Messages

1

RPGs / Re: What system to play "How to train your dragon"

« on: September 10, 2015, 12:26:46 PM »

It's a cut down one roll engine, so it's not bad.  Not nearly as bad as GURPS for complexity anyway.  It's not a loosy-goosy as FATE though.

If you're like me and most people I've played with the only things that are gonna give you a little bit of trouble are monster creation and multiple actions, so bone up on those bits and you should be fine.

If all else fails for dragon creation just take the sample monsters in the book and re-skin them.  They've also got a fun one roll monster creation table in the book if you want to just let the dice decide what bizarre mutant dragons show up.  That's also pretty in keeping with the weird designs in that movie.

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RPGs / Re: What system to play "How to train your dragon"

« on: September 10, 2015, 09:45:32 AM »

Monsters is perfect for How to Train Your Dragon.

-You can build your crazy dragon breeds and their bizarre superpowers.
-You can see the relationship rules in the first movie as Hiccup's relationship with his Dad gets used before dangerous scenes to help/encourage him, and how it gets shocked and damaged from Hiccup's sneaking off with Toothless early on.
-The end of the movie is a pretty good example of hiccup taking a ton of scar damage to his FEET location and the resultant permanent loss of 1 die and how to rep it.

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RPGs / Re: Any tips on running Dread?

« on: September 10, 2015, 09:37:04 AM »

Late response, hope it's still useful -

With lots of players come up with dangerous pulls often.  Like, more than you think you should.  If your players are fairly good at this Jenga thing it's gonna take a LONG time to get deaths.  Like 10 pulls or more to get a single death.  This is gonna effect game time more than you think it might.

With a group of 9 people, if you get them to make a pull every 5 minutes, assuming this 10 pulls to kill someone bit, it's gonna take you 50 minutes to kill a character.  Assuming 3 hours of game time, that's only 3 dead out of the 9. 

I know Dread is all about the... dread... over the actual killing, but you've got to have at least a few casualties by the end of the game or I've found that everyone's left thinking "that was a fun adventure" rather than "that was brutal and horrifying!"

Granted I've only run Dread twice for groups the size you're talking about, but that was my main take away point.  (That's Dread specific anyway.)

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Red Markets Alpha Playtest

« on: August 27, 2015, 10:55:18 AM »

Redundant post with the old Gencon one, but what they hey?  Home group's interested in playing Red Markets.

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RPGs / Re: Red Markets at GenCon/Upcoming Beta

« on: August 27, 2015, 10:15:14 AM »

Probably a bit late to this party, but my home group seemed interested in the Red Markets playtest.  Can I haz beta docs plz?

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General Chaos / Re: PAX East 2015

« on: December 08, 2014, 11:05:03 PM »

I am dissapoint.

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General Chaos / Re: What Vidja games are you playing?

« on: November 27, 2014, 07:45:58 PM »

As of the current steam sale I've bought:
-How to survive - neat wilderness survival game... with some zombies too I guess.
-Five Nights at Freddy's 2 - because my wife likes watching me be scared.
-Jamestown - bullet hell game fighting the conquistadors on Mars.
-Crypt of the Necrodancer - rhythm game dungeon crawling.
-Payday 2 - finally caved. Anyone still playing this?

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General Chaos / Re: Image Thread

« on: October 31, 2014, 01:33:49 PM »

Preview clip of Avengers: Infinity War:

Glad I'm not the only one who thought of Gurran Lagan when they broke out Tony's Hulkbuster armor.  It's like Russian nesting dolls, but with mecha

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RPGs / Re: The mind control PC thing

« on: September 18, 2014, 05:02:46 PM »

It's Ross' ruling specifically to prevent the following scenario:

PC Evil Bard: "Guy's, we've totally gotta burn down that orphanage."
PC Paladin: "That sounds pretty evil, I don't want to do that."
PC Evil Bard: "I roll persuasion to convince Paladin Bob this is a good idea." *rolls* "Natural 20!
GM: "Sorry Paladin Bob, he rolled a 20, your character is convinced."

Basically it's really boring and lazy.  It's also really weird to imagine that you can convince anyone of anything if only you roll high enough on a single skill.  With a single zinger you can convince someone to abandon cherished beliefs or commit suicide...

Doesn't make any sense at all unless it's a literal superpower and part of the character.  Not just a random skill roll.

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RPGs / Re: Serious injuries question

« on: September 15, 2014, 09:13:16 AM »

For Coc I'm a fan of the old "first aid check to heal 1d3 hit points" after one of those events.  They have essentially suffered from Schrodinger's injury.  If they roll well - maybe it wasn't a break, possibly just a bad sprain and a twisted knee or something.  If they roll poorly, it's still a break, but something that they can quick tie a splint to and keep walking around on.

People in real life can walk around for a while with some surprisingly bad injuries.  Especially when their lives are on the line.  Adrenaline and pain killers go a long way.

Another option is to temporarily allow them to move around at full speed when they really need to, but to call for a SAN roll as the agony of trying to run on an injured leg makes the monster chasing you that much more traumatic.

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General Chaos / Re: Best GUMSHOE rules?

« on: September 12, 2014, 10:00:32 AM »

My recommendation would be to add cherries for every skill and the critical hit rules from NBA.

I've seen some fights feel like they drag in base gumshoe due to the way they scale damage.  Unarmed is d6-2 and swords/chair legs/knives are d6-1, so it's entirely possible to go round upon round of doing 1 or NO  damage, even if you spent points to make sure the hit lands.  With critical hit rules there's less of an annoying sense of waste that you spent your precious points for no reason.

Cherries are golden because they give an incentive to put 8 points in things besides athletics.  Ken Hite wrote a bunch of cherries for Trail of Cthulhu that you can find for free on the Pelgrane site.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: The RPPR Catchphrase, In-joke, and Obscure Reference Appreciation Station

« on: August 22, 2014, 02:48:01 PM »

Is there an origin story for that "scrape...SCRAPE...SCRAAAAAPE..." thing Tom does occasionally?

Anything in particular or just a general sound of some psychopath ominously sharpening a knife?

13

RPGs / Re: M&M 3e question

« on: July 24, 2014, 09:17:33 AM »

Never bought hero lab.  Might have to look into it, keep hearing rave reviews.  I do agree about the power profiles book though.  It's pretty invaluable for figuring out how to build some stuff that's not super intuitive.

Possibly a bit boring, but my favorite entry was super strength; largely because it's a power that TONS of folks buy, and the whole thing is about the stuff you can do with it besides "hit people really hard."  Which is mostly what folks use it for.

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RPGs / Re: M&M 3e question

« on: July 22, 2014, 01:33:54 PM »

Biggest issues I see people having with M&M (and superhero games in general honestly) is character creation.  Doesn't surprise me that the first question from this thread from way back is on figuring out character creation.

Personally, my recommendation is to make liberal use of the example characters in the book and just reskin everything.  Don't try to build a character from scratch, start with one of the examples.  Once you've got an idea how to build powers, take one of the examples and just swap a power or two out. 

Been in a bunch of supers games that never got off the ground because folks couldn't figure out how to build their special snowflake character.  It's superheros, there's no shame in being derivative.  Don't bang your head against the wall trying to figure out how to build a quantum probability controller when there's a perfectly good psychic right there in the book that will work just fine.

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RPGs / Re: M&M 3e question

« on: July 18, 2014, 02:57:36 PM »

Actually Power Level doesn't limit total points. Normally you scale up PL every 15 points but you don't have to.

True enough.  You could always have a street level game where the enforced caps are for PL8 but people get more points for buying more powers/skills/abilities/gadgets.  That'd be pretty good for "Batman year one" type games.