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

[Red Dragon]

You don't need entire books of lore to get something interesting for a tabletop RPG, just good situations to turn into quests/dungeons/npc conflicts. A good example: Final Fantasy Tactics has a bunch of very cool lore right at the beginning of the game that you access through the 'rumors' option at a bar. You take 5 minutes to understand the situation of the continent, and just that small amount of lore is enough for a creative type to design an entire campaign around it. Yes, there are kings' names, a bunch of misterious deaths, names of territories... It's good background.

Compare it with 40k "lore", or the ramblings of a fat fuck who wrote his characters into a corner and is unable to finish his supposedly 7-book-saga... Sure, you can salvage parts of it, but diving in the ocean of bullshit to find the rare pearls takes too much time. I played enough chinese gacha games to understand quantity does not correlate to quality regarding literature.

I am a lorefag, I love deep backgrounds, history, interesting happenings and people... But I never asked my players to read an entire book or memorize my made-up dynasty of emperors to play a game. Hell nah.

 

[anti SJW]

 

[Notepad Anon]

Any recent game you guys have been looking into recently? Doesn't have to be new but I haven't seen any new ttrpgs worth mentioning lately.

Recently did a some diving into Draw Steel, Nimble, Shadow of the Weird Wizard, and DC20.

Draw Steel by MCDM is going to be a few people's new favorite D&D 4e Roleplaying Game and Matty "The Sudanese Timeshare Expert" Colville is going to ride that gravy train as long as he can. Though good god there are a lot of "Fiddly Bits" to keep track of. You are going to have to run it on a VTT or have some method of keeping track of things. Though I suspect they will eventually sell you cards or something to keep track of it all. It is what it is. Though I do really enjoy the concept of the Kits, but they dropped all the magical ones for some reason. I think they are pretty cool, but I want either double the number or half the number with more fiddly bits to play with. Attached image is two of them.

Nimble is . . . lithe. Arguably too light in some respects if you want some meat, but still hyper focuses on "fixing combat" more than anything. Still like some of the ideas in it, though I wish the gear was less horrifically lame.

DC20 is a massive passion project and I give it a solid 80% chance of actually releasing. It too is desperately trying to reinvent D&D Combat by making it Dungeons & Pathfinders 2.75e. Action Point combat seems like it works smoothly enough, though "It's coming soon guys" seems to be a reoccurring theme throughout the fucking beta they are charging 30$ for. The Race Pick & Point System is kinda neat and I may steal it for another project in the future. Also Attached is the Human - you get 5 Points to spend on your race. It's a neat idea and some of the more exotic . . . well not exotic, but "Not Human" Races have stuff going on.

Shadow of the Weird Wizard is Shadow of the Demon Lord with half of its features missing and about 80% less shit and 100% more ability to play a while longer. I have high hopes, it's immensely retarded they are charging for a second book to actually play anything other than a human when the cover has the alt races on it. I was irked by that for some reason.

I could do an unhinged rant on Funko Fantasy though, but I wanted to type all this up first.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I take back what I said, that is absolutely brilliant.

I'm thinking of reading is the Starfinder 2 setting book even though Starfinder 2 as a game is looking like a complete mess. Supposedly the way the setting book is laid out is the big deal. Instead of listing regions geographically, the book lays them out by gameplay and tone. Want to run a horror game? Here's the locations, monsters, and lore you should know about.

Compare it with 40k "lore"

Something I figured out over the last few years (including thanks to kiwis) is that wargame lore is a victim of it's own success. 40k lore is short and straight forward, as was Battletech at some point. I assume Shadowrun too. 40k was meant to be a grimdark future where any kind of sci-fi wargame, from gangers having a street fight to galaxy shaping epic campaigns could exist infinitely.

They add a little bit here, and people like it, add some more there, and people like it. In 40k, the Horus Heresy used to be a few sentences, a paragraph at most. Some ancient event, the specifics of which are lost to time. Now it's a 64 book series that's supposedly excellent and even has it's own games. At some point you have enough that when you do something, some nerd can "well ack-chu-ally" you and the whole thing comes crashing down. The homework isn't worth the effort and there's no convenient entry point.


This is why, as a Shadowrun noob, it's daunting to get started. It's also why I don't get into arguments about timelines and historical events. Even things like Ravenloft where there's all these domains and who is doing what where. It's part of why I like parts of Starfinder (the gap) and Eberron because they are (were in Starfinders case) set in a single place and time, with spaces deliberately left blank in such a way that you can do what you want.

DC20

My issue is it takes an already slow, and complicated game and makes it slower and more complicated.

 

[Ghostse]

Draw Steel by MCDM is going to be a few people's new favorite D&D 4e Roleplaying Game and Matty "The Sudanese Timeshare Expert" Colville is going to ride that gravy train as long as he can. Though good god there are a lot of "Fiddly Bits" to keep track of. You are going to have to run it on a VTT or have some method of keeping track of things. Though I suspect they will eventually sell you cards or something to keep track of it all. It is what it is. Though I do really enjoy the concept of the Kits, but they dropped all the magical ones for some reason. I think they are pretty cool, but I want either double the number or half the number with more fiddly bits to play with. Attached image is two of them.

I really like the concept of what I'm seeing from Kit, where it looks like PCs can shift stances and get access to various abilities based on preqs of armor/weapons. The more I think on it, the more I'm digging the concept of "spells for fighters".
Then I'm looking at the utter sperg and remember the worst parts of 4e.

 

[Fuck Bankers]

You don't need entire books of lore to get something interesting for a tabletop RPG, just good situations to turn into quests/dungeons/npc conflicts. A good example: Final Fantasy Tactics has a bunch of very cool lore right at the beginning of the game that you access through the 'rumors' option at a bar. You take 5 minutes to understand the situation of the continent, and just that small amount of lore is enough for a creative type to design an entire campaign around it. Yes, there are kings' names, a bunch of misterious deaths, names of territories... It's good background.

Compare it with 40k "lore", or the ramblings of a fat fuck who wrote his characters into a corner and is unable to finish his supposedly 7-book-saga... Sure, you can salvage parts of it, but diving in the ocean of bullshit to find the rare pearls takes too much time. I played enough chinese gacha games to understand quantity does not correlate to quality regarding literature.

I am a lorefag, I love deep backgrounds, history, interesting happenings and people... But I never asked my players to read an entire book or memorize my made-up dynasty of emperors to play a game. Hell nah.

Lore is like salt. You just need a pinch.

However, as a fellow lore fag, the fact that my salt all connects holistically makes me happy.

@Judge Dredd

They add a little bit here, and people like it, add some more there, and people like it. In 40k, the Horus Heresy used to be a few sentences, a paragraph at most. Some ancient event, the specifics of which are lost to time. Now it's a 64 book series that's supposedly excellent and even has it's own games. At some point you have enough that when you do something, some nerd can "well ack-chu-ally" you and the whole thing comes crashing down. The homework isn't worth the effort and there's no convenient entry point.

If some faggot wants to um actually lore at your rpg table you politely yet firmly ask them to leave.

 

[The Ugly One]

even though Starfinder 2 as a game is looking like a complete mess.

Executive summary for inquisitive minds?

 

[The Ugly One]

Draw Steel by MCDM is going to be a few people's new favorite D&D 4e Roleplaying Game and Matty "The Sudanese Timeshare Expert" Colville is going to ride that gravy train as long as he can. Though good god there are a lot of "Fiddly Bits" to keep track of.

Lots of TTRPGs have this fundamental problem. I think they don't understand that what works in turn-based video games doesn't really work in real life.

If some faggot wants to um actually lore at your rpg table you politely yet firmly ask them to leave.

"All material other than this setting book is considered non-canon in this game." Lorefags will usually self-select out.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Executive summary for inquisitive minds?

They want the game to be fully PF2 compatible, but classes can't compete with or step on the toes of other classes. Basically turning it into a PF2 expansion. So the soldier class who specialized in massive guns and melee weapons? Got to be completely overhauled or even removed outright because that's too similar to the PF2 fighter. Last I checked he was some kind of tank with damage reduction skills.

(Quickly checked for this post, and it appears from a quick skim that he also has AoE crowd control abilities in addition to DR.)

Also paizos "everything is canon" policy might fuck over the setting, given at one point they blew up the drift (which allowed faster than light travel).

If some faggot wants to um actually lore at your rpg table you politely yet firmly ask them to leave.

Lorefags will usually self-select out.

And that's the problem. With wargames, bringing your army somewhere only to get "I don't play against X" or "You painted your guys wrong".

Story I told before, playing MechWarrior 4 and not knowing any of the factions, so chose the one that payed the most money. Turns out that was the "wrong choice" because the Kell Hounds are in the game and are obviously the correct choice. Did I side with Davion or Stiner? Don't know who they are. Get linked with a wall of text on wikipedia and given a list of novels that are years out of print and were only released in America. Don't want to sit at my computer reading scanned books all day.


I was reading scanned books today. Some RIFTs module. Opens with the usual trigger warning about how the book contains violence and sexual themes and yadda yadda. Only to realize it was a book from 2003. The warning was part of the introduction, and was obtained from the high seas, so I doubt it was added after the fact. Didn't read the whole thing, but was surprised trigger/content warning went back that far.

 

[Overly Serious]

Compare it with 40k "lore",

In 40k, the Horus Heresy used to be a few sentences, a paragraph at most. Some ancient event, the specifics of which are lost to time. Now it's a 64 book series that's supposedly excellent and even has it's own games. At some point you have enough that when you do something, some nerd can "well ack-chu-ally" you and the whole thing comes crashing down. The homework isn't worth the effort and there's no convenient entry point.

This really isn't a problem. You want to run a WH40K game you're going to pick one small corner of it. You have to. You want to run an entire campaign on a single ship? You can do that. These vessels are km long and have crews in the thousands. You can start as crewmen in some gun chamber and work your way up through a whole series of adventures until you save the ship fighting heretics with the Lord Captain. It wont matter whether or not you know the fine details of the Istvar campaign. You want to run an Ork campaign where you burn your way across star systems stomping hive worlds and Imperial Guard? Go for it - you don't need to know the details of how the Adeptus Mechanicus work - you just need some stats for that Skitari endboss. Even if you go for pretty much the worst possible scenario out of some madness - a Rogue Trader campaign, 80% of it isn't going to matter. There's an Eldar companion on board and you have a Magos Biologis? Is it really that difficult to have some basic Aeldari background and the Magos Biologis is... a tech priest who works with organics. It's fine. It's no big deal. Most of the characters in-setting don't know more than a tiny fraction of what is really going on anyway so they shouldn't be talking about this stuff and it doesn't need to come up unless the GM wants to include it. Nobody in-setting is going to say "Oh, lets go to Medusa" and the GM has to panic because he doesn't know which Space Marine Chapter hails from there. The characters probably don't either and it's not Star Wars where you just decide to go somewhere.

We've had this conversation before, @Judge Dredd where you've first declared you have to know something and then declared it a problem because you don't. But you're the only one who thinks you need to read the entire Horus Heresy series to run a game. The Heresy takes place 10,000 years before current day! Most people probably know nothing about it or even what Chaos is. The Inquisition stamps out knowledge of The Ruinous Powers wherever they go. And as far as 99% of the Imperium are concerned, the Emperor sits on his Golden Throne because he likes it there. Necrons? History that even the Eldar only have legends of. Orks? They're big and you shoot them.

Meanwhile, the positive side to the massive lore of WH40K is great - it gives you a huge range of games and ways to play. A gritty gang-level game in the bowels of a hive world whilst some mysterious supernatural predator (a thrill-seeking noble from the upper levels) picks people off; a buccaneering game as the captain and his officers on a pirate ship; a grand military campaign with the Astra Militarum as you work you way up from lowly guardsmen to officers and upstart generals. You always talk about the lore to these games like it's an exam and you always talk about your players as if they're adversaries in life out to punish you at any moment. Probably more than any other game lore, due to the fact that most people in the setting have no knowledge of it and huge limitations on how they can travel, WH40K is a vast resource you can pull from to inspire your games. It's not a noose around your neck. What the absolute fuck are you talking about "no convenient entry point?" It's nothing BUT convenient entry points.

 

[Ghostse]

We've had this conversation before, @Judge Dredd where you've first declared you have to know something and then declared it a problem because you don't. But you're the only one who thinks you need to read the entire Horus Heresy series to run a game. The Heresy takes place 10,000 years before current day! Most people probably know nothing about it or even what Chaos is. The Inquisition stamps out knowledge of The Ruinous Powers wherever they go. And as far as 99% of the Imperium are concerned, the Emperor sits on his Golden Throne because he likes it there. Necrons? History that even the Eldar only have legends of. Orks? They're big and you shoot them.

The other thing is with something like 40K or where things happened long ago, you can just look at the UM AXCSHALLY and just say "Oh, its cute you believe that was what really happened".

Or even if that is what really happened, maybe thats not the belief in the current area of space you're in.

 

[The Ugly One]

Story I told before, playing MechWarrior 4 and not knowing any of the factions, so chose the one that payed the most money. Turns out that was the "wrong choice" because the Kell Hounds are in the game and are obviously the correct choice. Did I side with Davion or Stiner? Don't know who they are. Get linked with a wall of text on wikipedia and given a list of novels that are years out of print and were only released in America. Don't want to sit at my computer reading scanned books all day.

The problem isn't lore, the problem is everyone at that table was a kissless virgin with no friends. If you find people who aren't no-life cunts to play with, none of this matters.

I was reading scanned books today. Some RIFTs module. Opens with the usual trigger warning about how the book contains violence and sexual themes and yadda yadda. Only to realize it was a book from 2003. The warning was part of the introduction, and was obtained from the high seas, so I doubt it was added after the fact. Didn't read the whole thing, but was surprised trigger/content warning went back that far.

"Contains violence & sexual themes" isn't a "trigger warning," it's a "HEY, DUMBASS PARENTS, JUST BECAUSE THIS BOOK HAS A DRAGON FIGHTING A ROBOT ON THE COVER DOESN'T MEAN IT'S FOR LITTLE KIDS" warning. A trigger warning will warn you that a book portrays somebody being misgendered.

 

[Judge Dredd]

We've had this conversation before

Yes, that's why I don't want to go on about it. Agree to disagree and all that.

I also agree on everything you said about 40k. The problem is lore-lawyers who don't.

40k has a perfect example. Pariah Nexus. I love it as a setting. For those not into 40k, it's a region where suddenly there's stone towers popping out of the ground. The humans, animals, and everything else become are lethargic zombies as soon as they enter the zone, with the exception of Necrons, Tau, and zealots. Also the necrons appear to be fighting each other. Sounds like a fantastic setting to me. Cool, mysterious, lots of action, a rational reason for escalation, and even gameplay mechanics around collecting the weird chips of the towers called blackstone. Fuck, it even works as a RPG setting because there's a reason for the PCs to be a small band of randoms. They're all people who are immune.

Try discussing it online. "Well acktualllllly! The sisters miracles shouldn't work because it was established that they were psychic powers and the sisters didn't know!". To me it adds to the mystery of it, but most people don't see it like that. They see it as a massive plot hole to be plugged.

So if I theoretically managed to get people to play a 40k RPG, I'd want to set it in the nexus, but I'm not sure it would be worth the hassle. Not the best example since it's just one big plot hole instead of many small gotchas, but you get the idea.

 

[Average Russian Spy]

I always wondered if any group of Kiwis ever got together to get a game going, even if it was just a one-off adventure. Surely it had to have happened at some point, no?

 

[Capsaicin Addict]

"Contains violence & sexual themes" isn't a "trigger warning," it's a "HEY, DUMBASS PARENTS, JUST BECAUSE THIS BOOK HAS A DRAGON FIGHTING A ROBOT ON THE COVER DOESN'T MEAN IT'S FOR LITTLE KIDS" warning. A trigger warning will warn you that a book portrays somebody being misgendered.

This. A similar warning was found in D&D3E's Book of Vile Darkness and Book of Exalted Deeds because both dealt with mature themes.

 

[Loose Goose]

Inasmuch as "nipple clamps of exquisite pain" could be called mature themes.

(The BotVD was a fascinating document of what fucked up stuff WotC staff were into in the early 2000s. Largely the same people who wrote and produced the supplement ended up staffing Paizo.)

 

[Overly Serious]

Yes, that's why I don't want to go on about it. Agree to disagree and all that.

I also agree on everything you said about 40k. The problem is lore-lawyers who don't.

Well my point, though it's already been made more emphatically by @The Ugly One , is that this is a problem with your players or your relationship with your players, whereas you characterised it as a problem the the lore. Hence the disagreement.

40k has a perfect example. Pariah Nexus. I love it as a setting. For those not into 40k, it's a region where suddenly there's stone towers popping out of the ground. The humans, animals, and everything else become are lethargic zombies as soon as they enter the zone, with the exception of Necrons, Tau, and zealots. Also the necrons appear to be fighting each other. Sounds like a fantastic setting to me. Cool, mysterious, lots of action, a rational reason for escalation, and even gameplay mechanics around collecting the weird chips of the towers called blackstone. Fuck, it even works as a RPG setting because there's a reason for the PCs to be a small band of randoms. They're all people who are immune.

[...]

So if I theoretically managed to get people to play a 40k RPG, I'd want to set it in the nexus, but I'm not sure it would be worth the hassle. Not the best example since it's just one big plot hole instead of many small gotchas, but you get the idea.

I have only the vaguest awareness of "The Pariah Nexus" and I think it's some kind of contrived arena thing created for the tabletop game so GW could sell some kind of mission deck add-on. You say you'd want to set your game in it if you ran one. I certainly wouldn't. It sounds like you think it's ideal because it has everything in it - all factions and you have this notion that getting more in means more better. I really don't share that mindset.

I don't really want to rehash this debate again either but to me you're once again creating your own problem and then attributing it to something external. Look how difficult it would be to run something in this area of the lore! So why choose it? Because you can throw every type of creature from every background into it? That's the very thing you're saying makes things difficult for you. (Because again, you fear players knowing more than you.)

And if a player said "Sister's powers shouldn't work here", I'd just point out that GW says they do and to go write a letter to Games Workshop. I've honestly only barely heard of the Pariah Nexus. The last thing I would want for a WH40K game is to be throwing every conceivable sort of opponent into it. That's more of a tactical miniatures game thing.

So I'm sorry but first you pick a specific part of the lore you would find difficult, then you say the lore makes things difficult. WH40K is one of the easiest lores to utilise because most characters in-universe are so limited. It's not Star Wars where everything is everywhere and you can go anywhere. It's not Doctor Who where any creature you introduce is going to have a tonne of appearances and weird niche cases. It's not a historical setting where someone is going to say "typewriters weren't invented yet". Technology isn't even consistent from one planet to the next! So you grab some corner of the vast universe that appeals to your tastes and tone and start there. Nobody can bring in elements you don't want to include. They can't say "I'm going to the webway to find some Drukhari" and leave you fumbling through wikis in a panic. If they're inquisitors rooting out heresy in a hive world, that's where they are and where they'll stay until the GM says otherwise.

I'm not arguing with you when I point out something you think is a problem isn't, I'm helping you when I show how a problem is easily solved.

 

[Sayer of the N-Word]

"Contains violence & sexual themes" isn't a "trigger warning," it's a "HEY, DUMBASS PARENTS, JUST BECAUSE THIS BOOK HAS A DRAGON FIGHTING A ROBOT ON THE COVER DOESN'T MEAN IT'S FOR LITTLE KIDS" warning. A trigger warning will warn you that a book portrays somebody being misgendered.

It was also a selling point to the kids who wanted to play cool adult games where you could say curse words and kiss a lady's boobs. 8)

Trigger warnings in modern publications is a way to signal to their assumed readership that the authors are goodthinkers and so buying the book will be supporting a fellow warrior for tranny and negro rights.

 

[Overly Serious]

I always wondered if any group of Kiwis ever got together to get a game going, even if it was just a one-off adventure. Surely it had to have happened at some point, no?

I wish. It would be one of the few places from which I could source players without Progressive Politics raising its head. And I'm sure there would be some very interesting individuals. Plus there are posters here such as @The Ugly One , @Ghostse and others who write so well on the subject of how to run a game or what makes one fun that I'm certain it would be hugely rewarding to invite them to a game.

However, PL'ing would be a serious risk. Even if I set up some purely anonymous voice only thing over Matrix or whatever else people use, you'd be giving away information. And whilst I'm confident most posters here are trustworthy, the number of people involved in anything tends to grow.

It has been tempting on occasion to propose it though. I don't think I've ever said anything especially bad on the site. I'm not even racist. But just being found to be a poster here can be risky, I'm told.

 

[Brain Problems]

Lore is like salt. You just need a pinch.

However, as a fellow lore fag, the fact that my salt all connects holistically makes me happy.

I like it when a world feels like it's been considered and the parts fit. You don't have to be a total autist about it but I think it helps you DM/GM a game when you have something to lean on and consider versus throwing shit at the wall and having to remember what random shit you invented last week two weeks ago a few months ago when your group got together. You just don't want it to be an anchor dragging your sessions.

The first example that comes to mind is that if you're running a Ravenloft session understanding the Dark Lords and their domains, backgrounds, and motivations (especially if you're doing CoS) and it all kinda flows nicely from there. IMO the PCs respond really well to these things and it helps them formulate their actions rather than behaving like some sort of abstract ghosts floating through your AI generated dungeon-of-the-week.