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

[Judge Dredd]

it is that particularly the 5e implementation of it is terrible and in the name of not having trannies chimp out at the table if their teifling croaks makes PCs too hard to kill in a way that isn't fun.

I don't think that's the reason. It's just bad math/planning. Learning about the intention of "bonus action" vs how it played out was an eye opener on the flaws of 5es design for me.

One of the most elegant damage systems, in that it was perfectly suited to the game and it's tone, was that of Cubicle 7's Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space. Character attributes range from one to six and damage is deducted directly from attributes on a temporary basis. Take a point of damage and you were hit in the head? Lose a point of Intelligence due to concussion. Take three points of damage when someone fires the electron beam into your legs? Take them off Mobility. And if you're reduced to 0 in an attribute then it has the appropriate effect - unconscious, paralysed, etc. Extremely quick flowing, keeps combat dangerous (due to only having six points at most), has interesting variation - e.g. one person might be able to handle one type of damage better than another - and has a lot of room for descriptive effects rather than being a HP sponge that goes "fine, fine, fine, down."

Complex? No. A perfect fit for this game? Yes.

There was a fat furry fetish game popular in my scene that worked like that. It was a low numbers game, and iirc, a body part had 0-3 hp depending on your stats. Take a hit at 0hp you take some penalty. Said "hp" was also your stats, so arms would be strength, legs would be dex, etc. It also had weapons and attacks that used those other stats.

My take HP is always that it its an amalgamation of skill, toughness, and luck - It is a representation of a character's ability to have blow not hit a critical area.

I used to do that, but it ended up a bit abstract for people to understand. I just use video game logic and everything works out fine. Savage Worlds "shaken" is like that, and it baffles a lot of people.

I wouldn't have replied, but I want to share one use of HP I did that went over well and is related to what you said.

It was a rules lite game, and it was a non-lethal scenario. For sake of example, let's say the PCs are trying to avoid being arrested by mall cops. Instead of playing by the book (which would've either been fail-or-die or impossible-to-lose), I had mall cops roll attacks as normal, and when a PC was at 0hp, a successful grapple check against them would result in them being detained. It was a bit jank, and likely wouldn't work for a whole campaign, but for a one shot it worked well enough.

I've heard the mantra of applying HP to everything. I don't go that far, but sometimes it's a handy to prevent a single roll being a failure point.

I forget where I saw this, but it worked for random encounters too. 20"hp", and roll a d6 each dungeon turn. d4 if they're quiet, or d8 if they make noise. Though it ended up not mattering anyway, it's a neat way of doing random encounters.

 

[Manly_Brony]

Eldritch STDs

Nice idea. The new Delta Green game would absolutely love this but in an an inbred, redneck trailer park. You know sex work is real work, never punch down, yada yada.

 

[Uzumaki]

Someone before asked why osr games are obsessed with being rules light, and I have some time to kill so I’ll explain it.

There’s an expression in the osr community that sums up their attitude pretty well: “the answer isn’t on your character sheet.”

The osr philosophy has it that a character sheet full of skills and abilities turns into a hammer/nail situation. By minimizing the ways in which players directly interact with the system you force them to find narrative solutions.

For a dumb example let’s say the party has to cross a pit. If your game has skills and one player has a “jump” skill forget even discussing options that dickhead is jumping. If there’s no jump skill they have to start asking question. Is there stuff in the room we can use to make a bridge?

Osr wants you in the narrative as much as possible, and overcoming challenges by rolling dice as little as possible. So it has rules only for the bare bones procedures of what the game is about (graverobbing) and leaves the rest to the DM in an as explicitly intentional way as is possible.

 

[Snekposter]

Eldritch STDs

He asked how it was different, not how it was similar.

 

[AnOminous]

And it was different from a normal stripper vagina how?

Did I just accidentally stumble into the Styx thread?

It was a rules lite game, and it was a non-lethal scenario. For sake of example, let's say the PCs are trying to avoid being arrested by mall cops.

I love this scenario already. I'm wondering how it came about. Reminds me when I was 14 and would hang out with my bros in the mall wearing my shades and navy blue peacoat, browsing the game shop and looking bad, until those fucking mall cops threw us out.

Fucking pigs. I somehow never made my saving throw to avoid getting thrown out.

 

[Adamska]

Osr wants you in the narrative as much as possible, and overcoming challenges by rolling dice as little as possible. So it has rules only for the bare bones procedures of what the game is about (graverobbing) and leaves the rest to the DM in an as explicitly intentional way as is possible.

And how is this any different from the garbage they claim to hate, such as Powered by the Apocalypse? They really seem to hate being forced to see how much thought was put into the mechanics of those books. I think that might have been a factor in why I never cottoned on to OSR as a philosophy, since it's the same wishy washy vibe shit rather than a design ethos.

 

[Ghostse]

Sorry, I need explicit details about Deep One reproduction and their cold fishy dicks.

Deep ones would spawn, so they wouldn't have dicks you fucking racist. Reported. MODS?!

Someone before asked why osr games are obsessed with being rules light, and I have some time to kill so I’ll explain it.

There’s an expression in the osr community that sums up their attitude pretty well: “the answer isn’t on your character sheet.”

The osr philosophy has it that a character sheet full of skills and abilities turns into a hammer/nail situation. By minimizing the ways in which players directly interact with the system you force them to find narrative solutions.

For a dumb example let’s say the party has to cross a pit. If your game has skills and one player has a “jump” skill forget even discussing options that dickhead is jumping. If there’s no jump skill they have to start asking question. Is there stuff in the room we can use to make a bridge?

Osr wants you in the narrative as much as possible, and overcoming challenges by rolling dice as little as possible. So it has rules only for the bare bones procedures of what the game is about (graverobbing) and leaves the rest to the DM in an as explicitly intentional way as is possible.

I'm going to very lightly touch on this:
A proper OSR game is rules light ... for the players. The GM should have a wealth of figures and mechanics to act as helpful guides to adjudicate player actions. Much like reality, they decide they are going to try to do and then pass those actions to the GM and see what happens. If the GM wishes to ignore those mechanics, that is the right of the GM but the players should only be mildly aware of this or what's happening behind the scenes/screen.

But "did the designer actually think about how someone would use this system to handle normal player actions in a delve" is the divider between an actual proper system and the PbtA verson of B/X. PbBX if you will.

The good thing about Bronze Age if you're doing a realism thing is that bronze requires having both copper and tin. Those don't often occur in the same place, so for people to have both copper and tin required trade. This was a big part of creating civilization, because the societies that could get along and trade with each other suddenly had bronze, massively better than everything else for weapons, tools, and everything else humanity succeeds at.

Cooperation between civilizations is much better than war between civilizations.

Things didn't turn out too well for the people who opposed the Bronze Age apex civilizations.

The idea is that the party is entering a Donut Steel fantasy mediterranean post-bronze age collapse, or maybe mid collapse. Basically the tin stopped arriving a generation or two ago and the trade network based on bronze collapsed. So you have the crumbling reminents of these once-great civilizations still holding their capitals and able to leverage aquaducts/buildings/armories build up when times were good, and in general the world has crumbled to warlordism.

Event Donut Steel Egypt, notMemphis is still the seat of the region and the notPharoh can enforce his will beyond the city walls, but has to rely on Warlord-Nobles for delegation so its very weak and if a warlord says "yeah naw" there is limited ability to do anything about it. Sort of like the pope in Italy.

The civilizations would like to cooperate and trade, but there aren't enough resources so conflict is the only option.

 

[Henri Barbusse]

For a dumb example let’s say the party has to cross a pit. If your game has skills and one player has a “jump” skill forget even discussing options that dickhead is jumping. If there’s no jump skill they have to start asking question. Is there stuff in the room we can use to make a bridge?

You make it sound like the OSR philosophy is "Put a nail in front of the players and then get mad when they pull out a hammer." Which is fine with me, since I don't respect OSR philosophy.

Deep ones would spawn, so they wouldn't have dicks you fucking racist. Reported. MODS?!

I have to conclude you might be right, since the only full-blooded Deep Ones we see marrying humans in Lovecraft are female. I guess the marital duties for humans being just coming on some eggs the wife left behind makes the Deep One marriage easier on the human partner.

 

[Uzumaki]

You make it sound like the OSR philosophy is "Put a nail in front of the players and then get mad when they pull out a hammer." Which is fine with me, since I don't respect OSR philosophy.

This is just deliberately obtuse.

And how is this any different from the garbage they claim to hate, such as Powered by the Apocalypse?

If you genuinely can't tell the difference between PbtA and B/X then that says.more about you than the osr.

I'm not going to have an argument with you two jackasses where I defend osr and you argue in bad faith.

 

[The Ugly One]

You make it sound like the OSR philosophy is "Put a nail in front of the players and then get mad when they pull out a hammer." Which is fine with me, since I don't respect OSR philosophy.

The philosophy is, "Not everything needs to be a d20 roll on a skill list. Using your brain can be fun, too."

Not dumb example: You have captured a wizard who was making golems out of goblin carcasses in his lair. As he cowers and pisses himself, he offers you a deal - spare his life, and he'll join your party as a henchman. After all, seems like an easier path to riches than animated goblin carcasses, which he in retrospect had no effective plan to monetize.

OSR - You have to weigh the obvious benefits of a wizard in the party against the fact that this guy is shifty as hell.
3rd edition onward: You roll Sense Motive/Insight/whatever and immediately know whether it's a genuine offer.

Overdefining skills results in the imagination being sucked out of the game and everything becoming a die roll. This has the knock-on effect of too many skills, not enough skill points, not all skills being equal, and nonsensical conflicts - why does being a good athlete mean I have a boring personality?

 

[Henri Barbusse]

The philosophy is, "Not everything needs to be a d20 roll on a skill list. Using your brain can be fun, too."

Not dumb example: You have captured a wizard who was making golems out of goblin carcasses in his lair. As he cowers and pisses himself, he offers you a deal - spare his life, and he'll join your party as a henchman. After all, seems like an easier path to riches than animated goblin carcasses, which he in retrospect had no effective plan to monetize.

OSR - You have to weigh the obvious benefits of a wizard in the party against the fact that this guy is shifty as hell.
3rd edition onward: You roll Sense Motive/Insight/whatever and immediately know whether it's a genuine offer.

Overdefining skills results in the imagination being sucked out of the game and everything becoming a die roll. This has the knock-on effect of too many skills, not enough skill points, not all skills being equal, and nonsensical conflicts - why does being a good athlete mean I have a boring personality?

That is a much better example, though the real problem I see there is applying skills as a solution to social situations. If everyone is able to contribute in combat (even if the wizard is just plinking with a sling/crossbow most of the time) and in exploration (wizards read runes, fighters push boulders and open stone sarcophagi), then it does not make sense and isn't fun that social situations are just one character doing everything, while the wizard takes a nap after boosting the talker's charisma and the fighter just drools in a corner. OSR fixes that, but overcorrects in that it applies that fix to everything.

(Though in your example, then as a GM I'd say that Sense Motive etc. reveals that the wizard is absolutely terrified for his life and has no cards to play at the moment. The offer is still valuable for the time being, but makes no guarantee the shifty guy won't betray the party the moment he thinks he can get away with it. It's still a bad skill, since it's hard to balance it between useless and basically telepathy, so the general issue is still there.)

 

[Notepad Anon]

I appealed to the Neopets People (Praise Xenu) to write the TRPG, and got ghosted yet again. Truly, we're never going to reach Neogartha at this rate. But the entire collapse of that Kickstarter and situation has been an entertaining watch. In short, don't add Sex and Violence to a Goddamn Neopets TRPG what the fuck people.

As for my news, St. Miracles Hospital with Dr. Autism and Co. is greenlit and just needs a pass to set up the document before working on everything. It's a dicepool system because I like those and they tend to work out for what I'm making already. As for CONTENT, the Daggerheart Video is next on the chopping block. It's already huge and I haven't finished calling Spencer Starke a faggot yet.

I have been encouraged more to do a Kickstarter for a smaller project, which one very excited member of my server decided to contact Michael Kirkbride to do the art for one. He will most likely not respond, but it is amusing he responded somewhat to him already. Outside of that, finding artists is a pain in the ass and I still hate working with them because they are all drama queens.

 

[LovisXVI]

Outside of that, finding artists is a pain in the ass and I still hate working with them because they are all drama queens.

I'm very pleased that in my work, all my employers already had someone lined up. Even when I hired my friend to do some illustrations for a self published module I made, it felt like I had to twist his arm to keep him on task.

OSR - You have to weigh the obvious benefits of a wizard in the party against the fact that this guy is shifty as hell.
3rd edition onward: You roll Sense Motive/Insight/whatever and immediately know whether it's a genuine offer.

Though in your example, then as a GM I'd say that Sense Motive etc. reveals that the wizard is absolutely terrified for his life and has no cards to play at the moment. The offer is still valuable for the time being, but makes no guarantee the shifty guy won't betray the party the moment he thinks he can get away with it. It's still a bad skill, since it's hard to balance it between useless and basically telepathy, so the general issue is still there.

Counter point: in real life when trying to determine whether to trust someone, you can typically read their expression and subtle cues that wound require some impressive acting on the part of the gm to pull off and not just turn it into a dice toss. Sense motive (or perception or whatever) should be used to relay information that's discernable to the character so you have more information to work with, like the example @Henri Barbusse gave. You can also make them roll blindly, make it an opposed roll against an unknown roll, and couch everything in subjective terms, which I find that alone makes people cagey on trusting the results. A person investing time and effort into the skills that would make them better at discerning that kind of thing would be rewarded in as much as situations where such skills would benefit them. That said, the issues of skill over definition and character balance is only a problem with D&D derived d20 games, and I recommend playing literally anything else. Like Traveller! There's a game that rewards interesting use of skills and attributes together, since they're not inherently bound together. A social check could use education, intellect or social standing (or even physical attributes in certain circumstances) as the situation calls for it. You could use anything from Recon to Deception with intellect, or education and a Science (Psychology).

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

I appealed to the Neopets People (Praise Xenu) to write the TRPG, and got ghosted yet again.

Considering you posted on this site of all places, you probably have a much lower chance of getting anyone's attention, in a positive way at least.

Dr. Autism and Co.

Kek.

In short, don't add Sex and Violence to a Goddamn Neopets TRPG what the fuck people.

Fucking whut?

Michael Kirkbride to do the art for one.

God bless that random dicksword user, even if it might not amount to anything.

Outside of that, finding artists is a pain in the ass and I still hate working with them because they are all drama queens.

Such is the life of a "creative type." They're all weird fairy fucks, but when you do find a normal artist you better hold on to them tight because you caught yourself a unicorn.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

As for CONTENT, the Daggerheart Video is next on the chopping block. It's already huge and I haven't finished calling Spencer Starke a faggot yet.

4 pages of safety tools and an academic style lesson plan with breaks for a session zero! Not even the My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria had that many guidelines, and that was designed for kids to enter into rpgs!

 

[Manly_Brony]

I have to conclude you might be right, since the only full-blooded Deep Ones we see marrying humans in Lovecraft are female. I guess the marital duties for humans being just coming on some eggs the wife left behind makes the Deep One marriage easier on the human partner.

It's implied in the story too and definitely exists in the TTRPG. The Songs of Fantari adventure from the Fatal Experiments scenario collection has an illustration of a Deep One lying next to a nude, voluptuous woman suggesting they fucked or are about to get freaky. And the Escape from Innsmouth supplement/campaign has several examples of Hybrid families where the man of the house is scaly and shows up for regular conjugal visits. Slightly off-topic but 99% of the Gill-man/Fishman movies that exist portray the things trying to screw women.

 

[Halbschwanz]

So here's my idea (for PF 1e but I'm sure it can be translated to other systems with a bit of tweaking)

I personally would opt for "in combat, items hitting/being hit by things over their Hardness thresholds take Durability damage represented by a Durability Loss counter. But that damage isn't resolved until after combat, UNLESS a critical miss/critical success is rolled or the DP counters are greater than <Some value, probably double the item's total durability/hitpoints>"

If it helps, the section on saving throws in base PF does note that you check for item damage when rolling a natural 1 on saves. Most people just overlook that or don't play with the rule. Or if you want players to be more constantly aware of durability, you could allow all players to do sort of what Splintering Weapon does and let them damage their weapons to make crit confirmation easier, or maybe an inverse where you can opt to shunt the extra damage from a crit to your shield/armor/whatever to avoid getting pasted. I've done that while playing Knave and it's pretty fun, though that one already has a built in degradation system as part of its mechanics. Having a player's shield explode then watching them scramble on their turn to get another piece of protective gear or break off a sword in their opponent's ribcage is rather evocative and cool.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

The philosophy is, "Not everything needs to be a d20 roll on a skill list. Using your brain can be fun, too."

Not dumb example: You have captured a wizard who was making golems out of goblin carcasses in his lair. As he cowers and pisses himself, he offers you a deal - spare his life, and he'll join your party as a henchman. After all, seems like an easier path to riches than animated goblin carcasses, which he in retrospect had no effective plan to monetize.

OSR - You have to weigh the obvious benefits of a wizard in the party against the fact that this guy is shifty as hell.
3rd edition onward: You roll Sense Motive/Insight/whatever and immediately know whether it's a genuine offer.

Overdefining skills results in the imagination being sucked out of the game and everything becoming a die roll. This has the knock-on effect of too many skills, not enough skill points, not all skills being equal, and nonsensical conflicts - why does being a good athlete mean I have a boring personality?

Sort of. I would argue that even with 3E onward, even IF your Insight/Sense Motive check shows he's genuine, you have to weigh the benefits and downsides of having this guy in your retinue.

Cause, y'know, morally flexible wizards can cause problems even if they're telling the truth about being helpful. Some people's ideas of being helpful are not like others.

(This is also why super diplomacy checks can backfire hilariously. A red dragon's idea of 'helpful' or 'friendly' might not exactly jibe with the party's.)

 

[p1138]

Sort of. I would argue that even with 3E onward, even IF your Insight/Sense Motive check shows he's genuine, you have to weigh the benefits and downsides of having this guy in your retinue.

Cause, y'know, morally flexible wizards can cause problems even if they're telling the truth about being helpful. Some people's ideas of being helpful are not like others.

(This is also why super diplomacy checks can backfire hilariously. A red dragon's idea of 'helpful' or 'friendly' might not exactly jibe with the party's.)

Seriously, it's just a lower level version of a genie fucking someone over with a technically correct response to a wish. Sense motive doesn't need to be an equivalent to omniscience. Even if the wizard wants to work with the party now, that doesn't mean they won't change their mind later either.

Pathfinder "tried" to fix the issue of martial classes usually not having enough skill points by having their "background skills" in PF unchained. The problem is that while it's 2 free skill points in some knowledge and job type stuff for the most part, it doesn't actually do anything to resolve the issue of the warrior sitting on his hands while a face handles everything. Splitting physical and mental skills and assigning different amounts of each to classes would have been a much better way to resolve that, so you don't end up with Conan the Barbarian that somehow isn't intimidating at all due to having a shit charisma and no points to put into it.

 

[The Ugly One]

Though in your example, then as a GM I'd say that Sense Motive etc. reveals that the wizard is absolutely terrified for his life and has no cards to play at the moment.

3rd edition explicitly calls out trustworthiness, so if the wizard later tries to backstab the party, they will justly complain that after their nat 20 on the Sense Motive check, you told them he seemed on the level. In OSR, if it happens, they say, "Ah, you know...he was a sniveling little psycho."