NEVER get additional attacks. Ever.

We also changed their saves.

Strength is limited to martial being above 18. (Racial bonuses can boost you above for 1/2 Orcs only)

Now for the REAL kicker. This one is a door kicker that makes people REEEEE!

Hit point adjustment

Only MARTIALS get a Con bonus to HP greater than +2. Everyone else can eat a dick.
Only MARTIALS get additional HD past level 9. That's right, not specialists (rogues, bards), not mages, not bards, not divine. They cap at 9+2, 9+1, 9+3 respectively. With NO CON BONUS. Enjoy the taste of that dick.


Casters find themselves with spells limited by Int/Cha/Whatever, in their max amount of spells known. Spells per day doesn't get a bonus unless you're divine and in good standing or better with your God. No athiest or agnostic clerics. No God, no divine abilities.

We've got a few more, most of which, as you can tell, are cribbed from 1E.

Sure, it nerfs the fuck out of the casters, BUT, I apply those rules to the bad guys too.

We also do "Chance to learn spell" and some chance of spell failure when cast. (Sorry, every spell requires a concentration check, blow that check, roll a Will save or take 1d4 points of damage per level of the spell you just blew)

It slows down combat sometimes, but you know what, my players are fine with it.

Casters rarely NEED additional attacks. I can count on one hand the number of times my PF sorcerer wound up in melee.

Not a huge fan of combining limited spell resources (slots) with the chance for spell failure all the time. One or the other, but not both.

I like the cribbed 1E/2E thing where only martials get more than a +2 Con bonus.

Here's a concept: hand some of the bard's 'rally the troops' abilities to the fighter. Make them Exceptional abilities and laugh as anti magic fields and dispel magic do NOTHING to block the buffs/debuffs you're generating. If this sounds an awful lot like the 3.5E marshal, congrats; that's where I'm cribbing from.

 

[Ghostse]

Not a huge fan of combining limited spell resources (slots) with the chance for spell failure all the time. One or the other, but not both.

In my games, the implication is that casting (and praying, to a lesser degree) is physically and mentally taxing, and spell slots are representations of how much of your own arcane energy you can pump out before collapsing. So when there is a fumbled spell, a caster has a chance to lose the spell but not lose the slot (letting you refill it after battle without needing to get your 8 hours of rest) - you lost focus early in the cast, or realized the spell felt 'off', so didn't channel much power into it.
If a caster wasn't in combat or otherwise pressured, they were very likely to keep their slot. If threatened or taking fire, they might be too distracted to realize they'd fucked up.

 

[Adamska]

Reminds me of a fix for fighter that wasn't "Just play Warblade". You gestalt it with Knight and Marshall, taking the best elements of all three at once.

 

[Snekposter]

As someone who primarily plays either martials or martial-lites like Rogue, they need some love due to a caster's versatility. While bonus attacks are nice, it would be a lot nicer if they got extra actions period, such as Action Surge being 1/Encounter and not 1/Rest. Since "hit things with stick" is helpful but a mage can do that with a bitch basic cantrip, giving them some ways to either help to control the battlespace through actions or denying actions or the ability to straight up blender anything that gets close in the form of a two-weapon or two-handing fighter. But lets face it, Fireball does a much better job of wrecking shit than a greatsword ever will.

 

[The Demon Pimp of Razgriz]

Reminds me of a fix for fighter that wasn't "Just play Warblade". You gestalt it with Knight and Marshall, taking the best elements of all three at once.

The problem with that is that the Knight and the Marshal themselves aren't very good classes, and aren't even particularly good at being what they are specifically supposed to be specced out as (Walking tank and battlefield controller, respectively). Even with this gestalt setup, you would have to do extensive homebrew to make it work.

 

[Dunsparce]

The problem with that is that the Knight and the Marshal themselves aren't very good classes, and aren't even particularly good at being what they are specifically supposed to be specced out as (Walking tank and battlefield controller, respectively). Even with this gestalt setup, you would have to do extensive homebrew to make it work.

That reminds me of a topic back in the day where there was a hypothetical class that was a geshalt of all of the base classes that don't have access to a subsystem in any capacity(casting, psionics, maneuvers, ect), and it was at best barely a Tier 3.

 

[Adamska]

The problem with that is that the Knight and the Marshal themselves aren't very good classes, and aren't even particularly good at being what they are specifically supposed to be specced out as (Walking tank and battlefield controller, respectively). Even with this gestalt setup, you would have to do extensive homebrew to make it work.

Well yeah they suck, but slap the Marshall's auras and add in the mounts, plus add skills gained from them to the fighter and you get something that's playable. You get the boosts to allies, can hit worth a damn, and your mount gets good.

Still, just play Warblade.

 

[Corn Flakes]

I still want to give the idea of giving martials followers as a class feature a try. I've been meaning to finally try my hand at GMing seriously, so I think I'll ask my GM for some pointers and put our regulars through a few one-shots to test it out. I know our Paladin player at least would be over-the-moon about having a squire. I'll report back here if it works out.

 

[Sable]

You'll probably want to limit it, either by the number or ability of followers- there's a reason why Leadership is considered broken.

It could do pretty well though.

 

[The Demon Pimp of Razgriz]

You'll probably want to limit it, either by the number or ability of followers- there's a reason why Leadership is considered broken.

It could do pretty well though.

Funnily enough, leadership is considered to be the only way to make the Marshal worth while, because its powers are completely wasted on a normally sized group.

 

[ryu289]

For the five people who played Deadlands, they're retconning the entire crutch of the setting so the confederates lost and there is no stalemate. You also cannot play them as a faction.

Yeah. Nice job borking your own setting and making it generic fantasy western with no discussion or nuance or hard conflicts morally. SOUTH BAD!!! is the end game.

What nuance? The Confederacy was all about Slavery. You can't have the former without the latter.

In his famous cornerstone speech, Alexander Stephens — the first vice-president of the CSA — disputes, at length, the so-called "Lost Cause of the South"

Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition. [Crowd applauded.] This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth. This truth has been slow in the process of its development, like all other truths in the various departments of science. It has been so even amongst us. Many who hear me, perhaps, can recollect well, that this truth was not generally admitted, even within their day. The errors of the past generation still clung to many as late as twenty years ago. Those at the North, who still cling to these errors, with a zeal above knowledge, we justly denominate fanatics.

Among the various Articles of Secession promulgated by the would-be members of the Confederacy were:

Georgia:

The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.

Mississippi:

Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.

South Carolina:

We affirm that these ends for which this Government was instituted have been defeated, and the Government itself has been made destructive of them by the action of the non-slaveholding States. Those States have assume the right of deciding upon the propriety of our domestic institutions; and have denied the rights of property established in fifteen of the States and recognized by the Constitution; they have denounced as sinful the institution of slavery; they have permitted open establishment among them of societies, whose avowed object is to disturb the peace and to eloign the property of the citizens of other States. They have encouraged and assisted thousands of our slaves to leave their homes; and those who remain, have been incited by emissaries, books and pictures to servile insurrection.

Texas:

Texas abandoned her separate national existence and consented to become one of the Confederated Union... She was received into the confederacy...as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery — the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits — a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time.

all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations…

Constituent assemblies in the other states of the Confederacy all underscored in their discussions the need to maintain a slave society and economy. Likewise, the right to hold slaves was specifically protected by the constitution of the Confederacy, denying its constituent states the right to outlaw slavery within its territories(See Article I, Section 9 (4); Article IV, Section 2 (I) and (3); Article IV, Section 3 (3) of the Constitution of the Confederate States).

So much for "State's rights".

As a final nail in the coffin, there's the proposed Crittenden Compromise

of 1861. Four states had already seceded, but Senator John J. Crittenden hoped that war could be prevented and union restored with a massive "compromise" that was largely a concession to the South. The compromise consisted of a set of proposed Constitutional amendments which dealt entirely with slavery. In other words, Crittenden had some reason to believe that war could be prevented solely by promising the preservation of Southern slavery, and if it weren't for Republican opposition (the amendments lost in the Senate by 25 Republican votes to 23 others), the compromise could very well have succeeded. It never occurred to anyone to prevent war by offering the South a non-slavery-related compromise.

But fuck em. I have the originals and they'll be the only ones I play if they wanna do stupid shit. I'll be sure not to buy any more of their books and games in the future. Because he is right- he can do whatever to his setting but I don't have to like or support his pussy behaviour.

Yes because getting rid of the driving force of the Confederacy and pretending it wasn't a thing isn't being a pussy.

Seems an odd thing to do, part of any wild west game for adults should probably acknowlague a the social issues of the period-otherwise you're just doing a bland sterilized 50's western. Retoconning it doesnt really do anything for the setting or IRL society.

Actually, the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed by racists and Reconstruction is floundering. Racism, previously thought to be a thing of the past, is apparently still an enormous force in the setting.

 

[Starscreams Cape]

Shocker! ryu289 spams a post with a shitload of links that nobody clicks on.

Go back to your own lolcow thread you retard pedo apologist.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Shocker! ryu289 spams a post with a shitload of links that nobody clicks on.

Go back to your own lolcow thread you retard pedo apologist.

Replying to a 2-year old post, too. His buddies on Reddit must have taken a long time to craft this reply for him.

 

[knightlautrec]

Bruh - I ain't reading all that shit. The mere fact you replied to a comment I made nearly two years ago? Makes you a SUPREME fucking sperg. And I say that as someone who plays WoD as their mainline RP.

So fuck off dude. Nobody gives a shit. Deadlands is alt history not 1 to 1 history. If you really don't understand what grey morality and fucking nuance is in villains then you should go back to DnD 4th Ed because it clearly suits your minuscule understanding of storytelling and won't tax that smooth brain of yours too much.

 

[Adamska]

Shocker! ryu289 spams a post with a shitload of links that nobody clicks on.

Go back to your own lolcow thread you retard pedo apologist.

Never was the late rating so appropriate for this thread as what he dribbled out after begging others to do his work for him.

 

[Ghostse]

I wonder if that's why 20th century and modern adventure games don't work. Everybody loves Indiana Jones and Uncharted, but no one is down to play that. Same with cyberpunk. It has to be Shadowrun or nothing. After my current campaign, I'm tempted to try adding non-human races to those settings.

Sorry for being late on the reply to this, but needed to have the time to put in the effort for an effort post.
Before I start my autistic bloviation, I just want to say that if search was working I'd ask you just look up posts containing "nigger" by user Ghostse to establish my bonafides, but given that unwashed speds are DDOSing the site I'll just have to ask you to take my word that I'm no proponent of CRT or of cucking to the mysterymeat dangerhair mob.

The reason Modern Adventure Games don't work is because as @Corn Flakes points out, you need character diversity to draw people in. And it makes people uncomfortable to assign traits to modern Human racial groups, even national and regional ethnic groups, unless they can be completely demonized and dehumanized. See: Nazis, confederates.
This is why Humans in most systems are just the base customizable class. You can't have humans get +2 to STR when you have a noodle-armed nerd in the group.
You can get away with doing racial bonuses with Fantasy because "Elves get +2 Dex/+2 Int? Ok that makes sense, I've never met an elf but that fits." But try say "Moroccans get +2 Dex and Pickpocket /Bluff/Barter as default skills? ummmm....."

The problem is that while for current sensibilities this is a nonstarter, for something set in the 1920s/30s it is actually legit. Though you run ino the "Marble Jar Issue" (which I go into below) You could make general statements about the Irish, the Germans, or the Chinese, etc and have them be true more often than not.

Even into the 50s, if you were born into the wool-making region, regardless of how you felt about wool, you were going to be making wool/raising sheep (or supporting those who did) from cradle to grave. There was solid local culture because you didn't get out much. Before Radio and TV, your news was hyper local gossip. So you could make statements about people from a region - temperment, dress, speech - and have it be generally true, because people were isloated. After around the mid-1900s, that changed as transportation and media brought the world in. Travel became more common and regular. Its difficult for folks to understand that even if now you can't just say "Anyone from Sicily is a sheep-fucking murderous thief", for the majority of humanity's history that was largely true.

Where we run into what I call the "Marble Jar Problem".
Everyone remembers the old "You fill a jar with 100 marbles, 90 of them black and 10 white; what's the odds of pulling a black marble?". So if the jar is 90% black marbles, you can say 'Marbles in that jar are black' and be generally true but not completely accurate (and then you need to think about what if the jar is 60% black marbles; is that still a true statement?) So if you try to add nationalities to Modern/near modern settings, you risk shoehorning races/cultures into boxes that don't fit.

Anyway, tl;dr is the only two ways I've known this to really work reliably is essentially having players select Pre-gens: giving the players a bunch of characters to chose from so you are assigning things to a person and not a people. The broad cultural spectrum of the Caribbean doesn't matter, because you are only addressing the life story of Jonathan St. Thomas the mechanic from Jamaica.
The other is to go full alternative earth and just have made up cultures and countries. No one has any preconceptions about people from the Gittakkatakkan Empire.

Additionally, Backgrounds can also help in this regard, or you can also just straight up go Traveller/Tables where players roll up their characters based on origin, and you base things on how the dice turned out. The only other option is an autistic list of a bunch of origins.

Ironically, that's where accents and (often racist) national stereotypes shine. Characters need to have memorable things about them, and fantasy races map directly to human cultures. [ ... ] Diversity makes those games memorable. Unfortunately for the SJWs, it's not the kind of "diversity" they like. It's the kind of diversity where characters are actually easy to tell apart and not just one big jumble of wild hair colors and pronouns.

This right here. They don't understand that you can have things be generally true without it being its absolutely true

 

[Starscreams Cape]

Bruh - I ain't reading all that shit. The mere fact you replied to a comment I made nearly two years ago? Makes you a SUPREME fucking sperg. And I say that as someone who plays WoD as their mainline RP.

So fuck off dude. Nobody gives a shit. Deadlands is alt history not 1 to 1 history. If you really don't understand what grey morality and fucking nuance is in villains then you should go back to DnD 4th Ed because it clearly suits your minuscule understanding of storytelling and won't tax that smooth brain of yours too much.

And by the way, for those that might not know, not only is ryu289 the Spergclub president, he's also a client.

https://embed.kiwifarms.st/threads/jacob-s-blaustein-ryu238-ryu289.99675/

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

LOL. This is the same faggot who got turfed off RPGnet for necroing a thread just to whine at a mod. While the RPGnet mods are also faggots, that was pretty stupid.

 

[Corn Flakes]

Sorry for being late on the reply to this, but needed to have the time to put in the effort for an effort post.
Before I start my autistic bloviation, I just want to say that if search was working I'd ask you just look up posts containing "nigger" by user Ghostse to establish my bonafides, but given that unwashed speds are DDOSing the site I'll just have to ask you to take my word that I'm no proponent of CRT or of cucking to the mysterymeat dangerhair mob.

The reason Modern Adventure Games don't work is because as @Corn Flakes points out, you need character diversity to draw people in. And it makes people uncomfortable to assign traits to modern Human racial groups, even national and regional ethnic groups, unless they can be completely demonized and dehumanized. See: Nazis, confederates.
This is why Humans in most systems are just the base customizable class. You can't have humans get +2 to STR when you have a noodle-armed nerd in the group.
You can get away with doing racial bonuses with Fantasy because "Elves get +2 Dex/+2 Int? Ok that makes sense, I've never met an elf but that fits." But try say "Moroccans get +2 Dex and Pickpocket /Bluff/Barter as default skills? ummmm....."

The problem is that while for current sensibilities this is a nonstarter, for something set in the 1920s/30s it is actually legit. Though you run ino the "Marble Jar Issue" (which I go into below) You could make general statements about the Irish, the Germans, or the Chinese, etc and have them be true more often than not.

Even into the 50s, if you were born into the wool-making region, regardless of how you felt about wool, you were going to be making wool/raising sheep (or supporting those who did) from cradle to grave. There was solid local culture because you didn't get out much. Before Radio and TV, your news was hyper local gossip. So you could make statements about people from a region - temperment, dress, speech - and have it be generally true, because people were isloated. After around the mid-1900s, that changed as transportation and media brought the world in. Travel became more common and regular. Its difficult for folks to understand that even if now you can't just say "Anyone from Sicily is a sheep-fucking murderous thief", for the majority of humanity's history that was largely true.

Where we run into what I call the "Marble Jar Problem".
Everyone remembers the old "You fill a jar with 100 marbles, 90 of them black and 10 white; what's the odds of pulling a black marble?". So if the jar is 90% black marbles, you can say 'Marbles in that jar are black' and be generally true but not completely accurate (and then you need to think about what if the jar is 60% black marbles; is that still a true statement?) So if you try to add nationalities to Modern/near modern settings, you risk shoehorning races/cultures into boxes that don't fit.

Anyway, tl;dr is the only two ways I've known this to really work reliably is essentially having players select Pre-gens: giving the players a bunch of characters to chose from so you are assigning things to a person and not a people. The broad cultural spectrum of the Caribbean doesn't matter, because you are only addressing the life story of Jonathan St. Thomas the mechanic from Jamaica.
The other is to go full alternative earth and just have made up cultures and countries. No one has any preconceptions about people from the Gittakkatakkan Empire.

Additionally, Backgrounds can also help in this regard, or you can also just straight up go Traveller/Tables where players roll up their characters based on origin, and you base things on how the dice turned out. The only other option is an autistic list of a bunch of origins.



This right here. They don't understand that you can have things be generally true without it being its absolutely true

Through the years, I've seen two good solutions for making modern era settings more interesting:

The first is going with an alternate Earth. The Strangereal solution. The world is familiar and its nations and ethnic groups directly map to groups on Earth, but they're just different enough that you can get away with exaggerations and broad generalizations because they're clearly fictional. This could also work as the modern-day "evolution" of a fantasy world, with or without magic to go along with the technology. And remember, kids: Belka did nothing wrong.

The second is going ham. Like, hard pulp. That's the World of Darkness approach. By which I mean the OG WoD, not the Current Year sanitized shit they're pushing out these days. This world is clearly Earth as we know it, but everything about it is exaggerated. Stereotypes not only exist, they're omnipresent. Every young black man is a thug, every hook-nosed semite is a greedy bastard, every whore on the street has a 50% chance of being an undercover female cop, every Rotary Club member is a baby-eating Satanist, every white guy in a suit is a soulless corporate drone being crushed by the system, etc, etc. Everybody is an asshole to some level or another, but at least they're predictable assholes, so it's relatively easy for smart players to get NPCs to do what they want by playing with their motivations and goals. And, of course, this makes the exceptions to these stereotypes a lot more memorable.

Ironically, the second solution is sort of what a lot of woke settings try to do, but they fail by having clear favorites that aren't allowed to have glaring flaws. So their villains, the guys everybody is supposed to hate, and up being a lot more interesting than the protagonists they want us to root for. Case in point, Thirsty Sword Lesbians tried extremely hard to make the titular sword lesbians seem "cool", but this dude here stole the fucking show:

 

[Snekposter]

Fucking hell, with a kickass cape like that I can't think of a show he won't steal. Dude doesn't even need to bother T-posing to assert his dominance over that woman. His cane and his cloak's shoulders do that job for him.