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

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Notepad Anon said:
KAHN! He's the guy who wrote Fagtions and the Butt Plug of Immortality in Thirsty Sword Lesbians. He's made a career about being the worst stereotypes of both Jews and Homosexuals.
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Fagtions were like the only part of Thirsty Sword Lesbians that seemed like someone had fun with making a cynical cash grab. And it is an indictment of your so-called lesbian game if the part about playing gay men is one of the highlights.
 
Ghostse said:
Who ever it was (I think @Adamska) who said that alot of stuff purporting to be OSR is "vibe design" and that is massively accurate. And as you touch on, People tend to focus overly on "appendix N" and forget the others.
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A lot of the time, they just do essentially what Stranger Things did; "hey, member this 80s thing? I member, I'm so goofy for using it or some dead subculture aspect for my game".

They also have a nasty habit of borrowing from each other, often with similar annoying homebrew rules they use because they can't be arsed to pace levels like the older games did. If you're bitching about magic making balance a pain, then just crib the part from B/X that affects the level progression rate. Pokerole for fuck's sake can do that with evolution rates, and that thing can be played by kids.

I also am less amenable to this argument when you buff the dick-ass thief. They often have a bad habit of bolstering sneak attack dice or effects. It always screamed hypocritical to me, especially since they then also tend to always fucking nerf the Cleric to be shitty LARP healbot.

It's the style of the game; don't like the current iteration of DnDead? play a different fantasy game. Like fucking Runequest. Or Warhams fantasy with a homebrew setting or some shit. Or fucking B/X; nine times out of ten you barely do anymore with IT than Pathfinder did with DnD 3.5!

I find that playing different games solves a lot of problems.
Notepad Anon said:
KAHN! He's the guy who wrote Fagtions and the Butt Plug of Immortality in Thirsty Sword Lesbians. He's made a career about being the worst stereotypes of both Jews and Homosexuals.
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Oh yeah, the camp gay guy. He's horrifically one of the better writers from TSL, simply because if he's trying to be serious, he swings into full parody on FUCKING ACCIDENT.

He's like a Tommy Wiseau or Niel Breen creator. Very degenerate, very weird, but entertaining by comparison.
 
Ghostse said:
Yeah its a definite balancing act.

Another example I would like to use would
"Party is trying to convince the king to do something or otherwise suck up to royalty"

So lets say we're doing a generic "select relevant ability to action, d20 roll-under the score after modifiers" to adjudicate.
Now obviously "I charm the king.... 14 to roll under my charisma" is straight out.

But I'm going to give two examples where I'd let the player get a lot of flex.

First is, if that player is just wrecked by life. Long week, bad day. They are otherwise solid on the roleplaying, they are just having an off night and their brain isn't working, and they are asking for mulligan. I'm going to give them the option of turning things over to the dice & the gm. I'm still going to make the player provide a general description, a "ChatGPT prompt" if you will, of what they want to say, what they don't want to say, and if they know/remember any specifics to help them out. The better this is, the more likely the dice will favor them.
now if this is an EVERY TIME it won't fly. But I've had days where work has done temp INT and WIS damage, and the game is supposed to be fun not work.

Second is if the player says something to the effect of "I want to see if I know anything relevant of the kingdom and noble traditions" and that shit hasn't come up or been put into background information. Basically they are 100% relying on abilities and knowledge their character has and it would be difficult/impossible/overly autistic to convey that stuff to the player.

Another example is avoiding "Puzzle Solving via dice" but also respecting "My 18INT wizard should be smarter than me". Which is I'll usually let players do an INT check to get a solid puzzle hint in most case, depending.

But again, I don't view any of this as contradicting "the answer isn't on your character sheet"; the players shouldn't have access to any of the tables or numbers.
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This isn't how everyone plays? Just as you can't go bench press a car outside to demonstrate you can beat the strength check, if you had a charisma or int of 18 you probably wouldn't be sitting there playing a TTRPG(or maybe you would, I don't know). For a charisma type check, yeah you've just got to try saying something that isn't flatout retarded. The int thing? If you're at least trying to solve the puzzle, or remembering some basic elementary school science and trying to apply that even if it's not 100% perfect, sure make the roll. The roleplay part is the attempt, the game part is the dice roll. If you come up with something really good to say, have a little bonus, say some retarded shit and you get a penalty. Same goes for puzzle hints. Even if the player still can't figure it out after a single hint, that's not a big deal since the puzzle usually doesn't have to be resolved in a single roll or attempt anyway(now if it's something that can trigger a trap on failure then they're shit out of luck, but that's just how things go).
Adamska said:
Oh yeah, the camp gay guy. He's horrifically one of the better writers from TSL, simply because if he's trying to be serious, he swings into full parody on FUCKING ACCIDENT.

He's like a Tommy Wiseau or Niel Breen creator. Very degenerate, very weird, but entertaining by comparison.
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The entire thing seems to loop back around so hard with the identity shit, into parody and "taking it back" that it's easy to look at and wonder if it's antisemitic. A lich to represent jews? A creature that is ontologically evil pure from their desire to covet and hoard magic and knowledge that they knew no bounds in their greed to the point of abandoning their humanity? Fighting "fascist Christian privilege" paladins who wouldn't even be there if this jew-lich would just stop doing evil undead shit or not have done so in the first place? Anyone else writing that would have just kept making the lich-jew the badguy.
 
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CrunkLord420 said:
Call me a tourist but I've been deep diving into TTRPGs due being able to run solo campaigns with LLMs. I've tried play with actual humans before but it's tough for all the reasons everyone already knows. I've probably had more fun with solo play than any of the actual plays I've done.

I condense the Cyberpunk 2020 core book down to the essentials, and built modular lore dumps, mostly from OCRing the Night Cities Source books. From this the LLMs do a decent job at following the game mechanics, requesting dice rolls for skill checks as needed. Not awful with tracking skill bonuses, but I still do it myself. There's a universal issue with LLM that as the context gets longer the reasoning starts to break down. You need to make sure the LLM doesn't start hallucinating, at a certain point it can be like co-GMing or assisted creative wring. Eventually you have reload your prompts and start in a "fresh" context. So you have to journal your campaign in summarized form (you can get the LLM to help generate these).

GLM 4.7 is my favorite free model, but z.ai has massively oversold their services, so it can be slow (especially during Indian work hours).

PS. Death in Space looks cool
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Still at it. Still experimenting with different systems. Played a bunch of CY_BORG. Looked further into rules-lite systems. Namely 2400 but I think I prefer Freeform Universal's advantage/disadvantage dice pool system.

Does anyone actually do the legit Solo RPG stuff? Without an LLM? This might be the most autistic hobby I've engaged with.

If anyone's interested in my rulebook conversions (Cyberpunk 2020, CY_BORG, 2400, FU) or prompts let me know.
 
Seeing this thread reminds me of my autistic GURPS campaign I attempted to run years ago.
Unfortunately, my friends do not have the same strain of autism as I, they could not handle the tactical 1930s action, and wrangling them to play at a semi-consistent rate was hell.
Maybe I'll try again some day, being a GURPS player didn't work either because the group I joined online was full of lolrandom spergs, it seemed only me and the GM got what he was going for, and it died after 2 sessions.
sippin.jpg
 
AnOminous said:
I'm sure I'm not alone in this. GURPS was such a good idea.

But I could never get anyone to play it. You know it. You had it happen. It was just impossible.
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It was fun when I could organize it, and those two sessions were fun too, but yeah getting players/GMs in a nearby time zone that are not too retarded is very hard. I already had my group of friends, but they mostly were used to D&D (which has also died now due to everyones schedule changing too much) and I got absolutely sick of that system. I think my main issue is I want to play a more realistic scenario, and the majority of games and the community is based around fantasy/sci-fi that might as well be fantasy rather than the historical/modern scenarios that I wanted.
Still, don't give up, the community here surely has enough people around that might be interested as long as you're proactive enough, 4chan/tg/ has a GURPS thread, that's where I found the one game I was a player in, but that fell apart so I guess that's not great advice.
 
Hatewerfer said:
Still, don't give up, the community here surely has enough people around that might be interested as long as you're proactive enough, 4chan/tg/ has a GURPS thread, that's where I found the one game I was a player in, but that fell apart so I guess that's not great advice.
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I could always get together a Chaosium d100 campaign of some sort because people liked the system and the franchises (like CoC and Stormbringer and Ringworld) were all things people were fans of anyway.
 
Lightning's Heraldry said:
If you have something you would like me to go read because we want to No True Scottsman's Fallacy OSR then shoot your shot, but if I read it and come back with the same take away then what?
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You vastly overestimate how much I care about your opinion.
 
The Ugly One said:
It was because Gary Gygax didn't want to keep paying royalties to Dave Arneson. Arneson got royalties on D&D, but not AD&D.
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I’m aware of why it was done. That didn’t change the fact that they had two game lines competing for space and both of them had to be supported. It’s something that played out even more dramatically with all of the campaign settings that they created, even if I love some of them so.

Fuck, some of the old heads in the area that I grew up were completely unaware that Basic stayed in print until 1995 because their local scene was “All AD&D, all the time.”

Uzumaki said:
Battle tech is a wargame where the entirely lengthy session is a single combat. That is pretty much the result you should expect using your proposed rule.
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Battletech old heads here. You can keep it playing fast if everyone stays focused and uses dice to track target modifiers and torso twists among other tricks.

Henri Barbusse said:
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,
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This genuinely boggles my mind. The best skill system that D&D has ever had aspires to mediocrity while, for pretty much any other competent designer in the industry, skill systems have been a solved problem since the 90’s at the latest.
 
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