Update: We're in the middle of the "dead zone" and we've got another boat on the horizon. Looks abandoned. Moving in to check it out.

>>97209241
I've never actually met a proper vampire. From what I understand they go where the food is and I live in a very low population density kind of place. From what my guy tells me though, they are typically rather human. They're people with a curse, not demons riding corpses. Don't get me wrong they're still going around biting necks and doing a whole lot of other bad stuff but most keep a low profile. The ones that typically wind up on a hunter's radar are the stupid and the especially nasty ones. As for manageable? I guess that depends on your definition. Vampires aren't that high on the "oh shit there's a dozen people dead" scale but they are a parasite that's nearly impossible to dislodge, assuming my pal isn't full of shit.

>>97210908
According to him, he was a bureaucrat that stumbled on all this shit. Only reason he's still breathing is he quietly quit before he started his hunter activities rather than try to take down and I quote "the local branch of a ten-thousand year old undead aristocracy". I dunno what he had hard evidence for and what's speculation.

as we're approaching the bump limit and we're almost 2/3rds of the way through with december, I'm asking now if we think a second thread is warranted or if this should be it. I'm not gonna continue this thread past the hypothetical next one, since it was designed as a holidays-to new years limited run thread. Give your thoughts in spoilertext.

Sorry I haven't posted much. Expedition starts now. We've been doing a lot of prep work. Will post more tomorrow if all goes well

>>97205466
Enjoy reading a good book though currently have my hands full with one of them. Finally found where whatever creature is stuck in here is bound but there's a lot mumbo jumbo text around it that is hard to read currently. The last book I was reading was The Brothers Karamazov. It's alright, Russian literature is a bit depressive though.
>>97207994
>>97211290
I'd be careful putting those creatures on a pedestal like that, lest you get delusions of grandeur when your life is on the line. Anyway good to hear you're investigating, though I should probably send a quick prayer for your safety as apparently the book says this stuff works(?). I still haven't really deciphered all the weirdness through it but I gather I should definitely not undo the bindings on some of the pages until later.
I think just one is fine, and then when we get to like page 8 or something later on we'll reassess. It's been kind of fun but I'm unsure of it going on for the long term
>>97211787
Good luck on your expedition friend, hopefully it's safe. Let us know your findings over there! Hopefully, no more lizards.

>>97211290
I think we need a second thread.

>>97211290
Hopefully the ship bestows answers. An understandable outlook regarding blood suckers. The world would be better off without them, but the night seems to always have a more disconcerting fiend lurking deeper in the dark.
One is fine, maybe when we're closer to falling off we'll feel different. It's been fun.
>>97211787
God give you strength and endurance on your expedition. I hope you and your group get in and out without issue.
>>97211996
What type of creature got the misfortune of being bound? You might want to be careful if it turns out to be an imp. Nasty little buggers.

>>97211336
I always loved this one but it doesn't have a ton of replay value because it's not very flexible. To me the Hexsuit and the Order are the coolest, although if I were actually presented with this choice I would go for Clarion or (less likely) Neo

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>>97207626
>Christmas is approaching, and so is another licensed choose-your-own-adventure book starring your favourite hedgehog!

What's this?
An actual CYOA?
Featuring my favorite blue hedgehog?

>>97208514
>upper bounds of most physical powers is throwing around school busses, moving at 1000 mph, and being conventionally bulletproof
>physical powers on the levels of "most" gods is lifting 20k tons, moving at mach 4, and being unscathed by anything below a 10 megaton nuclear blast
Tech curbstomps demigods and even stands a shot at killing actual gods, that's some crazy shit

>>97210766
rollerino

>>97210766
So if you just dump your initial 6 points all in Intuition you have like, ultimate god-tier intuition that almost always leads you in the right direction? From some basic math that's a 99.2% chance your intuition always leads you to the right answer, becoming a 99.6% chance after a year of dedicated training. That's OP as fuck.

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>>97210392
>>97210460
Actually Zakusa gets to fight,,, ekhem, Megumi, in a DivineZ montage, but the result is never shown.

>>97210360
>>97210460
I'm almost certain Zakusa was supposed to be a Psyqualia user and bridge the gap between D and other eras.
D has way too many characters that just so happen to have "Psyqualia but not really" for it to be a coincidence

>>97209138
and VGDD1 never did get D set 13 in the end...

>>97211237
>Psyqualia
thats urara and halona

>>97209306
Divinez is really just better than Dress in every way. Dress is an absolute fever dream of rushed, underbaked, and forgotten ideas. It's almost like an unfinished prototype, of which Divinez is the final product.

>>97211865
Get fucked casterfag.
Or work on your rp so the rogue cares about their mates even if they're a dickass thief.

>it's a frogspamming faggot who can't even spell correctly

>>97211865
Arn't rouges (lol) supposed to be cowardly thief types though? Sounds like he was staying in character, playing his role, as it were, If the player wanted his character to be a brave hero, they would have chosen a Fighter or Paladin, not a sneaky backstabbing mugger or burglar.

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>>97211865
Total caster death.

>>97211865
>rouge
You’re too stupid to bother reading past that.

>>97211871
He didn't ask why it was being used. He asked what it was.

>>97211913
It was the standard for D&D forever. That was one of the points of a DM screen in the first place. Other than attack rolls or shit with obvious outcomes (you are going to know if you failed a climbing test immediately) the DM was supposed to handle that stuff. Traps were great because you think you disarmed it but didn't and your cleric just got cut in half. Now everyone is paranoid all the time.

>>97211914
My point is he could have been playing shit like prowlers and paragons for 10 years and never seen one.

>>97211316
GM screens are used for secret rolls.
They also have rules on them.
They also hide information that players shouldn't know (trap locations, maps, enemy health totals, etc).
5e had notoriously awful DM screen with 3/4 of it being artwork and condition information instead of actually useful general information for on the fly use.

Compare that to something like the Genesys screen with a breakdown of different check types, different weapon stats, different scenario tests, average loot tables, and what different die results can be used for what, and 5e is laughably bad.

>>97211999
The WHFRP 4th edition one had a list of Reichland appropriate names, which I always liked.

>>97207620
I usually here it being post-4ths that the gap becomes insurmountable by slot-efficiency of non-spell solutions, and this is theoretically simple to solve by making skills maintain a similar dynamic of lagging in momentary power for attrition insensitivity. But that'd require actually having robust skills allowed to do spectacular things, which requires either a LOT of hard lockouts or out-scaling the die to support soft lockouts to keep low-level skill-focused characters from doing high-level skill things off a high roll.

>>97207951
The issue with that is that it's an awkward proto-gamist emergent function dependent on no-diegetic-reason-given hard lockouts of weapon types and random loot distribution, making it extremely easy to fail to function from innocuous houserules for the sake of immersion or simple chance.

By modern TTRPG design convention, you "need" something like Trailblazer's Base Magic Bonus giving non-casters spell slots to fuel things that'd be a tradeoff for Wizards or riffing off Magic of Incarnum so Martials can directly use more or further scale magic items.

>>97208153
>5e was built based on one very bad game designer's idealized image of "powerful wizards and their fighter bodyguards" D&D built off of 3.X.
No, that goes pretty much all the way back as the high-level dynamic, a crucial difference being that combat casting used to be VERY hard to get away with without a meat-shield.

>>97208532
Than "Normal Dude" hitting with sword, sure, and some surplus for the resource constraints is fine, but some classes being bluntly out-moded is just bad game design. If you're going to give the Fighter a 1st-20th level progression at the same cost as a Wizard's, they OUGHT to be a valuable contributor all the way along this, even if comparatively limited in scope.

>>97209980
>No, that goes pretty much all the way back as the high-level dynamic, a crucial difference being that combat casting used to be VERY hard to get away with without a meat-shield.

High-level Warriors were still killing machines in earlier editions and casters want to ignore that truth. In 1e, a 10th level non-specialist Fighter with non-magical equipment and a longsword would deal roughly an 1/8 of an average red dragon's hp on their own each round. Give them 18/00 Strength (or Gauntlets of Ogre Power) and they will deal nearly a quarter the average red dragon's hp in a round. With a +1 longsword, they can deal more than 1/3rd. With weapon specialization more than 1/2.

2e massively buffed Dragon's increasing their HD and AC by incredible amounts, but warrior's still maintained similar levels of effectiveness against other 10 HD opponents. 3e further inflated monster HP by giving everything not a construct or undead a Con bonus while limiting the rate non-caster damage output increased with the diminishing returns of iterative attacks.

>>97207788
Those were raw content splats full of player options, part of WotC's pivot to market more to players, less to DMs.

>>97205400
I don't think anyone at WotC has any grand ideas for content to make; they just mine the old settings for memberberries at best.

>>97205588
>Plus side: Martials are actually good
To my knowledge, almost every martial class was heavily nerfed, which I didn't even think was possible, but somehow wotc delivers.

>>97206680
The good thing about backgrounds was the small bits of flavor that made your character unique, and putting them right on top of your character sheet.
2024 backgrounds removed all that flavor and push you towards 2 to 5 backgrounds per class that buff your most important attributes.

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>>97212159
Okay, roll 1d6+3!

Rolled 2 + 3 (1d6 + 3)

>>97212180

>>97212198
SHIT

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>>97212198
>>97212200

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>Right
OR
>Left

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>>97212054
EQUAL DISTRIBUTION OF MAGIC TO THE PEOPLE
No more symbols
No more initiations
No more coded spellbooks that cost loads of gold and time to translate

>>97211646
As someone with patents that got kicked out of the tech startup: kek.

I believe in early editions in DnD there could be only one level 18 wizard (or only 1 level 16 druid something like this). So there was actually competition for ljmited spots. It made no fucking sense logically so they removed it.

>>97210641
That's a lot of reasons to add to killing all casters. Total caster death.

>>97212155
It was with druids. The assumption was apparently that all the world’s druids were part of the same single hierarchy, so there were a limited number of positions for each of the higher ranks, with the last level only being held by one druid in the world at a time.

>>97210641
>a wizard sharing his secrets
Nigger. Even if you take magic within the most scientific of frames it's hardly the same because wizards, differently from scientists, have the means to execute the results of their research alone. Why would they share their power for free?

>if you don't have tables for me to play at, do not have singles for me to go through, why am I buying from you at all? >Especially if you are charging scalpers prices for packs and not msrp

>>97211984
>Having space dedicated to TCG aftermarket at all
That's just dumb at this point. You aren't going to compete with online pricing, you are eating up space that could be used for stuff that actually sells. Have a small spot for boosters and precons, that's it.

>please put prices on your stuff. I should have to sit and wait for you to look up Catan on ebay or whatever to see if it's magically become $100 before you let me buy it.

>if you are going to charge me to use the tables, give me a bag of chips or something for free
>there are three other game stores in the area that don't charge for table space give me a reason not to go to them

I quit playing at my local store because they would only charge dnd players to use the tables.
Magic players? Tabletop players? War gamers? Come on in have a seat no charge.
Dnd players? That'll be $5 a person.
I asked the store owner about it and he said it was because they were officially sanctioned by wizards of the coast.
My guy i guarantee you that my dms story about harvesting slimes because they are his world's replacement for weed is not a official event.

>>97211998
>Saulot
>Social
I'd say he's much more of a mental chad considering his weird experiments on Kindred nature.

>>97212016
Ah shit. I did intend to swap those two. Basically I picture Zillah as making all the shysters. Enoch making all the monsters, & Irad making all the "traditional Ann Rice types"

>>97212057
No fuck you. Saulot is a shyster & a fraud

>>97212144
Tremere will never be a real Kindred, and he will never be a real Mage again.

>>97212148
Tremere was an ambitious fag, he lead the House but the Clan doesnt need him. The Pryamid is its own power. Tribe
Tremere will branch off as well as maybe a Tremere Dynasty if we learn a thing or two from those soulsuckers & create a Spell of Unlife/Blood & of course, Guild Tremere once we pry more secrets of Necromancy from the wops. Magic is ruled by consensus & that means youre always subject to the will of others. How dare the mortals set limits on our ambition

>>97212189
>Tribe Tremere
>Tremere Dynasty
>Tremere Group
>Tremere House when they game the gay demon system
>Tremere-type Changelings
You would not want that canonized, lest they make Tremere unplayable as an antagonist faction but it would be based to even write about it in a supplementary/AU book
Tremere are aiming for the stars just to end up crashing on Europa with these ambitions

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>>97206628
I'll try doing a lightning round to clear things up.
>There was a war against alien monsters where 90% of the planet's population died and everyone entered "crisis management" mode
>There was a colossal super-robot mech and it managed to fight back enough to avoid everyone's extinction
>After the war, people fussed around about the supermech and figured out a semi-magical control system that could let them build smaller, simpler mechs easily and with affordable materials and technology
>It's years later, there are still monsters around (not just the aliens but also regular monsters that inhabit the world)
>Because of the low population, the military isn't interest in fighting monsters and the government agrees, setting them up near populated capitals to defend them if needs be
>The government issues a treaty that legalizes civilian ownership of combat mechs (so there's interest in the market for mecha development and so the people have some way to fight back against the monsters without the need for military involvement every single time) as long as they meet certain regulations, which lets them fight monsters on equal terms, but make it difficult for the average joe to fight the military (because doing that would be extremely fucking stupid)
>There are now thousands of civilian organizations of "monster hunters" fighting monsters, machines and everything else all around the world and exploring the post-apocalyptic world with cool mechs doing contracts for corporations, organizations, and even the military and the government for money, glory, fame, wanderlust or revenge (insert TTRPG "create your hero!" here)
>The vast majority of people have average mechs that can take care of the monsters just fine but are in a disadvantage against the military. There are SOME really powerful pilots with connections, skill and money to have much more powerful outlier mechs that do make them more powerful than the average military mech, but they are outliers.
that's it.

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Vibe check for my system’s damage mechanics.

>damage is split into 2 types - physical and energy

>physical damage reduction is based on armor quality(DR1, 2, 3 and sometimes 4)
>automatic weapons deal d4 and d6 damage and can deal 21d4 in a single attack
>single fire guns and melee weapons tend to deal 1 or 2 d8/10/12 damage
>armor subtracts 1/2/3/4 from EVERY dice thrown
>automatic weapons have much higher damage potential on completely unarmored targets(“standard” armor is 2), but gets fucked dramatically more against heavy armor

>energy shields can be any frequency(die size) you want, and have a battery life of X amount of dice
>energy shields affect ALL energy based attacks
>energy shields halve damage of all energy-based damage dice as long as the battery holds
>energy shields that have a matching frequency to the attack(d8 for example) instead negates the damage


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>>97212151
Seems reasonable but I'm not seeing anything here that really informs why a player wouldn't just pick the highest quality armor they can afford. Range intervals and accuracy also change quite a bit because 21d4 might be a bunch of pebbles but you're going to at least plink them, whereas a d8 is going to be 4 or less half the time anyways. What's your general level of HP? How many turns of combat do you expect it to take to resolve the average encounter?

The energy system might be too cute, I like the resonance frequency as a concept but I can see situations like the party each choosing a different number then hunkering down behind each other as cover depending on what's shooting at them.

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>>97212151
There’s also explosive damage
>counts as physical damage
>characteristically has higher sized flat bonuses(for example, 3d10+8)
>explosions also have a radius equal in size to the amount of damage dice it deals(in this example, epicenter space+3 spaces)
>the flat damage only affects targets at the epicenter, and the damage is reduced by 1 damage did for every space away from the epicenter the target is

Fate
>outside of mech combat, pilots “HP” is called fate
>fate is reduced by fucking up and getting hurt outside of your mech
>losing all fate means your pilot is unable to participate in mech combat, and has to be replace by a crewmate that doesn’t have any bonuses to anything if the player wants to participate
>fate points can also be used in mech combat to gain advantage on attacks or second chances to dodge attacks
>fate USUALLY can’t be directly targeted by enemies but can be damaged if a mech has broken parts
>very rarely can enemies target fate specifically
>losing all fate in mech combat results in character death as the mech explodes or the pilot has a heart attack or something

>>97212174
>why not pick the highest quality armor all the time
Price is one factor, but mech capabilities is another. The frame of a mech can only hold so much weight. Each component of your mech has weight(legs, arms, head, certain back components, certain larger weapons). Quality 3 and especially 4 armor is really heavy so you have to do a balancing act of taking lighter(and weaker) components or a frame that has a higher weight capacity(at the cost of other traits like energy capacity). The system is hopefully on the more fatal side with people dying in a couple attacks or even 1 really unlucky one if you aren’t equipped properly. Average HP is in the 20s, with gimmicky lightweight mechs having as low as 15, and the higher quality mechs being in the 50s

I wanted to make sure that mech customization and the human pilots inside the mech mattered to the players. Campaigns and missions are heavily designed around “human pilots find information on foot and THEN fight in their mechs”. And not having the information to take the right equipment that counters the enemy and avoids getting countered can make an easy fight into a full party death. So I’d 100% support the concept of the party hiding behind the one guy with a matching shield frequency to all the enemies guns

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>>97210075
>just a slopped up version of that chick from Atlantis

Elfs

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>>97210295
no

>>97210718
can't be, I genned it yesterday

>>97210755
yes, some Pirotess too

>>97207722
>A curved sword inspired by Tolkien?
I can't recall a single curved Elven sword in neither LOTR nor Silm.

>>97207722
Curved sword makes sense. Maybe even shortswords or machetes due to life in forests
>>97207774
>Or go full weeb, katanas work too.
Elves are like samurai. Introduced to setting with archery, calcified in setting with curved sword

>>97208291
>slopatar redditkids are SINGLEHANDEDLY DEFEATED by a few scathing critiques
Janie Cameron ain't sending xir best

>>97208175
>Star Wars was exactly the same when it came out
Star Wars was low budget, zero marketing B-movie that put whatever money they had into film (as in - the physical tape) and location shots (still cheaper than building sets). It took theatres by storm, entirely via word of mouth reaction. And not only it was an overnight sensation, the word of mouth was achieved pre-internet, making it twice as impressive.
Avatar spend quarter billion on marketing just so people would give a fuck, and when that money run dry, it completely disappeared from any sort of pop-cultural context. Or technical one, for that matter. All we've got from that movie was 3d3 years of failed 3D movies until the fad finally died out.
It never cease to amaze me that Avatar marketing machine keeps - and like a fucking clock - trying to draw false comparisons with original Star Wars. Those movies are nothing alike, and their impact couldn't be any more different.

Also consider >>97208302
That movie was set to make big money and it (kinda) does. The question is - is it wise to earn back your budget, when said budget (production + marketing) is at 600 mil ranges each and every time, making it a monumental gamble. I can imagine one of those movies failing in the box office and that would be a financial disaster that could hit even 20th Century Studios, because it would be just another reason for Disney to wrap them up.

>>97208411
>But you're clearly a subhuman who can't even articulate what he likes about Avatar
Marketing campaign for 400 mil told him to go see it and how important that is.
Unfortunately, admitting so would be equivalent of a committing sudoku.

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Your avatar cultural relevancy, xirs

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>>97181741
yes it absolutely could, both sides have well established strengths and weaknesses that the rules and scenarios would be built around.
You'd need a fuckton of terrain though

>>97212028
The T'au probably best encompass "herohammer" with the basic myth of their warrior caste being the triumvirate of Puretide's disciples O'Shovah, Shaserra, O'Kais to the point even the Chaos Gods acknowledge the trifold path theyve taken is bound to come to some specieswide conflict.

Eldar x Tau was the tastiest soup for a ridiculous edition. With Space Marine x Imperial guard slop being served up in the new Total War entry you best believe 11th or 12th at the latest will see a return of the allies matrix. (Ex special lee when they push for bashing two box sets together for a combat patrol + group introductory setting.)

>>97212080
Nope. Never gonna happen. They enforce no crossovers for marketing and analytics purposes. They only want you to buy eldar for your eldar army and tau for your tau army. This is why they killed the eldar soup push. They're either successfully merged into one faction, or they're going back to two factions. Didn't take so they killed it.

They even made slightly different versions of existing imperial guard tanks for 30k just so they could be listed separate. They have a personal crusade for this. You want it, they don't.

>>97212106
I just think the one two punch of SM2 and TW40k is going to see some rules restriction lifted to better accommodate new player groups mashing together armies. We will see how things go with their 500 Worlds Battalions and what kind of interactivity the sets have with one another or if it's just going to be a Boarding Party 2.0 scenario.

>>97211911
>Where are they?
Check your general, then fucking stay in there.

>>97212025
Ragebait.

>>97211769
Theoretically good but given how card hungry the deck is with the new Yao & Ryugumon, I think I'd continue playing the searcher from sources. Cute art.
>>97211674
This is really good. Don't have DigiPolice really so I might throw together a cheap Seekers slop deck

What do I need to get if I want to build DigiPolice?

>>97211783
>>97211784
I thought these were the Tamers, why the fuck did they use that art for the Digimon?

>>97210581
Rich girls are just like that.

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>>97211661
I early adopted to Liberators when I saw Close's character design, told myself whatever her deck was I'd play it, and it's worked out pretty well for me so far.