Hey WACriminal, have you looked at Action Movie World at all for inspiration with your thing? It's not like, the system you would want to use, but I just realized that it reminded me a bit of it, and at very least there's some moves you could steal from it.
I'd also look into the idea though of having players able to select a move from a specific chapter or whatever as a new signature move for their character.
I love both of these ideas. I haven't looked at Action Movie World yet, but I'm googling it now.
For the second thing, I'm planning a wild west "protect the town from bandits with revolvers" type adventure later, so there will definitely be some gritty gunslinger stuff available there. The Double-Cross (or a modified version of it) could also make sense as an XP trigger for the players to pick up from this one. Mostly for this chapter though, their level-up consists of whatever equipment they manage to carry out.
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MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
I love giant robots, but the public playtest stuff for Lancer seemed extremely cumbersome in a way that just repelled me despite the theme being tailor made for me.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Okay, yeah, Action Movie World is a weird system that doesn't quite work for what you're doing, but I think it's close.
Every character is theoretically an actor, and they have access to moves based on what type of characters they typically play in a cliche action movie - gunfighter, burly muscleman, martial artist, wisecrackin' type, that sort of thing. And then of course you have access to a set of basic moves, as is standard for PbtA. Each adventure, however, has a script, and the script unlocks additional moves (as well as gear and relationships, but that's not super important for your purposes). Each player gets to pick one script move for their character, which they will normally lose at the end of the adventure, but you can lock them in as permanent moves as a level up option (instead of picking another move from your playbook).
so I finished the mechanical bits of the celestial esperanto roboboss
The way ominous charge/skycleave nova works is that it can only do the latter the round after the former, and it has to lock in its targetting during the former, telegraphing where the (very strong vs a level 4 party) attack will hit
It also shares Reactions with the effects of the magic hammer I gave my fighter last session, the same magic hammer that was described as extremely out of place with its environment and probably belonging to something else. This robot can mimmick one of the hammers effects as a reaction, and if it manages to knock out said fighter and steal it's hammer back... Well, hopefully that won't happen.
Oh, and the mobs that spawn every 20 damage will be on "grapple the PC's in the damage cone" duty.
I'm thinking at 50% health, where the phase switch/music change happens, it gains a one time move where it makes 3 throw attacks at the PC's that also spawn half health Crystal Bone Skeletons, thoughts?
SCREECH OF THE FARG on
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BaidolI will hold him offEscape while you canRegistered Userregular
Strahd update
We're 21 sessions in. You'd think that, by this point, we'd have committed to a course of action involving Strahd.
We haven't. We are a force of chaos as we consistently hedge trusting anyone and refuse to commit to a long-term course of action. Major spoilers for the town of Vallaki below.
We make a number of promises we don't end up keeping. The burgomaster is killed in a coup. The coup leader is personally killed by Strahd in retribution for our interference in their stealing the bones of a local saint. The closet thing to a leader left is the local priest ensconced in the church he could restore the blessing to as a result of the one positive thing we've contributed to the town. We leave Vallaki to an uncertain future.
We end up in a new location. The local innkeeper feels us out and sees that we are unwilling to commit and, so, prepares to leave. I use Divine Intervention to read their surface thoughts. I see what they want. As a bonus to the successful reading, I can magically use suggestion on them. I suggest they hear us out and tell us what we can do to make them trust us.
My scheduled gaming session last night became a regular hang out as we don't all see each other as regularly as we used to, which had given me more time to plan my next move
I now have a plan involving infiltrating a theatrical production to save an assassination target, which leads to a missing father, a mistaken-identity sister, and the Vampire that started it all
I've been trying all week to figure out what exactly I'm going to do for tomorrow's D&D session. I've probably come up with a dozen different ideas and discarded them for various reasons.
I'm wanting to do a bit of infernal political intrigue between the archdevils (and spent a lot of time on Thursday researching them), but 1) I'm not sure how to go about giving the players the background info in a way they'll be able to quickly understand, and 2) it's kinda hard to imagine the complicated web of schemes that the archdevils would have cooked up to dick each other over.
Plus there's also still a lich running around.
And I've previously established that a NPC one of the PCs is going after is a servant of Graz'zt.
so I finished the mechanical bits of the celestial esperanto roboboss
The way ominous charge/skycleave nova works is that it can only do the latter the round after the former, and it has to lock in its targetting during the former, telegraphing where the (very strong vs a level 4 party) attack will hit
It also shares Reactions with the effects of the magic hammer I gave my fighter last session, the same magic hammer that was described as extremely out of place with its environment and probably belonging to something else. This robot can mimmick one of the hammers effects as a reaction, and if it manages to knock out said fighter and steal it's hammer back... Well, hopefully that won't happen.
Oh, and the mobs that spawn every 20 damage will be on "grapple the PC's in the damage cone" duty.
I'm thinking at 50% health, where the phase switch/music change happens, it gains a one time move where it makes 3 throw attacks at the PC's that also spawn half health Crystal Bone Skeletons, thoughts?
I haven't been super deep into 5th and don't know your party level. That seems ... strong. Like, I'm looking at that and going "that's a boss fight for sure, hopefully for a party who's up in their teens level wise" but I don't really know how HP scales or what the healing resources of the party are.
I have a question, though I won't be acting on any answers anytime soon, so it's kind of just for fun
Like I've posted about before, my wife is running a D&D game and doing a fantastic job
It's kind of giving me the DM bug, and I think, once we're done with D&D (however long that takes) I want to run a game where people are playing as Agents of SHIELD in the Marvel universe. But I don't know what a good system to use would be?
Finally came-up with an idea I really like for my next session. I've decided that to be an Archduke of the Hells Asmodeus must know your true name and inscribe it upon an obelisk within one of the towers of his palace in Nessus. Each Archduke's obelisk is within a tower all its own, and the obelisks are extremely well-guarded.
The party (which includes a daughter of Asmodeus, a paladin attracted to Princess Glasya, and a wizard who wants to take over Stygia from Archduke Levistus) is charged by Glasya with locating Levistus' obelisk and recording his true name so that he may be deposed. She intends for Geryon, the master of Glasya's consort Amon, to regain rulership of Stygia.
However, the PC who wants to rule Stygia himself has secretly been given a shard of the Heart of the Abyss, receiving it from an avatar of Graz'zt. With it he may carve his own true name into the obelisk, though there will certainly be major ramifications if he does. Plus there will likely be other agents of Glasya tailing the party in secret to attack them if they do anything Glasya wouldn't approve of.
Hexmage-PA on
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PiptheFairFrequently not in boats.Registered Userregular
I have a question, though I won't be acting on any answers anytime soon, so it's kind of just for fun
Like I've posted about before, my wife is running a D&D game and doing a fantastic job
It's kind of giving me the DM bug, and I think, once we're done with D&D (however long that takes) I want to run a game where people are playing as Agents of SHIELD in the Marvel universe. But I don't know what a good system to use would be?
d20 modern?
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WACriminalDying Is Easy, Young ManLiving Is HarderRegistered Userregular
I have a question, though I won't be acting on any answers anytime soon, so it's kind of just for fun
Like I've posted about before, my wife is running a D&D game and doing a fantastic job
It's kind of giving me the DM bug, and I think, once we're done with D&D (however long that takes) I want to run a game where people are playing as Agents of SHIELD in the Marvel universe. But I don't know what a good system to use would be?
Do you want any of them to have superpowers themselves, or is this strictly going to be a mundanes versus supers thing?
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astrobstrdSo full of mercy...Registered Userregular
I haven't picked up the newest edition, bur Murants and Masterminds works pretty well for superhero stuff. A bit crunchy, but covers most power sets well.
I like Masks a lot, but that is tightly focused on teen heroes and runs off PbtA which puts some folks off.
I like City of Mist, but that is another one with a lot of rules tied to narrative devices, with the gimmick that you are some aspect of a folk tale, legend, or god and a kind of WoD take on what regular folk know about how the world works.
@Hexmage-PA If you ever need info-dump npcs to leak secret information to your pcs, I feel Imps should work. Shifty devils always willing to sell out their masters for a shot at some more power, but so low on the totem pole that nobody really bothers about them except to kill them out of hand.
@SirEtchwarts I was in an Agents of Shield game that used Savage Worlds. With the Super Powers Companion book it worked quite well. Of course that was the game where each PC thought they were the one Hydra Agent on the team, right up until we saw Winter Soldier as a group. So many recriminations!
I have a question, though I won't be acting on any answers anytime soon, so it's kind of just for fun
Like I've posted about before, my wife is running a D&D game and doing a fantastic job
It's kind of giving me the DM bug, and I think, once we're done with D&D (however long that takes) I want to run a game where people are playing as Agents of SHIELD in the Marvel universe. But I don't know what a good system to use would be?
Do you want any of them to have superpowers themselves, or is this strictly going to be a mundanes versus supers thing?
I was thinking almost definitely just like, secret agent types
Like the pitch for the Agents of SHIELD TV show
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
Mutants and Masterminds is very good for granular superhero simulation, but it might be more than you would need if your PCs are just going to be secret agent types. Like, don't get me wrong, you can make secret agent types in it - you can make anything in it - but their stats are going to end up being pretty similar, and then you'll be spending an age statting out various other characters for them to encounter.
I don't love FATE personally, but I feel like some of the inherent pulpiness of FATE might work well for a spy-fi sort of game?
@Hexmage-PA If you ever need info-dump npcs to leak secret information to your pcs, I feel Imps should work. Shifty devils always willing to sell out their masters for a shot at some more power, but so low on the totem pole that nobody really bothers about them except to kill them out of hand.
One interesting thing I discovered during my research is that at least one D&D source stated devils can only legally destroy another devil if they are at least 9 stations below them in the hierarchy, meaning that if a devil wants to directly harm an imp they themselves need to be at least a pit fiend!
Also, one source apparently stated that bone devils are the cops of the Hells, and if a devil destroys a bone devil it can be demoted to a lemure and marked to disallow them from ever being promoted again. That really sells that the Hells is about legal authority and more than just power.
I have a question, though I won't be acting on any answers anytime soon, so it's kind of just for fun
Like I've posted about before, my wife is running a D&D game and doing a fantastic job
It's kind of giving me the DM bug, and I think, once we're done with D&D (however long that takes) I want to run a game where people are playing as Agents of SHIELD in the Marvel universe. But I don't know what a good system to use would be?
Do you want any of them to have superpowers themselves, or is this strictly going to be a mundanes versus supers thing?
I was thinking almost definitely just like, secret agent types
Like the pitch for the Agents of SHIELD TV show
In that case, if you're not averse to PbtA systems, I recommend a stripped-down, re-themed Monster of the Week. Reasons:
1. Rules are simple and easy to learn, but flexible.
2. MotW's genre, once you strip away the fantasy trappings, is centrally about teams of mildly-powerful people being outmatched by bigger, badder things as part of self-contained short arcs (that can optionally be linked together into longer stories). That's perfect for Agents of SHIELD. In particular, note that in MotW, there's no such thing (without taking specific advancements) as escaping combat unscathed -- if your players choose to go toe-to-toe with whatever they're facing, they're going to get fucked up without a solid plan. The general tempo of, "Encounter a new threat -> spend time investigating the threat and learning its weaknesses -> put together a plan using what you learned -> execute the plan and try not to die" really fits what SHIELD does on a regular basis, I'd say.
3. The built-in stats are generally representative of the traits that define SHIELD agents: Charm, Cool, Sharp, Tough, Weird. The only change I might suggest to these is renaming "Weird" (though I don't know what it should be called, maybe "Intuition") to represent a character's ability to generally work with things they don't fully understand, like Asgardian tech. This, then, takes the place of MotW's ambiguous magic system.
4. You can strip down the playbooks to remove the magical ones, probably keeping these: Crooked, Expert, Flake, Mundane, Professional, Wronged. The Initiate might also work, if you want to allow them to be an agent of SHIELD who is also a liaison with some other organization, such as the Wakandan government. There are more playbooks in the Tome of Mysteries, but I haven't been able to look at them yet. Apparently there's one called The Gumshoe, which would likely be a good fit here.
5. The magical playbooks you've removed at this point: Chosen, Divine, (Initiate), Monstrous, Spell-Slinger, Spooky. These are fertile ground from which to pull material for the things they are going to encounter. Maybe, somewhere down the road, one of them gets injected with some sort of serum and they pick up a move from the Monstrous book. Maybe they get their hands on an Asgardian weapon and it works like the Spell-Slinger's "Combat Magic".
6. Characters come with a clock, in the form of their Luck bar. It allows them to succeed where it really counts, but when they're eventually out of luck, their time in the story is almost done. This lets them go out in a blaze of self-sacrificial glory, ascend to true superhero status (and therefore out of SHIELD, into the Avengers or similar), or perhaps make a heel turn and join the forces of evil. In any of those cases, their time in the party has come to an end, and it's time for the player to bring in a new agent. If handled properly, this can help keep the story fresh, and has the bonus side effect of automatically creating NPCs with whom the party feels a connection. It's not just, "Oh, here's another super-powered asshole", it's "Oh, this is a super-powered asshole who used to work beside me."
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MaclayInsquequo Totus Es UnusHere and ThereRegistered Userregular
I think if I was doing Agents of SHIELD I would go with Leverage (a Cortex system sibling to Marvel Heroic). Each character has a rating in five roles: Hitter, Hacker, Grifter, Thief and Mastermind. These are obviously aimed at 'crime', but line up pretty well with spy stuff. I imagine it being pretty easy to mash it together with MH (there is also the upcoming Cortex Prime that brings together all the Cortex stuff, but right now it's a pre-order that might(?) give you access to a near-final draft of the core book).
For anyone that needs/wants a quick summary: Dice pool game with variable dice sizes and a metacurrency. Each variant uses different types of stats based on the genre it's trying to emulate.
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ShadowenSnores in the morningLoserdomRegistered Userregular
@Hexmage-PA If you ever need info-dump npcs to leak secret information to your pcs, I feel Imps should work. Shifty devils always willing to sell out their masters for a shot at some more power, but so low on the totem pole that nobody really bothers about them except to kill them out of hand.
One interesting thing I discovered during my research is that at least one D&D source stated devils can only legally destroy another devil if they are at least 9 stations below them in the hierarchy, meaning that if a devil wants to directly harm an imp they themselves need to be at least a pit fiend!
Yes, but you'd be surprised what you can live through.
If a devil committed a crime would they try and get away with it
The way I play it, Infernal law is set-up to reward intelligence, cunning, and strict legalism. You can get away with a lot if you know the law inside and out. Breaking the law is shameful because it means you aren't smart enough to do things the right way.
Similarly, sure you could torture a mortal until they sell their soul just so you'll stop, but why are you resorting to such brutish tactics? You're an intelligent and refined devil, not some savage demon.
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StraightziHere we may reign secure, and in my choice,To reign is worth ambition though in HellRegistered Userregular
I have a question, though I won't be acting on any answers anytime soon, so it's kind of just for fun
Like I've posted about before, my wife is running a D&D game and doing a fantastic job
It's kind of giving me the DM bug, and I think, once we're done with D&D (however long that takes) I want to run a game where people are playing as Agents of SHIELD in the Marvel universe. But I don't know what a good system to use would be?
Do you want any of them to have superpowers themselves, or is this strictly going to be a mundanes versus supers thing?
I was thinking almost definitely just like, secret agent types
Like the pitch for the Agents of SHIELD TV show
In that case, if you're not averse to PbtA systems, I recommend a stripped-down, re-themed Monster of the Week. Reasons:
1. Rules are simple and easy to learn, but flexible.
2. MotW's genre, once you strip away the fantasy trappings, is centrally about teams of mildly-powerful people being outmatched by bigger, badder things as part of self-contained short arcs (that can optionally be linked together into longer stories). That's perfect for Agents of SHIELD. In particular, note that in MotW, there's no such thing (without taking specific advancements) as escaping combat unscathed -- if your players choose to go toe-to-toe with whatever they're facing, they're going to get fucked up without a solid plan. The general tempo of, "Encounter a new threat -> spend time investigating the threat and learning its weaknesses -> put together a plan using what you learned -> execute the plan and try not to die" really fits what SHIELD does on a regular basis, I'd say.
3. The built-in stats are generally representative of the traits that define SHIELD agents: Charm, Cool, Sharp, Tough, Weird. The only change I might suggest to these is renaming "Weird" (though I don't know what it should be called, maybe "Intuition") to represent a character's ability to generally work with things they don't fully understand, like Asgardian tech. This, then, takes the place of MotW's ambiguous magic system.
4. You can strip down the playbooks to remove the magical ones, probably keeping these: Crooked, Expert, Flake, Mundane, Professional, Wronged. The Initiate might also work, if you want to allow them to be an agent of SHIELD who is also a liaison with some other organization, such as the Wakandan government. There are more playbooks in the Tome of Mysteries, but I haven't been able to look at them yet. Apparently there's one called The Gumshoe, which would likely be a good fit here.
5. The magical playbooks you've removed at this point: Chosen, Divine, (Initiate), Monstrous, Spell-Slinger, Spooky. These are fertile ground from which to pull material for the things they are going to encounter. Maybe, somewhere down the road, one of them gets injected with some sort of serum and they pick up a move from the Monstrous book. Maybe they get their hands on an Asgardian weapon and it works like the Spell-Slinger's "Combat Magic".
6. Characters come with a clock, in the form of their Luck bar. It allows them to succeed where it really counts, but when they're eventually out of luck, their time in the story is almost done. This lets them go out in a blaze of self-sacrificial glory, ascend to true superhero status (and therefore out of SHIELD, into the Avengers or similar), or perhaps make a heel turn and join the forces of evil. In any of those cases, their time in the party has come to an end, and it's time for the player to bring in a new agent. If handled properly, this can help keep the story fresh, and has the bonus side effect of automatically creating NPCs with whom the party feels a connection. It's not just, "Oh, here's another super-powered asshole", it's "Oh, this is a super-powered asshole who used to work beside me."
I had initially discounted MotW because I knew it would involve removing several playbooks, but I suppose you do retain a solid number of them.
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WACriminalDying Is Easy, Young ManLiving Is HarderRegistered Userregular
I have a question, though I won't be acting on any answers anytime soon, so it's kind of just for fun
Like I've posted about before, my wife is running a D&D game and doing a fantastic job
It's kind of giving me the DM bug, and I think, once we're done with D&D (however long that takes) I want to run a game where people are playing as Agents of SHIELD in the Marvel universe. But I don't know what a good system to use would be?
Do you want any of them to have superpowers themselves, or is this strictly going to be a mundanes versus supers thing?
I was thinking almost definitely just like, secret agent types
Like the pitch for the Agents of SHIELD TV show
In that case, if you're not averse to PbtA systems, I recommend a stripped-down, re-themed Monster of the Week. Reasons:
1. Rules are simple and easy to learn, but flexible.
2. MotW's genre, once you strip away the fantasy trappings, is centrally about teams of mildly-powerful people being outmatched by bigger, badder things as part of self-contained short arcs (that can optionally be linked together into longer stories). That's perfect for Agents of SHIELD. In particular, note that in MotW, there's no such thing (without taking specific advancements) as escaping combat unscathed -- if your players choose to go toe-to-toe with whatever they're facing, they're going to get fucked up without a solid plan. The general tempo of, "Encounter a new threat -> spend time investigating the threat and learning its weaknesses -> put together a plan using what you learned -> execute the plan and try not to die" really fits what SHIELD does on a regular basis, I'd say.
3. The built-in stats are generally representative of the traits that define SHIELD agents: Charm, Cool, Sharp, Tough, Weird. The only change I might suggest to these is renaming "Weird" (though I don't know what it should be called, maybe "Intuition") to represent a character's ability to generally work with things they don't fully understand, like Asgardian tech. This, then, takes the place of MotW's ambiguous magic system.
4. You can strip down the playbooks to remove the magical ones, probably keeping these: Crooked, Expert, Flake, Mundane, Professional, Wronged. The Initiate might also work, if you want to allow them to be an agent of SHIELD who is also a liaison with some other organization, such as the Wakandan government. There are more playbooks in the Tome of Mysteries, but I haven't been able to look at them yet. Apparently there's one called The Gumshoe, which would likely be a good fit here.
5. The magical playbooks you've removed at this point: Chosen, Divine, (Initiate), Monstrous, Spell-Slinger, Spooky. These are fertile ground from which to pull material for the things they are going to encounter. Maybe, somewhere down the road, one of them gets injected with some sort of serum and they pick up a move from the Monstrous book. Maybe they get their hands on an Asgardian weapon and it works like the Spell-Slinger's "Combat Magic".
6. Characters come with a clock, in the form of their Luck bar. It allows them to succeed where it really counts, but when they're eventually out of luck, their time in the story is almost done. This lets them go out in a blaze of self-sacrificial glory, ascend to true superhero status (and therefore out of SHIELD, into the Avengers or similar), or perhaps make a heel turn and join the forces of evil. In any of those cases, their time in the party has come to an end, and it's time for the player to bring in a new agent. If handled properly, this can help keep the story fresh, and has the bonus side effect of automatically creating NPCs with whom the party feels a connection. It's not just, "Oh, here's another super-powered asshole", it's "Oh, this is a super-powered asshole who used to work beside me."
I had initially discounted MotW because I knew it would involve removing several playbooks, but I suppose you do retain a solid number of them.
Yeah, discounting the Tome of Mysteries, you get to keep 6 or 7 out of 12, which ain't bad. With a little creativity and re-theming, it should be enough to represent most character concepts that would fit within the setting.
If a devil committed a crime would they try and get away with it
Devils are lawful beings, so it depends on whether society considers the crime anathema or simply a minor problem.
A Devil who murders might accept whatever the penalty is because their principles led them to the act in the first place, cognizant of the consequences.
aren't devils lawful in the "obey the letter of law in the most contorted, malicious possible interpretation; try to trick people into agreeing to rules and contracts that they don't fully understand the ramifications of and then gotcha them" sense
If a devil committed a crime would they try and get away with it
Devils are lawful beings, so it depends on whether society considers the crime anathema or simply a minor problem.
A Devil who murders might accept whatever the penalty is because their principles led them to the act in the first place, cognizant of the consequences.
It's only illegal if you get caught, be smart enough and careful enough to not get caught.
If a devil committed a crime would they try and get away with it
Devils are lawful beings, so it depends on whether society considers the crime anathema or simply a minor problem.
A Devil who murders might accept whatever the penalty is because their principles led them to the act in the first place, cognizant of the consequences.
It's only illegal if you get caught, be smart enough and careful enough to not get caught.
That's one way of interpreting a system of laws, yes.
I have a question, though I won't be acting on any answers anytime soon, so it's kind of just for fun
Like I've posted about before, my wife is running a D&D game and doing a fantastic job
It's kind of giving me the DM bug, and I think, once we're done with D&D (however long that takes) I want to run a game where people are playing as Agents of SHIELD in the Marvel universe. But I don't know what a good system to use would be?
Honestly? I think give Chronicles of Darkness/Hunter a look. Supers can be a mismash of powers from the various splat books, while the PCs are mostly mundane
So gonna point out the D&D Law/Chaos axis is not about legal systems so much as it is the values of collective conformity with accepted norms versus individual liberty.
Yesterday I either grabbed from the internet or created whole-cloth the following cleric sub-classes for my D&D campaign setting: Air domain, Artifice Domain, Earth Domain, Evil Domain, Fire Domain, Sea Domain, and Water Domain
I’m being the angel on the shoulder of my friend that wants to DM a game. I’m telling them about other systems and settings, giving them a nudge to do their own thing, while my totally evil wrong friend is telling them about Forgotten Realms.
Don’t @ me, I’m a paragon of role playing virtue.
Endless_Serpents on
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
I mean it wouldn't kill anyone to play something not-D&D every so often
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Blake TDo you have enemies then?Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.Registered Userregular
Posts
I love both of these ideas. I haven't looked at Action Movie World yet, but I'm googling it now.
For the second thing, I'm planning a wild west "protect the town from bandits with revolvers" type adventure later, so there will definitely be some gritty gunslinger stuff available there. The Double-Cross (or a modified version of it) could also make sense as an XP trigger for the players to pick up from this one. Mostly for this chapter though, their level-up consists of whatever equipment they manage to carry out.
Every character is theoretically an actor, and they have access to moves based on what type of characters they typically play in a cliche action movie - gunfighter, burly muscleman, martial artist, wisecrackin' type, that sort of thing. And then of course you have access to a set of basic moves, as is standard for PbtA. Each adventure, however, has a script, and the script unlocks additional moves (as well as gear and relationships, but that's not super important for your purposes). Each player gets to pick one script move for their character, which they will normally lose at the end of the adventure, but you can lock them in as permanent moves as a level up option (instead of picking another move from your playbook).
The way ominous charge/skycleave nova works is that it can only do the latter the round after the former, and it has to lock in its targetting during the former, telegraphing where the (very strong vs a level 4 party) attack will hit
It also shares Reactions with the effects of the magic hammer I gave my fighter last session, the same magic hammer that was described as extremely out of place with its environment and probably belonging to something else. This robot can mimmick one of the hammers effects as a reaction, and if it manages to knock out said fighter and steal it's hammer back... Well, hopefully that won't happen.
Oh, and the mobs that spawn every 20 damage will be on "grapple the PC's in the damage cone" duty.
I'm thinking at 50% health, where the phase switch/music change happens, it gains a one time move where it makes 3 throw attacks at the PC's that also spawn half health Crystal Bone Skeletons, thoughts?
We're 21 sessions in. You'd think that, by this point, we'd have committed to a course of action involving Strahd.
We haven't. We are a force of chaos as we consistently hedge trusting anyone and refuse to commit to a long-term course of action. Major spoilers for the town of Vallaki below.
We end up in a new location. The local innkeeper feels us out and sees that we are unwilling to commit and, so, prepares to leave. I use Divine Intervention to read their surface thoughts. I see what they want. As a bonus to the successful reading, I can magically use suggestion on them. I suggest they hear us out and tell us what we can do to make them trust us.
We get a quest.
I think
we might
just be about to become adventurers.
Eh, while I'm here...
My scheduled gaming session last night became a regular hang out as we don't all see each other as regularly as we used to, which had given me more time to plan my next move
I now have a plan involving infiltrating a theatrical production to save an assassination target, which leads to a missing father, a mistaken-identity sister, and the Vampire that started it all
I'm wanting to do a bit of infernal political intrigue between the archdevils (and spent a lot of time on Thursday researching them), but 1) I'm not sure how to go about giving the players the background info in a way they'll be able to quickly understand, and 2) it's kinda hard to imagine the complicated web of schemes that the archdevils would have cooked up to dick each other over.
Plus there's also still a lich running around.
And I've previously established that a NPC one of the PCs is going after is a servant of Graz'zt.
I haven't been super deep into 5th and don't know your party level. That seems ... strong. Like, I'm looking at that and going "that's a boss fight for sure, hopefully for a party who's up in their teens level wise" but I don't really know how HP scales or what the healing resources of the party are.
Tough sumbitch, though.
Like I've posted about before, my wife is running a D&D game and doing a fantastic job
It's kind of giving me the DM bug, and I think, once we're done with D&D (however long that takes) I want to run a game where people are playing as Agents of SHIELD in the Marvel universe. But I don't know what a good system to use would be?
The party (which includes a daughter of Asmodeus, a paladin attracted to Princess Glasya, and a wizard who wants to take over Stygia from Archduke Levistus) is charged by Glasya with locating Levistus' obelisk and recording his true name so that he may be deposed. She intends for Geryon, the master of Glasya's consort Amon, to regain rulership of Stygia.
However, the PC who wants to rule Stygia himself has secretly been given a shard of the Heart of the Abyss, receiving it from an avatar of Graz'zt. With it he may carve his own true name into the obelisk, though there will certainly be major ramifications if he does. Plus there will likely be other agents of Glasya tailing the party in secret to attack them if they do anything Glasya wouldn't approve of.
d20 modern?
Do you want any of them to have superpowers themselves, or is this strictly going to be a mundanes versus supers thing?
I like Masks a lot, but that is tightly focused on teen heroes and runs off PbtA which puts some folks off.
I like City of Mist, but that is another one with a lot of rules tied to narrative devices, with the gimmick that you are some aspect of a folk tale, legend, or god and a kind of WoD take on what regular folk know about how the world works.
@Hexmage-PA If you ever need info-dump npcs to leak secret information to your pcs, I feel Imps should work. Shifty devils always willing to sell out their masters for a shot at some more power, but so low on the totem pole that nobody really bothers about them except to kill them out of hand.
@SirEtchwarts I was in an Agents of Shield game that used Savage Worlds. With the Super Powers Companion book it worked quite well. Of course that was the game where each PC thought they were the one Hydra Agent on the team, right up until we saw Winter Soldier as a group. So many recriminations!
I was thinking almost definitely just like, secret agent types
Like the pitch for the Agents of SHIELD TV show
I don't love FATE personally, but I feel like some of the inherent pulpiness of FATE might work well for a spy-fi sort of game?
One interesting thing I discovered during my research is that at least one D&D source stated devils can only legally destroy another devil if they are at least 9 stations below them in the hierarchy, meaning that if a devil wants to directly harm an imp they themselves need to be at least a pit fiend!
Also, one source apparently stated that bone devils are the cops of the Hells, and if a devil destroys a bone devil it can be demoted to a lemure and marked to disallow them from ever being promoted again. That really sells that the Hells is about legal authority and more than just power.
In that case, if you're not averse to PbtA systems, I recommend a stripped-down, re-themed Monster of the Week. Reasons:
2. MotW's genre, once you strip away the fantasy trappings, is centrally about teams of mildly-powerful people being outmatched by bigger, badder things as part of self-contained short arcs (that can optionally be linked together into longer stories). That's perfect for Agents of SHIELD. In particular, note that in MotW, there's no such thing (without taking specific advancements) as escaping combat unscathed -- if your players choose to go toe-to-toe with whatever they're facing, they're going to get fucked up without a solid plan. The general tempo of, "Encounter a new threat -> spend time investigating the threat and learning its weaknesses -> put together a plan using what you learned -> execute the plan and try not to die" really fits what SHIELD does on a regular basis, I'd say.
3. The built-in stats are generally representative of the traits that define SHIELD agents: Charm, Cool, Sharp, Tough, Weird. The only change I might suggest to these is renaming "Weird" (though I don't know what it should be called, maybe "Intuition") to represent a character's ability to generally work with things they don't fully understand, like Asgardian tech. This, then, takes the place of MotW's ambiguous magic system.
4. You can strip down the playbooks to remove the magical ones, probably keeping these: Crooked, Expert, Flake, Mundane, Professional, Wronged. The Initiate might also work, if you want to allow them to be an agent of SHIELD who is also a liaison with some other organization, such as the Wakandan government. There are more playbooks in the Tome of Mysteries, but I haven't been able to look at them yet. Apparently there's one called The Gumshoe, which would likely be a good fit here.
5. The magical playbooks you've removed at this point: Chosen, Divine, (Initiate), Monstrous, Spell-Slinger, Spooky. These are fertile ground from which to pull material for the things they are going to encounter. Maybe, somewhere down the road, one of them gets injected with some sort of serum and they pick up a move from the Monstrous book. Maybe they get their hands on an Asgardian weapon and it works like the Spell-Slinger's "Combat Magic".
6. Characters come with a clock, in the form of their Luck bar. It allows them to succeed where it really counts, but when they're eventually out of luck, their time in the story is almost done. This lets them go out in a blaze of self-sacrificial glory, ascend to true superhero status (and therefore out of SHIELD, into the Avengers or similar), or perhaps make a heel turn and join the forces of evil. In any of those cases, their time in the party has come to an end, and it's time for the player to bring in a new agent. If handled properly, this can help keep the story fresh, and has the bonus side effect of automatically creating NPCs with whom the party feels a connection. It's not just, "Oh, here's another super-powered asshole", it's "Oh, this is a super-powered asshole who used to work beside me."
For anyone that needs/wants a quick summary: Dice pool game with variable dice sizes and a metacurrency. Each variant uses different types of stats based on the genre it's trying to emulate.
Yes, but you'd be surprised what you can live through.
The way I play it, Infernal law is set-up to reward intelligence, cunning, and strict legalism. You can get away with a lot if you know the law inside and out. Breaking the law is shameful because it means you aren't smart enough to do things the right way.
Similarly, sure you could torture a mortal until they sell their soul just so you'll stop, but why are you resorting to such brutish tactics? You're an intelligent and refined devil, not some savage demon.
I had initially discounted MotW because I knew it would involve removing several playbooks, but I suppose you do retain a solid number of them.
Yeah, discounting the Tome of Mysteries, you get to keep 6 or 7 out of 12, which ain't bad. With a little creativity and re-theming, it should be enough to represent most character concepts that would fit within the setting.
A Devil who murders might accept whatever the penalty is because their principles led them to the act in the first place, cognizant of the consequences.
It's only illegal if you get caught, be smart enough and careful enough to not get caught.
once
it didn't go well
but it does prove that there's a certain point where devils will straight up break the rules
Probably right around the time they think it's good opportunity to move up a rank
Twitch (I stream most days of the week)
Twitter (mean leftist discourse)
In D&D you get into the whole mess what alignment actually represents
I mean, if you can break the rules and totally get away with it... No witnesses!
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Honestly? I think give Chronicles of Darkness/Hunter a look. Supers can be a mismash of powers from the various splat books, while the PCs are mostly mundane
how are you all doing?
Yesterday I either grabbed from the internet or created whole-cloth the following cleric sub-classes for my D&D campaign setting: Air domain, Artifice Domain, Earth Domain, Evil Domain, Fire Domain, Sea Domain, and Water Domain
Don’t @ me, I’m a paragon of role playing virtue.
Come holidays I am planning on making one or two buildings for terrain purposes. So today I make a jillion bricks as a starting point.
I also got an organiser for all the figures I am.using for curse of strahd.
Satans..... hints.....