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

[AnOminous]

I would like to add for the record, this wasn't some pro-Commie fantasy shit like one would expect from someone who builds a scenario around Soviet Russia. It's based off of real life events of Soviet soldiers shooting a wild man that charged at them from a cave in the Caucuses in the 1920s.

In my case, the game was literally the idea of the players and specifically the guy who was usually party leader. He basically said something like "I want lots of guns." And I was like "okay why does he have lots of guns?" And he spun this yarn about his character's background, and I thought, a Russian mobster arms dealer who loved the United States and hated commies? Yeah I'll go with that.

This was a high mortality campaign to say the least. The original Russians all died before it ended, but by then, even the librarian and accountant in the party could lay down serious tommy gun fire.

(And yes I know in actual reality the tommy gun was actually not widely in use by mobsters, but it's both iconic and fun.)

 

[Average Russian Spy]

In my case, the game was literally the idea of the players and specifically the guy who was usually party leader. He basically said something like "I want lots of guns." And I was like "okay why does he have lots of guns?" And he spun this yarn about his character's background, and I thought, a Russian mobster arms dealer who loved the United States and hated commies? Yeah I'll go with that.

This was a high mortality campaign to say the least. The original Russians all died before it ended, but by then, even the librarian and accountant in the party could lay down serious tommy gun fire.

(And yes I know in actual reality the tommy gun was actually not widely in use by mobsters, but it's both iconic and fun.)

I wish I could find another group to do another CoC campaign with. My current one is more interested in Pathfinder, which is perfectly fine.

Longest running campaign I can think of was an expedition to Bolivia to uncover what we believed to be a long forgotten civilization, which ended up being snakemen who worshiped Yig. We ended up finding incredible wealth, killing a giant snake woman, took a picture of it with us posing around it and ended up becoming famous worldwide because of it.

I had one character who survived through the whole campaign, miraculously. An Arabian Indian Jones-esque adventurer who ended up becoming so rich that he was considered to be apart of the top 1% richest people on Earth. He basically became a super celebrity by the end of the campaign and was passively making more money through books and other royalties. I miss him.

 

[LovisXVI]

With nonsense. IL makes a big point of having excruciating detail on things that look like clues but go nowhere. The adventure has no clues. I don't care that the players don't come out on top, I care that it burns characters on a cavalcade of nonsense.

In the girl's apartment, there's a world war 1 field radio that has a serial number that is the date of the construction of the building that went missing from a soldier who was the third cousin of the barber of the architect...

God help you if your party discovers that literally none of the clues ever lead anywhere. I love investigative games like DG because I love making players think like that, actually investigating, rewarding engagement with the narrative reality. IL effectively punishes this behavior by making every instance an active waste of the players' time and the characters' resources, and it does this across three hundred pages of an adventure with no payoff either mechanically or narratively. It's just a bunch of random shit that happened for no reason and also undermines the entire setting by establishing that everything happening in the DG universe also happens for no reason because reality is just KY's jumble o'nonsense.

It's a bad adventure with a slick presentation.

The investigative adventure where the clues make no sense and you get to roleplay out losing your damn mind sounds like one of those adventures that would be really fun, like my long-standing idea of a CoC adventure where there is no mythos and it is completely mundane, but in practice it is just incredibly frustrating and leaves you blue-balled as you are constantly waiting for the shoe to drop instead of realizing what is actually going on precisely because you cannot divorce the meta-knowledge of game you are playing. You are playing an investagative game to... INVESTIGATE! Just fucking around for god knows how many sessions is actively annoying, even if theoretically it sounds fun.

 

[Dante Alighieri]

the final enemy that finished them off wasn't Cthulhu or the eldritch, but the IRS.

I'm definitely more afraid of the IRS than some eldritch being.

 

[The Ugly One]

The problem is what to do with a new edition. Can't go old school due to the abundance of OSR. Best option I can see is modernise, streamline, and rewrite all the mechanics. ie. Nimble 5e. It will piss off the grogs something fierce. It would also require playtesting and editing, something they're unlikely to do if they're trying to speed run a new edition after the collapse of 2024 ed.

Only minor changes are needed to 5e. It's as playable an edition as there ever was. D&D doesn't need new mechanics; it needs new content, and this content needs to not be fucking gay. Chainmail bikinis. Cannibal orcs. Flying pirate ships run by space monkeys. Stop catering to fat weirdos who wear dresses to the game shop, and when there is a manufactured outcry over some monster being a stand-in for racial minorities, say nothing. Or say "lol be mad." Stop fucking apologizing and changing content to pacify woketards. Then fire Jeremy Crawford and the woke brigade he brought in. They won't do that, and so they won't fix it.

 

[Manly_Brony]

I've pushed back on the wokeness claims of modern DG before in this thread. The guys running DG are certainly leftists, but they aren't writing about the DEI hiring practices of the Program.

The whole point of Delta Green is that the conspiracies are true, evil things lurk on the fringe and in the centers of power. The 90s DG was a reaction to the actions of the federal government on innocents and well-deserved targets. COINTELPRO, MKULTRA, Waco, Ruby Ridge, Watergate, JFK Commission, Vietnam, all that shit. The agents we play were somewhat of a bulwark against the more nefarious elements within and without society.

However, what happened in the 2000s? The terrorists became foreigners. The hippie boomers cheered on as they voted away civil liberties and promoted the patriotic values of bombing brown people. The response to the discovery of a vast domestic surveillance infrastructure was just a few mutterings of outrage, contained to the 24 hour news cycle. You, agent of the Program, might get to fight the monsters, but you can't look into the corporation that funded the experiments. You will violate every law on the books, because otherwise "Cthulhu" will win. A reaction to the 2000s and 2010s.

They were left-leaning libertarians back then and it was tolerable but they're far-left now and spent the last decade screaming about how the enemy is inside the gates again and everyone right of AOC needs a bullet or a re-education camp. I want to fight Sons of Yog-Sothoth disguised as repulsive troons who are running for office, Tcho-Tcho majority towns with mysterious disappearances and mass fraud, We Wuz Kangz Black supremacists worshiping Nyarlathotep's Black Pharaoh Avatar in the ghetto, militant furry Tsathoggua cultists recruiting on Reddit/Discord/BlueSky, a network of gender affirming surgeons feeding Ghouls with chopped off tits/dicks too when I play DG. Not just endless hordes of rich, White cismen in suits, sinister alien slime #15 and odd, almost or entirely extinct Christian sects like the snake handlers and the Skoptsy. I want a game that punches everywhere. And I don't want to read diarrhea like this. What's next? White people culturally appropriated fried chicken?

You are playing a DG game and expected the characters to come out on top?

Nobody wants to win DG. It's about giving the unaware masses one more bright, calm day to wake up to. And it's perfectly normal to let your agents triumph over a small threat.

 

[Manly_Brony]

A friend of mine had a similar idea but it took place in the early 20's right around when the civil war was finally coming to a close. Sadly, we never played it. Basically, you're a group of about 4-5 Soviet soldiers rooting out White soldiers in the Caucuses and the commanding officer dies very early on from a booby trap and the group gets cut off by White forces, forcing the group to go deeper into the mountains. There's some survival elements but ultimately, the group comes across a race of Neanderthal-Ape-like men living in massive cave systems and things escalate from there.

The Soviets were also fighting in China and Afghanistan in the latter half of the 1920s. No need to go full Commie when you have local monsters and Mythos worshiping tribesmen/celestials to deal with.

 

[p1138]

Stop catering to fat weirdos who wear dresses to the game shop, and when there is a manufactured outcry over some monster being a stand-in for racial minorities, say nothing. Or say "lol be mad."

If you actually encounter one of these idiots in the wild, you can do better than that and make their brain bluescreen.

"Why is it that when you look at a description and image of an orc, a savage elf, evil demon, etc. you see black people/muslims/whatever?"
The only possible comeback they can have is flailing their arms and screeching about old art
"That art hasn't been printed in 30 years, and those descriptions were changed decades ago, you probably weren't even fucking born yet when that art was a thing"
If anything more comes out of their mouth, just call them a racist bigot. If they have the brainpower to have tied their shoes, their brains will slowly attempt to figure out what how their entire argument got turned on its head.

I'm not sure what this has to do with TTRPGs but anyone who assumed that it would result in anything but a revenue source for government and get scaled to being run by larger companies and VC firms is a fucking idiot. Just look at the post prohibition era in the US for booze. The various levels of government got their revenue via licenses and taxes, and the entire industry went corporate. Most of the old moonshine makers and runners went out of business or continued to be in business while having to evade government regulators and tax collectors, meanwhile the general public wasn't interested in Billy's Bathtub Bourbon anymore since they didn't need to deal with that shit.

 

[AnOminous]

Stop fucking apologizing and changing content to pacify woketards.

I'd almost say even do the opposite. Just make your campaign so offensive you drive off woketards from the outset. Fat guy in dress? Get the fuck out retard. I'd even go so far as to make the opening villain a completely over the top troon who even Buffalo Bill would tell to calm down.

Most of the old moonshine makers and runners went out of business or continued to be in business while having to evade government regulators and tax collectors, meanwhile the general public wasn't interested in Billy's Bathtub Bourbon anymore since they didn't need to deal with that shit.

That said, one of the best liquors I ever had was moonshine from some 80 something year old boomer from Oklahoma who had been doing it for decades. Despite being the completely traditional corn mash type, it had a complex, nuanced flavor but was ridiculously high proof and came on sweet, then hit you like a brick in the head.

 

[Manly_Brony]

I'm not sure what this has to do with TTRPGs

This my friend is straight from the Delta Green scenario God's Breath about an eldritch fertility cult in the weed industry which was also ruined by White Americans.

 

[Loose Goose]

Lots of people went from "Dude, the government should just legalize weed, dude" to "The government legalized weed, reeeeee!" even though they got exactly what they wanted. You can't really take them seriously, because they are dumb, disingenuous or (usually) both.

 

[AnOminous]

Lots of people went from "Dude, the government should just legalize weed, dude" to "The government legalized weed, reeeeee!" even though they got exactly what they wanted. You can't really take them seriously, because they are dumb, disingenuous or (usually) both.

Sometimes you have an idea and you think it's good and then it's done but the results are not good. I'm still in favor of decriminalization, but now there's super high-THC weed available that causes people to scream and vomit for hours.

And legal weed shops are surrounded by crime.

 

[Manly_Brony]

I'd almost say even do the opposite. Just make your campaign so offensive you drive off woketards from the outset. Fat guy in dress? Get the fuck out retard. I'd even go so far as to make the opening villain a completely over the top troon who even Buffalo Bill would tell to calm down.

There are many good ways to weed them out in the well established, really popular TTRPGs that went for the "mOdErN aUdIeNcE". You need to ban everything they're there for. Older edition, a Human only DnD campaign, dungeons and hex crawls instead of festivals, an Imperial campaign in Star Wars, a Cyberpunk campaign outside Night City's tranny bars, 1920s CoC in the Deep South, Victorian CoC in India, a Warhammer campaign focused on the fight against Slaanesh that's just thinly veiled kinkshaming and LGHDTV bashing, etc.

 

[Ghostse]

That said, one of the best liquors I ever had was moonshine from some 80 something year old boomer from Oklahoma who had been doing it for decades. Despite being the completely traditional corn mash type, it had a complex, nuanced flavor but was ridiculously high proof and came on sweet, then hit you like a brick in the head.

tl;dr: when you are making 50,000 gallons you have to take the corn you can find on the market and the FDA restriction on how much bugs & rodent feces you are allowed to have become a real thing.
When you are making 5 gallons you can drive out to that guy you know who has the farm with the good soil and get a bushel.

Also when you are making and mass-marketing huge batches you go with the process that works reliably, not the one that works the best.

Add to this ATF requirements on proof-limits means that the whiskey from the store is blended with other of the same-type of whiskey and diluted to hit the desired 80.

There are ways around this, but the jews at the distillery keep finding them and ruining them.
Single Barrel used to be a reasonable way around it (that is all the whiskey in the bottle came from a single barrel) but now what they do is either super-ferment the barrel so you can dilute it and stretch it further, use giant barrels with wood planks, or (iirc) they do some rules lawyer shit where the whiskey goes into a big tank to ferment for a time and then is transfered to small barrels - but see it all started as single origin so its legal.

Cask Strength (in theory, undiluted poured from the cask) too used to be a good way to get around being jewed, but what they do now is mix "old" and "new" whiskey to get the proof into a desired range.

 

[p1138]

This my friend is straight from the Delta Green scenario God's Breath about an eldritch fertility cult in the weed industry which was also ruined by White Americans.

I guess I'd have to resubmit to question to the writers of this bullshit then. "wtf does this have to do with anything?"

I get wanting to make a scenario for a game about weed. Fine. But it doesn't need a page long tirade whining about the thing that anyone with a partially functioning brain saw coming. I guess it serves as yet another example of people who can't fucking write a TTRPG without injecting unnecessary bullshit but holy shit I wouldn't have been expecting it to be about that.

or (iirc) they do some rules lawyer shit where the whiskey goes into a big tank to ferment for a time and then is transfered to small barrels - but see it all started as single origin so its legal.

You definitely need to watch out for the single barrel/cask "finish" where they just leave a batch in some barrels for a week or whatever, dump it out and send it to the filling machines, and then repeat with the barrels. All the while leaving it as vague as possible for people who don't read the entire label to assume that it was actually aged or fermented in those barrels.

 

[AnOminous]

Cask Strength (in theory, undiluted poured from the cask) too used to be a good way to get around being jewed, but what they do now is mix "old" and "new" whiskey to get the proof into a desired range.

This guy had the connections to do it legally, but on principle, chose to continue doing it illegally. He didn't consider it "moonshine" if it was legal.

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

I guess I'd have to resubmit to question to the writers of this bullshit then. "wtf does this have to do with anything?"

Delta Green is about playing members of an unofficial conspiracy within the US government that hunts down Lovecraft shit. The writers, as mentioned previously, have completely lost their minds. They haven’t responded well to the fact that their game is about government conspiracies being real while you play members of the deep state, so they put sidebars about shit like this into their games and make adventures about ICE being part of a child sacrifice cult, and even then my local store refuses to carry it because it’s “copaganda.”

Like everything else in culture, lmao it’s fucked make your own

 

[Manly_Brony]

Delta Green is about playing members of an unofficial conspiracy within the US government that hunts down Lovecraft shit. The writers, as mentioned previously, have completely lost their minds. They haven’t responded well to the fact that their game is about government conspiracies being real while you play members of the deep state, so they put sidebars about shit like this into their games and make adventures about ICE being part of a child sacrifice cult, and even then my local store refuses to carry it because it’s “copaganda.”

Like everything else in culture, lmao it’s fucked make your own

Adam Scott Glancy whined a bit already about losing who knows how many Free Palpatine! "friends or at least friendly acquaintances" after October 7th because he's a Zionist so I guess the whole Epstein Island thing won't appear in DG: Or they'll turn it into a Russian operation with the most hardbass, Adidas clad, squatting, Russiany Russians holding Jeff's leash.

 

[Brain Problems]

This shit is retarded and whenever someone on the right does it (look up Phil Eklund and the fucking pillorying he has taken from the troons and commies on BGG) they get lambasted for having Wrong Thoughts and SHOVING THEM DOWN OUR THROATS, YUCK but meanwhile you can toss in whatever basic bitch Daily Show-tier factoids into the middle of your fucking game for some epic updoots without anyone blinking. Shameless.

I know it's a bit of a tedious derail (apologies) but why can't writers just keep this shit to themselves? Are they that starved for asspats that they need to do some noodle-arm flexing for 16 psychos on Twitter? Or am I not seeing the hidden truth, the knowledge behind the curtain... that it's all marketing and that all publicity is good publicity; alienating RIGHT WING CHUDS doesn't cost you as much as you think versus appealing to the commies that won't buy your shit anyway.

Either way, I haven't played DG (yet) but why not just approach it with the Deus Ex Files ideology of "every conspiracy theory is true, go from there". But that said, minus my aforementioned reservations about throwing shekels at people who hate me, nothing is stopping me from ignoring this and taking the campaigns and just doing what I want with them either. The -isms just got 6 feet angrier.

It's like nuD&D trying to retcon Ravenloft shit. Go ahead, race and gender swap all the characters you want, I ain't doing that retards and even my cucked commie friends don't recognise them either. Just pissing in the wind appealing to activists who don't give a shit.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Completely unrelated, but saw Questing Beast's review of Draw Steel and despite him shitting on it for 20 minutes, it sounded like my kind of game.

As always seems to be the way with Matt Corville. The game appears to be taking 4e and putting some 5e production value to it.

I had heard his 5e monster manuals were good, but I remember hearing somewhere that he basically just 4e'ized 5e monsters. Draw Steel is minis, grid, and combat focused. There are minion rules, swarm/squad rules, and has a lot of emphasis on positioning and pushing/throwing guys around the board. This seemed to break Questing Beast's OSR brain as he couldn't grok the concept of a squad, spreading them out across the board and then getting confused when the game assumes they stay somewhat close together.

Mr Beast Questing Beast's criticism of needing to flip through three different books to run an adventure/encounter does sound like bullshit however.

I know I'm in the minority here. But I like fantasy super heroes and combat focused RPGs. I don't like character meat grinders. Having a game where the melee guys don't just stand in place rolling d20s at each other is great. PF2 was a step in the right direction but didn't go far enough. Love the idea of a Dark Messiah like game where the PCs are kicking dudes off of cliffs/into spikes. One of the classes able to go ham by spending a bunch of meta currency to wipe a squad in a single turn is a feature, not a bug. Another aspect that interests me is that it's supposedly a long game, but doesn't feel slow as players are always engaged with the action. Another plus for me.

And the kicker. I don't like Matt Corville. I'm interested in Draw Steel as a game, not as popular YouTuber merch. (I know that sounds empty from someone with an Iron Lung icon.)


Do you guys have any opinions of it?