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
In what is hopefully a surprise to no one, the review copies of the new Planescape supplement have been released and it is complete shit.
 
Last edited:
Ghostse said:
And regarding both theater of mind and Role Playing vs Roll Playing... 4e introduced something called a "skill challenge" which I initially disliked but came to appreciate and adapt. Basically when the party wants to diplomatize the King into stopping his war on the Elves, instead of it coming down to a single roll of diplomacy, the party needs to take multiple actions - rolling to get a number of successes before certain number of failures - to succeed.

First player rolls straight INT and lays out an economic case for stopping the war, next player uses History to tell the King wars against the elves never end up well, Third player uses diplomacy to try to convince the king to stop being a violent asshat, etc. There's lots of room for players to go free form, players can even instead of calling out a skill just describe what their character does to aid the effort and the DM can assign it to a skill.
In the modules they have recommended stuff, but you can always make up your own.

(So what I usually do for non-gridded encounter is just turn the combat into a combat-based skill challenge, and just knock off healing surges depending on how long it took)
Or I want a skill challenge that doesn't have any penalties for failure other than time taken, 4e DM material has easy/medium/hard level DCs for player level, so I'll multiply that by number of successes to pass a skill challenge of the right complexity and have the party roll till they cumulatively hit that number and count how many rolls it takes - I've started doing this for overland travel and it's working pretty good.
Click to expand...
I've run some skill challenges for CoS and even though the PCs were a bit confused at first I enjoyed how it took a section that had some decent if grindy content (Wizard of Wines) and turned it into something streamlined and interesting. My advice for anyone trying this though is to break the 4th wall and just explain what you're doing and how you're doing it and then hopefully guide the PCs into letting their imaginations run loose as they try to get through the challenge(s).

Another option is to have done a smaller or lighter one earlier so they get the gist. But highly recommend for when you've got scenarios set up that could potentially take the whole session depending on you've built them when you just want the PCs to get through it but still feel like they accomplished something. I had done this with the escape from death house but it was so long ago everyone had forgotten.
Ghostse said:
"Betrayal at the House on the Hill" talk
Click to expand...
My own experience with Betrayal is mostly negative because for all the cool stuff it does (building the house, theme) it gets bogged down in painful shit that revolve around the randomness of which rooms are drawn, how shitty are the dice rolls going, is the haunt taking too long or starting way too early, is it one of the many boring shitty ones, did the people who own this throw in the expansion haunts that paid Chelsea van Valkenberg to shit out material for them? I've had games of Betrayal take 3hrs and it haunts me. Dead of Winter has the same problems but even makes things worse with a "lol you rolled badly the character dies instantly".

Mall of Horror might appeal to anyone looking for a spookier board game with more of a focus on negotiation and bartering than dice chucking.
 
JJLiautaud said:
In what is hopefully a surprise to no one, the review copies of the new Planescape supplement have been released and it is complete shit.
Click to expand...
I wasn't even aware about it, could swear a planescape product or at least one that sounded painfully similar to it was released last year
 
ZMOT said:
there are some dungeon crawler boardgames that might also work as an entry to ttrpg, but usually more expensive (even before you go into kickstarter and how covid lockdowns fucked up prices and got even worse due to inflation)
Click to expand...
One I see recommended all the time is Hero Quest. When I finally played it on Tabletop Simulator I was disappointed. It's boring. Supposedly it plays better with fewer players controlling multiple characters than it does as psudo DnD.

I can recommend Descent however. I've only played the Tabletop Simulator version, but it's so much a DnD like that I'm fairly sure you could homebrew a campaign with basically no issues. The only thing it lacks is social and utility skills.

Ghostse said:
How the hell can you hate powergrid?
Click to expand...
By having taste.

Seriously though. I don't like bidding games in general (knowledge of basic auction theory and the winners curse does that to most of them) and I don't like how pure output is more important that efficiency.

Ghostse said:
"Betrayal at the House on the Hill"
Click to expand...
I second Brain Problems that Betrayal is hugely overrated and is overall shit. Even a friend who likes the game has removed specific haunts like the Donald Trump haunt. Iirc there was a bunch of other "influencers" who were invited to write haunts in that expansion.

When it comes to horror themed traitor games, I recommend Unfathomable. It's basically Cthulhu Battlestar Galactica with the rules cleaned up. It has a little bit of wokeshit in the form of the player characters (one is a tranny and others are diversity despite being set on a 1920s cruise ship sailing from Europe to Boston) but those are easily overlooked or simply replaced.

Unfortunately, I can't recommend Mansions of Madness. It fits the theme better, but the first edition is a setup nightmare and the sequel is played via an app and therefore pointless to me. If you like app based board games, I guess it's okay.



I'm a big fan of the Eldritch/Arkham games. I can safely say they've gotten better over time. Some of the newer ones I've only played digitally, but there is a huge improvement game to game. I think the only one I've not played is the first one from back in the day, but the Fantasy Flight ones I played all the ones I know of.

I recommend the Arkham game with the hex based map tiles the most. Eldritch Horror after that. Then the rest vary. The only one I don't much care for is the dice game, but people seem to love that one, and the stories are good.

The reason for this bit of autism is because a lot of people play them wrong.
  • Read the flovour text aloud. "A strange looking man approaches you and asks if you've seen the yellow sign, roll infuence. His clammy hands reach into his coat and he gives you a strange relic." is more evocative than "Blah-blah-blah... handshakes and a red item". I get the latter is quicker, but the game is about the theme, not speed running.
  • Don't use more than one expansion at once. So many people put dozens of expansions together and makes for a diluted mess. Played individually with just the expansion characters leads to a more balanced game rich with a specific theme.
  • House rule as needed. A favourite at my table a free re-roll once a roll to reduce RNG. For Eldritch, double moves for low player count games is a must to make up for the lack of board coverage.
  • Finally (and this goes for most co-op games) allow others to take their turns. Too often co-op games have one guy call all the shots.
 
Got on the Dalle3/Bing train and now I want to redo all my NPC portraits since Dalle3 is actually okay at making characters hold guns (so is the latest midjourney but I'm poor).
Kinda bad at doing a consistent comic book style, which is an advantage of stable diffusion (also midjourney but I'm still poor).
 
I decided to check in again on Lancer since I enjoyed playing it (we ran a one-shot once and I loved the smoothness of the system), but I remembered the system setting is supposed to be like a tankie's wet dream, so I got curious and looked at their Xitter. As of like January this year their corporate account has largely been run of the mill, rexeeting fan stuff, mentioning releases, but man they were nuts a few years ago:

1696454921994.png
1696455025052.png

Likewise it seems that Tom (one of the two creators) mostly keeps his nose to the grindstone; lately it's been artwork and stuff about his own projects, similar to the Massif account. And then there's Miguel:
1696455507082.png
1696455638578.png
1696455868933.png
You get the idea I don't wanna turn this into an impromptu cow thread. Fun system, retarded writer.
 

Attachments

  • 1696455600887.png
    1696455600887.png
    57.5 KB · Views: 13
Agent of Z.O.G. said:
Got on the Dalle3/Bing train and now I want to redo all my NPC portraits since Dalle3 is actually okay at making characters hold guns (so is the latest midjourney but I'm poor).
Kinda bad at doing a consistent comic book style, which is an advantage of stable diffusion (also midjourney but I'm still poor).
Click to expand...
Good to hear. I want generic goons, thugs, minions, etc. for a James Bond game. Finding a source for that stuff has proven surprisingly difficult and I never considered AI as an option.
 
Sneedfully and Peacefully said:
I decided to check in again on Lancer since I enjoyed playing it (we ran a one-shot once and I loved the smoothness of the system), but I remembered the system setting is supposed to be like a tankie's wet dream, so I got curious and looked at their Xitter. As of like January this year their corporate account has largely been run of the mill, rexeeting fan stuff, mentioning releases, but man they were nuts a few years ago:

View attachment 5385298
View attachment 5385305

Likewise it seems that Tom (one of the two creators) mostly keeps his nose to the grindstone; lately it's been artwork and stuff about his own projects, similar to the Massif account. And then there's Miguel:
View attachment 5385312
View attachment 5385317
View attachment 5385322
You get the idea I don't wanna turn this into an impromptu cow thread. Fun system, retarded writer.
Click to expand...
That just makes it even more fun to make it about the Space Waffen-SS exterminating undesirables on the space Eastern-Front.
 
Welp, the powers that be at Wizards have decided that those lousy book stores and Penguin are taking too much of their shekels, so now you have to order your books from WotC only.

F7pVaEzbcAAve_P.jpg

F7obAPIXAAAQfIl.jpg

Just more proof that Wizards hates the idea of anyone having fun or making any money with their game.

Fuck, I hate that company.
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
Welp, the powers that be at Wizards have decided that those lousy book stores and Penguin are taking too much of their shekels, so now you have to order your books from WotC only.

View attachment 5386642

View attachment 5386643

Just more proof that Wizards hates the idea of anyone having fun or making any money with their game.

Fuck, I hate that company.
Click to expand...

"Imagine how many golden eggs must be inside this goose," said the man, as he sharpened his knife.
 
The Ugly One said:
Saying you like Al-qadim gets you unpersoned even faster in SJW circles than saying you like Oriental Adventures.
Click to expand...
What, just because of the word "oriental?" Even in normal politically correct discourse (I mean pre-2016 or so), the only rule about that was don't use it to refer to people, but to objects.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom