Attribute names haven't changed. The expected starting range has crept upwards but not that far. Armor Class is still there but it's positive direction inverted a couple editions ago.
Attribute names haven't changed. The expected starting range has crept upwards but not that far. Armor Class is still there but it's positive direction inverted a couple editions ago.
Orcs. There are orcs to kill.
what about l00t
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ThomamelasOnly one man can kill this many Russians. Bring his guitar to me! Registered Userregular
Attribute names haven't changed. The expected starting range has crept upwards but not that far. Armor Class is still there but it's positive direction inverted a couple editions ago.
Orcs. There are orcs to kill.
Comeliness and then later Appearance are attributes that don't see use now. That's where we start running into lots of weirdness. Stuff like UA and Skills and Powers in 2nd Ed allowed for some fairly massive changes to the core system.
Attribute names haven't changed. The expected starting range has crept upwards but not that far. Armor Class is still there but it's positive direction inverted a couple editions ago.
Orcs. There are orcs to kill.
Comeliness and then later Appearance are attributes that don't see use now. That's where we start running into lots of weirdness. Stuff like UA and Skills and Powers in 2nd Ed allowed for some fairly massive changes to the core system.
I thought Comeliness came from UA and I wasn't really including supplements. Though I may be wrong on that. Really don't remember.
Attribute names haven't changed. The expected starting range has crept upwards but not that far. Armor Class is still there but it's positive direction inverted a couple editions ago.
So, after checking out the Quickstart rules for Eclipse Phase, I don't think I'd want to run it. It seems kind of clunky for what its actually doing. I mean, in an opposed check, both sides are rolling, one side might have to halve their skill, both sides have to add and subtract bonuses and penalties that will change every turn.
I like some of the ideas, I like the stats and the wound/trauma stuff, but it seems to add a bunch of crunch just to say it has crunch. It doesn't seem to add anything I want to the resolution mechanics.
Like, really, why, if someone is shooting at me, do both of us have to mess with skills and modifiers and then roll? Why are my skills/positioning not just translated in to penalties against their roll? And does it really need to be a d100 system? Do I need to be able to increase my success chance by just a single percent, given that all penalties and bonuses are applied in 10-based chunks anyway?
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l00t is really what it's all about. The only thing I really miss about the older editions of D&D is how completely unbalanced things could get if you (as a DM) used the random tables for everything. BECMI timeframe had some great treasure tables and you could come out of an early dungeon with some gnarly gear. Go in with chain mail and a long sword, wander out with a sentient flaming sword +3 of slaying or something. Now everything's about "balance". Screw that, I want chaos in my D&D.
l00t is really what it's all about. The only thing I really miss about the older editions of D&D is how completely unbalanced things could get if you (as a DM) used the random tables for everything. BECMI timeframe had some great treasure tables and you could come out of an early dungeon with some gnarly gear. Go in with chain mail and a long sword, wander out with a sentient flaming sword +3 of slaying or something. Now everything's about "balance". Screw that, I want chaos in my D&D.
Vorpal Axe. there is nothing better than ending a campaign because the DM screwed up and gave you a Vorpal weapon, which you then get two natural 20s on in your first encounter with the biggest bad in the game on your first attack roll.
Randomness and imbalance are my two least favorite things about early D&D.
I have a hard time fathoming a desire to return to those days.
I'll have to see if I can find it, but Gygax made a forum post about the 3d6/4d6 house rule, but his preference was for the 4d6 because while it was still random, the randomness was less likely to screw people over. And while we're talking about balance and Gygax....
"If magic is unrestrained in the campaign, D & D quickly degenerates into a weird wizard show where players get bored quickly .... It is the opinion of this writer that the most desirable game is one in which the various character types are able to compete with each other as relative equals, for that will maintain freshness in the campaign" Gary Gygax, Strategic Review Volume 2, Number 2
Childhood nostalgia mostly. That's what D&D is to me. Also, the art in the BECMI books is the best of any edition, in my opinion. Also, the randomness helped out a young (I must have been 9 or 10) DM find some interesting ways to take his imagination. Why was this Vorpal Axe in this dungeon so near town? How did the pack of kobolds not know they had something so powerful in that pile? It led to all kinds of unintended story points that I wouldn't have thought of on my own. And it was easy to leave out if you wanted to populate your dungeon in a specific way or hand out specific treasures.
Really, I'd rather play something that didn't require me to go back to the rules all the time. When we played Shadowrun in high school, mostly 2E, I think we made some 1E characters and then never played them, we ended up gutting the rules because it ended up being a constant rulebook grab. I'm sure it eventually would have become second nature, but that's a lot of hassle for something that's supposed to be entertainment.
D&D has always seemed that way, too. I haven't gotten into 5E, but it seemed you were always going back to the books to check something. Then in 4E it ended up just being too much clutter; situational +1s here and there, minis, power cards, etc. It felt too much like accounting just to get a power off.
Anything I run anymore I run pretty fast and loose with the rules. EotE seems to flow well with this style, so it's become my system of choice. I understand why people get attached to systems they've played for years, but I don't understand why they get all defensive when someone else doesn't want to play how they do. It doesn't change or lessen the way they have fun.
I'm looking for a chance to have some fun in an imaginary setting with dice as an arbiter of our fate. If something can do that without making me feel bogged down in rules minutiae then that's what I'm going to use. And any system that makes being the DM/GM easier is getting major points in my book.
There's a lot of different ways to play out there, more now than ever before. And they're all valid. I don't think divorcing a setting from its ruleset ruins the setting. I will agree that it makes it a different game, though. But homebrew systems and settings have been around as long as the hobby has and I don't think it makes people thieves or pirates to use one setting and another system. That's needless name calling.
I've run and played eclipse phase and I find the system in practice to work just fine. The crunch is there to facilitate the widespread use of equipment and morph modification, which is a core element of the game's theme and tone.
In eclipse phase being a protagonist doesn't mean shit, it's your upgrades, skills and gear that count. Wouldn't want it any other way either. It's why I wouldn't use a narrative system for it, they tend to be too forgiving of the players just because they are players.
Please talk about your Shadowrun game. Our GM shot his mouth off before he was ready. Now we have a handful of characters waiting for him to get his stuff together. Seriously, I mean I put this together I'm so excited to play:
That is really cool! It's a map of Manhattan Island with 2075 Shadowrun landmarks and districts laid out on it. If we ever run in Manhattan, that map would be a cool resource to use.
If your GM needs an opening session already laid out for him, that's an option (but if he uses it, don't read it!). It's 4th edition, but most of the stats haven't really changed, and he/she can easily replace the grunts with the ones from the SR5 Core book if you are running 5th edition.
I've run and played eclipse phase and I find the system in practice to work just fine. The crunch is there to facilitate the widespread use of equipment and morph modification, which is a core element of the game's theme and tone.
In eclipse phase being a protagonist doesn't mean shit, it's your upgrades, skills and gear that count. Wouldn't want it any other way either. It's why I wouldn't use a narrative system for it, they tend to be too forgiving of the players just because they are players.
Well, a game can be a bit more unforgiving when a major point of the setting is that you just wake up in a new body after you die.
Origin for Dragon Age: Inquisition Shenanigans: Inksplat776
That is really cool! It's a map of Manhattan Island with 2075 Shadowrun landmarks and districts laid out on it. If we ever run in Manhattan, that map would be a cool resource to use.
We are running 5th, which is one of the hold ups. He wants to make sure he is familar with all the changes before running it. We will be playing, it's probably just going to be another few weeks before we do.
I started the map because as I was reading Stolen Souls I realized I had no idea where things were located in Manhattan. I found another map on google and started reworking it. The locations are pulled from the Missions (including Rotten Apple) and from Stolen Souls.
Randomness and imbalance are my two least favorite things about early D&D.
I have a hard time fathoming a desire to return to those days.
DCC RPG embraces those elements to mostly good effect, I find. If you flip through the book, like 400 of the pages are just random tables (it sounds awful but it's really not). The only complaint I have is that Wizards are more broken than they've ever been, but fixing them is pretty simple if you just force their spellburn to be permanent.
To be fair, in this case, I specifically asked about a hack. So people suggesting to hack it to FATE wasn't inappropriate.
Pff. That was ages ago, and it was about Android. The Shadowrun thing is a tangent, from my point of view.
No one cares about what YOU want Inksplat! (Just kidding)
Though, I do find it funny that Hahnsoo1 can say how he doesn't like FATE, and then say how he doesn't like it when people say they don't like his system of choice.
I know, right? DOUBLE STANDARD! I don't really think my feelings on the matter of Shadowrun-shitting are rational, and I certainly don't think my opinion matters more than others. I tried to phrase my dislike of FATE in the most courteous manner possible, saying things like "it's <insert opinion> to me", and I apologize if that came off as condescending. When it comes to systems of choice, I really don't judge unless it's some heathen who likes Dungeons and Drag... erm, I mean. Heh.
I think any sub-culture has nuanced ways of describing their hobby to fellow enthusiasts. Take First Person Shooters, for example. If you are on the outside looking in, you can easily dismiss all conversations about this particular FPS or that one. You have folks who are divided by control scheme (Southpaw vs. Right-Handed, Mouse/Keyboard vs. controller, sensitivity on the sticks, auto-aim), folks who are divided on the specific game (Call of Duty, Battlefield... even folks who are divided on iterations of the same franchise, like Ghosts versus CodBlops), folks who like regenerating health and who don't, folks who prefer specific engines over others (Crytek versus Unreal versus Quake, etc.). I think people crave shared conversation with other like-minded people, and the devil is in the details. Heck, you can even scope it out further into divides between folks who like Nintendo vs. Xbox vs. PlayStation vs. PC vs. everything else. Some people will care, some people won't, but those details matter.
What's weird is that the discussion that we have right now (re: FATE and Shadowrun and Dungeons and Dragons) probably wouldn't even happen 15 years ago. The same discussion probably wouldn't even happen right now between the average member of our own sub-genre of the RP Gamer (the average RP Gamer probably only has played 1 or 2 RPGs in their life, and one of those will probably be some edition of Dungeons and Dragons, including Pathfinder), just like the average video gamer probably only plays Call of Duty and Madden. It's a brave new world, and the hobby is constantly changing, and we're at the fringe/cutting edge of it.
That is really cool! It's a map of Manhattan Island with 2075 Shadowrun landmarks and districts laid out on it. If we ever run in Manhattan, that map would be a cool resource to use.
We are running 5th, which is one of the hold ups. He wants to make sure he is familar with all the changes before running it. We will be playing, it's probably just going to be another few weeks before we do.
I should do a brief writeup on the changes between 4th and 5th editions and publish it somewhere. Most people have to learn this information the hard way (wait, Physical Drain for spells is based off of hits and not Force? WHOA!).
I should do a brief writeup on the changes between 4th and 5th editions and publish it somewhere. Most people have to learn this information the hard way (wait, Physical Drain for spells is based off of hits and not Force? WHOA!).
I'd share it with my group. We ran a very basic Stuffer Shack just to get the feel of combat with Accuracy/Limits/New Inititive/etc last week. To be honest I wasn't paying attention to if they were getting the magic parts correct. I went with a Face/Stealth character this time around.
What's weird is that the discussion that we have right now (re: FATE and Shadowrun and Dungeons and Dragons) probably wouldn't even happen 15 years ago. The same discussion probably wouldn't even happen right now between the average member of our own sub-genre of the RP Gamer (the average RP Gamer probably only has played 1 or 2 RPGs in their life, and one of those will probably be some edition of Dungeons and Dragons, including Pathfinder), just like the average video gamer probably only plays Call of Duty and Madden. It's a brave new world, and the hobby is constantly changing, and we're at the fringe/cutting edge of it.
Troof right here. If you're in a group that isn't playing the double d'd monster in the room, you're already doing something pretty different than a lot of other groups.
D&D is the big recognizable name.
But I think there have always been a lot of different alternatives to it.
Growing up I think Elf Quest was the first thing I bought outside to D&D. But all of the Pallidum games (TMNT, Fantasy, Rifts) were popular in my area.
There was always someone who loved GURPS and wanted to port every other game into it (that sounds oddly familiar).
West End's Star Wars had a ton of books.
Cyberpunk vs Shadowrun was a huge arguement.
There were the little odd games like Teenagers from Outerspace.
And then came White Wolf. When they started Vampire/Werewolf/etc they were huge. At their peak they were certainly more socially acceptable than D&D.
We do have a lot of great options now and I'm loving it, but there has always been a lot of stuff out there, the internet just makes it easier to find.
What's weird is that the discussion that we have right now (re: FATE and Shadowrun and Dungeons and Dragons) probably wouldn't even happen 15 years ago. The same discussion probably wouldn't even happen right now between the average member of our own sub-genre of the RP Gamer (the average RP Gamer probably only has played 1 or 2 RPGs in their life, and one of those will probably be some edition of Dungeons and Dragons, including Pathfinder), just like the average video gamer probably only plays Call of Duty and Madden. It's a brave new world, and the hobby is constantly changing, and we're at the fringe/cutting edge of it.
Not really. Tons of systems have been around forever and been popular forever. Call of Cthullu, Gloranthia based stuff, Shadowrun, Rolemaster, GURPS, Paranoia, Traveller, Torg, Deadlands, the West End Games Star Wars, and White Wolf was exploding. Those were all games systems I stocked while working at Waldenbooks. The late 90's were a glorious period for games because that sweet, sweet CCG money was funding a speculation boom. That collapse and the OGL did a lot to reduce the diversity of the hobby and now we're seeing a new wave of cool RPGs coming out of Kickstarter.
That is really cool! It's a map of Manhattan Island with 2075 Shadowrun landmarks and districts laid out on it. If we ever run in Manhattan, that map would be a cool resource to use.
We are running 5th, which is one of the hold ups. He wants to make sure he is familar with all the changes before running it. We will be playing, it's probably just going to be another few weeks before we do.
I should do a brief writeup on the changes between 4th and 5th editions and publish it somewhere. Most people have to learn this information the hard way (wait, Physical Drain for spells is based off of hits and not Force? WHOA!).
Isn't it really a little bit of both? You've got a limit on the number of hits you can apply equal to the force of the spell. If you apply more hits than your Magic (by basically casting a higher force spell than your Magic or by Edging it to ignore the limit), then it becomes Physical.
And then your DV to resist is based off your Force of your spell, not necessarily how many hits you rolled. (Which makes it funny if you're going to pre-edge anyway, might as well cast at a Force 1 just because lots of spells go off net hits instead of Force.)
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I wasn't arguing that there was a lack of games. I'm saying that the average RP Gamer now probably plays some variant of DnD, probably more so now than before (especially if you include Pathfinder). Gaming is more mainstream now than ever.
There have been alternatives for almost as long as the hobby, in as much variety as we have now. But most RPers are DnD players.
Also, I am saying that the "hack it to FATE" conversation would not have happened 15 years ago. The closest analogue to that conversation was "hack it to GURPs" or "hack it to d20", and neither of those games are FATE. Sure, home brew systems have been around as long as the hobby (it is the birth of the hobby). But that conversation has drastically changed from what it was before. It's less about specific house rules and more of creating mindsets. It's a good thing.
I mean anecdotes are fine, but they are really limited data sets, and everyone's personal experience is different. Currently, in my sample set, I know of one GURPS player (a high school kid! Amazing), one White Wolf player, and one Dungeon World player (aside from you guys, who play all sorts of things, and my friends, who obviously play the same games I do). Everyone else who identifies as an RPGer plays DnD or Pathfinder exclusively. When I was growing up in Indiana, White Wolf and Shadowrun were big, but I knew one GURPS group and one Star Wars group, and about half the groups I saw/knew played DnD. DnD has been dominant as long as I can remember, social acceptability be damned, and their massive sales over the years may back that up. (Or not)
However, I do feel a bit disenfranchised when folks in this thread shit on my current campaign's RPG system, Shadowrun (20 years and running), by damning it with faint praise ("Oh, the setting's great! But I hate the rules. I'd rather play FATE."). It discourages me from coming here to talk about the awesome things that happen on a weekly basis in my group's Shadowrun adventures. In other words, it makes me, an RPGer, feel unwelcome in the RPG thread.
Ouch man. I love Shadowrun. I love to play Shadowrun in all of its mechanically-intricate, ridiculously (perhaps pointless) complex glory. Like I said, for me it's inextricable from its mechanics; it somehow doesn't feel the same without NPC deckers and security guards hopped up on goofballs.
I have been sitting on a particular character I've wanted to play for about six months now, but I can't find a group whose times sync up with my (admittedly limited and somewhat odd) schedule that I feel could actually maintain a pace of play for a year or more. Which is frustrating.
I do realize that in terms of exposure, financial success, etc. that the Shadowrun brand has done remarkably well, so I guess it may sound like someone complaining from a point of RPG privilege, if such a thing could exist. It's like a DnD player saying "If only there were people online that I could play Dungeons and Dragons with..." I also know that a lot of the criticisms of the mechanics aren't unfounded either (you have to roll 3 times to determine if someone takes damage, unless you are using optional rules). Still...
Shadowrun has struggled. Honestly the entire hobby is struggling at the moment; with so much quality work being produced the old guard (some of which are notoriously bad at math) are watching their market shares shrink, and their audiences along with them. It makes them angry and liable to lash out, which is why people react poorly to being told that X, Y, or Z is a superior system even if, from a logical perspective, they agree.
One thing that strikes me about FATE is that the rulebooks are formatted very well and are highly readable in both print and online/tablet format. Unlike, say, ORE rulebooks which generally look like a hot mess from the 90s (Wild Talents Essentials Edition isn't so bad, but pretty much all of the rest of them are hard to read in print or in PDF) or Shadowrun, which look awesome in print, but sometimes are a bear to tab through on my computer as a PDF.
Man, let me tell you what. Codifying my notes on running epic space operas in FATE has been rough. Not just because trying to write everything down in a style that is both informative and engaging is hard, but because figuring out what order to present information in is a goddamn master-level Go game. Everyone's feedback is different and it's often contradictory and I need to make sense of it all and try to organize it in a way that doesn't suck.* Then there's the debate about "how much should you talk about gamemastering for this sort of thing?" and "am I too deep in the weeds doing comparative explanations of Alcubierre drives and Star Trek Warp drive?" and other such trivium. All of this matters to me, but it may not matter at all to people who just want to run Guardians of the Galaxy for their group (where ships move at the speed of plot; actually my personal choice for handling this stuff).
But yeah, just because I will almost always say FATE when someone asks what to go to for mechanics doesn't mean I am not a fan of (and interested in playing) things like L5R, Shadowrun, Spycraft, Fragged Empire, or 13th Age. I will admit that I refuse to recommend people try games I consider mechanical abominations, even if the setting and style would be right up their alley. I spent too much of my youth wondering why someone thought THAC0 was a good idea to consider dooming someone else to a similar fate a fair trade for what they asked for. Sometimes you don't know what you're asking for, after all.
* I should probably disclose that this is something I actually do for a living these days; editing, designing, and composing boring facts into interesting and engaging reports. So that should stand as a pretty decent bar for how hard this would be for someone with no particular background in this stuff. I also have the unfair advantage of having an actual background in a lot of the stuff that tends to be RPG fodder.
My problem with that is the ideas that some systems are logically better than others and that preferring traditional game styles means you are more irrationally lashing out at a perceived loss of territory than you are actually defending a type of game you feel is genuinely better. Fate is only logically better than, say, shadowrun if you like fate style games.
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VanguardBut now the dream is over. And the insect is awake.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
My problem with that is the ideas that some systems are logically better than others and that preferring traditional game styles means you are more irrationally lashing out at a perceived loss of territory than you are actually defending a type of game you feel is genuinely better. Fate is only logically better than, say, shadowrun if you like fate style games.
I don't think Ardent is saying that. If I may interpret for a moment, I think that Ardent is saying that as games that do things differently have become more popular, some people have reacted negatively to their presence, even if they handle some things better or offer perspectives that said person may find useful. Of course, this does not apply to everyone. But there is no denying that people like RPG Pundit, who call people swine if they like non-traditional RPGs, exist in some measure.
Further along these lines, I think it's perfectly fair to say that some systems are objectively better at handling certain things than others. For example, D&D is awful at handling encumbrance (cannot comment on the most recent edition). Games like Torchbearer and Lamentations of the Flame Princess are indisputably better at handling this stuff. Of course, you may prefer simply to not play with encumbrance rules and that's fine, but if you do use encumbrance rules I can almost guarantee you're playing a different game or houseruling that shit because those rules are awful.
And lastly, it's important to remember that the perfect game, the one that does it all, does not even exist. So even if one game does something or many things well, it may not be suited to your tastes. Fate, for example, is a pretty awful game for people who want the tactical nuance of a miniature war game in their combat.
We can objectively say that some games handle certain aspects well or poorly.
I don't think we can objectively say that any combination of those areas makes the "perfect" game. Especially since some of those areas may be mutually exclusive, for example "Highly detailed tactical combat" and "Quickly resolved combat that reinforces the narrative". Each has a place but probably not in the same game.
I spent too much of my youth wondering why someone thought THAC0 was a good idea to consider dooming someone else to a similar fate a fair trade for what they asked for.
To be fair, at the time, THAC0 was a genius stroke. Instead of cross-referencing your level against an armor class on a table (something that they ask you to do in 1st edition Dungeons and Dragons, and a holdover from DnD's wargame roots), it boiled the combat roll down to something written down on your character sheet, something that you could calculate on your own as a player (even if it often meant subtracting a negative number from the value at higher levels of play). It's reviled now, but it was way better than the alternative back then. 2nd edition ADnD is near the bottom of the list of RPGs that I would play, but THAC0 still beats a table lookup.
thAC0 was one of those things that was a step in the right direction but still made no sense when you look at what the other options were, or where it would eventually end up.
Low being good and high being bad was a very strange place to build a game from.
I've run and played eclipse phase and I find the system in practice to work just fine. The crunch is there to facilitate the widespread use of equipment and morph modification, which is a core element of the game's theme and tone.
In eclipse phase being a protagonist doesn't mean shit, it's your upgrades, skills and gear that count. Wouldn't want it any other way either. It's why I wouldn't use a narrative system for it, they tend to be too forgiving of the players just because they are players.
Well, a game can be a bit more unforgiving when a major point of the setting is that you just wake up in a new body after you die.
But you have to realize that that isn't a reward. It's a punishment. You wake up missing days, weeks, months of memory you'll never get back. You may never know how you died. And people might want you dead permanently and you'll never know why.
Dead is failure. Just with more bite then rerolling a character.
thAC0 was one of those things that was a step in the right direction but still made no sense when you look at what the other options were, or where it would eventually end up.
Low being good and high being bad was a very strange place to build a game from.
But when you are being ranked, being number 1 is better than being number 2 or number 12! In some board games, going last means that you get to see what everyone else's move is before you reveal your own. And in the card game Hearts, you want the fewest amount of points, not the most (unless you are "shooting the moon", in which case the points are divested onto the other players anyway). I understand the perception, but it seems more like a weird false perception (higher is always better) to me than anything.
THAC0 still is flawed, but I don't fault it for having a scale where being lower is better (that was only because it was tied to a reverse scale Armor Class). It was probably the best compromise at the time. I'm sure 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons had the same (or worse!) problems as more recent editions of Dungeons and Dragons had in terms of pleasing the existing player base while designing in another direction. Imagine those first edition DnD folks who really really wanted to keep Armor Class as a reverse scale... it seems silly now, but back then it was srs bzness.
Hell, I remember when 3rd edition came out, and there were folks who simply refused to play 3rd edition because it had a positive scaling to-hit bonus (the descendant of the THAC0) and positive scaling AC. :-P
thAC0 was one of those things that was a step in the right direction but still made no sense when you look at what the other options were, or where it would eventually end up.
Low being good and high being bad was a very strange place to build a game from.
But when you are being ranked, being number 1 is better than being number 2 or number 12! In some board games, going last means that you get to see what everyone else's move is before you reveal your own. And in the card game Hearts, you want the fewest amount of points, not the most (unless you are "shooting the moon", in which case the points are divested onto the other players anyway). I understand the perception, but it seems more like a weird false perception (higher is always better) to me than anything.
THAC0 still is flawed, but I don't fault it for having a scale where being lower is better (that was only because it was tied to a reverse scale Armor Class). It was probably the best compromise at the time. I'm sure 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons had the same (or worse!) problems as more recent editions of Dungeons and Dragons had in terms of pleasing the existing player base while designing in another direction. Imagine those first edition DnD folks who really really wanted to keep Armor Class as a reverse scale... it seems silly now, but back then it was srs bzness.
Hell, I remember when 3rd edition came out, and there were folks who simply refused to play 3rd edition because it had a positive scaling to-hit bonus (the descendant of the THAC0) and positive scaling AC. :-P
I definitely remember the grognardism regarding the change from thAC0 to BAB. It was pretty illustrative of the worst parts of our hobby; dedication to nostalgia, exclusionary impulses, inferiority/superiority complexes wrt the rest of the population, etc.
Edition changes in D&D have not traditionally been proud times for tabletop gamers.
I've run and played eclipse phase and I find the system in practice to work just fine. The crunch is there to facilitate the widespread use of equipment and morph modification, which is a core element of the game's theme and tone.
In eclipse phase being a protagonist doesn't mean shit, it's your upgrades, skills and gear that count. Wouldn't want it any other way either. It's why I wouldn't use a narrative system for it, they tend to be too forgiving of the players just because they are players.
Well, a game can be a bit more unforgiving when a major point of the setting is that you just wake up in a new body after you die.
But you have to realize that that isn't a reward. It's a punishment. You wake up missing days, weeks, months of memory you'll never get back. You may never know how you died. And people might want you dead permanently and you'll never know why.
Dead is failure. Just with more bite then rerolling a character.
Unless your whole team wipes, none of that is actually true though? Unless the game is meant to be played with just 1 PC.
Origin for Dragon Age: Inquisition Shenanigans: Inksplat776
I definitely remember the grognardism regarding the change from thAC0 to BAB. It was pretty illustrative of the worst parts of our hobby; dedication to nostalgia, exclusionary impulses, inferiority/superiority complexes wrt the rest of the population, etc.
Edition changes in D&D have not traditionally been proud times for tabletop gamers.
I have plenty of problems with third but I'm trying to remember if any came up during the edition change. At the time I remember everything being so obviously so much better than 2nd.
Hmm....maybe Power Attack but that wasn't really an issue as written in 3.0, it took Andy Collins House Rules edition to break that.
People probably complained about Haste and in 3.0 it was a pretty big deal.
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Orcs. There are orcs to kill.
what about l00t
Comeliness and then later Appearance are attributes that don't see use now. That's where we start running into lots of weirdness. Stuff like UA and Skills and Powers in 2nd Ed allowed for some fairly massive changes to the core system.
I thought Comeliness came from UA and I wasn't really including supplements. Though I may be wrong on that. Really don't remember.
The orc obviously has a pie.
I like some of the ideas, I like the stats and the wound/trauma stuff, but it seems to add a bunch of crunch just to say it has crunch. It doesn't seem to add anything I want to the resolution mechanics.
Like, really, why, if someone is shooting at me, do both of us have to mess with skills and modifiers and then roll? Why are my skills/positioning not just translated in to penalties against their roll? And does it really need to be a d100 system? Do I need to be able to increase my success chance by just a single percent, given that all penalties and bonuses are applied in 10-based chunks anyway?
Vorpal Axe. there is nothing better than ending a campaign because the DM screwed up and gave you a Vorpal weapon, which you then get two natural 20s on in your first encounter with the biggest bad in the game on your first attack roll.
I have a hard time fathoming a desire to return to those days.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I'll have to see if I can find it, but Gygax made a forum post about the 3d6/4d6 house rule, but his preference was for the 4d6 because while it was still random, the randomness was less likely to screw people over. And while we're talking about balance and Gygax....
Really, I'd rather play something that didn't require me to go back to the rules all the time. When we played Shadowrun in high school, mostly 2E, I think we made some 1E characters and then never played them, we ended up gutting the rules because it ended up being a constant rulebook grab. I'm sure it eventually would have become second nature, but that's a lot of hassle for something that's supposed to be entertainment.
D&D has always seemed that way, too. I haven't gotten into 5E, but it seemed you were always going back to the books to check something. Then in 4E it ended up just being too much clutter; situational +1s here and there, minis, power cards, etc. It felt too much like accounting just to get a power off.
Anything I run anymore I run pretty fast and loose with the rules. EotE seems to flow well with this style, so it's become my system of choice. I understand why people get attached to systems they've played for years, but I don't understand why they get all defensive when someone else doesn't want to play how they do. It doesn't change or lessen the way they have fun.
I'm looking for a chance to have some fun in an imaginary setting with dice as an arbiter of our fate. If something can do that without making me feel bogged down in rules minutiae then that's what I'm going to use. And any system that makes being the DM/GM easier is getting major points in my book.
There's a lot of different ways to play out there, more now than ever before. And they're all valid. I don't think divorcing a setting from its ruleset ruins the setting. I will agree that it makes it a different game, though. But homebrew systems and settings have been around as long as the hobby has and I don't think it makes people thieves or pirates to use one setting and another system. That's needless name calling.
In eclipse phase being a protagonist doesn't mean shit, it's your upgrades, skills and gear that count. Wouldn't want it any other way either. It's why I wouldn't use a narrative system for it, they tend to be too forgiving of the players just because they are players.
Missions Season 3 was in New York. While the Mission files are 3.95 each, the first one (Everyone's Your Friend) is free:
http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=60700
If your GM needs an opening session already laid out for him, that's an option (but if he uses it, don't read it!). It's 4th edition, but most of the stats haven't really changed, and he/she can easily replace the grunts with the ones from the SR5 Core book if you are running 5th edition.
Well, a game can be a bit more unforgiving when a major point of the setting is that you just wake up in a new body after you die.
We are running 5th, which is one of the hold ups. He wants to make sure he is familar with all the changes before running it. We will be playing, it's probably just going to be another few weeks before we do.
I started the map because as I was reading Stolen Souls I realized I had no idea where things were located in Manhattan. I found another map on google and started reworking it. The locations are pulled from the Missions (including Rotten Apple) and from Stolen Souls.
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DCC RPG embraces those elements to mostly good effect, I find. If you flip through the book, like 400 of the pages are just random tables (it sounds awful but it's really not). The only complaint I have is that Wizards are more broken than they've ever been, but fixing them is pretty simple if you just force their spellburn to be permanent.
No one cares about what YOU want Inksplat! (Just kidding)
I know, right? DOUBLE STANDARD!
I think any sub-culture has nuanced ways of describing their hobby to fellow enthusiasts. Take First Person Shooters, for example. If you are on the outside looking in, you can easily dismiss all conversations about this particular FPS or that one. You have folks who are divided by control scheme (Southpaw vs. Right-Handed, Mouse/Keyboard vs. controller, sensitivity on the sticks, auto-aim), folks who are divided on the specific game (Call of Duty, Battlefield... even folks who are divided on iterations of the same franchise, like Ghosts versus CodBlops), folks who like regenerating health and who don't, folks who prefer specific engines over others (Crytek versus Unreal versus Quake, etc.). I think people crave shared conversation with other like-minded people, and the devil is in the details. Heck, you can even scope it out further into divides between folks who like Nintendo vs. Xbox vs. PlayStation vs. PC vs. everything else. Some people will care, some people won't, but those details matter.
What's weird is that the discussion that we have right now (re: FATE and Shadowrun and Dungeons and Dragons) probably wouldn't even happen 15 years ago. The same discussion probably wouldn't even happen right now between the average member of our own sub-genre of the RP Gamer (the average RP Gamer probably only has played 1 or 2 RPGs in their life, and one of those will probably be some edition of Dungeons and Dragons, including Pathfinder), just like the average video gamer probably only plays Call of Duty and Madden. It's a brave new world, and the hobby is constantly changing, and we're at the fringe/cutting edge of it.
I'd share it with my group. We ran a very basic Stuffer Shack just to get the feel of combat with Accuracy/Limits/New Inititive/etc last week. To be honest I wasn't paying attention to if they were getting the magic parts correct. I went with a Face/Stealth character this time around.
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Troof right here. If you're in a group that isn't playing the double d'd monster in the room, you're already doing something pretty different than a lot of other groups.
But I think there have always been a lot of different alternatives to it.
Growing up I think Elf Quest was the first thing I bought outside to D&D. But all of the Pallidum games (TMNT, Fantasy, Rifts) were popular in my area.
There was always someone who loved GURPS and wanted to port every other game into it (that sounds oddly familiar).
West End's Star Wars had a ton of books.
Cyberpunk vs Shadowrun was a huge arguement.
There were the little odd games like Teenagers from Outerspace.
And then came White Wolf. When they started Vampire/Werewolf/etc they were huge. At their peak they were certainly more socially acceptable than D&D.
We do have a lot of great options now and I'm loving it, but there has always been a lot of stuff out there, the internet just makes it easier to find.
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Not really. Tons of systems have been around forever and been popular forever. Call of Cthullu, Gloranthia based stuff, Shadowrun, Rolemaster, GURPS, Paranoia, Traveller, Torg, Deadlands, the West End Games Star Wars, and White Wolf was exploding. Those were all games systems I stocked while working at Waldenbooks. The late 90's were a glorious period for games because that sweet, sweet CCG money was funding a speculation boom. That collapse and the OGL did a lot to reduce the diversity of the hobby and now we're seeing a new wave of cool RPGs coming out of Kickstarter.
Isn't it really a little bit of both? You've got a limit on the number of hits you can apply equal to the force of the spell. If you apply more hits than your Magic (by basically casting a higher force spell than your Magic or by Edging it to ignore the limit), then it becomes Physical.
And then your DV to resist is based off your Force of your spell, not necessarily how many hits you rolled. (Which makes it funny if you're going to pre-edge anyway, might as well cast at a Force 1 just because lots of spells go off net hits instead of Force.)
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
There have been alternatives for almost as long as the hobby, in as much variety as we have now. But most RPers are DnD players.
Also, I am saying that the "hack it to FATE" conversation would not have happened 15 years ago. The closest analogue to that conversation was "hack it to GURPs" or "hack it to d20", and neither of those games are FATE. Sure, home brew systems have been around as long as the hobby (it is the birth of the hobby). But that conversation has drastically changed from what it was before. It's less about specific house rules and more of creating mindsets. It's a good thing.
I mean anecdotes are fine, but they are really limited data sets, and everyone's personal experience is different. Currently, in my sample set, I know of one GURPS player (a high school kid! Amazing), one White Wolf player, and one Dungeon World player (aside from you guys, who play all sorts of things, and my friends, who obviously play the same games I do). Everyone else who identifies as an RPGer plays DnD or Pathfinder exclusively. When I was growing up in Indiana, White Wolf and Shadowrun were big, but I knew one GURPS group and one Star Wars group, and about half the groups I saw/knew played DnD. DnD has been dominant as long as I can remember, social acceptability be damned, and their massive sales over the years may back that up. (Or not)
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I have been sitting on a particular character I've wanted to play for about six months now, but I can't find a group whose times sync up with my (admittedly limited and somewhat odd) schedule that I feel could actually maintain a pace of play for a year or more. Which is frustrating.
Shadowrun has struggled. Honestly the entire hobby is struggling at the moment; with so much quality work being produced the old guard (some of which are notoriously bad at math) are watching their market shares shrink, and their audiences along with them. It makes them angry and liable to lash out, which is why people react poorly to being told that X, Y, or Z is a superior system even if, from a logical perspective, they agree.
Man, let me tell you what. Codifying my notes on running epic space operas in FATE has been rough. Not just because trying to write everything down in a style that is both informative and engaging is hard, but because figuring out what order to present information in is a goddamn master-level Go game. Everyone's feedback is different and it's often contradictory and I need to make sense of it all and try to organize it in a way that doesn't suck.* Then there's the debate about "how much should you talk about gamemastering for this sort of thing?" and "am I too deep in the weeds doing comparative explanations of Alcubierre drives and Star Trek Warp drive?" and other such trivium. All of this matters to me, but it may not matter at all to people who just want to run Guardians of the Galaxy for their group (where ships move at the speed of plot; actually my personal choice for handling this stuff).
But yeah, just because I will almost always say FATE when someone asks what to go to for mechanics doesn't mean I am not a fan of (and interested in playing) things like L5R, Shadowrun, Spycraft, Fragged Empire, or 13th Age. I will admit that I refuse to recommend people try games I consider mechanical abominations, even if the setting and style would be right up their alley. I spent too much of my youth wondering why someone thought THAC0 was a good idea to consider dooming someone else to a similar fate a fair trade for what they asked for. Sometimes you don't know what you're asking for, after all.
* I should probably disclose that this is something I actually do for a living these days; editing, designing, and composing boring facts into interesting and engaging reports. So that should stand as a pretty decent bar for how hard this would be for someone with no particular background in this stuff. I also have the unfair advantage of having an actual background in a lot of the stuff that tends to be RPG fodder.
I don't think Ardent is saying that. If I may interpret for a moment, I think that Ardent is saying that as games that do things differently have become more popular, some people have reacted negatively to their presence, even if they handle some things better or offer perspectives that said person may find useful. Of course, this does not apply to everyone. But there is no denying that people like RPG Pundit, who call people swine if they like non-traditional RPGs, exist in some measure.
Further along these lines, I think it's perfectly fair to say that some systems are objectively better at handling certain things than others. For example, D&D is awful at handling encumbrance (cannot comment on the most recent edition). Games like Torchbearer and Lamentations of the Flame Princess are indisputably better at handling this stuff. Of course, you may prefer simply to not play with encumbrance rules and that's fine, but if you do use encumbrance rules I can almost guarantee you're playing a different game or houseruling that shit because those rules are awful.
And lastly, it's important to remember that the perfect game, the one that does it all, does not even exist. So even if one game does something or many things well, it may not be suited to your tastes. Fate, for example, is a pretty awful game for people who want the tactical nuance of a miniature war game in their combat.
We can objectively say that some games handle certain aspects well or poorly.
I don't think we can objectively say that any combination of those areas makes the "perfect" game. Especially since some of those areas may be mutually exclusive, for example "Highly detailed tactical combat" and "Quickly resolved combat that reinforces the narrative". Each has a place but probably not in the same game.
Low being good and high being bad was a very strange place to build a game from.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
But you have to realize that that isn't a reward. It's a punishment. You wake up missing days, weeks, months of memory you'll never get back. You may never know how you died. And people might want you dead permanently and you'll never know why.
Dead is failure. Just with more bite then rerolling a character.
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They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
THAC0 still is flawed, but I don't fault it for having a scale where being lower is better (that was only because it was tied to a reverse scale Armor Class). It was probably the best compromise at the time. I'm sure 2nd edition Dungeons and Dragons had the same (or worse!) problems as more recent editions of Dungeons and Dragons had in terms of pleasing the existing player base while designing in another direction. Imagine those first edition DnD folks who really really wanted to keep Armor Class as a reverse scale... it seems silly now, but back then it was srs bzness.
Hell, I remember when 3rd edition came out, and there were folks who simply refused to play 3rd edition because it had a positive scaling to-hit bonus (the descendant of the THAC0) and positive scaling AC. :-P
Edition changes in D&D have not traditionally been proud times for tabletop gamers.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Unless your whole team wipes, none of that is actually true though? Unless the game is meant to be played with just 1 PC.
I have plenty of problems with third but I'm trying to remember if any came up during the edition change. At the time I remember everything being so obviously so much better than 2nd.
Hmm....maybe Power Attack but that wasn't really an issue as written in 3.0, it took Andy Collins House Rules edition to break that.
People probably complained about Haste and in 3.0 it was a pretty big deal.