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

[Ghostse]

Is there? I thought the whole point of old DnD was +1s were extremely hard to come by.

+1 gear is more uncommon because effects are usually not just flat numerical advantages.

But attribute-boosting potions & items are more common because 1) mortal stats hard cap at 18. and 2) Stat-damage is ALSO more common.

 

[The Bogwater Flows On]

Also, got into a digital game of WHFRP4e and I'm having a grand old time. The Career system provides a pretty interesting way to have flexibility in building your character while preventing outright minmaxing immediately. I do like how opposed weapons skill tests mean you can accidentally dodge/parry into the attack and nuke yourself.

I'm playing a regular-ass peasant who has ingratiated himself with a party of his betters just by being humble and asking reasonable if uneducated questions (high Int for Outdoor Survival because he's a Scout).

WHFRP4E going back to the 2E style and pretending 3E doesn't exist with its FUCKING CARDS is the absolute right move.

 

[Head Muggle]

The Warhammer RPGs always seemed difficult to get into, starting from choosing the system.
For fantasy there's WFRP and The Old World. For 40k there's Wrath and Glory and Imperium Maledictum (and all the other ones like Dark Heresy, Only War and Rogue Trader).
I have no idea which one's supposed to be the "best" choice or what their underlying rules.

BRP 40k should be athing.

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

I could keep going but I'll cut things short, but yes I could continue ranting about how fucking awful it is for another 2000+ words easily because Lancer is that fucking cancerous of a game.

Please do, like I told (I think) @Overly Serious I really do enjoy long ass, detailed posts.

 

[The Bogwater Flows On]

The Warhammer RPGs always seemed difficult to get into, starting from choosing the system.
For fantasy there's WFRP and The Old World. For 40k there's Wrath and Glory and Imperium Maledictum (and all the other ones like Dark Heresy, Only War and Rogue Trader).
I have no idea which one's supposed to be the "best" choice or what their underlying rules.

BRP 40k should be athing.

2e was my drug into WFRP and it was my second longest run campaign that actually reached a conclusion. I plan to pick it back up some day, but I'm in a weird mood with actually running games now. 4e sounds pretty good from what I'm hearing. I slept on it because modern Warhammer finds ways to excite and sadden me in maddening ways.

For 40k, I'd honestly say Dark Heresy is the best way to get introduced to those RPGs. If you like it you can try the other games in that FFG series. If not you can try WaNG or Imperium Maledictum (which I hear is similar to the old FFG playstyle).

I'll probably dig around to get WFRPG 4e and Imperium Maledictum. I got all the WaNG books from Humble Bundle a while ago because I'm going to try to homebrew something else using the dice system.

 

[Tri-Tachyon'sClown]

Humble Bundle has a bundle that seems interesting, thoughts? Personally I think you don't really need most of this as I'm sure there's free and better alternatives out there to most of this stuff.

 

[Rapier Ape]

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

Rerolling at each level works pretty well. Especially if you're not interested in being a torture hobo DM. The PCs end up being pretty beefy. A practice that I use it to actually keep track of HPs rolled at every level per character and just keep it on a little side sheet in the event of an energy drain etc. I had about 6 months of sessions where the players would re-roll against those old scores per level on level up.
It worked out pretty nicely because I was running mainly dungeon crawl type games and utilizing some materials from Dungeon Magezine and old TSR era modules with 4 players pretty much as written. So it upped the survivability a good bit but at the end of the day was still challenging. It pretty much gave them an extra hit or 2 of padding by level 9. It doesn't really matter after that due to low HP gain per class.
I probably wouldn't attempt it in anything 3e or above with the way HPs work on level gain.
Currently running Dragonquest 3e so players HPs are 100% up to them to invest in as they see fit.
Finally broke the group down to playing not D&D. It's an autistic amount of math at times to write material for but runs pretty quick after you figure out the system.

 

[FieldPiece]

Has anyone here played Delta Green? I've never played a TTRPG in my life but I randomly got recommended a jewtube video going over it and it peaked my interest since I love X-Files and spooky spy shit. Is it something a newcomer to TTRPGs could actually get into or is it niche to the point you need to already have a circle of TTRPG people you know?

 

[LovisXVI]

Has anyone here played Delta Green? I've never played a TTRPG in my life but I randomly got recommended a jewtube video going over it and it peaked my interest since I love X-Files and spooky spy shit. Is it something a newcomer to TTRPGs could actually get into or is it niche to the point you need to already have a circle of TTRPG people you know?

It's just Call of Cthulhu + X-Files. It is hardly obscure.

 

[Blarmed&Dangerous]

Has anyone here played Delta Green? I've never played a TTRPG in my life but I randomly got recommended a jewtube video going over it and it peaked my interest since I love X-Files and spooky spy shit. Is it something a newcomer to TTRPGs could actually get into or is it niche to the point you need to already have a circle of TTRPG people you know?

*piqued

I lovehate Delta Green. It's a great premise, and the atmosphere is top notch. The problem is that a lot of the adventures, even the popular ones (looking at you, Impossible Landscapes) kinda suck. The writing is inconsistent at best, and the system itself leaves a lot to be desired (it grinds to an absolute halt if you ever have to do something like traditional RPG combat).

But you have nothing to compare it to, so I'd say take a look. I'm personally really fond of an adventure book for DG called "Control Group." It contains four adventures, three of which involve players completely unfamiliar with the Program (or is it the Agency?), so you can roleplay them getting exposed to the Unnatural and being inducted into the conspiracy. The adventures are:

BlackSat: NASA astronauts on a mission to escort some math nerds to a satellite for repair. It turns out that the highest levels of advanced math in this setting is functionally magic ("hypergeometry") and the satellite is a malfunctioning hypergeometric weapon. This adventure is super railroady for obvious reasons, but I ran it for a group including one person who'd never played an RPG before and all of them say it's one of, if not the, best one-shot they've ever played.

Night Visions: US soldiers in Afghanistan, their fed handler, and a local interpreter go up into the mountains to try and convince a local tribe to help fight the Taliban. They're demon-worshipping cannibals who try to feed you to their ethereal sky demon.

Sick Again: A team of experts from the CDC get dispatched to a small town with a mysterious illness rapidly spreading. It turns out that a local physicist and his wife were working on a project in their basement that accidentally created a field that a time traveler from the future was able to use to come through, and brought the disease with her. This one has a lot of mechanics for investigating the illness but they're all moot because it's carried on gravity waves or some shit. Also, Delta Green agents come to "close the loop" by killing everyone involved. As the GM, make sure they kill the time traveler because the book has absolutely nothing for you in the logical event that the group tries to save or interrogate her.

Wormwood Arena: the survivors of the first three adventures get inducted into Delta Green and sent on a mission to Waco-, err, "discreetly neutralize the threat" posed by a new age hippy cult that doesn't know that it worships an evil vampire boulder. It's cooler than it sounds.

Some other favorite adventures are "The Last Equation" (a math nerd discovers an equation that has a different solution every time you solve it, and the solution can predict the future if you study it hard enough. Solve it enough times and it convinces you to spread the equation - usually by committing a grisly murder and writing the equation in your victim's blood to draw attention to it. Your mission: contain the Last Equation. After running this, I love sneaking little bits of the number sequence from the equation into random stuff to spook players that are paying attention.) "Observer Effect" (you're in your civilian life and something feels incredibly wrong. Your handler reaches out to you and sends you on an emergency mission to a particle accelerator, without saying why. You pose as Department of Energy inspectors while trying to figure out why you're even there. Turns out that their experiment touches the mind of Azathoth at the end of time and destroys reality, then reverses time to start a loop, but the loops are getting shorter. You already went on this mission, and failed...) and the classic "Last Things Last" (Clive Bauman 'retired' from Delta Green. Now he's dead. Go to his apartment and make sure he didn't leave behind anything incriminating. Destroy any evidence or anything he might've taken home from work that he shouldn't have. Make everyone believe he was a boring man who led a boring life and died a boring death. Oh, and take care of the wife, too.) You may notice I mostly like adventures where the solution isn't shooting things, because again, combat kinda sucks.

Delta Green isn't super obscure, but it isn't D&D or even Blades in the Dark level of popular. It has its dedicated fans. If you've got somewhere you can get players, you can probably find a few willing to give it a try, especially if they're older.

If you've got any other questions, I'm more than happy to help

 

[The Ugly One]

Ver archivo adjunto 7833196

Looks like Stinking Cloud has already been taken care of.

 

[Imperial Citizen]

Dice Scum looks into the world of Exalted this week. Expect lots of 2000s anime proportioned characters, furries, and confused reviewers as we don’t know that much about Exalted.

 

[The Bogwater Flows On]

Dice Scum looks into the world of Exalted this week. Expect lots of 2000s anime proportioned characters, furries, and confused reviewers as we don’t know that much about Exalted.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jKgRA1QRFAc

I like Exalted's dice system (I think).

 

[Rapier Ape]

Dice Scum looks into the world of Exalted this week. Expect lots of 2000s anime proportioned characters, furries, and confused reviewers as we don’t know that much about Exalted.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jKgRA1QRFAc

My experience with it was picking up the 1st edition core way back when because why not?
Sticking it in the hood of the car to shove a bunch of stuff to the side because I ran into 2 dudes on foot i knew and was giving them a ride.
Promptly forgetting it was on the hood and driving off until like 5 minutes later. Then backtracking a couple times trying to spot my books on the side of the road.
From what I understand it was probably for the better.
Sucks though because I was a poorfag during that time period.

 

[Fuck Bankers]

When the largest possible bonus is +3, it's not a big deal. One of the strongest characters at my table had no bonuses at all.

I have a Sylian Witch at my table with a -2 charisma, but she can speak with animals. The party has talked its way out of probably 5 or 6 encounters and gotten a lot of information about the necromancer they wouldn't have easily gotten.

4d6-in-order drop the lowest is repeated adnauseum

I think this is find if you make the character that is rolled (i.e. you have low strength, but high intelligence, so this will be a mage.), and each player get multiple characters. I did this when running a DCC one-shot a year ago and everyone had fun.

 

[AnOminous]

I have a Sylian Witch at my table with a -2 charisma, but she can speak with animals. The party has talked its way out of probably 5 or 6 encounters and gotten a lot of information about the necromancer they wouldn't have easily gotten.

This raises the question of what CHA really is, doesn't it? Shouldn't a negative charisma even repel animals?

 

[Judge Dredd]

I think this is find if you make the character that is rolled (i.e. you have low strength, but high intelligence, so this will be a mage.), and each player get multiple characters. I did this when running a DCC one-shot a year ago and everyone had fun.

And this is largely a problem.

For a one shot, you're likely either using pre-gens. Multiple characters I've had work but it really needs a simple system and a forgiving GM. Mainly because people kept getting confused. I got around this a second time by having each player have a single shared stat block for all their characters. HP was a bit weird but it worked well enough. When I played Savage Worlds, it was fairly common for me to hand NPC sheets to a player to control in combat, though I don't know if I'd do so now*.

For a campaign, multiple characters is in, but also out. I allow players to make fresh characters at their current level, but can only play one at a time*. This has only been used a couple of times in the time I've DMed, and it was basically when a player was having a bad time with their character.

*I did make an exception for one campaign when we're down many players. I've yet to find good "sidekick" or "filler" character rules. This worked great for Savage Worlds as I'd just hand a sheet to a player, but every other system I've tried this with, people get so confused. Even Knave which, to me, is as simple as it gets, caused no end of confusion. I don't know if it's a system problem or a player problem.

the system itself leaves a lot to be desired (it grinds to an absolute halt if you ever have to do something like traditional RPG combat).

I can't comment on Delta Green as a setting, but I ran a modern horror game for a while using Savage Worlds and it worked well.

 

[Fuck Bankers]

This raises the question of what CHA really is, doesn't it? Shouldn't a negative charisma even repel animals?

the way ACKs does encounters is you roll a 2d6 reaction roll and add modifier. he never got a modified 2 or less. When getting a lower number he generally will bribe them with food. I'll take this gesture as a +1 giving him a -1 overall modifier.

For a campaign, multiple characters is in, but also out. I allow players to make fresh characters at their current level, but can only play one at a time*

In my ACKs campaign each player (I had 4 but now down to 3) plays 2 characters. In ACKs you can spend gp from a character to xp for another character. I had a character die, but the party had a pool of cash they spent 500gp and got a 1st lvl theif with 500xp. If I had 6 to 8 players I would only let each play 1 character. But for ACKs or many OSR games you need at least 6 characters if not 8 or even 10. Obviously the encounters can be balanced for fewer characters but you'll be missing many class abilities that can really help a whole party.

 

[Ghostse]

Shouldn't a negative charisma even repel animals?

Repel? No. But it will make compelling them more difficult.

If the system is D&D related, Charisma is force of will which is why it is the stat for using staves/wands, and why its the pump stat of both Paladins and Warlocks.

the way ACKs does encounters is you roll a 2d6 reaction roll and add modifier. he never got a modified 2 or less. When getting a lower number he generally will bribe them with food. I'll take this gesture as a +1 giving him a -1 overall modifier.

This is the way.

In my ACKs campaign each player (I had 4 but now down to 3) plays 2 characters. In ACKs you can spend gp from a character to xp for another character. I had a character die, but the party had a pool of cash they spent 500gp and got a 1st lvl theif with 500xp. If I had 6 to 8 players I would only let each play 1 character. But for ACKs or many OSR games you need at least 6 characters if not 8 or even 10. Obviously the encounters can be balanced for fewer characters but you'll be missing many class abilities that can really help a whole party.

I also can't speak for ACKs, but given its based on 1e, combat/encounters in general take significantly less time so running two or even three characters doesn't slow down combat that much. If you remove the "Role play" aspect and the fact the party will naturally split, its not that much in-the-moment overhead to have each player running effectively their own party.

Of course shit like trying to swap perspectives between characters, or trying to do secretarial stuff with inventory/gear gets a little mentally taxing. But depending on the campaign, even that's usually not too much.

 

[Fuck Bankers]

trying to do secretarial stuff with inventory/gear gets a little mentally taxing

ACKs has the best encumbrance rules. Everyone can carry 10 stones. A stone is an abstract measurement that is based on both weight and awkwardness. So a long sword is 1 st, so is 50' of rope, so is a 10ft pole. For armor weight, most armors are 1 st per point of AC. Most things that aren't stones are in 1/6th stone, everything else is in coins. 1st = 1000 coins. Encumbrance changes speed, but the chart is printed on the character sheets. Acks has a lot of systems, but each system is optimized to be as easy as possible.

My players are 1 grognard, his 15 year old, and a 22 year old map games enjoyer. I have also played with family that aren't generally into turbosperg shit, but it's a fun indoors activity. I've never heard complains about it being too complicated. As for role-playing, both my noob-players still don't 100% get the idea of roleplaying. Talking to characters how your character would. My Grognard is good about separately having goals for his characters. A bard that is wanting to carry on his family line. Their first adventure had them convincing a cave bear to leave a homestead of the local innkeep's brother. That brother had a 19 year old maiden, so he's romancing her. While the witch is trying to get more powerful spells to bring back to her grandmother up north. But he's been playing for nearly 40 years, multiple times a week when he was a teen/early 20s.