Worthless Bumsanyway this is why talking about rpgs online sucks
90% of people are lying about playing rpgs, and then 90% of the rest of the people never read anything but confidently state shit like they have
anyway, luck of the draw is A REALLY BIG DEAL in fallout 2d20 because despite the wild west, cartoony nature of fallout and this rpg, it's actually super fucking crunchy in a lot of ways, including combat, survival mechanics, and stuff like modding items and ammunition
so yeah, metacurrencies, but you end up burning them a lot unless you wanna keep finding the wrong ammo
anyone actually running this system should probably know that, unless they went the rando scavenge -> sell -> buy ammo route
while you definitely can do that last thing, note that fo2d20 has aggressively stacked the deck against the pcs in terms of getting caps, and the early pre-written scenarios reinforces the idea that you're gonna be poorer than travellers who bought a merc cruiser right out of chargen
don't get me wrong, you don't gotta play that way. you can eject the survival rules (they're all modular as hell), you can tweak the bartering/haggling percentages, or you can just be more generous with mission/job rewards
but by default fo2d20 wants your pcs to be poor wasters lol
traveller: "we'll give you a meal voucher"
fo2d20: "do this for us and you can lap dirt water off our boots"
one of the beginner (~level 1) adventures has the caps reward being TWENTY CAPS PER PC
TWENTY
congratulations, you can buy one (1) box of fancy lads snack cakes and then shove your last two caps up your ass
twilight 2k: *old timey, brown/yellowed parchment archival ass looking maps*
fallout: *just weird little guys*
i wanna talk about my pain with fallout rpgs and how i track weapon magazines and how things like fusion cells/cores are fine except the granularity of charges vs physical items on loot tables
but this would make me sound like a giant fucking nerd
(short version: roll multiple times, once for quantity of <physical thing> and then for charge level; huzzah percentile dice and rounding)
rpg people: completely incapable of making things more clear when someone asks about different editions of a game
me: "nice little settlement ya got there. be a shame if something happened to it"
also me: "wut"
hey guys
/r/rpg likes a negative review of a 5e thing
it's wild how many of my rpgs bend toward "murder all the slavers"
"do you prefer worldbuilding or roleplay?"
solo play: "why not both?"
guys my satyr finally seduced someone
nat 12 bby 😈
i haven't done this yet because it sort of violates an odd sense of "purity" i have, but it's basically: playing the same characters in the same setting with different rpg rules
so you could hop genres by also hopping more genre-appropriate rules and just port characters however feels right
that i don't do this is absolutely fucked because my homebrew has literally been dynamic the entire time i've been playing it
"no that doesn't work, let's try this, hmm..."
it absolutely has some weird thing to do with my sense of what i think a character's identity is; apparently i feel it's tied to some vague notion of a ruleset
because i will absolutely play a setting/universe with different pcs under different rulesets 🤷🏼
it's just "same pc, different rulesets" that's sticking me for some reason
there's a supplement for barbarians of lemuria on kickstarter and i kinda wanna, but also i have Very Bad luck with what i back on ks, historically xD
been on a months long cancel my ref campaigns and solo sci fi kick for a while now
but i feel that itch... the itch of low fantasy
kill a sheepsquatch
make a horned helmet
become dragonborn
with all due respect to dragonbane (which i love), running their fantasy content as low fantasy/s&s in bol is pretty pro too xD
🎵 i didn't kno-OOOOWWWWW 🎶
🎵 the flask was loaded 🔥🧨💣 🎶
🎵 the flask was loaded 🔥🧨💣 🎶
do i want mallards in my bol campaign tho...
do i want darkwing duck
"uhhhh..."
- ref who doesn't know how to rule an innocuous, but incredibly reckless in-context-they-don't-have, player action
- ref who doesn't know how to rule an innocuous, but incredibly reckless in-context-they-don't-have, player action
"are we just wasting precious dice rolling energy?"
*clatter*
"that's a fail"
it's the ref in me but watching 4 players roll bad for half an hour is hilarious
realizing i would probably be okay with gurps running low fantasy if everyone was just a big meathead barbarian tho lol
then i wouldn't get my hackles raised over their fucked stats and linked skills
oops all barbarians
actually is draw steel good for low fantasy/sword and sorcery
is this a good excuse to do that
if you search for low fantasy in /r/drawsteel the top post is asking how hard it'd be to homebrew it into low fantasy and the top comment is basically "hard" lol
honestly bol is fine for low fantasy... just make 0 lifeblood = dead and tone down or remove hero points
boom, ultra deadly
it's fine i'm reading jaws of the six serpents
they had something good going with quality ranks but then they had to complicate it with damage ranks
i'm not wild about the prop abstraction for money
i feel like noting ranks going down for combat is actually a huge pita, even digitally
i get that they want narrative hooks and degrading "stats/skills" for combat but what starts off as an elegant system quickly becomes a nightmare
even traveller physical characteristics is better than this
they didn't even have the courtesy to have the implicit quality levels/ranks correspond to the mod number, so you're tracking 3 numbers per quality, 2 of which can change during combat as you tak edamage
this is like the opposite of pulpy s&S combat lol
accountants throwing books at each other and saying "argh! you damaged my filing skill!"
i don't hate the system, it just feels very not genre-appropriate
LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLOLOL i looked at an old blog post and it basically skipped over combat damage while praising the game
it had one sentence explaining how ranks tick down, does not call attention to how fiddly this is
i can imagine referees liking this because 1) it's incredibly easy to stat out any baseline themed enemy "it's a rogue with good +2 sneak"
and they don't actually do any of the bookkeeping players have to do (7 fucking qualities ticking down just after chargen, more once your character goes up)
*8 qualities
you could probably make this a lot easier if you scaled it more to traveller (rank X = mod X) and then at 0 (or "unskilled") you apply whatever arbitrary penalty level (jaws uses -2 for poor)
this shifts your success curve dramatically, though, because if average is rank 1 then master is rank 4 which is +4 versus their scaled +6
but maybe you want things to be harder in gameplay but not bookkeeping...
that said there's a fairly easy fix for that, too: lower your target numbers
job done
i haven't run their tn table math but i'm certain you can get this to work in Some Rough Range that doesn't feel bad
even streamlining the quality ranks in jaws of the six serpents the combat is tedious
i am not surprised people don't play this
i just wanna say that the way i sort of influence my pcs and use their stats similar to this in my homebrew is i just group attributes into physical and mental and have two different hitpoint pools, and then the pools can have their own modifiers that track with attribute style modifers
so you're tracking 4 to 6 numbers (usually just 2-3 for pure physical damage)
not... 21+
this is an absolutely wild number of numbers to track and this is coming from a guy who likes damage resistance on body parts, wound thresholds, tracking ammo per magazine, etc
you might think, oh but you only take a few damage points an attack so you're just moving a few numbers around
sure. until you get slapped with larger damage numbers
oh and also this is a sword and sorcery rpg so you're refilling these numbers after short periods, then tracking them getting knocked down again the very next fight
people always think it's so sexy to have "realistic" simulationist stuff like this until they have to track hit location hp and degrading armor
i've just never before seen it used for what is ostensibly supposed to be a streamlined s&s game that pretends this is very straightforward
"Why BRP didn't became as popular as GURPS?"
*squints*
video got boosted into my eyes about how to write rpg adventures, and the topic was mostly centered around ease of ref use/reducing prep
the guy wants adventures you buy, pre-writtens, to be able to be skimmed in like 30 minutes and then immediately run at the table, no hiccups
notably he hates prep and his contention is that this is at least one metric of what makes a pre-written "good"
i disagree with this on a general level. this is only going to be possible with a narrow band of scenarios
and in fact he touches on this because while after saying this, he goes on to say that he likes/wants little ref asides like "we tried this at the table, in playtesting we found XYZ"
well yeah and that's not stuff you're gonna be able to pick up in most pre-writtens in just a 30 minute flip through
this is look-ahead stuff. stuff you need to... know ahead of time to run the stuff that comes before, properly. or at least, according to how the pre-written was structured
it's perfectly acceptable if your pre-written is just a constant forward moving, never backtracing, branching choose your own adventure structure
any kind of looping, clues based, hidden information, etc busts this apart instantly depending on what your players do
there's another issue which is playstyle
it's way easier to write, and imo run, adventures that are more sandboxy/open-ended like the way he describes
cyberpunk in particular tends to do this well: "this is the job, haggle over support/reward, here's the situation and setup, you figure it out, get back, get backstabbed, try and get paid"
it works because that's just a really common trope-y genre to run jobs in