Until the FFG game came out, WEG D6 was the best Star Wars system.
I'd argue that swapping out the Wild Die mechanic for a Triumph/Despair die makes D6 better than FFG.
I'm in love with the Advantage/Threat result being separate from Success/Failure.
You can't have everything, and I strongly dislike the careers in their gateway function. I'm willing to trade results 5-6 for freedom to build your character more organically.
Careers are by far the thing I like the least in FFG's Star Wars, the big ugly grid of mostly just guff that complicates how to play your character without being interesting. I feel like even for a class based set up it's gotta be one of the more irksome.
Yeah, it's aggravating as a player and as a GM. It's also not nearly as good at maintaining build balance as you'd think at first. I'm not sure if I've mentioned this here before but Jedi snipers are ludicrously overpowered in FFG.
My biggest problem with FFG is that after awhile, there's very little your character can't do. The characters in a game I'm playing has +1500 xp and I swear to god it's quickly becoming EU levels of stupid.
I'm impressed you guys have even stuck it out and kept playing at 1500.
The FFG campaign I was in ended at about +500, and it was already devolving into rocket tag with near-automatic success on all out of combat checks in our areas of specialty.
(There's a lot of things I don't like about FFG Star Wars but the issues the system has with XP gains are, I feel, definitely one of the big ones. There are very few systems that do really high-level play well IMO, almost all of them break down to some extent, but I thought it broke down much faster and more thoroughly than most games.)
Star Wars characters don't really "level up" which is always kind of a problem in an RPG. Luke trains as a Jedi but it's not like Leia or Han or Chewie are any more powerful by the end of RotJ or in TFA than they were in ANH.
Having static characters is kind of boring but it can definitely get out of hand quickly.
It might be an interesting experiment if there were a game where the sole measure of advancement was wealth by level (or, just wealth, since there would be no level).
3.X and 4E already enforced wealth by level so rigorously that it was effectively another XP bar (locked to your existing XP bar); I wonder if it would feel enough like progression if you only advanced in equipment and never increased your actual skills/stats/what have you.
It might not feel enough, I might want to add something like feats to it, as long as you were careful in which feats were available and which abilities/tricks you had as a starting character.
I can think of games in which equipment is extremely important, and some in which it's just considered part of leveling, but I can't think of any off the top of my head in which it's the sole method of advancement.
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Mongoose Traveler basically assumes that the vast majority of your mechanical character growth is done during character creation
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited September 2017
The career trees don't bother me in FFG at all. I don't have to interact with them as a GM - they're completely player-facing - and as a player you only have to deal with them between sessions, when you're spending XP, which is also the time to do stuff like gear management or whatever. All you need to have handy in actual play is a list of what your Talents do.
I do think PC advancement should probably not be indefinite and I think tailing off after about 500 earned XP is a wise idea. One strategy for dealing with this is awarding less XP: since my IRC games cover less ground than a RL session anyway, I tend to award about 5XP per session, with another 5 for story completion bonus, and it's been a good pacer and kept everything in a pretty reasonable range without gimping the PCs terribly. My plan for if my campaign were to stretch on and on for several more years (it's 2.5 years old already but we're approaching the climax, I think) was that I'd break the big story up into Episodes like the films and at the start of each new Episode bring the PCs back down to a more reasonable XP total but with some new high-octane gear (a lightsaber with more mod slots on it, the chance to trade in that busted old YT-1300 to a YT-2400 or whatever, etc) as recompense, and an opportunity for a total respec or reimagining of the character. I think of it as giving the character a new action figure, like how when I was a kid you could get Tatooine Luke, X-Wing Pilot Luke, Hoth Assault Luke, etc.
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
Star Wars characters don't really "level up" which is always kind of a problem in an RPG. Luke trains as a Jedi but it's not like Leia or Han or Chewie are any more powerful by the end of RotJ or in TFA than they were in ANH.
Having static characters is kind of boring but it can definitely get out of hand quickly.
Disagree. Luke trains as a Jedi. making his power growth more obvious (especially when you contrast the two duels with Vader), but each character displays abilities and skills they didn't have previously in each movie. You can call it hidden depths if you like--they always had those skills and just didn't have the opportunity to show them--but it's hard to imagine that, e.g., smirking boasting criminal Han Solo from ANH had enough ability as a leader to get instantly promoted to general and assigned leadership of a critical strike mission as he is in ROTJ. Leia is clearly an important operative in ANH, and is one of the leaders in ESB, addressing Rieekan as a full equal.
(although Leia should have been in command of the ground mission on Endor but that's a whole 'nother can of worms)
My plan for if my campaign were to stretch on and on for several more years (it's 2.5 years old already but we're approaching the climax, I think) was that I'd break the big story up into Episodes like the films and at the start of each new Episode bring the PCs back down to a more reasonable XP total but with some new high-octane gear (a lightsaber with more mod slots on it, the chance to trade in that busted old YT-1300 to a YT-2400 or whatever, etc) and an opportunity for a total respec or reimagining of the character. I think of it as giving the character a new action figure, like how when I was a kid you could get Tatooine Luke, X-Wing Pilot Luke, Hoth Assault Luke, etc.
Which is kinda like the GM advice I think you gave earlier or in another thread, that you don't have to stat out every NPC for their full abilities in the system, just what they'll be used for in a scene (you don't need to puzzle out exactly what level of knowledge of ancient lore a Rebellion X-wing pilot has for a strike mission, e.g.).
That said I am a total power gamer and love the idea of infinite power gain--as long as it's in the right setting. And the default setting of FFG's Star Wars game (post ANH, pre-ESB) is not it. If you did a campaign set in the KOTOR or TOR eras, on the other hand...
it has slowly dawned on me that the game i'm running has turned into my players roleplaying as fun OCs they made while I occasionally interject to describe a fucked up dream or idea I had one time
Mongoose Traveler basically assumes that the vast majority of your mechanical character growth is done during character creation
Part of that is because Traveller has always been a very hardcore world-simmy design philosophy but it's also kind of a virtue out of necessity thing, since "2d6+bonus and try to get an 8" doesn't leave a whole lot of mechanical ceiling to grow into. You can roll up a dude with a +4 in something and they'll succeed 17/18th of the time.
My personal bias is definitely toward games that have some degree of mechanical growth unless they're meant for short mini-campaigns like a lot of PbtA or FATE games. Star Trek Adventures has really, really slow character growth - if you played once a week in a solo game with just you and the GM, completed a new story from start to end every week, and and met the criteria for advancement every single story, it would take you something like 27.2 years of constant play to max out your guy - but I like that it's at least there and does give players something to aim for in the long term, and in the short and medium terms it lets you tweak your character without actually making them "better" but helping them focus better in your desired direction or role, so that's okay.
it has slowly dawned on me that the game i'm running has turned into my players roleplaying as fun OCs they made while I occasionally interject to describe a fucked up dream or idea I had one time
case in point, last night the party went to investigate a village that supposedly worships the evil god they're trying to kill
everyone in the town wears a greek comedy mask at all times, and the center of town is a bunch of ancient remains of burned down buildings from when the town was sacked by one of the other goddesses thousands of years ago. One of the townspeople explains that after the fire, the survivors wore the masks to hide their burned and disfigured faces from one another and it became a tradition to keep them on at all times
on a hill overlooking the burned up town square is an immaculate theater dating back to the same era, the only building that actually survived the fire. every day the entire town congregates there for a "show," where the curtains of the stage open up to reveal the bombed out back wall, through which you can see the destroyed town, with large blocks of stone showing the burned up sillhouettes of some of the people who were killed. They stare at that scene and laugh at it for an hour a day. Anyone who can't laugh changes out their comedy mask for a tragedy one, and the rest of the crowd swarms them, murders them and throws them through the hole in the wall out of the building and off of the hill.
it has slowly dawned on me that the game i'm running has turned into my players roleplaying as fun OCs they made while I occasionally interject to describe a fucked up dream or idea I had one time
case in point, last night the party went to investigate a village that supposedly worships the evil god they're trying to kill
everyone in the town wears a greek comedy mask at all times, and the center of town is a bunch of ancient remains of burned down buildings from when the town was sacked by one of the other goddesses thousands of years ago. One of the townspeople explains that after the fire, the survivors wore the masks to hide their burned and disfigured faces from one another and it became a tradition to keep them on at all times
on a hill overlooking the burned up town square is an immaculate theater dating back to the same era, the only building that actually survived the fire. every day the entire town congregates there for a "show," where the curtains of the stage open up to reveal the bombed out back wall, through which you can see the destroyed town, with large blocks of stone showing the burned up sillhouettes of some of the people who were killed. They stare at that scene and laugh at it for an hour a day. Anyone who can't laugh changes out their comedy mask for a tragedy one, and the rest of the crowd swarms them, murders them and throws them through the hole in the wall out of the building and off of the hill.
it has slowly dawned on me that the game i'm running has turned into my players roleplaying as fun OCs they made while I occasionally interject to describe a fucked up dream or idea I had one time
case in point, last night the party went to investigate a village that supposedly worships the evil god they're trying to kill
everyone in the town wears a greek comedy mask at all times, and the center of town is a bunch of ancient remains of burned down buildings from when the town was sacked by one of the other goddesses thousands of years ago. One of the townspeople explains that after the fire, the survivors wore the masks to hide their burned and disfigured faces from one another and it became a tradition to keep them on at all times
on a hill overlooking the burned up town square is an immaculate theater dating back to the same era, the only building that actually survived the fire. every day the entire town congregates there for a "show," where the curtains of the stage open up to reveal the bombed out back wall, through which you can see the destroyed town, with large blocks of stone showing the burned up sillhouettes of some of the people who were killed. They stare at that scene and laugh at it for an hour a day. Anyone who can't laugh changes out their comedy mask for a tragedy one, and the rest of the crowd swarms them, murders them and throws them through the hole in the wall out of the building and off of the hill.
Good lord, man!
the adventure before that, they went out to explore a canyon where the remains of a giant monster created by the evil god could be found
it wasn't actually canyon so much as a sinkhole that opened up because of the extreme weight of the monster, which was just a bull the size of a mountain
it turned out that its heart hadn't died, and the veings had rooted into the earth and spread all throughout the region for dozens of miles, sprouting up out of the ground like weird little bloody bushes that "bloomed" at night and spewed blood everywhere
all of the party members that ingested the blood slowly started turning into monsters. One of them became quadrapedal and kept getting bigger and bigger every day, one of them had their hands turn into hooves, and the third one was a water elemental that grew a bull skeleton inside of their body that then started growing tendens and musculature over top
like i said I really just spout off whatever creepy shit I think up while they try and have a nice time pretending to be cool fantasy people. somehow we've managed to strike a balance
*begins to laugh, in a controlled manner, for he knows that he must continue with this for some time*
*after several minutes, the tears come. but the laughter continues.*
it wasn't a constant laugh, i described it like if you erased everything but the laugh track from the audio of a sitcom, just silence punctuated by random unsolicited fits of laughter
it has slowly dawned on me that the game i'm running has turned into my players roleplaying as fun OCs they made while I occasionally interject to describe a fucked up dream or idea I had one time
case in point, last night the party went to investigate a village that supposedly worships the evil god they're trying to kill
everyone in the town wears a greek comedy mask at all times, and the center of town is a bunch of ancient remains of burned down buildings from when the town was sacked by one of the other goddesses thousands of years ago. One of the townspeople explains that after the fire, the survivors wore the masks to hide their burned and disfigured faces from one another and it became a tradition to keep them on at all times
on a hill overlooking the burned up town square is an immaculate theater dating back to the same era, the only building that actually survived the fire. every day the entire town congregates there for a "show," where the curtains of the stage open up to reveal the bombed out back wall, through which you can see the destroyed town, with large blocks of stone showing the burned up sillhouettes of some of the people who were killed. They stare at that scene and laugh at it for an hour a day. Anyone who can't laugh changes out their comedy mask for a tragedy one, and the rest of the crowd swarms them, murders them and throws them through the hole in the wall out of the building and off of the hill.
Good lord, man!
I love Luke a lot and he's a great GM
But there is a reason I had to tap out of the game after a few sessions
*begins to laugh, in a controlled manner, for he knows that he must continue with this for some time*
*after several minutes, the tears come. but the laughter continues.*
it wasn't a constant laugh, i described it like if you erased everything but the laugh track from the audio of a sitcom, just silence punctuated by random unsolicited fits of laughter
Whew, I'm glad you cleared that up, for a second I thought it was creepy
they also stole a magic, bottomless coffee cup from a woman named Monday, with coffee in it that doubles all of their stats every round they drink it
(the coffee is progressively going more and more bad over time and will require progressively higher Will rolls to choke it down without gagging as it gets grosser)
it has slowly dawned on me that the game i'm running has turned into my players roleplaying as fun OCs they made while I occasionally interject to describe a fucked up dream or idea I had one time
case in point, last night the party went to investigate a village that supposedly worships the evil god they're trying to kill
everyone in the town wears a greek comedy mask at all times, and the center of town is a bunch of ancient remains of burned down buildings from when the town was sacked by one of the other goddesses thousands of years ago. One of the townspeople explains that after the fire, the survivors wore the masks to hide their burned and disfigured faces from one another and it became a tradition to keep them on at all times
on a hill overlooking the burned up town square is an immaculate theater dating back to the same era, the only building that actually survived the fire. every day the entire town congregates there for a "show," where the curtains of the stage open up to reveal the bombed out back wall, through which you can see the destroyed town, with large blocks of stone showing the burned up sillhouettes of some of the people who were killed. They stare at that scene and laugh at it for an hour a day. Anyone who can't laugh changes out their comedy mask for a tragedy one, and the rest of the crowd swarms them, murders them and throws them through the hole in the wall out of the building and off of the hill.
I thought I was being weird when I had the PCs track down Count Dracula in his spelljamming command meteor from which he was making dinosaur vampires in the year 65 million BC, but now I no longer think that.
Even their (sadly unfinished) adventure to trap the king of the apocalypse sharks in the Master Ball after he escaped from the zoo sounds pretty normal.
Star Wars characters don't really "level up" which is always kind of a problem in an RPG. Luke trains as a Jedi but it's not like Leia or Han or Chewie are any more powerful by the end of RotJ or in TFA than they were in ANH.
Having static characters is kind of boring but it can definitely get out of hand quickly.
Do I ever know I felt worthless when He had his Jedi almost god like and my bounty hunter was basically sitting on their hands from a certain point on
But your WEG books are so pretty mine are beat up and used I am scared to open them as I think the glue decayed out of them
My Hunter/Werewolf books are still in the box I bought from that bookstore as I did not have the room for them in the bookcase and it became the start of the pile of books in my room
Star Wars absolutely is one of the settings that benefits from conceits like Fate's where you basically start 75% to the finish line with the character.
Unfortunately a lot of people who play RPGs get cranky about a lack of tangible character advancement (in the numbers sense, often forgetting about actual character advancement), so the industry tends to produce games like FFG's Star Wars which function well for about a year's worth of sessions and then completely start breaking down.
Star Wars characters don't really "level up" which is always kind of a problem in an RPG. Luke trains as a Jedi but it's not like Leia or Han or Chewie are any more powerful by the end of RotJ or in TFA than they were in ANH.
Having static characters is kind of boring but it can definitely get out of hand quickly.
Disagree. Luke trains as a Jedi. making his power growth more obvious (especially when you contrast the two duels with Vader), but each character displays abilities and skills they didn't have previously in each movie. You can call it hidden depths if you like--they always had those skills and just didn't have the opportunity to show them--but it's hard to imagine that, e.g., smirking boasting criminal Han Solo from ANH had enough ability as a leader to get instantly promoted to general and assigned leadership of a critical strike mission as he is in ROTJ. Leia is clearly an important operative in ANH, and is one of the leaders in ESB, addressing Rieekan as a full equal.
(although Leia should have been in command of the ground mission on Endor but that's a whole 'nother can of worms)
There's a big difference between a character learning to overcome their narcissism and a party of four mercenaries magically becoming force sensitive and master level lightsaber users.
Casually Hardcore on
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Zonugal(He/Him) The Holiday ArmadilloI'm Santa's representative for all the southern states. And Mexico!Registered Userregular
Hey, so...we broke out some new games this week, because our DM wasn't available for D&D, and here are some brief thoughts:
First off: I found a couple copies of the Arkham Horror: the Card Game core set, and got them for a pretty good discount so...we played that! It's really interesting, and I don't even think we're in the real meat of it yet, but for those who don't know, it's a Fantasy Flight LCG, along the lines of Netrunner or Game of Thrones, only it's pure co-op, and you run through a number of interconnected scenarios where you earn new cards, XP to buy more powerful cards, and possibly gain trauma and the like. We ran through the first scenario, which was pretty basic, but at first glance it seems like a lot of fun.
Part of the problem I've had with Arkham Horror is that occasionally, the game gets in its own way and you can lose some of the flavor. Especially since it's just...a lot of game. The card game dodges this issue by having you build a deck of assets and skills and things like that, that make it a more personal experience from the start, and the scenarios all seem like they can adjust how you interact with the game in some really interesting ways. I'll need to see how the core campaign plays out to get more of a feel for it, but right now it seems really neat, and it also seems like something I'll be able to corral my gaming group into actually playing.
The other one we broke out was Mansions of Madness, which is...kind of similar in that it's a more guided, story driven Arkham game, but it's driven by an app and miniatures and such, so it's also able to dig a little deeper into the lore than a card game would be. It's really interesting, more than anything, and I'd love to see the idea applied to something other than Cthulu stuff, but I really do like how offloading a lot of fiddly stuff to the app makes things run a lot more smoothly than Arkham Horror would, at times.
And a few weeks ago I picked up the new Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game, more out of curiosity than anything and...it's fine? In keeping with the apparent theme here, it's essentially a lighter version of Arkham Horror, one that...didn't seemingly have an art budget beyond the playable characters and the "big bads." It's...a pretty solid attempt at translating a TV show into a game, as each time you play you're essentially playing a shortened season of the show, where you have to defeat three "monsters of the week," to uncover and then foil the plot of the "Big Bad," for the season. Ultimately it feels a little abstract, and it's fairly easy to get into a place where you're spending multiple game rounds just searching for items and then wandering over to the lone enemy on the board and hoping not to get boned by random chance. We haven't picked it up again since the first night we tried it and I don't think that's likely to change.
I also played around with a starter set for the Star Wars Destiny dice/card game and I was surprised to check reviews for it and find out that people love it. It feels clunky and doesn't really make sense as a Star Wars game?
You'll need two to have enough cards for three or four people. But you'll be set from there, outside of expansions
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Casually HardcoreOnce an Asshole. Trying to be better.Registered Userregular
edited September 2017
Star wars destiny is excellent because it isn't just MTG with a star wars skin. It's fast and simple. The
absolute worse thing about it are all the freaking dice you'll accumulate. It becomes a nightmare storing all the dice and you better prey you don't lose a legendary die.
Arkham Horror TCG: Two core sets is perfect for 3 people, it's what my group ran through the core set with. It also gets a full playset of the player cards. Two cores can support 4 players, but it requires picking the right combo of investigators and may still stretch things thin.
Star Wars Destiny: I feel like the gameplay is probably fine, but with both starters and ~12 packs I still couldn't really put a deck together at all which killed any interest I had in it.
Yeah, when I was putting decks together for our game night, I put together four decks and it got a little dicey at the end. Since we only ended up playing with three people, I'll probably have everyone adjust the decks to account for it. Also: we definitely fucked up some pretty important rules, which made things way easier on us in the first scenario, mostly in that we got through things way faster. Which isn't a big deal, necessarily. We obviously probably took less trauma than we probably should have, but we also didn't find more enemies with victory points, so we missed out on some XP, probably. I really am excited to check out the next scenario though, I can definitely feel that the game's about to open up in a really fun way.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I find it fascinating that you thought the Arkham Horror card game had less issues with the mechanics getting in the way of the theme. That's been exactly the opposite of my experience with it.
I find it fascinating that you thought the Arkham Horror card game had less issues with the mechanics getting in the way of the theme. That's been exactly the opposite of my experience with it.
I can...definitely see how that would play out. We're notoriously bad at actually thinking stuff like, "wait it's weird that this cop randomly showed up in this magically sealed room, right?" as it's happening. I'm operating under the assumption that in different scenarios it's a bit less wonky, but also I'm largely favorably comparing it to the Arkham Horror board game, which could occasionally produce an interesting moment, but largely felt like getting bounced around by chance. In this you run a scenario and then there are cards that only show up in that scenario, that are...by and large going to play well with what's going on, and the race to uncover what you need to uncover before the scenario specific doomsday clock runs out adds a nice layer to it.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut...I'm also not super attached to the lovecraftian horror theme, and any weird shit like....summoning a beat cop to a magically sealed room like he's been there the whole time comes off as more of a fun quirk than anything. The overall feeling, of scrambling to solve a mystery before some unknowable awful thing comes to pass, that super works for me, and on their own, the mechanics are really fun.
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I'm impressed you guys have even stuck it out and kept playing at 1500.
The FFG campaign I was in ended at about +500, and it was already devolving into rocket tag with near-automatic success on all out of combat checks in our areas of specialty.
(There's a lot of things I don't like about FFG Star Wars but the issues the system has with XP gains are, I feel, definitely one of the big ones. There are very few systems that do really high-level play well IMO, almost all of them break down to some extent, but I thought it broke down much faster and more thoroughly than most games.)
It might be an interesting experiment if there were a game where the sole measure of advancement was wealth by level (or, just wealth, since there would be no level).
3.X and 4E already enforced wealth by level so rigorously that it was effectively another XP bar (locked to your existing XP bar); I wonder if it would feel enough like progression if you only advanced in equipment and never increased your actual skills/stats/what have you.
It might not feel enough, I might want to add something like feats to it, as long as you were careful in which feats were available and which abilities/tricks you had as a starting character.
I can think of games in which equipment is extremely important, and some in which it's just considered part of leveling, but I can't think of any off the top of my head in which it's the sole method of advancement.
DIESEL
Against the Fall of Night Playtest
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
I do think PC advancement should probably not be indefinite and I think tailing off after about 500 earned XP is a wise idea. One strategy for dealing with this is awarding less XP: since my IRC games cover less ground than a RL session anyway, I tend to award about 5XP per session, with another 5 for story completion bonus, and it's been a good pacer and kept everything in a pretty reasonable range without gimping the PCs terribly. My plan for if my campaign were to stretch on and on for several more years (it's 2.5 years old already but we're approaching the climax, I think) was that I'd break the big story up into Episodes like the films and at the start of each new Episode bring the PCs back down to a more reasonable XP total but with some new high-octane gear (a lightsaber with more mod slots on it, the chance to trade in that busted old YT-1300 to a YT-2400 or whatever, etc) as recompense, and an opportunity for a total respec or reimagining of the character. I think of it as giving the character a new action figure, like how when I was a kid you could get Tatooine Luke, X-Wing Pilot Luke, Hoth Assault Luke, etc.
Disagree. Luke trains as a Jedi. making his power growth more obvious (especially when you contrast the two duels with Vader), but each character displays abilities and skills they didn't have previously in each movie. You can call it hidden depths if you like--they always had those skills and just didn't have the opportunity to show them--but it's hard to imagine that, e.g., smirking boasting criminal Han Solo from ANH had enough ability as a leader to get instantly promoted to general and assigned leadership of a critical strike mission as he is in ROTJ. Leia is clearly an important operative in ANH, and is one of the leaders in ESB, addressing Rieekan as a full equal.
(although Leia should have been in command of the ground mission on Endor but that's a whole 'nother can of worms)
Which is kinda like the GM advice I think you gave earlier or in another thread, that you don't have to stat out every NPC for their full abilities in the system, just what they'll be used for in a scene (you don't need to puzzle out exactly what level of knowledge of ancient lore a Rebellion X-wing pilot has for a strike mission, e.g.).
That said I am a total power gamer and love the idea of infinite power gain--as long as it's in the right setting. And the default setting of FFG's Star Wars game (post ANH, pre-ESB) is not it. If you did a campaign set in the KOTOR or TOR eras, on the other hand...
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Part of that is because Traveller has always been a very hardcore world-simmy design philosophy but it's also kind of a virtue out of necessity thing, since "2d6+bonus and try to get an 8" doesn't leave a whole lot of mechanical ceiling to grow into. You can roll up a dude with a +4 in something and they'll succeed 17/18th of the time.
My personal bias is definitely toward games that have some degree of mechanical growth unless they're meant for short mini-campaigns like a lot of PbtA or FATE games. Star Trek Adventures has really, really slow character growth - if you played once a week in a solo game with just you and the GM, completed a new story from start to end every week, and and met the criteria for advancement every single story, it would take you something like 27.2 years of constant play to max out your guy - but I like that it's at least there and does give players something to aim for in the long term, and in the short and medium terms it lets you tweak your character without actually making them "better" but helping them focus better in your desired direction or role, so that's okay.
case in point, last night the party went to investigate a village that supposedly worships the evil god they're trying to kill
everyone in the town wears a greek comedy mask at all times, and the center of town is a bunch of ancient remains of burned down buildings from when the town was sacked by one of the other goddesses thousands of years ago. One of the townspeople explains that after the fire, the survivors wore the masks to hide their burned and disfigured faces from one another and it became a tradition to keep them on at all times
on a hill overlooking the burned up town square is an immaculate theater dating back to the same era, the only building that actually survived the fire. every day the entire town congregates there for a "show," where the curtains of the stage open up to reveal the bombed out back wall, through which you can see the destroyed town, with large blocks of stone showing the burned up sillhouettes of some of the people who were killed. They stare at that scene and laugh at it for an hour a day. Anyone who can't laugh changes out their comedy mask for a tragedy one, and the rest of the crowd swarms them, murders them and throws them through the hole in the wall out of the building and off of the hill.
http://www.audioentropy.com/
Good lord, man!
the adventure before that, they went out to explore a canyon where the remains of a giant monster created by the evil god could be found
it wasn't actually canyon so much as a sinkhole that opened up because of the extreme weight of the monster, which was just a bull the size of a mountain
it turned out that its heart hadn't died, and the veings had rooted into the earth and spread all throughout the region for dozens of miles, sprouting up out of the ground like weird little bloody bushes that "bloomed" at night and spewed blood everywhere
all of the party members that ingested the blood slowly started turning into monsters. One of them became quadrapedal and kept getting bigger and bigger every day, one of them had their hands turn into hooves, and the third one was a water elemental that grew a bull skeleton inside of their body that then started growing tendens and musculature over top
like i said I really just spout off whatever creepy shit I think up while they try and have a nice time pretending to be cool fantasy people. somehow we've managed to strike a balance
http://www.audioentropy.com/
*after several minutes, the tears come. but the laughter continues.*
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
it wasn't a constant laugh, i described it like if you erased everything but the laugh track from the audio of a sitcom, just silence punctuated by random unsolicited fits of laughter
http://www.audioentropy.com/
I love Luke a lot and he's a great GM
But there is a reason I had to tap out of the game after a few sessions
Whew, I'm glad you cleared that up, for a second I thought it was creepy
they also stole a magic, bottomless coffee cup from a woman named Monday, with coffee in it that doubles all of their stats every round they drink it
(the coffee is progressively going more and more bad over time and will require progressively higher Will rolls to choke it down without gagging as it gets grosser)
http://www.audioentropy.com/
this is good and i'm stealing it
the bull heart is also good
Even their (sadly unfinished) adventure to trap the king of the apocalypse sharks in the Master Ball after he escaped from the zoo sounds pretty normal.
DIESEL
Against the Fall of Night Playtest
Nasty, Brutish, and Short
what does a demon from the 80s look like, aside from Reagan/Thatcher
also
Do I ever know I felt worthless when He had his Jedi almost god like and my bounty hunter was basically sitting on their hands from a certain point on
But your WEG books are so pretty mine are beat up and used I am scared to open them as I think the glue decayed out of them
My Hunter/Werewolf books are still in the box I bought from that bookstore as I did not have the room for them in the bookcase and it became the start of the pile of books in my room
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Unfortunately a lot of people who play RPGs get cranky about a lack of tangible character advancement (in the numbers sense, often forgetting about actual character advancement), so the industry tends to produce games like FFG's Star Wars which function well for about a year's worth of sessions and then completely start breaking down.
There's a big difference between a character learning to overcome their narcissism and a party of four mercenaries magically becoming force sensitive and master level lightsaber users.
Are your demons all like Adam Scott from the Good Place?
First off: I found a couple copies of the Arkham Horror: the Card Game core set, and got them for a pretty good discount so...we played that! It's really interesting, and I don't even think we're in the real meat of it yet, but for those who don't know, it's a Fantasy Flight LCG, along the lines of Netrunner or Game of Thrones, only it's pure co-op, and you run through a number of interconnected scenarios where you earn new cards, XP to buy more powerful cards, and possibly gain trauma and the like. We ran through the first scenario, which was pretty basic, but at first glance it seems like a lot of fun.
Part of the problem I've had with Arkham Horror is that occasionally, the game gets in its own way and you can lose some of the flavor. Especially since it's just...a lot of game. The card game dodges this issue by having you build a deck of assets and skills and things like that, that make it a more personal experience from the start, and the scenarios all seem like they can adjust how you interact with the game in some really interesting ways. I'll need to see how the core campaign plays out to get more of a feel for it, but right now it seems really neat, and it also seems like something I'll be able to corral my gaming group into actually playing.
The other one we broke out was Mansions of Madness, which is...kind of similar in that it's a more guided, story driven Arkham game, but it's driven by an app and miniatures and such, so it's also able to dig a little deeper into the lore than a card game would be. It's really interesting, more than anything, and I'd love to see the idea applied to something other than Cthulu stuff, but I really do like how offloading a lot of fiddly stuff to the app makes things run a lot more smoothly than Arkham Horror would, at times.
And a few weeks ago I picked up the new Buffy the Vampire Slayer board game, more out of curiosity than anything and...it's fine? In keeping with the apparent theme here, it's essentially a lighter version of Arkham Horror, one that...didn't seemingly have an art budget beyond the playable characters and the "big bads." It's...a pretty solid attempt at translating a TV show into a game, as each time you play you're essentially playing a shortened season of the show, where you have to defeat three "monsters of the week," to uncover and then foil the plot of the "Big Bad," for the season. Ultimately it feels a little abstract, and it's fairly easy to get into a place where you're spending multiple game rounds just searching for items and then wandering over to the lone enemy on the board and hoping not to get boned by random chance. We haven't picked it up again since the first night we tried it and I don't think that's likely to change.
I also played around with a starter set for the Star Wars Destiny dice/card game and I was surprised to check reviews for it and find out that people love it. It feels clunky and doesn't really make sense as a Star Wars game?
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Yes, but they count against your PC's limit of attuned items
(This is just the adventurers league ruling however, so as always the real answer is "it's up to the DM")
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You'll need two to have enough cards for three or four people. But you'll be set from there, outside of expansions
absolute worse thing about it are all the freaking dice you'll accumulate. It becomes a nightmare storing all the dice and you better prey you don't lose a legendary die.
Star Wars Destiny: I feel like the gameplay is probably fine, but with both starters and ~12 packs I still couldn't really put a deck together at all which killed any interest I had in it.
I can...definitely see how that would play out. We're notoriously bad at actually thinking stuff like, "wait it's weird that this cop randomly showed up in this magically sealed room, right?" as it's happening. I'm operating under the assumption that in different scenarios it's a bit less wonky, but also I'm largely favorably comparing it to the Arkham Horror board game, which could occasionally produce an interesting moment, but largely felt like getting bounced around by chance. In this you run a scenario and then there are cards that only show up in that scenario, that are...by and large going to play well with what's going on, and the race to uncover what you need to uncover before the scenario specific doomsday clock runs out adds a nice layer to it.
Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut...I'm also not super attached to the lovecraftian horror theme, and any weird shit like....summoning a beat cop to a magically sealed room like he's been there the whole time comes off as more of a fun quirk than anything. The overall feeling, of scrambling to solve a mystery before some unknowable awful thing comes to pass, that super works for me, and on their own, the mechanics are really fun.
basically "hey kids, do you like physical adepts in shadowrun?" the build
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