The Gaming Den

Stinktopus wrote: "Low Life" is a Savage Worlds campaign setting and the diseased brainchild of author/artist Andy Hopp. You can be the horrifically mutated remains of humanity in a post-post-post-apocalyptic future, or a sentient Twinkie, or something stranger.

I would love this to be done. I regularly have to turn down invites to this game would would love reasons trust were better than "that sounds stupid" and "I still hate savage worlds".

Also, not ossr but he just put out a new edition with pathfinder comparable rules. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/13 ... e-rulebook

And by put out I mean conned people out of money and then failed to come close to his promised dates before inevitably fading away with no product.

Anyone willing to do the Immortals handbook and accompanying monster manual?

Could we get a review of the Savage Worlds core book and why it is shitty? The only complaint I've seen on here is the exploding dice, which is kinda dumb and RNG-wrecking, but if you got rid of that would it be salvageable?

CapnTthePirateG wrote:Could we get a review of the Savage Worlds core book and why it is shitty? The only complaint I've seen on here is the exploding dice, which is kinda dumb and RNG-wrecking, but if you got rid of that would it be salvageable?

The following are reasons that Savage World is shitty:
The way health and damage is handled in combat is unusably bad. If you read the system even briefly you will see that no one could survive even a single combat if it was run honestly. Each hit deals about 1/3rd of your total health and you get weaker as you take damage so characters have all the survivability of a wet paper bag even if they're supposed to be superhero level invulnerable. The only defense is to never be hit and while it's possible with enough system abuse to make characters that just can't ever be hit there is no way to make a character that can get hit and still live. Any character that an enemy could target and shoot would be dead within a couple sessions.

They have a ridiculous set of maneuvers that you can choose to use in combat. None ever see use except "Wild Attack" which makes you more likely to hit so everyone uses it every single attack ever.

Like many "lite" products the powers and abilities are poorly defined. For instance I defy you to explain to me how invisibility works in Savage Worlds. It is totally unclear in the text what happens when an invisible dude walks up to stab you. There are many many instances of vaguely or poorly defined abilities.

There is no indication of what challenges are appropriate for a party. You are given no information as to how many Giant Spiders your Veteran party of 5 is supposed to find challenging.

Basically in general there is nothing to recommend the game because it isn't good and has no features to speak of that are innovative or well done.

deanruel87 wrote: The way health and damage is handled in combat is unusably bad. If you read the system even briefly you will see that no one could survive even a single combat if it was run honestly. Each hit deals about 1/3rd of your total health and you get weaker as you take damage so characters have all the survivability of a wet paper bag even if they're supposed to be superhero level invulnerable. The only defense is to never be hit and while it's possible with enough system abuse to make characters that just can't ever be hit there is no way to make a character that can get hit and still live. Any character that an enemy could target and shoot would be dead within a couple sessions.

This is one of my big objections. Actually playing combat is basically if you get hit once, you become unable to hit anything and will probably die. So everything is either "all PCs just died"or "none of the PCs got hurt" there isn't a lot in between.

Most people end up building people with awesome stealth powers or are impossible to hit. Except new people, they try to build whatever is genre appropriate and die a few times. Especially if they are used to a game where you want a balanced group. "Well we've got a mage, and 3 rogues guess Ill carry a sword" or "Well we've got 4 snipers and a doctor. Ill carry two pistols or something".

Another big one missed is the dice curve. As you get better at stuff, you don't increase linearly. Sometimes the jump is big, sometimes its small. Sometimes when you invest your first rank in stuff you get worse (in more fantastic settings where high stats exist). This plays out in 1 of 3 builds.

1 - The best idea - Hyper specialize in 1 thing. Each member of the party picks 1, maybe 2 things and always wins at it while never attempting other things.

2 - A single member of the party invests up to d4 (the minimum) in a wide variety of skills and is allowed to attempt anything the rest can't.

3 - New players make characters with a balanced array of characters who aren't much better than player 2, but are totally shown up by player 1. Also they die immediatley.

Your party is generally 3 snipers a specialist in whatever interesting thing the setting has (magic/mechs/cars) and a face (who knows a ton of random shit). In western settings its 4 longarms guys and a face. In supers its 3 people with teleport/super speed/ghost powers, 1 with a big pile of random shit, and aquaman. In fantasy its a bunch of rogues/archers and illusionists.

I'm going to make this short and sweet, fuckers.

I've done reviews of Draconomicon and Libris Mortis under the moniker "Ted the Flayer". K already did Fiendish Codex, and I'm going to assume he did a better job that I would do.

No one to my knowledge has done Lords of Madness. I will do this if anyone would want to see it, otherwise I'll fuck myself and go back to /tg/, where I've been slumming since my self-imposed exile from here.

Your move, Den.

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:No one to my knowledge has done Lords of Madness.

Not to rain on your parade, but Frank did a "review of sorts" back when it came out.

It wasn't a full review and I'm sure there is still plenty to say though.

I'd be interested in seeing a review of LoMadness. I pull some stuff from there, but I've never sat down and read it.

I'm going to interpret that as positive feedback. I'll say a bit more than what was said before. I fucking love that terrible fucking book.

Hey, it gave a Graftificer. There's some good stuff in it. The main problem I'm aware of is that Illithids are a jumbled goddamned mess in general.

I'd like a review of Lords of Madness.

I'd love to see a review of the 3E Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting. Not only because I see it being mentioned here and there now that it's clear that WotC is going to basically retcon the setting to pre-4E status, but also because I think it's one of the more interesting books of the 3rd edition era - despite it being introduced by Elminster's statblock (or maybe because of it? Hard to say...).

I'd like to see both of those.

Everything that's being said in the Earthdawn thread is straight jibberish to me. I would like to request an Earthdawn OSSR so I can be a part of the cool kids table.

A proper Earthdawn OSSR is something that I'd like to do with Frank, but I don't know if our schedules permit it.

I'm sure they'll resolve sometime. Keep it in reserve

I'd love to see Bastards and Bloodlines d20 by Green Ronin. It's a book of various half breeds intended to be playable characters. Some stuff includes:

Elf/Giant Eagle
Elf/Unicorn
Elf/Treant
Blink Dog/Halfling
Dwarf/Roper
Dwarf/Gargoyle
Dwarf/Winter Wolf

I'd be curious to see a 3E Forgotten realms OSSR. I own all of the 3rd ed FR books, for better or worse, and am curious what people think of the various rules they introduced.

I think that 3E FR is too convoluted to do an OSSR on. That campaign setting, while not the backbone of 3E D&D, is too woven into its success to be handled with anything short of a Slate Blogs The Bible-style Megareview.

... I say that, but I think that if there's any WotC-stamped d20 property that needs to be reviewed, it's d20 Modern + Urban Arcana. It's not the worst game/setting I've played/seen or even the worst d20 game of that category, but it gets so many fundamental things so fucking wrong that it's just astounding. The Stat-Hero classes, the wealth system, the feat nerfing, the defense bonus system, the gimped magic system, the equipment lists, character vs. class level, the monster and CR system, the mind-melting vehicle system, the action point system... it's like, all of the failure points that 3E D&D were famous for they exacerbated. Except for the magic system -- they fucked that one up in the opposite way.

I'd still like to see Superworld.

radthemad4 wrote:I'd love to see Bastards and Bloodlines d20 by Green Ronin. It's a book of various half breeds intended to be playable characters. Some stuff includes:

Elf/Giant Eagle
Elf/Unicorn
Elf/Treant
Blink Dog/Halfling
Dwarf/Roper
Dwarf/Gargoyle
Dwarf/Winter Wolf

I will consider this. It's a short book, so I may be able to focus enough for a quick review. I do love ranting about the terrible, terrible shit that is LA and how third parties always miscalculated it.

OH FUCK THE MENTAL IMAGES

I'd like to see a from-scratch OSSR of 3rd edition D&D, as if encountered for the first time rather than taken to be the assumed background of all gamers.

Maxus wrote:OH FUCK THE MENTAL IMAGES

Now I'm just tempted to search for images that best illustrate the creation of each half-race...

I'd like to see a from-scratch OSSR of 3rd edition D&D, as if encountered for the first time rather than taken to be the assumed background of all gamers.

The problem there, from scratch, is that 3e.0 was a response to the peculiarities of 2nd edition and other 90's games. And it totally just fixes them all. It's completely and unequivocally awesome including in all the ways it annoys people like Shadzar about how it fixed the 90's RPGs.

But they went too far almost everywhere. It's super-hard to not talk about that. It'd be like reviewing 4e for how it totally dealt with a lot of problems that 3e has, without mentioning that it doesn't actually work as a thing in itself, that the non-combat engine they provided strongly discourages everything it tried to encourage, and the combat engine fixed 3e's win-initiative-or-die system with 20+ round clusterfucks that never resolve (which they totally knew about and thought was good for some reason).



Unless you mean sitting down someone who's never played an RPG at all with 3.5, because the review goes "It's, like, a million words, I'm not reading all that." See also 4th edition and 5th edition.