+1 Thread of Tabletop Roleplaying

Wizards have a bunch of those, too. They really want to make it easy to get people playing their shit.

A new Troika! kickstarter launched today. It's barely an update of the text but the new art is gorgeous and it looks like the kickstarter will provide backers with PDFs of a few excellent Troika books through stretch goals.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/melsonia/troika-rpg?ref=8dp4b4

I see that basically everything PDF at Modipheus is half price today. Any recommendations?

I really like Dishonored 2d20, but got some reason I've rarely seen anyone else talk about it.

I'd skip the published adventure for it, though (The Assassins Four); it's not very well put together. I haven't run it, but just from reading thought, it seems like it would either have to be very railroady, or go very badly wrong for the party very quickly, with little opportunity to recover.

I need to finish writing mine at some point…

I was looking at Dishonored, it is particularly cheap. I wish Homeworld was out already.

In other news, the current Troika! kickstarter is almost done and it looks like it's going to unlock the "secret Troika! dice" stretch goal. Which is exciting. Even without the dice though it is a ridiculous deal. For £12 you get the new rulebook, all eight bizarre/surreal/excellent Troika! supplements in PDF, postcards and bookmarks with pretty art, possibly some dice and a poster map of the Blamanche & Thistle Hotel.

It's always highly spoken of as a game, but I've always found the art for Troika! to be really offputting.

It's certainly a bizarre mix. I don't like all of it, but I love some of it!

I got a 33% off code for Modiphius on my email, and I've been in a bit of a Dune mood recently, so I figured I could justify £12 for the core Rulebook PDF.

I know they have bit of a reputation for (not) proofreading, but… this won an Ennie for writing? Really? I've not gone through the whole book, but the first few chapters, which deal with the history and function of the Imperium, are appallingly first-draft. Bits of it are practically bullet points without the spacing, and others are just repetitive and clumsy:

Erasmus had a fascination with humanity and expressed it through dissection of them. Serena was pregnant with Xavier’s child while Erasmus’ prisoner. She befriended Vorian. Erasmus became obsessed with Butler.
[…]
Omnius Prime relocated itself to Corrin as it prepared for what was to come while Erasmus escaped the human Jihad by fleeing to Corrin.

There must be a more elegant and compelling way of writing this, surely.

If only they had the writing style of an award-winning series of novels to use as a template.

One can only imagine.

Bundle of Holding have a 13th Age Megabundle at the moment, in case anyone here is interested in the system and hasn't already gotten into it.

(There's a second edition on the way, so this might be a last hurrah for the first edition books, but as far as I know it's intended to be backwards compatible anyway.)

It's you Ninchilla. You are the one who should be buying this.

Because I don't have enough books for systems I'll never play?

What is this "enough books" you mention? Never heard of it. What a novel theory!

You lost me Ninchilla. What?

In a twist that NOBODY will have seen coming…

A combination of Giftmas cash, a cheap price on Amazon, and just generally not getting along much with RPGs in PDF format means I now have a hardback copy of Dune: Adventures in the Imperium. Inside the back cover is a code for a PDF version, which I of course don't need.

Anyone want it?

Is the writing in it any better than the standard from Modiphius?

Not as good as Dishonored (which I don't think I had any issues with in its final form), but I think it's better than Star Trek Adventures.

It's clumsily-written in places (mainly in the summary of the hyper-dense Dune Lore™; the bit I quoted above is probably the worst offender), and there's (at least) one table that appears in the wrong place: on page 120, the "Drive Importance" table is mid-paragraph under "Talents" instead of following the relevant paragraph under "Drives".

But the mechanical stuff all makes sense, and there's nothing that I think would cause any issues playing the thing.

Another update, and Wizards are now promising an Unearthed Arcana-style feedback-survey system.

If they stick to it, cool. But they're still pretending that the leaked OGL 1.1 was a draft, and the rumours about their stupid plans for D&D Beyond are very, very stupid.

It's still big damage control mode energy.

I haven't bothered reading it. I see there's another bundle of D&D alternatives over at the Bundle of Holding. It's not the best selection but it's not bad.

The most significant part, I guess, is that there's going to be some version of (some of?) the new OGL available by Friday, with a feedback survey running for 2 weeks.

There are, I think, two main areas of concern as regards the survey:

1. There's no guarantee they're going to do anything meaningful with the feedback; and
2. There's no guarantee they're even going to get meaningful feedback.

Too many people are just mad about the whole thing, and if certain sections of Reddit have their way, and the thing just gets flooded with "fuck you, leave 1.0 alone", they'll bin the lot of it and do what they want anyway.

Whatever happens, I don't see a way this ends particularly well for anyone.

https://mobile.twitter.com/DnD_Shorts/status/1615806825198194708

Yeah, not surprising.

EDIT: Also, apparently, not necessarily true.

Well, that's interesting.

Wow, that's a big walk back.

The CC rules are basically all outside of copywrite laws anyway. They are still closing off 1.0 OGL which puts an end to access to a lot of books. They have a clause which states they can shut down anything they consider harmful, they have previously removed work from DM's Guild due to it being anti-capitalist.

The important things haven't changed.

The VTT stuff looks crap though

What isn’t permitted are features that don’t replicate your dining room table storytelling. If you replace your imagination with an animation of the Magic Missile streaking across the board to strike your target… that’s not the tabletop experience. That’s more like a video game.

So VTTs can't animate spell effects? That's like saying you're not allowed to make sound effects while playing.

They are still closing off 1.0 OGL which puts an end to access to a lot of books.

It potentially causes issues updating books already out there, sure, but anything already released under OGL 1.0a stays that way according to the text of 1.2. They're not revoking the licence for existing content, just saying that new content has to be under the current OGL. I get that's potentially not ideal, but I don't think it's necessarily a doomsday scenario?

They have a clause which states they can shut down anything they consider harmful, they have previously removed work from DM's Guild due to it being anti-capitalist.

I don't see a version of this where they don't try and put some kind of legal barrier between themselves and potentially-offensive content. People have good reason to be concerned about what their review process would be, though, especially given that some of their own recent output would have undoubtedly failed to pass muster.

As for the DM's Guild, that's a closed system, and, like D&D Beyond, was already subject to its own, stricter content agreement - nothing published there was ever under any version of the OGL, which is a large part of why I never considered publishing anything on either platform.

So VTTs can't animate spell effects? That's like saying you're not allowed to make sound effects while playing.

Their specific example of Magic Missile is interesting, because IIRC Magic Missile is one of the things WotC owns as part of the D&D brand. I don't know if the point is that you can't animate anything, or just that you can't animate anything D&D-specific, which is confusing, and something that needs to be clarified. Because if you can animate generic effects (like an explosion), then making a purple spark or whatever move across the screen is also presumably fine - as long as you don't call it Magic Missile.

They have a clause which states they can shut down anything they consider harmful,

I mean, this makes sense…

… they have previously removed work from DM's Guild due to it being anti-capitalist.

Wait, what? Because someone, somewhere, considers anti-capitalist sentiment harmful?

This makes less sense.

The important things haven't changed.

Well, I guess this is true? Sadly?

I listened to The Smart Party podcast about the Wizbro and the OGL. They spoke a lot of sense. They acknowledged that the situation sucks but they don't have a lot of sympathy for anyone who has been relying of Wizards being nice when it's been pretty clear for years that "nice" is not a priority for them.

The pod compared the current situation to when Games Workshop dropped RPGs and turned to concentrate on Brand WH/40k. They made some pretty good points. Wizards have moved into big brand territory and are making films and probably in discussions with Netflix or whoever about where to go next. They can't leave a loose end like the OGL lying around when they are discussing merch rights for the hopeful next big TV phenomenon.

They probably don't give a shit what the RPG industry does from here, they just need to be able to say, the OGL is dead, to whoever wants exclusive lunchbox and plushie rights.

Ran a session zero tonight for my long-percolating Scum & Villainy game, with what is probably an inadvisably large party. We made it through some rules overview, character and crew creation and a setting summary, with the full thing kicking off in two weeks – by which time I'm hoping to have some ideas for a starter mission. (I need to read through all the character stuff in detail; had a bit too much context switching in the session.)

I was supposed to be running Band of Blades on Saturday but I postponed it fort a week because I wasn't ready. It's so structured and there is so much stuff you need to do in the first session that I didn't want to start until I was sure I had it all down.

There's a Foundry module called All Goblins Have Names that lets you use rollable tables as the basis for randomly naming tokens when the drop them on the map.

For my Scum and Villainy game, I was throwing together a couple of lists for first and last names, but I was getting frustrated with how long it was taking and worrying that it was too western-focused for a far-future setting, so I started looking at Wikipedia for inspiration.

So of course then I wrote a couple of scripts to scrape all the page names from the "given names" and "surnames" categories and import them into Foundry RollTables, and now I have an NPC token that, when it's added to a scene, randomly sets its name to one of 1.7 billion possible combinations.

Did you remove any names, or is one of those 1.7 billion possibilities Adolf Hitler?

Sounds amazing. Even if there's a 1/17 billion chance of Hitler.

I feel like tonight's Avatar session was the best in a while, which is doubly great because I had planned exactly none of the things that happened.

We picked up with a conversation that hadn't been fully resolved from last session, then out of nowhere the party decided to break into a government office on the off chance they could find some incriminating evidence about the governor.

They didn't fail a single roll all night, so they got in and out without being spotted, got a ton of context that seems to have really lit a fire under them, and then they contacted two major NPCs about what they've learned and ended on a cliffhanger with a split party and a lone player being ambushed by a group of soldiers.

I managed to tie together a couple of plot threads that hadn't met yet, set up a couple of things for future sessions (both short and medium term), and they've finally picked a side in the main story conflict!

(My plans for the evening were basically to ambush them with a combat encounter, but this was so much better!)

I've just about read The One Ring cover to cover now, and I'm keen to try a one-shot with one of my occasional groups (probably the Landmark in the core book, just to test the system, before I go finishing off the one-shot I've been noodling at).

The more I've read, the more I like it as a system, though I don't know if I'm enough of a Tolkien lore guy to run a full campaign; I think I'd consider using/adapting this ruleset for any low-magic homebrew setting I run in future, though. My current TV habits are probably informing my thoughts, too, but I think you could run a pretty rad game of The Last of Us in this.

The One Ring/The Last of Us is a really interesting idea!

I'd also consider adding the pushing rolls mechanic from Free League's other games; maybe adding Shadow (or whatever you'd call the Last of Us equivalent) as a cost.

That could work really well. The only complaint some people have with the TOR travel systems is that they can feel a little gamey and divorced from the roleplay. You can dress it up with narrative colour but if it's the dice which decide how the journey goes then the colour can't hide that. Adding a couple more points of interaction or risk/reward for the players can't hurt.

Are there by games that do travel particularly well? It's inherently going to be the bit between the interesting bits, so unless you intend to play it all out (which would be dull and exhausting), you may as well handwave it, especially in a world as empty as The Last of Us.

Maybe travel could use up some resource, and you have to either try and stock up on a settlement or QZ and scavenge or hunt on the road? That has the advantage of it being a player choice, at least, not just a totally random result. There could still be a roll to see what you found, and whether it was protected by people (to fight or negotiate with), or if you stumbled into a group of Infected.

I enjoy travel the old school way where it's all random encounters and tracking supplies and diminishing HP. It is a time sink though, so it isn't worth it unless your game is about the journey.

The One Ring is generally considered to have the best travel system but like I said, some people really don't enjoy it.

I've been reading the revised Mothership books from the Kickstarter and they are really good! The player's book fixes the issues I had with the original game and the warden's book is I think the best collection of GM advice I have read.

The first reveal of the D&D VTT is pretty much as expected. https://youtu.be/S8NoG-w1RbI

Y'know, I was expecting to feel something when details started dripping out about this thing, but I think I've just realised how little of a shit I give about D&D.

I'm sure it'll look great on Critical Role.

Speaking of VTTs…

497 days after I first emailed Magpie Games about getting permission to list my Avatar Legends RPG implementation on Foundry's built-in system directory, it's finally available.

Who knew corporate legal departments worked so slow?

🎉

I was flicking through the new(ish) Into The Odd book in the bookshop yesterday. It's a lovely wee thing. It's blooming expensive though and I really don't need it. But it really is a lovely wee book… I've had similar thoughts looking at Cy Borg and Death In Space.

Vaults of Vaarn too. I thought this was supposed to be a cheap hobby!?