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- Apr 1, 2017
Sounds like that late in the life cycle PF1E social combat checks.
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
- Thread starter Surtur
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- Aug 23, 2018
I'm not familiar with that, and google brings up a deck of cards you move on a grid?
The only other thing I can think of is the general advice of giving social problems HP, and social rolls do damage. During social encounters into combat encounters. Though I've seen that advice a few times, there's nothing that codifies it. eg. How much damage would a persuade roll do.
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- Apr 16, 2019
They also put out an in-universe explanation for why they insist on calling them clips instead of magazines to head off pedants like me:
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- Feb 7, 2018
I still got a couple of the old 2ed sourcebooks, the firepower and mercenary ones and I always like the little flavor FASA did by adding what appeared to be reviews and comments by deckers on the various guns.
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- Apr 16, 2019
CGL still does stuff like that. They'll also occasionally lampshade why they're providing info for shit like cruise ships or fighter jets that runners will never own by pointing out the people they're running against might so it's good to know what they're capable of. of course like all things CGL does they fucking ruined it because all those in-universe characters are
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- Jan 18, 2017
Uhoh, that sounds dangerously close to being creative there goatman, maybe dial it back a bit and return to the grey sludge that occupies most modern TTRPG experiences, thank you kindly.
I've been reading CoC stuff lately and I'm really impressed with the amount of historical verisimilitude they're going for. The Horror on the Orient express books are just chocked full of references, further reading material, diagrams, explanations (the goddamn book is recommending me read historical travel guides on Istanbul for God's sake that's wild) - it's borderline edutainment, very nice. I think D&D can really benefit from this as well but the problem is that you have to be a different type of nerd autist to read up on the world and the dieties and backgrounds and factions etc. all that boring shit versus "go here, stand still, fight that, next room please".
And you know what, there's a time and a place for brain off, basic shit, I get it, not trying to be a dick and requiring a textbook for frontloading your dungeon crawl.
But how many DMs are gonna read a bunch of supplemental material from 20-30 years ago to help run Ravenloft settings? How many are sitting there scumming wikis that have been purged and re-purged throughout the years thanks to troons and dangerhairs bitching about racism or bikini-armour? Like everyone says, it's a game it's meant to be fun, and the DM/GM is included in that so you just have everyone's idea of fun is aligned (and for my groups I am quite fortunate that that is almost always the case).
But I think you can bullshit away a lot in a pure fantasy setting versus something like the 1920s because I think the threshold for including BMW 5 series with optional heated seating is higher than you'd think and anachronisms/inconsistencies are tougher to mAgiCk away.
Henri Barbusse
kiwifarms.net
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- Nov 2, 2022
The Japan-only CoC supplement for playing in 1920s Japan is the same and even better, it deals a lot with practical matters that are kind of hard to find out unless you're a nerd into exactly that kind of stuff. Things like travel times between major cities, types of trains used in the period, maps of Tokyo neighborhoods at the time, photos of surviving examples of specific types of buildings (like apartment buildings built between the Great Kanto Earthquake and WW2), and so on. (It's also funny that schoolgirl is pretty good as a PC occupation while still being historically accurate).
And I know I mentioned Ars Magica as being autistically researched, but here's one of the five bibliography pages from 4e supplement for Stonehenge Tribunal (England+Wales):
Though the bibliography really is just what the writer used, the recommended reading section is elsewhere.
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- Oct 20, 2019
There is zero chance I am allowing anyone to play a Japanese schoolgirl in a game with as many tentacled monsters as Call of Cthulhu.
Henri Barbusse
kiwifarms.net
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The creator of Maid RPG made an unofficial ERP supplement for Call of Cthulhu.
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- Dec 28, 2014
I was really impressed with the 1920s supplement in the original boxed CoC set.
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- Sep 3, 2014
This set up tends to be hit or miss. I think Green Ronin's ASOIAF RPG does it pretty well and it makes sense given how much of a toxic shithole politics in Westeros can be, and it helps it uses different stats and a different form of health to do it. Mouseguard did it too and it sucked, but that's due to other factors like having your party get split into teams and trying to also be the system that does combat to make it simpler.
I also don't intrinsically like it that much as a method to run social interactions, since I think it rewards players who can't be arsed to even try to play a character into just letting the dice talk. I wouldn't call this much of a draw personally.
Although to be blunt I don't like Draw Steel all that much, since it's almost solely a combat game and leans way too much into skirmish style gaming. I just don't like its design philosophy and goal to begin with.
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It's not game over yet! Dice Scum reviews the Alien RPG expansion; Colonial Marines Operations Manual.
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Nice try but years of internet racism has prepared me to pierce your charade, East_(((CLIP)))wood!
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- Aug 23, 2018
I'm mainly curious about it as a way to add more depth to social encounters.
A great example is an adventure of the spy game clearly wants some Casino Royale style verbal sparring during high stakes poker type scene. But it basically comes down to persuade checks with gambling checks in between.
I don't have any interest in it for a different reason. The game just sounds bad. And supposedly the guy that made it is a big RPG YouTuber who's word is treated as gospel.
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- Sep 7, 2019
the game has witches living in skulls of dead giants and sky islands nuking each other with warpstone, is that early, high or late middle ages?
yes, but sometimes the setting isn't important. if you have a low-stakes rural oneshot where the local baron is up to chaotic evil nigger shit, the tax policy and technological level of the neighboring nation (unless you start the industrial age) is pretty irrelevant.
the other is the debate if a society that has access to magic where you can people headshot with a pebble at the flick of a wrist would ever invent guns in the first place. trying to reduce the setting to "ah, it's just X - but with magic!" is simply dumb. most world building doesn't just follow earth then split at some arbitrary point in time. of course nothing prevents anyone to have a mandatory 500 page lore bible ready before session 0, if that works for the your table no harm no foul.
and none has anything to do with the technological level or having a telegraph. if you're at the ass-end of the nowhere your local population will behave accordingly. they certainly won't have the same opinion and view of the world as a cosmopolitan urbanite. this is the same today as it was 100 or even 500 years ago.
those places are called backwater for a reason.
as I said above, building a whole setting is fine and it's your time wanting to flesh out details and answers that will never come up or are never important. probably also handy in this case to make a list if something like mayonnaise is an instrument.
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- Oct 10, 2014
Especially when you pick off one or two of them because they were fucking around. The best fights I've ever had as a player and have ever ran as a DM are the ones when your resources are spent and every action counts. The kind of fight where the fighter has 10 hit points left, using the cast-out cleric as a flanking post with a dead rogue and wizard in the corner and everyone is holding their breath when both he and whatever he's fighting rolls to hit. Fights like those are the reason I roll in front of the party, it's not just that I refuse to spare them by lying about a die roll, I make it so they know I can't.
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- Sep 7, 2019
so you're saying dwarves are basically fantasy indians?
yeah, the setup-time and book-keeping is another one where it underperforms, and I say that as someone who is used to the most chit-heavy FFG games or even KDM. I think what sums it up is that almost everything it offers another game does better, either for onboarding players or as a card-driven battler, "legacy" game or casual rpg-replacement/dungeoncrawl. however that requires knowing those alternatives in the first place, there's a reason people to this days still mostly play risk and monopoly.
I think what made gloomhaven the thing it is was being the first in a all-in-one box and one the surface looked exactly what people were looking for. I wish there was a stat system like vidya achievements so you could see how many buyers even played it, let alone finished it.
especially after covid there's still demand for a "plug-and-play" solution that needs no GM, and a lot of kickstarters are still riding that. ironically frosthaven retails for more than the latest descent (even with it's marvel-tier writing) or journeys in middle-earth, and is somewhat in the same range as most kickstarters. not to sound like shill it but this has been one of the best solutions (even to the point of being almost too much and a sheet of paper could've easily done as well) for the same price: https://gamefound.com/en/projects/f...aths-we-dare-tread#/section/featured-products.
awaken realms does a lot of good stuff in that regard, but here and there are some quirks you might wanna houserule (like the druid menhirs in tainted grail, which you sometimes can get for 50 bucks), oathsworn and middara should have cheaper second-hand copies these days as well.
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- Dec 28, 2014
They figured out pretty soon that if I was rolling it behind the screen, mercy was a possibility. If I took the screen down and rolled it up front, you're getting whatever the dice say.
A backwater in 1500 is not the same as a backwater in 1700 and is not the same as a backwater in 1900. Available technology absolutely matters regarding communication, trade, government, etc. you know... things that an impact a setting? How does the backwater town handle crime? How do they trade? Is it along a route travelled regularly or does someone only go to town every few months? Can a letter be sent? If someone in the village is murdered, how does the justice system respond if at all?
Yes, all of this shit matters in a TTRPG that extends beyond a band of adventures just killing shit in a dungeon. If your players can be made aware of the level of available technology, time period, comparable culture, etc. that means you the DM don't have to be constantly filling in mundane details for when the players actually want to engage with anything other than acting like a party of 15th century Robocop equivalents.
The basics do matter. How do you even expect the players to describe what the hell they're even wearing if you give them zero information about the setting? Is the shit set in Northern Europe? The Mediterranean? South-East Asia? Even in a one-shot the game still takes place somewhere.
The way you're talking about this is as if you're just expecting the players to treat this shit like a boardgame and not actually bother to come up with characters to interact with anything because I guess you just don't want them to? The characters are just meeples? Usually it's people forgetting the G part in TTRPG, I guess you're just forgetting the RP part.
I always roll combats openly. If your players aren't dumb and you aren't lying about dice rolls, they're going to estimate defensive and attack stats fairly quickly anyway. Doing it in the open means when someone does fuck around, and the dice decide it's their turn to find out there won't be any doubt in anyone's mind it was the die roll that dictated it.
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2014
You can even reason rolling in front of them in combat out narratively. The party is trying to kill whatever they're fighting, it makes sense that they get a grasp at how dangerous something is after a few rounds of combat. Watching them shit themselves when I hit on a 3 or something is really fun anyway. It's also fun watching the sword and board fighter know he has some asshole beat when the guy misses on an 18 which is a cool feeling as a player.
I guess if you're using something like bluff you could use a hidden roll as a DM but more and more I'm getting soured on rolling social skills in the first place. If they say a stupid lie I'm not letting them have it anyway.