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- Dec 17, 2022
i was only put off when reading a GURPS handbook
Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)
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- Jun 17, 2020
The systems that try to do that are nearly all crap, but there is a playstyle for exactly that stuff - freeform roleplaying. You either simplify or outright remove most of the rules.
You can't sell books off it, and I don't think a lot of people are even all that aware of it. Also without rules you are entirely left up to the skills of the gm and the group which tends to be mediocre.
Since you can't go by system what you need to do is find a tryhard group. If they look down on dnd and like talking about rpg theory and how you should roleplay not roll-play that's a good sign. Problem is such groups can get pretty insular because inevitable they become a bit arrogant. But if you can get in with them they'd do exactly what you want.
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- Dec 28, 2014
GURPS is pretty neckbeardy tbh. Even that can be stripped down and simplified, though. Its best aspect is highly developed character generation so you can basically build your own class.
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- Dec 18, 2019
Going back to this topic, I still find myself confused by certain planes like the abyss, which is infinite and gods like Tharizdun have a following in both oerth and toril. I get gods can have different manifestations even within the same plane so is not too crazy to think that's also the case for different material planes/crystal spheres yet the Abyss confuses me: Is it the same Abyss threatening both forgotten realms and greyhawk or does it solely exist in the forgotten realms?
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- Nov 4, 2017
You are in no way wrong in your confusion, but you are also overthinking a plot device that will morph to whatever the writer wants, and described to allow exactly that.
This is like trying to figure out the Criminal Code in Batman that lets the Joker keep being released to Arkham, its pointless because anywhere inhabited by actual people after the 18th time he clowngasses a neighborhood there being an executive action that would authorize the Gotham Trials where after two months of legal arguments 11 members of Batman rogues gallery would be sentenced to immediate death by hanging.
Thats boring, so the legal system in batman to contort itself into whatever knots are needed to ensure Batman can keep fighting Joker. Same with the Abyss/Astral sea.
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- Dec 17, 2019
From further reading on the topic, the best answer I can give you is "it works how you want it to work."
Some people say that each setting has its own distinct planes, while others say that the Outer Planes are shared among all of them. I read one source (can't remember where now) that suggested that because the planes are infinite, that can account for discrepancies in how each setting describes those planes, where it's just those residents' interpretation of the part that they're familiar with.
Planescape throws a wrench in the works with regards to the whole "every setting has its own planes" idea. Sigil has portals to practically every Prime Material world (and any number of other locations), while the Outlands gatetowns have a single portal to each of the twelve Outer Planes. This would suggest that the Outer Planes are shared among nearly all worlds, and it's indeed possible to go from a Prime Material to an Outer Plane and exit to a different Prime Material. (Obviously, this doesn't apply to worlds that don't play ball with Great Wheel cosmology like Athas and Eberron.)
Of course, when you start factoring in gods and demons and other supremely powerful beings, that makes things even more complicated. If Prime Material worlds are separate but Outer Planes are shared among them, what's stopping a god from one setting from deciding to barge into another? Considering how every setting seems to have its own pantheon distinct from all the others, with no knowledge of others existing, this would suggest that there is a unique set of Outer Planes for every Prime Material (and that would support alternate cosmologies as well). Then again, maybe separate pantheons have gentlemen's agreements not to interfere with each other's playgrounds.
But in the end, it's your game, so you can decide for yourself how you want the planes to work. The only thing I would advise is to keep Prime Material worlds separate, as that seems to be the constant throughout all I've read.
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- Dec 18, 2019
Yeah I figured i was overthinking it, guess having both spelljammers and planar travel leads to plenty of confusion (even if both can coexist just fine)
Anyways, on another subject: I skimmed over the alexandrian's review of the shattered obelisk the alexandrian's and this bit caught my attention:
Which got me thinking how the 5e DMG wasn't particularly useful when it came to creating dungeons and also got me wanting to check the AD&D 1e and 2e DMGs to compare.
The reviewer caught shit from people on reddit and other sites for a claim he made about the maps being unnumbered so he had to make yet another post to address that
Gonna be reading his articles on dungeon and adventure design, I've been interested in knowing how official adventures got this bad.
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Duiker
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Dec 18, 2022
I've found myself drawn to older systems. Even if they are unpolished, they are now old enough to be novel to me since I got in long after it started. A big one is first edition Metamorphosis Alpha. Sadly, I haven't had a chance to actually run it yet. Hell, I might not like it once I actually do it.
What systems are on your 'I want to run but probably never will." list?
What systems are on your 'I want to run but probably never will." list?
Agent of Z.O.G.
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2016
Gonna shill my autistic nigga from the tg gamedev threads, he makes short TTRPG reviews and more thorough system walkthroughs. Also short TTRPGs but those are like whatever.
Praying he gets out of that single digit viewver stream ghetto but not so much he becomes popular enough that he doesn't have to engage with everything I post in chat.
Praying he gets out of that single digit viewver stream ghetto but not so much he becomes popular enough that he doesn't have to engage with everything I post in chat.
MISTER-CREEPMAN00
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Sep 14, 2023
Holy shit, I thought I was only one who watched Notepad. He's great, his reviews are even better than Dice Scum
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
The thing that attracts me to older systems is not that they are old - there are a lot of stinkers and I don't think every "we type set this like we don't know what a word processor its" OSR apeing is good.
But B/X specifically has been in the autistic rock tumbler for nearly 50 years. It is now at a very high level of polish with the resources you can get. We have advanced math, better type setting, and lots of information on the tradition pain points and failings.
The other nice thing is that in-session math is pretty simple.
- Joined
- Jan 18, 2017
Honey, my new favourite phrase to describe old shit that is leagues better than new crap dropped.
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2018
I've talked about them at length in this thread, but I'll go over them again since you asked.
The big one for me has to be Castles and Crusades. Every video and forum post praises that system to hell and back. But nobody actually wants to play it. This is basically true of most OSR games, but Castles and Crusades is the one I've heard the best things about.
Some systems I was curious about but gave up on.
Years ago I was really interested in the Cypher system. I wasn't a fan of the reliance on disposable gadgets, and I've forgotten almost everything else about it, but I remember the system seemed interesting.
A friend of mine keeps telling me to play Spycraft 2. The appeal of that system seems to be the broken builds you can make, but I'm not a fan of how everyone has a pre-defined role and is useless outside of that.
And furries have shilled IronClaw to me a bunch of times. Seems almost like Savage Worlds in many ways.
The main thing for me is less systems, and more settings.
Cyberpunk 2020 and GURPs Cyberpunk sound like a great time, but people only want to play Shadowrun. I don't like how the magical bullshit dilutes the cyberpunk elements and how it's easy to break the game with certain things like Riggers.
I want to play a mech based setting, but everyone only knows MechWarrior and that game scares away everyone. The only other systems available are either autism simulators, rules lite story games that lack in crunch, or seem incomplete. Tiny Frontiers (the old edition) is the closest I've found to acceptable, but that leans a bit too close to rules lite and incomplete. Fates also gets name dropped a lot, but I completely fail to understand it.
I could go on by mentioning a whole bunch of stuff (RIFTs, super heroes) but the final setting I'll mention in this post is Al-Qadim, or any desert based setting really. I don't care if it's medieval fantasy or 1930s Indiana Jones adventure. It's just raiding pyramids, fighting mummies, and the whole general aesthetic appeals to me, but it's largely ignored in favour of Tolkien medieval fantasy.
I'm not. I prefer "new" systems. I put "new" in quotes because systems like Savage Worlds or Castles and Crusades apparently go back a ways. "Old" systems and modules tend to be hard to read and poorly edited in many ways.
The problem with many "new" systems is they tend to be pointless. The glut of woke PbtA based games that add nothing of substance have been condemned a lot here, but I also I don't see the need for another d20 + modifier DnD clone system. They might move minor things around like making AC ascending or descending, but I fail to see the point.
Another problem with "old" systems is math bloat. Or is that "new" systems? Whatever, spending 5-10 minutes every roll trying to figure out bonuses and penalties, or having to sift through thousands of feats and recalculate a bunch of formula every time I level is something I don't miss.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2017
FATE is off the table for me now because the company is a bunch of woketars.
One of my 'theater major' players wanted to play it (so that's nother strike)
And according to their pitch "you just do things and if it matters later you go back and roll to see if it happened that way", which sounds like a fucking nightmare to track.
It also sounds like it is ripe for all sorts of abuse; so (as was described) you have stats and skills, and one of the skills you have is literally just "Wealth". If the cost is under your wealth skill, you just have enough money to buy it. If its not, you need to roll for it (and can spend from dice pools ot make it more likely you have the cash), and the mechanic seems to carry to all the other things you can do.
So I can see muchinkins abusing the fuck out of that.
Anyway, make & sold by woketards, so I never bothered looking into it closely.
Another issue with "old" things, especially "old" modules, is the reason "old" movies are viewed as better, which is a filter-bias. That is, no one will keep shilling the dogshit ones for decases. If its 30 years on and people are still talking about it, its probably good.
Again, the autism rock tumbler will have broken down anything garbage.
I'll also say, another thing is the "old" plus column is, straight up, Gary Gygax. This nigga just understood gaming. Yes, he's an autistic sped and wasn't always right, but even when he was wrong he still put out great content, and on one has come along even close to his ability to build systems.
the fact Trolllord got him at the very end for C&C is the majority of my interest in trying to get into it.
Raoul_Duke
kiwifarms.net
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- Jan 26, 2021
In regards to Cyberpunk games, would recommend using Cyberpunk RED. Fairly simple system, easy to use, though the formatting in the rulebook is all over the fucking place.
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2018
I actually like "wealth as a die roll" in some systems. I even jury rigged one for Savage Worlds that worked quite well. It doesn't work for
The reason it works is two fold. First, it allows people to role play without being put at a disadvantage while also taking pressure off the DM. A Bruce Wayne like millionare can just buy things willy nilly, and regular characters can buy small things like bus fare and coffee without the DM having to price check it and count pennies. They players just get them. Anything of value requires a roll.
The second reason is that basic possessions are worth a lot of money, and modern finance ruins the game. It's easy for a character to get a bunch of loans, sell all the furniture in their house, and basically buy their way through the early to mid game. And as a DM there isn't really a logical reason to say no. A wealth die fixes that, because loans and the like don't change your wealth stat directly. It's a short term bonus for a penalty later. Attempts to game the system like buying 50,000 "free" coffees to open a business are very easy to catch and hard for players to justify.
It doesn't work in DnD because those games are based around specific loot, financial services are limited, and the player doesn't start with any "basic" wealth.
This is something I do with other RPGs if it's an outcome the players don't know. In a recent game, the PCs didn't know what books were valuable, so just took as many as they could carry. I didn't roll the value until they got back to town, because otherwise they'd ditch the dud ones. But having that as a standard mechanic sounds horrible.
I'd heard Cyberpunk RED removed a bunch of the cool gunfight rules that make Cyberpunk 2020 special. I don't know, as I've never got it to the table.
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- Nov 4, 2017
Everyone does that - if the players do something interesting, its you chance to fuck with them.
That's the thing (per the theater major): its not just the GM, and its not just carrying books. Like a PC says "I knocked out the guard" or "ok, I lock pick the door and disable the alarm" and they just did it, making having to spend from their dice pool. But then later on when the party fucks up and triggers the facility lockdown, now the GM has them go back and either figure out if the guard got some shots off, or isn't knocked out, or if they failed to disable the alarm.
It sounded like an excuse to constantly bitch and argue with the GM, which I think was the primary draw for them.
I get that, and I saw something similar for 4e (where you are eventually handing items worth literal tons of gold) to just give the players "wealth tokens". The issue is that while its nice to not autistically track the 2sp for the night at the inn or the $2.25 for a bus ticket, the minute you give the players something unlimited they will immediately abuse it unless there is a limiter.
(For the 4e system, they had some built-in correctors: wealth tokens reset to the same value when you leveled, so it was effectively use-or-lose (no hoarding, but players could combine wealth to buy expensive items), and encouraged the GM to just take a wealth token if they felt the player had acquired enough goods/services to be equivalent (aka try to abuse it and get facefucked), and old gear was treated as worthless. But again, 4e has a different focus than other editions, where you just "Have travelled" to places instead of travelling there)
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2019
IMO Shadowrun handled it pretty nicely in the Running Wild supplement. You had your monthly upkeep costs for your Lifestyle, and anything up to your level was considered included as part of that. So if you were paying 10k a month to live well, you're automatically going to have some nice-looking clothes in your closet, good food at home, and you don't need to worry too much about counting Nuyen if you go out.
- Joined
- Aug 23, 2018
For me, that's where the wealth die shines because the limit is vague but reasonable.
eg. "You start with a fully furnished home."
"I pawn my fridge, TV, and microwave to buy a +5 m16."
As a DM, I can object to that but it turns into a negotiation.
In contrast, "I buy 500 'free' bus tickets and resell them on ebay for massive profit" is easy to say no to, and the players can't really defend it.
There was some RPG that had an exploit I saw mentioned repeatedly. I forget the system and exact rule, but the gist was you take a lavish lifestyle cost, and the perk is you can spend 1 hour searching your house to gain any common item. You then spend 8 hours a day searching for spiked gauntlets (the most valuable common item) and generate infinite money. I'd point out that any DM with a even a tiny amount of sense would not allow that, but I'd just blank stares in response. I never saw that rule come up in practice.
It's kind of the opposite of theatre majors (if I'm using that term right) in that people will rules lawyer as hard as they can, but when smacked in the face with the logic of the world, their brain shuts down.