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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 17, 2016 23:43:08 GMT -8
One thing that's always important to Rogue Trader PCs is answering the question of why you're on a ship, on the fringes of space, doing whatever it is you happen to do. A member of the Ecclesiarchy could be leading a flock of Imperial subjects on some world somewhere, or he could be serving the Imperial Guard as a militant chaplain, or could be a cog in the massive space-Vatican bureaucracy that keeps the Imperium running. Why does he have this job, with its combination of extreme danger and extreme individual power? Is he secretly (or openly) conniving to amass a great fortune of his own? Does he see himself as the firebrand who will inspire some great crusade? Is he looking for glorious martyrdom? Is he genuinely concerned with protecting the souls of the officers and crew from all the corrupting influences that surround them? You can take almost any religious archetype and tack it onto a Rogue Trader's missionary.
One sort of Missionary might turn a blind eye to a Rogue Trader's xenophilia out of pure greed. Another might do it based on the belief that short-term corruption can serve a greater long-term good. Another might just be accumulating evidence to be turned over to the Inquisition in good time.
Most of the PCs in a Rogue Trader game are outwardly focused. Fighting external threats, chasing after material riches, acquiring knowledge, that sort of thing. The Missionary has a lot of opportunities to be inwardly focused--acting as the foil for the other PCs. He can be the one reminding the Rogue Trader of the dangers of xenos influence or heretical knowledge. He can be the one scrutinizing the crew for disloyalty or apostasy. You might even start acting secretly to protect your fellow officers from themselves...
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 17, 2016 23:21:04 GMT -8
Rogue Trader, unsurprisingly, has a lot of rules attached to this sort of thing. It sets up ship-to-ship combat as a tactical skirmish game, with ships moved around on a tabletop map. Each PC is meant to have some sort of role in the combat, enabling the players' ship to fight more effectively. Each turn they can choose actions that affect the performance of the ship.
Rogue Trader (Captain)- can hand out "inspiration" bonuses to other PC or NPC crewmen, and can make leadership tests to enable large-group tasks like damage control or boarding parties.
Void-Master (helmsman/bridge officer) - most often is used as a helmsman, making piloting checks to perform difficult maneuvers, evade fire, etc. Can also specialize in things like gunnery or sensors.
Speaking of which, weapons control and sensor scans are something that different characters can take on--there isn't so much of a dedicated PC role for them. Sensor scans use perception checks to do things like identify enemy ship equipment, damage assessment, or assist with gunnery. Psykers and Navigators can use their powers to further enable the ship via precognition, tracking, or concealment.
Tech-Priests are the engineers, and do what you would expect. If they want to boost the ship's speed or maneuverability, they have to perform mechanics checks each turn. They're also required to repair damaged ship components.
As I mentioned, though, this takes the form of wargame-style tactical combat. Players can take moments to roleplay whenever they like, but the GM needs to make sure that the mechanical elements move quickly and smoothly. You have several players controlling one ship on the battle mat, so you don't want to leave them sitting around waiting for their turn unnecessarily. Keeping things fast and dramatic is important.
The other extreme is to go very narrative heavy. Have the PCs do very little to mechanically affect the outcome of the battle; instead, concentrate on setting up dramatic situations that require their attention. Treat the battle as a series of vignettes, like putting out an engine fire, sealing off a breached section, or scrutinizing sensor output for the sign of an elusive enemy.
I do think you generally have to go extremely high-level (the battle as a ship-to-ship wargame) or very low-level (the battle as personal scenes of dramatic action). Don't try to straddle the difference. And most importantly, steal ideas from things like naval or submarine stories. There should be no end of situations on a ship aside from manning the helm or the guns. The climactic sequence of Das Boot, for instance, basically involves sealing water leaks, bailing water, and fixing engines...while lying at the bottom of the sea. I think you'll get more mileage out of that sort of thing, than focusing on the Star-Wars-style dogfighting and barnstorming.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 23, 2015 19:12:21 GMT -8
Rogue Trader is a bit odd in that it gives the PCs a huge ship and thousands of followers; but the rules seem to assume that they'll still play like Starfleet officers, beaming the bridge crew down to handle things themselves. So much of the ruleset focuses on the PCs' personal combat skills and abilities, rather than abstracted social mechanisms.
One thing to do is remember that in the 40k universe, technical competence is a relatively rare thing. Your ship is maintained by a fanatically secretive cult, and you need a psychic wizard to guide the ship through Space Hell for FTL travel. Most of your crew are ignorant wretches that live in a regime of rum, sodomy and the lash. They aren't capable of, and can't be trusted with, most truly important tasks. You want Kurt Deckswabbenz to be the first person to come across that uncanny alien artifact? Bad idea.
Also, the PCs' operation of the ship can also be a great source of role play and conflict. Who are the NPCs that the PCs will deal with regularly? The grizzled chief bosun, the lead press-gang slaver, the Network Administratum Cogitatus, the senior accountant, or the tribal chieftain of the cooling-duct maintenance clan? Endless possibilities. If the players send hundreds of their troopers off to be horrifically slaughtered, then their company commander may have a rather negative reaction...
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Post by henryhankovitch on Apr 25, 2014 21:14:40 GMT -8
Well! Guess I wasn't as interested in typing my ideas up back then as I thought. But the campaign's been going on for three or four sessions now, so I feel good about this. The PitchThe PCs are new hires for a prospective defense contractor, developing a novel intelligence-gathering method: sensing and interpretation computers that allow multiple individuals to perceive the dreams of one person. Yes, pretty much just like Inception. Except... The machine is not simply some fancy brain-scanner. Under its influence the dreamers can actually interact with an intangible realm where alien energies and human emotions entwine: the Dreamlands. This idea isn't entirely mine, of course. I was inspired by more or less the same concept being tossed around elsewhere on the Internet. This is just my version of it. DreamingThe technology works much as it does in Inception. One person is the subject--the originator of the dream--and the PCs perceive themselves within it. They can even influence it by sheer force of will, communicating with the dreamer overtly or altering the narrative of the dream itself. The players are told that the scanning data is simply too complex and too idiosyncratic to be deciphered by software, but that human brains can actually interpret the signals that the sensors record. Therefore, teams of "interpreters" are used, with each person recording his own perception of the dream. The reports can then be compared, looking for collaborated details. The Not-Magic SystemI look around. Are there any weapons here?I don't know. Do you think there are?I loosely adopted the magic rules from Call of Cthulhu to represent the ability of PCs to alter the dream world, even referring to magic points as "ego." In normal CoC, players are usually extremely cautious about anything involving magic, and learning and casting spells devastates a PC's Sanity points. Part of the appeal of this concept is to create a scenario where the players can play with "magic" without such dire consequences. In proper CoC fashion, of course, this is a trap. Players spend Ego points in an effort to alter the dream. They must also pass an INT test, based on the magnitude of the change they are attempting. Minor changes (INTx5 roll, 1 Ego): producing an item the PC often has on his person (a credit card, a sidearm), or altering a small element of the dream (creating a key for a locked door, changing a photo on the wall) Moderate changes (INTx3 roll, 3 Ego): a significant change that still generally fits the "dream logic" of the scene (pulling a tommygun out of a suitcase, creating a waitress with drinks for your table) Major changes (INTx1 roll, 5 Ego): a drastic change to the scenario, one that violates the dreamer's narrative in a very obvious way (a squad of soldiers suddenly crashes through the door, changing the venue from the dreamer's high school to the dreamer's apartment) In any of these rolls, players can add 5 percentile points to their INT target for each additional Ego point they spend. So if a PC with INT 15 and 10 Ego is trying to change a raging werewolf into a yapping poodle, he can spend 5 extra Ego to get +25% to his target--rolling under 40, instead of 15. The Ego points are lost whether the PC succeeds or not. This is a very powerful system, and it is meant to be. In the first few dream sessions, the players get comfortable with the idea that they can make stuff happen at a whim, and become accustomed to shaping the world around them to enable them to get information. But it won't work so easily for very long. The PCs can also use their normal skills to interact with the dream without losing any Ego. Making a Drive check to tail someone in a car, or making an attack roll with a weapon, or using Persuade or Fast Talk on someone.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Mar 10, 2014 18:08:42 GMT -8
The video begins. A dire legal reminder of the viewer's confidentiality agreement, and the penalties for divulging any of the presented content. A corporate logo, fading to black. Cut to stock footage of American soldiers walking down a dusty Iraqi street, a gaggle of brown-faced children trailing behind. A deep, authoritative narrator speaks.
The War on Terror is an ever-changing struggle that transcends battlefields, ignores national borders, defies traditional military doctrine. It is a battle we cannot afford to lose.
More stock-footage montage. A Marine in desert camouflage firing a machine gun. An explosion, caught on shaky videocamera from behind a roofline. A generic Bad Guy in Turban speaking into a cell phone. Overhead thermal-image video of a huddle of men burying an IED beside a road. A civilian airliner on landing approach. A 1980s mujaheddin grinning as he hoists a Stinger missile tube.
This war cannot be won without intelligence. America enjoys a SIGINT infrastructure second to none, but we can never overlook the need to understand our enemy's intentions. His thoughts. His beliefs. However well-intentioned, our efforts at gathering such human intelligence have met with stumbling blocks.
Still image--a grinning US soldier with pixel-obscured face, standing next to a pair of naked, hooded detainees, as another soldier shoves the face of one against the groin of the other.
Such missteps, however well-intentioned, have harmed America's ability to speak with moral authority on the international stage. We must do better. We must develop techniques that are humane, yet effective.
Footage of two individuals lying on hospital beds, a man in hospital scrubs leaning over one of them. They each have an IV in their arm, and a mask of some kind, fitted with a standard oxygen tube, and connected to a Gorgon's-head array of electrical leads. The mask covers each subject's eyes, giving them a blank-faced, anonymous appearance.
At Remtech Security Solutions, we are harnessing cutting-edge neuromedical technologies to provide enhanced interrogation and HUMINT cross-association methodologies. And you may have what it takes to join us. We need talented men and women with diverse occupational expertise for our signal-interpretation teams. Experience, drive, creativity, and excellence. We look forward to working with you.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Mar 10, 2014 17:29:54 GMT -8
Originally, the free version included a comments board for each campaign, separate from the campaign fora (which required the subscription). My group always used the comments board for basic discussion and group communications, particularly for game scheduling. With that feature removed, the free version has basically no usefulness to the group as a community portal. Before, Obsidian Portal was basically a combination of a tools that you could find for free elsewhere, bundled somewhat conveniently under a single banner. Now they've put enough of those features behind the paywall that you may as well just set up a personal Proboards forum or whatever instead.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 23, 2014 18:46:10 GMT -8
Yep, still in. Send me an email or a PM with how you'd like to handle character creation and such.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 20, 2014 19:51:43 GMT -8
I ended up holding my nose and watching it in 3D, because I missed the non-3d showtime on the day I went to see it. As always, a mistake. The movie was still pretty decent, though.
I did chuckle a bit at the dialogue obviously written to inform the ignorant gaijin savages. Like when the shogun says, "I now order you to commit seppuku. Ritual suicide, to absolve yourself of honor, so that your family will not live with the stain of your disgrace..."
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 18, 2014 12:59:11 GMT -8
I'd definitely be interested, if you don't have someone already.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 18, 2014 10:17:09 GMT -8
That tension between classes as narrative archetypes and classes as collection-of-related-abilities is one of the straining points in D&D. People will continue to argue what playing a paladin means, because the paladin is in a system that rides the rail between design philosophies. It's a narrative archetype lingering in a mechanical-archetype world.
Broadly speaking, you use a class-based system when you want to enable/enforce certain types of PCs in your world. In a Star Trek game, for instance, you might have classes for Command, Engineering, Security, and Science. In L5R you have Bushi, Shugenja, and Courtiers. (And monks, whatever.) It's there to enforce, however subtly, the themes and trappings of your setting. For example, your Star Trek game probably doesn't have classes for Space Janitor, because it just doesn't fit the stories that Star Trek tells. Being the beautiful and unique snowflakes you are, you can try to create an adventure for a science officer, a redshirt, a brash lieutenant, and the janitor; but trying to accommodate the abilities and in-universe role of the janitor on the same missions as the other three is really only going to cause headaches. Similarly, your Star Trek game probably will not have a Space Marine character, not so much because he would be unable to find a role in the adventure, but because it clashes with how Starfleet is described in the fiction.
But D&D has never been built around any single fictional setting. If anything, since AD&D the setting writers have generally been forced to create worlds that explain and conform to the game mechanics, rather than the other way around. ("Who the hell made a Sphere of Annihilation, anyway?") And--at least since 3rd edition--the fanbase has run with the assumption that D&D is for ALL fantasy, everywhere. So the class system has strained to encompass characters that resemble Boromir and characters that resemble Elric in the same rulebooks. Even worse, within the same adventuring parties.
So there has been a tendency in D&D to discard any of the narrative themes remaining in the classes, and simply treat them as bundles of stats and abilities. Why does your character have a level in Rogue? +1d6 sneak attack, of course. Because he's good at killing things. The powerbuilders embrace this philosophy completely, becoming Kabbalistic masters of cross-referencing. Want a character who can dual-wield trebuchets? Well, you need a feat from this book over here, and your race should be "Half Stone Golem" from this other book, and then you take levels in this prestige class based on guys who operate siege equipment... You end up treating a class-based system as the world's most obtuse point-buy system. Want to be able to turn invisible at will? We can't just let you spend 15 points and buy it; you have to hope that you know of a prestige class that has it as a feature, and that you can get to before 15th level. Only then is it kosher!
But then we come back to the paladin, who has the unfortunate problem of being the only PC whose narrative role--not just his equipment and combat style, but his morality--incorporated into his mechanical abilities. Is he a Van Helsing-esque monster hunter--judge, jury, and executioner in one? Or is he obliged to drag that owlbear back to town so it can be judged by a jury of its peers? Those are vastly different narrative concepts, and live in different settings entirely. The class fails to create a narrative archetype, because it can't assume anything about the world it occupies. So its built-in roleplaying mechanics become vague and messy, which makes them argument fodder for nerds.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 12, 2014 17:14:53 GMT -8
I thought Stu's Five Questions started with "AC or DR?" and "GURPS or Hero?"
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 12, 2014 16:52:45 GMT -8
What this possibly highlights is how we rarely play "normal people" in fantasy or historical type games. They're adventurers, soldiers, wizards, thieves, nobles, scoundrels, and so on. People don't generally play games where five peasants take up their pitchforks and go fight the goblin menace; and I would daresay that when they do, it's more of a short-lived novelty compared to most campaigns.
But when we run games in the real world, the bizarre nature of murderhoboing is even more obvious. So you have a choice between true "bystanders"--everyday people--or those who by their profession are duty-bound to go into dangerous situations.
I think this is a case where Delta Green is instructional. DG is basically a setting book for the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Regular CoC leaves it up to the players and GM to find a reason for an antiquarian, an heiress, a retired Marine and a tribal fisherman to go investigating horrible things together. There's no intrinsic, unifying theme. One of the primary goals in writing Delta Green was to create a scenario where likely "adventurers" would be brought together. Namely, an extralegal conspiracy working within the government to fight Mythos threats. So the average group of PCs is a guerrilla-style cell of government agents and other "friendlies," who get sent secret assignments. Someone dies horribly and a new PC has to be introduced to the party? You get an encrypted email saying "we're sending Agent Barker to you. Get it done, B-cell."
Other unifying themes also work well. Military teams, police investigators, even a neighborhood watch. It's one of the easiest way to justify a modern adventuring group, without having to rely on everyone being related to the same dead-under-mysterious-circumstances NPC. You need a plausible way for the PCs to know one another, and a plausible motivation for them to do something other than skip town. It doesn't need to be a heartfelt motivation shared by all the PCs, but an initial nudge in the right direction. Maybe your cop isn't willing to die fighting the flying fungi aliens from Pluto; but his job and his duty will start him down that path before he finds out what's really going down.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 2, 2014 10:55:51 GMT -8
To put it in another context, the reason I really like two of these characters--the Crane asshole and the bad Unicorn husband--is that they've already handed me their fatal flaws. Before the campaign has even started, I know who is coming after their heads, and why.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 1, 2014 23:23:13 GMT -8
]Don't know whether you're particularly bothered but going through what you've said about the characters this one jumps out at me as a potential issue. Firstly, as written, it sounds like the character would fit better in a D&D campaign than L5R and that the player may not realise how much of an issue they could cause for the rest of the party, I mean a kleptomaniac is bad enough but ninja, that's just asking to be executed on the spot. The second reason I'd be weary is that this PC is going to need a lot of side boarding as they can't use their primary skills in front of the rest of the group, which put together is why I personally prefer to keep the Scorpion as NPCs. Yeah, this is definitely something that we're going to keep an eye out for. The guy playing this Scorp is the guy whose work will keep him from attending every session, so he'd likely end up being somewhat sidelined in the plot anyway. But we may have to renegotiate if this concept becomes unwieldy in practice. I'll own it as a rookie mistake on my part if that happens.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Jan 1, 2014 23:20:19 GMT -8
This guy would likely be a ronin for killing someone in a duel to first blood. He dishonored the duel, the duelist, and his school. Killing someone in a duel to first blood shows a lack of ability and/or restraint and is HIGHLY dishonorable. IF he survived the ordeal intact then it took some massive leveraging by someone high up in which case he owes a massive debt to someone and more than likely it also earned him a major sworn enemy in his opponent's family. I'd even go so far as to say if he did make it through the ordeal he might have been cast out of his school. I'll be the first to admit I'm no expert on Rokugan fluff. But nothing I've read so far in the main rulebook would indicate this is that severe an issue. After all, it even specifically says that duels to the death without permission, despite being a violation of your duty to your lord, are frequently overlooked with slap-on-the-wrist penalties. It seems to be assumed that samurai are gonna samurai, and you may as well look the other way until it becomes an actual problem. Additionally, I'm going with the assumption that swinging a chunk of sharp steel at another guy wearing nothing but silk robes is a high-risk sort of hobby. I would be surprised if accidental maiming or deaths WEREN'T an occasional and excusable outcome of first-blood duels. Unless you've got a healing shugenja at hand (which sure, a lot of respectable types might do), there's not a great distance between a picturesque scratch on the cheek and a severed jugular that kills in seconds. That's not to say that people will like you if you cripple someone's sword hand in a nonlethal duel; but I'm not convinced it's an automatic "turn in your badge and your katana and get thee to the Wall" sort of offense. So this may boil down to "my Rokugan vs your Rokugan," but I don't see this being a setting-breaking thing. Yeah, it's the sort of thing that people are going to be rightly pissed about. He's Infamous for a reason--he's that guy that takes dueling too far, how shameful. But I can still see it being the sort of thing you could get away with by following the letter of the law, honor wise. And the character does actually have powerful protection: he paid the maximum points for the Allies advantage. So we've settled on the idea that he's often doing favors for somebody powerful when he duels somebody else. The idea that he's both favored and hated by powerful people is a major element to the character. But if there's material that elaborates more thoroughly on dueling culture and the like, I'd certainly be interested to read it.
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