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Pen and Paper Role Playing Games (Warning: May contain Dungeons and/or Dragons)


SirFozzie

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We just finished our Electric Bastionland RPG campaign last night. We've been playing it for our actual play podcast. I highly recommend the system to anyone. It's so light and full of great concepts for players and GMs to sink their teeth into.

One of the elements that makes it special is that the party begins the game in debt 10K dollars to some entity. This entity is derived at character creation. And I can't state how much this debt changes how people play the game. It really activates players and makes them engage with the world differently. Everything becomes something they can exploit for cash.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Really enjoying the content in EE.  Not a big fan of how Keith handles Artificer infusions, though.  He makes Artificers use tools and widgets as spell foci while I take a more "Full Metal Alchemist" approach and turn infusions into mini-rituals.

I also swap out some of the Evocation and Necromancy spells in their master list in favor of Conjuration, Divination, Abjuration, Illusion, and Transmutation.  I try to tweak Artificer spells so that they require no material component and balance them by increasing the casting time slightly so that you get that good "Edward Elric tracing glowing sigils on the ground" feel.

Edited by J.T.
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Seeing that Rock of Bral map makes me really irrationally happy.  The original was one of my favorite 2E sourcebooks, just a really detailed description of a place, its people, and how it works.

Spelljammer is the best because it's D&D at it's absolute dumbest and it fuckin' rules.  Where else can you get a load of space hippos rolling up in a ship shaped like a squid loaded with dangerous, experimental cannons?

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  • 3 months later...

So, the final book of d20 Kids shows turned rpg is out, and I have two (GI Joe and Power Rangers), and the third one in PDF (Transformers). Looks really nice too.

 

also, they're releasing a new 5th edition d&d version of Legend of the Five Rings because.. 5th edition is dolla dolla bills yo.

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Yeah, Paizo is releasing a couple of the big Pathfinder modules for 5e too. It's bizarre how dominant that one game is in the market.

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  • 5 weeks later...

The origin story for the Hadozee that offended people was a c&p from the 80s. It's very colonial, lots of Slavery and White Saviour stuff in there. 

  • The first hadozees were timid mammals no bigger than housecats. Hunted by larger natural predators, the hadozees took to the trees and evolved wing-like flaps that enabled them to glide from branch to branch. Several hundred years ago, a wizard visited Yazir, the hadozee home world, with a small fleet of spelljamming ships. Under the wizard’s direction, apprentices laid "magic traps and captured dozens of hadozees". The wizard fed the captives an experimental elixir that enlarged them and turned them into sapient, bipedal beings. The elixir had the side effect of intensifying the hadozees’ panic response, making them more resilient when harmed. The wizard’s plan was to create an army of enhanced hadozee warriors for sale to the highest bidder. But instead, the wizard’s apprentices(Liberals) grew fond of the hadozees and helped them escape. The apprentices and the hadozees were forced to kill the wizard, after which they fled, taking with them all remaining vials of the wizard’s experimental elixir. With the help of their liberators, the hadozees returned to their home world and used the elixir to create more of their kind. In time, all hadozee newborns came to possess the traits of the enhanced hadozees. Then, centuries ago, hadozees took to the stars, leaving Yazir’s fearsome predators behind.
     
     
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  • 2 weeks later...

So, I'm in the middle of a Pathfinder 2nd Edition online campaign via Foundry. We're mere level 1 folks starting the campaign, and our healer (an investigator type_, has had horrible luck with his treat injury rules... his risky surgery ability can heal, or if he fails the skill roll, damage the person further.) In two attempts to heal my Dwarf Fighter, he's failed both times, and both times did the maximum damage (8 points) to me. That's significant but not deadly, (start with like 22), but you know, already wounded. Between that and his Blunderbuss doing splash damage and his firing it at folks my character is in melee with, has led to some.. terse exchanges.

"Ye shot me! AGAIN!"

"I was trying to Vaccinate you!"

"Ye vaccinate with needles, not bullets!!!!!"

"Are you saying you want me to load needles in my blunderbuss?"

"If you do, I'm gonna see if it can be applied rectally, cuz I'm gonna shove it up..."

And:

"If there was such thing as a PathfinderYelp listing for healers, I'd SO give you a one star scathing review!"

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  • 2 weeks later...

I know the feeling. Someone over at SA volunteered to run us through shadows of Alkenzaar. If I ever could figure out how to do so online, I want to run Kingmaker PF2E (or hell, even using the D&D 5E bestiary they put out for kingmaker and run it in D*D 5th edition)

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Has anyone ever played any Mork Borg? A friend on Discord is trying to put a session together for Sunday and I know nothing about the system. 

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54 minutes ago, AxB said:

Has anyone ever played any Mork Borg? A friend on Discord is trying to put a session together for Sunday and I know nothing about the system. 

It's pretty rules light, if you have any experience playing an RPG, you can probably get the hang of it pretty quickly. Anything you want to accomplish is given a DR(Difficulty Rating), you roll a D20 + Ability Score Modifier to beat the DR. It's also pretty deadly, but character creation is quick so you can hop back in after getting obliterated. So either play smart or be ready to go out in a blaze of glory.

Since it's very old school inspired, the game play will be more "rulings" over "rules", with your game master calling it as they see it within reason. This can annoy folks, but if you don't have a dick GM on a power trip it should be a fun time. You might find it more creatively liberating to not have to consult a 300 page book for exact wording when you want your character to suffocate a monster in its sleep, only to have to google the question to see if anyone else has asked it.

 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 2 months later...

I feel bad for just about everyone involved in all of this except for those at the very very top of WOTC/Hasbro.

Though I'm interested in what appears the rebranding of Dungeons and Dragons as an online ecosystem, one that you subscribe to like a video game, and with an AI GM, engage with like a video game as well(complete with micro transactions and lootboxes!).

It's seems that the OGL fiasco was more to divorce D&D from 3rd party creators, to make it appear that the One D&D Virtual Table Top is the only platform in which you can play the "real game."

It reminds me of Gygax/TSR at their most litigious, telling players "If you're not playing by the AD&D ruleset, you're not actually playing D&D."

The good news is that those who enjoy Table Top Role Playing Games aren't really left in the cold. The game is still ours and can be played with no official oversight. But it's a sad end of an era.

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2 hours ago, piranesi said:

It sucks when a relatively obscure pastime or entertainment form gets popular. 

It's like you can almost hear Capitalism waking up like Smaug and sniffing the air and saying "what's this then?"

I mean, it sucks, but it's awesome. Like I can't tell you how many conversations I've had with people that went something like this:

"Yeah I play D&D"

"Oh really, I always wanted to try that."

And then we were playing D&D. If it hadn't been popular that conversation may never happen.

So the bright side is, ttrpg are more popular than ever, which means more ways to have the most fun on the planet with the most amount of people willing to try it.

The dark side is, there's one system that is synonymous with RPGs, and the people who own it are making the people who do so much of the heavy lifting(create content, run games, buy all the goddamn books) hate it.

 

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I think have spent enough anger and energy on all of the OGL 1.1 bullshit on the DVDVR Discord and on the Discord channel I have with my friends. The whole thing stinks. When my youngest was born, I was basically left with no time to play D&D with my friends and so I dropped from their game, but they still have it going every Wednesday over TTS. Our whole stance at the moment is fuck em, we'll just steal the shit we want. My one friend who is our usual DM said he had no plans to pay another cent for another WotC D&D book and would just find a copy of it for free. 

And yeah, our group isn't impacted by this yet and personally, I'm pretty interested in One D&D because TTS can be a real pain in the ass, but I also can't imagine One D&D allowing you the freedom to do all of the wild shit you can do in games now.

Pathfinder is also an option, but I'm not sure any of us want to switch over to that.

What would be nice is if someone would develop a Gloomhaven/Frosthaven game that allowed for more than 4 players. That's our other alternative now, but the problem is that we always have 5 or 6 of us online so if we decide to play Gloomhaven, then we're basically telling two friends they can't play, so we do other shit instead like playing Jackbox or Valorant or whatever.

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