Tabletop Roleplaying Games (D&D, Pathfinder, CoC, ETC.)

This also gets rid of "choice paralysis": the player assumes you're giving him a needed class for the adventure, and is happy to customize the pregen a little bit without worrying too much about the build and stats. This is very effective with new players.
I like to have at least twice the number of pregens as players, and give each one like a paragraph/two paragraphs of description, and let players pick.
The first sentance is always along the lines of "<Name> is a <adjective> [description]." with the adjective describing their strongest stat ("strong" "tough" "nimble" "Smart" "clever" "strong-willed", etc. I mix it up) and the desciption describing class (and race if needed).
Then a quick generalized blurb about personality, and then the second paragraph - if needed - has information about relation to factions in the megadungeon.
And then below that summarized crunch (equipment, etc)

Another GM said he also writes blurbs for his pregens but writes them in First Person in a "pick me" pitch ("Grog need be on adventure because..."). Which I can see being fun with the right audience.
 
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No matter how much of a hardcore dice-fall-where-they-may old school player they claim to be, there is always salt whenever they level up, roll for HP, and roll a 1. With the table unanimously agreeing to take the average from then on.
I really often just gave first level characters the max on level one. I'm not going to have a TPK because everyone got bitten by a mosquito.
I like to have at least twice the number of pregens as players, and give each one like a paragraph/two paragraphs of description.
I did this two ways, one was my index cards with a character on them and one was actually having NPCs in the party already so in particularly deadly campaigns, instead of sitting out or stopping everything to roll someone a new character, they could just take over one of the NPCs or meet one of the pregens on the road.

I'd often GM very small groups like 2-3 actual players and didn't want a PC death to be an utter bummer that ruined the session. I still a couple times had a death that was upsetting enough we just decided to quit for the day and process it (one of which I have probably mentioned multiple times in this thread when an old and beloved character in a very deadly game died to an utter sucker trap and I could not justify giving a mulligan).
 
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I really often just gave first level characters the max on level one. I'm not going to have a TPK because everyone got bitten by a mosquito.
That isn't enough. It's when they level up I tend to see this.

One method I wanted to try, but haven't got to, is re-rolling health every level. So for sake of argument, if you gain level x d6 per level, and you're level 5, roll 5d6. If the number is higher than your current HP, that is your new HP, if it's lower, you gain +1hp. That way a single bad roll at level up isn't a permanent black mark on the character.
 
Grognards and OSR simps refuse to admit this, but random rolling is and always will be a meme for long campaigns. No matter how much of a hardcore dice-fall-where-they-may old school player they claim to be, there is always salt whenever they level up, roll for HP, and roll a 1. With the table unanimously agreeing to take the average from then on.

I have my players roll all HP every level, and take the highest result. Like at 5th level, you roll all 5 hit dice, and if the result is lower than what you had at 4th level, you just stay where you're at. It adds some randomness without screwing anyone long-term.
 
I have my players roll all HP every level, and take the highest result. Like at 5th level, you roll all 5 hit dice, and if the result is lower than what you had at 4th level, you just stay where you're at. It adds some randomness without screwing anyone long-term.
I've usualy just manadated averages for HP, or I'm doing a low-lethality campaign "Roll and if its under average, take the average" so there is some HP variation between two Fighters, but the fighters always have more HP than the fucking wizard.

But rolling each level to see if it goes up that's an interesting idea.

I guess for a lot of B/X games, getting dicked on Stats or HP isn't the end of the world, as there are lots of ways to pump those numbers.
 
The way HP rolls have kind of settled in my game is that you can take the average (half plus one because I'm nice) or roll. Nobody has ever complained and with the exception of one player they just do average anyway. Maybe I'll examine the practice the next game I run, but we'll see.

The way I used to do it was rolling with a minimum. I think that was half the die minus one, so rolling bad still sucked a little, but it wasn't your barbarian rolling a 1 on his d12.

Maybe I should just combine the two of them and have a kinder minimum. You're getting your average but you still get to roll something when you level. You know, like exactly what @Ghostse just said. If the the party has too many hit points I'll just grab a bigger hammer.
 
The way HP rolls have kind of settled in my game is that you can take the average (half plus one because I'm nice) or roll. Nobody has ever complained and with the exception of one player they just do average anyway. Maybe I'll examine the practice the next game I run, but we'll see.
PF1E? That was the rule for PFS.
 
Cthulhutech 2 is now out and Vordrak wrote some buzzword.txt post about.

...... what the fuck?

I clearly remember Ctech being one of the first victims of the woke takeover, with the beginning of the usual suspects screaming at the top of their lungs about how wrong and bad the game was (and the game was quite edgy, only it didn't understand it was 2007 and not the 90ies anymore). Also the fetishes of the author bled through brightly, and the mechanics are still one of my go-to to tell newbies how not to design a system.

I'd love to read it, but I doubt someone will even bother to pirate. I'm amused that the solution to the insane power scaling was essentially to gut the game to Tagers only.
 
https://youtube.com/watch?v=nPHxw-k7CnY1. Critical Role using DND 2024 for campaign 4. Matt Mercer outright defends using DND 2024 over DaggerHeart by saying his own game isn’t very good.
2. Hasbro/WOTC still don’t have an official name for the 5E successor.
1. Maybe, but even the critical role people understand that their bread and butter is "D&D" so it makes sense to stick with that for their main show. Also for the side game thing they did for their rules lite candela obscura game thing, it did pretty badly for a variety of reasons. But if their new thing isn't "D&D" that's a massive risk due to...
2. They don't care. They want to pull the same stunt as Apple did with leaving their desktop OS as OSX for over a decade, as changing the name of it is likely to alienate people even further than the "2024" version already has. Their audience of nitwits was always desperate to be clinging to the "5e" brand, kind of like Apple customers from 2005 onward. Meanwhile Daggerheart, Pathinder, Tales of the Valiant, etc. are not the lifestyle brand that these consoomers have turned D&D into(with Hasbro/WotC failing to capitalize on that at every step).

edit: Since I didn't want to sit through a clownfish video and listen to that tourist try to figure shit out.
That's the article he's got on screen and a key part of it
Campaign four, however, will actually still have a Daggerheart component to it, as Critical Role has also confirmed that Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins (the two senior designers who previously lead the D&D team at Wizards of the Coast) will be working on new Daggerheart material that ties directly into campaign four. What this material will look like and when it will be released, however, are not yet known.
So they're going to use it as a vehicle to tie in the CR content into Daggerheart as a source of content, like they did for the CR books for 5e. This makes sense due to them not having a lot of content yet. Although how long that takes to happen(it was never going to be quick) could be an issue as these CR campaigns were already taking years, and a 13 player West Marches mess could be even more ridiculous.
 
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I clearly remember Ctech being one of the first victims of the woke takeover, with the beginning of the usual suspects screaming at the top of their lungs about how wrong and bad the game was (and the game was quite edgy, only it didn't understand it was 2007 and not the 90ies anymore).
It was edgy in the worst way. The Nazzadi were just fetish bait, with the book stating that some of them just go around in the nude as well as the exoticized look of many of the females. Rape and pedophilia were not handled in the proper manner that it should in a horror game.

I posted the Dice Scum episode about a year ago that was done on Cthulhutech and the conclusion was that the game was handling too much. It was a mech combat game, a superpower stealth game, and an investigatory Call of Cthulhu game all in one.

Having read Cthulhutech 2e, I would say that the break up of game types is necessary, but there still is bloat. Now you can play as humans, Nazzadi, Catkin of Ulthar, Ravenkind of Carcosa, Ghouls, Deep One descendants, time displaced humans, Viperborn, and Tcho-Tcho.

It’s like the author can’t help himself and has to go overboard with the content.
 
So they're going to use it as a vehicle to tie in the CR content into Daggerheart as a source of content, like they did for the CR books for 5e. This makes sense due to them not having a lot of content yet. Although how long that takes to happen(it was never going to be quick) could be an issue as these CR campaigns were already taking years, and a 13 player West Marches mess could be even more ridiculous.
For just a second, imagine Dangerheart isn't a half-assed cash grab and was made by an actual DM not a low-talent grifter attempting to make himself a star.

Imagine you have an audience of millions, most of them retarded paypiggies, and a writers room who... they make shit their retarded audience likes and works for them and I'll leave it there.

You kickstarted a whole game system. You had complete freedom to make this system whatever you wanted, to fit your games and play style.
There's no content for it. But imagine.

You are starting a new version of your Peppa the Paypig. Now imagine you start your retarded season of pretend-play semi-scripted game - and then imagine you run it using YOUR sytem that you made to show everyone how much fun it is to play.
And then you drop the huge bomb:
There will be FLGS weekly adventures like PFS/Adventurer's guild/etc, and some being run online (for terminal shutins). And like Warhams tournies, the results of these campaigns are going to be agregated and used to determine how things go for the show. which factions controls what, etc.
You would immediately solve the usual TTRPG bootstrap of "Want to play, no one else to play with".

But doing so means you'd be turning up that big Hasbro check and depending solely on your system being good and fun to play.

What I'm saying is I think Mercer is making the right call.
 
You are starting a new version of your Peppa the Paypig. Now imagine you start your retarded season of pretend-play semi-scripted game - and then imagine you run it using YOUR sytem that you made to show everyone how much fun it is to play.
And then you drop the huge bomb:
There will be FLGS weekly adventures like PFS/Adventurer's guild/etc, and some being run online (for terminal shutins). And like Warhams tournies, the results of these campaigns are going to be agregated and used to determine how things go for the show. which factions controls what, etc.
You would immediately solve the usual TTRPG bootstrap of "Want to play, no one else to play with".
That would have required doing more than coming up with a bare minimum of a "game system" to begin with. Although I'm not sure hiring Crawford was a smart move but whatever. They spent 2 years and only had a core rulebook because they wrote their "taldaorei reborn" campaign setting book... for 5e, and not even a bestiary.

What I'm saying is I think Mercer is making the right call.
Absolutely, but even if there wasn't a check from Hasbro it's still the right call. They don't have anything to sell people if they go with Daggerheart, and like I said D&D 5e, even CRs version of "D&D" still gets consoomers due to being a fucking lifestyle brand. Just look at this shit, they've got more apparently for their show tied to D&D, than they do for their own TTRPGs by a landslide(the daggerheart book and 1 t-shirt). https://shop.critrole.com/collections/apparel?sort_by=price-descending
And they've still got an entire section of home and office shit, and then another section of pins and accessories all themed around their "D&D" shit with practically nothing for their own games.
 
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That would have required doing more than coming up with a bare minimum of a "game system" to begin with.
right. I covered that part when I asked you imagine it wasn't a half-assed cashgrab made by an actual talented GM.


They don't have anything to sell people if they go with Daggerheart
If they were in active development you could still run Daggerheart for a season while you spam content, and as I said, get people involved in shaping the game world.
That perfect combination of Exploiting your Paypaggies with tons of FOMO; you'll never again get the chance to influecence the official setting like this! What the fans decide is canon until the wokies say its now big yikes and we retcon it for the next 50 years with our D&D killer.

Again, you have to imagine this wasn't Daggerheart as it exists, but made by someone who actually is good at DMing and game design.

also fuck you aren't kidding.

$15 for a deck of cards, down from $25.
FTGE.
 
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