Tabletop RPG Catch All

Redwing wrote:

But I suppose the way I see it, if my players are rolling dice because of a check I've asked them to make, and a 20 is a failure, I've made a mistake somewhere. If it's impossible, I'll tell them so

Again, it happens when there's missing information. Nobody's suggesting a strength check for trying to lift an obviously massive stone, but it's reasonable to do a check for lifting an ordinary-looking box with an Immovable Rod secretly wedged inside. The player has no reason to think it's impossible to lift; just that their attempt to lift it failed.

Or, the example about players trying to intimidate a lifelike statue is a real one from my table. It would be a crime against DMness not to roll a skill check in cases like that.

master0 wrote:

Honestly for crits probably the only thing I'd think would be a good change is just turning them off for level 1 and 2. For PCs and monsters. Prevents the early level weirdness where squishy PCs can get insta killed by anything.

I like this idea a lot! Gaining the ability to crit would be a great "unlock" at L2 or L3 or so, and it would smooth out some of those "whole party died to the goblin ambush that starts out Lost Mine of Phandelver" stories.

I can’t reconcile “don’t have them roll when success is impossible” with “there is always a 5% chance of success”. I don’t run 5e or D&D (not in the traditional sense anyway), so I don’t have a horse in this race, but it seems like players will want to try anyway.

I think it would be interesting if rolling a natural 1 gave the GM inspiration, which they could spend to amp up the danger and risk.

My RPG does something like this. Except if you roll a natural 20 (akin to a critical miss in D&D), your cause chaotic environment damage. The room/environment you are in takes damage and has wounds. Different wound states will change or create puzzles, treasure, and events. Also, all linear, radius or cone damage causes environment damage.

Likewise, each character's core (element type) determines what effects are applied on rolling 1-4 (the equivalent of a critical roll). I.E. cold damage chills that debuffs to hit% from shivering. Unholy can cause a wound on a crit whereas normally you would have to hit a monster with 0 or less hp to cause a wound. This is especially potent against minions with only 1 wound. If you crit them, you can kill them no matter how many hp they had left.

I like this idea a lot! Gaining the ability to crit would be a great "unlock" at L2 or L3 or so, and it would smooth out some of those "whole party died to the goblin ambush that starts out Lost Mine of Phandelver" stories.

I addressed this by following the Diablo style monster types: minions, champions, and bosses. Minions are classified lower than a PC and can't crit PCs. Champions are equivalent to a PC. And bosses are considered equivalent to 3+ PCs.

fangblackbone wrote:
I like this idea a lot! Gaining the ability to crit would be a great "unlock" at L2 or L3 or so, and it would smooth out some of those "whole party died to the goblin ambush that starts out Lost Mine of Phandelver" stories.

I addressed this by following the Diablo style monster types: minions, champions, and bosses. Minions are classified lower than a PC and can't crit PCs. Champions are equivalent to a PC. And bosses are considered equivalent to 3+ PCs.

4th edition handled this nicely giving the monster roles. Basically tank/dps/support/minion/etc. Very useful for a DM but one of the things complained about as being too gamey. I think it would be smart to bring that back honestly. The average player wouldn't care anymore and it could make monsters more interesting.

Like instead of just a vanilla goblin, you can have one for being a warrior, rogue, support, etc. Which allows for a more unique skill set for them without much difficulty for the dm.

Like instead of just a vanilla goblin, you can have one for being a warrior, rogue, support, etc. Which allows for a more unique skill set for them without much difficulty for the dm.

-Helping DMs was definitely one of the points of incorporating monster types.
-The other came about when I ran a simple prototype battle and 3 monsters annihilated a party of 2 PCs despite having a credibly worse hit chance. So I decided to do monster types and made it so that minions hits could be "blocked" with heavy armor and/or shields such that a hit would be converted to a half damage graze and a graze would do one damage.

I think the biggest perk is that DMs can set difficulty to party taste and RPG experience.

I like the way Pathfinder 2e handles bosses and minions. It does it by making the D&D 3e encounter-building math actually work. If you want a boss, use a higher level monster. If you want minions, use lower level ones. The combat isn’t for everyone. It can be pretty demanding of the PCs to play well. But it’s a lot of fun if you can meet its expectations. I really enjoyed the session I got to play at Origins this year.

Might as well update the status on my homebrew system.

Last session went well, but next session is going to require basically full rebuilds of the PCs again. I am hopeful I am converging on final versions of their classes and skill lists. I ended up removing Know from the general skill list (because it can be handled by using INT as your approach), and I renamed a few skills, so there are only six now (Connect, Demand, Exert, Influence, Study, and Survive). I also changed classes in the warrior group to gain an increase in a combat skill or speciality every level, which required cutting a lot of stuff from the barbarian class. However, the big change was magic.

I’m not sure what prompted me to do it, but I’m exploring an mp-based magic system. To gain access to magic, you take the Magic speciality for a certain spell list, then you learn magical specialities from that list as spells. Casting a spell requires making a casting roll (3d6+Magic+spell rank), which usually provides some benefit such as giving an additional bonus on bless or hindering enemy saving throw rolls. I expect it will require some revision after play, but it provides some nice symmetry with the rest of the system: experts gain an extra noncombat speciality, warriors gain combat specialities, and mages gain magical specialities.

Another big change is I am redoing the layout. I’m still targeting A5, but I’m trying to get class descriptions down to one page. I also want to get rid of stuff like anathema I was using to ensure a certain play style for classes. I’m now trying to weave that into the class’s mechanics. Barbarians, for example, now have 0 mp and cannot do anything to increase it. When they are subject to a beneficial arcane spell, they take extra stress. The same goes for divine spells over a certain mp cost. They’re barbarians because they shun magic, and that’s reflected in the mechanics rather than in some fluff.

Regarding the metacurrency discussion, my system doesn’t have that. It doesn’t even have crits. Combat is a blend of 5e and Moldvay Basic. I want to keep things predictable. If you are at 10 hp, and the monster attacking you does 1d8, you should be able to make tactical decisions based on that. It keeps things scary by capping out hit dice progression at 9 HD (levels past 9th give a low amount of bonus hp) and by having generally low hit points. However, combat isn’t meant to be balanced with the PCs’ capabilities in mind. You’re not really even meant to presume that combat will happen. Last session has a good example.

Last session, the PCs learned that a merchant had arrived at their settlement in the early morning. He had fled from his camp after awaking to see a bulette had taken interest in it. Burrowed bulettes are pretty slow, so he was able to keep ahead of it, but he basically ran for an hour or so north until he got to the settlement. Of course, the bulette followed. Since my system is compatible with B/X, I used the bulette from Old-School Essentials advanced fantasy. It’s a 9 HD monster. My PCs are only 5th level. It would destroy them in a stand up fight. It was interesting how they responded. They adopted two approaches.

The first approach was to muster the guard. While the captain got everyone together, the cleric got ready to bless everyone. Guards are single HD people. Even with bless (this was pre-revision at the time, so only a +1 to hit, +1 to damage, and +1 to morale), the guards were cannon fodder. The PCs were going to lead them into battle, and there would be losses. The bulette’s main attack (a bite) does 3d12. It also has two claw attacks at 3d6 each. It can also leap and make four claw attacks. On average, it would kill three guards per round. It could also possibly one-shot most of the PCs. Their hp are 21 (thief), 22 (cleric), and 37 (barbarian). Fortunately, the barbarian had another idea.

The barbarian decided instead of engaging the bulette directly, they just needed to get it away from the settlement. She went and got a bunch of preserved meat from their supplies, and attached it with a rope to the back of a horse. She then rode out ahead of the bulette to try to entice it to follow her. Since the approach involved executing a plan, and she was trying to entice the bulette, we agreed that would be what is now an Influence (INT). I do have a Riding speciality, but I don’t know that it would be the right one here. That’s worth examining in a retrospective. Anyway, you can also give up things to add dice to your roll. They have to be something that makes sense and the opposition would accept, which we agreed the bulette would (the meat), so the barbarian ended up rolling 5d6−1 because she’s not trained in Influence.

The barbarian got a 20, which means (since my system uses conflict resolution) she got what was at stake: she lead the bulette away from the settlement. The barbarian then got the idea she should lead it back to the statue garden to the west where the were gorgons (both the D&D-style metallic bull and the classical style Medusa). She only got a partial success this time on her Survive (WIS) roll to find the location, so I added a complication. She could lead the bulette there, but the robed figure (Medusa) would be out. The barbarian was fine with that. She kept her head down and rode straight through the garden. The Medusa was like as this figure on a horse came flying by, and the bulette pounced and completely obliterated her.

I need to play out how the fight between the other gorgon and the bulette goes to see whether the barbarian took care of two of the treats to their hex (for their hex-clearing project), but the barbarian’s clever response ended up taking care of one of them without even having to fight it (or deal with it, which was an option, though my PCs were too scared to try getting close).

We’ll start next session with a character rebuild. Most of their choices will still be valid, but we’ll need to redo skills and specialities again due to the changes. The plan is for the party to head north into the swap looking for the caves where The Incandescent Grottoes are. My system aims to be compatible with adventures designed for Moldvay Basic, so this will be a good test of the compatibility. Interestingly, they’ll also have several retainers with them (a bard, a magician, a thief-acrobat). I say interestingly because they did not like retainers when I ran Old-School Essentials, but here we are.

4e got so much stank for how it played, but it was freakin' great at what it did. It was brilliant for those players that liked a grid and minis in their D&D, which I would say has EXPONETIALLY grown in the wake of VTTs and online play. I'd love to see so many of those concepts come back.

Minotaar wrote:

4e got so much stank for how it played, but it was freakin' great at what it did. It was brilliant for those players that liked a grid and minis in their D&D, which I would say has EXPONETIALLY grown in the wake of VTTs and online play. I'd love to see so many of those concepts come back.

It was also really newbie friendly. I did a few pax easts volunteering for the WoTC learn to play games. Teaching new players was a breeze for these. Not that the current gen is harder but the visual processing for 4e was easier.

Igneus wrote:
Minotaar wrote:

4e got so much stank for how it played, but it was freakin' great at what it did. It was brilliant for those players that liked a grid and minis in their D&D, which I would say has EXPONETIALLY grown in the wake of VTTs and online play. I'd love to see so many of those concepts come back.

It was also really newbie friendly. I did a few pax easts volunteering for the WoTC learn to play games. Teaching new players was a breeze for these. Not that the current gen is harder but the visual processing for 4e was easier.

4E is 100% of the reason why I play D&D. It was so easy to understand even I could grok it

And it'll always have a special place in my heart: it's how I got into D&D and how I met the great group of friends I have now that play D&D and board games every week.

The interest my friends and I have in D&D as adults stems from 4e and the Encounters program where hundreds of LGSes ran pick-up games of D&D on a set night of the week, with volunteer DMs at the ready. We stopped when several of us had another round of children, but when Covid hit, we started up an online game, this time with 5e.

Encounters was so great! My first time DMing was for the Dark Sun series of Encounters and I made some good friends from it. I'm still mad at myself for selling off all my Encounters modules

4e was fun for what it was, but what it was really boiled down to a really solid tabletop tactical miniatures game that had some D&D stuff with it, and it "felt less like D&D" than any other version. Your character abilities were essentially defined by movement on the grid, and noncombat stuff just felt far less significant because almost everything was really tied to that. Even worse, lots of classes just felt the same, as you'd have the same "do 1 damage and move an ally 1 square" ability regardless of whether you were a Bard or Cleric or whatever. There did wind up being this same-ness feel, and it felt like it had four classes for the four roles. I really enjoyed it, and a lot was Encounters, and it was a perfect game for that; because the narrative aspect just felt less important compared to all the tabletop mechanics, you could really drop in one week and miss the next two and it felt like you could be up to speed all the way.

I did a lot of Encounters with my son every Wednesday, and we had a great time, and I'll always like 4e for that, but the "feels video game-y" criticism was pretty warranted, and it just didn't have any legs for me. To give it credit, pre-4e I did a lot more Theater of the Mind stuff, but I enjoyed the tactical aspect of looking at my minis on a grid so much that I'm miniatures/VTT tokens for life at this point, as 4e's focus on that aspect was really loads and loads of fun.

In other RPG news, somehow my random internetting has gotten me down a rabbit hole of indie RPGs. It may have come from reading something about Mork Borg, or possibly Delta Green, but I've been exploring all kinds of stuff.

It can be hard for me (and I presume others) to get a sense of what a game is supposed to be like, but fortunately, these days there are thousands of "actual plays" out there in podcasts and Youtube, etc. Years ago I listened to the original Acquisitions Incorporated podcasts, and as recently as 2020 I dove back into some of their newer stuff. This time around, I started listening to Pretending to be People, which I believe is a Delta Green/Trail of Cthulhu mashup - and it's absolutely excellent, five episodes in.

Then I stumbled into the Death in Space RPG, followed quickly by Mothership, and Vast Grimm. These are all three launching around the same time and are all deep space science fiction with horror elements - think Alien, Event Horizon, and Nightflyers. DiS is the only one that has fully launched, although Mothership is the oldest - it started with a "version 0", and you can currently get version 0.5 for free. Version 1.0 has been Kickstarted but isn't out yet. Vast Grimm is a sci-fi horror version of Mork Borg, so a huge focus on the aesthetic.

Which one of these seems coolest seems to depend on which one I've been reading about most recently. Death in Space has the advantage of having been fully published; Vast Grimm is riding the wave of the enthusiasm for Mork Borg. However, Mothership has been out there with a couple early and free versions, and has seen a ton of community support. It seems like most of these modern indies have very generous publishing licenses, so anyone creating content for them can get paid.

Earlier this week I listened to a three-episode Mothership one-shot from the podcast Very Random Encounters (scroll down to Mothership or get it in your favorite podcast app - those episodes started in March 2019). I am not exaggerating when I say that this one-shot of people actually role playing and improvising a story was one of the best audio dramas I've ever heard, and I'm sad that more people won't hear this really excellent short story.

Anyway, all this has me combing though websites and Discords, checking out various Kickstarters like This Ship is a Tomb (a Mothership "derelict crawl" sourcebook, closing soon), and catching up on some movies that I can't believe I've never gotten around to watching. And of course, hoping to try a one-shot of one or more of these games in the near future. They all have Discords, but right now, only the Mothership one seems all that active, so far.

I totally agree. 4E felt more like an extension of a D&D tactics board game than it did a roleplaying game. Everything attack felt like I was, I dunno, pushing a button in Warcraft to do something? I can't put my finger on why, but 5E feels like there are way more opportunities for role playing than 4E did.

When we started playing indie RPGs like "Don't Rest Your Head" and "Fiasco", I think that's when my love for 4E started to wane. It made me realize what was missing in D&D at that time.

A bit of a sidetrack: D&D Next. So far from what I've read, it's all going to be backwards compatible with 5. So is this going to be a situation like 3 and 3.5? Or was that a much more complicated thing?

The next iteration of D&D (One D&D) is causing freakouts with all its changes, even though "all its changes" are at this point a 21 page PDF with updates on how Backgrounds and Races work, along with a few mechanics like only PCs can crit, and only with weapons, as well as "20 is an auto-success on any ability check/saving throw, 1 is a failure" as opposed to that only mattering for attack rolls. I dislike both of those ideas, but, well, it's the first document. Jeremy Crawford explicitly says in the interview about the release of the document that one of their goals was to experiment with mechanics and just see how people responded, so there's literally zero reason to worry about it at this point.

I don't think it's a 5.5; they've changed a number of things about 5e since it came out, and the Tasha's stat bonus changes were great, and that laid the groundwork for what's in the playtest document. I suspect it's just going to be an iterative changes, as anything significant would risk blowing up in their face as 5e's by far the most successful TTRPG in history.

Freakout is probable too strong a word I'd say. DnD geeks just love to argue over this sort of stuff. Cause that's usually easier then actually getting a group together and playing while still being fun. To me the changes so far are barely a blip. If the full changes come out and it's more then merely dnd 5.5. Then I'd be surprised. It's the VTT that could really be game changing. Assuming they don't half ass it.

Fedaykin98, the Alien RPG from Fria Ligan is also worth a look for space horror. It's a much slicker and fancier production than those you mentioned, but also a simple and evocative system for that style of game.

I suspect you can mix and match adventures between all of them pretty easily.

master0 wrote:

DnD geeks just love to argue

We do, we really really do

Igneus wrote:
master0 wrote:

DnD geeks just love to argue

We do, we really really do

No we don't!

MikeSands wrote:

Fedaykin98, the Alien RPG from Fria Ligan is also worth a look for space horror. It's a much slicker and fancier production than those you mentioned, but also a simple and evocative system for that style of game.

I suspect you can mix and match adventures between all of them pretty easily.

I have heard good things about it in the same community. I've also seen plenty of talk about converting adventures to various systems. I remember some time ago, seeing people talking about how their games were mash-ups between multiple systems, or even just altered to the GM's taste - the purist in me thought "I'd never want anything but bog standard!" But now that I'm looking at these three systems, I'm thinking "Well, what if no one of these does everything perfectly?"

For example, Mothership has more content available than the other two put together, even though it will be the last one to publish it's 1.0 version. Launching as a work-in-progress paid off for them in terms of building a community.

However, even though they claim to be rules-light, I think it may just be lighter than D&D, which is obviously a game descended from a tactical combat game. Vast Grimm is likely more of a truly rules-light game. That said, one may not be enamored of the six species of invasive wurms that can infect your character in Vast Grimm.

Then again, while both of those games lean into sci-fi horror, Death in Space has a particular focus on the weird, like crazy mutations that can happen to characters because of their contact with the void. There might be something that's worse than aliens out there...

Yeah, for myself I’m thinking “someday I might run a long Alien game, but steal lots of adventures from Mothership (etc) so it isn’t always xenomorphs”

There was some talk about doing a 4e game after our Torchbearer game wrapped up, but we got hung up on trying to play online. The VTT situation is not great. GSL makes it hard unless you like setting up all the powers and stuff manually.

We ended up getting a few more people and doing Blades in the Dark. It’s been tons of fun so far.

I picked up the Blades in the Dark rulebook just to get some ideas for running heists in 5e. Seems like a pretty solid little system.

MilkmanDanimal wrote:

I picked up the Blades in the Dark rulebook just to get some ideas for running heists in 5e. Seems like a pretty solid little system.

I’d say it’s exceptional rather than just solid. Fantastic combination of a vision and a system that supports it perfectly.

MikeSands wrote:

Yeah, for myself I’m thinking “someday I might run a long Alien game, but steal lots of adventures from Mothership (etc) so it isn’t always xenomorphs”

TOTALLY. I have a bunch of Mothership stuff and having run several games of ALIEN now it would be a breeze to port them over. Though I feel ALIEN's strength lies very much in short one-shot / mini campaigns rather than long-running games.

(That said, the Colonial Marine campaign in the CMM expansion is pretty good, considering you'd expect all of those adventures to kind of blur into one another, and the three cinematic scenarios that have been released so far for are all nicely linked together with a good deal of variety between them too. The third one (not yet out physically) takes the Alien stuff in a VERY new direction more akin to Dead Space).

On another note, I picked up Symbaroum (like...ALL of Symbaroum. All four rulebooks, the five current parts of the Throne of Thorns campaign and the starter set is en-route) and I LOOOOOOVE this setting and the associated campagin. I am very much looking forward to somebody inventing an eighth day in the week so I have time to run it!

Symbarous has the most amazing setting, and the most amazing campaign, the one you mention. I love this so much - I've bought both the same books as you did, and I also backed and have recieved the same game in the D&D 5E rules as well.

I'd be interested in hearing if you ever get to run it, how it went? I've only run the intro adventure with my group (daughters, and my GF) and it went really, really well, but they had a bit of a hard time adjusting to how dangerous the world is supposed to be.

This game just oozes atmosphere!

In general, I am a very big fan of everything Free League.

so, should I wait to purchase the sourcebook bundle on Beyond then?

For Symbaroum? You'll be waiting a while for that to show up on d&d beyond since it's a freeleague published property!

@razgon - as soon as I finish up one of the other games I'm running this is very likely the next thing I run! Prepping 'the copper crown' trilogy of intro adventures so that I am ready.