Even though I've not played 40k since high school, I've tried to keep up with the lore for years and now I'm sad to know his touch on it is gone forever...
I met him a few times. Lovely man, very courteous and friendly, hugely enthusiastic about his work and hobbies. Huge loss
Even though I've not played 40k since high school, I've tried to keep up with the lore for years and now I'm sad to know his touch on it is gone forever...
I met him a few times. Lovely man, very courteous and friendly, hugely enthusiastic about his work and hobbies. Huge loss
So, I picked up Torment: Tides of Numenera cheap and god help me I've been enjoying it.
It actually has me thinking about maybe paying actual money for a Monte Cook table top product. Stop me, thread. I beg of you.
If I remember right, Numenara is the game that actually encourages the GM to lie to the players to trick them into spending their resources when they don't need to.
It's also a game that has like 10 different skills for the "thinker" characters but like one or maybe two skills for the physical characters? I think?
So, I picked up Torment: Tides of Numenera cheap and god help me I've been enjoying it.
It actually has me thinking about maybe paying actual money for a Monte Cook table top product. Stop me, thread. I beg of you.
If I remember right, Numenara is the game that actually encourages the GM to lie to the players to trick them into spending their resources when they don't need to.
It's also a game that has like 10 different skills for the "thinker" characters but like one or maybe two skills for the physical characters? I think?
Actually, I'm pretty sure that skill ratio is backwards. In the videogame, they seem to have filed off most of the "adventuring" skills into a more managable pile.
Anyone ever bought some TTRPG stuff from CoolStuffInc?
I ordered about 300$ of 13th age stuff about five weeks ago and was told via email that my order was shipped on april 28. I wrote back yesterday since I haven't received anything yet.
"Thanks for shopping with us. We're sorry for the mix up. It seems your order may have been shipped with another customers order. At this time we can offer you a refund and/or replacement of your order, but at this time a few of your items are currently out of stock. Let us know what you'd like us to do."
I bought this stuff specifically because it was on sale and stocks are running out. 13th age is pretty much impossible to find here in print form. What I'm thinking is they never actually had that stuff in inventory for the price they advertised. Guess I'll take the refund and never buy anything from them again.
Uhm....what?
Assume they didn't have it in stock and lay out how their ideal scenario goes. Do you really think their nefarious plan was to hope you'd never notice that your stuff didn't arrive?
Obviously do what you'd like but it seems to me a more reasonable response would be asking how long it would take them to fulfill the order they accepted and see how they respond to that.
The stuff I bought was a ridiculously low price compared to what I could find everywhere else. I just find it more likely that the online store was wrong and they charged me for inventory they didn't have than they misplaced an international order of 8 books. It's about as nefarious as I'd go. This isn't the first time something like that happens to me with online retailers but maybe I'm wrong or unlucky! It's the first time I buy something from them and they never sent me a tracking number and I found the emails they sent me kind of sketchy looking?
I'm glad to hear they give good service usually, this is the kind of information I was looking for actually. I'll see if they can actually fulfill the order, not in a hurry to get the books.
I've skimmed and have started a more detailed read of Veins of the Earth, which is like a game neutral guide to the underdark (I mean, its actually written for LotFP, but the numbers are like the least important part). It's dope, and I kinda just want to gush a little bit.
Its an underdark which is actually terrifying, and not just like, fantasy scary, if that makes sense?
When I read the Dark Elf trilogy as a teenager, it was not scary. It was a different place, and evil, but not frightening. And when myself and my friends would bring up or adventure in the underdark in D&D, it was the same. It is a dangerous and overly hostile place, but it didn't ever go beyond that. Which is fine and I don't think Wizards was ever trying to actually go beyond what they did, but I like the contrast.
The Veins are horrible. They are an impossibly old and vast and filled with obscene darkness, overwhelming hunger and confusion/ madness. You want to get out as soon as you can. That is until you've been down there for so long, what even are you at this point?
You are on your belly, wriggling like a snake through a passage too short to even crawl through, and your friend Jeremy in front of you is desperately trying to kill who-knows-what-the-fuck, and you want to back up but there are more people behind you. And you can't stop thinking about what you had to eat last night, how Jeremy seemed to like it, and maybe you did too? Its all fucked.
Hes got lots of rules that are specifically useful for cave travel. Such as an efficient yet abstract way to make 3D cave and vein generation, information on food and maintaining light sources, and what to do with a party that lost all ways to make light (its not great for them). He smartly has smells and sounds descriptors for all of his critters (which are all very non-standard and crazy scary).
My favorite table is the Effects, which are changes to your character, and which happen when the GM decides you've overcome some strange milestone. Such as
Forced to choose between using something as light or using it as food.
The author does a great job of being descriptive in a way I don't really see in RPG writing. Like, it would not be uncommon or unreasonable to just write: You can detect when someone is lying, or You feel a compulsion to collect bones. Patrick instead writes
48-49: You can taste lies on someone's breath as they speak. You must be within kissing distance.
81: Bone collector. Every enemy you kill has one bone waiting for you, take it and wrap it carefully.
Anyone ever bought some TTRPG stuff from CoolStuffInc?
I ordered about 300$ of 13th age stuff about five weeks ago and was told via email that my order was shipped on april 28. I wrote back yesterday since I haven't received anything yet.
"Thanks for shopping with us. We're sorry for the mix up. It seems your order may have been shipped with another customers order. At this time we can offer you a refund and/or replacement of your order, but at this time a few of your items are currently out of stock. Let us know what you'd like us to do."
I bought this stuff specifically because it was on sale and stocks are running out. 13th age is pretty much impossible to find here in print form. What I'm thinking is they never actually had that stuff in inventory for the price they advertised. Guess I'll take the refund and never buy anything from them again.
Uhm....what?
Assume they didn't have it in stock and lay out how their ideal scenario goes. Do you really think their nefarious plan was to hope you'd never notice that your stuff didn't arrive?
Obviously do what you'd like but it seems to me a more reasonable response would be asking how long it would take them to fulfill the order they accepted and see how they respond to that.
The stuff I bought was a ridiculously low price compared to what I could find everywhere else. I just find it more likely that the online store was wrong and they charged me for inventory they didn't have than they misplaced an international order of 8 books. It's about as nefarious as I'd go. This isn't the first time something like that happens to me with online retailers but maybe I'm wrong or unlucky! It's the first time I buy something from them and they never sent me a tracking number and I found the emails they sent me kind of sketchy looking?
I'm glad to hear they give good service usually, this is the kind of information I was looking for actually. I'll see if they can actually fulfill the order, not in a hurry to get the books.
I just don't see how the scenario you posit ever works out in their favor. Like, sitting on the float from your money for like a month does not seem like a "win". Not when it causes folks to complain about them on the internet and possibly do a charge back or otherwise cause problems. I'd also note two things that might not be obvious to you: An international order makes it more likely they fucked up the address as US folks tend to be completely worthless in handling non-US addresses and second that a US company that sends an unsolicited shipment to somebody is usually trained to just write that product off. In the US, somebody ships you something you didn't order it is legally a gift. While it's ethical to send it back you're under no legal obligation to do so.
To be clear, I haven't ordered from them but have heard from a couple friends that have, repeatedly, and not had issues. This sounds like a standard small business screw up. I try not to judge folks on the screw up itself, those happen to everybody, but how they handle the recovery from the screw up.
I also don't remember seeing any of the 13th Age books going permanently OOP though obviously local supplies are gonna vary.
Even though I've not played 40k since high school, I've tried to keep up with the lore for years and now I'm sad to know his touch on it is gone forever...
I met him a few times. Lovely man, very courteous and friendly, hugely enthusiastic about his work and hobbies. Huge loss
Man, I would have loved to have done that.
Benefits of living an hour's drive from Warhammer World, and knowing loads of people who have worked in GW, or still do.
For all the bad rep the company gets, or got (seem to be doing better these days) I've met many of their head office writing, hobby and so on staff and they're all great, passionate people without exception. The workplace culture there produces people who are friendly, open and always keen to discuss the game. Despite that Alan was notably a top bloke, he really had his reputation of being a lovely, friendly guy for a reason. A number of my friends who knew him well are very upset of course, and I am too even though I only met him on occasion. The Horus Heresy series was his baby and he dedicated a huge amount of time and effort to it.
Aaron-Demski Bowden wrote a post on his blog where he says things that I think a lot of people will be thinking right now
My friend Alan died tonight.
Better posts than mine will come. They’ll be more detailed, more insightful, and with the benefit of time to take a finer form. I had to get this down, get it from skull to fingertips to screen, in the brief but merciful expanse of numbness between emotional poles. Right after I heard the news I went to speak with the others that had known about his illness for a while, only to find I had an hour of missed messages from them trying to contact me, to tell me he’d died.
I’d known for a while that he was sick, and then a few of us learned recently, privately, that he was much, much sicker than we’d all thought. The words “weeks to months left” were given out, and I clung to those words the way my five-year-old son Shakes clings to all of my “In five minutes, buddy…” delaying tactics. I held them to the same sacred standard of absolution, when really they’re expressions of timeless vagueness.
Ultimately, it leaned heavily on the side of Days and Weeks, not so much in the Months corner.
Alan was one of my closest friends. He was much smarter than me, without ever making me feel shitty about it. He drank more tea than any other human being I’ve ever met. He often read my work before it hit print, suggesting X, saying he liked Y. He smuggled me out WIPs of his own. I first read the text for two Space Marine Legions in Microsoft Word, f’rex, with Alan’s typos still baked into the text. He sent the kids book vouchers at Christmas. Our various channels of communication were filled with 40K lore talk more than anything else, which is practically a given if you’re a good friend of mine, though there was a significant amount of him telling me to stop putting it off every year and write some non-40K stuff, and there was a roughly equal amount of lamenting and laughing about life’s ups, downs, zigs, and zags. Nothing unexpected. Nothing unusual.
When I was at my most furious and least reasonable with the tick-tocking madness of Games Workshop behind the scenes (during the Dark Times a few years ago), it was almost always Alan that would calm me down. That was Alan in a nutshell. Insert vexation; receive wisdom.
He’d say things like “This too shall pass”. He said that one often enough that those who knew him would quote it in doing impressions of him. Alan always said it with the knowing smile of a man that knew. And he was always right. They always did.
As Alan was dying in England, I was here in N. Ireland, inking an Ophidian Archway. Given how often he teased me for not painting enough, I suspect that would’ve amused him immensely. As glad as I am at the cold comfort of coincidence, I would much rather have been at his side.
My flight to see him was tomorrow morning. We’d heard from the ward nurse that he wasn’t up to visitors this weekend, so earlier this afternoon I’d changed my flight to next weekend instead. All useless, all pointless. He died tonight.
I had so, so much left to say to him. There was no doubt a bajillion things he still had left to say to me over the course of X years, but even without that much time left, I was ready with a host of what I wanted to say to him. He was weak and drained, and frankly I was braced for him to just lie there in his bed and look despairingly at me, hoping I’d shut up, while I talked and talked and cried and talked.
Everything I wanted to say is meaningless now. I can tell him none of it. It will evaporate over time, occasionally forming chunks of conversations that I have with his other close friends, occasionally surfacing as regret wreckage in the oceans of 2am melancholy that seem intrinsic to the human condition.
Earlier this week, Shakes caught me crying. He looked awkward, worried I was upset because he’d done something wrong. When I told him the reason, he said “Your friend might not die if they find a way to make him better.”
I hugged him hard, too hard, and sent him back outside into the sunshine. In my office, the pressure of emotion inside my skull was beyond crying. I had to shout into my cupped hands just to discharge it, just to get it out of my head.
I’ve done that more than once this week. My head space was a compass. North was an inability to think about it at all; it was too much, too impossible, too much, too much, so for those hours I was perfectly fine since it wasn’t happening. South was a practical and cold look at the truth: He was going to die, so what needed to be done, what times were flights, what needed to be said before there wasn’t a chance to say any more? What would the 40K fandom say? What would Horus Heresy meetings be like (and the email sessions afterwards) without Alan? East was mostly trying and failing to look at it critically, to imagine what other people in the know were thinking and feeling. I’ve wasted a lot of hours this week being unable to see anything from anyone else’s point of view. West was a place of pathetic but earnest, tear-streaked hope – it was Googling “Terminal cancer survival percentages” and screaming into my hands so the poison wasn’t behind my eyes any more.
Now my friend is dead. My life is poorer for it, but immeasurably richer for what he brought to it. From the confidence and wisdom he gave me, to the fucking way he’d say “The perfidious Elllldaaaaaarrrr” which has stuck in my head for years now, unable to be shaken.
I once brought my fear to him that I wasn’t a worthy successor to Andy Chambers and co.; that the Codex Imperialis of 2nd Edition 40K was never going to be surpassed, but that I wanted to at least equal it. I thought his Badab War books for Forge World were on the same level as the old greats. I meant that, wholeheartedly. He could see that I meant it.
He looked me dead in the eyes and said “You worry about the strangest things.” He then gave me a look, the look he always gave me when I was charging up some ill-advised path but there was time yet for a Blighian scowl to make me rethink things. I sipped my gross tea and realised why he – an avid tea-drinker, hadn’t got any here himself. He’d known it was gross.
I miss him dearly already, with the insane selfishness of being caged by my own feelings.
I bought a lot of stuff through coolstuffinc until a year or so ago when I moved somewhere with local shops. I never once got jerked around, and on a couple of occasions got extra product out of the blue for various reasons. My wife ended up with a set of special convention dice that way, for example.
I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I sucks that you won't get your stuff, but I can't imagine anything malicious is afoot.
I just don't see how the scenario you posit ever works out in their favor. Like, sitting on the float from your money for like a month does not seem like a "win". Not when it causes folks to complain about them on the internet and possibly do a charge back or otherwise cause problems. I'd also note two things that might not be obvious to you: An international order makes it more likely they fucked up the address as US folks tend to be completely worthless in handling non-US addresses and second that a US company that sends an unsolicited shipment to somebody is usually trained to just write that product off. In the US, somebody ships you something you didn't order it is legally a gift. While it's ethical to send it back you're under no legal obligation to do so.
To be clear, I haven't ordered from them but have heard from a couple friends that have, repeatedly, and not had issues. This sounds like a standard small business screw up. I try not to judge folks on the screw up itself, those happen to everybody, but how they handle the recovery from the screw up.
I also don't remember seeing any of the 13th Age books going permanently OOP though obviously local supplies are gonna vary.
As I mentionned earlier, the most malicious thing I'm thinking about is wrong numbers in their online inventory compared to what they actually have on hand. I have no reason to believe they are making fraudulent sales in the hope that nobody will catch on when they don't receive anything. The books I was buying had 1-2 items left and were at a uncommonly low price. I was suspicious as a first time buyer that had a similar issue with another online retailer.
Since then I've had some back and forth with the customer service and they've been great. So problem solved! Worst case is I'll get some of the books and they'll refund the shipping cost otherwise I'll just wait longer for the same products at the price I paid which is about 50% of what I could find in canadian stores or ebay. Satisfied customer in the end.
So, I picked up Torment: Tides of Numenera cheap and god help me I've been enjoying it.
It actually has me thinking about maybe paying actual money for a Monte Cook table top product. Stop me, thread. I beg of you.
If I remember right, Numenara is the game that actually encourages the GM to lie to the players to trick them into spending their resources when they don't need to.
It's also a game that has like 10 different skills for the "thinker" characters but like one or maybe two skills for the physical characters? I think?
Numenera doesn't encourage the GM to lie to the players to trick them into spending their resources. That's just the first skill check in the example of play. Numenera does explicitly discourage the GM from asking the players for rolls when there's nothing there to find. ...on the same page as it encourages the GM to make the players burn XP to not trip and faceplant in front of the Pope. Y'know, if the GM wants to.
The skill system in Numenera is actually entirely up to the GM! They can have whatever skills they want, as fine-grained or coarse-grained as they desire! Because that always works out so well.
But the base classes and descriptions do have training in certain specific things.
So for example, in the base classes of Glaive (fighter), Jack (rogue), and Nano (wizard), the Glaive is trained in swimming, climbing, jumping, and balancing, and the Nano is trained in identifying and using the cyphers, artifacts, and oddities that give both the system and the game its name, no matter what they do or which of the eight previous eras they came from.
...oh, wait, I misspoke. The Glaive has to pick one of swimming, climbing, jumping, or balancing to be trained in. Phew! That would have been embarrassing. Imagine how unbalanced it would be to start out with training in all of those things at once!
Anyway, Glaive Jack and Nano are kind of pool-keyed to Might, Speed, and Intellect, and Intellect encompasses all tasks of knowledge, perception, social interaction, and mental fortitude. If you look at the skill list from another general-purpose roleplaying game like Fate Core (Athletics Burglary Contacts Crafts Deceive Drive Empathy Fight Investigate Lore Notice Physique Provoke Rapport Resources ShootStealth Will) you'll notice that Intellect covers about two-thirds of them.
But I don't believe this is because Monte Cook is himself encouraging GMs to lie, or is concealing a sinister wizard fanboy plot, or is otherwise a garbage person. Monte Cook is a game designer who writes games that seem to make sense and doesn't think through the mechanical implications of their rules.
The example of somebody using a pool for a task it wasn't designed for is somebody using Intellect to pick a lock because of how much they know about locks, because doesn't that make sense?
There are literally no special class or focus powers in the core book that cost Might or Speed points and can be used out of combat, because, I mean, isn't that what skills are for? "Jumping" is a skill. "Teleporting in a flash of lightning" is a focus power that costs Intellect points. Doesn't that make sense?
The top-tier Nano power is to spend a bunch of Intellect Points and just make a hurricane. The top-tier Glaive power is to spend a bunch of Might Points to make an additional attack*. (*additional attack is unarmed only unarmed combat and weapon combat must be separately improved total effort expenditure on both attacks and their damage is subject to tier cap per action) Doesn't that make sense that those are the things the most powerful wizards and the most powerful fighters can do?
On the surface, until you think about what that's going to mean for the players, sure, that makes sense. And that's pretty much been consistent over Monte Cook's career as a designer. If none of that really bothers you, you'll be alright with a Monte Cook game.
---
If you want an example of an actual garbage person, there's Lamentations of the Flame Princess universe contributor (Vornheim, A Red And Pleasant Land, Maze of the Blue Medusa) and recent White Wolf interactive fiction author (We Eat Blood) Zak S.
Zak S keeps an enemies list, consisting of people who have +1'd posts on Google Plus Zak S does not approve of, and who have refused to recant them when ordered. Through a process unknown to science, people on this list regularly receive death threats over social media, which have driven at least one person out of the industry, and pictures of their children's schools in the mail, which have driven at least one person out of the country.
When an author wrote a history of the RPG hobby which was insufficiently adulatory of Zak S, Zak S's "roommate" made an account on Reddit to impersonate the author ""as a joke"". Because the author did not use Reddit regularly, the impersonation continued for at least a year, at which point someone who knew the author got curious and looked into the account's post history, finding many posts adulatory of Zak S and several deleted posts (which Reddit had archived) that reproduced, in their entirety, posts which Zak S would later make on Reddit. This is because Zak S and the "roommate" """share""" a """"common computer"""" and the "roommate" occasionally """""forgot to log out""""" before Zak S posted.
Zak S continues to work in the industry because it is by and large an enthusiast press and enthusiasts hold themselves to less than a professional standard of conduct.
Irrespective of what you enjoy about those products, you should only spend money on Zak S with full knowledge of that past.
Does anyone have any of the old Mechwarrior Tabletop books laying around? I don't mean battletech, but the actual RPG Mechwarrior game.
I would love to find a group and maybe get a game of that going somewhere. With the new Battletech Beta starting its getting my mind rolling in that direction.
Maybe do something like a merc group during the Succession Wars.
Does anyone have any of the old Mechwarrior Tabletop books laying around? I don't mean battletech, but the actual RPG Mechwarrior game.
I would love to find a group and maybe get a game of that going somewhere. With the new Battletech Beta starting its getting my mind rolling in that direction.
Maybe do something like a merc group during the Succession Wars.
I do! It's in a tote in my closet with the rest of my gaming stuff.
The issue I had with the Mechwarrior RPG was that it spent too much character creation resources on things that might not matter or could create problems between players.
I'd honestly rather see something closer to a PbtA hack for it. Especially since that resolution system works so well.
e: as far as playing in a group goes, time permitting I'd be down. My availability is hit and miss, but I'd certainly try to make it work, seems like it'd be fun!
I used to have it...and while I have all of my old Battletech stuff, I'm not quite sure I have the MechWarrior RPG anymore. Even all those years ago, I knew the system was...not good.
I like some of the PtbA stuff, but I don't like the idea of it being a catch-all. Ofcourse I am one of those odd ducks that like d20 systems. So doing Mechwarrior with d20 Modern and the Future/Futuretech books would be great for me. Ha.
I like some of the PtbA stuff, but I don't like the idea of it being a catch-all. Ofcourse I am one of those odd ducks that like d20 systems. So doing Mechwarrior with d20 Modern and the Future/Futuretech books would be great for me. Ha.
Yes but d20 is....kinda broken as fuck, as you eventually reach a point where you either are god-tier or absolutely shit at any given skill roll. Unless you do something like E6, where your modifiers basically cap at +/-3.
But I think PbtA actually works quite well for Mechwarrior, especially since Btech/MWar were always 2d6 based games.
Alright, ran a first session of LotFP. Our cleric got charged by a crazy feathered pig with a beak and had his heart ripped out. Three total limbs were amputated and cauterized due to a parasitic infection (two right hands and a left leg). Three NPC's were mercy killed and one was very happy to have his spellbook returned. Some loot was acquired, although they missed out on the best of it.
I think it went relatively well. I asked everyone if they were ready to stop at the time we usually stop at, and they wanted to continue, so that seems like a good sign. The more meticulous inventory management looked like a problem from where I was sitting (it just took a long time to get going), but nobody complained about it even when I asked at the end of the session, so maybe its fine for now.
i will also point out that in combination with the aforementioned history @Glazius talks about, Zak S is "dnd with pornstars" guy
nothing wrong with it on its own, but when taken in context with his skeeve character and history, makes the skin crawl a bit
Well... he himself is a former pornstar, so that's honestly the least skeevy part of him.
I might be one of the few people here that liked the DnD with Pornstars game. It's not like Pornstars aren't people who have normal hobbits and might be geeks/nerds like us.
But that's my only experience with the guy and his history, so I can't really comment on the skeeve aspects of his character. But his V:tM mobile game "We Eat Blood" was garbage and just an excuse for him to show off his "artwork".
i will also point out that in combination with the aforementioned history @Glazius talks about, Zak S is "dnd with pornstars" guy
nothing wrong with it on its own, but when taken in context with his skeeve character and history, makes the skin crawl a bit
Well... he himself is a former pornstar, so that's honestly the least skeevy part of him.
I might be one of the few people here that liked the DnD with Pornstars game. It's not like Pornstars aren't people who have normal hobbits and might be geeks/nerds like us.
But that's my only experience with the guy and his history, so I can't really comment on the skeeve aspects of his character. But his V:tM mobile game "We Eat Blood" was garbage and just an excuse for him to show off his "artwork".
nothing wrong with it on its own, but when taken in context with his skeeve character and history, makes the skin crawl a bit
I was aware. I deliberately excluded it, because the mere fact of who you spend your leisure time with does not, by itself, say anything about how garbage of a person you are.
Zak is a huge piece of shit and has been exceptionally unpleasant in literally any action I've had him with him.
Moving on.
Anyone have thoughts on Coriolis? I am tempted, but all the reviews I can find are just people who have read the book. I want play reports.
I play in a Coriolis campaign. It's pretty good, even though I think my group is being way too cautious when we're playing. The setting is great, but it isn't very tied to the mechanics. The setting is also very big, so it's taking us a bit of time to understand all the factions and how they relate to each others. We're playing a very mystical and macro campaign (we found old artifacts that we are trying to comprehend while multiples factions want them) and I think it's the way to go. I don't think a merchant or pure mercenary campaign would be the best use of this setting.
I think the experience system is the best part of the system. It's a key-based system similar to Dungeon World that forces you to explore your relationships with the other players, put yourself in danger and bring up your personal problem. However, the other players, who are very experimented traditional gamers, thinks that it's unnecessary because they know how to play rpgs.
The space combat is fun, but feels very much like a minigame. There's too much gear and ship customization rules for my liking.
I think a PbtA or Blades in the Dark hack would be a better system, but if you like more traditional games it's pretty great !
What kind of mechanics does it have? More traditional sounds good to me over a narrativist kind of game like PbtA
I would say that it sits somewhere around old WoD games. Emphasis on skills, character concept, party role as it pertains to theme of game, with some lighter story game mechanics (relationships, personal problems, etc).
Based on what I know about the games you like, it probably dips its toe too far into the story game/narrativist pool for your tastes.
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Mostlyjoe13Evil, Evil, Jump for joy!Registered Userregular
Okay. With the changes to Starfinder to the d20 mechanic of Pathfinder...I'm really curious how it address the QWLF issue and how higher level characters play now.
Yeesh, if Coriolis isn't traditional, I don't know what is! It's pretty much a stock-standard skill resolution system.
The game still has failing forward though, which is something I generally associate with story-games.
But you really shouldn't. Call it "No Bob, We're Not Sitting Here Until You Somehow Roll a Fucking 100" rule if you like. Failing forward can be a story game thing but it is defensible from the other two schools as well.
Failing forward is narrative in that it essentially means that making the attempt guarantees success as long as it makes narrative sense.
But it's also a concept that has been in the RPG canon since they started putting hardcovers on D&D books, so it's not some newfangled touchy-feely mechanical interloper. It's just a pragmatic recognition that stuff happening is usually more interesting than stuff not happening, and GMs should act accordingly.
Hmm....that is not how I would use the term failing forward. The way I've seen it defined is that the act of making the die roll changes the situation, pass or fail. That change doesn't have to be success so much as it has to make repeating your action no longer an option. The classic example is opening a lock. The roll is not "Can you open the lock?" The roll is "Can you open the lock before the guards discover you?" or "Can you open the lock without leaving evidence?" Both of these would change the situation pass or fail. One assumes you always open the lock while the first one doesn't necessarily (but could.)
Edit: Another way to phrase it would be if the failure state of the roll is exactly same as where you started then you've just wasted everybodies time.
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I met him a few times. Lovely man, very courteous and friendly, hugely enthusiastic about his work and hobbies. Huge loss
Man, I would have loved to have done that.
If I remember right, Numenara is the game that actually encourages the GM to lie to the players to trick them into spending their resources when they don't need to.
It's also a game that has like 10 different skills for the "thinker" characters but like one or maybe two skills for the physical characters? I think?
Actually, I'm pretty sure that skill ratio is backwards. In the videogame, they seem to have filed off most of the "adventuring" skills into a more managable pile.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
The stuff I bought was a ridiculously low price compared to what I could find everywhere else. I just find it more likely that the online store was wrong and they charged me for inventory they didn't have than they misplaced an international order of 8 books. It's about as nefarious as I'd go. This isn't the first time something like that happens to me with online retailers but maybe I'm wrong or unlucky! It's the first time I buy something from them and they never sent me a tracking number and I found the emails they sent me kind of sketchy looking?
I'm glad to hear they give good service usually, this is the kind of information I was looking for actually. I'll see if they can actually fulfill the order, not in a hurry to get the books.
Its an underdark which is actually terrifying, and not just like, fantasy scary, if that makes sense?
When I read the Dark Elf trilogy as a teenager, it was not scary. It was a different place, and evil, but not frightening. And when myself and my friends would bring up or adventure in the underdark in D&D, it was the same. It is a dangerous and overly hostile place, but it didn't ever go beyond that. Which is fine and I don't think Wizards was ever trying to actually go beyond what they did, but I like the contrast.
The Veins are horrible. They are an impossibly old and vast and filled with obscene darkness, overwhelming hunger and confusion/ madness. You want to get out as soon as you can. That is until you've been down there for so long, what even are you at this point?
You are on your belly, wriggling like a snake through a passage too short to even crawl through, and your friend Jeremy in front of you is desperately trying to kill who-knows-what-the-fuck, and you want to back up but there are more people behind you. And you can't stop thinking about what you had to eat last night, how Jeremy seemed to like it, and maybe you did too? Its all fucked.
Hes got lots of rules that are specifically useful for cave travel. Such as an efficient yet abstract way to make 3D cave and vein generation, information on food and maintaining light sources, and what to do with a party that lost all ways to make light (its not great for them). He smartly has smells and sounds descriptors for all of his critters (which are all very non-standard and crazy scary).
My favorite table is the Effects, which are changes to your character, and which happen when the GM decides you've overcome some strange milestone. Such as The author does a great job of being descriptive in a way I don't really see in RPG writing. Like, it would not be uncommon or unreasonable to just write: You can detect when someone is lying, or You feel a compulsion to collect bones. Patrick instead writes
I just don't see how the scenario you posit ever works out in their favor. Like, sitting on the float from your money for like a month does not seem like a "win". Not when it causes folks to complain about them on the internet and possibly do a charge back or otherwise cause problems. I'd also note two things that might not be obvious to you: An international order makes it more likely they fucked up the address as US folks tend to be completely worthless in handling non-US addresses and second that a US company that sends an unsolicited shipment to somebody is usually trained to just write that product off. In the US, somebody ships you something you didn't order it is legally a gift. While it's ethical to send it back you're under no legal obligation to do so.
To be clear, I haven't ordered from them but have heard from a couple friends that have, repeatedly, and not had issues. This sounds like a standard small business screw up. I try not to judge folks on the screw up itself, those happen to everybody, but how they handle the recovery from the screw up.
I also don't remember seeing any of the 13th Age books going permanently OOP though obviously local supplies are gonna vary.
Benefits of living an hour's drive from Warhammer World, and knowing loads of people who have worked in GW, or still do.
For all the bad rep the company gets, or got (seem to be doing better these days) I've met many of their head office writing, hobby and so on staff and they're all great, passionate people without exception. The workplace culture there produces people who are friendly, open and always keen to discuss the game. Despite that Alan was notably a top bloke, he really had his reputation of being a lovely, friendly guy for a reason. A number of my friends who knew him well are very upset of course, and I am too even though I only met him on occasion. The Horus Heresy series was his baby and he dedicated a huge amount of time and effort to it.
Comics, Games, Booze
I'm inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. I sucks that you won't get your stuff, but I can't imagine anything malicious is afoot.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
As I mentionned earlier, the most malicious thing I'm thinking about is wrong numbers in their online inventory compared to what they actually have on hand. I have no reason to believe they are making fraudulent sales in the hope that nobody will catch on when they don't receive anything. The books I was buying had 1-2 items left and were at a uncommonly low price. I was suspicious as a first time buyer that had a similar issue with another online retailer.
Since then I've had some back and forth with the customer service and they've been great. So problem solved! Worst case is I'll get some of the books and they'll refund the shipping cost otherwise I'll just wait longer for the same products at the price I paid which is about 50% of what I could find in canadian stores or ebay. Satisfied customer in the end.
Numenera doesn't encourage the GM to lie to the players to trick them into spending their resources. That's just the first skill check in the example of play. Numenera does explicitly discourage the GM from asking the players for rolls when there's nothing there to find. ...on the same page as it encourages the GM to make the players burn XP to not trip and faceplant in front of the Pope. Y'know, if the GM wants to.
The skill system in Numenera is actually entirely up to the GM! They can have whatever skills they want, as fine-grained or coarse-grained as they desire! Because that always works out so well.
But the base classes and descriptions do have training in certain specific things.
So for example, in the base classes of Glaive (fighter), Jack (rogue), and Nano (wizard), the Glaive is trained in swimming, climbing, jumping, and balancing, and the Nano is trained in identifying and using the cyphers, artifacts, and oddities that give both the system and the game its name, no matter what they do or which of the eight previous eras they came from.
...oh, wait, I misspoke. The Glaive has to pick one of swimming, climbing, jumping, or balancing to be trained in. Phew! That would have been embarrassing. Imagine how unbalanced it would be to start out with training in all of those things at once!
Anyway, Glaive Jack and Nano are kind of pool-keyed to Might, Speed, and Intellect, and Intellect encompasses all tasks of knowledge, perception, social interaction, and mental fortitude. If you look at the skill list from another general-purpose roleplaying game like Fate Core (Athletics Burglary Contacts Crafts Deceive Drive Empathy Fight Investigate Lore Notice Physique Provoke Rapport Resources Shoot Stealth Will) you'll notice that Intellect covers about two-thirds of them.
But I don't believe this is because Monte Cook is himself encouraging GMs to lie, or is concealing a sinister wizard fanboy plot, or is otherwise a garbage person. Monte Cook is a game designer who writes games that seem to make sense and doesn't think through the mechanical implications of their rules.
The example of somebody using a pool for a task it wasn't designed for is somebody using Intellect to pick a lock because of how much they know about locks, because doesn't that make sense?
There are literally no special class or focus powers in the core book that cost Might or Speed points and can be used out of combat, because, I mean, isn't that what skills are for? "Jumping" is a skill. "Teleporting in a flash of lightning" is a focus power that costs Intellect points. Doesn't that make sense?
The top-tier Nano power is to spend a bunch of Intellect Points and just make a hurricane. The top-tier Glaive power is to spend a bunch of Might Points to make an additional attack*. (*additional attack is unarmed only unarmed combat and weapon combat must be separately improved total effort expenditure on both attacks and their damage is subject to tier cap per action) Doesn't that make sense that those are the things the most powerful wizards and the most powerful fighters can do?
On the surface, until you think about what that's going to mean for the players, sure, that makes sense. And that's pretty much been consistent over Monte Cook's career as a designer. If none of that really bothers you, you'll be alright with a Monte Cook game.
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If you want an example of an actual garbage person, there's Lamentations of the Flame Princess universe contributor (Vornheim, A Red And Pleasant Land, Maze of the Blue Medusa) and recent White Wolf interactive fiction author (We Eat Blood) Zak S.
Zak S keeps an enemies list, consisting of people who have +1'd posts on Google Plus Zak S does not approve of, and who have refused to recant them when ordered. Through a process unknown to science, people on this list regularly receive death threats over social media, which have driven at least one person out of the industry, and pictures of their children's schools in the mail, which have driven at least one person out of the country.
When an author wrote a history of the RPG hobby which was insufficiently adulatory of Zak S, Zak S's "roommate" made an account on Reddit to impersonate the author ""as a joke"". Because the author did not use Reddit regularly, the impersonation continued for at least a year, at which point someone who knew the author got curious and looked into the account's post history, finding many posts adulatory of Zak S and several deleted posts (which Reddit had archived) that reproduced, in their entirety, posts which Zak S would later make on Reddit. This is because Zak S and the "roommate" """share""" a """"common computer"""" and the "roommate" occasionally """""forgot to log out""""" before Zak S posted.
Zak S continues to work in the industry because it is by and large an enthusiast press and enthusiasts hold themselves to less than a professional standard of conduct.
Irrespective of what you enjoy about those products, you should only spend money on Zak S with full knowledge of that past.
I would love to find a group and maybe get a game of that going somewhere. With the new Battletech Beta starting its getting my mind rolling in that direction.
Maybe do something like a merc group during the Succession Wars.
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
I do! It's in a tote in my closet with the rest of my gaming stuff.
The issue I had with the Mechwarrior RPG was that it spent too much character creation resources on things that might not matter or could create problems between players.
I'd honestly rather see something closer to a PbtA hack for it. Especially since that resolution system works so well.
e: as far as playing in a group goes, time permitting I'd be down. My availability is hit and miss, but I'd certainly try to make it work, seems like it'd be fun!
Critical Failures - Havenhold Campaign • August St. Cloud (Human Ranger)
nothing wrong with it on its own, but when taken in context with his skeeve character and history, makes the skin crawl a bit
Yes but d20 is....kinda broken as fuck, as you eventually reach a point where you either are god-tier or absolutely shit at any given skill roll. Unless you do something like E6, where your modifiers basically cap at +/-3.
But I think PbtA actually works quite well for Mechwarrior, especially since Btech/MWar were always 2d6 based games.
Well... he himself is a former pornstar, so that's honestly the least skeevy part of him.
I think it went relatively well. I asked everyone if they were ready to stop at the time we usually stop at, and they wanted to continue, so that seems like a good sign. The more meticulous inventory management looked like a problem from where I was sitting (it just took a long time to get going), but nobody complained about it even when I asked at the end of the session, so maybe its fine for now.
Next session we figure out prosthetics.
I might be one of the few people here that liked the DnD with Pornstars game. It's not like Pornstars aren't people who have normal hobbits and might be geeks/nerds like us.
But that's my only experience with the guy and his history, so I can't really comment on the skeeve aspects of his character. But his V:tM mobile game "We Eat Blood" was garbage and just an excuse for him to show off his "artwork".
I might be one of the few people here that liked the DnD with Pornstars game. It's not like Pornstars aren't people who have normal hobbits and might be geeks/nerds like us.
But that's my only experience with the guy and his history, so I can't really comment on the skeeve aspects of his character. But his V:tM mobile game "We Eat Blood" was garbage and just an excuse for him to show off his "artwork".
I was aware. I deliberately excluded it, because the mere fact of who you spend your leisure time with does not, by itself, say anything about how garbage of a person you are.
I would certainly never imply there's anything wrong with being a porn star or playing DnD or doing both at the same time
I'm very tempted to pick this one up.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Moving on.
Anyone have thoughts on Coriolis? I am tempted, but all the reviews I can find are just people who have read the book. I want play reports.
The system is the same one as in Mutant Year Zero. It's fine.
I play in a Coriolis campaign. It's pretty good, even though I think my group is being way too cautious when we're playing. The setting is great, but it isn't very tied to the mechanics. The setting is also very big, so it's taking us a bit of time to understand all the factions and how they relate to each others. We're playing a very mystical and macro campaign (we found old artifacts that we are trying to comprehend while multiples factions want them) and I think it's the way to go. I don't think a merchant or pure mercenary campaign would be the best use of this setting.
I think the experience system is the best part of the system. It's a key-based system similar to Dungeon World that forces you to explore your relationships with the other players, put yourself in danger and bring up your personal problem. However, the other players, who are very experimented traditional gamers, thinks that it's unnecessary because they know how to play rpgs.
The space combat is fun, but feels very much like a minigame. There's too much gear and ship customization rules for my liking.
I think a PbtA or Blades in the Dark hack would be a better system, but if you like more traditional games it's pretty great !
What kind of mechanics does it have? More traditional sounds good to me over a narrativist kind of game like PbtA
I'd wager it's not trad enough for your tastes.
I would say that it sits somewhere around old WoD games. Emphasis on skills, character concept, party role as it pertains to theme of game, with some lighter story game mechanics (relationships, personal problems, etc).
Based on what I know about the games you like, it probably dips its toe too far into the story game/narrativist pool for your tastes.
The game still has failing forward though, which is something I generally associate with story-games.
But you really shouldn't. Call it "No Bob, We're Not Sitting Here Until You Somehow Roll a Fucking 100" rule if you like. Failing forward can be a story game thing but it is defensible from the other two schools as well.
At this point it is really just good game design.
But it's also a concept that has been in the RPG canon since they started putting hardcovers on D&D books, so it's not some newfangled touchy-feely mechanical interloper. It's just a pragmatic recognition that stuff happening is usually more interesting than stuff not happening, and GMs should act accordingly.
They tried to bury us. They didn't know that we were seeds. 2018 Midterms. Get your shit together.
Edit: Another way to phrase it would be if the failure state of the roll is exactly same as where you started then you've just wasted everybodies time.