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Penny Arcade - Comic - Return of The Lip
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Return of The Lip
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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While I can see where you're coming from, the Gorillaz tend to have an overbite, if anything:
I think he's peeved that he spent months writing rules for his campaign only to have a system come out with all that work done right as he's finishing getting it all ready.
Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda, of all games really have killed two of my settings. Well, I mean I can still use them, it's just... weird now.
And while there are other PNP RPG systems... the D20 system (D&D) is one of the most straightforward and simplest to learn, sans expansions and obscura... doesn't surprise me that they would go with that. It's vanilla ice cream at a buffet with unlimited toppings... there's a certain point wherein you're just eating toppings and vanilla flavored milk. So you throw it out and make another bowl and do the same thing to it.
I played Pathfinder once and have just written up a character for a play-by-post that uses d&d 2nde (with Skills and Powers which is I guess an add-on?). I found both systems to be utterly, unnecessarily convoluted. The homebrew system I learned to game on is very simple.
Now, there's lots of different ways to build a system: Warhammer Fantasy RPG is quite different from ours and still pretty good. But I'm just surprised the king of RPGs is generally so hard to parse. Granted I have not tried the latest edition, but both 2e and Pathfinder seem to have so many die hard defenders and it just surprises me. Trying to grasp THAC0 from a game design standpoint left me wondering how it could have any defenders at all.
The more I get into board game culture, where people love *complex* games, but where games that are hard to learn to teach are considered worse for it...the harder it is for me to understand the tendency of rpg and Warhammer fans to wear imperceptible rules as a badge of honor.
Pathfinder isn't Wizards (D&D) though... 2nd edition DnD is as old or older than both of us certain is for me. IDK. Pathfinder was Paizo's callback to 3.5E, written primarily due to the restrictions and whatnot with the new 4E OGL (also lol, PDFs?) and sweeping mechanical changes of 4E, a lot of which were ditched with 5E. Still no PDfs though.
At its simplest, with 3.5/4/5E you have a skill and its modifiers and a target to beat... you roll your d20. That's pretty much it. No unders, none of that.
I think a D20 Sea of Thieves would be neat, but also not sure how the ganking and robbing your fellow players would work in a PNP setting. Though I guess players could choose not do that. But there's always one guy at the table...
I guess this ties into the discussion topic because people have said that D&D is the most prolific and the most adapted to other IPs because it is the easiest to pick up, and I just don't see that.
I think though I can’t play an old school system of anything honestly, I like the simplified systems too much. I found some old Palladium stuff and winced at how bad that system is and never had any real revisions in mechanics.
The complaint is just so weird because they haven't used THAC0 for about 20 years. It's understandable to think it's outdated and should be replaced, since it is and it was.
Not intended as a complaint. Like I said, the game I just joined uses 2e with THAC0 and all, and it's run by a DM who seems pretty committed to easy going gaming with a focus on story. I have nothing against D&D as a system and certainly can't complain or even comment on the current edition, since I've never played it. My confusion was about player perception: like I said, in my area I have had several players insist that 2e was the best, or that Pathfinder is the best because 3.5 was the best. I haven't really had anyone try to pitch the current system to me, and any comments about it are in reference to the older stuff being better. And I understand nostalgia or just wanting to keep using what you are used to. It's just that defense for archaic, impenetrable, and outdated systems that confuses me. But maybe this is irrelevant because maybe most people have moved on to newer, better systems outside my group of grumpy old men.
-Tycho Brahe
I literally cannot fathom how they have managed to survive, it must be entirely off the back of Traveller, a game which they merely own the license to and did not actually come up with themselves.
Mongoose are roughly speaking the least competent tabletop company I have ever known, and how they keep getting licences baffles me. I mean the industry in general, but Mongoose specifically.
Over the years Mongoose has managed to get and then lose through their own fumbling fingers the following properties: Babylon 5, Starship Troopers, Judge Dredd, Strontium Dog, ADB's Starfleet Battles (HOW!?) Fading Suns, Conan the Barbarian... and probably others I'm forgetting. How, how do they keep getting these licensing deals?
SERIOUSLY, THEIR SHOP PAGE FRONT HAS A PICTURE OF A MODEL THEY HAVEN'T SOLD IN ALMOST TEN YEARS ON IT, AND CAN'T SELL BECAUSE OF LEGAL COPYRIGHT.
How can they even afford all of these? It's like living next door to a cartoon sitcom character and wondering where on earth this bumbling bufoon is getting the money for helicopters with his own face on the front, or how he is keeping his family fed without seemingly doing any real work for the last three seasons.
Seriously these licences cost serious money, the Halo license broke Spartan games, well, the Halo license and their much documented ADHD where they could never focus on a single product line and had to keep making new ones every three months, but mostly the Halo license.
I've gotten offtrack. The point I am making is, if their writing is about the same as it has always been up to date, I wouldn't worry about it, odds are good your homebrew will be better.
Then they offered a preorder where the books would be heavily discounted if you paid up front for the whole series, including 4 new books that would be written by Dever. I bit.
They had increasingly bad problems over time, and book 2 has a different textual issue that makes no damn sense and breaks it than the original version. Partway through they failed badly enough to lose the license and offered everyone on the preorder a deal - either they'd pay you back what you gave them less the full retail price of the books received or give you the full amount you received as store credit.
...and that, dear friends is why I now have a small library of no out of print Mongoose products, including an entire edition of Paranoia.
And then Mongoose forgot to put that new unit in the book.
I'll have to disagree with you there. The D100 system used in the likes of Dark Heresy is the simplest and easiest to explain to newcomers. See that number on your character sheet? That's literally your the percent chance of success when you roll. Boom, we're done, we can play the game now.
There aren't any layers of weird bullshit where having a 17 in Strength for some reason is only equal to a strength bonus of +3, and don't get me started on trying to explain flat footed AC versus touch AC.
The d20 system is a gosh dang MESS. Hell, even Interlock (used in Cyberpunk 2020) is easier to explain and learn since it's literally "Add your skill + reliant stat + d10, compare to target DC".
And that weird poker system Deadlands Hell On Earth (and maybe just normal deadlands? I never played the original Old West setting ones, I prefer sci fi stuff) was way more intuitive after I read the rules on it, and you had to have like two decks of cards and three different kinds of poker chips to play that shit.
Ugh, don't get me started on Starfinder and the shambling, bloated monstrosity that Pathfinder has become.
Imagine LARPing as frenchmen when you could be an invading Viking in the entourage of Cnut the Great in 1016 conquering England.
To the wayback machine!
So, do your GMs tell you the number you have to roll for success before you decide whether you are going to attempt something?
Honestly curious. It seems like you're not just playing with a different game system, but an entirely different mindset than a lot of the people that enjoy D&D.
As far as I know, there is no flat-footed or touch mechanic in the current edition (5E) of D&D, and there wasn't a flat-footed mechanic in 4E either. The whole vanilla ice cream at a buffet thing is a reference to how the editions start off simple then get bloated and complex and just... hey, let's just make a new edition.
I searched for information on Dark Hersey and the first thing I got was a longform post about how convoluted it was, so... IDK. I imagine this is probably a discussion better served in a different thread?
Is their Sea of Thieves game actually using a d20 system or something else?
ediT: fixed quote
Post is in reply to Syzygy, but I quoted you, sorry.
Also, based off this photo it's not a D20 system:
Mongoose also has a 20 pack of d6 labelled for the game too (link)
Yeah, I think in his news post, Jerry likened it more to the storytelling custom dice style of the Star Wars RPG.