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

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Bloitzhole said:
Allow me to share a nice DnD anecdote, apropos of nothing:

I DMed for a dwarf fighter, a human wizard and a halfling rogue. They are in the city. The dwarf, utterly fed up with the rogue's shenanigans and the wizard's incompetence, sits at the bar and orders a tall flagon of ale, refusing to follow the rogue into the red light district to do "research" on a merchant who owes the mayor a tidy sum of cash.

The wizard finds the merchant in a grimy back alley, about to do the dirty with a lady of the night. The rogue steps in before the wizard approaches, because

Followed immediately by a loud

The merchant, who had been taking a considerable amount of a local specialty known as "zerkweed" (read: meth), charges the pair half naked as his prostitute pulls a bootknife. The commotion also draws the attention of some other shady characters.

The next 20 rounds consisted of a lot of failed rolls and the wizard almost dying in the scuffle.
Because it's only proper to keep everyone involved, I'd ask the dwarf player after just about every round

--You consider your acquaintances who ought to be back at this point - what do you do?--



--Someone opens the door to the tavern and you catch a glimpse of half a dozen guards running towards the red light district outside--


--A commoner sits down at the bar and mentions a great brawl taking place, involving a loudmouthed rogue who has proclaimed himself 'the whoreslayer' --
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I think your dwarf player had the right idea.
 
Capsaicin Addict said:
I think your dwarf player had the right idea.
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Pretty much. I mean, I like to play stereotypical brash rogues myself, but that's beyond brash into braindead.
(My rogues would wait until the merchant is about to orgasm and then slip a blade under his chin so he's unable to decide if the blue balls or the threat of death are his biggest concerns. The brash part comes afterwards when they're downing flagons paid for with coins taken right from said merchant's monogrammed coin purse and drunkenly boasting about how awesome they were to rob the guy blind right as he's about to come.)
 
anti SJW said:
Anyone play Dungeon Crawl Classics? How is it? Looking for a more sleepy, less woke system than DnD.
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Best system. I haven't had as much fun with basically any other RPG, it is lethal and rules light, and the fact that there's virtually no distinction between Fighter 1 and Fighter 2 pushes people to spice up their characters. And the funnel system of generating characters and session 0 meatgrinders is brilliant - not only does it immediately forge bonds between PCs but it also gives you what more heroic systems lack, a sense of actual growth rather than just incrementing numbers.
And, well, the funnels also give you the OP animal meta - a donkey or a cow is as useful [or more useful] than the farmer leading it, and many hazardous situations can be solved by throwing chickens at them. I think I'll never forget the mental image of our funnel group of 20 assorted townsfolk having 2 donkeys, a horse, a cow and a small herd of chickens in tow hopping in through a portal to a tomb of a long-dead conqueror.
 
anti SJW said:
In 10 years or so, I wonder if the people working on DnD for WOTC will say they were forced to turn the game woke.
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Yep. Once this shit blows over, you'll see a lot of blame being flung around. I'm sure some people are really only doing what they need to avoid being fired, but you'll absolutely see a lot of enthusiastic champions for Wokes of the Coast™ claiming they didn't mean all those insults to their core playerbase and didn't mean to assume black people are savages.
 
DeagleNationRefugee said:
I have been eyeing DCC for some time now. The core rulebook is awesome, has some great artwork. It's a weird more deadly than normal ruleset that's kind of hybrid OSR/modern, but I didn't get any woke vibes from reading it.

The crit/spellcasting tables the game includes are probably one of the coolest things I saw in there. If anything crits instead of just doing double damage you roll a d20 and go off of a table to determine what happens. Enemy monsters get these different crit effects as well, but usually only have one special thing they do. Also, if you cast a spell you have to roll on a table to see if you get the effect you want and how effective the effect is.

Some DCC artwork:
View attachment 2177927
Toad god best god.

View attachment 2177935
A handful of boomer era funny page comics are sprinkled throughout.

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Fighting mushrooms.

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One of my favorite RPG book illustrations ever. This is what I assume a lvl 0 adventure will be like.

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Spell Failure.
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I've ran a couple of 0 level grinds and a couple of adventures afterward and DCC is a lot of fun. Getting my group to play fantasy that isn't 5e is like pulling teeth but I've wanted to revisit the game. One of the most fun things about DCC is making your four 0 level characters and running into a dungeon. In fact there's even this handy generator here: https://purplesorcerer.com/create_party.php

I've actually been flipping through my physical copy again lately. Might make a push to at least run a dungeon or two, maybe sell the majority of players on it. Wish me luck.
 
anti SJW said:
In 10 years or so, I wonder if the people working on DnD for WOTC will say they were forced to turn the game woke.
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It's an interesting topic. I've said a few times that I wonder what will happen when they're 70.

I think it'll be more like the end of Comicsgate.

Correct me if I'm wrong (I didn't really follow comicsgate) but when it was all over, the troublemakers walked into the office one day and acted as if all their cancelling and social media bullshit never happened. Only to be surprised when told that what amounted to "jk water under the bridge" was not good enough and they'd have to find another job.

In gaming, we see the same thing. All the SJW types were quietly cast out. Those that couldn't be kicked out are now worked around. The term "broken stair" describing the more persistent ones.

As fun as it would be to see WOTC turn around and make excuses for shitting up a sure thing at the height of it's popularity, I think the far more likely they just won't mention it. Burying it under corporate speak like "restructuring" and "taking a new direction" and scrub any mention of it from their past.

Assuming they don't double down and go down in flames that is.
 
anti SJW said:
In 10 years or so, I wonder if the people working on DnD for WOTC will say they were forced to turn the game woke.
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It'll be like when 2E AD&D came out and the upper echelon was voicing its disdain for their players.

They'll just pretend it never happened.

Funny thing, remember back when this shit first started with the they/them bullshit for rulebooks and the demands for diversity in splatbooks, the big fucking cry was "They aren't going to tell you how to run your game!"

Well well well. Look at the 5E books, with entire pages devoted to telling you how to run your game and what you need to include and exclude.

True, they aren't looking over your shoulder, but the attitude is there, along with empowering wokescolds who will be more than happy to interrupt an adventure to sperg on and on about how triggered they are by the Vistani gypsy dancing around the fire while a fiddler plays.
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
True, they aren't looking over your shoulder, but the attitude is there, along with empowering wokescolds who will be more than happy to interrupt an adventure to sperg on and on about how triggered they are by the Vistani gypsy dancing around the fire while a fiddler plays.
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I've probably said this before, but I'd trade real life gypsies for old Vistani stereotypes without hesitation.
 
40 Year Old Boomer said:
I've probably said this before, but I'd trade real life gypsies for old Vistani stereotypes without hesitation.
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Oh, without a doubt.

When running Ravenloft, I don't base the Vistani on the fucking gyppos I ran into in the 80's. Holy shit, were those people scumbags. Fuck, the monthly payday briefing would always remind motherfuckers not to give money to gypsies.

Nobody likes child stealing scamming pickpockets and thieves.

The Vistani actually have redeeming qualities.
 
Jet Fuel Johnny said:
Oh, without a doubt.

When running Ravenloft, I don't base the Vistani on the fucking gyppos I ran into in the 80's. Holy shit, were those people scumbags. Fuck, the monthly payday briefing would always remind motherfuckers not to give money to gypsies.

Nobody likes child stealing scamming pickpockets and thieves.

The Vistani actually have redeeming qualities.
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If my European friends are any indication, the gypsies are still as bad as the 80’s (aside from the north, which don’t have that problem I guess).
 
This felt appropriate given the turn this thread has taken

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Having learned that there's a 5ed. setting for Ravenloft that came out this month, I just had to buy it. Given that 3.5 is my jam, I understand they couldn't keep everything that White Wolf did with the series so that mean no more Calibans (humanoids mutated by foul magic in the womb, their answer to Half-Orcs), outcast ratings, and the plotlines were ignored.

On the bright side they redid I'Cath from scratch and vastly improved it given that it was a pretty crappy domain back in 2nd ed. (See Islands of Terror) On the other side, maaaaannnnn did they do a lot of gender-swapping and replacing of the original darklords. I was especially disappointed that Adam and Dr. Mordenheim were kicked out like they didn't exist since I liked them in the other editions. I guess they wanted to make it more politically correct (they race-swapped Harkon).

I have only read chunks, but so far, the book is ok.
 
I finished a quick read Savage Pathfinder 1.0 (I know the Kickstarter version is 1.2).

I was surprised to see it's not woke. I expected it to have inherited Paizo's wokeshit, but it seems to have escaped most of it. I didn't see anything about x-cards or consent forms. There's even a bunch of un-PC stuff in there like the "Ugly" hindrance, or half-orcs not being trusted due to most orc-human pregnancies being "unwilling".

From my initial read, the most PC things are races are called Heritages, but I think that's to keep compatibility with Pathfinder 2. The Attractive edge (edges = feats) lists "sex, gender, and species" as criteria that triggers it. At first I thought this was woke, but on reflection, it implies that characters can be straight but not attracted to troons.

As for rules. The changes are fairly minor. eg. Two Fisted and Two Gun Kid have been consolidated into a single Two Weapon Fighting edge. The Desperate Attack option is like Wild Attack but you sacrifice damage instead of defence. Things like that. One big change is there are now class edges that emulate Pathfinder classes for people who want that, but most of the rest is similar to the fantasy companion.
 
I've been reading more into my new 5th ed. Ravenloft book and while I like how they explain horror and how to make your own darklord and domain, the political correctness and/or steamlineing is bothering me big time.

  • They kicked out a number of male darklords and replaced them with women. Granted, some of these lady darklords would be fine if they had their own domains instead of piggy-backing off an established character, but others are inferior copies.
    [*]Souragne, which was based on Antebellum Louisiana and had slavery, voodoo, swamps, and Loa, is reduced to being a swamp land with a sadistic prison warden.
    [*]Hazlik's past is altered a bit so the fact that he was a victim of gay-bashing and having his lust for another man leading to said gay-bashing is changed to him being in a mostly accepted gay relationship. He can't be a closet homosexual any more.
    [*]I don't mind Alank Ray (think an Elven Sherlock Holmes) and his male assistant being a couple (the Ravenloft fans have been pairing them for years), but I doubt that a domain that used to be based off of pre-revolutionary France would be that open to gay marriage.
    [*]There's no more Dark Powers Checks. Which is a downward spiral that your PCs can fall into if they commit acts of evil to the point they could become tragic villains (or even darklords) themselves. I guess that would be too triggering for SJW players. (Insanity checks are also gone.)
    [*]Not too much of a fan of how they handled Ivan Dilisyna (my favorite darklord). I've always seen him more as an evil Marques de Sade with a childish streak (and a rival cousin he wants too kill) than a total manchild who is more obsessed with "toys" than Chris-Chan. (They did Garbrielle Aderre dirty as well.)
Once again, SJW-ism strikes again and I'd give this book 2 stars out of five.
 
Yaoi Huntress Earth said:
I've been reading more into my new 5th ed. Ravenloft book and while I like how they explain horror and how to make your own darklord and domain, the political correctness and/or steamlineing is bothering me big time.

  • They kicked out a number of male darklords and replaced them with women. Granted, some of these lady darklords would be fine if they had their own domains instead of piggy-backing off an established character, but others are inferior copies.
    [*]Souragne, which was based on Antebellum Louisiana and had slavery, voodoo, swamps, and Loa, is reduced to being a swamp land with a sadistic prison warden.
    [*]Hazlik's past is altered a bit so the fact that he was a victim of gay-bashing and having his lust for another man leading to said gay-bashing is changed to him being in a mostly accepted gay relationship. He can't be a closet homosexual any more.
    [*]I don't mind Alank Ray (think an Elven Sherlock Holmes) and his male assistant being a couple (the Ravenloft fans have been pairing them for years), but I doubt that a domain that used to be based off of pre-revolutionary France would be that open to gay marriage.
    [*]There's no more Dark Powers Checks. Which is a downward spiral that your PCs can fall into if they commit acts of evil to the point they could become tragic villains (or even darklords) themselves. I guess that would be too triggering for SJW players. (Insanity checks are also gone.)
    [*]Not too much of a fan of how they handled Ivan Dilisyna (my favorite darklord). I've always seen him more as an evil Marques de Sade with a childish streak (and a rival cousin he wants too kill) than a total manchild who is more obsessed with "toys" than Chris-Chan. (They did Garbrielle Aderre dirty as well.)
Once again, SJW-ism strikes again and I'd give this book 2 stars out of five.
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I knew they were going to get rid of Dark Powers checks in the name of player agency. Knew they were going to get rid of insanity checks too.

Did they ditch fear and horror checks and does Ravenloft still modify standard spells?
 
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