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

[LovisXVI]

Do you guys have any opinions of it?

I'd need to get my hands on it before I can pass judgement, but more active game does sound interesting. I've played an run a lot of the FFG Star Wars game, it sounds pretty similar in fundemental conceit, I'd need to know what progression is like, which has become my current obsession in rpgs rn. A tactics game is all well and fine, but unless it has good progression, it's DOA as an rpg.

 

[2LtMashengo]

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.

Caleb really takes the cake for gayest nigger at Arc Dream. I ran Lover in the Ice a few months ago, and in one of the handouts there is much bitching about the evil fascist government of 60s Brazil. In a scenario about a facehugger rape monkey.

 

[Brain Problems]

Caleb really takes the cake for gayest nigger at Arc Dream. I ran Lover in the Ice a few months ago, and in one of the handouts there is much bitching about the evil fascist government of 60s Brazil. In a scenario about a facehugger rape monkey.

If you're referring to the letter/journal pages, I hear what you're talking about but at least that's diegetic and not the writer putting a block of text in as an aside to say Fuck Capitali$m.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

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.

The whole point of all of the investigations is to sink deeper and deeper into the grasp of the King. Your characters start seeing patterns in the rantings of madmen, occult symbols etch themselves in the fluids of lost documents, all driven on by the players' search for an answer.


Players need to slowly realize that their reality does not make sense. That impossible connections start appearing, all surrounding the King in Yellow. The payoff is the end realization of some personal, terrible truth. They take the King's mask and put it upon their head, realizing that they were always the King. This all may have been the delusions of an agent stuck in the Dorchester House. They learn that the play exists to make itself and survive with incurable paranoia.

You were a part of the stage production of the King in Yellow. It might not be your payoff, but it is a conclusion that fits the surreal nature of the game.

 

[LovisXVI]

The whole point of all of the investigations is to sink deeper and deeper into the grasp of the King. Your characters start seeing patterns in the rantings of madmen, occult symbols etch themselves in the fluids of lost documents, all driven on by the players' search for an answer.


Players need to slowly realize that their reality does not make sense. That impossible connections start appearing, all surrounding the King in Yellow. The payoff is the end realization of some personal, terrible truth. They take the King's mask and put it upon their head, realizing that they were always the King. This all may have been the delusions of an agent stuck in the Dorchester House. They learn that the play exists to make itself and survive with incurable paranoia.

You were a part of the stage production of the King in Yellow. It might not be your payoff, but it is a conclusion that fits the surreal nature of the game.

That's all well and fine, but I feel it just doesn't work as a tabletop adventure. It would be a much better video game, movie or book, where the curated qualities of the experience play to the strengths.

 

[Manly_Brony]

Caleb really takes the cake for gayest nigger at Arc Dream. I ran Lover in the Ice a few months ago, and in one of the handouts there is much bitching about the evil fascist government of 60s Brazil. In a scenario about a facehugger rape monkey.

Is this a license issue or are the Arc Dream boys just too high on their own farts to use the regular Mythos races? This is Michael LaBossiere level creature design.

 

[p1138]

And the kicker. I don't like Matt Corville.

You're not alone in this. The moment his Strongholds & Followers 5e supplement blew up to a couple million dollars on kickstarter(which should have shown Hasbro WotC there was demand for this sort of thing for 5e but that's an entirely different topic about a lack of material for the system other people have already mentioned) his head went straight up his own ass making him completely insufferable to watch.

 

[Ghostse]

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.

The main issue I have with 5e is everything gets pushed to "Advantage/Disadvantage", which I think its a good mechanic but ends up in "everything is a nail" territory.
Infinite cantrips are also complete and utter horseshit, but also the return of vancian casting I don't take as a positive improvement.
Subclasses are also unbalanced garbage.

For me personally it simply occupies a that uncanny valley between 3.5's "Natural language" and 4e's "Everything is an explicit keyword (except when the editors forgot)" and is just really unsatisfying.

Almost everything else is fixable, but I dunno how you fix subclasses and the over reliance on A/D with a massive rebuild.

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.

That stuff too.
I will say if you can get access to actual, OG recipe Jack Daniels right from the cask its the difference between a McDonalds hamburger and a quarter pound of fresh beef on a potato roll. Not the stuff they make now for bottling, that is flavor tweaked for getting watered down, but the original recipe.

 

[p1138]

Almost everything else is fixable, but I dunno how you fix subclasses and the over reliance on A/D with a massive rebuild.

The subclasses, actually do playtesting and stop trying to make every new class option just be a subclass. Feats can be done without making 500 of them or feats that rely on feats.

The A/D thing, actually allow static bonuses/penalties(outside of bless) to exist in the system and stop assuming that players can't do 2nd grade arithmetic. Especially with regard to skills and saves, so many of the A/D could have just been a +/- 1 or 2(and not letting them stack with anything besides A/D), and still allow A/D to exist and be handed out by the DM based on the situation without simply overlapping A/D that the players already have from a mechanic. Handing out A/D should have mostly been a DM tool to reward/penalize players for their roleplay on the fly(and not just inspiration tokens to use whenever). As it is now usually all the DM can really do is hand disadvantage to NPCs for things the players may have done.

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

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.

Because communism is a totalizing religion. I've mentioned this elsewhere but it's like how before ~1900 virtually everything in Western culture had to have some Christian framing or theming. You couldn't make a grandfather clock with details about how much you like fishing, it has to be cherubs and saints and the Trinity.

These creators are converts to a radical new hamartiology, and they must proclaim their faith even at the expense of their worldly gain if they even want a chance at an ounce of absolution.

It's the same reason why you see the Deadlands folks go apoplectic at the idea of someone acknowledging the existence of the Confederacy in their supernatural American Civil War game: they are converts to a religion first and game designers second, and they will destroy their sinful works before compromising on salvation.

The whole point of all of the investigations is to sink deeper and deeper into the grasp of the King.

I want you to imagine for a moment a ttrpg based on Warframe, or Ready or Not, or some other fast paced action franchise. I want you to then imagine that every character gets one action per round. Moving counts as an action. Aiming counts as an action. Reloading, dodging, making a single attack, these are all one action each, then you're back in the initiative stack. Kinda slow and tedious, right? Almost like such a system would intrinsically disincentivize getting into combat at all.

Kinda why I don't rag on DG's shitty combat so much - it discourages solving problems by rolling Firearms.

But IL turns the basic activity, the "core gameplay loop," of Delta Green into meaningless tedium. It discourages you from playing the game and teaches players that their engagement with the investigation will be punished.

It's an anti-adventure.

 

[CrunkLord420]

If you unironically like borg games

BORG aesthetic is peak. The rules are fine. I assume people hate it because it's style over substance, but that's also the point. It's a perfect dark comedy setting where you don't have to overthink over the top violence. Life's a meat grinder, and that's cool.

There's nothing less appealing to me than standard tolkien high fantasy.

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

BORG aesthetic is peak. The rules are fine. I assume people hate it because it's style over substance, but that's also the point. It's a perfect dark comedy setting where you don't have to overthink over the top violence. Life's a meat grinder, and that's cool.

There's nothing less appealing to me than standard tolkien high fantasy.

In the same vein of people not wanting to buy from people that hate you, CY/BORG's Rule 0 is literally that you're not allowed to play if you're not a communist.

 

[LovisXVI]

The rules are fine.

You should aspire to a ruleset that is better than fine.

There's nothing less appealing to me than standard tolkien high fantasy.

Also, there is nothing Tolkienesque about DnD High Fantasy; if anything, Tolkien's works are low/middle fantasy. Forgotten Realms is the source for modern kitchen sink fantasy that is promulgated. Try Greyhawk instead.

 

[CrunkLord420]

In the same vein of people not wanting to buy from people that hate you, CY/BORG's Rule 0 is literally that you're not allowed to play if you're not a communist.

Just ignore it. I do. They're all like this. The Mothership guy is even worse. The whole sektor is a huge trannoid hugbox and it unironically is the target demographic. White woke GenX soymillennials.

Meanwhile Hasbro is literally just globohomo.

 

[LovisXVI]

Just ignore it. I do. They're all like this. The Mothership guy is even worse. The whole sektor is a huge trannoid hugbox and it unironically is the target demographic. White woke GenX soymillennials.

Meanwhile Hasbro is literally just globohomo.

Try ACKS then, or Shadowdark if you don't want to do the CKS part. I know the ACKS guy, Alexander Macris, is indeed chud adjacent; the fact that it is also a good system helps. I haven't gotten around to playing or running it, but I really like what I have read, and it has inspired me to consider running something in it despite not being a d20 guy.

 

[CrunkLord420]

Try ACKS then, or Shadowdark if you don't want to do the CKS part. I know the ACKS guy, Alexander Macris, is indeed chud adjacent; the fact that it is also a good system helps. I haven't gotten around to playing or running it, but I really like what I have read, and it has inspired me to consider running something in it despite not being a d20 guy.

Shadowdark was heavily promoted on the basis it was written by a certified vagina owner. Everything is tainted. I'm not going to purity test.

I did consider Knave 2e/Shadowdark. The table in Shadowdark look more interesting. Mythic Bastionland won out on my fantasy-next-to-try list because of how unique and specific the character creation is.

btw Astroprisma features "Strategem Hormones" and "Testogre Hormones". The whole book is clearly tranny bait.

 

[Judge Dredd]

There's nothing less appealing to me than standard tolkien high fantasy.

Agreed. That's why I like setting like Eberron, and the so called "freakshit" races of 5e.

The A/D thing, actually allow static bonuses/penalties(outside of bless) to exist in the system and stop assuming that players can't do 2nd grade arithmetic.

Strong disagree.

I've played mid-level and high-level Pathfinder. Static bonuses kill the game. Every modifier adds mental bloat and slows the game down. A +2, that's nothing. When a turn ends up as "I attack, +2 for flank, -2 for off hand, +1 for the duel wield feat, +2 from the paladins aura, is the bard singing? that's +2,.." and then a player jumps in about how he forgot to add the aura bonus last turn so his attack would've hit. It gets fucking exhausting. A/D puts an end to all that.

Now, I do think you could have double advantage/disadvantage, but I don't know.

Infinite cantrips are also complete and utter horseshit,

Casters that can actually cast. Unthinkable!

but also the return of vancian casting I don't take as a positive improvement.

Agreed. Something like a mana system, or some kind of dice based resource would be good I think.

Another pet peeve with spells is spell level. Either spell level should be character level, or they should ditch the concept and going with tier A, tier B, etc. Spell levels are like THAC0, fine for people immersed in it, but utterly confusing for newcomers. It's not even a difficult concept, just a poor choice of name.

Subclasses are also unbalanced garbage.

I don't know the problem with subclasses. I thought it was fine and a good way to customize a class without making new classes every five minutes.

It's also the least of the games problems when you have things like Ranger being completely worthless as a class, or lots of spells that are either useless (true strike) or game breaking (goodberry removes survival campaigns).

 

[JJLiautaud]

Listening to BLP Actual Plays of Dark Heresy and man is it fun, its hilarious just how lethal combat is.

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

I have heard incredibly good things about ACKS but shamefully have yet to read or try it. Macris is also a good Twitter follow and indeed chud-adjacent.

The BroSR and adjacent RW RPG set are generally good folk, but are (obviously) kinda hung op on the OSR and classic fantasy stuff that just isn't really my bag these days.

The trannies, for all their degeneracy, are at least creating shit that's new (even if "new" in this instance means games about tranny robot camgirls)

 

[Rend Me Asunder]

ACKS 1e is cool. I believe ACKS 2e is a misbegotten, bloated mess. Creator is based though so he gets a pass