The Gaming Den

When I was hunting down some annoying differences between 3.5 and PF, I noticed that the d20SRD.org is not only still alive, but kicking as well. There are a couple of neat generators now for names, dungeons, encounters and all the stuff you might want. It seems like a cooperation with donjon.bin.sh since it's all directly copied from there, but hey.

Koumei wrote:So it turns out someone else has made a Disgaea game, using Pathfinder. I am confident mine is better, for three reasons:
1. Obviously I'd think my version is better
2. Pathfinder
3. I had some Den input on it

I am more mildly amused than anything else, and it speaks to an obvious need that exists. Also they had the good sense to make the same kind of dumb references that I did for silly ability names, because you sort of need to do that with Disgaea.

Should I do a review thread of it or something? Would that be in any way interesting and not just an exercise in futility and hating "someone else's stuff"?

Link that shit
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Prak wrote:https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/54 ... age-worlds

Whhhhhhhyyyyyyyyy?

It got funding and a shit tonne of stretch goals.

On the quest for open source artwork for fantasy/occult RPG's, I came across wikiart and google art project

http://www.wikiart.org/
https://www.google.com/culturalinstitut ... rt-project

Type in stuff like "Satan", "demon", "spirit", "Angel", "Babylon", "vampire", and you'll find a lot of nice paintings and occasional woodblock print.


Jean Delville

The symbolist artists are particularly great as they paint lots of monsters, heroes, and cute waifu girls. It's far from complete though, I was expecting to find Henry Justice Ford's really clean black and white fantasy inked illustrations but didn't find 'em. But there's still plenty of Dore and Kuniyoshi.

Some particular photos are marked not for reproduction though, Time/Life has a bunch of nice photos and scans of old art that they won't allow to be reused for commercial reasons.

Some dude's 4e heartbreaker has the technical integration we've talked about before. So that's a proof of concept, at least.

I spent like 20 minutes browsing that site and I don't think I read a single actual rule. Most of it is pages describing how awesome this game is, if only there were a goddamn book you could read to learn how to play it.

Axebird wrote:I spent like 20 minutes browsing that site and I don't think I read a single actual rule. Most of it is pages describing how awesome this game is, if only there were a goddamn book you could read to learn how to play it.

You have way more patience than me. I nope'd out after like a minute. Example B) of bad site design, and how to overplay your hand with too much going on on your page.

I found it, let it be known that I am the master of wandering around websites here. Looks to me like it's effects-based in the least cool possible way: https://fyxtrpg.com/build-fyxt-rpg-char ... er-powers/

Foxwarrior wrote:I found it, let it be known that I am the master of wandering around websites here. Looks to me like it's effects-based in the least cool possible way: https://fyxtrpg.com/build-fyxt-rpg-char ... er-powers/

So, it's one of those "here's the effect, you describe it how you want" deals?

page wrote:Take for example a Power that affects 1 Target, 3 Spaces away, and does 3d6 Hit Points Damage. The player can describe those effects however they want to. Here are just a few examples of how to describe this Power.

• Rock Toss: You lob a rock at an enemy for damage.
• Call Lightning: You summon lightning from the sky and electrocute an enemy for damage.
• Mark Target: Lighting up your target with a laser range finder, your unseen drone drops a missile for damage.
• Blinding from Above: After speaking to your animal companion, it swoops down from sky, tearing at your enemies for damage.
• Verbal Lashing: In a loud and brutal tirade of insults, you sap your enemies’ will to fight, doing damage.
• Silly Slap: Your elastic arms stretch out and slap your enemy for damage.

Hell, even "Silly Slap" highlights the whole Captain Hobo thing.

Captain Hobo is only the tip of the iceberg really. There's also the fact that this is supposed to be a role-playing game, so the socio-political implications of the various powers actually matter. Both throwing a rock and calling in a drone strike may well do 3d6 damage, but only the guy who can throw rocks is allowed near the White House.

In addition, it shows that the game doesn't bother to have enough complexity to implement side aspects of each power. There are a lot of ways in which using a laser to guide a drone missile strike is not like throwing rocks, even throwing rocks really well: you could potentially lob a rock over a wall or at someone hiding in a smoke cloud; you should probably be able to tell the drone to keep firing at a spot even after you switch to doing something else; if you're fighting someone indoors, the first missile should probably just blow a hole in the ceiling. That sort of thing.

RobbyPants wrote:

Foxwarrior wrote:I found it, let it be known that I am the master of wandering around websites here. Looks to me like it's effects-based in the least cool possible way: https://fyxtrpg.com/build-fyxt-rpg-char ... er-powers/

So, it's one of those "here's the effect, you describe it how you want" deals?

page wrote:Take for example a Power that affects 1 Target, 3 Spaces away, and does 3d6 Hit Points Damage. The player can describe those effects however they want to. Here are just a few examples of how to describe this Power.

• Rock Toss: You lob a rock at an enemy for damage.
• Call Lightning: You summon lightning from the sky and electrocute an enemy for damage.
• Mark Target: Lighting up your target with a laser range finder, your unseen drone drops a missile for damage.
• Blinding from Above: After speaking to your animal companion, it swoops down from sky, tearing at your enemies for damage.
• Verbal Lashing: In a loud and brutal tirade of insults, you sap your enemies’ will to fight, doing damage.
• Silly Slap: Your elastic arms stretch out and slap your enemy for damage.

Hell, even "Silly Slap" highlights the whole Captain Hobo thing.

Does this: "•Blinding from Above: After speaking to your animal companion, it swoops down from sky, tearing at your enemies for damage"

Require the Companion to fly? Can your pet pig do that?

Pretty sure you don't have to spend any character resources on having an animal companion. So... yes. And your pet Azathoth can do it too.

Dunno if anyone cares, but there's a Plane Shift pdf for Innistrad now. It's of course 5e, but I'm going to be cribbing from it when I get back to writing a 3.X Innistrad campaign file.

Link is to the file I found googling, I couldn't find it on WotC's site, and Geek and Sundry fucked up the linking in their article about it.

So, I'm looking at Plane Shift: Innistrad and...

*sigh*

Humans have playable stats, and come in four flavors, and that's cool and all. I'm behind giving humans slightly different traits based on culture or whatever.

But werewolves, vampires and geists are all monsters. Werewolves are challenge 3, vampires and geists challenge 4 (with 10 FUCKING HITDICE for geists), despite there being 1/1 werewolves, vampires and spirits in Innistrad (and, sure, the werewolves gain more power when they transform, but fucking still, they are werewolves that can be ganked by basic humans).

Goddamnit, D&D. Get your collective head out of your collective ass.

Edit: they made Innistrad vampires undead.

I don't think it's unreasonable to classify Innistrad Vampires as Undead. They count as Vampires for everything from every set that has cards that care about such things and they don't count as humans any more (while Werewolves do count as humans before they transform).

But basically if you can't play a Reckless Waif or an Insolent Neonate, you're not playing Innistrad. You just aren't. Those are 1 cost 1/1s whose shtick is that they are inexperienced newcomers to adventure. If that isn't a starting character your RPG is fucked.

Geists I could go either way on. There are definitely Geists that are CR1 or its equivalent, but I could see them not being playable characters. Depends really on how you wanted to represent the location locking and repetition that a lot of the Geists seem to be doing.

-Username17

Fake name generator:
http://www.fakenamegenerator.com/

Handy for generating details for NPC's in modern settings

FrankTrollman wrote:I don't think it's unreasonable to classify Innistrad Vampires as Undead. They count as Vampires for everything from every set that has cards that care about such things and they don't count as humans any more (while Werewolves do count as humans before they transform).

But basically if you can't play a Reckless Waif or an Insolent Neonate, you're not playing Innistrad. You just aren't. Those are 1 cost 1/1s whose shtick is that they are inexperienced newcomers to adventure. If that isn't a starting character your RPG is fucked.

Geists I could go either way on. There are definitely Geists that are CR1 or its equivalent, but I could see them not being playable characters. Depends really on how you wanted to represent the location locking and repetition that a lot of the Geists seem to be doing.

-Username17

I can kind of see that reasoning on vampires, but the fluff of Innistrad makes a big deal about Innistrad vamps not being undead. I think it could go either way. I would make Innistrad vampires living, probably humanoids. But if it was the one thing that didn't hold to Innistrad canon fluff, I could easily overlook it.

http://i.4cdn.org/tg/1470629533672.png

So, just saw this little piece of cringy bullshit. I know I shouldn't care, given that it's by The Hack, but I still can't help but be annoyed. All the excuses in the world won't make his works worth a damn.

The line "this ties into the huge success of 5e and the growth of RPGs" tells you all you need to know there. Unless you're talking about computer RPGs, neither of these are at all true.

If he stopped at post 4 and was only talking about online communities, he'd be sniffing around an obvious point.

Do... do people really learn baseball or soccer by watching? I literally cannot imagine playing either of those games (but especially baseball, god, what a clusterfuck) without at least being told base rules, and then every time an extra rule comes up someone who already knows it has to tell you.

I'm just baffled by that claim and I can't tell if my sports experience is super abnormal or if his is....

Yeah, the whole "5e is doing great" thing is the main giveaway that everything that isn't a deliberate lie is completely deluded.

Hes the guy behind 5e. Of course everything is amazing. His job depends on people thinking its amazing. He might have to go get a real one if someone finds out it isnt. Why would you expect him to say anything else

Just noticed the Savage RIFTS kickstarter, I am surprised siembieda allowed such a partnership. Never played Savage Worlds but is it a decent fit for RIFTS?


Anyone played this Fantasy Flight Battles of Westeros hexgrid game?
https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.c ... ok_eng.pdf

1: yes, things changed with online discussion (which TSR had always tried to brutally murder in infancy), like you didn't need to own $2000 worth of books to understand where the most broken options in the game lay, you could just read their forums.

2: 3e, into 4e, is a rather big book. The rules however aren't particularly dense compared to GURPS or Champions, a great deal of the game is "d20 + mods >= DC", which is not rules-heavy in any sense.

3: The 80's and 90's have GURPS and Champions and Shadowrun and Rifts and fucking Rolemaster and I have no idea why Mearls thinks any those games are simpler than 3e or 4e. Rolemaster has several books full of cross-referencing lookup tables for everything.

4: I was online for the transition to 3e. so
a) 2nd edition D&D chat was nothing but arguments about how the rules worked, for ten years, and people posting their characters who usually abused some poorly written rule.
b) 3e D&D chat didn't take long to stop arguing about rules because people could understand them instead, and the characters mostly just did obvious things that would obviously work.

5: OSR was pretty tiny, and indie games are necessarily small without rules for most things because it's one guy writing it in his spare time. That has almost always been true. But what really arose from 3e was the OGL movement, where tonnes of money was made turning out the character options that people actually wanted to play with, until Wizards put them all out of business.

6: No one cares about your actual play.

7: No one cares about your actual streaming play.

8: Mike likes to watch people streaming play, rather than just play, I guess.

9: He means, he's given up trying not to make broken rules, and will only allow discussion of if people are happy playing the game to enter his brain. People who aren't happy don't play, so he never sees their play, so there are no unhappy people, problem solved.

10: they threw out a bunch of rules that no one put on youtube.

11: "it's not broken because you can fix it."

12: "people wanted us to fix the rules, but we're not going to."

13: "because it's not broken because you can fix it."

14: "This was an advertisement for GenCon, please show up."

15: "Don't argue, fuck you."

15+1: "there aren't even rules, just play, woohoo."

15+2: actually, Mike, the fucking referees for sports need to read the rulebook, it's part of their terms of employment that they know all of the rules really well, they sit tests and shit for it, and so do the fucking players so they don't break the rules and cost their team the game.

15+3: really, the coaches, players, referees, in the NBA, they have all read the rulebook, most of them could fucking well quote you chapter and verse, including relevant legal opinion, they know exactly how far out they can stick their hip, in addition to the years and years of training. It's a super-bad metaphor.

OgreBattle wrote:Just noticed the Savage RIFTS kickstarter, I am surprised siembieda allowed such a partnership. Never played Savage Worlds but is it a decent fit for RIFTS?

No. Quite apart from having stupid epicycles in its RNG, Savage Worlds doesn't really scale like RIFTS needs to.

Anyone played this Fantasy Flight Battles of Westeros hexgrid game?
https://images-cdn.fantasyflightgames.c ... ok_eng.pdf

Yes, it's a reimplementation of their BattleLore system, which is itself basically Command & Colors. It's pretty good.