werewolf: dark ages
mage: renaissance
vampire: enlightenment
changeling: 19th century
hunter: wwii
there's a lot of these. why does anyone need a game where you all play as frankensteins? isn't the whole point of frankenstein that there's only one frankenstein
Frankenstein is kind of the elevator pitch version. It's also golems and Pinocchio - imperfect creations who want to be more than what they are.
Like a lot of the original NWoD games, the original version of Promethean was kind of too much in the Vampire mold with like societies and factions and all that other LARP-friendly shit but the new 2nd edition really zooms in on the ideal Incredible Hulk sad friendly dude hitchhiking across the country vibe. It's designed so that even with a party you still feel very much like the loneliest thing in the world, following a very personal journey.
Guys, what'd be a good system for camp, saturday morning cartoon sci fi stuff?
Very specifically thinking of Awesomenauts:
Off the top of my head: 7th Sea, In Spaaaaace, Inspectres (if you can get a hold of it), Feng Shui 2, Mutants and Masterminds.
Or PM me - I've got something in perpetual beta you might find useful.
Oh hey
How is that thing going?
Frustrating, I guess?
Like, mechanically, it is done. It's been playtested. It's doing what I want it to. It's got a bunch of tricks I am just pleased as punch about.
But I don't got that artist capital, and it is too much of my baby to let run free without a proper accompaniment of art.
So, perpetual beta, while I work on other, smaller products that will hopefully fund my big baby.
Oh, hmm.
I'll talk to some folks.
What sort of art are you looking for? I'm assuming you've got graphic design covered, knowing you, so just standard RPG art interiors?
That would be cool!
Yeah, it's basically all the interior/exterior art. I could do my normal stuff for it, and am for the other stuff I'm working on, but that thing is just too precious/too much of a tone piece.
So, working on a 7th Sea's 2nd Ed one shot to play for my group next week. Pre-gen characters designed to get people right into the system and over the top swashbuckling stuff.
General pitch for the first session is: After being ousted from their position of wealth/nobility/something one of the PC's contracts another, a down on their luck (but very charming) Castillian Pirate captain for passage out the country. Still pursued by the law/inquisition as they stumble over the very first hurdle: Said charming captain's ship has being impounded by the authorities for... questionable cargo.
So the cast needs to be 5 PC's strong. Split between the captain and his crew and the ousted party and their guards/friends.
Currently got two for the captain and his first mate:
PC 1: The Castillian captain, raised primarily by pirates after an unfortunate child hood. His starting story is the comedy one: His only tie to his family is a large, framed picture of the family matriarch. Said picture was stolen by a crew member after a drunken night of revelry and the captain desires to get it back and in his quarters.
PC 2: A Voddace courtesan who fell in love. Real, romantic love with a high born noble who adored her too. Her reward was to wake up stranded on a row boat in the middle of the ocean one day with a note stamped by the family of her love simply saying 'disappear'. Instructions she took to heart after being rescued by and serving as a sailor for PC 1. Except now she's caught wind of her former loves wedding being planned and well, she figures she might as well give love one last (party crashing) try.
For the other PC's I'm thinking maybe a merchant's son whose father's scholarly ways has gotten an overly aggressive inquisitor on their back. Bodyguarded by an Avalon Knight (not sure of the story) and a party going charlatan friend who got dragged along. Though that admittedly leaves no duelist school folks and that might be nice.
+2
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
The crew of the USS Gibraltar began the first half of their prologue story last night! Rather than ask my players to make characters for a game they'd never played, I wrote up seven pregen characters, let my 4 players pick from them with the stipulation that we had to have a captain. The prologue story is set in the TOS era. After it's done, everyone will make their TNG-era characters and we'll begin with the crew of the USS (TBD), whose adventures will of course tie back into this prologue story in some way.
They received a distress call from a merchant vessel that had suffered a reactor leak dangerously near the Klingon Neutral Zone. Luckily, this wasn't actually a Kobayashi Maru scenario - there really was an emergency, but the sensor sweep ordered by the captain detected the presence, not of a leaky reactor, but of the dangerously volatile and illegal substance protomatter! If it was ignited, the protomatter could easily destroy the Gibraltar, so the engineer and the doctor worked to affix transporter booster relays to a pair of Class A probes, fire the probes to near the merchant vessel, and then launch a shuttlecraft to stand away from the probes at maximum transporter range, with the ship itself at maximum transporter range from the shuttle.
The gambit worked and after some fancy shuttle flying by the helmsman they were able to beam the merchant vessel/smuggler ship's crew straight to the brig. After some interrogation by the captain and security chief, it transpired that the smuggler, a guy named Mitch (I picture him played by young Harry Dean Stanton), had been hired to pick up the protomatter from a dead drop in the Vardaine star system - home of a reclusive colony of technocrats who have had run-ins with the Federation about illegal experimentation - and deliver the stuff to empty space near a large nebula. Approaching the nebula, the Gibraltar's science officer calibrates the sensors to detect protomatter, and turns up the location of a hidden research outpost, cloaked by the nebula's emissions.....
And that's all we had time for, but I am thrilled to report that everything went really smoothly, people picked up on the basics of the system quickly (we did basic skill rolls and an Extended Test with a work track for the big probe-altering rescue setpiece at the end). I think my friends (and my friend's wife, who joined us because she loves Trek) had a pretty good time, judging by how much they got into the proceedings and picked up on the spirit of their characters.
Next week, with luck, we will encounter the villain, a rogue Vardaine scientist doing dangerous terraforming experiments with protomatter, and he will bust out the D7 cruiser he bought from the Klingons. Then we'll create characters for the campaign proper. People already seem to have some strong ideas about what they're doing, to the point where friend's wife was looking up the names of Betazed colonies on Memory Beta.
Here are the pregens I made, and their little biographies. I was impressed at how well my friends milked these. I was worried I'd expended all these words for naught.
Captain Jonathan Singh
Born on the Vega colony - one of humanity's first - to a family of doctors, Jonathan Singh saw a dangerous frontier world transform into a bustling metropolis in his lifetime and vowed to do his part to help civilize the rest of a dangerous galaxy, signing up for Starfleet Academy. While his parents were hoping he would follow a path of science or medicine, Singh's impatience and idealism led him to the command track.
Jonathan Singh is a big, fit man in his late 30s with a square jaw and flinty eyes - he can seem stern from a distance, but has an easy smile and a quick sense of humor. His rough frontier ways have been polished somewhat by his training, but he still prefers plain speaking to formality and action to speech. He trusts his crew enough not to micromanage them in their day-to-day tasks but his spirit of adventure causes him to lead from the front, taking on danger first hand, sometimes recklessly so. He and Commander Veda have a chaste, understated romance - they are attracted to one another, and respect each other as equals and friends, but regulations and good sense prevent it becoming more than that.
Focuses
Diplomacy
Emergency Medicine
Hand-to-Hand Combat
Persuasion
Shipboard Tactical Systems
Survival
Talents:
Resolute
Follow the Lead
Mean Right Hook
Veteran
Traits: Human
Values
Risk Is Our Business
Lead by Example
Nobody Gets Left Behind
In Love With Commander Veda
Commander Veda
Description: A Deltan from the planet Delta Prime, Veda was raised in a commune of artists and scholars, and internalized the Deltan philosophy of compassion and empathy, but always found herself desiring more privacy - more time away from people, to learn and read, rather than the constant pursuit of socialization and sensation.
Recognizing her unusual need for boundaries and structure, her loved ones recommended she enlist in Starfleet. They regarded this as a perfect fit: where by Deltan standards, Veda is a social maladapt, by human standards she is a richly compassionate person and her community hoped she could find fulfillment while helping foster those values in those around her.
Veda passed through Starfleet Academy with ease, earning multidisciplinary honors and her pick of prestigious hands-on research assignments. What she didn't expect to find was a growing sense of admiration for, and connection to, her comrade, Jonathan Singh. Unsure what to do with this feeling, she has retreated behind formality and protocol, sublimating her desires into the pursuit of becoming the perfect, efficient first officer.
Values
The Pursuit of Knowledge Is Life's Highest Goal
Violence Is a Failure State
Suffering Can Be a Great Teacher
Admires Captain Singh
Chief Engineer Santiago Sakai
Born on Earth, in South America, Santiago Sakai was raised on stories of the pioneer ships pushing back the edges of the unknown, and dreamed of joining them one day, although it seemed impossible. His family were not truly poor - even fifty years ago, poverty was largely eliminated on Earth - but they lived simply, in a rural area, with no real tradition of academic excellence.
Santiago had one avenue available to him, though: his natural gift for fiddling with gadgets and technology. His town needed someone handy to keep its subspace communicator link and food synthesizers working up to snuff and he quickly learned his way around such systems, becoming the village fix-it man. He liked feeling needed, and he found a wife, Dolores, and his old dream of going to space seemed to recede into the distance.
However, tragedy struck: they lost their child, and while Vulcan counseling helped keep them functional and sane, Santiago and Dolores couldn't be together anymore, and he could no longer bear to stay in his town. So at thirty-two, with no prospects and no official certifications, he enrolled in Starfleet Academy, and somehow found his way in.
Machinery and computers had always come easily to Santiago, and now so did subspace physics and 5-dimensional warp manifolds, and they gave him something to burrow into to avoid thinking about what he had left behind. He graduated with commendations and began a twenty-year career of service, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander in 2251.
Sakai is a burly Santa Claus of a man, with a round, avuncular Asian face bearing a ruff of thinning white hair and a somewhat unkempt beard. Unlike many more stereotypical engineers, he is not a socially awkward technophile, but a seasoned liver of life and a genial and hearty uncle to the captains and crews he has served with.
His relative seniority, in age if not rank, has lent Lt. Cmdr Sakai a wry sense of amusement at the more arcane or seemingly pointless bits of military procedure, and this irreverence may explain why, when he discovered a critical flaw in a new experimental system, he violated the chain of command to take the issue up with the design group directly, going over the head of a superior who hadn't taken his findings seriously. That incident could have torpedoed Sakai's career, but along with calling out the flaw, he also devised a working solution. The design team was impressed and the superior was quietly reassigned to other duties.
Focuses
Computers
Electro Plasma Power Systems
Handheld Electronics
Small Craft
Transporters and Replicators
Warp FIeld Dynamics
Talents
I Know My Ship
Jury-Rig
Technical Expertise
Veteran
Traits: Human
Values
This Is My Ship, I Just Loan It Out
The Captain's Confidant
People Need Fixing, Too
Curiosity Is the First Step
Communications Officer Gerol Pak
Gerol Pak is a symbiotic entity: a humanoid member of the Trill species, Gerol Imonium, joined physically and mentally with Pak, a long-lived, sluglike symbiont. Few of the hundreds of thousands of applicants ever make it to initiate status, much less a full Joining, but Gerol Imonium's energy and zest for life recommended him to the senior members of the Symbiosis Commission, as did his natural gift for languages.
The Trill are recent entrants to the Federation and a few of the more adventurous symbionts want to experience life in the Federation - and particularly life in Starfleet - both for the chance at discovery and personal growth, but also to verify that the planet Trill has made the correct choice. The Pak symbiont, which had traditionally preferred Trill females in artistic or scholarly fields, recognized the impact that new and alien vistas could have on its future work and chose Gerol as its vehicle.
The joined entity Gerol Pak is a gregarious, xenophilic individual with boundless, almost childlike curiosity about everything and everyone around it, sometimes to a discomfiting degree. However, in moments of stress or danger, the confidence and breadth of knowledge of the Pak entity come through, lending the youth a serenity beyond his years.
Notable events in Lt. Pak's career include brokering a difficult peace between two warring factions on an alien planet, earning him their respect as an interpreter and intermediary, as well as finding a way to communicate with a truly alien entity composed of hundreds of square kilometers of vegetation linked below the surface in a neural network.
Talents
Joined Trill
Collaboration
Defuse the Tension
Computer Expertise
Traits: Trill, Pak symbiont
Values
Two Heads Are Better than One
If It Has a Mind, We Can Communicate With It
People Are More Important than Principles
The Young Can Benefit from My Experience
Security Chief Vyssia zh'Shran
Vyssia zh'Shran grew up in the harsh environment of an Andorian mining colony on an almost lifeless planetoid far from civilization, a place where law and order were nonexistent and a young girl had to learn to live by her wits, her fists, and her Ushaan-tor blade. With her rugged physique and ferocious spirit, she found employment as a club bouncer during her teens, and probably would have stayed in that life - until inevitably dying at the knife or disruptor of some thug - if a passing Starfleet officer, impressed by her toughness, hadn't personally recommended her to the Academy and paid her fare for transport to Earth.
Starfleet gave Vyssia the orderly environment she'd always wanted, and she has pledged a lifetime of service in return, considering it an honorable trade. Her Academy courses in operations and security polished some of her rough edges; though Vyssia is still slow to trust, always watchful for a hidden blade, always habitually checking the corners and exits of every room she enters, she's managed to find friends, people that she considers worth protecting.
Vyssia's protectiveness can have a slightly condescending edge; without meaning to, she views herself as acting in loco parentis to a pack of brilliant but hopelessly vulnerable children. She sees Ensign Archer as a fragile thing in need of protection, Lt. Cmdr Sakai as a wizened elder, Doctor Blake as an absentminded nerd, and Gerol Pak as a naive dreamer - which particularly grates on Pak, who is two hundred years her senior. However, Vyssia means well, and her vigilance has paid off on several occasions, so her attitude is generally tolerated.
One such assignment came early in her career, when attacked by hostile native creatures while exploring a new planet. With her superior officer wounded, Vyssia had to take control, rallying the team to hold off the hostile wildlife until the solar storms preventing beam-out had abated.
Focuses
Emergency Medicine
Hand Phasers
Hand-to-Hand Combat
Intimidation
Shipboard Tactical Systems
Survival
Talents
Close Protection
Constantly Watching
Interrogation
The Ushaan
Traits: Andorian
Values
My Word Is My Life
Trust, But Verify
Klingons Are Honorless Dogs
They Need Me to Protect Them
Ensign Madison Archer
Madison Archer grew up on Starbase 7, child of a family that had served Starfleet - and United Earth before it - for four generations. Her great-grandfather was the legendary Admiral Jonathan Archer at Starfleet Command, and her mother, Captain Brianna Archer-Young, was famed as the charter of the Asclepius Rift and the savior of Eta Gamma III, and while Madison never got to see enough of her mother, she knew the Captain would always return - until one day she didn't, her ship lost in a training accident.
An enormous legacy weighed her down like cement, but Madison decided to face it, and enrolled in the Academy. In a way, it was comforting, as fleet life was the only life she'd ever really known. However, her academy career was undistinguished - passable, but not meteoric - and uncharitable whispers began to suggest that she was the beneficiary of nepotism, especially when she received a string of plum assignments straight out of graduation.
Madison is determined to prove the naysayers wrong. She knows she's not a genius scientist like her father, a hero like her mother, or a legend like her great-grandfather, but she's good behind a helm and does her best for the team. She gets nervous sometimes and finds some of her coworkers intimidating - Captain Singh is larger than life, Commander Veda is so wise and thoughtful, Gerol Pak has seen everything, and Vyssia is intense (and beautiful) - but she knows that if she sticks around and keeps doing her job, her chance to prove herself will come.
What most of Madison's classmates and instructors weren't aware of was that in the infamous and secretive Kobayashi Maru simulation, she personally took the helm and fought off the virtual Klingons long enough that the computer judged her ship's crew to have successfully evacuated. Later analysis showed that she'd employed the clever, dangerous tactic of reinforcing her ship's facing shields by drawing power from the structural integrity fields on non-threatened arcs of the craft - a breach of safety protocol, and a tactic that in real life would consign the vessel that tried it to months of repair in spacedock, but an excellent last-ditch suicide strategy.
Focuses
Astronavigation
Computers
Helm Operations
Small Craft
Sensor Systems
Talents
Bold - Conn
Fly-By
Spirit of Discovery
Untapped Potential
Traits
Human
A Famous Name
Values
Living Up to a Legacy
At Home Behind the Wheel
A Crush on Vyssia
You Can't Learn Everything from Books
Doctor Daniel Blake
Born on Earth to a family of teachers, doctors, and scholars, Daniel "Dan" Blake has always been a driven, focused achiever, participating in every activity he could muscle his way into at school, and getting used to living on four or five hours of sleep a night for years at a stretch.
The obsession paid off; Blake graduated at the top of his class from Starfleet Academy's research medicine program, although a captain perusing the file will find several counselor's warnings that Blake's lifestyle is unhealthy and undersocialized, with few acquaintances from his time at the Academy and even fewer friends. Nonetheless, he moved swiftly into serious, high-security research postings, serving several years on various outposts and starbases.
However, Blake grew impatient with the kind of work he was being asked to do - projects whose parameters were dictated by others and in which he was simply another cog - and what he felt was a general lack of mental stimulation. This came to a head when a facility where he was working, a biological lab, was attacked by Klingons who believed it was developing secret weapons. Blake's quick thinking and rower's physique saved many lives and earned him a commendation, and kindled a perverse inclination to experience that kind of danger again.
In a surprise lateral move, he asked to be transferred to a starship, a place where he could set his own research priorities and constantly encounter new challenges to his theories and ways of thinking, as well as the constant stream of novelty he craved. As the USS Gibraltar had just lost its Chief Medical Officer in a mishap, the request was granted and Blake was fast-tracked into the position, arriving only recently.
This transition has been less than ideal. While immensely gifted academically, Dr. Blake's practical experience in everyday medicine is lacking and he's had to lean on his nursing staff to help him get up to speed - a process not helped by his preoccupation with a series of esoteric laboratory experiments he carries on in sickbay and its labs.
Fundamentally, Doctor Blake does not yet have the confidence of the people he works with, and he doesn't have the social skills to reassure them - but just as fundamentally, he doesn't care. He stays up late in the darkened sickbay catching up on the ship's medical logs while his simulations compile or his samples mature, and he already has ideas for how he could have handled certain situations better, more efficiently. When the next crisis strikes, Captain Singh will get Blake's best work, but he fully expects that in fifteen or twenty years the Gibraltar will be most famous for the discoveries he made on it.
Focuses
Botany
Emergency Medicine
Genetics
Trauma Surgery
Virology
Xenobiology
Talents
Bold - Medicine
Doctor's Orders
Quick Study
Untapped Potential
Traits
Human
Loner
Values
Do No Harm
Mistakes Are How We Learn
Not Colleagues, Just Patients
Publish or Perish
I also had kind of an epiphany about roleplaying in general: all of my players, even the one who isn't a big Star Trek guy, are familiar with the storytelling and know how the world "works." Like, the show has a certain rhythm, a way that people talk and interact, and as a player you can just kind of follow that script and it will feel right.
By comparison game like D&D is so full of layered and often mismatched assumptions taken from various fantasy sources that it can be hard for a player, even a gifted storyteller, to know what's the right thing for their level 6 cleric of the harvest god to do in this situation. They have to stop and think about it, or they just kind of do something they're already inclined to do - to make a tactically sound choice, or a dumb joke choice, or whatever - and paper it over with a veneer of roleplaying ("my god thinks we should stick together so the rogue doesn't get ganked i guess," "are there any hookers in this tavern?!" etc etc).
Whereas this, without any prompting from me, the table quickly became a back and forth of "Open hailing frequencies!" "Aye aye, sir!" and I'd tell them what they saw on the viewscreen or whatever, and then the guy playing the captain would be like "engineering, can we beam them aboard?" and I, as the GM, would answer, and it's this groove that's really easy to slide into. And the system supports everything you can think of doing in Star Trek, from going to maximum warp to locking on phasers to modulating shield harmonics. My buddy said "Let's launch a Class A probe!" and he was openmouthed when I promptly turned to the page in the rulebook about doing exactly that.[/quote]
turning the monk into a giant ape so he could splatter a butler to death
almost getting turned into a zombie by some asshole jackal wizard and then casting "heat metal" on his glasses until he ran away and left his spellbook. I'm a bard. I literally played a face-melting lute solo
oh also we probably weren't supposed to fight that guy yet but we accidentally teleported to the end of a dungeon we weren't ready for and now we have to work our way backwards through the entire fucking thing and the paladin got himself hit with a vampire curse on purpose and the monk now looks like a zombie and none of the evil statues would even talk to me
+13
Options
MrMonroepassed outon the floor nowRegistered Userregular
That Star Trek game sounds incredibly dope and I wish I could join you.
it was a success, which i'm pretty happy about. i haven't run 5th edition before and it was my first time using Yoon-Suin, which is a South-East Asian OSR setting book that has some really excellent stuff and some stuff i think doesn't quite work. i rolled up a criminal conspiracy involving an opium den, a delusional fakir, a sacred library, velvet worms and gladiatorial combat between crab men that the players seemed to really enjoy
i feel like Jacob's point about roleplaying speaks to a significant difference between the OSR mode of play and what i guess is a more storygamey model. the PCs in my game default to these small-time gangster/mercenary lowlives who are overwhelmingly devoted to their own self-interest, with very little in the way of roleplaying or higher motivation. one guy worshipped a randomly generated vulture god, that was fun. otherwise they just looked out for themselves. the literary model here is presumably Vance or Leiber but the guys i play with haven't read them and they seemed to figure it out alright
anyway they're keen to play again. i'm hoping to get them involved with some kind of detective society so i can have something to regularly generate plot hooks
I also had kind of an epiphany about roleplaying in general: all of my players, even the one who isn't a big Star Trek guy, are familiar with the storytelling and know how the world "works." Like, the show has a certain rhythm, a way that people talk and interact, and as a player you can just kind of follow that script and it will feel right.
By comparison game like D&D is so full of layered and often mismatched assumptions taken from various fantasy sources that it can be hard for a player, even a gifted storyteller, to know what's the right thing for their level 6 cleric of the harvest god to do in this situation. They have to stop and think about it, or they just kind of do something they're already inclined to do - to make a tactically sound choice, or a dumb joke choice, or whatever - and paper it over with a veneer of roleplaying ("my god thinks we should stick together so the rogue doesn't get ganked i guess," "are there any hookers in this tavern?!" etc etc).
Whereas this, without any prompting from me, the table quickly became a back and forth of "Open hailing frequencies!" "Aye aye, sir!" and I'd tell them what they saw on the viewscreen or whatever, and then the guy playing the captain would be like "engineering, can we beam them aboard?" and I, as the GM, would answer, and it's this groove that's really easy to slide into. And the system supports everything you can think of doing in Star Trek, from going to maximum warp to locking on phasers to modulating shield harmonics. My buddy said "Let's launch a Class A probe!" and he was openmouthed when I promptly turned to the page in the rulebook about doing exactly that.
[/quote]
I think this is why a lot of stuff that people seem to really like is based on smaller, specific settings and focuses on having rules evocative of how we view media and not of the universes own rules. Stuff like Blades In the Dark or 7th Sea can be summarized using references to movies most people have seen and mechanically focus much more on telling stories like you'd see in those films or games than on creating a 'real' feeling crime or pirate game.
Also how did you find the 2d20 stuff? I still think that core mechanic seems pretty clever with how it's designed to feed the GM and players into having a conversation about what's happening.
+1
Options
Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
Hey team, I posted this in critical failures but I was hoping for some feedback with my kenku ranger and what feats to choose.
I'm playing a ranged class so I've archery as a style and beast master cause I want a wolfie friend and my first feat is sharpshooter.
My question is though, if I stick with bows, are there any other feats that are any good?
Because I'm struggling as I don't think my dude would choose crossbow expert as a specialty because I don't think he really likes change to much.
But on the other hand the synergies just seem pretty nuts, free reloads and an extra turn means if I have a one handed crossbow and combine with sharpshooter, fire again as a bonus action and something else like hunter's mark I could do 46-90 damage plus my wolf can spend his free action to give me advantage (this would be only for easy to hit targets though). Or I can just use a single heavy the rest of the time and switch when I have a target that is easy to hit.
Does anyone have any ideas on cool feats that I could take or should the crossbow specialization? Thanks!
Also as a side note. If I fire again with my crossbow as a bonus action, do I get to apply my dex damage to the second shot as they don't talk about that in the feat bonus.
As you GM my usual answer is always to go with whatever you think will be the most enjoyable.
If that means sticking to your character's preferences, do that, if it means doing some pretty sick damage then go with that.
I will say that even though the campaign we're doing is challenging, I'm not so brutal a GM that missing out on some optimal setups will bone the party- I'll tune stuff depending on what capabilities the party has. Though don't take that as an indication I'm not going to frequently do my best to defeat the party even if ya'll go with goofy builds
Hey team, I posted this in critical failures but I was hoping for some feedback with my kenku ranger and what feats to choose.
I'm playing a ranged class so I've archery as a style and beast master cause I want a wolfie friend and my first feat is sharpshooter.
My question is though, if I stick with bows, are there any other feats that are any good?
Because I'm struggling as I don't think my dude would choose crossbow expert as a specialty because I don't think he really likes change to much.
But on the other hand the synergies just seem pretty nuts, free reloads and an extra turn means if I have a one handed crossbow and combine with sharpshooter, fire again as a bonus action and something else like hunter's mark I could do 46-90 damage plus my wolf can spend his free action to give me advantage (this would be only for easy to hit targets though). Or I can just use a single heavy the rest of the time and switch when I have a target that is easy to hit.
Does anyone have any ideas on cool feats that I could take or should the crossbow specialization? Thanks!
Also as a side note. If I fire again with my crossbow as a bonus action, do I get to apply my dex damage to the second shot as they don't talk about that in the feat bonus.
it's another crossbow shot so you would get the dex damage again - you have to roll for the second hit, still, so it would suck big time if you didn't have it
without the hunter conclave, tho, I'm not sure what you could do to beef up your damage more
word of caution: hunters mark and the bonus crossbow shot are both bonus actions, so you can only do one of them in a round
Miss me? Find me on:
Twitch (I stream most days of the week) Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
0
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Also how did you find the 2d20 stuff? I still think that core mechanic seems pretty clever with how it's designed to feed the GM and players into having a conversation about what's happening.
We didn't get super into the nitty-gritty of 2d20 yet - just basic task resolution, how Focuses affect your roll, what rolling Complications does, etc. The players spent a little Momentum but not much and I didn't really touch the Threat pool. Hopefully the space battle next week will be a good opportunity to introduce a lot of the remaining concepts, like higher task difficulties and the use of Traits.
Hey team, I posted this in critical failures but I was hoping for some feedback with my kenku ranger and what feats to choose.
I'm playing a ranged class so I've archery as a style and beast master cause I want a wolfie friend and my first feat is sharpshooter.
My question is though, if I stick with bows, are there any other feats that are any good?
Because I'm struggling as I don't think my dude would choose crossbow expert as a specialty because I don't think he really likes change to much.
But on the other hand the synergies just seem pretty nuts, free reloads and an extra turn means if I have a one handed crossbow and combine with sharpshooter, fire again as a bonus action and something else like hunter's mark I could do 46-90 damage plus my wolf can spend his free action to give me advantage (this would be only for easy to hit targets though). Or I can just use a single heavy the rest of the time and switch when I have a target that is easy to hit.
Does anyone have any ideas on cool feats that I could take or should the crossbow specialization? Thanks!
Also as a side note. If I fire again with my crossbow as a bonus action, do I get to apply my dex damage to the second shot as they don't talk about that in the feat bonus.
it's another crossbow shot so you would get the dex damage again - you have to roll for the second hit, still, so it would suck big time if you didn't have it
without the hunter conclave, tho, I'm not sure what you could do to beef up your damage more
word of caution: hunters mark and the bonus crossbow shot are both bonus actions, so you can only do one of them in a round
HM only requires a bonus action to change the target otherwise it only requires concentration which isn't an action.
Hey team, I posted this in critical failures but I was hoping for some feedback with my kenku ranger and what feats to choose.
I'm playing a ranged class so I've archery as a style and beast master cause I want a wolfie friend and my first feat is sharpshooter.
My question is though, if I stick with bows, are there any other feats that are any good?
Because I'm struggling as I don't think my dude would choose crossbow expert as a specialty because I don't think he really likes change to much.
But on the other hand the synergies just seem pretty nuts, free reloads and an extra turn means if I have a one handed crossbow and combine with sharpshooter, fire again as a bonus action and something else like hunter's mark I could do 46-90 damage plus my wolf can spend his free action to give me advantage (this would be only for easy to hit targets though). Or I can just use a single heavy the rest of the time and switch when I have a target that is easy to hit.
Does anyone have any ideas on cool feats that I could take or should the crossbow specialization? Thanks!
Also as a side note. If I fire again with my crossbow as a bonus action, do I get to apply my dex damage to the second shot as they don't talk about that in the feat bonus.
it's another crossbow shot so you would get the dex damage again - you have to roll for the second hit, still, so it would suck big time if you didn't have it
without the hunter conclave, tho, I'm not sure what you could do to beef up your damage more
word of caution: hunters mark and the bonus crossbow shot are both bonus actions, so you can only do one of them in a round
HM only requires a bonus action to change the target otherwise it only requires concentration which isn't an action.
casting it in the first place is a bonus action
Miss me? Find me on:
Twitch (I stream most days of the week) Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
0
Options
Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
I think my next D&D campaign is gonna have a power metal soundtrack, and also cheesy inspirational 80's rock, like Burning Heart by Survivor. I usually make a Lord of the Rings Pandora station or something but my next campaign is gonna be Manowar and Iron Maiden and shit.
Me and another friend want to play shit all the time but the trouble we run into is getting other people regularly
By 2-player do you mean one GM and one player? If so, there are a lot of games that are not explicitly intended for that but do it well, and some that even work better with fewer players.
Vampire (Masquerade or Requiem) is 100% playable for one person (just recall the Bloodlines video game) and arguably fits the material better, with a lone PC struggling against a shadowy and hostile world. Promethean: the Created, the golem/Frankenstein game, is also as good/better this way.
If you both want the chance to play (and hence both don't mind GMing) there's a really cool indie RPG called /shock/: Social Science Fiction where you and a friend collaborate to create a sci-fi premise (a world where androids so the work of people, a world where political can see future crimes, etc) and you each GM the other person through a story in that world.
+1
Options
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
Also thanks to this thread I'm now watching Star Trek for the first time that isn't one of the modern films.
I'll probably buy the RPG to read through it and see what it does different from Infinity. It definitely sounds more abstract and narrative focused.
Radddddd
Hit me up if you want episode suggestions. The nice thing about old TV is that you are under no obligation to watch it comprehensively or in any kind of order
I was talking with a friend about White Wolf games as Duets, and he had a great observation: all of the WW RPGs are, to an extent, about forming political structures to ward off the horror implicit in their premises (Mage Covens, Vampire Broods, etc etc). Playing them with one person removes that political structure, and causes it to be a real horror game.
The only one this doesn't quite work for is Werewolf, because lyncanthropy isn't portrayed as quite the horrific curse as the rest (more of a burden/responsibility).
Tommy2Handswhat is this where am iRegistered Userregular
edited July 2017
promethean honestly sounds like a fucking dope solo game
like, almost everything I hate about wod (aside from Mage) is the fact that you're supposed to be together with a group of equally outcast supernatural figures all following their own goals and in the end it feels like everything a GM wants to do with a campaign is shoehorned in there
i had to finish up yesterday's game in a hurry because one of the players had to leave early, so i let the PCs cop out of the final setpiece fight and had another adventuring party take care of the monster while they ran away
i think i want to bring this other party back and have them be doing heroic shit in the background of the next few sessions. like, they're waging an epic campaign to prevent the return of an evil god while the PCs are dicking around doing petty crimes, and it just sort of comes up every so often
i had to finish up yesterday's game in a hurry because one of the players had to leave early, so i let the PCs cop out of the final setpiece fight and had another adventuring party take care of the monster while they ran away
i think i want to bring this other party back and have them be doing heroic shit in the background of the next few sessions. like, they're waging an epic campaign to prevent the return of an evil god while the PCs are dicking around doing petty crimes, and it just sort of comes up every so often
Posts
Bakunin tends to be more 13-14 which is probably slightly better. That's how I run them anyway.
Oh hey
How is that thing going?
Frustrating, I guess?
Like, mechanically, it is done. It's been playtested. It's doing what I want it to. It's got a bunch of tricks I am just pleased as punch about.
But I don't got that artist capital, and it is too much of my baby to let run free without a proper accompaniment of art.
So, perpetual beta, while I work on other, smaller products that will hopefully fund my big baby.
Cartoon Action Hour is literally built for this. It's lightweight, ridiculously flexible and really captures the spirit of lighthearted fun.
Oh, hmm.
I'll talk to some folks.
What sort of art are you looking for? I'm assuming you've got graphic design covered, knowing you, so just standard RPG art interiors?
Frankenstein is kind of the elevator pitch version. It's also golems and Pinocchio - imperfect creations who want to be more than what they are.
Like a lot of the original NWoD games, the original version of Promethean was kind of too much in the Vampire mold with like societies and factions and all that other LARP-friendly shit but the new 2nd edition really zooms in on the ideal Incredible Hulk sad friendly dude hitchhiking across the country vibe. It's designed so that even with a party you still feel very much like the loneliest thing in the world, following a very personal journey.
Someone remind me to save up like 50 bucks for that citadel base colors set.
I want to start trying to paint more tiny mans. I feel like practicing something like that would do my mental health some good.
That would be cool!
Yeah, it's basically all the interior/exterior art. I could do my normal stuff for it, and am for the other stuff I'm working on, but that thing is just too precious/too much of a tone piece.
General pitch for the first session is: After being ousted from their position of wealth/nobility/something one of the PC's contracts another, a down on their luck (but very charming) Castillian Pirate captain for passage out the country. Still pursued by the law/inquisition as they stumble over the very first hurdle: Said charming captain's ship has being impounded by the authorities for... questionable cargo.
So the cast needs to be 5 PC's strong. Split between the captain and his crew and the ousted party and their guards/friends.
Currently got two for the captain and his first mate:
PC 1: The Castillian captain, raised primarily by pirates after an unfortunate child hood. His starting story is the comedy one: His only tie to his family is a large, framed picture of the family matriarch. Said picture was stolen by a crew member after a drunken night of revelry and the captain desires to get it back and in his quarters.
PC 2: A Voddace courtesan who fell in love. Real, romantic love with a high born noble who adored her too. Her reward was to wake up stranded on a row boat in the middle of the ocean one day with a note stamped by the family of her love simply saying 'disappear'. Instructions she took to heart after being rescued by and serving as a sailor for PC 1. Except now she's caught wind of her former loves wedding being planned and well, she figures she might as well give love one last (party crashing) try.
For the other PC's I'm thinking maybe a merchant's son whose father's scholarly ways has gotten an overly aggressive inquisitor on their back. Bodyguarded by an Avalon Knight (not sure of the story) and a party going charlatan friend who got dragged along. Though that admittedly leaves no duelist school folks and that might be nice.
They received a distress call from a merchant vessel that had suffered a reactor leak dangerously near the Klingon Neutral Zone. Luckily, this wasn't actually a Kobayashi Maru scenario - there really was an emergency, but the sensor sweep ordered by the captain detected the presence, not of a leaky reactor, but of the dangerously volatile and illegal substance protomatter! If it was ignited, the protomatter could easily destroy the Gibraltar, so the engineer and the doctor worked to affix transporter booster relays to a pair of Class A probes, fire the probes to near the merchant vessel, and then launch a shuttlecraft to stand away from the probes at maximum transporter range, with the ship itself at maximum transporter range from the shuttle.
The gambit worked and after some fancy shuttle flying by the helmsman they were able to beam the merchant vessel/smuggler ship's crew straight to the brig. After some interrogation by the captain and security chief, it transpired that the smuggler, a guy named Mitch (I picture him played by young Harry Dean Stanton), had been hired to pick up the protomatter from a dead drop in the Vardaine star system - home of a reclusive colony of technocrats who have had run-ins with the Federation about illegal experimentation - and deliver the stuff to empty space near a large nebula. Approaching the nebula, the Gibraltar's science officer calibrates the sensors to detect protomatter, and turns up the location of a hidden research outpost, cloaked by the nebula's emissions.....
And that's all we had time for, but I am thrilled to report that everything went really smoothly, people picked up on the basics of the system quickly (we did basic skill rolls and an Extended Test with a work track for the big probe-altering rescue setpiece at the end). I think my friends (and my friend's wife, who joined us because she loves Trek) had a pretty good time, judging by how much they got into the proceedings and picked up on the spirit of their characters.
Next week, with luck, we will encounter the villain, a rogue Vardaine scientist doing dangerous terraforming experiments with protomatter, and he will bust out the D7 cruiser he bought from the Klingons. Then we'll create characters for the campaign proper. People already seem to have some strong ideas about what they're doing, to the point where friend's wife was looking up the names of Betazed colonies on Memory Beta.
Here are the pregens I made, and their little biographies. I was impressed at how well my friends milked these. I was worried I'd expended all these words for naught.
Captain Jonathan Singh
Jonathan Singh is a big, fit man in his late 30s with a square jaw and flinty eyes - he can seem stern from a distance, but has an easy smile and a quick sense of humor. His rough frontier ways have been polished somewhat by his training, but he still prefers plain speaking to formality and action to speech. He trusts his crew enough not to micromanage them in their day-to-day tasks but his spirit of adventure causes him to lead from the front, taking on danger first hand, sometimes recklessly so. He and Commander Veda have a chaste, understated romance - they are attracted to one another, and respect each other as equals and friends, but regulations and good sense prevent it becoming more than that.
ATTRIBUTES
Control 8 Fitness 9 Presence 10
Daring 10 Insight 10 Reason 9
DISCIPLINES
Command 4 Security 3 Engineering 1
Conn 3 Science 2 Medicine 3
Focuses
Diplomacy
Emergency Medicine
Hand-to-Hand Combat
Persuasion
Shipboard Tactical Systems
Survival
Talents:
Resolute
Follow the Lead
Mean Right Hook
Veteran
Traits: Human
Values
Risk Is Our Business
Lead by Example
Nobody Gets Left Behind
In Love With Commander Veda
Commander Veda
Recognizing her unusual need for boundaries and structure, her loved ones recommended she enlist in Starfleet. They regarded this as a perfect fit: where by Deltan standards, Veda is a social maladapt, by human standards she is a richly compassionate person and her community hoped she could find fulfillment while helping foster those values in those around her.
Veda passed through Starfleet Academy with ease, earning multidisciplinary honors and her pick of prestigious hands-on research assignments. What she didn't expect to find was a growing sense of admiration for, and connection to, her comrade, Jonathan Singh. Unsure what to do with this feeling, she has retreated behind formality and protocol, sublimating her desires into the pursuit of becoming the perfect, efficient first officer.
ATTRIBUTES
Control 10 Fitness 08 Presence 09
Daring 08 Insight 09 Reason 12
DISCIPLINES
Command 2 Security 2 Science 5
Conn 2 Engineering 2 Medicine 3
Focuses
Botany
Computers
EPS Systems
EVA
Physics
Xenobiology
Talents
Mind-Meld
Soothing Touch
Intense Scrutiny
Studious
Traits: Deltan
Values
The Pursuit of Knowledge Is Life's Highest Goal
Violence Is a Failure State
Suffering Can Be a Great Teacher
Admires Captain Singh
Chief Engineer Santiago Sakai
Santiago had one avenue available to him, though: his natural gift for fiddling with gadgets and technology. His town needed someone handy to keep its subspace communicator link and food synthesizers working up to snuff and he quickly learned his way around such systems, becoming the village fix-it man. He liked feeling needed, and he found a wife, Dolores, and his old dream of going to space seemed to recede into the distance.
However, tragedy struck: they lost their child, and while Vulcan counseling helped keep them functional and sane, Santiago and Dolores couldn't be together anymore, and he could no longer bear to stay in his town. So at thirty-two, with no prospects and no official certifications, he enrolled in Starfleet Academy, and somehow found his way in.
Machinery and computers had always come easily to Santiago, and now so did subspace physics and 5-dimensional warp manifolds, and they gave him something to burrow into to avoid thinking about what he had left behind. He graduated with commendations and began a twenty-year career of service, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander in 2251.
Sakai is a burly Santa Claus of a man, with a round, avuncular Asian face bearing a ruff of thinning white hair and a somewhat unkempt beard. Unlike many more stereotypical engineers, he is not a socially awkward technophile, but a seasoned liver of life and a genial and hearty uncle to the captains and crews he has served with.
His relative seniority, in age if not rank, has lent Lt. Cmdr Sakai a wry sense of amusement at the more arcane or seemingly pointless bits of military procedure, and this irreverence may explain why, when he discovered a critical flaw in a new experimental system, he violated the chain of command to take the issue up with the design group directly, going over the head of a superior who hadn't taken his findings seriously. That incident could have torpedoed Sakai's career, but along with calling out the flaw, he also devised a working solution. The design team was impressed and the superior was quietly reassigned to other duties.
ATTRIBUTES
Control 10 Fitness 07 Presence 08
Daring 10 Insight 09 Reason 12
DISCIPLINES
Command 02 Security 02 Science 03
Conn 03 Engineering 05 Medicine 01
Focuses
Computers
Electro Plasma Power Systems
Handheld Electronics
Small Craft
Transporters and Replicators
Warp FIeld Dynamics
Talents
I Know My Ship
Jury-Rig
Technical Expertise
Veteran
Traits: Human
Values
This Is My Ship, I Just Loan It Out
The Captain's Confidant
People Need Fixing, Too
Curiosity Is the First Step
Communications Officer Gerol Pak
The Trill are recent entrants to the Federation and a few of the more adventurous symbionts want to experience life in the Federation - and particularly life in Starfleet - both for the chance at discovery and personal growth, but also to verify that the planet Trill has made the correct choice. The Pak symbiont, which had traditionally preferred Trill females in artistic or scholarly fields, recognized the impact that new and alien vistas could have on its future work and chose Gerol as its vehicle.
The joined entity Gerol Pak is a gregarious, xenophilic individual with boundless, almost childlike curiosity about everything and everyone around it, sometimes to a discomfiting degree. However, in moments of stress or danger, the confidence and breadth of knowledge of the Pak entity come through, lending the youth a serenity beyond his years.
Notable events in Lt. Pak's career include brokering a difficult peace between two warring factions on an alien planet, earning him their respect as an interpreter and intermediary, as well as finding a way to communicate with a truly alien entity composed of hundreds of square kilometers of vegetation linked below the surface in a neural network.
ATTRIBUTES
Control 10 Fitness 08 Presence 11
Daring 08 Insight 09 Reason 10
DISCIPLINES
Command 03 Security 02 Science 04
Conn 03 Engineering 04 Medicine 01
Focuses
Anthropology
Computers
Diplomacy
Linguistics
Philosophy
Subspace Communications
Talents
Joined Trill
Collaboration
Defuse the Tension
Computer Expertise
Traits: Trill, Pak symbiont
Values
Two Heads Are Better than One
If It Has a Mind, We Can Communicate With It
People Are More Important than Principles
The Young Can Benefit from My Experience
Security Chief Vyssia zh'Shran
Starfleet gave Vyssia the orderly environment she'd always wanted, and she has pledged a lifetime of service in return, considering it an honorable trade. Her Academy courses in operations and security polished some of her rough edges; though Vyssia is still slow to trust, always watchful for a hidden blade, always habitually checking the corners and exits of every room she enters, she's managed to find friends, people that she considers worth protecting.
Vyssia's protectiveness can have a slightly condescending edge; without meaning to, she views herself as acting in loco parentis to a pack of brilliant but hopelessly vulnerable children. She sees Ensign Archer as a fragile thing in need of protection, Lt. Cmdr Sakai as a wizened elder, Doctor Blake as an absentminded nerd, and Gerol Pak as a naive dreamer - which particularly grates on Pak, who is two hundred years her senior. However, Vyssia means well, and her vigilance has paid off on several occasions, so her attitude is generally tolerated.
One such assignment came early in her career, when attacked by hostile native creatures while exploring a new planet. With her superior officer wounded, Vyssia had to take control, rallying the team to hold off the hostile wildlife until the solar storms preventing beam-out had abated.
ATTRIBUTES
Control 09 Fitness 12 Presence 09
Daring 11 Insight 07 Reason 08
DISCIPLINES
Command 03 Security 05 Science 01
Conn 03 Engineering 03 Medicine 02
Focuses
Emergency Medicine
Hand Phasers
Hand-to-Hand Combat
Intimidation
Shipboard Tactical Systems
Survival
Talents
Close Protection
Constantly Watching
Interrogation
The Ushaan
Traits: Andorian
Values
My Word Is My Life
Trust, But Verify
Klingons Are Honorless Dogs
They Need Me to Protect Them
Ensign Madison Archer
An enormous legacy weighed her down like cement, but Madison decided to face it, and enrolled in the Academy. In a way, it was comforting, as fleet life was the only life she'd ever really known. However, her academy career was undistinguished - passable, but not meteoric - and uncharitable whispers began to suggest that she was the beneficiary of nepotism, especially when she received a string of plum assignments straight out of graduation.
Madison is determined to prove the naysayers wrong. She knows she's not a genius scientist like her father, a hero like her mother, or a legend like her great-grandfather, but she's good behind a helm and does her best for the team. She gets nervous sometimes and finds some of her coworkers intimidating - Captain Singh is larger than life, Commander Veda is so wise and thoughtful, Gerol Pak has seen everything, and Vyssia is intense (and beautiful) - but she knows that if she sticks around and keeps doing her job, her chance to prove herself will come.
What most of Madison's classmates and instructors weren't aware of was that in the infamous and secretive Kobayashi Maru simulation, she personally took the helm and fought off the virtual Klingons long enough that the computer judged her ship's crew to have successfully evacuated. Later analysis showed that she'd employed the clever, dangerous tactic of reinforcing her ship's facing shields by drawing power from the structural integrity fields on non-threatened arcs of the craft - a breach of safety protocol, and a tactic that in real life would consign the vessel that tried it to months of repair in spacedock, but an excellent last-ditch suicide strategy.
ATTRIBUTES
Control 11 Fitness 09 Presence 08
Daring 09 Insight 08 Reason 09
DISCIPLINES
Command 3 Security 4 Science 1
Conn 4 Engineering 2 Medicine 1
Focuses
Astronavigation
Computers
Helm Operations
Small Craft
Sensor Systems
Talents
Bold - Conn
Fly-By
Spirit of Discovery
Untapped Potential
Traits
Human
A Famous Name
Values
Living Up to a Legacy
At Home Behind the Wheel
A Crush on Vyssia
You Can't Learn Everything from Books
Doctor Daniel Blake
The obsession paid off; Blake graduated at the top of his class from Starfleet Academy's research medicine program, although a captain perusing the file will find several counselor's warnings that Blake's lifestyle is unhealthy and undersocialized, with few acquaintances from his time at the Academy and even fewer friends. Nonetheless, he moved swiftly into serious, high-security research postings, serving several years on various outposts and starbases.
However, Blake grew impatient with the kind of work he was being asked to do - projects whose parameters were dictated by others and in which he was simply another cog - and what he felt was a general lack of mental stimulation. This came to a head when a facility where he was working, a biological lab, was attacked by Klingons who believed it was developing secret weapons. Blake's quick thinking and rower's physique saved many lives and earned him a commendation, and kindled a perverse inclination to experience that kind of danger again.
In a surprise lateral move, he asked to be transferred to a starship, a place where he could set his own research priorities and constantly encounter new challenges to his theories and ways of thinking, as well as the constant stream of novelty he craved. As the USS Gibraltar had just lost its Chief Medical Officer in a mishap, the request was granted and Blake was fast-tracked into the position, arriving only recently.
This transition has been less than ideal. While immensely gifted academically, Dr. Blake's practical experience in everyday medicine is lacking and he's had to lean on his nursing staff to help him get up to speed - a process not helped by his preoccupation with a series of esoteric laboratory experiments he carries on in sickbay and its labs.
Fundamentally, Doctor Blake does not yet have the confidence of the people he works with, and he doesn't have the social skills to reassure them - but just as fundamentally, he doesn't care. He stays up late in the darkened sickbay catching up on the ship's medical logs while his simulations compile or his samples mature, and he already has ideas for how he could have handled certain situations better, more efficiently. When the next crisis strikes, Captain Singh will get Blake's best work, but he fully expects that in fifteen or twenty years the Gibraltar will be most famous for the discoveries he made on it.
ATTRIBUTES
Control 11 Fitness 10 Presence 07
Daring 08 Insight 08 Reason 12
DISCIPLINES
Command 02 Security 02 Science 03
Conn 02 Engineering 02 Medicine 05
Focuses
Botany
Emergency Medicine
Genetics
Trauma Surgery
Virology
Xenobiology
Talents
Bold - Medicine
Doctor's Orders
Quick Study
Untapped Potential
Traits
Human
Loner
Values
Do No Harm
Mistakes Are How We Learn
Not Colleagues, Just Patients
Publish or Perish
I also had kind of an epiphany about roleplaying in general: all of my players, even the one who isn't a big Star Trek guy, are familiar with the storytelling and know how the world "works." Like, the show has a certain rhythm, a way that people talk and interact, and as a player you can just kind of follow that script and it will feel right.
By comparison game like D&D is so full of layered and often mismatched assumptions taken from various fantasy sources that it can be hard for a player, even a gifted storyteller, to know what's the right thing for their level 6 cleric of the harvest god to do in this situation. They have to stop and think about it, or they just kind of do something they're already inclined to do - to make a tactically sound choice, or a dumb joke choice, or whatever - and paper it over with a veneer of roleplaying ("my god thinks we should stick together so the rogue doesn't get ganked i guess," "are there any hookers in this tavern?!" etc etc).
Whereas this, without any prompting from me, the table quickly became a back and forth of "Open hailing frequencies!" "Aye aye, sir!" and I'd tell them what they saw on the viewscreen or whatever, and then the guy playing the captain would be like "engineering, can we beam them aboard?" and I, as the GM, would answer, and it's this groove that's really easy to slide into. And the system supports everything you can think of doing in Star Trek, from going to maximum warp to locking on phasers to modulating shield harmonics. My buddy said "Let's launch a Class A probe!" and he was openmouthed when I promptly turned to the page in the rulebook about doing exactly that.[/quote]
highlights were:
turning the monk into a giant ape so he could splatter a butler to death
almost getting turned into a zombie by some asshole jackal wizard and then casting "heat metal" on his glasses until he ran away and left his spellbook. I'm a bard. I literally played a face-melting lute solo
oh also we probably weren't supposed to fight that guy yet but we accidentally teleported to the end of a dungeon we weren't ready for and now we have to work our way backwards through the entire fucking thing and the paladin got himself hit with a vampire curse on purpose and the monk now looks like a zombie and none of the evil statues would even talk to me
It's quite good, yes.
The rules for making redshirts on the fly are great too.
it was a success, which i'm pretty happy about. i haven't run 5th edition before and it was my first time using Yoon-Suin, which is a South-East Asian OSR setting book that has some really excellent stuff and some stuff i think doesn't quite work. i rolled up a criminal conspiracy involving an opium den, a delusional fakir, a sacred library, velvet worms and gladiatorial combat between crab men that the players seemed to really enjoy
i feel like Jacob's point about roleplaying speaks to a significant difference between the OSR mode of play and what i guess is a more storygamey model. the PCs in my game default to these small-time gangster/mercenary lowlives who are overwhelmingly devoted to their own self-interest, with very little in the way of roleplaying or higher motivation. one guy worshipped a randomly generated vulture god, that was fun. otherwise they just looked out for themselves. the literary model here is presumably Vance or Leiber but the guys i play with haven't read them and they seemed to figure it out alright
anyway they're keen to play again. i'm hoping to get them involved with some kind of detective society so i can have something to regularly generate plot hooks
[/quote]
I think this is why a lot of stuff that people seem to really like is based on smaller, specific settings and focuses on having rules evocative of how we view media and not of the universes own rules. Stuff like Blades In the Dark or 7th Sea can be summarized using references to movies most people have seen and mechanically focus much more on telling stories like you'd see in those films or games than on creating a 'real' feeling crime or pirate game.
Also how did you find the 2d20 stuff? I still think that core mechanic seems pretty clever with how it's designed to feed the GM and players into having a conversation about what's happening.
I'm playing a ranged class so I've archery as a style and beast master cause I want a wolfie friend and my first feat is sharpshooter.
My question is though, if I stick with bows, are there any other feats that are any good?
Because I'm struggling as I don't think my dude would choose crossbow expert as a specialty because I don't think he really likes change to much.
But on the other hand the synergies just seem pretty nuts, free reloads and an extra turn means if I have a one handed crossbow and combine with sharpshooter, fire again as a bonus action and something else like hunter's mark I could do 46-90 damage plus my wolf can spend his free action to give me advantage (this would be only for easy to hit targets though). Or I can just use a single heavy the rest of the time and switch when I have a target that is easy to hit.
Does anyone have any ideas on cool feats that I could take or should the crossbow specialization? Thanks!
Also as a side note. If I fire again with my crossbow as a bonus action, do I get to apply my dex damage to the second shot as they don't talk about that in the feat bonus.
Satans..... hints.....
If that means sticking to your character's preferences, do that, if it means doing some pretty sick damage then go with that.
I will say that even though the campaign we're doing is challenging, I'm not so brutal a GM that missing out on some optimal setups will bone the party- I'll tune stuff depending on what capabilities the party has. Though don't take that as an indication I'm not going to frequently do my best to defeat the party even if ya'll go with goofy builds
There is a track for "Action Captain", yes.
It is rather entertainingly effective, as well.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
it's another crossbow shot so you would get the dex damage again - you have to roll for the second hit, still, so it would suck big time if you didn't have it
without the hunter conclave, tho, I'm not sure what you could do to beef up your damage more
word of caution: hunters mark and the bonus crossbow shot are both bonus actions, so you can only do one of them in a round
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
We didn't get super into the nitty-gritty of 2d20 yet - just basic task resolution, how Focuses affect your roll, what rolling Complications does, etc. The players spent a little Momentum but not much and I didn't really touch the Threat pool. Hopefully the space battle next week will be a good opportunity to introduce a lot of the remaining concepts, like higher task difficulties and the use of Traits.
I'll probably buy the RPG to read through it and see what it does different from Infinity. It definitely sounds more abstract and narrative focused.
HM only requires a bonus action to change the target otherwise it only requires concentration which isn't an action.
Satans..... hints.....
casting it in the first place is a bonus action
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
Me and another friend want to play shit all the time but the trouble we run into is getting other people regularly
Oh my yes. What kind of game do you want to play?
@Dex Dynamo
A bunch! Here is a great list, and if you have a more specific game/setting request, give me a shout--I play a lot of 2-player games.
By 2-player do you mean one GM and one player? If so, there are a lot of games that are not explicitly intended for that but do it well, and some that even work better with fewer players.
Vampire (Masquerade or Requiem) is 100% playable for one person (just recall the Bloodlines video game) and arguably fits the material better, with a lone PC struggling against a shadowy and hostile world. Promethean: the Created, the golem/Frankenstein game, is also as good/better this way.
If you both want the chance to play (and hence both don't mind GMing) there's a really cool indie RPG called /shock/: Social Science Fiction where you and a friend collaborate to create a sci-fi premise (a world where androids so the work of people, a world where political can see future crimes, etc) and you each GM the other person through a story in that world.
Radddddd
Hit me up if you want episode suggestions. The nice thing about old TV is that you are under no obligation to watch it comprehensively or in any kind of order
The only one this doesn't quite work for is Werewolf, because lyncanthropy isn't portrayed as quite the horrific curse as the rest (more of a burden/responsibility).
they violate the core premise of the game imo
like, almost everything I hate about wod (aside from Mage) is the fact that you're supposed to be together with a group of equally outcast supernatural figures all following their own goals and in the end it feels like everything a GM wants to do with a campaign is shoehorned in there
i think i want to bring this other party back and have them be doing heroic shit in the background of the next few sessions. like, they're waging an epic campaign to prevent the return of an evil god while the PCs are dicking around doing petty crimes, and it just sort of comes up every so often
you just described 8-bit theater pretty well