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PnP RPGs OT || Come play the REAL RPGs
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It was in community to begin with, I believe. I don't think anyone ever asked about a separate OOC thread, the OOC notation just kinda happened and everyone ran with it.
Jackben
bitch I'm taking calls.
You can also choose start a thread in OT community or regular Off-Topic. I think thLunarian chose to start it in community but I'm not sure.
CornBurrito
Member
I am talking about 3.5e.
And even just in core the classes are stupidly imbalanced. At level 1, a Druid's pet is on par (if not better) than a fighter. I took a war trained riding dog as my animal companion. It outdid the party fighter in AC, damage, and utility since it could make trip attacks and had scent. It eventually lost out in damage once the fighter got power attack, but still won out in AC and utility. And then at some point (had I not suicided the character) would have been traded in for an even better animal companion.
The Wizard has unlimited spells known basically, and in core there are some really broken spells. With plane shift and astral projection and a few other spells you can essentially make yourself unkillable. A 4th level spell is Polymorph. Polymorph is an absolutely insane spell. If the Wizard wants he can polymorph himself into a form and outdo the fighter in melee. Wizards also get Fly pretty early on, earlier than most classes can afford the equivalent magic item to gain a fly speed. This can trivialize most fights early on, especially combined with a spell that blocks ranged weapon attacks.
EndcatOmega
Unconfirmed Member
I was wondering if anyone in the topic had experience with Basic DnD and its variations/retroclones? I'm looking to run a PbP somewhere and have a DnD itch but I'm not the biggest fan of 3.PF, 4e's a hassle to run without a grid and isn't quite gritty enough for the feel I want, and 2e has its own problems.
On optimization forums, they often talk about CoDzilla, the Cleric or Druid that by optimizing rampages through a game like Godzilla on Tokyo.
Well, in a decade of playing 3.X, I have to say that's sadly true... too easy to trivialize the whole rest of the group with some smart playing by wizards, clerics and druids.
If you are wanting simplicity and ease of running, I'd actually recommend going with AD&D 1st and just limit the players to the PHB and maaaaaybe Unearthed Arcana.
You *could* go with Basic D&D, but you aren't gaining that much more simplicity (some of its mechanics are actually more complicated) and you have to deal with them rolling class and race into one thing.
EndcatOmega
Unconfirmed Member
Honestly, that's part of the appeal- Races don't ever seem to matter in other editions- but maybe I'll give 1e a shot instead. Hope the books are easier to read than 2e's.
Only 3.5 game I've played in managed to avoid that by making the only full caster the dumbest player!
It was me
I've heard good things about Old School Hack. That might be worth a try.
Jackben
bitch I'm taking calls.
All right, own up. Which one of you guys is this?
fallengorn
Bitches love smiley faces
Whoever takes the job should bring the biggest DM screen she can find.
Has anyone else seen or used How to Host a Dungeon?
I know it's been out for quite a while now, but I thought I'd bring it to peoples attention in case they haven't seen it. Essentially, it's a way to roll up a dungeon with a cool design and history from its very beginning. $5 for a PDF is so very reasonable, and there is a free version minus art and some content so you can give it a look over.
It was this video of dungeon creation that I came across that made me throw some money in his direction. I'd had the sample PDF for ages, but never given it a look. After seeing the video, it was too cool to not buy it immediately.
Also, The Quiet Year. I saw this on IndieGoGo when it was being funded and as much as I like what Joe McDaldno does, it just didn't grab me at the time. Now the more I see it, the more I want that sweet deluxe copy and to play it. I think it's a sweet little game on its own and it it's also something that you could squeeze into an RPG campaign somewhere. I love games which have that kind of flexibility.
An update on Alas Vegas. It has now passed £12,000, which is great. I'd love to see it pass £19,000 for a write-up on how to keep the game going. Give the game a look, it sounds very unique and excellent, and spread the word.
I know it's been out for quite a while now, but I thought I'd bring it to peoples attention in case they haven't seen it. Essentially, it's a way to roll up a dungeon with a cool design and history from its very beginning. $5 for a PDF is so very reasonable, and there is a free version minus art and some content so you can give it a look over.
It was this video of dungeon creation that I came across that made me throw some money in his direction. I'd had the sample PDF for ages, but never given it a look. After seeing the video, it was too cool to not buy it immediately.
Also, The Quiet Year. I saw this on IndieGoGo when it was being funded and as much as I like what Joe McDaldno does, it just didn't grab me at the time. Now the more I see it, the more I want that sweet deluxe copy and to play it. I think it's a sweet little game on its own and it it's also something that you could squeeze into an RPG campaign somewhere. I love games which have that kind of flexibility.
An update on Alas Vegas. It has now passed £12,000, which is great. I'd love to see it pass £19,000 for a write-up on how to keep the game going. Give the game a look, it sounds very unique and excellent, and spread the word.
Oh thought this might be interesting for everyone here:
http://archive.org/search.php?query=dragon magazine AND subject:"Dragon Magazine"
Every issue of Dragon magazine has been posted here for free. Good quality PDFs.
And Polyhedron is up there too.
http://archive.org/search.php?query=dragon magazine AND subject:"Dragon Magazine"
Every issue of Dragon magazine has been posted here for free. Good quality PDFs.
And Polyhedron is up there too.
LaserBuddha
Member
Anyone found a torrent or something that will grab all of it? Needless to say, downloading them each manually would be tedious.
Anyone got any/know where to find some advice for how the DM can keep things interesting during the "down moments" between events? Particularly travel. If the players are traveling to a location (and I don't want them to wander into a fight for time or pacing reasons), it usually boils down to me saying "okay, you traveled."
krypt0nian
Banned
I have them prep a short list of 3-5 campfire stories that they can share with the party of a cool backstory moment, where they saw/did something extraordinary or interesting, and they share one here and there. Works well for us.
Believe it or not, the guys at Role Playing Public Radio just did an episode on exactly this topic. Here it is for your enjoyment.
Riposte
Member
What do you guys think of this character creation policy I've been tossing around in my head: (I'll frame it as a set of instructions)
-Name
-Class (One sentence description how this class will be played. e.g. "Barbarian with a great sword who uses this or that alt rage mechanic".)
-Gender + Race + Country/Culture + Age
Don't tell me any background information (yet). Instead simply give me 5 hooks for your character. By hooks I don't mean adventuring hooks, but rather the reverse: 5 ways your character hooks into the setting that a DM can pull on to create adventuring hooks. You are free to add material to the setting, within limits that should be obvious. Also feel free to use this opportunity to help shape a character who has a lot going on beyond his desire to collect loot. (Some ideas to work from: Family ties, career, long-term ambitions ("I want to be a powerful sorcerer" doesn't count), revenge, prejudices, your prioritized skills or feats, what were you doing during The Last War?, why are you in Sharn?)
Later on, players would provide a full "character sheet". Players might also need to provide a more traditional background write-up at some point, but I'm not even sure on that as long as we don't begin to break character or continuity.
(If it is not clear: I envision using this for an Eberron campaign, a published campaign setting. Going homebrew may make it a little messy.)
-Name
-Class (One sentence description how this class will be played. e.g. "Barbarian with a great sword who uses this or that alt rage mechanic".)
-Gender + Race + Country/Culture + Age
Don't tell me any background information (yet). Instead simply give me 5 hooks for your character. By hooks I don't mean adventuring hooks, but rather the reverse: 5 ways your character hooks into the setting that a DM can pull on to create adventuring hooks. You are free to add material to the setting, within limits that should be obvious. Also feel free to use this opportunity to help shape a character who has a lot going on beyond his desire to collect loot. (Some ideas to work from: Family ties, career, long-term ambitions ("I want to be a powerful sorcerer" doesn't count), revenge, prejudices, your prioritized skills or feats, what were you doing during The Last War?, why are you in Sharn?)
Later on, players would provide a full "character sheet". Players might also need to provide a more traditional background write-up at some point, but I'm not even sure on that as long as we don't begin to break character or continuity.
(If it is not clear: I envision using this for an Eberron campaign, a published campaign setting. Going homebrew may make it a little messy.)
Holy shit! Looks like the Alas Vegas kickstarter is going to make it past £21,000.
Along the way there we've gotten Hell 4 leather PDF for free, a 4-user license, a novel, a way to extend the game past 4 sessions, a 'Killing Bugsy Siegel' game in the book, bringing the game mechanics to OGL. If/when it passes £21,000 we get a superhero game scenario in the book.
The way it was crawling along for some time, I didn't think it was going to get there. I am so excited that it has. All the extras will surely make this book so much more worthwhile. If you haven't jumped on yet, you last chance is fast approaching. 17 hours to go.
Along the way there we've gotten Hell 4 leather PDF for free, a 4-user license, a novel, a way to extend the game past 4 sessions, a 'Killing Bugsy Siegel' game in the book, bringing the game mechanics to OGL. If/when it passes £21,000 we get a superhero game scenario in the book.
The way it was crawling along for some time, I didn't think it was going to get there. I am so excited that it has. All the extras will surely make this book so much more worthwhile. If you haven't jumped on yet, you last chance is fast approaching. 17 hours to go.
EndcatOmega
Unconfirmed Member
Seems good to me- simplified version of the 5 allies, 5 rivals etc thing I can't remember the name of right now. Other than the answer to 'Why are you in Sharn?' is 'Because every Eberron adventuring party starts in Sharn or Stormreach' *cough*
I like the simplified thing that 13th Age is doing, which is 'One Unique Thing'. It's essentially one thing that will separate your character from every other. It can be the result of something that happened in your past, a strange ability or something that arose from your birth, there are so many possibilities. The player and the GM can work together to flesh it out, create a mechanic for it if necessary and absolutely can create adventure hooks from it.
With the above idea, the player will be saying "I would like at least part of the adventure to revolve around this, please make it happen". Working with the GM to completely understand their unique thing can bring it about. I've essentially stolen words from Rob Heinsoo in this paragraph, but I couldn't put it better myself.
If you're interested to hear how it works, there is a recording of Rob Heinsoo running a short session of 13th Age on BJ Shea's Geek Nation, it very much includes character creation and One Unique Thing, as well as Rob helping bring these things to life, it's brilliant. If you want to hear more, here's part 2, part 3, part 4 and part 5. They run for about 30 mins each, I'm sure you'll enjoy them.
Riposte
Member
I know 13th Age exists. Not currently planning to use it (I should check if it is out). One Unique Thing seems to slightly different from what I'm asking (but only slightly). I'm not really interested in players creating something only they have, only characteristics that links them to a setting (hooks). So "I'm *this*" or "I have *this*" is not very satisfactory unless this or that can be used as a hook. Which 9 out of 10 times it probably can easily, so it is not a problem, but compare it to saying "I have a Deneith dragonmark (and my relationship to the house is...)" which isn't unique at all but has immediate implications. "I consider working as a private eye as my true career", again not very unique, but useful.
What I'm more after is condensing the background to its most useful attributes (in terms of content creation) and pushing players to think up a background which has five things worth mentioning in terms of hooks. Imagine it might be easier going in reverse if someone is averse to writing a lot of their own fluff.
Good point about Sharn EndcatOmega lol. Being an adventurer by trade is a boring hook unless they can put some ambition into it. So ideally, they wouldn't that question as a basis if that's what they would come up with.
EDIT: What are people's thoughts on "Trailblazer" (the "patched" 3.5)? Personally I like it more than Pathfinder, at least before considering Pathfinder's new class stuff.
EndcatOmega
Unconfirmed Member
From my boundless, first-hand knowledge of skim-reading stuff on other forums sometimes, I got the impression that general feeling was mixed but everyone agreed it was easier on the DM.
shoplifter
Member
It's not out yet, prepurchasers have gotten most of the text though.
It's definitely gone through some tough times (server rebuilds, edition wars, etc..), not as good as it used to be I think, although pop numbers seem okay to me.
I haven't been going as often as I used too, probably because I'm running SWSE and not following DND next closely.
DiscoJer
Member
Yeah, when I went back there (after D&D 5e was announced), I was shocked at how quiet it was.
I think 4e kind of broke up the community a lot. 4e fans moved to the WOTC boards and RPG.net, 3.x fans moved to the Pathfinder boards, old school fans moved to Dragonsfoot and other places.
Pelgrane Press freelancer Chris Huth just lost his home in a fire. He was working on the layout for 13th Age and creating the template for Esoterrorists 2.0. All data was lost in the fire, as there was no backup. Apparently he was almost done with the layout for 13th Age and having seen some of it, he was doing an incredible job.
To help him out, until Friday, Pelgrane Press are donating 50% of all physical book sales and 100% of all PDF sales (including those from DriveThruRPG) to help him get back on his feet. If Pelgrane has a book you've been thinking of buying, now's the time to get on that. Pelgrane publish some incredible games, I'm sure there's something you'll like there, and they really are good people. More details here.
To help him out, until Friday, Pelgrane Press are donating 50% of all physical book sales and 100% of all PDF sales (including those from DriveThruRPG) to help him get back on his feet. If Pelgrane has a book you've been thinking of buying, now's the time to get on that. Pelgrane publish some incredible games, I'm sure there's something you'll like there, and they really are good people. More details here.
LaserBuddha
Member
4th Edition DnD feels a lot like Final Fantasy Tactics. It really seems the best for a JRPG feel as far as how the system is presented.
There are anime-styled games like Big Eyes Small Mouth, Anima, or Exalted if that aesthetic is something they're looking for, but I can't comment on the systems.
In what sort of feel? Big Eyes, Small Mouth is a system designed to replicate an anime experience, if that's what you're talking about (though there are more system designed for that, even Exalted to a degree.) If you're talking in terms of battles system than I don't really think so... P&P battle is way too open for that.
When I was younger and into anime, we used BESM to play games set in almost every popular manga universe - Naruto, Shaman King, Hunter x Hunter, Fullmetal Alchemist... It took some house-ruling with some of them, but it mostly worked perfectly.
Anyway, guys, question time - What is a good way to organize stuff for a campaign? I mean, do you guys have any apps, software of websites you use? Until now I just had everything in open big ass Word document with bunch of headings (for each character sheet, monster, boss, whatever) but I just realized that might not be the best way to go at it... Any suggestions?
EndcatOmega
Unconfirmed Member
I tend to use http://www.obsidianportal.com/ as a mini-wiki for my campaigns- each page having player visible stuff and gm-only stuff, so you can have places and npcs and pcs up there with your own notes and some more PC-centric information there as well so the players can ignore it with even greater efficiency!
I think the guy is just wanting a kind of simple-ish combat system where it's more "I'm going to cast a spell." ::look at spell list:: "I'm going to cast fireball." instead of worrying about dailies and encounters and fate points and karma and memorizing spells and whatever. Honestly he was kind of vague. Maybe something that just has something similar to a standard JRPG MP system?
Maybe what he's looking for is more of a "canned character progression" type system. They've been playing Dresden lately and it's so intensive to build a character and all the skills and such are so floaty I think maybe he's just looking for something more concrete.
Is it convenient to use during a session though? Like if I need to look up a character sheet for some villain or monster I created in advance, I want to be able to get to it as fast as possible...
BESM is pretty simple. Anyway MP systems tend to get pretty messy in P&P games - You have to constantly keep track of it in your CS and all, my Exalted sheets for example tend to get horribly dirty because of all the erasing and re-writing of the Essence pool.
There are many systems that are simpler, but I can't think of anything that is very JRPG-like... I mean, I don't even think it would be much fun, considering it wouldn't make use of any advantage a P&P game might offer. Usually simpler systems do away with most combat stuff to focus more on role-playing or free-form combat.
EDIT:
Older systems tended to be like that. For example, in AD&D you generally had very little say in your progression - No sorcerer meant no picking spells, you had no feats to choose from, and skills were much simpler and less obnoxious. In general, you had to just kind go with the flow and the story dictated where your character will go...
I saw Realm Works go up on Kickstarter a little while ago and it looked pretty neat. It might be something like what you're after. Here's the kickstarter page which might have some more info for you.
Thanks, but that really seems waaay too complicated for what I need. I really just want something that'll help me keep all the various information organized, so that I can, for example, quickly get out a player character sheet or a monster stats or the info I wrote about some area...
Plus, my new campaign starts on Thursday, and I don't think this will be ready by then
Guess I'll just stick with either Word or OneNote...
Like LaserBuddha suggested, Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is very much in line with what you are after. Might suggest looking at the starter set if unsure.
Microsoft OneNote?
CrudeDiatribe
Member
I'm using Evernote and a PHPBB forum.
For D&D 3.5 players, the iOS app RPGScribe just recently updated to allow custom classes (or, you know, inputting ones beyond the 3.5 PHB), which was really one of the app's two biggest shortcomings. Now if they add a dice rolling function, it'd be amazing, but for now it's just a super handy character sheet manager. Totally going to input my Swashbuckler in there as soon as I have time to make the custom class.
Yes. It's utterly amazing. Can't believe I lived without it until now...
We've been playing 4e for a while now. I'll have to talk to the guy again to see if I can get him to elaborate, but it just occurred to me this morning he may have just meant (in addition to what I was talking about earlier) that he wanted something in which the combat system didn't evolve a map and a grid (removing the "Tactics" from "Final Fantasy Tactics," in other words); if that's the case then we could probably just run a regular game of whatever and mod it a little bit to do away with the map (have spells/skills that restrict movement range instead slow down initiative, stuff like that).
I think D&D can be run as well without a map. Most things in the books have detailed stats about ranges (35 feet and etc. (they really need to change to the metric system)) that playing without a map or grid should be very well possible. Maybe a few rules need to changed like Combat Advantage and corner shooting so its more up to imagination and GM decision.
If the tactical combat that D&D 4e offers is not desired, then it'd probably be best not to use that system. Remove that aspect and you're not really playing D&D 4e anymore.
Take a look at what you want from the game, what sort of collaborative story you want to tell. Once you know the answer to that, then you can have a look for the game/system that is going to help make that happen for you.
Take a look at what you want from the game, what sort of collaborative story you want to tell. Once you know the answer to that, then you can have a look for the game/system that is going to help make that happen for you.
I know a decade ago my friends and I played AD&D without a map at all, so I certainly know it CAN be played that way, but IIRC there is a lot more stuff like flanking and opportunity attacks in 4e that are dependent on the grid. I think the worst we ever "worried" about back in the day was how many people a fireball would hit but that was as simple as asking the DM before casting. It was my introduction to RPing so I don't really know if we had to drop much else.
I've never played D&D, any edition, with a map or miniatures... I don't think that way of playing was mandatory or even encouraged before 4e (and to a lesser extent 3e.)
Miniatures and maps and such always seemed like waaay too much of a hassle. I can't even imagine playing with them...
Miniatures and maps and such always seemed like waaay too much of a hassle. I can't even imagine playing with them...
Keru_Shiri
Member
Have you considered Mutants and Masterminds? It's an extremely open-ended d20 system, so your group should already be somewhat familiar with how it plays. I ran an anime-style game with it, and my group had a great time with it. There's also very little tactical movement (no attacks of opportunity, for example) and we only used a map to get a general idea of relative positions.
Jackben
bitch I'm taking calls.
Depends on how strict your DM is about it. If it's all required and very strict I can see how it would be not fun or a hassle. But I also think it can be fun in a lot of instances to set up the scene or plan tactics. If your group enjoys it and people like making maps and such as they explore or learn of a new area it adds a lot to the physical game atmosphere.
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@Monroeski: