seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from Russia
seen from France
seen from Indonesia
seen from United States
seen from United Arab Emirates
seen from South Africa
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
the state of ttrpg blogs on this site is dire... i should rpgblog again still can't get over the idea of making a 700 page storygame as a prescriptive manual on columbo/scooby-doo fanfic and having the audacity to call combat in other rpgs "an hour and a half of wordless dice rolling" why do so many rpg designers hate the game part? just go back to rp forums.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
to use an example from a game i've been playing recently. if i made a STALKER rpg i wouldn't have a rule for throwing bolts. i would just say in the artifact hunting section "remember you can throw small rocks, bolts, or similar items to help find anomalies and avoid them!" having even 1 page of bolt throwing rules would be unnecessary.
for a game as hyped up as Eur3ka is on tumblr it was very funny to open the pdf and get jumpscared by 700 unformatted pages. on the site where no one reads rulebooks and does vibes-based gameplay i suddenly understood a lot. i asked another girl who actually sat down and read the thing and the worst part is the game doesn't even have a novel solution for mysteries. the GM is just supposed to write a mystery screenplay and then the players play it, and skimming that chapter myself confirmed this. 700 pages of rules text for a game where the gm makes up a scooby doo episode and you play it. at least the august beta is slightly more formatted but they're still basically vomiting paragraphs at you, and so many of them are about extremely insignificant rulings that a GM could just come up with or personal opinion. more to the point i just don't agree with a lot of the "setting guidelines" which are really the mission statement and should be closer to the front. i usually love crunchier games but most of these rules have nothing to do with the mystery solving and are just life-sim shit. why are there rules for eating food? to justify a diner scene? you can just go there! why does this have the "John Woo" roll? why are there so many rules for shooting people in this game that explicitly tells you a chapter later that "violence isn't the answer" or some other liberal shit?!
this is just TVtropes!
re: knowledge skills/failure states
Around 10 years ago, I was playing a game of Pokemon Tabletop United with some friends from school. The GM wanted us to start as young trainers without meta knowledge. We had to roll Pokemon Education for each pokemon we encountered. This meant sometimes we would encounter a new creature best described as a large insect, but we weren't allowed to say it was Bug type, because we didn't meet the skill check DC.
This isn't about the meta knowledge argument as much as game designers needing to put an actual fail-state or use case for the skills in their game that aren't just a feat tax/class tax. Apocalypse World was pretty good about this but I think there's room for improvement in the game design sphere that isn't just copying off AW for another 10 years.
re: previous reblog This is on track with what I was talking about the other day. So many people in the tabletop rpg space consider the "game" to be rolling dice" and the "roleplaying" to be freeform improv with maybe a prompt or two, with zero overlap.
Lancer is really bad about this to the point where engaging with the setting actively made it harder to run the "game", and none of the mech pilot's skills translated to that part of it. Lancer also featured the classic: "I roll diplomacy to make the NPCs agree with me, I got a 15 so they have to do what i say."
I praise FFG's games a lot but admittedly, the piloting skill was useless according to rules as written. Unless the GM specifically called for piloting checks to take off or made every fight take place in an asteroid field, it was never used. The knowledge skills had this problem as well, I think they're mostly a relic of game design but I'll make a more detailed post about that.
Apocalypse World is one of the few games I've seen that (mostly) resolved this issue. Players say what they wanna do, and the GM might call for a roll. If the result is high it goes well, if not it goes poorly or there's a cost. Since every interaction plays out like this, it at least has cohesion.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
Free to watch • No registration required • HD streaming
I think when people talk about the "slog" of combat in tabletop RPG's it comes from slaying hordes of faceless enemies, or repeating the same actions every turn until the parties win because the zeitgeist has decided that losing under any circumstances is bad.
Obviously if no one is allowed to lose the combat will become boring, and since the only way to meaningfully take damage in d20 games is if an opponent gets lucky. Of course it's going to feel like all combat is monotonous until those random "highlight reel" moments happen.
The solution is to not play d20 games, or games where there is only a 10-20% chance of something happening on a given roll. The problem isn't the idea of combat, the problem is that nothing happens on 90% of d20 rolls. When designing games, just get rid of the d20 mindset where only 1 in 5 rolls are failures, and you're good. You don't need any other non-synergistic mechanics to patch this 1 issue. FFG probably solved this better than anyone I've seen, with their custom dice (the cost of which isn't a problem if you're playing virtual tabletops).
Anima has a reputation as an arcane hyper-crunchy system with damage numbers into the hundreds. In my experience taking 90 damage in a single hit will outright kill most characters. Your health doesn't increase that much as you level up, and damage rarely goes above 150, except for the most powerful end-game abilities, which cap out around 600.
The most powerful spells a starting wizard is likely to cast have a base damage of around 90, but take time to cast. The most powerful weapon a martial character could start with has a base damage of 70, and costs 20 Gold (Affordable for most characters without spending additional points.)
In addition to adding 2x strength bonus to two-handed weapons, you would easily be at or above 90, and you don't need to accumulate energy to cast "sword". Depending on your attack stat, and combined Agility + Dexterity, you can even make 2 or 3 attacks per turn as a new character. And strangers can't sic the Inquisition on you for owning a sword or axe.
All in all, it's really playable. Critical hits can be deadly, but you'd expect as much. Anyone with a weapon poses a threat, even untrained, because a lucky crit could be the end. You can also make a character who is immune to crits and tank for your friends. I love the game because not only are so many things possible, but they actually matter in the gameplay. I can do literally anything with FATE but at the end of the day I'm getting ++ or --.
it's still really funny to me when people in the ttrpg space say 5e is a crunchy game
like I get what they mean, and in comparison to most indie games I wouldn't call it "rules light". but all of the crunch in 5e is completely wasted (as many are aware). it's wasted on massive spell books where only a fraction of the spells are even worth writing down. it's wasted on bloated health pools where martial classes just attack mindlessly every turn.
the "crunch" of 5e is learning the unwritten play culture and knowing that entire chapters of the book were written with the express purpose of being ignored. the actual gameplay is painfully simple. inexperienced gm's often ending up running a "mother may I" type game where players just ask questions repeatedly until they get what they want. (i.e. "can i lockpick this, can I make a perception check, can I use diplomacy, can I roll a d20?")
500 pages and there's no good explanation of what a "bonus action" even is. you just have this arbitrary barrier to entry while still trying to be the universal "anyone can use our system for anything". I wish I knew more about what was going on in the design process beyond "don't make 4th edition again"
