jjjalljs

@jjjalljs@ttrpg.network

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Pride flag killing suspect appears to have a long history of anti-LGBTQ social posts (www.nbcnews.com)

The 27-year-old man who police say shot and killed a California business owner over a Pride flag draped in her store appears to have had a yearslong history of posting disturbing — and often violent — anti-LGBTQ messages on social media....

jjjalljs,

Is there a better phrase for “he was killed without a trial” than “summary execution”?

jjjalljs,

Yes, you are correct.

jjjalljs,

There’s two main versions of fate. Core and Accelerated. Core (and it’s slightly abridged sibling Condensed) have skills in addition to aspects. So you might have Swordplay +3, Sailing +2, Parley +2, athletics stubbornness threatening +1 on your “First Mate of The Black Harpy” pirate. When you try to threaten someone, you can invoke your relationship with the infamous Black Harpy for a bonus on your roll.

Accelerated is similar but has approaches instead of skills. They’re like flashy, careful, quickly, etc. So your pirate can swordfight because his aspect gives him that permission, and he probably uses the Flashy approach most of the time because he’s a showoff.

It’s a neat game I’d like to play more, but DND sucks all the air out of the hobby. It also needs players to be more engaged than DND typically requires, and the table needs to be on the same page about what you’re playing. If you have one player that’s just “I attack” and it’s going to go poorly.

Baldur’s Gate 3 is a masterpiece built on a bad tabletop game (www.polygon.com)

The writer got mad when a goblin shoved Astarion off a cliff. It reminded me of when I had Karlach shove a goblin in lava, then a goblin ran up and shoved HER in the lava. I didn’t get mad; I took it as a learning moment: enemies can shove me back, so move away from the lava.

jjjalljs,

The easiest cheese is to send a rogue in alone to kill it from stealth. The ai isn’t smart enough to find you if you start on the higher ledges. Attack, bonus action hide, move, repeat.

Doing it straight didn’t give me a lot of trouble. Spread out, don’t skimp on spell slots. Spiritual weapon and flaming sphere are pretty good and might distract the owl bear into hitting them instead of you.

Dnd 5e isn’t a very deep game so there aren’t that many options, really .

jjjalljs,

There’s also the fact that generally DND magic has every spell as a bespoke effect. There’s not an underlying system you can reason about. You’re not really expected to make your own spells. You don’t really tweak the ones you get very much. What can you do with a 4th level slot vs 5th? You can kind of infer from the examples, and maybe there’s details in the DMG somewhere , but it’s not foregrounded.

They also are very, well, mechanical rather than magical. You declare you’re casting, check off the spell slot, and the spell just happens. Some people might prefer this taste, but it makes it feel very mundane and bland to me . Compare like Mage (awakening, 2e) where you’re always looking for ways to stretch how far your spells can go, balancing risk, and looking for thematic boosts.

jjjalljs,

I think I meant more about “I can take a -6 on the roll to affect all the guys and risk it not working” or “I’ll risk three dice on paradox” for stretching your spells rather than “I can totally cure cancer with life 2, right??”

DND doesn’t really have much tactical depth for the spells. They do what they say and always work (unless saved against). You never get the “I don’t know if I have another spell on me!” trope.

What you meant I think shows up in DND too. Players being like “can I use mage hand to swing a sword?” or “can I use create water to drown him?” That’s more an annoying player problem, but I see what you mean about some systems enable it more than others.

You’d probably really dislike Fate, then, where it’s almost entirely based on what the table agrees makes sense for your free form written character traits.

jjjalljs,

They see it as a war because they are finding themselves (and their ideals) in the minority and feel their voice is being taken away.

Possibly because their ideals suck. Pretty much every conservative idea is a bad one.

jjjalljs,

I feel like that’s going to do weird things to your story pacing, and possibly put your players in an unwind position.

Like maybe they’re idiots or unlucky and use a lot of resources, and need a rest. Does the plot allow a full week of the bad guys/natural disaster/whatever to do ita thing unimpeded?

The solution remains kill the adventuring day. It’s not how most players actually want to play the game.

jjjalljs,

Yeah, but that’s way less fun than the original. The original invites making tactical decisions every round.

jjjalljs, (edited )

That’s very cool but DND will never have that kind of tactical depth without tying it to per-rest.

The adventuring day is garbage and it strangles cool ideas like this.

jjjalljs,

Mage the awakening (2e) has a concept of Reaches. As in overreaching. You can throw more than your safe amount of reaches on a spell to get it to be bigger, longer, more complicated… but you’ll have increasing odds of causing a Problem. And every time you make that check in a scene, it gets harder to pass safely.

Good game. Extremely different than DND

jjjalljs,

I’m pretty sure the things that separate me from Nazis include “I do not want to kill people based on racial or sexual traits”.

“We shouldn’t let the guy who wants to vote to kill us vote” !== “We shouldn’t let the women vote”

jjjalljs,

I really like Fate. It’s a generic system you can run in any setting. It doesn’t have any of D&D’s stupid baggage like martial-caster divide or the adventuring day. The way aspects work feels to me more intuitive and like how new players try to do RPGs. That’s stuff like “But he’s a paladin surely if I invoke his love of justice he’ll go along with our plan.” New players try that all the time until D&D hammers the idea out of them.

However! Fate does not really work if your players suck. Sorry. Passive players that want to just sit there while you tell them a story aren’t a good fit. Players that get easily discouraged and give up rather than coming up with clever ways to succeed-with-cost won’t like it. It’s described as a more writer’s room mode of playing sometimes. Everyone needs to have a little GM in them. But then it can be a lot of fun.

jjjalljs,

I think it really depends on the table.

Here’s an example. The game doesn’t have explicit rules for what it means to have a broken arm. Someone might suggest that as a consequence for something, and an argumentative table might later be like “you can’t just climb a ladder like it’s nothing with a broken arm!”

A good player would probably take this as an opportunity to self-compel and get a fate point. An annoying player will try to weasel out of any consequences.

The game doesn’t work well if the players don’t buy into the premises. A more rules heavy game will have like impartial tables set out- “see it says on page 183 if one arm is broken you can ascend a ladder at quarter Dex per round”. Fate is more hands off and trusts your friends to be reasonable about such minutia. Do you trust your friends?

As to the specific rules it does provide about attack and defend and overcome, I didn’t find it any worse than other systems. But in my experience most players are really bad at learning and reading and remembering, so it wasn’t a perfectly smooth run.

jjjalljs,

You could give bullet time to one player while the other moves and controls slowly. Or you could give one player bigger iframes to sort of approximate it.

Like, for one player they’re invulnerable for a full two seconds after pushing dodge, but the other player is only invulnerable for a quarter second.

Lots of ways to try

But as someone else in this thread said, this was kind of me going off topic. Slightly related but not exactly what the article was about.

jjjalljs,

I have… problems long resting as much as the game wants me to. Long rest classes give me stress. Also I don’t really optimize builds much, but

  • main character half elf fey warlock, pact of the chain
  • wyll as pact of the blade
  • laezel as 23 ac battlemaster sword and board. She’s basically indestructible. Heavy armor master + adamantine armor means she can’t be crit, and damage is reduced by 5.
  • shadow heart as her default cleric, but honestly she’s not pulling her weight a lot of the time. Spirit weapon is nice but misses a lot and has butt for movement speed. Spirit guardians is real nice, admittedly. Cleric cantrips kind of suck.

On the other hand, two warlocks with devil’s sight and gith lady with an “immune to blind” ring is extremely effective. Shadow heart can chill out in the dark with spirit guardians, too.

Only in act 2 though we’ll see how the rest of the game goes!

jjjalljs,

I pushed her off a cliff with laezel and then checked a guide to see what loot I missed. Cursed real hard and reloaded.

jjjalljs,

I recently had a player tell the group they were afraid of pursuing things because they didn’t want to waste the group’s time. I’m like who hurt you.

I mean, you do have to read the room a little and if you’re the only one that wants to go to the knitting festival maybe sell it harder or yield. But just quietly being unhappy isn’t fun for anyone.

jjjalljs,

Crawl stone soup is a classic style rogue like you can play in the browser. It has depths (that’s a pun you’ll see if you get far in it), but a minotaur berserker is pretty straight forward.

There are tournaments every so often where you can compete with the community for high scores and winning different combinations. You can also play offline if you prefer. It’s single player aside from this aspect, and meeting computer controlled ghosts of other players.

jjjalljs,

(I was making a joke about how if you screw up in ed it just prints ?)

Forgotten fantasy: after 11 years, Dragon’s Dogma makes an unlikely return (www.theguardian.com)

Both open-world and fantasy in general have changed enormously since the first Dragon’s Dogma: when it came out, Game of Thrones had only just aired its first season. Can Capcom keep up? “Let’s just say that I think each player will have a different kind of discovery and surprise waiting for them as they play the game,”...

jjjalljs,

Comments I can hear in my head…

“Even in numbers, a weakling is a weakling still!”

jjjalljs,

I believe you but to me that just means where you live sucks.

I’m lucky enough I can choose to only live places with good transit options. Sometimes I forget not everyone has that option and when people are like “but the nearest thing is a 45 minute walk” I’m like “so fucking move!” But of course it’s not that simple.

But I really would rather people considered the lack of transit options a higher priority. If you lived somewhere without running water you’d probably not put up with it.

jjjalljs,

I really like Fate but I’ve struggled to find a good group for it. I tried to run it for my DND group and it didn’t really go well. I think partly because they didn’t know the system well and approached it more like DND - very zoomed in on their character rather than the more “writer’s room” style that fate can do well.

jjjalljs,

It sometimes gives me mild existential dread thinking about how you can never really know that many places. I live in New York City and in 15 years I still feel like I barely know the surface. If I wanted to know Chicago or DC or Houston or Portland, what chance do I have? What can you learn in a week or a month? And even if I moved there now I’d never know what it was like as a kid, a teenager, a young adult. I doubt I could really know each of their subcultures, too.

jjjalljs,

I think of this quote whenever internet tough guys are like “if someone breaks into my house I’m going to shoot them dead!!”

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