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

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Anonymus Fluhre said:
The same people who too much of a fanboy of NWoD to see the glaring problems with each games fluff and crunch.
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A lot of the writers and devs hang out on the forum, the cool ones like Dave Brookshaw and Bunyip are pretty good at answering questions. Then you have the second string writers like Hayley Margules the self proclaimed sjw bard who has a small harpy like click that includes a mod.

Syaoran Li said:
Revised metaplot in his new vision for WoD
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I don't even think he's running with a continuation of the revised meta plot imo, it's more like he's trying to come full circle and bring it back to 1st ed. Especially with the mage stuff.
 
See, I like 1e New World of Darkness. I occasionally have to apply some setting hacks to the fluff (such as removing the whole "Vampires are emotionally and creatively dead" fluff from Requiem, which isn't even mechanically enforced and rather poorly worded), but I like its toolkit approach and that there is no defined metaplot as well as the fact that Rule Zero is encouraged.

Unfortunately, 2e New World of Darkness AKA Chronicles of Darkness is a horrid mess both mechanically and thematically. It's overwrought with SJW nonsense, shitty mechanics updates, and garbage games like Demon: The Descent and especially Beast: The Primordial. To say nothing of the new pseudo-metaplot bullshit nonsense (the God-Machine in the overall franchise, the new version of the Strix in Requiem 2e, the Idigam in Werewolf 2e, etc.)

Both versions of World of Darkness started out awesome but then reached a point where White Wolf/Onyx Path shat the bed (Revised Edition for Classic World of Darkness, Second Edition/Chronicles of Darkness for New WoD).

The 20th Anniversary Editions of Classic WoD started out a partial return to form, celebrating the best elements of all the iterations of WoD, such as keeping the refined mechanics of Revised while taking back the worst of the metaplot changes and generally remaining metaplot-neutral as well as thematically neutral. Then Mage 20th Anniversary Edition ruined that (thanks Satyros Brucato!) and now with Paradox Interactive buying out White Wolf and placing it in the hands of petulant edgelord/Steven Segal look-alike Martin Ericsson, things are only going to get worse in my opinion.

TL;DR White Wolf is run by edgelords and Onyx Path is run by SJW maniacs. So I'm just going to hang on to the old books from the 90's and early 2000's and just run my WoD games with those.
 
I like what they have done with Awakening 2nd ed and most of Requiem and Werewolf (mostly the morality tracks). Changeling 2nd I'm on the fence especially since Hill was one of the primary writers. After seeing Satyros's treatment of mage I'm really leary of far lefty writers.

I don't get why everyone sperged out over dark eras though. It's just historic canned settings.
 
Syaoran Li said:
See, I like 1e New World of Darkness. I occasionally have to apply some setting hacks to the fluff (such as removing the whole "Vampires are emotionally and creatively dead" fluff from Requiem, which isn't even mechanically enforced and rather poorly worded), but I like its toolkit approach and that there is no defined metaplot as well as the fact that Rule Zero is encouraged.

Unfortunately, 2e New World of Darkness AKA Chronicles of Darkness is a horrid mess both mechanically and thematically. It's overwrought with SJW nonsense, shitty mechanics updates, and garbage games like Demon: The Descent and especially Beast: The Primordial. To say nothing of the new pseudo-metaplot bullshit nonsense (the God-Machine in the overall franchise, the new version of the Strix in Requiem 2e, the Idigam in Werewolf 2e, etc.)

Both versions of World of Darkness started out awesome but then reached a point where White Wolf/Onyx Path shat the bed (Revised Edition for Classic World of Darkness, Second Edition/Chronicles of Darkness for New WoD).

The 20th Anniversary Editions of Classic WoD started out a partial return to form, celebrating the best elements of all the iterations of WoD, such as keeping the refined mechanics of Revised while taking back the worst of the metaplot changes and generally remaining metaplot-neutral as well as thematically neutral. Then Mage 20th Anniversary Edition ruined that (thanks Satyros Brucato!) and now with Paradox Interactive buying out White Wolf and placing it in the hands of petulant edgelord/Steven Segal look-alike Martin Ericsson, things are only going to get worse in my opinion.

TL;DR White Wolf is run by edgelords and Onyx Path is run by SJW maniacs. So I'm just going to hang on to the old books from the 90's and early 2000's and just run my WoD games with those.
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Hopefully they can keep Martin Ericsson restrained. I did like how the Mage v20 had options to either keep the metaplots, alter them a bit or just have them not happen. I'm still rather interested in what new books they have to offer. I really liked Shattered Dreams and I guess it's just the optimist in me.

Speaking of White Wolf, its a shame that they stopped making stuff for Ravenloft. They did such a great job and brought some interesting ideas into it. Now we're just stuck with repeats of Castle Ravenloft whenever a new D&D edition comes out.
 
The whole beast things makes more sense for Gangrel, not Ventrue. Hell Brujah makes more sense than Ventrue. Just look at how much Ventrue hated Werewolves.

Makes me think they'll make Wraiths great friends with Vampire when new books arrive.
 
Yaoi Huntress Earth said:
Hopefully they can keep Martin Ericsson restrained. I did like how the Mage v20 had options to either keep the metaplots, alter them a bit or just have them not happen. I'm still rather interested in what new books they have to offer. I really liked Shattered Dreams and I guess it's just the optimist in me.

Speaking of White Wolf, its a shame that they stopped making stuff for Ravenloft. They did such a great job and brought some interesting ideas into it. Now we're just stuck with repeats of Castle Ravenloft whenever a new D&D edition comes out.
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Ravenloft is actually my favorite officially published D&D setting and the only published setting I'll DM games in (I usually prefer to create my own homebrew settings for D&D)

Speaking of Ravenloft and old-school D&D, I am actually getting more and more into OSR gaming (Old-School Revival). While 3.5 and 5e D&D are great, there is a certain charm to TSR-era D&D and I like that a lot of the OSR retro-clones take the simplicity and charm of old-school D&D while streamlining it with a few modern tweaks (like ascending AC, which is far superior to THAC0). My favorite OSR game is Basic Fantasy, which is primarily a simplified and streamlined clone of B/X D&D.

I'm even considering making my own OSR game in the vein of Basic Fantasy using the OGL and it would be heavily inspired by Ravenloft (though for legal reasons, would obviously be not set in Ravenloft itself). The game would mix anime aesthetics and old-school Gothic Horror aesthetics in a manner similar to Castlevania.

Not sure if I would actually make this Castlevania-esque game an actual self-published OSR product or just run it as a campaign in Basic Fantasy yet. I'm definitely going to run the campaign first to see what works and what doesn't, and then make further decisions from there.
 
Anonymus Fluhre said:
She was playing a female character. I don't think it ruined the game as everyone at the table just burst out laughing (luckily I haven't played with any SJW's or feminists before). It was just a one time thing since as usual, the majority of the players just got busy again.

I just hope my next Pathfinder game can last more than a day. The last five haven't.
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It can be fine in the right context but you don't have to be a sjw to have it ruin the tone last time i saw it happen it went the other way:

We were playing an urban campaign and were basically something between judge dread and superman- we were a group of G and Lg characters licensed by the church to retake the streets and break the criminal underworld.

It was hard to feel like the good guys when one of the party tied a defeated mobster down and made him watch her rape his daughter until he gave up his'boss's safehouse. The rest of us were dealing with something else in another part of the town at the time and so didn't have an oppurtunity to stop it, or discover it. If she was a better player having a pc snap and go from LG to CE without anyone noticing until it was too late could have been really cool, but this came completely out of left field and was definitely a #lolsorandom kind of thing. It wasn't horrifying or shocking just awkward and skeevy tbh.
 
That's why I tend to just avoid sex in tabletop games, it's as bad as watching it in Bioware games. I'm totally fine with senseless killing as I've once used a child to carry a plague bomb into a city as a Alchemist. That was fun.
 
Since I mentioned OSR gaming earlier, I figured I'd also discuss another facet of old-school tabletop role-playing games that I find fascinating. And that is the first generation of RPG's (the first generation ranging from 1974 to around 1981 or so)

I love researching the early days of RPG's in the 1970's and very early 1980's and reading the materials of these games (or clones thereof in some cases). There is a lot of overlap with wargaming (I would also love to pursue miniature wargames as a hobby, but it is prohibitively expensive) and D&D itself was basically envisioned as a pseudo-medieval fantasy version of Braunstein, a wargaming variant popular in the Midwest from the late 1960's and early 1970's that in many ways was a proto-RPG. See, the original Braunstein games were a Napoleonic styled wargame where players would assume various roles in the armies such as officers, cavalrymen, villagers. and the like. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson played these Braunstein games, and Arneson made his Blackmoor setting with the Braunstein wargames in mind, which would later be refined into the original version of D&D.

Steve Jackson (most noted as the creator of GURPS and the Munchkin card game) is another interesting figure from this period, notable for creating the early combat simulation engines known as Melee and Wizard, which would be compiled into The Fantasy Trip RPG in 1977. The Fantasy Trip in many ways was a predecessor to GURPS and introduced many concepts that GURPS 1e would use. He also made Car Wars around 1979-1980, a combat simulation engine with a dystopian setting heavily inspired by Death Race 2000 and the original Mad Max. From what I can gather, Car Wars was a combat game that was in a strange limbo between a traditional wargame and an RPG. You could do small-scale vehicle wargaming (and many often did, using Micro Machines or Hot Wheels as miniatures depending on which edition and scale you were using) or do some light role-playing scenarios with it as well. Which brings me to my next point...

The first role-playing games of the 1970's were often just a tabletop combat engine (and a 1:1 scale to separate it from traditional wargames) with a vague implied setting. The key was that you were an individual combatant instead of a commander of units and immersion was encouraged. Role-playing, immersion, and storytelling was there from the start but it was often implied rather than openly enumerated and you were practically required to use your imagination and improvise as much as possible (this applies to both the players and the GM).

Most notably, OD&D didn't really have a default setting assumption (Greyhawk and Blackmoor not withstanding, as most of the people who I talked with that played OD&D back in the 70's and 80's often ignored the bare bones setting fluff and just mined it for the spells, monsters, character options, and other mechanical goodies), it was a big sandbox that used pseudo-medieval fantasy as a starting point and then became whatever the GM and the players wanted to make it. From what I can gather, most early RPG players often did their campaigns in an open sandbox style.

I'd like to one day do an RPG campaign in that classic old-school style, whether it's with a pre-existing system or a bare-bones homebrew system.
 
@Syaoran Li Warmachine/ Hordes is pretty cheap. So is Star Wars X-Wing (Haven't played it myself though), Flames of War (a game I'd like to get into) and even Kings of War (mostly collect that for bringing in more undead onto my table). Really, the only real expensive miniature games out there is Games Workshop who over charge for their product.

Also can confirm, my old group just use the original AD&D crunch and came up with our own setting as the ones already out didn't click with any of us.
 
Syaoran Li said:
I'd like to one day do an RPG campaign in that classic old-school style, whether it's with a pre-existing system or a bare-bones homebrew system.
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I've been kinda hashing out details on doing a campaign like this. I give the players a basic setting sheet with a broad picture of the gameworld, and run it in something like Microlite 20 or Dungeon World.

So far I've been playing with the idea of music being tied to magic. Not sure what I'm gonna do with it yet though, still slamming some inspiration stuff.
 
I've been wanting to do a Sword and Wizardry game but I can never find a group so really haven't bothered to learn the rules.

Though luckily there's the Assassin class from early AD&D 1st Edition so I'd be interested in playing that class, but I would probably just play my tried and try class of a magic user...Because well I like to make things go BOOM! and melt things.
 
I've been over in the ADF sub-forum a lot more lately and I've been struck with inspiration for my next Vampire: The Masquerade character in an upcoming 1990's Chicago-themed chronicle, a Brujah who is an old-school Italian-American blue collar street tough named Angelo DeLici. (yup, I'm stealing the name and backstory of Phil's dad, as autistic as that sounds and probably is)

Angelo in the World of Darkness is also a Vietnam vet, but decided to leave New Jersey and settle in Chicago upon returning from Vietnam, finding a cheap place in the area of Ohio & Levitt around 1970 or so.

In the midst of the oil shortages and economic recessions of the early-to-mid 1970's, Angelo finds himself underemployed and in order to survive, joins the Insane C-Notes street gang, a white greaser gang that mostly was comprised of Italians. From there, he makes his name as an enforcer and later lieutenant of the C-Notes and gets embraced by a Brujah ancilla around 1980 or so.

Now it's 1990 and he's the unofficial leader of the Insane C-Notes and is leading a war against the Ventrue vampire known as Kevin Jackson, leader of the Bloods gang and noted drug kingpin who has turned the Cabrini-Green Housing Project into his own personal fiefdom.

More info on the actual Insane C-Notes gang can be found here for reference.

http://chicagoganghistory.com/gangs/insane-c-notes

Yes, it's as awful and spergy as it sounds, but I'm doing this as an inside joke. My GM is in on the joke and finds it hilarious. He's even going to stat up Phil in the game as a Nosferatu NPC in the Sabbat who is hell-bent on making Angelo and the other player characters miserable.
 
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