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

[MazonLabs Recruitment Rep]

could try Zona Alfa? Its more based on STALKER types of settings but its a modern setting based around scavanging and more lower level types of weapons being the norm, mutants to fuck you up

I'm familiar with the title, but no idea about the mechanics. I might take a closer look now.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Gonna shamelessly ask for a reccomendation here.

I got the Resident Evil board game. The figures are cool, I've painted every STARS member (even the dead ones), and it's production value is pretty sweet, but the game takes longer to set up than to actually play out and it makes my neuropathy flare up in sheer frustration and anger. I need a better way.

Can anyone reccomend a skirmish system that might fit the whole Resident Evil thing or might be adaptable to it?

I have some maybe recommendations. Take these with a grain of salt as I've not tried them for this purpose.

Savage Worlds supposedly players a great zombie game. It plays a good horror game, especially action horror, so would be my first go-to as a TTRPG rule set.
I hear good things about the Alien TTRPG.
For board games. I hear mixed things about Zombicide. Good prodiction. CMON (the company that make it) hit some financial troubles recently.


For a skirmish system. The one page rules RPG mode (heroes vs hoards) might work.
You could also try One Hour Skirmish Wargames. Ranged combat is safe, but guys keep getting up, and melee combat is decisive and deadly. One Hour Fantasy Skirmish Wargames is more melee focused, but I don't know how that works.
Two more war games. 5 Parsecs, or Stargrave with the zombie expansion.


I have played the RE2 board game on TTS, but don't remember much about it.


Finally, might be worth looking into the Aliens board game, Core Space, or Maladum. These might have the same issue of long set up time, but also have fun minis.

 

[Adamska]

Cantrips let low level magic users actually play the game instead of having to do the ol’ “I have used magic missile 3 times and now I’m completely fucking useless” dance. I think people who dislike them are jealous martialtards who think casters should be miserable to play until level 5 for “balance.” (Hint: the GM balances your game, not the rulebook.)

Suck it up and use bows. Exploit your skills to decode and solve puzzles. Plot and scheme with socials.

It's not that hard to find some use even when you've gone nova.

As for a zombie minis game? Not really good at those since most require some set up. If it was TTRPG, I'd just autorec All Flesh Must be Eaten, but minis is a tougher one.

 

[The Ugly One]

I wouldn't be grumbling about it if I didn't.

You recover half your ammunition after every fight. At low level, you cannot put out enough attacks to run out of ammo in a dungeon. typical fight lasts ~4 rounds, so you're expending an average 2 arrows per fight. A quiver holds 20, so it will take you 10 fights to run out, which in practice is around 4-5 game sessions of never running into an enemy with a ranged weapon (strangely, there are lots of these in the "1-2 hit die" range) or ever going to civilization. Even just supposing this sadistic DM designed a campaign just to ruin your Archery Fighter's life, an Archery Fighter at level 1 should be doing 2d6+3 damage in melee with dual short swords. Same with a Rogue.

If you're trying to do a slower paced dungeon crawl/war game where attrition is a problem and a lot of 1-2 hit die enemies checking for morale is the backbone of your fights, then they become a problem.

5e doesn't have morale checks, and enemy strength isn't measured in hit dice. And as someone who has DMed multiple megadungeons, no, this straight up does not happen.

You are outright bullshitting; this campaign where the wizard supposedly was sweeping the floor with a cantrip while your Archery Fighter and his rogue companion wept softly in the corner, unable to contribute, didn't happen. You've never played an Archery Fighter, and I suspect never played 5e.

Suck it up and use bows.

If the wizard doing at-will damage is a problem, how does doing at-will piercing damage instead of fire damage fix it?

 

[MazonLabs Recruitment Rep]

I have some maybe recommendations. Take these with a grain of salt as I've not tried them for this purpose.

Savage Worlds supposedly players a great zombie game.

I do have a lot of digital SW stuff, I'll comb through it again.

I hear good things about the Alien TTRPG.

It's a good system ( I LUV the stress system), but not really for what I'm aiming for.

For board games. I hear mixed things about Zombicide. Good prodiction. CMON (the company that make it) hit some financial troubles recently.

Already covered there. Got 2.0, Black Plague, Night of the Living Dead version, the military base campaign, urban legends, even the Monty Python supplement. It's a decent enough pick up and play and the figures are good molds. Again, not quite the jib I'm hunting for.

For a skirmish system. The one page rules RPG mode (heroes vs hoards) might work.

I have the OPR Grimdark Future stuff, is that a different product?

You could also try One Hour Skirmish Wargames. Ranged combat is safe, but guys keep getting up, and melee combat is decisive and deadly. One Hour Fantasy Skirmish Wargames is more melee focused, but I don't know how that works.

Funny story about OHS. I actually picked up Red Ops 5 and another supplement, Asylum, but realized that the latter had no rules for what I was really hunting for, namely a creation and campaighn system, it just had the OHS core. I communicated with the OHS people and got told the older books weren't going to be compatable with what they got in the works, linked me to the new core rules instead. They're a current candidate, but what the hell, OHS?!

Two more war games. 5 Parsecs, or Stargrave with the zombie expansion.

I poked around 5 Parsecs and 5 Klicks from the Zone. Stargrave has a zombie expansion?!

I have played the RE2 board game on TTS, but don't remember much about it.

Again, I have the RE1 board game already so figs and some indoor mansion tiles are no issue.

Finally, might be worth looking into the Aliens board game, Core Space, or Maladum. These might have the same issue of long set up time, but also have fun minis.

I have Another Day in the Corps, can't see adapting it given the heavy reliance on card mechanics.

Got Core Space (if only for it also including Battle System terrain), it's a candidate. Regular Purge robots can easily be adapted to zeds. Not sure about the rest though.

Can't comment on Maladum. No idea, but will look.

 

[LovisXVI]

Suck it up and use bows.

There is no edition of D&D or off D&D where wizards or mages or whatever pure arcane caster that gives them proficiency with bows. AD&D 2nd and before gives them darks, 3 and its followups give them crossbows. Notably, nothing that is either a. good or b. scaling.

 

[The Ugly One]

Played a divination wizard from 3rd to 17th level in a 5e 2012 campaign. Past 5th level using my cantrip felt like I just passed turn for all it did. In fact, single target even casting damaging spells with spell slots fell behind what the martial did with no or little resources (outside of the few spells that are allowed to be good because they are "iconic" like disintegrate). Of course it might have been different if my DM had allowed the cheese where using my goblin racial let me do +proficiency damage on all my magic missiles to medium or larger creatures since after all I only roll damage once. But uhhh, I really didn't expect him to.

This is the experience everyone who's actually played the game has. Low level, cantrips keep you in the game. Once you have 10 or so spell slots, they are a waste of an action. The idea of a wizard sweeping through waves of kobolds with the might of Poison Spray is amusing, but fictional.

 

[Adamska]

Notably, nothing that is either a. good or b. scaling.

The situation was complaining about being out of slots, which included Cantrips before they became infinites.

You still have options in that case, not good ones, but it's still there. And your skill pool outside of combat are supposed to also somewhat cover that in delves when you're bust. Yeah, the Bard can sort of do that, but do you think the Barb invested in Knowledges? One of the gates to the power cosmic was you could only style so often; it was part of the balance. You picked your spells to throw down with, and if you were foolish oh well.

I just see it as something you have to deal with. Akin to having to watch 1s eat successes in the World of Darkness, or needing to improve my terrible skills via success in CoC. It's the nature of the beast.

I think it's just because I find it's easier to just play a different game whenever I'm bothered by DnD's foibles.

 

[Halbschwanz]

You are outright bullshitting; this campaign where the wizard supposedly was sweeping the floor with a cantrip while your Archery Fighter and his rogue companion wept softly in the corner, unable to contribute, didn't happen. You've never played an Archery Fighter, and I suspect never played 5e.

You're putting words in my mouth at this point and I've already gone on at length about a mechanic I don't care for. For the sake of not shitting up the thread with edition sperging, I'll agree to disagree. See:

I think it's just because I find it's easier to just play a different game whenever I'm bothered by DnD's foibles.

 

[Sunflower Samurai]

I have the OPR Grimdark Future stuff, is that a different product?

I dont think he was talking about OPR but OnePageRules does have a "Quest" version for both their Sci FI and Fantasy offerings that is a coop experience, its pretty generic so i dont know if you could use it for a zombie mode, but you could just use the zombie faction in it, its all derived from its wargame component

 

[Tom Bombodildo]

From the perspective of a normal person, a +1 weapon is essentially a decade of martial training (think 1 warrior HD) wrapped into a single implement. IRL tech like that would change the course of warfare, which would make sense for why it might be expensive, but I think that mostly becomes an issue because like you said, they're everywhere.

That might work in a world where casters have to pay Experience Points to craft magic items, but in Pathfinder the crafting rules just don't mesh with that idea. Someone with a couple NPC levels can forge a longsword in a matter of days, a week if they barely succeed. They could also forge a Masterwork Longsword successfully, it would just take something like 2 months (depending on what they rolled). An especially skilled craftsman, say, someone with 5 PC levels, could feasibly craft a masterwork sword in as much time as a regular smith would take for a regular sword. Craft Magic Arms and Armor has a prereq of being caster level 5 and magic arms and armor take 1 day to enchant for every 1k gold the enchantment costs. Assuming good and bad times at work even out because it's all on a d20, a level 5 cleric or wizard specced to make magic weapons could make about one +1 sword (or other non-exotic weapon) per business week. It would be strictly better to pay for the training of artisans to mass produce magic swords than to train soldiers at that point, and you would have a shitton of +1 weapons floating around.
Now, this isn't the case because saying a +1 to hit is equivalent to 10 years of martial training is overly literalist and mudfarming simulator-brained, and it should be at least as cheap and fast to train soldiers and guards to fight better as it is to pay for mass +1 sword production. Which brings me back to my point that 5x a farmer's lifetime salary doesn't make sense for the work of a moderate to well-trained artisan.

One can debate over whether or not magic swords should be common or not in a game setting, but the fact is that the relative ease with which they can be made is contradictory to Pathfinder's house of cards economic system.

 

[Halbschwanz]

That might work in a world where casters have to pay Experience Points to craft magic items, but in Pathfinder the crafting rules just don't mesh with that idea.

One can debate over whether or not magic swords should be common or not in a game setting, but the fact is that the relative ease with which they can be made is contradictory to Pathfinder's house of cards economic system.

I am not going to pretend that 3.PF's mass magic economy of scale makes a lick of sense. That was sort of the problem with WotC trying to codify hard wealth breakpoints into character balance and introducing magic item creation at much lower levels than in AD&D. The sentiment follows you have to justify an easy way that the character building gameplay can include magic items, thus relic marts, even when they're nonsense on their face. It is for that reason that I like automatic bonus progression and axing item creation feats. Or otherwise tell the CR system to go fuck itself and just hand out items that make sense and ball with the numbers.

Now, this isn't the case because saying a +1 to hit is equivalent to 10 years of martial training is overly literalist and mudfarming simulator-brained, and it should be at least as cheap and fast to train soldiers and guards to fight better as it is to pay for mass +1 sword production.

10 years was a sort of half remembered reference point that your average person with NPC levels doesn't get higher than around 3rd to 5th level. It's not an ironclad figure as basically every edition will have writers who forget what their own numbers actually mean and how they're supposed to relate to average people (like Gygax statting Conan around level 40 or something along those lines). This guard is presumably an average guy in decent physical condition, combat trained, knows a decent number of weapons, and is likely around late teens or 20s without aging penalties. Reasonably common for a guard. Nothing in his kit is worth the same as a +1 weapon and at least according to cost of living RAW, only 10 gp/month is required to keep the guy alive. A few months or years of training is still likely orders of magnitude less expensive than a magic sword. In his hands though, a magic weapon is the difference between punching through hide and scale mail on an average roll, which is the difference between fighting savages who rely on cured animal hides and being able to chop through the armor of an officer. It's just that presentation and gameplay wise, PCs advance much faster than NPCs (to clarify, not a bad thing) so what a +1 is actually worth kinda gets lost in the sauce when you've got a half dozen other things giving similar bonuses.

 

[The Ugly One]

, or needing to improve my terrible skills via success in CoC

In CoC, you are useful with your useful skills, and even if you aren't useful in combat, combat is brief. The game is fun for everyone. In D&D, combat can easily be the majority of the time spent at the table, so if you aren't useful in combat, all you're useful for is getting snacks while everyone else actually gets to play the game. This isn't fun. Making the game unfun to play for one of your players for the first few months and "balancing" that by making it unfun to play for another player for the last few months isn't effective game design. One of the good things about 4e's design philosophy was they consciously tried to ensure the game worked for everybody at every level, and they brought this over to 5e. My experience with 5e is they overall did pretty good. 1st-level wizards had fun, and so did 16th-level fighters.

hat might work in a world where casters have to pay Experience Points to craft magic items, but in Pathfinder the crafting rules just don't mesh with that idea. Someone with a couple NPC levels can forge a longsword in a matter of days, a week if they barely succeed. They could also forge a Masterwork Longsword successfully, it would just take something like 2 months (depending on what they rolled). An especially skilled craftsman, say, someone with 5 PC levels, could feasibly craft a masterwork sword in as much time as a regular smith would take for a regular sword.

Every RPG has a fundamental world-building problem, which is that it's really not that hard to train up to be able to crack a mountain in half with your legendary axe, which then raises the question of why there are so few god-slaying warriors and reality-bending mages, why things still cost money, and why disease still exists. At some point, you just have to stop worrying about it and enjoy the game for what it is.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I have Another Day in the Corps

How is it? I never played it, but a friend keeps getting tempted by it as a space hulk replacement.

Can't comment on Maladum. No idea, but will look.

It's the fantasy version of core space. You run around dungeons fighting mostly undead.

Stargrave has a zombie expansion?!

Quarantine 37. Never played it, I just know if it's existance.

I do have a lot of digital SW stuff, I'll comb through it again.

The base game should be enough. While I never ran a zombie game directly in it, I imagine the mechanics of wildcards vs mooks, and that NPC attacks can be lethal even against high level PCs makes zombies work.

Every RPG has a fundamental world-building problem, which is that it's really not that hard to train up to be able to crack a mountain in half with your legendary axe, which then raises the question of why there are so few god-slaying warriors and reality-bending mages, why things still cost money, and why disease still exists. At some point, you just have to stop worrying about it and enjoy the game for what it is.

This is why I simp for Eberron, because it makes an attempt to answer those questions.

1st-level wizards had fun, and so did 16th-level fighters.

And that's a good thing, imo.

Grognards have a stick up their arse that says casters should be un-fun and useless at low levels, while martials should be un-fun and useless at high levels simply because that's how it was in old editions.


@Halbschwanz Even outside of edition and setting sperging, there's a disconnect. People poo-poo the idea of "fantasy super heroes" but that's what DnD PCs are and should be. Savage Worlds explicitly stats PCs are "wildcards". You can use whatever term you like, but in everything from movies to games, the main character is built different to the rank and file around them. This is why I hate the gongfarmer "realism" excuse OSR and grogs throw around. Because the stable, boring, safe life is something the NPCs do, not the PCs.

 

[Aib Ld]

Today was a good day.
Back at my game: I was on a stressed point midcampaign so I told my players to please pay attention, keep notes, and focus on the game. Two of them left the group instead.
And I am glad because these two are the worst players I've ever seen. They're not the annoying kind, they are the 'theater kid' kind. Refusing to play the game like using mechanics and rolls, not paying attention and repeatedly asking whats the plot to other players, refusing to read the rulebook to repeatedly pausing the game, thinking they can get through sessions by only roleplaying and doing lame one-liners that kill a scene, and so on.
And I also feel a bit retarded that I could nip this in the bud in the beginning just by being assertive and putting my foot down. The hard way of being a beginner GM, so I also learned.

 

[LovisXVI]

They're not the annoying kind, they are the 'theater kid' kind. Refusing to play the game like using mechanics and rolls, not paying attention and repeatedly asking whats the plot to other players, refusing to read the rulebook to repeatedly pausing the game, thinking they can get through sessions by only roleplaying and doing lame one-liners that kill a scene, and so on.

Maybe it is the kind of people I have run for, but I associate the theater kid roleplayer as one who is overly concerned with the plot and the character, rather than someone who is sort of just not paying attention. Sounds like they were just bad players to me. Personally, my main gripe is when people can't be bothered to engage with the roleplay or game things out so much that it slows the whole thing down to talmudic rule discussion.

 

[Halbschwanz]

Snip

I'm not in disagreement with any of this. My point wasn't that PCs should feel like mud farmers, my point is that a lot of adventure writing forgets the fiction for the numbers and that mechanical homogenization can make things that should feel cool less so. I also don't think classes should be useless at any level. My point of contention is that the mechanical identity of classes in a system where the sliding scale is "consistent and gets the best numbers with universal mechanics" versus "encounter ending power with lower performance when using the universal rules" aught to have a certain level of niche protection. Kirthfinder does this reasonably well, where martials feel like proper superheroes at high level and mages aren't completely sitting on their thumbs at low levels, but the options that let them stretch resources have an opportunity cost or require decent team play to utilize.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

Dice Scum takes a look at some of the more peculiar specimens of the Battletech franchise.

 

[MazonLabs Recruitment Rep]

Grognards have a stick up their arse that says casters should be un-fun and useless at low levels, while martials should be un-fun and useless at high levels simply because that's how it was in old editions.

And this Grognard likes to remind them that the old editions, in a lot of ways, sucked like a whore with the rent coming due tommrow, and yes, the famous magic-user/fighter teeter-totter scale was part of it.

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

Today was a good day.
Back at my game: I was on a stressed point midcampaign so I told my players to please pay attention, keep notes, and focus on the game. Two of them left the group instead.
And I am glad because these two are the worst players I've ever seen. They're not the annoying kind, they are the 'theater kid' kind. Refusing to play the game like using mechanics and rolls, not paying attention and repeatedly asking whats the plot to other players, refusing to read the rulebook to repeatedly pausing the game, thinking they can get through sessions by only roleplaying and doing lame one-liners that kill a scene, and so on.
And I also feel a bit retarded that I could nip this in the bud in the beginning just by being assertive and putting my foot down. The hard way of being a beginner GM, so I also learned.

I absolutely detest people who fail to at least study the mechanics of their own fucking character. It's especially bad with casters, but if the game grinds to a halt every few minutes because someone doesn't know how their shit works, it stops being fun.

This is why I encourage people to build quick reference sheets and make sure their math is done before the game even starts.