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Post by henryhankovitch on May 18, 2012 16:30:36 GMT -8
This is the reason I can never run my "zombie apocalypse in a concentration camp" idea.
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Post by henryhankovitch on May 14, 2012 16:20:14 GMT -8
I think the question you have to ask is, "what does this add to the game?" "Because I think it's realistic" isn't actually a very good answer. Games are for fun, you don't make your players roleplay their bowel movements, etc. If the entire group is on-board with using it for humor (e.g., Escape Into the White Man's Planet), then that works. Or if you want to use it for a specific dramatic effect, then that would be possible also. In both cases, the onus is on the writer and GM--especially in something meant to be third-party, 'published' material like this--to approach the subject with up-front disclaimers and honest description of ANY controversial content. Racism could be a strong dramatic element in games where horror or historical brutality is a focus. For instance, oppressed peoples in a Call of Cthulhu campaign might become occultists out of desperation to survive rather than greed for wealth or power. Or institutional racism might hamper the efforts of PCs, or provide "out of sight, out of mind" ghettos where corruption can hide as easily as it can in the palaces of the rich.
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Post by henryhankovitch on May 14, 2012 15:46:41 GMT -8
Of all the "single biome" planets out there, desert planets are the ones known to actually exist. Like Mars. You still have warmer desert and cooler desert, depending on the daylight cycle and latitude, etc., but all you need is a lack of liquid water to make the whole planet a desert.
And even in Dune I believe it was implied that the whole planet wasn't uniform. The region that the capitol and other offworlder settlements existed in was less harsh than the "open desert" that the Fremen occupied. Still dry as hell, but more habitable. Or at least, less sandworms.
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Post by henryhankovitch on May 3, 2012 15:11:44 GMT -8
Dude! That's what my games have been missing! Swarms of ghost piranhas! Bad. Ass. Idea shamelessly stolen from the webcomic Oglaf:
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Post by henryhankovitch on May 3, 2012 15:01:41 GMT -8
You're playing a game where the heroes are shonen anime characters who shoot exploding halberds out of their noses while doing backflips Not really. Just because we're using BESM as a system doesn't mean we're playing Bleach. I don't know if you've ever played BESM, but it's actually a generic system; you don't have to do everything in over-the-top shounen fighting anime style. I wasn't basing the comment on the game being BESM. It was a judgment on your description of the characters' abilities (the rogue walking upside-down on the ceiling shooting exploding arrows at things). I actually assumed you were playing some flavor of 3E D&D until people started mentioning BESM. And my observations are based on running a 3.5/Pathfinder campaign, where the ludicrously over-the-top mobility and firepower of the party quickly nullifies any sort of real-world tactical problems. My thinking is that ranged artillery characters become quickly overpowered once they have defensive or mobility options that nullify melee attackers or enemy defences. So for instance, a bunch of bandits hiding behind tables can pose a problem--and a threat--to a wizard who is standing on the floor shooting Magic Missiles against his enemies. But if the wizard is flying around the room spraying everyone beneath him with Fog of Explosive Incontinence, then it doesn't really matter whether the bandits are hiding behind tables or belly-dancing on top of them. The fact that he's vulnerable to anyone who gets close isn't a problem, because no one can get close to him without dying from rectal explosions. So instead, you need enemies that can actually threaten your ranged characters on their own terms, requiring melee characters to "bodyguard" them, or attack enemies in ways they cannot. To my thinking, you need enemies that can threaten the ranged characters despite their abilities. Tentacle-type objects that can ensnare enemies from a distance, requiring buff/nimble guys with sharp devices to break through. Ephemeral enemies that only appear once they get into melee range. Atmospheric conditions that make flying hazardous or reduce visibility to only a few feet. That sort of thing. Just like D&D, your threats need to be just as supernaturally weird as your heroes. I don't know if this will actually fix the problem; maybe your players have an Angel Summoner and BMX Bandit sort of discrepancy between their abilities. Do the melee characters have any sort of supernatural or superhuman abilities beyond "I hit them really hard with my metal thing"? If not, you may just be boned. This is a perfect example. In a world where it's possible for someone to turn himself invisible at will, it's not at all implausible for there to be enemies who can see through or ignore invisibility. It could just be smart magical enemies who say "hmm, this invisible person is shooting me with arrows, perhaps I should be doing something about that." Or maybe it's a giant worm who finds his prey by sensing the vibrations in the walls/floor, or bats with echolocation, or undead from the Shadow Realm who can smell the aura of the living, or a room with puffer fungus all over the floor that tend to explode into clouds of choking spores when someone steps on them.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Apr 26, 2012 15:51:02 GMT -8
You're playing a game where the heroes are shonen anime characters who shoot exploding halberds out of their noses while doing backflips, and the combat you described has them fighting "realistic" bandits who shoot arrows from behind tables. You probably need enemies as weird as your heroes are.
You need ninjas who bounce around the walls and ceilings like Spider-Man, disappearing in clouds of smoke. Lizards wearing golem-armor who combine like Voltron. Swarms of ghost piranhas. Lava worms who come burrowing out of solid rock to try to swallow players whole.
If your players are violating the laws of gravity and blowing up the room, then their enemies need to be operating on that level of unreality also.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Apr 24, 2012 16:50:20 GMT -8
Nobody's taken me up on my question of "Why do you want to game in an existing fictional universe in the first place?" The more I read of this thread, the more I suspect that the answer to this question is what underlies our different preferred approaches. Existing fictional universes are full of material which I can use to whatever degree I see fit, for the sake of fun. For instance, Warhammer 40k is a silly but fun space-opera setting with lots of ready-made conflicts and over-the-top iconography. But I prefer to throw away any parts of so-called canon that don't suit my fun. Like the Imperial Guard being full of retards who don't know of any tactics other than human-wave bayonet charges with untrained recruits. And so on. If I don't want dwarf women to have beards, then they don't have beards; I don't care whether Tolkien thought that joke was funny. Sometimes these changes are drastic enough that you may as well build a new, "inspired-by" setting from the ground up. But a lot of the time it's simply a matter of carving out a couple of rotten bits that are smelling up the existing fiction, and being content with the rest. "I'm running the DC universe, except everyone in the JLA was killed ten years ago" is a perfectly good starting-place for a game. All that said, I'm mostly concerned with the setting details, rather than those of plot events. I'm disinterested in playing/running a game that ties directly into the plotline of a well-known property like Star Wars.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Apr 23, 2012 15:29:12 GMT -8
Fuck canonicity.
Continuity-wanks are one of the worst parts of fandom. They're not as bad as furry self-insert erotic fanfic writers, but they're close.
Generally, the problem is that they insist on extrapolating the few examples or broad descriptions that are provided in the material into immutable natural laws that all must follow. So if an author writes "dwarves have long beards and a great appetite for ale," your canon-wanker will get his panties in a bundle if you make a teetotaling dwarf with a tidy goatee. If the "canon material" doesn't list exceptions, or regional variation, or changing fashions, then they cannot be allowed to exist. They want everything to be like Star Wars, where every planet has only one climate, all wookiees are Chewbacca, and all Jedis dress in the same skirts. Or the Warhammer 40k fans. Dear god, never talk to a 40k fan in a gaming store...
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Post by henryhankovitch on Apr 17, 2012 15:12:57 GMT -8
These days, I tend to prefer banter to "gaming advice." Or at least, a more wandering discussion rather than trying to seriously address a particular topic. After you've listened to a season or two of a couple gaming podcasts, there's not really much in the way of gaming advice that's left to be covered.
If you don't get the appeal of Actual Play podcasts, I highly suggest Role Playing Public Radio. Their APs are what really sold me on Call of Cthulhu. Check out "Lover in the Ice" for a great example. It's great storytelling, and very little in the way of "I'm rolling attack, I'm rolling damage" drudgery. (Of course, that's a feature of CoC games in general. Fights tend not to last more than a few rounds...)
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Post by henryhankovitch on Apr 2, 2012 18:58:02 GMT -8
Regarding cursed items:
One form of "curse" that I like is the item which malfunctions in some spectacular fashion. Especially consumables like potions or wands. Either the item has somehow become damaged or corrupted, or some mistake was made in its crafting. The malfunction, then, wouldn't just be a failure or a damaging effect, but some sort of unwanted version of the intended effect. Like a cursed potion of flight might cause the drinker to float twenty feet off the ground like a balloon, unable to move himself.
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Post by henryhankovitch on Mar 12, 2012 20:24:17 GMT -8
Tappy is defining crunchiness as a binary setting. If a system has a rule that adjudicates a situation, then the system is crunchy; if there is no rule for the situation, then the system is not crunchy. The side effect of this definition is that it leads to every system except Amber diceless being categorized as "crunchy." This makes the term useless as a descriptor, obliging us to stop using it altogether if we were to subscribe to this definition.
Crunch or crunchy-ness is not a binary state, in opposition to "fluff" or whatever else. It's a relative descriptor, like "warm." You can't separate things into "warm" and "not warm"; you can only compare them by saying that one is warmer than another, and make statements of taste regarding how warm you want something to be. Crunch is the same. Crunch is a measure of volume; the more numeric rules and abstract subsystems a system uses, the more crunchy it becomes, regardless of the amount of fluff material or roleplaying which may also exist within the game.
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