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

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
Alabama Gamer said:
I have just come from /tg/, where an anon enlightened me that "freakshit" is a meme that Kiwi Farms started forcing back in 2021.

Click to expand...
Nobody used it here before 2021. It's not in any Google archives before 2021 in the sense /tg/ uses it.

And there are plenty of hits on /tg/ for it before 2021.

So they invented it and if anything we borrowed it from them.

I suppose you could post the 4plebs link if you care.
 
Pendulous Dong said:
What's your favorite encumbrance system in a TTRPG? Most systems seem to gravitate towards either "autistically track every pound of shit you're carrying" or "lol make it up."

I'm really looking for something where the size of an object factors into how encumbering it is rather than just how heavy it is.
Click to expand...
My group and I generally hate encumbrance systems, so we usually just go with a handwave "common sense" approach. Neither I nor my players find meticulous tracking of the weight of every single arrow or bullet or water flask or whatever to be fun or interesting.

Basically: hey, you found like a dozen throwing knives. You can carry that. You found a suit of plate armor? Now we gotta figure out how you're gonna carry that. At that point I'll eyeball what they're carrying, and take a look at their Strength (or equivalent stat), and decide if they can carry it without becoming encumbered. Takes less than a minute, and then we can move on to the actual fun shit.

The only time I'd get heavily math crunchy with it is if we were playing a super hardcore survival game, where every single stupid item you're carrying actually matters, and that flint and steel a player decided to buy is the difference between life and death. That's the only circumstance where that level of "weight accounting" is really justified in my mind.
 
LobsterBoy669 said:
The only time I'd get heavily math crunchy with it is if we were playing a super hardcore survival game, where every single stupid item you're carrying actually matters, and that flint and steel a player decided to buy is the difference between life and death. That's the only circumstance where that level of "weight accounting" is really justified in my mind.
Click to expand...
I've seen and done a couple puzzle type scenarios where it was important to limit the firepower/tools available and there I'd go into it in a little more detail, but sperging out and spending lots of time worrying about it just isn't interesting to me usually. I would have some things like a human generally couldn't wear armor fitted for a dwarf, but figuring out exactly where the torches and bottles of oil and so on are in someone's backpack is a level of granularity I can live without.

This is especially the case in pen and paper games where actually scrawling out some endless inventory of items and containers would be a crashing bore. And for the rest, again, a bag of holding or two handwaves away the problem nearly entirely.

That level of detail can work if a computer is dealing with it all, like in Dwarf Fortress, but it's nothing I want on the tabletop.
AnOminous said:
I suppose you could post the 4plebs link if you care.
Click to expand...
Holy shit, those retards are still sperging out about it.
 
LobsterBoy669 said:
My group and I generally hate encumbrance systems, so we usually just go with a handwave "common sense" approach. Neither I nor my players find meticulous tracking of the weight of every single arrow or bullet or water flask or whatever to be fun or interesting.

Basically: hey, you found like a dozen throwing knives. You can carry that. You found a suit of plate armor? Now we gotta figure out how you're gonna carry that. At that point I'll eyeball what they're carrying, and take a look at their Strength (or equivalent stat), and decide if they can carry it without becoming encumbered. Takes less than a minute, and then we can move on to the actual fun shit.

The only time I'd get heavily math crunchy with it is if we were playing a super hardcore survival game, where every single stupid item you're carrying actually matters, and that flint and steel a player decided to buy is the difference between life and death. That's the only circumstance where that level of "weight accounting" is really justified in my mind.
Click to expand...

I tend to get a little fussy about encumbrance because my groups all tend to be obsessive horders. its more about making them actually think about what random trinkets they've picked up that actually spark joy Vs. trying to make them perform weight and balance calculations everytime they pick up a rock.
Also so that I have an idea of what they have in the inventory. I've had issues where the party was lugging around a piece of Random Table Trash since level 1, so I decided I'd make it fun and have that be a key item for a puzzle. But of course they had several dungeons worth of useless crap so forgot that they had a wooden Avandra statue to leave at the shrine.

Corn Flakes said:
I've been a fan of the inventory slot system you see in some of the more "modern" OSR games. You get X items (or bundles of items) you can bring with you, plus your equipped gear, and that's that. At the GM's discretion you may also have a couple small items that would be relevant to your character's backstory or class. And that's it. It might seem limiting at first glance, but in our group's experience it was interesting to have to plan out who's carrying the adventuring kit (a grabbag of useful items), who's bringing the extra rations, who's got the extra 50ft coil of rope, etc.

Treasure also gets treated the same, so no carrying the entire dragon's hoard in our pockets unless we have a cart or five and time to actually retrieve all that stuff. It's a simple system, but it scratches the inventory autism while being reasonably quick so we've been sticking with it for the past two years or so.
Click to expand...

Another thing I've been playing with is inspired by 5 Torches Deep's inventory system where your character can carry a limited amount of abstracted "supply" (based on intelligence) that can be turned into more any item the player brought at least one with them. I like it because it means you need bring a 10 foot pole you can't just conjure one out of no where, but you don't need to think about how many of everything to bring. And also solves the problem of "If the party went through the magical field that destroys everything metal, how do they now have a hammer and iron nails?" - you know what the party is carrying, but thye can shift quantities one the fly.

I've been wanting to do something like that with an adventurer's kit; the kit is consumable and you need to roll to see if you brought the thing you want with you. Each time you get out an item it 'damages' the kit. Sort of like a 3e reagent pouch.
 
Last edited:
Ghostse said:
Also so that I have an idea of what they have in the inventory. I've had issues where the party was lugging around a piece of Random Table Trash since level 1, so I decided I'd make it fun and have that be a key item for a puzzle. But of course they had several dungeons worth of useless crap so forgot that they had a wooden Avandra statue to leave at the shrine.
Click to expand...
I had something like that in Tomb of Horrors which was the only reason one of about three teams actually won (albeit with only one member remaining). One of them had an unidentified Talisman of the Sphere since way earlier in the game and it had never been identified. Another team member died with a scroll of identify.

So there was a desperate scrabble through inventory of living and dead to find something, anything that might give them a chance. The Talisman (which had been thought to be mere jewelry since it was obtained) was on a necklace and was an oddly shiny and perfectly spherical black pearl. Or at least that's what I decided when asked "what does it look like?" One identify scroll later. . .

Not even Acererak could tank a Sphere of Annihilation to the face.

I'd been REALLY aching to drop a hint about that since the beginning, since of course I knew what they had. But that would have ruined the !FUN!
 
2LtMashengo said:
Jej, in the main campaign I'm in the GM trapped every single door in the first real dungeon crawl, I assume to instill a sense of paranoia.
I think we've encountered maybe 3 or 4 traps since then, and that was something like 40 sessions ago.
Click to expand...
Man, that was a fun dungeon tho.

For a bit of context, the GM after the fact admitted that he had used an online generator tool as an aid in designing the dungeon, in which he had set "trap frequency" to maximum and "trap lethality" to minimum. 80% of doors were trapped, but each one of them did something like 1d4 damage and were easy enough to disarm. This actually made sense in context, since this wasn't just an ancient dungeon, it was an ancient dungeon that had been cleared by a hobgoblin horde to serve as a bunker, and then (once we had routed their forces) as a last redoubt for their Khan, with the whole place being hastily and less-skillfully retrapped.

This was also the dungeon where we encountered The Door, a story I'd love to tell if anyone's interested.
 
Alabama Gamer said:
This was also the dungeon where we encountered The Door, a story I'd love to tell if anyone's interested.
Click to expand...
Sounds interesting.

My gimmick trap dungeon was one of those generic "insane trickster wizard" things, and they were all deadly as hell. I was like 14.
 
AnOminous said:
Sounds interesting.

My gimmick trap dungeon was one of those generic "insane trickster wizard" things, and they were all deadly as hell. I was like 14.
Click to expand...
My not-so-subtle bait worked. I shall now tell the tale of The Door. @2LtMashengo, feel free to chime in if you feel I've skipped over anything.

So, we're exploring this dungeon. I distinctly remember we were level 4, since my cleric needed a scroll to be able to cast Stone Shape. This was a proper dungeon crawl, albeit one with something of a time limit. Puzzles, traps, bizarre encounters, the odd wacky one-off. (We came across a room with its door barricaded, containing a cadre of anarchist non-hob goblins who were attempting to secede from the rest of the dungeon and form the independent state of Gobtopia. We managed to breach their defenses by convincing them that our wizard was actually three goblins in a trenchcoat.)

Anyway, at one point we found this very large door made of iron, through which a strange voice whispered. Upon examination, the door appeared to be made of cold iron. (Some of you can already tell where this is going.) The voice spoke in an ancient tongue of violence and revenge, and avowed its intentions to wreak the same if loosed. In a spirit of retarded optimism, we deduced that our enemies had been the ones to imprison it, and it would prove a worthy ally if freed. Needless to say, they had not, and it was not. It was a shadow, which was a pretty nasty fight for level 4. After it had been dispersed, one of us (I forget whom, except that it wasn't me) got an idea. He scored the door with a blade, and the GM confirmed that the door was solid cold iron, not just plated. He queried regarding the dimensions of the door and calculated its volume, and thus its weight, which was nearly two tons. Finally, he said to the GM, "Hey, did you know that there's a bulk metal prices table?"

It turns out that in Pathfinder core rules, cold iron is quite literally worth its weight in gold. That is to say, 50gp per pound. The GM goes off and rechecks the numbers, and finally he comes back and says to us "Yeah, this minor set piece is worth 190,000 gp." Ironically, everything he had set up before that point made the extraction of The Door a triviality. The Door was on the top floor of the dungeon, and to reach the ancient ruins below the surface the hobgoblins had excavated a massive pit. We had assaulted their camp using an airship, was was still in a holding pattern overhead. All we had to do once we had defeated the Khan was get a dozen or so airmen down there, knock through a few doorways, and drag it to the entrance on rollers. From there it could be lifted by strong ropes onto the ship.

Now, our GM was (to his credit) honest enough not to reverse his previous statements on the characteristics of The Door, but that didn't mean he wasn't going to make it a burden as well as a boon. After all, where can you sell something like that, with a material value equivalent to that of a moderately-sized town? We actually knew of exactly one place, The City. The City is Floating Wizard AnCapistan, and you can't even get an entry visa unless you can cast at least 4th level spells. (Motto: "If you can't fly like a normal person, we don't want you here.") We hauled The Door around for months of both game and real time waiting for an opportunity to offload it. The tale of how we ended up selling it in The City is a whole story in its own right, but I shall say at least that it involved using Floating Disk spells and a checkered blanket to disguise it as a flying picnic table so we wouldn't get wizard-mugged on our way to the auction house. At the end of it, we ended up with 176,000 gp in profit after the auctioneer took his cut, which (split five-ish ways) put each of us in a very pretty way for future endeavors.
 
Alabama Gamer said:
My not-so-subtle bait worked. I shall now tell the tale of The Door. @2LtMashengo, feel free to chime in if you feel I've skipped over anything.
Click to expand...
You didn't include our group portrait with the ghost.
the-boys.png

RIP Pancake, daddy misses you :'(
 
Last edited:
I haven't been on 4chan in a while but I remember there's a group there that has a grudge against the farms. I want to say some KF users decided to start fucking with certain threads a long time ago but I'm not sure. I might poke around later when I'm not phone fagging to figure out what it actually was. Probably wasn't particularly funny because I don't remember it. Edit: fucking phone, you know what I'm talking about
 
Alabama Gamer said:
I have just come from /tg/, where an anon enlightened me that "freakshit" is a meme that Kiwi Farms started forcing back in 2021.

Click to expand...
Kiwi Farms has become "the hacker known as 4chan." to the troons and degenerates who populate modern 4chan. Go on about "muh /pol/tard" boogieman all you like but they were absolutely right that if you don't rigourously bully these people they infest websites like a fungus. /tg/ is especially infamous as a Sigmarxism beachhead.
 
Alabama Gamer said:
I have just come from /tg/, where an anon enlightened me that "freakshit" is a meme that Kiwi Farms started forcing back in 2021.

Click to expand...
/tg/ forced that stupid shit itself, since it came about from making fun of the medieval "realists" who would sometimes shit up campaigns by overemphasizing idiot takes on the medieval period, get pissy whenever someone played something outside of like three different races they "tolerate", and for them being too dumb to play Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which plays a lot nicer with that mindset. Now they're trying to blame others for its creation since their powerfantasy garbage is being tarred with it rightfully.

I actually hate the term since I'm of the mind it's never the race; it's always the player that's at fault. Except for the Krynn races... those deserve the title wholeheartedly, even if Tinker Gnomes created Wooly Rupert through their insane savant obsession with space hamsters.

In lighter news, I've been having some fun running a Hunter the Vigil game. It's been an entertaining ride and I'm curious on which of my players will kill themselves on the supernatural gribbly, get arrested for something hilarious, or some combination of both. They're already in pretty deep on some particularly nasty variant of vampire I made, so I'm curious on how fate and their minds get them out of it.
 
All this talk about encumberance reminds me of a session I ran several years ago. The PCs were sneaking through a citadel in a strange dimension and came across a life-size statue of a humanoid frog which was cast in solid silver. They decided to lug the thing a half mile to the portal that led to their home dimension even though I ruled that it weighed almost a full ton. They had to roll a collective 80 on a STR check for every 500 feet they moved or else they dropped it, prompting a roll on a random encounter table to see if any guards or civilians heard them. Ad hoc events like that are so much fun.

I have never seen the word "freakshit" before.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom