I don't like 13th Age, but I do like d20. But I don't like 3.X or Pathfinder. But I do like 4E. But I don't like 5E. But I like Alternity. But I never ran it properly or ever got the chance to play it.
I'm not sure I have the most reliable opinions on things.
I don't like 13th Age, but I do like d20. But I don't like 3.X or Pathfinder. But I do like 4E. But I don't like 5E. But I like Alternity. But I never ran it properly or ever got the chance to play it.
I'm not sure I have the most reliable opinions on things.
I don't like 13th Age, but I do like d20. But I don't like 3.X or Pathfinder. But I do like 4E. But I don't like 5E. But I like Alternity. But I never ran it properly or ever got the chance to play it.
I'm not sure I have the most reliable opinions on things.
I got to play some Alternity back in the day. I really wish I had an excuse/chance to play with it again. It was a neat twist on the d20 formula.
It's a bunch of dice for 160 bucks, in all the standard sizes, d4, d6...d20. Lots of metal dice, a full pound of acrylic dice (18 sets)... and 2 d60s.
What game uses d60s? What are they used for? I've tried googling it and come up with a reddit thread asking what you use a d60 is for, and this list of sixty things you can use a d60 for (currently only has 31 items).
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admanbunionize your workplaceSeattle, WARegistered Userregular
uh if you divide it by two it becomes a D30 for DCC?
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
the core mechanic of "roll a d20, add a modifier, try to hit a target number" is totally fine, if swingy - and some storytelling styles benefit from swinginess and there is no shortage of good games that use that mechanic
but "d20" as a rat's-nest of half-baked world-simulation mechanics that create perverse incentives ("according to table 7.3 of the Fuckmaster's Guide to the Realms, I can make more money as a beggar than as an adventurer, so I'm just going to roll to beg this session!") and endlessly proliferating character classes that intersect in story-destroying ways that only hardcore CharOppers enjoy leaves me utterly nonplussed, and "d20" as this Procrustean bed that every setting or story idea must to be stretched to fit is a plague
Sometimes I forget how cynical people in this community are towards d20 games.
I don't think that people are against d20. The problem is that d20 always has the same problems. The only d20 game (that I know of) that doesn't have these problems is 13th Age, which still has some of those problems.
Resourceless classes and resource classes. Fighter can fight everything, all day. Rogues can pick locks and find traps, all day. Rangers can plink arrows and collect bears, all day. Wizards/Clerics/Druids each can all fight, pick locks, find traps, plink at range, and summon bears a limited number of times per day. Often better than the other classes. But limited doesn't matter if the players can decide how many fights they get in per day. If they can decide to fight once per day, they nova all their spells, obliterate the encounter, and go to sleep. The impetus on the GM is now to make EVERY encounter time sensitive.
Math. One feat gives three health, another feat gives you five health and +1 to hit; a different feat doubles your damage output. One spell paralyzes on a Fort save, one paralyzes on a Will save; 97% of monsters have bad will saves. One class gets a bear, another class gets a bear, turns into a better bear seven times a day, and also can summon up to 36 additional bears each day.
Glut. 3.5's combat rules are about 20,000 words, while 5e's combat rules are about 7,000 words, and operate almost entirely the same. Rules for things like the price of an inn stay, and holdovers like overland travel fill the book with garbage. Feats and magic items that are completely uninteresting and would never be used are stuffed in there, wasting my time while I look for cool stuff.
Rigidity, or Why My Wife Doesn't Play D&D Anymore.
1: "Oh cool, can my elf fighter jump over the goblin?"
DM: "Yeah, roll an acrobatics check."
3: "Acrobatics doesn't let you do that in this edition."
DM: "Wait, they changed that?"
4: "Dude, I took six levels in rogue and fourteen feats to get to jump over people with acrobatics!"
DM: "For real tho, what the fuck can acrobatics do in this edition?"
3: "You can move through its space if you roll charismatutiongth plus three fifths of your level divided by the number of feats you have (not counting non-combat feats) against the monster's toughness modifier as an imaginary integer."
DM: "What the fuck is a toughness modifier? I homebrewed these goblins."
*Thirty minutes of shop talk later*
DM: "Alright, so you're rolling 42d10+7^3 against a DC of -πx (where x is equal to your base attack bonus, if you had seven levels of monk)."
1: *looks up from her phone* "Hm, what? Oh, I attack the troll or whatever."
There's a reason why there's a D&D thread, and an "everything else" thread. Everyone has played D&D, but eventually you get bored of miniature combat (the only thing d20 excels at), or you tire of the minutiae. We'd like d20 if it weren't for the fact that we've played d20 for (literally) decades, and it has never changed its old problems for new ones.
Are there any RPGs that purposely reward synergy or teamwork mechanically?
What I imagined was playing 4e where players have actions/powers but at the bottom of that power/action, in fine print, it says something like "If you use this after another character uses X, then something cool happens." Whether that's a related school of magic, or boosting healing, giving them advantage on the next attack, or doing more damage to an enemy.
I can think of some examples in 5e, but I didn't know if any RPGs had that hard-baked into it. Like...every ability could be paired with another ability to really make an impact in that game round, but the synergy is across classes instead of only within one. I know that starts rewarding system mastery, and I wouldn't want it if it led to "NO, USE THAT ABILITY BECAUSE I USED THIS ONE."
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
4E allows for a lot of mechanical synergy in combat between the different broad class types (striker, leader, etc). It's not specifically called out but it is the expected mode of play.
Lots of games with metacurrencies allow players to pass them between each other under certain conditions. Any die roll in FFG Star Wars can generate "advantage," which can be spent to help your own character (you recover some mental strain, take an extra move action, etc), to create generally favorable circumstances (the blast door shuts, stranding the stormtroopers on the other side), or passed along to another player. The new Star Trek Adventures has players generate "Momentum" by oversucceeding on rolls, and that Momentum is added to a group pool of points that are used to buy additional dice, or buy additional successes, additional damage in combat, etc.
I had a lot of fun in 4e games where people played characters that were, "objectively" not min-maxed like on the CharOp forums, but they were played and leveled up over time with the idea of working together as a team. So the fighter and the rogue had a bunch of abilities that they could use to do one-two kind of things, or to shore each other's weaknesses up, the magic users had debuffs that would stack, stuff like that.
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
That was one of the nice things about 4E. You could white-room a "best build" for a specific class but that best-build might be outperformed by one that you built specifically to work with your team.
Oh man. OH MAN. Just got back from playing Shadowrun Missions 08-06 at GenCon, aka the end of the Chicago storyline so it's going to be lethal as fuck. https://youtu.be/9jK-NcRmVcw
WE CRUSHED IT. Nobody died! The synergies and planning and teamwork was a beautiful thing to behold.
I am hype as hell right now.
Serious spoilers:
Getting to kill a insect-infested dragon, and basically severing the bug's connections to the leylines to keep Chicago from getting hammer-fucked with nukes will do that.
Hijacking a damaged and partially on-fire but otherwise intact tank to blast it with the tank's railgun and special dragon-killing payload in the middle of this massive battle was batshit insane, especially since we had to escape the tank before the other tank the dragon picked up and hurled our way impacted.
TECHNOS REPRESENT
PMAvers on
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I feel like the biggest issue with d20 games is that they are so focused on combat that everything else is forgotten. Like a social encounter is basically roll a d20+skill+modifiers and beat target of 10/15/20/25/30 depending on your tier. Meanwhile, combat has spells and fests and cool shit and it's super interesting. I'm on a Discord server that just added a tabletop channel and people are just getting together for 5e and the guy running the games is brand new. All he does, basically, is combat. Both his games where "You get quest from X, Combat 1, 2, let big bad speak, Combat 3". He doesn't know better because he sees nothing but combat in the books and sheets. The groups are having fun so I won't ruin that but that's an issue that no d20 game I've seen has tried to address. Not even my precious 13th Age and I love that game.
but "d20" as a rat's-nest of half-baked world-simulation mechanics that create perverse incentives ("according to table 7.3 of the Fuckmaster's Guide to the Realms,
Oh man. OH MAN. Just got back from playing Shadowrun Missions 08-06 at GenCon, aka the end of the Chicago storyline so it's going to be lethal as fuck. https://youtu.be/9jK-NcRmVcw
WE CRUSHED IT. Nobody died! The synergies and planning and teamwork was a beautiful thing to behold.
I am hype as hell right now.
Serious spoilers:
Getting to kill a insect-infested dragon, and basically severing the bug's connections to the leylines to keep Chicago from getting hammer-fucked with nukes will do that.
Hijacking a damaged and partially on-fire but otherwise intank to blast it with the tank's railgun and special dragon-killing payload in the middle of this massive battle was batshit insane, especially since we had to escape the tank before the other tank the dragon picked up and hurled our way impacted.
TECHNOS REPRESENT
We just did that run, too! It was so epic, but nearly everyone died.
deal with that fucker Dr. Tate. We ended up getting a trace on his location when he made his offer to walk away and fed the info to Simon, who "took care of it."
I wish I could remember the exact string of emojis he replied with, since it involves a dragon cracking his knuckles, flexing and a rocket firing at a airplane.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I feel like the biggest issue with d20 games is that they are so focused on combat that everything else is forgotten. Like a social encounter is basically roll a d20+skill+modifiers and beat target of 10/15/20/25/30 depending on your tier. Meanwhile, combat has spells and fests and cool shit and it's super interesting. I'm on a Discord server that just added a tabletop channel and people are just getting together for 5e and the guy running the games is brand new. All he does, basically, is combat. Both his games where "You get quest from X, Combat 1, 2, let big bad speak, Combat 3". He doesn't know better because he sees nothing but combat in the books and sheets. The groups are having fun so I won't ruin that but that's an issue that no d20 game I've seen has tried to address. Not even my precious 13th Age and I love that game.
I wish I could find a group to play something live in a chat, or what have you. Barring any schedule conflicts, I would be hard pressed to turn down any game with any system.
There are one or two obvious exceptions to that...
JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited August 2017
Try asking around! In my experience there are a ton of people on PA who want to roleplay. If you can't find anyone, organize a game yourself. People will crawl out of the woodwork to get in on it.
I feel like the biggest issue with d20 games is that they are so focused on combat that everything else is forgotten. Like a social encounter is basically roll a d20+skill+modifiers and beat target of 10/15/20/25/30 depending on your tier. Meanwhile, combat has spells and fests and cool shit and it's super interesting.
I agree with this, except for the "combat is super interesting" part. Combat is super boring. If I wanted to do tabletop miniature wargaming I'd just play Frostgrave or 40k or somesuch (and I do). I play RPGs for the RP part. (This is why I always play spell-casters; at least some of their abilities have out-of-combat applications.)
Is there a good role-playing game that actually focuses on the non-combat stuff at least as much as the combat stuff?
[Expletive deleted] on
Sic transit gloria mundi.
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I feel like the biggest issue with d20 games is that they are so focused on combat that everything else is forgotten. Like a social encounter is basically roll a d20+skill+modifiers and beat target of 10/15/20/25/30 depending on your tier. Meanwhile, combat has spells and fests and cool shit and it's super interesting.
I agree with this, except for the "combat is super interesting" part. Combat is super boring. If I wanted to do tabletop miniature wargaming I'd just play Frostgrave or 40k or somesuch (and I do). I play RPGs for the RP part. (This is why I always play spell-casters; at least some of their abilities have out-of-combat applications.)
Is there a good role-playing game that actually focuses on the non-combat stuff at least as much as the combat stuff?
Like...lots of them.
Call of Cthulhu is one of the oldest roleplaying games ever and it's much more about researching horrible menaces from dusty tomes in the library than about fighting. In fact, your best solution when confronted with a hideous beast is usually just to run away. You're not going up against a Shoggoth.
Pretty much all of the World of Darkness and New World of Darkness games (Vampire, Mage, Changeling, Demon, Geist, etc etc) prioritize socialization, politicking, and mystery-solving at least as much, and often considerably more, than fighting. Werewolf and Hunter are the two sort-of exceptions because Werewolves are explicity violent and tribal and Hunter is a game about humans hunting monsters, although often that means outwitting or banishing them rather than going toe-to-toe with them. Combat, when it happens, is intended to be sudden, brutal, and lethal; it gives players a lot of incentive to pursue other avenues of problem-solving (by sneaking past enemies, or tricking them, or etc etc). Most sessions of my Mage campaign revolved around the players talking to each other and to NPCs. There were entire sessions about just going to a party and getting high/laid, or arguing in court, or whatever.
The GUMSHOE system prioritizes mystery-solving and investigation over combat, and when combat does happen it's very fast and abstract, not a bunch of grid-counting. There are various GUMSHOE games to fit lots of desired flavors - Night's Black Agents is an excellent game about gritty, realistic modern-day spies going up against a conspiracy of vampires...as a player, your mastery of tradecraft is going to have a much bigger effect on your success than your knowledge of how to optimize ice weapons against cyclopses. Mutant City Blues is about police investigating murders in a world full of superheroes, where a homicide might have been committed by an ant-sized man giving someone a coronary, or by heat vision from the sky. Bubblegumshoe is about teen detectives solving mysteries in high school, like Brick or Veronica Mars.
Leverage is all about a team of expert con men, safecrackers, etc getting together to pull heists. Punching dudes may sometimes be a part of that but it's never the centerpiece, and it's handled narratively rather than tactically. Narratively means it's like "Dave fights the guards" *roll* "Dave wins," not "I take three steps forward and two steps to the left then activate my Fuckinator as a minor action so I get +3/+2/+1 on my turbo attack chain, and then...."
Apocalypse World and the various games inspired by its system ("Powered by the Apocalypse") also often prioritize other things above combat, and when combat does happen it's almost always handled narratively (there are a couple of exceptions, like Dungeon World, where you can use rudimentary tactics). Saga of the Icelanders is about everyday life as one of the Norse people who colonized Iceland in the 800s - you hunt, you fish, you try to help your village survive. Masks: A New Generation puts you in the role of teenage superheroes, like Young Justice or the original X-Men; your powers are influenced by your ongoing relationships and the web of teenage drama around you, so maybe your fire dude gets an extra-powerful fire blast because he just saw his girlfriend Rocket Girl making out with Tree Dude and that anger has to go somewhere. Spirit of 77 is a game about playing Shaft, or Foxy Brown, or Burt Reynolds in Cannonball Run. You have adventures and get into conflict but it's, again, not D&D-style "tactical" combat - it's car chases and speedboat chases and motorcycle chases and disco dance-offs to save the community center from being bulldozed by The Man.
Golden Sky Stories is a Japanese tabletop RPG where you play helpful spirit animals that get involved with the lives of ordinary people in a small Japanese town and try to help them with their ordinary problems. There is no violence at all.
Star Trek Adventures is a brand-new game for recreating the experience of the various Trek TV shows in a fast-paced, narrative fashion. It can do naval combat and phaser battles but it has just as much support for nonviolent stories of exploration, diplomacy, science mysteries, and problem-solving, and the focus is on moral quandaries that illustrate your character and develop their personality over time. Like, the chapter on social conflict comes before the chapter on combat.
Fate has a conflict system that does just as well for social stuff as physical combat. As do most of the variations on Cortex. L5R has deep social conflict stuff (and a dozen associated skills). PbtA stuff like Monster Hearts and Urban Shadows is specifically designed to drag you into social/political conflicts and resolve them in interesting ways. Burning Wheel has a whole secondary combat system for debates and social confrontation.
There are a ton of indy period Court drama simulators out there that also focus on social stuff to a large degree.
I think part of the problem is combat is just much easier to understand from both a player and a GM perspective. Anytime can go "I shoot the bad guy". Social, and investigation to a smaller extent, is harder to role play so new players and GMs struggle with it. This is where having good examples and experiences can help. I also think things are getting better. There are a number of fantastic actual play podcasts out there now with good examples of all aspects of RP.
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MrVyngaardLive From New EtoileStraight Outta SosariaRegistered Userregular
edited August 2017
I'll also point out that specifically in Vampire: The Masquerade combat is to be avoided because your character has the theoretical potential to live forever if you're careful. Therefore social skills and political influence can be a very big thing in that game! It's not Call of Cthulhu but that kind of underhanded intelligent footwork pays off big time, instead of having Highlander-esque battles with swords on rooftops at dawn in concealing motorcycle gear. Who needs to be Blade when you can get their haven bulldozed by a misplaced urban renewal project at high noon?
MrVyngaard on
"now I've got this mental image of caucuses as cafeteria tables in prison, and new congressmen having to beat someone up on inauguration day." - Raiden333
I'll also point out that specifically in Vampire: The Masquerade combat is to be avoided because your character has the theoretical potential to live forever if you're careful. Therefore social skills and political influence can be a very big thing in that game! It's not Call of Cthulhu but that kind of underhanded intelligent footwork pays off big time, instead of having Highlander-esque battles with swords on rooftops at dawn in concealing motorcycle gear. Who needs to be Blade when you can get their haven bulldozed by a misplaced urban renewal project at high noon?
Of course, games that don't have a combat focus aren't for everyone.
There's something satisfying about the directness and finality of combat in something like D&D that just doesn't translate well into the social, investigative or political arenas. Granted, each of those has things that combat can't do very well, too. And different people are looking for different kinds of experiences at the table.
I think combat has stuck around as a focus in RPG's mostly because it's a situation where:
Every player is involved to some degree
The stakes are usually really obvious and dramatic
Players usually intuitively understand what a system wants them to do in combat (because they know how cool sword fights/gun fights are supposed to work)
Basically it's a place where every player can be active and creative once the GM's established the situation.
EDIT: Also what sort of system is Spellbound kingdoms bc it's making a lot of grand promises on it's store page.
Thanks for the input, guys. (Especially Jacobkosh; I did like the sound of several of those).
I think my GM wants to do some sort of high fantasy campaign next, but we're in agreement that focus should be on non-combat stuff.
Anything stand-out in the non-combat fantasy genre?
Fellowship. I haven't played it, but I see it pop up constantly.
Essentially, the DM is NotSauron, and each player is representative of their respective races. The elf, dwarf, human, halfling, etc. The kicker here is that each player has pretty much carte blanche to how their race's civilization works.
Combat requires the most rulings, so establishing rules set for it makes a lot of sense.
Many people don't ever bother to use the social rules because there's little reason to roll for something when you can just say it and the GM decide whether it's good enough or not.
Thanks for the input, guys. (Especially Jacobkosh; I did like the sound of several of those).
I think my GM wants to do some sort of high fantasy campaign next, but we're in agreement that focus should be on non-combat stuff.
Anything stand-out in the non-combat fantasy genre?
Fellowship. I haven't played it, but I see it pop up constantly.
Essentially, the DM is NotSauron, and each player is representative of their respective races. The elf, dwarf, human, halfling, etc. The kicker here is that each player has pretty much carte blanche to how their race's civilization works.
In that same area, wasn't The One Ring supposed to be pretty good? I've never played it myself but I recall hearing good things about it.
Posts
I'm not sure I have the most reliable opinions on things.
Very strange.
Penny Arcade Rockstar Social Club / This is why I despise cyclists
Or are computer games like it?
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
I got to play some Alternity back in the day. I really wish I had an excuse/chance to play with it again. It was a neat twist on the d20 formula.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Lately, I've been seeing the Demi-God dice bundle pop up in facebook ads.
https://www.skullsplitterdice.com/products/demi-god-bundle?variant=32636317263
It's a bunch of dice for 160 bucks, in all the standard sizes, d4, d6...d20. Lots of metal dice, a full pound of acrylic dice (18 sets)... and 2 d60s.
What game uses d60s? What are they used for? I've tried googling it and come up with a reddit thread asking what you use a d60 is for, and this list of sixty things you can use a d60 for (currently only has 31 items).
but "d20" as a rat's-nest of half-baked world-simulation mechanics that create perverse incentives ("according to table 7.3 of the Fuckmaster's Guide to the Realms, I can make more money as a beggar than as an adventurer, so I'm just going to roll to beg this session!") and endlessly proliferating character classes that intersect in story-destroying ways that only hardcore CharOppers enjoy leaves me utterly nonplussed, and "d20" as this Procrustean bed that every setting or story idea must to be stretched to fit is a plague
I don't think that people are against d20. The problem is that d20 always has the same problems. The only d20 game (that I know of) that doesn't have these problems is 13th Age, which still has some of those problems.
Resourceless classes and resource classes. Fighter can fight everything, all day. Rogues can pick locks and find traps, all day. Rangers can plink arrows and collect bears, all day. Wizards/Clerics/Druids each can all fight, pick locks, find traps, plink at range, and summon bears a limited number of times per day. Often better than the other classes. But limited doesn't matter if the players can decide how many fights they get in per day. If they can decide to fight once per day, they nova all their spells, obliterate the encounter, and go to sleep. The impetus on the GM is now to make EVERY encounter time sensitive.
Math. One feat gives three health, another feat gives you five health and +1 to hit; a different feat doubles your damage output. One spell paralyzes on a Fort save, one paralyzes on a Will save; 97% of monsters have bad will saves. One class gets a bear, another class gets a bear, turns into a better bear seven times a day, and also can summon up to 36 additional bears each day.
Glut. 3.5's combat rules are about 20,000 words, while 5e's combat rules are about 7,000 words, and operate almost entirely the same. Rules for things like the price of an inn stay, and holdovers like overland travel fill the book with garbage. Feats and magic items that are completely uninteresting and would never be used are stuffed in there, wasting my time while I look for cool stuff.
Rigidity, or Why My Wife Doesn't Play D&D Anymore.
1: "Oh cool, can my elf fighter jump over the goblin?"
DM: "Yeah, roll an acrobatics check."
3: "Acrobatics doesn't let you do that in this edition."
DM: "Wait, they changed that?"
4: "Dude, I took six levels in rogue and fourteen feats to get to jump over people with acrobatics!"
DM: "For real tho, what the fuck can acrobatics do in this edition?"
3: "You can move through its space if you roll charismatutiongth plus three fifths of your level divided by the number of feats you have (not counting non-combat feats) against the monster's toughness modifier as an imaginary integer."
DM: "What the fuck is a toughness modifier? I homebrewed these goblins."
*Thirty minutes of shop talk later*
DM: "Alright, so you're rolling 42d10+7^3 against a DC of -πx (where x is equal to your base attack bonus, if you had seven levels of monk)."
1: *looks up from her phone* "Hm, what? Oh, I attack the troll or whatever."
There's a reason why there's a D&D thread, and an "everything else" thread. Everyone has played D&D, but eventually you get bored of miniature combat (the only thing d20 excels at), or you tire of the minutiae. We'd like d20 if it weren't for the fact that we've played d20 for (literally) decades, and it has never changed its old problems for new ones.
What I imagined was playing 4e where players have actions/powers but at the bottom of that power/action, in fine print, it says something like "If you use this after another character uses X, then something cool happens." Whether that's a related school of magic, or boosting healing, giving them advantage on the next attack, or doing more damage to an enemy.
I can think of some examples in 5e, but I didn't know if any RPGs had that hard-baked into it. Like...every ability could be paired with another ability to really make an impact in that game round, but the synergy is across classes instead of only within one. I know that starts rewarding system mastery, and I wouldn't want it if it led to "NO, USE THAT ABILITY BECAUSE I USED THIS ONE."
Lots of games with metacurrencies allow players to pass them between each other under certain conditions. Any die roll in FFG Star Wars can generate "advantage," which can be spent to help your own character (you recover some mental strain, take an extra move action, etc), to create generally favorable circumstances (the blast door shuts, stranding the stormtroopers on the other side), or passed along to another player. The new Star Trek Adventures has players generate "Momentum" by oversucceeding on rolls, and that Momentum is added to a group pool of points that are used to buy additional dice, or buy additional successes, additional damage in combat, etc.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
WE CRUSHED IT. Nobody died! The synergies and planning and teamwork was a beautiful thing to behold.
I am hype as hell right now.
Hijacking a damaged and partially on-fire but otherwise intact tank to blast it with the tank's railgun and special dragon-killing payload in the middle of this massive battle was batshit insane, especially since we had to escape the tank before the other tank the dragon picked up and hurled our way impacted.
TECHNOS REPRESENT
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I have that pdf
08-06
I wish I could remember the exact string of emojis he replied with, since it involves a dragon cracking his knuckles, flexing and a rocket firing at a airplane.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
I wish I could find a group to play something live in a chat, or what have you. Barring any schedule conflicts, I would be hard pressed to turn down any game with any system.
There are one or two obvious exceptions to that...
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
I agree with this, except for the "combat is super interesting" part. Combat is super boring. If I wanted to do tabletop miniature wargaming I'd just play Frostgrave or 40k or somesuch (and I do). I play RPGs for the RP part. (This is why I always play spell-casters; at least some of their abilities have out-of-combat applications.)
Is there a good role-playing game that actually focuses on the non-combat stuff at least as much as the combat stuff?
Like...lots of them.
Call of Cthulhu is one of the oldest roleplaying games ever and it's much more about researching horrible menaces from dusty tomes in the library than about fighting. In fact, your best solution when confronted with a hideous beast is usually just to run away. You're not going up against a Shoggoth.
Pretty much all of the World of Darkness and New World of Darkness games (Vampire, Mage, Changeling, Demon, Geist, etc etc) prioritize socialization, politicking, and mystery-solving at least as much, and often considerably more, than fighting. Werewolf and Hunter are the two sort-of exceptions because Werewolves are explicity violent and tribal and Hunter is a game about humans hunting monsters, although often that means outwitting or banishing them rather than going toe-to-toe with them. Combat, when it happens, is intended to be sudden, brutal, and lethal; it gives players a lot of incentive to pursue other avenues of problem-solving (by sneaking past enemies, or tricking them, or etc etc). Most sessions of my Mage campaign revolved around the players talking to each other and to NPCs. There were entire sessions about just going to a party and getting high/laid, or arguing in court, or whatever.
The GUMSHOE system prioritizes mystery-solving and investigation over combat, and when combat does happen it's very fast and abstract, not a bunch of grid-counting. There are various GUMSHOE games to fit lots of desired flavors - Night's Black Agents is an excellent game about gritty, realistic modern-day spies going up against a conspiracy of vampires...as a player, your mastery of tradecraft is going to have a much bigger effect on your success than your knowledge of how to optimize ice weapons against cyclopses. Mutant City Blues is about police investigating murders in a world full of superheroes, where a homicide might have been committed by an ant-sized man giving someone a coronary, or by heat vision from the sky. Bubblegumshoe is about teen detectives solving mysteries in high school, like Brick or Veronica Mars.
Leverage is all about a team of expert con men, safecrackers, etc getting together to pull heists. Punching dudes may sometimes be a part of that but it's never the centerpiece, and it's handled narratively rather than tactically. Narratively means it's like "Dave fights the guards" *roll* "Dave wins," not "I take three steps forward and two steps to the left then activate my Fuckinator as a minor action so I get +3/+2/+1 on my turbo attack chain, and then...."
Apocalypse World and the various games inspired by its system ("Powered by the Apocalypse") also often prioritize other things above combat, and when combat does happen it's almost always handled narratively (there are a couple of exceptions, like Dungeon World, where you can use rudimentary tactics). Saga of the Icelanders is about everyday life as one of the Norse people who colonized Iceland in the 800s - you hunt, you fish, you try to help your village survive. Masks: A New Generation puts you in the role of teenage superheroes, like Young Justice or the original X-Men; your powers are influenced by your ongoing relationships and the web of teenage drama around you, so maybe your fire dude gets an extra-powerful fire blast because he just saw his girlfriend Rocket Girl making out with Tree Dude and that anger has to go somewhere. Spirit of 77 is a game about playing Shaft, or Foxy Brown, or Burt Reynolds in Cannonball Run. You have adventures and get into conflict but it's, again, not D&D-style "tactical" combat - it's car chases and speedboat chases and motorcycle chases and disco dance-offs to save the community center from being bulldozed by The Man.
Golden Sky Stories is a Japanese tabletop RPG where you play helpful spirit animals that get involved with the lives of ordinary people in a small Japanese town and try to help them with their ordinary problems. There is no violence at all.
Star Trek Adventures is a brand-new game for recreating the experience of the various Trek TV shows in a fast-paced, narrative fashion. It can do naval combat and phaser battles but it has just as much support for nonviolent stories of exploration, diplomacy, science mysteries, and problem-solving, and the focus is on moral quandaries that illustrate your character and develop their personality over time. Like, the chapter on social conflict comes before the chapter on combat.
No, wait, I might be bad at this.
I made a game, it has penguins in it. It's pay what you like on Gumroad.
Currently Ebaying Nothing at all but I might do in the future.
There are a ton of indy period Court drama simulators out there that also focus on social stuff to a large degree.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Of course, games that don't have a combat focus aren't for everyone.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Basically it's a place where every player can be active and creative once the GM's established the situation.
EDIT: Also what sort of system is Spellbound kingdoms bc it's making a lot of grand promises on it's store page.
I think my GM wants to do some sort of high fantasy campaign next, but we're in agreement that focus should be on non-combat stuff.
Anything stand-out in the non-combat fantasy genre?
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Fellowship. I haven't played it, but I see it pop up constantly.
Essentially, the DM is NotSauron, and each player is representative of their respective races. The elf, dwarf, human, halfling, etc. The kicker here is that each player has pretty much carte blanche to how their race's civilization works.
Many people don't ever bother to use the social rules because there's little reason to roll for something when you can just say it and the GM decide whether it's good enough or not.
In that same area, wasn't The One Ring supposed to be pretty good? I've never played it myself but I recall hearing good things about it.