Messages

61

General Chaos / Re: List of Caleb's Interviews?

« on: June 27, 2016, 06:47:18 PM »

Lost of good stuff. That Legends of Tabletop interview was my favorite (not counting ours!). It gave me some good ideas about using stuff from Don't Rest Your Head in one of my Civil War scenarios.

62

RPGs / Re: Hacking Red Market question.

« on: June 21, 2016, 08:56:49 PM »

That's a super cool time travel idea.

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RPGs / Re: Hacking Red Market question.

« on: June 20, 2016, 06:43:52 PM »

Those sound like great ideas, for both the cyberpunk and espionage variations. I particularly like having it as a spendable resource, like the Roach can apparently do in Red Markets now.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: The Strangest Places You've Listened to RPPR?

« on: June 17, 2016, 03:07:57 PM »

Never thought to listen to podcasts at the dentist. Might have made my wisdom teeth extraction more bearable.

It would beat the shitty daytime television they always have on at mine. I'll try it next time. Fortunately back when I had my own wisdom teeth pulled ten years or so ago, they knocked my ass out cold.

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RPGs / Re: What should I run this in?

« on: June 11, 2016, 03:39:30 PM »

Thanks guys! The suggestions are great. So great in fact that my wallet decided to take a vacation and I can no longer be responsible for it's actions. Will probably end up giving it a shot in torchbearer. Never played any of the burning wheel games but it looks to match what i'm going for to a bit of a tee.

I got to play Torchbearer once at a con. The first time we went into a dungeon, we got robbed by skeletons in the first room and ended up even poorer than we'd started. We rested up, tried again, and got TPK'd in the second room. It was pretty great.

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General Chaos / Re: Image Thread

« on: June 11, 2016, 03:31:19 PM »

For those of us that don't speak French, what's that Justin Trudeau pun?

67

RPGs / Re: Technical Difficulties Gaming Podcast: Red Markets Beta Campaign: The Reformers

« on: June 07, 2016, 09:33:51 PM »

I like that take on the cult. They'd make a very dangerous main antagonist in a job. Maybe the job is to extract and deprogram a particular member? So a shootout risks killing the paycheck.

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RPGs / Re: Watcha gonna do? Delta Green: Agent's Handbook is coming for you!

« on: June 07, 2016, 09:31:08 PM »

Yay, more evil Nodens takes. I like it. I've used Nodens in a Civil War scenario. He's got a cult that looks plenty weird, inhuman and fanatical, but happens to be pointed at something even worse, namely an avatar of Nyarlathotep. My take is that Nodens doesn't care about humans any more than any other Great Old One. He just treats them like bullets rather than snacks.

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

« on: June 07, 2016, 09:03:49 PM »

I support making Ludwig the Dronkey the official Red Markets mascot character.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Red Markets Playtest Campaign: Fallen Flag

« on: June 07, 2016, 09:02:13 PM »

Question about setting.

If DHQS is the ultimate antagonists for the players in the settting (clandestine goverment agency dedicated to ensure that there are no orginized civilization/survivor resistance and unpersoning of anyone in the loss) how can any taker group ever work for them without distroying their retirement plan? It seems your branded by the devil for life because he caught you trying to sneak into his house. The end result being joinning them and sent right back out on missions or being killed as a security risk.

Would it be any better working for the moths or we talking high fuctioning driven refugee that needs shit done until you die.

It would seem the way to survive in red markets is to not engage with any of the major players At All, And just scootch by into the safezone. You need both to live, moths for ubic and DHQS for bounty but neither are your friend and will get you killed.

I'm not Caleb, but seeing the DHQS as nothing but ultimate antagonists is only one possible choice that the Market could make when running the setting. In your game, they could be less hostile and ruthless than they are in the Brutalists Maybe they're trying to extinguish all organized Enclaves, or maybe they're trying to pick certain ones to grant official Reclamation status to. Or maybe some parts of the Agency are doing one or the other of those things, or completely different things, or are just so inefficient and unaccountable that they're not really doing anything with a single discernible purpose.

The fundamental fact for Takers is that DHQS needs jobs done, and they have a lot of money. Yes, it's pretty dangerous working for the Feds, but that's who has the money.

71

RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: June 02, 2016, 09:40:14 PM »

Sometimes it just doesn't occur to the player to screw over their fellow players.

As to Synthenia, the money was to keep the price of the stability drugs down to affordable levels in their own enclave, thus keeping their home base from having instability problems.

As to the Ivory Plains folks, well I can only speak from my experiences, but as my levels of hostility seemed to match the Brutalists, maybe it'll be instructive. There is something incredibly of putting about the hypocrisy of rich self-righteous jerks who claim membership in Christianity (a religion which preaches compassion for the poor, humility, and doing good deeds) justifying their their distain for the poor through prosperity heresy and using folks being poor as evidence that they are insufficiently Christian to be worthy of assistance. In addition, there was a strong 'conform and accept our believes or you're not people' vibe I was getting from Ivory Plains. Well, maybe specifically Pastor Tomlinsinburg. Which for me as someone who does not naturally conform to mainline norms in a variety of areas is flat out terrifying. Or would be if I wasn't so used to it as a day-to-day reality. It's like Caleb's roofer analogy: at some point it just becomes your baseline.

I think I understand that, and I think Caleb did a pretty great job of making Pastor Tomlinsenberg hateful. But it wasn't like they were just going to kill off the church folks. All those poor helpless people in the slums were going to die, too. Maybe they never got a chance to develop any empathy with those people, since they were only ever dealing directly with Tomlinsenberg and his cronies.

Which leads to a stray observation: a big part of the whole campaign's tension comes from how willing the Brutalists are to work for really horrible employers, and Caleb testing their limits on that. At least the Grimecloth farmers seem like fundamentally okay guys.

72

RPGs / Re: Technical Difficulties Gaming Podcast: Red Markets Beta Campaign: The Reformers

« on: June 02, 2016, 06:25:55 PM »

@Gorkamorka

No worries! For the Abberents and Cults I had to fill in a lot of gaps for what's been written thus far, and I know I took a leap of logic or two. i envisioned that some of the old Candymen were victims of Patient Zero prior to the Archivists, with half or less being Arvhivists. The insane Archvists worship the Candyman and seek to become it when close to death, and the same ones keep the insane ones complacent and not 'let's go spread His will! And by will I mean molten caramel!'

I'll fully admit that I'm still working out the bugs in my GM style. I'm still pleased with how the cult and Abberent turned out, and hopefully will do better in the future.

As a player, the specific motivations and origins of the cultists didn't really really matter much to me. Freebird sure as heck didn't want to stick around long enough to try to understand them. I found them to be a very effective little horror scene; if we were going to use them as more central elements in the story -- for example, if our contract were to extract and deprogram a particular member -- then they would probably need a more thorough development. I can understand how the vaguer parts of their story could be more noticeable for a listener.

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RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: June 02, 2016, 06:17:23 PM »

Gorkamorka: I had that same thought about the drug score. I was a little unclear as to why they felt like they had to pay Sythenia the drug money. To keep her from getting mad at them? A 9mm to the skull would have solved that problem a lot more cheaply.

On the other hand, I was a little surprised by how hostile they were to the Ivory Plains folks in the Episode 9. Okay, so they've got a bunch of rich self-righteous jerks surrounded by impoverished masses...which makes them different from Le Corbusier how, exactly? Maybe in degree of success, I guess.

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Role Playing Public Radio Podcast / Re: Better Angels: The Chosen Few

« on: June 02, 2016, 06:04:45 PM »

Awesome campaign premise.

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RPGs / Re: Redmarket. The ideas I get while listening to the actual plays.

« on: May 30, 2016, 01:46:08 AM »

Ok, we've got a bunch of people who played and ran the beta here. I asked this in the Kickstarter update it was in, but I'm curious as to your take on this.

Simply put, the Profit mechanic is very very nice, but it falls down for me in one particular place - combat damage location.

Damage itself, as whatever the Black is, is good. But location is problematic, simply because the distribution of successes will orient damage towards legs (because lower numbers on Red are more likely to be successes) when Takers attack, and when Takers fail to dodge (because, of course, it's more likely to be higher numbers on Red if you fail), the damage will be smaller and the locations will be higher.

What's your suggested mechanical fix to give a better distribution? Should damage location be rolled seperately after the combat roll?

Yes, this has been a very well-discussed issue through the beta. It came up in The Reformers campaign a lot. I think Caleb's planning on simply adjusting the hit location ranges, so it's something like only one number for each limb and head, and the rest torso. Personally, I think I would reroll for location instead. I think that's a very simple solution that doesn't slow the game down but adds a nice little moment of suspense.