That rolling twice thing really worked out for you that time!
I'll say! And I'm making a 2H Fighter so I only needed two of those numbers to be good to begin with. Buff Hardbody (working name) is shaping up pretty nice :winky:
Depends, do you want to feel like a super hero out the gate? Marvel Heroics. Do you want to be so wet behind the ear that Uncle Ben dies? World in Peril.
Hey RPG thread, GenCon is just a few weeks away, and I always try to pick up a few new games at GenCon. While the big names like Starfinder and the new L5R card game are already on my list, I like to grab stuff from the little publishers/designers too. So, what games/companies should I toss on my look at list for the exhibit hall? What stuff is out there that you wish more people were playing?
I have gone into three, THREE!, game store here in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) looking for FFG dice for Star Wars with no luck. Fuck it, I'm just using the app. You can't say I didn't try, though.
Apparently, the problem lies in that FFG was bought out by some European company. FFG had one distributor in Canada for their product, but the new company has their own distribution line. So, during the switcheroo, the new distributor(s?) have not got a handle on getting the product out there yet. Or that's what the friendly nerd said at the last store I visited today.
MaclayInsquequo Totus Es UnusHere and ThereRegistered Userregular
If you want to see it in action Geek & Sundry are running a twitch game on Wednesdays at 9.30 Pacific (about 7hrs from now?). They've only had one combat so far and didn't use a grid though, if that's the main info you're looking for.
So, I've been eying the Star Trek Adventures tabletop game and it uses Modiphius' 2d20 system. I'm not familiar with it. How does it play out?
The game has miniatures, so how is the grid-based combat in their system?
It does not use grid-based combat. You can easily think about it as grid-based (contact range = touching, close range is nearby, etc.), but it uses zones instead of a grid. 2d20 apes a lot of mechanics from other systems (Narrative Currency from FATE, including a Doom track that's like MHRP, Aspects from FATE, freely combining large skill groups with an attribute to determine target numbers, etc.). The basic die roll is a pool system of 2d20, where each die rolled that is equal to or less than a target number is a success. A roll of a 1 is a Critical Success (+1 bonus success), and a roll of a 20 is a Critical Failure and creates a Complication (essentially a FATE Aspect). You can buy additional dice to add to the pool using narrative currency or certain Talents/abilities. To complete the average task, you need 1-5 successes, with net successes giving you more of a specific narrative currency to play with.
It also uses d6 dice for "Damage" or "Effect" as a second layer of rolls. The d6 have the following faces: 2, 1, 1+ Effect, 1+ Effect, 0, 0. The "Effect" means you add some sort of bonus/penalty for each one rolled. For example, I think "Vicious" attacks (not sure) give you a damage bonus of +1 damage per Effect rolled (so essentially, 1+ Effect becomes a 2).
It's has more crunch than FATE or Cortex (number of stats on a sheet are on-par with DnD Essentials), but mechanically it leans heavily into the narrative currency mechanic like FATE or MHRP.
My friends and I are going to play through our first session on Sunday, so I can report back after that. We are flying around in the NCC-2008 USS Obama, an Intrepid-class ship with an EMH that we are calling ObamaC.A.R.E. (Completely Automated Response to Emergencies).
Hahnsoo1 on
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
So, I've been eying the Star Trek Adventures tabletop game and it uses Modiphius' 2d20 system. I'm not familiar with it. How does it play out?
The game has miniatures, so how is the grid-based combat in their system?
My friends and I are going to play through our first session on Sunday, so I can report back after that. We are flying around in the NCC-2008 USS Obama, an Intrepid-class ship with an EMH that we are calling ObamaC.A.R.E. (Completely Automated Response to Emergencies).
So, I've been eying the Star Trek Adventures tabletop game and it uses Modiphius' 2d20 system. I'm not familiar with it. How does it play out?
The game has miniatures, so how is the grid-based combat in their system?
My friends and I are going to play through our first session on Sunday, so I can report back after that. We are flying around in the NCC-2008 USS Obama, an Intrepid-class ship with an EMH that we are calling ObamaC.A.R.E. (Completely Automated Response to Emergencies).
I'm pretty intrigued by this RPG Kickstarter for something called "The Spire". The premise: The Spire is a city built as a giant tower, the home and domain of dark elves. About 200-300 years ago, high elves swept in and conquered the Spire: the drow army destroyed, the surviving citizens forced into being the underclass in their own city. The high elves rule with caprice and cruelty, and the drow are just trying to get by.
The player characters are members of the Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress, a secret organization that worships one facet of the tripartite drow goddess and is trying to organize a revolution. So, the setting is a sorta-industrial urban fantasy, focused on revolts, and trying to explore dark elves as complicated and sympathetic (rather than the two-dimensional puppy-kickers that are the D&D standard). Gods are many, and just about everyone worships some sort of a god.
The game sounds like it's narrative-first, and the classes are takes on familiar fantasy RPG classes seen through this weird lens. The ranger-analog, for example, is a priest of the death god, and their starting pet is a hyena (the drow burial tradition in this setting being to leave the bodies to be devoured by carrion-eaters). One of the classes the creators loosely described in a podcast was named something like "firebrand", whose narrative deal is inciting others to action and whose mechanical deal is buffs; at high levels, they can create some kind of an idea or slogan, and then physically appear wherever this idea is being discussed. That sounds super-cool to me, and also like a nightmare to adjudicate from a game master's perspective.
I dunno, I like how novel and unique this game looks, and I feel like I would have a good time reading the book, but I'm not sure how mechanically sound the system is (in their defense, there isn't much to go on at this time, so this is a baseless accusation), and I'm pretty sure I'd never get to play/run it. But that's fine? I've bought plenty of RPGs just to read them.
Oh, also, the art that's going to go in the book looks real good.
EDIT: The creators previously made something called "Unbound", which is a setting-less RPG where - as I understand it - each character keeps track of their character status, uses abilities, and generates randomness through the use or a personal deck of cards (which they write on as the character grows and changes). I grabbed the PDF of it last night, but haven't had a chance to read it yet. Does anyone have any impressions of it, by any chance?
Delduwath on
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited July 2017
I keep opening the KS page for The Spire, hovering over the "cancel pledge" button, and then looking at the art and book mockups and closing the window. It's expensive, but goddamn...
Conceptually I like how they're framing it mechanically, the world-building looks fucking awesome, and everything involved is gorgeous. Also this line really fucks me up, "It’s like D&D crossed with Unknown Armies, or Gormenghast crossed with Necromunda."
edit: I just realized that by backing I get access to the quickstart rules so uh Imma go take a look at those.
I keep opening the KS page for The Spire, hovering over the "cancel pledge" button, and then looking at the art and book mockups and closing the window. It's expensive, but goddamn...
Is cost the only reason you're thinking of cancelling?
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited July 2017
@tastydonuts to expand on what Hahnsoo said regarding combat, Star Trek uses a zone system, which is basically a grid except that a zone is defined purely by what's inside it and by its relationship to other zones, it doesn't have to be a fixed size or shape. A ground battle could have three zones - "the town," "the fields," "the woods", with their relationship defined as the fields surround the town and the woods surround the fields.
And then maybe a dude in the town goes inside a building and now he's in "the hut" or whatever. Each zone can have its own environmental conditions attached to it with a tag system, like the fields have "no available cover," the woods have "difficult terrain," etc, and players and the GM can use characters' skill rolls or the spending of narrative currency to add or remove tags to or from a zone, like maybe a PC makes an Engineering roll to activate the town's Force Field, or the GM spends points from his Threat pool to make the hut count as volatile cover that will explode if hit (it's full of kerosene barrels!).
EDIT: so what this all means is that miniatures are not required but they are handy. You're not counting squares or worrying about flanking but still want a quick way to remember where your dude is and who's next to him.
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
edited July 2017
I've read through the quick start and here is my "review".
TL;DR: I like it! But I kind of wish it was just a Blades in the Dark hack.
The core system is D10 dice pools, but small pools -- likely 4 or 5 at a realistic max. Only players roll dice. You start with a D10, gain a D10 if you have the skill you're using, then further D10s for applicable high-quality equipment, help from others, and so on. There are nine Skills, one of which is just Fight, so combat and non-combat are rolled the same way. Results are basically success or failure (1-5 failure, 6-10 success) but with varying degrees of Stress taken.
Stress is the consequence mechanic for everything, and there are five different types of stress: Blood (physical), Mind (mental), Shadow (covertness), Silver (resources), Reputation (social standing). Whenever you take stress you mark boxes in the appropriate track, then roll 1D10 and if it's lower than your total marked stress, you suffer Fallout (and lower your current stress). Fallout is minor, major, or severe based on how much stress you have when you suffered fallout. Fallout are more specific consequences divided, again, into the five categories. Blood fallout are things like bleeding, knocked out, or dead. Reputation fallout is stuff like a vendetta, humiliation, or reviled. Fallout seems to be a mixture of narrative and mechanical consequences -- Lash Out forces you to lash out against the source of your stress, whereas Tired stops you from using the Fight, Pursue, or Sneak skills.
I like the stress mechanic as a blanket for just about everything bad that can happen to you and it mechanizes consequences in a way that I like, but the fallout is a little awkward in the extra roll that it adds to every result and then digging through a very specific list of consequences... I'm less fond of that. That said, it does push a lot of the burden off of the GM as, unlike in Blades in the Dark, they don't need to improvise nearly as many consequences for players -- they can just roll some stress, then if they suffer fallout there's probably something on the list that maps to whatever just happened.
Characters look straightforward (in the quickstart they're written across two pages) but the special abilities are and with a power level akin to PbtA-style moves (so, high). A character is made up of:
Resistances -- five values that correspond to the five stress types. If you have X in a resistance, the first X stress you take to that track is ignored for fallout.
Skills -- you either have a skill or you don't.
Domains -- tags like Low Society, Criminal, Occult, Order, Commerce -- these can give you bonus dice if they're related to an action you're rolling.
Refresh -- a narrative phrase like "Take something back from those who would oppress you" that allows you to recover stress.
Bonds -- individual NPC or group affiliations that you can call on to do things for you.
and that's it! Except for the special abilities, which are MANY AND VARIED. There are simple mechanical ones that give you bonus resistances, or Mastery (bonus dice) when rolling in certain contexts, or re-rolls, and then narrative ones that let you do things like "so long as there are people nearby and a place to have it, you can create an instant gathering with dancing, games, drinking, eating and chatting." The quick start lists eight special abilities per character, and I imagine that's reduced from the full list. You can also take abilities from other classes, and there are abilities locked under requirements that you have to satisfy in-game, so the customization looks many and varied.
The character stuff looks really solid. This feels like a game where you're going to start out effective (but in desperate circumstances) and then grow horizontally rather than vertically.
The rest of the quickstart is some setting info and a bunch of factions. The quick start adventure is not like a D&D adventure: it's a starting situation, some more factions and NPCs, and hooks into each of the quickstart PCs. There are no laid-out scenes. It's expected that the PCs approach, allies and enemies, and goals will be determined in play.
Overall, I'm happy with what I read and I'm sticking with my pledge. The system feels about as heavy as Blades in the Dark (which puts it above PbtA, but well below D&D) but with a little less smoothness and a little more cruft in exchange for less improvisational weight placed on the GM.
I Kirked a dude while my away-schlub engineer exploded a console on his buddy. Then we stabbed a bad guy back to life with a rock and narrowly avoided an incident with the Kardashians through a combination of science and speechifying.
In all seriousness, it works really well for the thing it's trying to model, and the flow is great. Threat/Momentum is a really neat mechanic that opens up a lot of indirect player interaction while building the ebb and flow rhythm of a Trek episode into every player action.
We've got another session on Saturday and I'm psyched.
I Kirked a dude while my away-schlub engineer exploded a console on his buddy. Then we stabbed a bad guy back to life with a rock and narrowly avoided an incident with the Kardashians through a combination of science and speechifying.
In all seriousness, it works really well for the thing it's trying to model, and the flow is great. Threat/Momentum is a really neat mechanic that opens up a lot of indirect player interaction while building the ebb and flow rhythm of a Trek episode into every player action.
We've got another session on Saturday and I'm psyched.
This all sounds pretty interesting and neat, thanks for the info! Been eyeing the game from a distance now that it's closer to preorder time I figured I'd get more information.
Not having to worry about grid movement really makes life easier for map making too, definitely like that.
Star Trek Online plugged the stream that's going to happen tonight too, but it's 12:30a EDT and I can't really swing that, unfortunately. I'll try and remember to catch it tomorrow htough.
“I used to draw, hard to admit that I used to draw...”
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I'll say! And I'm making a 2H Fighter so I only needed two of those numbers to be good to begin with. Buff Hardbody (working name) is shaping up pretty nice :winky:
I think I did this wrong
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Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Wait I mean which supers system should I run? Current forerunners are MHRP and Worlds in Peril.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
I still count the M&M game in my early days on this forum as one of my best RP experiences. I should really go back and read that thread, again.
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God I loved playing that character. Everyone really brought their A game to that one.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
Apparently, the problem lies in that FFG was bought out by some European company. FFG had one distributor in Canada for their product, but the new company has their own distribution line. So, during the switcheroo, the new distributor(s?) have not got a handle on getting the product out there yet. Or that's what the friendly nerd said at the last store I visited today.
The game has miniatures, so how is the grid-based combat in their system?
@Jacobkosh
It also uses d6 dice for "Damage" or "Effect" as a second layer of rolls. The d6 have the following faces: 2, 1, 1+ Effect, 1+ Effect, 0, 0. The "Effect" means you add some sort of bonus/penalty for each one rolled. For example, I think "Vicious" attacks (not sure) give you a damage bonus of +1 damage per Effect rolled (so essentially, 1+ Effect becomes a 2).
It's has more crunch than FATE or Cortex (number of stats on a sheet are on-par with DnD Essentials), but mechanically it leans heavily into the narrative currency mechanic like FATE or MHRP.
My friends and I are going to play through our first session on Sunday, so I can report back after that. We are flying around in the NCC-2008 USS Obama, an Intrepid-class ship with an EMH that we are calling ObamaC.A.R.E. (Completely Automated Response to Emergencies).
This is a good & wholesome joke.
The player characters are members of the Ministry of Our Hidden Mistress, a secret organization that worships one facet of the tripartite drow goddess and is trying to organize a revolution. So, the setting is a sorta-industrial urban fantasy, focused on revolts, and trying to explore dark elves as complicated and sympathetic (rather than the two-dimensional puppy-kickers that are the D&D standard). Gods are many, and just about everyone worships some sort of a god.
The game sounds like it's narrative-first, and the classes are takes on familiar fantasy RPG classes seen through this weird lens. The ranger-analog, for example, is a priest of the death god, and their starting pet is a hyena (the drow burial tradition in this setting being to leave the bodies to be devoured by carrion-eaters). One of the classes the creators loosely described in a podcast was named something like "firebrand", whose narrative deal is inciting others to action and whose mechanical deal is buffs; at high levels, they can create some kind of an idea or slogan, and then physically appear wherever this idea is being discussed. That sounds super-cool to me, and also like a nightmare to adjudicate from a game master's perspective.
I dunno, I like how novel and unique this game looks, and I feel like I would have a good time reading the book, but I'm not sure how mechanically sound the system is (in their defense, there isn't much to go on at this time, so this is a baseless accusation), and I'm pretty sure I'd never get to play/run it. But that's fine? I've bought plenty of RPGs just to read them.
Oh, also, the art that's going to go in the book looks real good.
EDIT: The creators previously made something called "Unbound", which is a setting-less RPG where - as I understand it - each character keeps track of their character status, uses abilities, and generates randomness through the use or a personal deck of cards (which they write on as the character grows and changes). I grabbed the PDF of it last night, but haven't had a chance to read it yet. Does anyone have any impressions of it, by any chance?
Conceptually I like how they're framing it mechanically, the world-building looks fucking awesome, and everything involved is gorgeous. Also this line really fucks me up, "It’s like D&D crossed with Unknown Armies, or Gormenghast crossed with Necromunda."
edit: I just realized that by backing I get access to the quickstart rules so uh Imma go take a look at those.
And then maybe a dude in the town goes inside a building and now he's in "the hut" or whatever. Each zone can have its own environmental conditions attached to it with a tag system, like the fields have "no available cover," the woods have "difficult terrain," etc, and players and the GM can use characters' skill rolls or the spending of narrative currency to add or remove tags to or from a zone, like maybe a PC makes an Engineering roll to activate the town's Force Field, or the GM spends points from his Threat pool to make the hut count as volatile cover that will explode if hit (it's full of kerosene barrels!).
EDIT: so what this all means is that miniatures are not required but they are handy. You're not counting squares or worrying about flanking but still want a quick way to remember where your dude is and who's next to him.
TL;DR: I like it! But I kind of wish it was just a Blades in the Dark hack.
The core system is D10 dice pools, but small pools -- likely 4 or 5 at a realistic max. Only players roll dice. You start with a D10, gain a D10 if you have the skill you're using, then further D10s for applicable high-quality equipment, help from others, and so on. There are nine Skills, one of which is just Fight, so combat and non-combat are rolled the same way. Results are basically success or failure (1-5 failure, 6-10 success) but with varying degrees of Stress taken.
Stress is the consequence mechanic for everything, and there are five different types of stress: Blood (physical), Mind (mental), Shadow (covertness), Silver (resources), Reputation (social standing). Whenever you take stress you mark boxes in the appropriate track, then roll 1D10 and if it's lower than your total marked stress, you suffer Fallout (and lower your current stress). Fallout is minor, major, or severe based on how much stress you have when you suffered fallout. Fallout are more specific consequences divided, again, into the five categories. Blood fallout are things like bleeding, knocked out, or dead. Reputation fallout is stuff like a vendetta, humiliation, or reviled. Fallout seems to be a mixture of narrative and mechanical consequences -- Lash Out forces you to lash out against the source of your stress, whereas Tired stops you from using the Fight, Pursue, or Sneak skills.
I like the stress mechanic as a blanket for just about everything bad that can happen to you and it mechanizes consequences in a way that I like, but the fallout is a little awkward in the extra roll that it adds to every result and then digging through a very specific list of consequences... I'm less fond of that. That said, it does push a lot of the burden off of the GM as, unlike in Blades in the Dark, they don't need to improvise nearly as many consequences for players -- they can just roll some stress, then if they suffer fallout there's probably something on the list that maps to whatever just happened.
Characters look straightforward (in the quickstart they're written across two pages) but the special abilities are and with a power level akin to PbtA-style moves (so, high). A character is made up of:
and that's it! Except for the special abilities, which are MANY AND VARIED. There are simple mechanical ones that give you bonus resistances, or Mastery (bonus dice) when rolling in certain contexts, or re-rolls, and then narrative ones that let you do things like "so long as there are people nearby and a place to have it, you can create an instant gathering with dancing, games, drinking, eating and chatting." The quick start lists eight special abilities per character, and I imagine that's reduced from the full list. You can also take abilities from other classes, and there are abilities locked under requirements that you have to satisfy in-game, so the customization looks many and varied.
The character stuff looks really solid. This feels like a game where you're going to start out effective (but in desperate circumstances) and then grow horizontally rather than vertically.
The rest of the quickstart is some setting info and a bunch of factions. The quick start adventure is not like a D&D adventure: it's a starting situation, some more factions and NPCs, and hooks into each of the quickstart PCs. There are no laid-out scenes. It's expected that the PCs approach, allies and enemies, and goals will be determined in play.
Overall, I'm happy with what I read and I'm sticking with my pledge. The system feels about as heavy as Blades in the Dark (which puts it above PbtA, but well below D&D) but with a little less smoothness and a little more cruft in exchange for less improvisational weight placed on the GM.
n
I Kirked a dude while my away-schlub engineer exploded a console on his buddy. Then we stabbed a bad guy back to life with a rock and narrowly avoided an incident with the Kardashians through a combination of science and speechifying.
In all seriousness, it works really well for the thing it's trying to model, and the flow is great. Threat/Momentum is a really neat mechanic that opens up a lot of indirect player interaction while building the ebb and flow rhythm of a Trek episode into every player action.
We've got another session on Saturday and I'm psyched.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Who did you speechify? Kourtney or Kim?
The console explosion took out Kim, and I Kirked Khloe.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Not having to worry about grid movement really makes life easier for map making too, definitely like that.
Star Trek Online plugged the stream that's going to happen tonight too, but it's 12:30a EDT and I can't really swing that, unfortunately. I'll try and remember to catch it tomorrow htough.