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

[Desu Mountain]

I decided to take a look through the Pathfinder 2E books, specifically the Bestiaries and Core Rulebook, and I can confidently say that the art quality has noticeably declined from 1E, especially in regards to body proportions. Most disturbing is that heads tend to be either drawn grossly oversized or comically small.

 

[Janusz z Gliwic]

That was actually something I also should've mentioned; "Rules light" systems are suffering to run as a GM too. It's because each edge case is something they have to kludge a fix for since the design principle of stuff like this is "fuck it, the GM will fix it for the players". These systems are lazy, and expect the players to fix their unfinished shit for them.

That's the entire point of this system. It gives you general framework to work and the rest is up to you.

It also highlights the other issue in this same sentence: trying to turn these games collaborative. It means the players have an incentive to bully the GM into allowing things they otherwise could either clarify or shut down in a crunchier system.

In something like Pathfinder 2e, you had a far wider selection of skills and abilities you could draw on that would not require a debate or discussion to use for a problem. Same with Vampire. Same with Call of Cthulhu.

In crunchy system you will instead get powergamers and rule lawyers. Retards gonna retard.

"If".

That actually proves my point; your GM had to essentially and forcefully try to kill you, since it was the only way to actually get something close to approaching a threat. It's also why I do rate the system higher than PBTA, where it's even harder to actually make something threatening unless you have the party roll.

That was what I originally said - that the system can be as lethal as GM wants. And our GM didn't specifically design the situation to fuck us up, he designed regular score, we made bad decisions, and bad dice rolls made it pretty close call. He could easily make it much, much deadlier.

There'd be no ifs, ands, or buts if this was an ST or Chaosium system in effect, since there's actual and finer ways to modulate and make things threatening in those.

Never played either of these though I want to play VTM in the future.

It also assumes you have reliable access to a good group, and much like awful films, you can mitigate a lot with that. Companies focus more and more on groups cobbled together from strangers as of late, hence why I tend to find this to be an issue.

That explains your attitude, I imagine random tards are not what you want when running system like this. Luckily, I have decent group of players so not an issue for me.

 

[Fag Albert]

I love watching how triggered leftists get when reviewing the price of freedom RPG. So a good number of soy boy types had to make a disclaimer after Russia invaded Ukraine. Because he swore Russia invading everyone was a rightwing conspiracy theory. The vintage RPG podcast is extra hilarious because they got offended by the game having a conservative playable jew being an anti-communist freedom fighter. These faggots love to cry racism, yet they aren't even hiding the fact they hate Jews. I bet this is a common mindset at WOTC and choasium. Probably going to be used to clean out house just like Hollywood is doing now.

Holy shit. Yes.

This fucking cover rules. There is so much joy to be had here. Go way overboard with it. I'd have a mixtape of the shittiest 80's pop songs i could find. npcs would have names like Rex Stryker.

 

[Snekposter]

Holy shit. Yes.
View attachment 6371499
This fucking cover rules. There is so much joy to be had here. Go way overboard with it. I'd have a mixtape of the shittiest 80's pop songs i could find. npcs would have names like Rex Stryker.

All of the sample characters are great, too. You've got a Dirty Harry, a black-skinned Rafael Gan Ganowitz, an old-ass Polish-Jew jeweler who wants to go out in a blaze of glory at 72 fighting the Communists who wrecked his native land and have come for his new one...

And of course the book itself pulls no punches on Communists, collaborators, and what to do about them both:

 

[Obstacle]

Basically, the simpler the game, the more the GM has to actually design and build it themselves since the game didn't do any of that. Then throw in the mentality that's become popular which states the players have more control over the story in some cases than the DM, and you can see why I think they can be quite shit.

Yeah, there's a happy median between rules bloat and rules defecit.
A system should be robust, consistent, and easy to reference.
Some edition of Runequest I ran had 20% difficulty increments as standard for skill checks, depending on if a task was of "average" difficulty, or easy, very easy, or hard, or very hard, and so on and so forth (percentile skill system, roll under) which helped greatly with gauging off-the-cuff skill challenges that I hadn't anticipated.
Mighta been the new one, or Mongquest.
Neither edition is perfect mind.
Mongquest is terribly edited to the extent of basic combat being being broken without errata (hence why the books were so cheap) and the new one is sorta unwieldy, with the fluffy but sorta vague elemental affinities affecting whole swathes of skills, and especially the default chargen options with family history and all that jazz, which are both too specific to dragon pass and the surrounding areas circa just after the Lunar conquest of The Holy Country, and also tedious as fuck.
But then, I've always had to make do with whatever normalfags I could wrangle for a group, and normalfags make everything tedious.

Shit, I remember one time I ran a one-shot (because I couldn't be fucked to run another for them) for two ostensibly well educated men, who were both too lazy to actually add up their skill totals on their character sheets, and just wrote all the bonuses next to one another, even when I told them to add them up as they got them.
So first time one of them tried to do anything requiring a skill check he looked at his character sheet and just went "Derp?", and the game ground to a halt for ten minutes as they both did something they should have done in the pre-game.

I don't DM much any more.
My upstairs neighbor, who's a programmer said "I'll have a go, how hard can it be?"
So I laughed and offered to lend him my core set.
He looked at the thickness and said "Maybe some other time".

I mean, maybe "rules lite" systems are superficially less intimidating to normalfags, which is why there's a trend for them.

 

[Corn Flakes]

I mean, maybe "rules lite" systems are superficially less intimidating to normalfags, which is why there's a trend for them.

That's probably part of it.

In fairness, GMs are and have always been a rare and strange breed. It takes a different kind of person to not just want to play the game, but also run it. Dealers choice on whether that person is a frustrated writer or a control freak. So someone who'd like to be a GM would read those books just fine, they'd be interested in the mechanics of the game. Most rules-lite games seem to subscribe to this idea that everybody can GM, or that GMing is a "collaborative" effort... even though it clearly doesn't work like that for most people.

 

[Henri Barbusse]

There's a bunch of rules-lite games that are pretty comprehensive on how to roll, but they tend to be Japanese games and those are often geared towards one-shot play that's easy to pick up. The simplest I probably ran into just had character stats as 10 boxes that are either filled or blank. If you act nicely or try to help, you have to roll less on a d10 than your amount of blank boxes. If you act like an asshole or try to hurt, you have to roll less on a d10 than your filled boxes. As time passes, character's boxes get filled, so it's easier to succeed at being an asshole and harder to succeed at being nice and since the game is supposed to be semi-PvP horror game, that fits the theme. Moment to moment adjudication is pretty easy, but it's a Japanese game, so it's pretty scripted in terms of scenes etc. including pre-made roles for characters to play.

 

[Ghostse]

For me, the good/bad side of "Rules light" is 'does the game have a system in place to deal with common issues'

As a for-instance, the CritRoletard systme Candelabra Obscura, where there is no PvP system despite the system set so the characters will often be at odds with each other.

Most rules light systems do what @Adamska describes which is give you the CONCEPT of a game you have to fill in. They use words and terms but don't define them. And to what @Janusz z Gliwic says about rules lawyers and minmaxers in rules heavy games, I can only say the less tight the system, the bigger issues I've had rules laywers and power gamers. Just in more narrative games the Power Gamers there often have very little limits on how much power they can acquire.

PbtA games especially suffer from a talkative player completely taking over and shutting out quieter/shyer/more thoughtful players because there is no turn order, or "rounds", and no set time for things to take.

 

[AnOminous]

Wealthy Jews also funded the white army till the bitter end and then funded resistance groups.

Fun fact: one of my longer running CoC campaigns involved Russian gangsters who had supported the White Russians and did in fact have organized crime contacts, including Russian Jews, both in the U.S. and Russia, who had been involved in that funding. It was one of the players' ideas and the justification for them having nearly limitless access to guns and explosives, legal and otherwise, basically to the limit of what they could afford.

And of course the book itself pulls no punches on Communists, collaborators, and what to do about them both:

It's like they're too dumb to understand most things Costikyan did were, at least on some level, ironic if not outright parody. I'm pretty sure he actually did loathe Communism though, as any rational person does.

And to what @Janusz z Gliwic says about rules lawyers and minmaxers in rules heavy games, I can only say the less tight the system, the bigger issues I've had rules laywers and power gamers.

I never minded invoking the rules in good faith, especially if I actually did get something wrong, but turning every game into a rules argument gets very, very tiresome. If someone kept doing that, I'd make it clear that if you were going to do that, I was going to interpret every rule as strictly as possible too. Not rocks fall everyone dies but rocks fall YOU die.

And I could be pretty good at this, having played the Illuminati card game variant where you're allowed to cheat so long as you don't get caught. And even if you did get caught, the only penalty was you had to give back whatever you stole or just didn't get away with it. So every game was just nonstop cheating. My favorite cheating method was lying about the rules or claiming absolutely insane interpretations of them.

 

[Irish Turtle]

What is your favorite charecter
mine is in a campagain I just started
I am playing schizophrenic furry elk totem warrior barbarian
I am a human who got isekaied into a dnd world. I bonded with a elk named jeremy and it became my companion. Jeremy got killed by a gnome bandit on my fight that made me level up to level 2. all of level 2 I was carrying the corpse of jeremy while acting deranged. Eventually a cleric I tried to bribe to bring jeremy back to life felt bad and created a totem for me to connect with jeremy. I did a ritual where I could talk with jeremy and my soul ended up fusing with him. As a result of fusing with him I gained several elk characteristics like a hatred of wolves and a desire to eat grass.

 

[Alabama Gamer]

I have made some character art of Lord Captain Tristain Gildenkin and Darrius the Seneschal.

 

[Snekposter]

It's like they're too dumb to understand most things Costikyan did were, at least on some level, ironic if not outright parody. I'm pretty sure he actually did loathe Communism though, as any rational person does.

Yeah, the back of the book has a little "Please don't take this too seriously" thing. That of course winds up being over-the-top in its own way. Great fun.

 

[Tom Bombodildo]

Rules light basically means you try and eliminate as many rules as possible, hence the name.

But see, I'm not sure what you mean by "eliminate as many rules as possible". I've read systems that basically just describe a character generation process so the group can jack off to a multi-hour improv session. The fact that you're talking about adjudicating rules at all implies to me you're not talking about those systems. I generally consider stuff like FATE rules-light, but part of the rules-light thing is its simplicity. In FATE you have about 4 different types of action and one type of roll. The GM always has wiggle-room in how he applies rules / runs the game, but I dunno what kind of edge case could bring a FATE game to a screeching halt even in a less than stellar group. I guess I'm mostly just curious if you have any specific examples in mind or specific rules-light game design / systems that lead to this?

 

[Ghostse]

I never minded invoking the rules in good faith, especially if I actually did get something wrong, but turning every game into a rules argument gets very, very tiresome. If someone kept doing that, I'd make it clear that if you were going to do that, I was going to interpret every rule as strictly as possible too. Not rocks fall everyone dies but rocks fall YOU die.

Which is the issue with the usual "rules light", there are no rules to invoke on a powergamer other than "I'm the DM and I said so" which usually just makes them more likely to be a disruptive little shit. And with a lot of the "collaborative" rules lights, that's sometimes not even a valid rule.

 

[AnOminous]

Which is the issue with the usual "rules light", there are no rules to invoke on a powergamer other than "I'm the DM and I said so" which usually just makes them more likely to be a disruptive little shit. And with a lot of the "collaborative" rules lights, that's sometimes not even a valid rule.

I always played with good friends and the occasional invaders would have to behave themselves. Nobody wanted to make shit less fun.

 

[Irish Turtle]

I always played with good friends and the occasional invaders would have to behave themselves. Nobody wanted to make shit less fun.

im curious are your tables mostly combat heavy or roleplay heavy

 

[Obstacle]

As a result of fusing with him I gained several elk characteristics like a hatred of wolves and a desire to eat grass.

Nice.
I award you the medal of the four corners.
The highest honour conferred by my people.

I get to be a player rarely, and never in the systems I like running.
My favourite character was a 5e Gnome Barbarian, Bear Totem (Fluffed as Badger Totem)
Backstory was that he was a modestly successful accountant, who's work/life balance imploded due to having to work infinity overtime, to pay massive child support bills, for being a one-gnome bastard factory.
He went postal one day, mauled his whole office with a chair, severely injuring his boss, and many co-workers, and ran off into the woods to become a "Smash and grab gnome".
He joined the party after stalking them through some woods, sizing them up as marks, but waded in on their side when it looked like they were about to win a fight with some bandits.

He made it through Curse of Strahd, found the magic psychic laser-sword that hates Strahd because it used to belong to his dead brother, used it for a while, then gave it away because it's psychic presence "made his brain itchy" (ooc reason was another player was better specced for it).
Basically I used him to intentionally ruin social encounters by being naked, filthy and surly, then would face-tank the resulting brawl.
His best moments were breaking into a mansion and letting some feral child they had locked in the attic loose with no investigation or attempt to find her a new home (just let her run off into the woods) dueling a Vrock in the basement of said mansion, and winning, drowning a man who was about to sacrifice a different child to a lake spirit, and repeatedly allowing himself to be thrown as a living missile by another party-member polymorphed into a giant ape; that was something of a signature move we had.
In the end, me and the Druid made a pact, and ran off with the pick of Strahd's treasury, after we killed Strahd and the rest of the party was distracted; thus completing his initial goal of robbing the party, and his character-arc, allowing him to finally pay child support.

Satisfying as fuck; I still have his sheet.
Bugwick Badfinger will live forever in my heart.

 

[Alabama Gamer]

I'm pretty sure he actually did loathe Communism though, as any rational person does.

He's a crazy communist Jew, but leaning towards the more anarchist side of things, so doubtless he hated the Soviet Union regardless.

 

[AnOminous]

im curious are your tables mostly combat heavy or roleplay heavy

I haven't played in years but in my really active period, I went from serious munchkin/hack and slash stuff (this was when I was 12 or so), but as we got older we got more roleplay heavy and by the time I was playing in college, it was mostly roleplaying with a focus on Borgia type political scheming.

I haven't GMed in forever, and on the rare occasion I do play it's usually a one shot (at least for me). And then it's whatever the group is doing.

 

[Tactical Wizard]

https://youtube.com/watch?v=iRAQQpPEBZshttps://youtube.com/watch?v=97daVVnyt1sView attachment 6366575
I love watching how triggered leftists get when reviewing the price of freedom RPG. So a good number of soy boy types had to make a disclaimer after Russia invaded Ukraine. Because he swore Russia invading everyone was a rightwing conspiracy theory. The vintage RPG podcast is extra hilarious because they got offended by the game having a conservative playable jew being an anti-communist freedom fighter. These faggots love to cry racism, yet they aren't even hiding the fact they hate Jews. I bet this is a common mindset at WOTC and choasium. Probably going to be used to clean out house just like Hollywood is doing now.

>THE PRICE OF FREEDOM IS $19.95!
>Not $17.76

You had one job…