>>96829321
>TQ
>What are the best games with large, interesting worlds that aren't inherently hostile to the player?
Is there one? I mean there are great nohostile worlds and great games by i cant think of a single combination of the two
>Is a world without constant enemies boring?
Not really. It is more the domain of espionage, shadow deals, underground cults, merchant feuding, piracy etc
All perfectly fine things to explore in the NSR mindset/with NSR tulesets

>thread on page 7
>literally one reply in 5 hours
Could it be any more obvious that this general was created by that one sperg and while he has his troll version of /osrg/ up he no longer cares about this one?

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Anyone play Monolith? I didn't realize it was a Cairn hack when I bought it. I really only bought it as reference because Retro Sci-Fi Rules & Traveller aren't playable out of the box and lack a lot of rules.

>>96829321
>Is a world without constant enemies boring?
It depends on how much of an emasculated faggot you are.

>>96830727
Not heard of this. Very good artwork. Will investigate and report back.

>>96830727
>Traveller
>not playable out of the box
>lacks a lot of rules
Substantiate this claim.

>>96831704
In particular I'm referring to MG2E and Zozer games. Classic might be different. I can't substantiate because I can't remember but we distinctly had more than a few conversations that ended with "huh that's weird this thing is referenced but there is literally no rules here for it".
>>96831636
I got it PoD from Lulu for real cheap. It's a nice book but I haven't sat down to give it a try yet.

Can I talk about AD&D here?

>>96835546
sure. Which edition are you interested n?

>>96829321
Games for your pic's feel?
>thread question
Conflict is necessary, but not necessarily with enemies. Races are always a change of pace for me, and pursuits too.

>>96835860
>Games for your pic's feel?
none that i'm aware of. something like Ace Combat, Black Lagoon, and Michiko & Hatchin rolled into one

more of the guy here: https://bsky.app/profile/dofresh.bsky.social

>>96835546
Assume this is good faith and not bait.

You CAN talk about it here, but it's not necessarily the place where you will get the most or best answers.

If you want to talk about Gygax's AD&D ("1e") played the Gygax way, you might have better luck asking on the real /osrg/ thread, which is very much focused on that style: >>96815749

If you want to talk about AD&D 2e, you might try on the 2e thread that is posing as an /osrg/ thread in a pathetic attempt to hijack it: >>96815556

The second one is also the thread if you want to talk about AD&D 1e but played in the narrativist / railroading / Hickman style, which is what lies at the core of the AD&D 2e game philosophy. However, you're not very likely to get useful answers there because the thread wasn't really created to discuss games, just to troll the real /osrg/.

>>96830719
>Could it be any more obvious that this general was created by that one sperg and while he has his troll version of /osrg/ up he no longer cares about this one?
You lads are always welcome back in the real /osrg/ while he's not there if you want to come hang out.

It's funny really, I remember that you'd get shit for liking something like, say, Shadowdark, but no one ever told you not to talk about it over there. Which means this thread doesn't need to exist and is just a divide & conquer attempt.

>>96837444
>no one ever told you not to talk about it over there
Just because saying it's shit was almost always enough to get people to stop talking about it, unlike 2e, which is an obsession of one particular psychotic individual who's been trying to use it to torment /osrg/ for years at this point.

>Which means this thread doesn't need to exist and is just a divide & conquer attempt.
I disagree. There's definitely multiple games that are off-topic on /osrg/ but deserve a place where they can be discussed. Shadowdark, Mork Borg, Cairn, Knave, Mauritter, and so on. So /nsrg/ does serve a purpose.

>>96837444
That's a strange take, anon. In 2022 we had a lot of people trying to force NSR stuff in /osrg (backed by yet another mod) and a lot of yelling for them to take it elsewhere, because it's fundamentally a different sort of game. It's been mostly quiet since then, but if anything the boundaries between OSR and NSR have only solidified, as NSR has more and more come into its own. I think it definitely deserves its own thread: I just don't know if there's enough NSR fans on /tg to keep it alive. I hope it thrives, though.

>>96837605
>>96838134
Shadowdark specifically is clearly an OSR game, come on. It's basically just another shoddy B/X knockoff. Yeah, sure, the way it was turbohyped during the Kickstarter was distasteful, but I don't think that was even the girl's fault – she just happened to be lined up to crowdfund at the moment the OGL debacle broke out, and obviously the kind of queermos who still play 5e were primed to hop on "a simpler system written by a lesbian!"

So yeah, while I agree that Cairn and the Borgs need to fuck off out of /osrg/ I think Shadowdark is clearly on topic. It's in the same niche as BFRPG: no real reason to play it, but of course it's OSR. OSR isn't a stamp of quality, people just think it is because 2e is both not OSR and far and away the worst edition of D&D ever published.

>>96838295
>It's basically just another shoddy B/X knockoff
False. It makes radical changes to the system, for example to how magic and advancement work.

>>96838134
It was obviously the same people as those complaining about 2e now, but using a different excuse. It's quite clear that don't actually care care about 2e or have anything to say about it, just look at their general now. Literally zero actual content apart from bumps saying inane stuff, like that they like the art.

>>96838639
Not sure what you're on about, currently the "We love 2e crowd" is talking about scat porn and spelljammer in their tantrum thread while /osrg/ is continuing on as usual.

>>96838753
Based on the rest of his post, I think he meant to say "complaining that 2e should be included now".

>>96838831
Good point, I'm retarded.

>>96830727
I played it with a GM who ran it without aliens and without psionics, so I can't really call it a "pure" experience, but it worked fine, with just a heavier emphasis on tech/augmentations. Can't say I loved it. I did appreciate the Group Debt thing that made it feel like Cowboy Bebop right from the start.

>>96840137
They're desperate to "control the narrative."
ie. Lie their balls off and hope people fall for it.
Just ignore their shitposts in this and any other thread.

To whoever posted the Overland Travel substack last thread: thank you! It's exactly the kind of legwork I was looking for when I came to /osrg/ but got blackballed.

I'll go with the Simulacrum approach by dropping the miles pretention, assigning a Movement Points pool to animals and vehicules, a Movement Cost to hexes and voilà. It's apparently how 0D&D started and as a former hex and shit wargamer it's what makes the most sense to me because you can fiddle with a lot of details with this kind of design and the maths stay super easy.

I'll get the guide to check for orientation in the morning with an Int check, the look-out to check for random encouter at night with a Wis check, the leader to roll any reaction with a Cha check and maybe a Dex check for the occasional hunter so everybody is involved and happy. Hex will be treated as containers so anything obvious is described while travelling but any hidden sites requires a whole day searching the hex itself.

Rancourt wrote something really sensitive at the end of his long study and it made quite an impression on me: if I'm using curated dungeons and not proceduraly generated ones, why would I use proceduraly generated overland and not curated one?

>>96841084
>dropping the miles pretention, assigning a Movement Points pool to animals and vehicules, a Movement Cost to hexes and voilà
What do you mean? That's exactly the same as what you call the "miles pretention": The "movement pool" is the number of miles you can travel in a day.

>>96841084
>To whoever posted the Overland Travel substack last thread: thank you! It's exactly the kind of legwork I was looking for when I came to /osrg/ but got blackballed.
What? They're talking about it in /osrg/ *right now*, how were you blackballed over that blog post?

>>96841385
It keeps the maths simple. You don't think "48/2 -6 -6 -6 -6" but "8/2 -1 -1 -1 -1". Also you can bump up your abstracted base Movement Points to higher values without anyone batting an eye if you need more granularity, like when going from a D6 to a D12 or D100. This way you can account for more modifiers for weather or whatnot, without resorting to a -33% on top of a +50% as OSE handles it. Or you can go the 0D&D way and keep these abstracted numbers and modifiers really low.

Really, that's it. Easier math. Might be unworthy to most but as a Referee learning a new system I don't want to wrangle it for the first few sessions. Not in the ease and comfort of 2025, with so much knowledge just a few clics away. So movement points and ascending armor class it is for me.

>>96841899
I made a lengthy post about homebrewing OSE class system to something more fitting to my young table, like removing infravision for the dwarf and elf but giving them something else instead like maybe 2 in 6 chance of gem appraisal for the dwarf and 2 in 6 chance of animal empathy for the elf. Plus my players are kids so I wanted really bright and red neons pointing at the thief class by making the first encounter a high pitch voiced goblin in a jail so everyone understand we're talking backstabbing bastard here.

I was told absolutely all my shit is retarded, which I can stomach; but also how B/X is sacro-sainct design and I should not mess with the delicate balance of it, which is absolute bullshit since OSE encourage you to homebrew it from it's very first pages. I fucked off and came here and Io and Behold, someone helped my retard self instead of smelling its own farts.

>>96841951
Are you okay buddy? I used the terms legwork and hex as containers because they come from this very sustack article so I'm happy to borrow it and make it my own because as you can tell I'm a uncalled for wordy moffo that really struggle to encapsulate concept in clear words and make small posts.

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>>96842683
>I was told how B/X is sacro-sainct design
That's not how things went, buddy. And, more importantly, nobody gives a shit about your grievances, this is not a women's studies discussion forum.

You might instead try sharing your ideas here again and see if you get different feedback.

>>96842958
Well first don't pretend I'm acting like a woman if you're to post some David Beckham sith according to your picture's name. Why do you even a picture like that in stock or know where to google it? Sounds gay to me desu, not gonna lie.

Second don't bring /osrg/ toxic behavior here. You can very much go and be a dick there with the others. I read enough "fishfag this schizo that" to bother with your false pretense at David Beckham admirer machismo. It's already stale to me anon, try and be better than yet another shitposter in a flamewar crusade.

Third I've been here for two threads and it's been two threads with an idiot asking for /nsrg/ to "come back home" to /osrg/. I didn't bother to answer so obviously I'm not on a mission or even butthurt. But I think there's a chance you might be that very specific poster that keeps collecting rebutals threads after threads for a weird reason so I'm done with (you).

I came here to ask about abstracted positioning during encounters and a bit more involved overland travel system then I got my answers. So, once again, I thank the anon that posted that substack link, it was really on point. You lecturing me is just bad taste anon.

>>96831808
MG2E is perfectly playable out of the box. The only thing it doesn't really have is rules for aliens.

>>96843991
>The only thing it doesn't really have is rules for aliens.
CT doesn't have them either. Or do you mean rules for procedurally generating animals?

>>96843991
Yeah, I know it's off topic, but can't help by wonder what kind of blue-moon ass rule anon thinks is vital that MG2E is missing.

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>>96844869
He sounded like just another moron who has no idea what he's talking about. Not the kind of thing that is worth investigating further.

>>96842683
>Are you okay buddy?
Gee HR lady, keep your struggle to yourself, I'm not your analrapist.

>>96829321
>What are the best games with large, interesting worlds that aren't inherently hostile to the player
Most properly designed settings have a mixture of conflict and nonviolent contact. If you've somehow made
>constant enemies
you're making a very boring game yes. Nusr using variations on reaction rolls and negotiation is key, if its skipped that its not even really adjacent anymore.

>>96829321
what's the OP pic? is it a game?

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I ran Death in Space a few days ago.
I'm not seeing how this is a horror system, but I did realize how Mork Borg it is when creating chareacts. Rolling 2d4 and substracting the later from the first is miles better than the comparison table every other MB uses.
I was a bit surprised by the "how you were meant do die" table. I didn't understand it at all, but used it anyway because I was testing the system and wanted to do it in good fatih. The conclusion we reached, and it kinda worked, is that the table is the shitty death you were destined to have as a regular joe, but instead you had a cool death doing stuff and living life. I'm not entirely sure if that's the point. If anyone can confirm or has another ake let me know.

I just played Pirate Borg.
I have no clue why you people said it didn't feel like a Mork Borg at all, it was super Mork Borg.
We ended up in an aztek tomb, two players being turned into skelletons plus a sorcerer that could make more skelletons. We took our aztek skelleton crew to take over Spain, kinda woke.

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>>96854586
it kind of softens the blow of losing a character, but there also seems to be some meta, although i'm not entirely sure what they meant about it, like the void interfering with the deterministic universe? are the players part of the void?

>>96855952
Pirate is more grounded in its setting. it rarely gives you intentionally vague rolls like "a map to a place that cannot possibly exist", leaving you wondering what the hell it meant

like one game gives you a fever dream to interpret like some avant-garde homework, while the other gives you actual adventure hooks that point you toward loot and things to stab

don't die on me

>>96854586
>I'm not seeing how this is a horror system,
I didn't really think of it as one when I was reading it. More like a grimdark future game but instead of being made in the 80s it was made in the early 2020s.
Death is likely, the gameworld is fucked up and everything sucks, but its not scary its just normal.

>>96857197
true
I also found the quirks and random character stuff not only very on point (expectable) but also playable. We run 6 characters between 3 players, one at the time, and each random creation had a playable personality. No anti-party characters or confusing concepts.

>>96857197
>>96863016
>one game gives you a fever dream to interpret like some avant-garde homework,
>while the other gives you actual adventure hooks that point you toward loot and things to stab
Which other borgs (or other games) would you guys say are the second type? I like the idea of mork more than the execution.

>>96863257
I guess cy_borg is pretty playable, people keep it going for campaigns. A point in favor is that most cyberpunk games are on the heavy crunch side so a lite cyberpunk game is gonna hit with a lot of people that got filtered.

>>96863281
>most cyberpunk games are on the heavy crunch side
Frankly, what keeps the genre from ever capyuring me. While "historical" settings, fantasy or not, are "solved", tech settings 15 minutes into the future are stagnant, in comparison to 5 years of tech advances.

>>96863317
yeah, this one has very few options, like most MB games, and a general "fuck it be OP if you roll it" attitude. I think it also has extra HP compared to other games, but I might confusing that everyone rolled great.

>>96863257
>>96863016
>>96857197
I think Pirates are easier to get your head around, but there's a certain type of metal head that just gets mork borg and can instantly play long. It's a bit of a filter that I find entirely fair, not everything has to be for me.

>>96864095
still waiting for a D&D style game to get the Pirate Borg treatment. like a mix of high concept art, dense, usable content, and a strong identity, but for classic fantasy

>>96865418
Dolmenwood.

can you run starless sea in theater of the mind?

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>>96866483
The DCC one? Mapping isn't that big a deal for DCC stuff and showing the players the art seems key to the vibe. I don't think you'd need miniatures or a grid though.

>>96866686
yeah i'm thinking of running it on discord+roll20

>>96865490
pretty much this
I think everyone into medieval fantasy should at least give it a look

>>96866693
Dungeons and maps can be confusing when it's only description, people don't read books and they're not used to keeping too much info in their RAM. Be ready to reinforce and re-describe over and over again.

>>96866710
speech to text might be the move then thanks for the heads up.

>>96866693
Haven't done much online play but quick search makes it look like there's maps and plugins for it already for roll20 and DCC stuff. Not sure how they work.

>>96830727
>>96831636
Am reading it right now. It's competently written, with a few small niggles here and there. The cover art is the only art jsyk. I didn't read Cairn yet, but I did read ItO and obviously Monolith is quite similar, just adapted for a fairly "generic baseline" sci-fi core. If you like or dislike Odd-likes or Cairn-likes, you'll have the same opinion on Monolith. My opinion thus far is that it does exactly what it sets out to do and is dirt-cheap, so, yeah.
>>96777664
>>96777717
>>96777751
Absolutely agree, I immediately lose any interest when I see lazy, generic-style slop AI on DTRPG or Kickstarter... The odds that the actual content in the book is novel or high-quality immediately plummets. I think everyone should be extremely vary of any project with it desu, unless maybe the writer is proven already (and even then).

>>96864095
Nah, doesn't seem like it to me, I prefer dark souls to pirates. I've run mork borgier campaigns than morkborg in other systems. It just lacks the parts that would feel like work for me to make and gives me the parts I would fid fun to make it myself.
>>96863257
I almost want to play a game disregarding rule 0, with players just being corporate slaves using the highest tech money can buy to chase rebels, but I don't think the other GM in the group would run it.

>>96866693
If you're doing online, you should have maps. It's easy and widely available, and while players can do theater of the mind at the table, online makes it so much worse for the distractions.

You could also check out Talespire (community hub Talestavern) if you have steam. It's a really cool 3D VTT

>>96867346
i bought it years ago and forgot about it. I remember i tried to make a map and to be honest it came out pretty bad looking but I know its a skill issue so maybe i'll give it another shot

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>>96686823
>>96687438
>>96693000
>>96696807
Thank you anons for your support. I did read your posts before playing and did follow your advice - admittedly without special index cards/replacement characters ready, and without watching the linked Actual Play. Still, I read ItO cover-to-cover like 3 times (not really difficult desu), as well as found some nifty character sheets online (players love that) and "one page rules" to print out as handouts. I also made and printed a version of the Fallen Marsh hexcrawl to have ready.

The short of it is that it was an awesome time with many laughs; my biggest pain points were sometimes having to flip through the book and somehow forgetting to get a GM screen... With that said, all 3 players got very into it and enjoyed it. I didn't want to quash their comedic tone and allowed them to be goofy, but reigned in absurd stuff or murder-hobo attempts, as well as tried to highlight anything remotely weird or tense. They had fun adapting their characters from the starter packages: would-be pirate with a parrot, horse cart mechanic and asylum escapee, all with both grounded and quirky traits to them. I also included a generic pushover GMNPC, kinda unplanned, but to try and give them direction and inevitably show off the lethality (he's still alive tho).

Anyway, I ended up doing the Iron Coral and Fallen Marsh. I leaned into the pirate background of the 1 player: he heard about rumors of some weird giant coral popping up from seedy sailors, his old crew were too chicken to go, but he met these new weirdos at a pub and they decided to give it a go together. They caught a cheap ship to travel to Hopesend and this is where I gave them the first big choice as the boat captain offered them a dingy to immediately go to the beach near the Coral instead of remaining on the boat to Hopesend. They had some fun deliberation and decided to go directly to the Coral.

(cont.)

Does this "without number" series fit in here? I have someone questions about Ashes Without Number if anyone has experience with the Enclave subsystem.

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>>96867692
Holy shit I botched that.
>this
the*
>someone
some*

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>>96867437
>>96686823
>>96687438
>>96693000
>>96696807
At the Coral things were fun; my weaknesses were figuring out how much I can show/tell without spoiling room contents, but the biggest issue was that I forgot to roll on the encounter table for every time they change rooms! Unsurprisingly, one of their few critiques after the session was that there wasn't a lot of action as they explored. There were tense moments as they split up, I thought one player would straight-up die alone in the "red room" (L1,R2); a bit later two of them almost went down the shaft of no return all the way down to level 3 - but both were averted naturally. Was still quite exciting and tense for me. Later someone did faint in the red room but was saved in time, a natural learning moment. The one moment I got "worried" was when they found some absolutely minor trinket and were like "should we leave for Hopesend now?" - but they eventually decided to camp outside and decide on the next day (session). I rolled on the overland encounter table and they heard a distant horse running - one player committed to a bit where his character became deathly afraid of the CENTAUR RAPIST for no reason whatsoever. We all found that so funny that I'm now thinking of including it; perhaps they wake up to find the DMNPC missing and hoovesteps leading away from their camp...

Perhaps bold for a first session, but I decided to hack ItO with two things. First, I tried to backport the Maneuver/Feint thing from Mythic Bastionland - albeit lower in power since the players are not epic knights. Second, I decided to add more depth to the "initiative" (doesn't really exist in ItO) by 1:1 copying the system from Shadow of the Weird Wizard. My goal with these was to add some mechanical depth and choice nuance to the game, to help give players both more "meat" and agency. Ultimately neither "really" came up as there was a single and short fight. Will continue tinkering with these changes/additions before the next session.

>>96867107
>I almost want to play a game disregarding rule 0, with players just being corporate slaves using the highest tech money can buy to chase rebels, but I don't think the other GM in the group would run it.
Corp Borg?

>>96867692
go ahead anon, don't get hung up on the labels

you never know who's out there, lurking, waiting for a question just like this one. all we can do is send our post out into the ether and have a little faith

>>96867692
It's kind of its own thing, I've seen threads dedicated to it pop up now and then and sometimes people have stuff to say.
But I'm pretty sure that you'll find the same anons in this general as long as they know it exists, so add a picture they can recognize on page 0 shoot your shot.

>>96867812
>that I forgot to roll on the encounter table for every time they change rooms!
oops. Happens, part of learning to run the game but it will make a noticeable difference.
I've never run it with a gm screen personally, hadn't even occurred to me.
Sounds like it was a good time, glad it worked out. Bold's good, its a short system so making it punchy and fast is the idea.
What's the Weird Wizard's initiative system? Haven't looked at it.

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>>96867901
Or Cybercops. I really just want to play 1 fucking cyberpunk game where my party holds some institutional power, instead of playing guerrilla dregs for the nth time.
Wait, I thought you were joking, I'll give it a read.

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>>96868276
>oops. Happens, part of learning to run the game but it will make a noticeable difference.
Yeah, I did roll it when they spent too much time talking or making noise, just so happened to be "nothing" each time - but I was supposed to roll it like 10 more times, at least. As far as learning the game goes, I think I should sit down and write down all the core rules for myself, both as a reference and as a way to help me remember them better.
>I've never run it with a gm screen personally, hadn't even occurred to me.
I'm used to it from playing 5e with people and I do think it helps provide some "mystique" as I can roll encounters/luck in peace or flip through the book. More tension and the like as the players start imagining wtf is going on behind the screen. ItO doesn't haven an official one - I got an unofficial one from DriveThru (gotta figure out how to print it). Alternatively, I've gotten some physical GM screens from other games since the session and can just use those.
>Sounds like it was a good time, glad it worked out. Bold's good, its a short system so making it punchy and fast is the idea.
Thanks for the support and, yeah, ItO and Cairn-likes are neat but just a tad more depth wouldn't hurt. Trying to keep the leanness without bloat.
>What's the Weird Wizard's initiative system? Haven't looked at it.
So, in ItO, the PCs all go, then the monsters; Move, then Action being the action economy. In SotWW, the monsters all go first, then the PCs; Move + Action + Reaction being the action economy. Reactions are broken down into a few generic options that you can use on the monster's turn for defense/mitigation/utility - BUT you can also burn your Reaction to go before all the monsters! This is IMO a simple way to allow players to strategize about whether they want to hit first or respond to the monsters. That choice itself is the entire point, I think.

>>96868479
Corp Borg can also be about challenging the system, but you are a clog and you can do clog things. There is no expected way to stop the corporate apocalypse one way or another.

>>96868479
Blade Runner RPG, although it's more a police procedural than Bubblegum Crisis

as the Rep-Detect Unit, you have the authority to take over almost any LAPD investigation and get access to places regular cops can't, like high level corporate offices, at the same time, you still have to do the legwork, pull connections to secure warrants, equipment and support. that tension between having immense institutional power and still needing to be a street level detective is what makes it so much fun

we had a blast with it. my only worry is that the theme might be too narrow, like, how many times can you hunt replicants before it gets stale

>>96871006
it's 100% locked in. the entire core loop is case files, investigation, tracking down leads, social pressure, and dealing with the stress of the job, there aren't rules for being anything else than cops.

and the tech is pure 80s cassette futurism, with vid phones and dot matrix printers

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>>96871063
i think it could work with some tinkering, the main change would be swapping the LAPD Resource Request table to reflect the new agency's priorities and jurisdiction. pirate the rulebook and take a look first, i wouldn't want to talk someone into spending money in case it wouldn't work.

>>96868592
At hand notes help for sure. I tend to make my own quick reference of rules at the back of the rulebook on the blank index pages.
I roll everything in the open, I'm not too concerned about players looking at my dice rolls. But I've seen people use 3-ring binders with open slots on the outside and just cycle cool art through them as screens and it looked like it worked well.
>SotWW action/reaction choice
Neat, I'll look into that. Thanks anon.

>>96871550
fuck yeah anon!
ACKS is my favorite NuSR system to read through
traditional B/X and AD&D are like rudimentary systems for kids going into "dungeons" and on "adventures" compared to the simulationist ACKS' approach
I can imagine epic kingdoms and wars that play out using all the systems
I would love to actually play ACKS one day

>>96871550
>>96871718
lol, no one's gonna fall for it anymore. Everyone knows acks is shit.

>>96863317
Cyberpunk games aren't meant for anything more than a short campaign, maybe a few months or a year at most. Anything longer than that and things get unpredictable.
Think of it as repeating the same Friday night over and over, but from a million different operator's upgraded eyes.

Your sockpuppeting is not making people hate ACKS, just you. Go back to shitting up /osrg/

>>96873340
>Go back to shitting up /osrg/
Please do not

>>96875079
too late

Troll obviously false flagging with AI-generated pro-ACKS comments so he can start spamming/flooding this general with anti-ACKS comments like he's been doing on /osrg/ for the last couple of days:
>>96871550
>>96871718

>>96875692
We're aware; Please don't give him more attention than he deserves

>>96870927
Law & Order keeps making new shit and it's a less interesting setting.
I think the problem is that you need a really complete and complex case, with multiple avenues of investigation. The pre-made cases are great at this, but they're hard to prep and you have to do that if you want to make it smooth.
I had some issues crosschecking stuff in the manual. For example dealing with Wallace is explained through 3 different sections and what they can offer is way too vague. One of the cases sugests you can just scan a brain like a camera, that could solve a huge chunk of investigations. But it's just in that case.

>>96871050
I think you're the same anon.
No doubt the down time is a huge part of the game, you really want to take a break and get tricked into thinking you might be a replicant or your wife is cheating on you. Great stuff.

The need to get a retirement order before you murder a replicant is also a cool thing, but players may clash with the fact they can also shoot randos if they are threatened so they might as well shoot the replicant trying to escape.

I think it requires players to really want to play along.

>>96871972
why?
I guess the genre does feel much shorter, I can easily imagine campaigns in a pseudo medieval magical world while at first I can only imagine short cyberpunk sequences. But Gibson wrote whole trilogies, there's a lot you can do in a setting that is similar to our own but has some new tech changing society. It's the same as scifi extrapolating modern stuff but at a more mundane scale.
Maybe the issue is going too hard into it, having all your ideas in the set up and nothing to keep going. The Bridge trilogy slowly incorporates VR, and then AI, and then global corporate take over.

>>96870927
Shit, it sounds fun but it's incompatible with both of my groups.
>how many times can you hunt replicants before it gets stale
That also needs better character writing than I'm willing to push for.
>>96871972
Sure, but it's not what I meant. I was trying to say every setting looks stale for someone, because sci-fi fans will each have at least one idea of how the near future should've developed. I don't run much of it because, to suspend disbelief for my groups, it innevitable gets re-genre'd into either grindfiction, Digimon/SMT or toku.

>>96877302
>That also needs better character writing than I'm willing to push for.
Not that much, but it needs players who want to engange.
You have the day divided in shifts. If you work more than three in a row you start to lose stats, if you take a break for a shift you had a series of random rolls to define what your home life is like. Then you have random events that might be related to the case intruding your personal life, family issues, doubting you're a replicant, or just random stuff like a mugging. That's the thing that connects the cases. As long as the case itself changes that's probably enough. Just like any police procedureal show.

Then the cases are solid Free League stuff. 40 pages with a dozen NPCs spread through maybe as many locations, crime scene pictures to check, and two or three roads connecting every clue. All ending in a moral dilema. You level up by either doing things by the book and gaining skills (including snitching on other players if you have evidence) or by being humane and gaining stats.

Out of the Free League games it was the only one that made me go for it. It is way too much prep for my poor NSR brain, I struggled a lot and a couple players months later still bust my balls for apologizing so much when I had to go silent five minutes to focus on reading a page or finding a description. But you have to be specific and definite if you want them to piece complex bits of info together. It's not a game about coming up with original ideas or expressing yourself, at least not in the investigation portion.

>>96877373
>bust my balls for apologizing so much when I had to go silent five minutes to focus on reading a page or finding a description.
Mine just say "he's rendering the quest" and take 5. You're trying to sell a sportscar to a family man, I want to ride it badly, but my toddlers demand I take the minivan. A group of players is nowhere near engaged for this to work, I usually just run them through meat grinders and they like it. The other is entirely consistent of lawyers, so they'd get sidetracked by actual police procedure, actual law and such, and that ruined more than one game already.

>>96877428
>so they'd get sidetracked by actual police procedure, actual law and such, and that ruined more than one game already.
an anon already posted the list of procedures that take in game time to get, including permission to shoot, and you gain xp for snitching on bad procedure from other players. It might be the perfect game for them.

But yeah, it's a very specific experience. I trust MoSh because it keeps working at open tables even with absolute newfags, BR is the exact opposite.

Have you checked The House Always Wins for MoSh? Players sell rights to clone them and are sent into a deadly game show, they get extra money if they have an over the top death. There's a subplot about the sponsors competing for control of the game and whole planet. You might like it.

>>96877373
the rulebook itself is a bit of a mess, not the worst i've ever seen, but the rules are spread out all over the place, and it's easy to miss things. our game only ran smoothly because i got hyped, read it cover to cover, and could help the GM when he got stuck

the investigation side was no problem, CoC is one of our main systems, so the GM was already used to the usual bag of tricks (clue redundancy, floating clues, not relying on perception rolls)

and it's not necessarily a problem if the investigation fails, that can happen, especially if it's in a fun, spectacular way. not everything has to get explained and understood. part of the game is just being a witness to something, accepting the mystery even if there's no resolution. who knows, maybe you'll trip over a clue for it in a future case. a good unresolved case can leave a lasting impression, sometimes more so than one with a clear cut ending.

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I have so many modules I'd like to run but I'm not willing to pay for.

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>>96880726
Liminal Horror in particular has way too little pirated

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>>96880874
This is another one I've been requesting in the share thread for ages.

>>96871550
>I *really* like ACKS. A bit cumbersome, but macris really put in the work.
Yes, that's the only flaws I see: being spreadsheet heavy.
The longer the campaign goes, more spreadsheets get added to the pile.
Even if you're only doing the abstract versions of the battles, handling the armies and calculating BR for all the troops, commanders, lieutenants every time there's an update, is really a big effort and time-consuming.

>>96877428
>You're trying to sell a sportscar to a family man, I want to ride it badly, but my toddlers demand I take the minivan.
I feel that so bad
I'm happy running games for the groups I have, but there's so much I'd like to try and I know it just won't work.

>>96873340
>>96875692
This is hilarious. You were so embarassed by the guy's attempt to shill the system that you called it a falseflag, but he's gone right back to trying to shill it.

>>96877456
>Players sell rights to clone them and are sent into a deadly game show, they get extra money if they have an over the top death. There's a subplot about the sponsors competing for control of the game and whole planet. You might like it.
Fuck, that almost sounds like the plot of the yuri anime we were watching, or Kamen Rider Geats. Is it agnostic enough that I can reskin the sponsors as Azatoth, Nyarlathotep, etc...?
>>96882432
I tried running SRW Iwaku at least 3 times, and failed. My players are too set on WFRP 2e and FFd6.

>>96882450
he is right though those anons are falseflagging
and you know how those 2 anons are 100% sure of it?
because they know they are the only 2 ackshills on the entire website

>>96884562
Go back to your own thread >>96881801 and try to keep it alive with anything that isn't shitposting. Let's see how you do.

>>96867357
You should! The Talestavern thing I mentioned is their community hub, they have a lot of maps/templates/and setpieces for free download to use in your own stuff, it's really handy

acks good

Any tips/rundown of how to easily convert any spell from B/X and/or ADND to GLOG magic?

>>96886512
Yeah, by not playing glog and just using bx

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>>96887504
Yeah, hate to say it, but GLOG was basically the poster child of pic related. So many people on so many blogs wasted so much time trying to make it into a playable game, and eventually everyone just gave up. It's a mess.

>>96886512
You re not supposed to. You re supposed to be making your own custom spells and it implies a different design mentality from B/X

>>96887582
I really think that Glog is playable but it is the start of the nsr design for me.

>>96887614
>I really think that Glog is playable
Last time I was interested (which is admittedly years back) I couldn't find any actual play that used it. Has that changed?

>>96887718
https://diyanddragons.blogspot.com/2020/05/actual-play-glog-wizard-city-sophomore.html
Someone tried. I thinks its a little half baked and incomplete

>>96887718
Skerples has a bunch of them.

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Is OSR still a selling point for a game?
Will my Traveller-esque flying-island airship-merchant game with gold-for-XP really benefit from being an OSR game? as in sticking with hit dice, 3d6 straight down, etc and not getting too far off the reservation when it comes to those mechanics?
Or is it more likely you'll be constrained by trying to fit the OSR mold?

>>96888653
I think you should do whatever you like, which is more likely to make it a good game than chasing popularity. If it's commercial success you're interested in, marketing is the way to go anyway. Make friends with the plebbit mods and Questing Beast and start an astroturfing campaign like Shadowdark did.

>>96888664
>If it's commercial success you're interested in, marketing is the way to go anyway. Make friends with the plebbit mods and Questing Beast and start an astroturfing campaign like Shadowdark did.
damn... okay maybe that is what I should do.
It's just a hard decision to make.

>>96888664
Shadowdark's "astroturf" campaign is an overblown meme. What it was is that the author had a large 5e fanbase to begin with, and SD had the good luck to launch right in the middle of the WotC-wants-to-revoke-the-OGL debacle, which was the perfect time for luring people from 5e. Basically a perfect storm for the internet to go nuts over a mediocre system being published, but it's not anything anon is going to be able to replicate.

Are there art free pdfs for pirate and cy like there is in mork borg?

>>96888653
an osr game, not really.
An nsr game with a very specific stylistic direction and a couple important procedures for facilitating the style of game you want? sure
The osr brand isnt an auto success but it is a small field where every piece of work gets reviewed and kinda promoted if its a semi playable game with a distinct artstyle and a strong theme which is what you should do

>>96888653
If it's money you want it's all about your marketing strategy, not about the quality of your game.
-Stick with OSR/NSR just so you can retain that D&D brand recognition.
-Hire a local escort to pretend to be you on your public communications.
-Lure some well established mofos to promote your incoming KS.
-Contact the KS support to say as a woman in the TTRPG industry you don't know how to make sure your voice is heard and valued.
-Open a KS with a low as fuck goal so using your ensnared influencers and KS support leverage you get funded in less than 24h and can slap a stupid FUNDED IN LESS THAN 24H sticker to your project and enjoy some more trend.
-Make few sockpuppet accounts on Youtube to spam comments about this incredible trending game on the few Youtube accounts that didn't bother to talk about your product.
-Don't waste time and energy advertising it here.

Overall be a lying psychopath and assume your average comsumer is a mindless drone eager to fill the void of its soul by copying the perceived joy of its favorite fake as fuck influencer.

>>96890041
thanks for the advice. how much would this all cost out of pocket? a few thou?

>>96889578
>An nsr game with a very specific stylistic direction and a couple important procedures for facilitating the style of game you want? sure
Yeah it won't be OSR but more like Stars Without Number. But I'd rather make my own 40 page game than an add-on for WWN.

So at that point will the D&D B/X heritage in my game design help it more or hurt it? Say for a person who casually leafs through the book at the FLGS. Or the PDF online.

>>96889146
All of those things can be true at the same time. She already had a fanbase, the timing was right, AND it was astroturfed.

>>96892675
>A few thou?
A whole lot more than that kek. To be honest anon this is not a profitable industry and trying to make bank out of it is a fools errand. Your livelihood will revolve around attracting the attention of dumb people who spend money on overpriced garbage.

>>96888653
Are you making it so the game can easily be used to run a lot of other widely available material with minimal conversion effort?
Do you actually like OSR style gameplay?
If Y, then Y. If N, then N.

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>>96892675
>But I'd rather make my own 40 page game than an add-on for WWN.
Its pretty successful and well liked, where as whatever you're up to is unknown and will need social media to splash while competing with everyone and their dog for 10 seconds of fame from Exalted Funeral or some similar cluster.
Slapping an OSR™ on it will give you more traction but you'll have to stand out from the shovelware somehow.
But really, if you're not making a game because you really like it and want to share that you're probably doing it wrong because they're not lucrative unless you want to go full retard.

>>96894801
>Your livelihood will revolve around attracting the attention of dumb people who spend money on overpriced garbage.
This is the real dealbreaker honestly. "Success" consists of debasing your creativity to appeal to paypig whales.

>>96895642
Meh. Money requires sacrifices. The real problem for me is that it's a pittance for a massive sacrifice: Your time, integrity, and hobby. If TTRPGs were a gold mine I could see it being worth it, but even relative success isn't much better than what you'd get from wageslaving.

>>96892675
if by bx heritage you mean the 6 stats, the type of rolls etc then sure it will help people through familiarity alone.

>>96895642
>>96894801
I am not for going all rpg designer if you can't afford it/don't love it but come on anons.
There are plenty of stuff that are clearly passion projects that didnt compromise on their creativity doing well like Myhtic Bastionland for example.
I dont see creative compromise as a necessity to making games, just as the easier more corporate path but we are talking indie games rn

>>96896532
>There are plenty of stuff that are clearly passion projects that didnt compromise on their creativity doing well
Sure, but for every one of those there are a hundred failures. And odds are, your creativity is not really in line with what paypigs will want.
Mind you, even with that the "doing well" part is just me taking you at your word without breaking down cost estimations and funding/sales figures. For most things people think are doing well, it's probably much bleaker financially than they actually know, and a lot of game companies that push games that are relatively popular are still operating at a deficit right now, like Steve Jackson.

>>96896570
I get what you re saying anon but steve jackson games isnt an indie project done by some tg anon. Yes, major rpg publishers are having it very hard financially .
I also dont think that the paypigs want anything besides a cool idea, a decent book and good art, so you dont really hav to compromise much.
The Borgs literally made bank just on the art and many other nsr projects did so as well

>>96896591
>I get what you re saying anon but steve jackson games isnt an indie project done by some tg anon.
You're correct. They're a larger game company that knows the ins and outs of the industry, knows how to reduce expenses, has a wide variety of product lines, and a fairly large reserve to coast off when things get rough (at least according to their stakeholder reports), can push more products to a wider audience, and have immediate brand recognition.
So you're right, insofar as identifying that being an indie would be harder rather than easier.

>I also dont think that the paypigs want anything besides a cool idea, a decent book and good art
Paypigs don't really know what they want, but the answer is something eye-catching that fits whatever mood they have at the moment. Good art alone doesn't sell it. Cool ideas alone don't sell it. A decent book definitely doesn't sell it. And all three together also have little to do with it. Sadly you're gonna have to take 1-100 gambling odds on your ideas having appeal to the right people, or chase trends.

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>>96896532
>Mythic Bastionland
>didn't compromise on their creativity
Anon... Mythic Bastionland is just a fantasy rewrite of Electric Bastionland made to cash in on EB fans' clamoring for a fantasy version they were too creatively bankrupt to just homebrew. It doesn't have the slightest bit of creative integrity, it's literally a purpose-made cash cow.

>>96896591
>The Borgs
They're pretty much the antithesis of what you're arguing for, man.

>>96896612
Why is an Arthurian Legends version of his passion project, that looks really designed with passion for the game, has actual cool ideas and isnt a lazy hackjob a bad example?
Because he knew he could probably sell it?

>>96896611
Corporations have different costs than a couple of artists for art and your best friends for help with proofreading, and playtesting the thing.

I am not saying it's easy to succeed and that most projects get burried in the landslide of rpg products of today but you re making it be much much harder than it is/was for most of the people in the indie scene whose whole experience is
juste keep making stuff, casually promoting them, till eventually you are well known and you can make decent enough stuff to sell them

>>96896629
>Corporations have different costs
Typically lesser ones too relative to project size, because they've already embedded themselves in the industry and have all the means needed to cut costs. It's why they form in the first place, economy of scale. Didn't they teach you this in school?

>but you re making it be much much harder than it is/was for most of the people in the indie scene whose whole experience is
Anon, most indies make fucking nothing and are abject failures. The entire point is that even success means making pennies, and even if you whore out there's not much to be had. This is simply not a very profitable industry anymore. You're in it because you're either a moron, sheer love of the game, or blessed with luck.

>>96896643
>anymore
It was never a very profitable industry. White Wolf made *okay* money at its height, aside from that only D&D is an actually valuable RPG property (and TSR still managed to go bankrupt once).

>>96896648
Nah. There was a time most people can't remember, except through rose-tinted glasses and misfired neurons, when the non-D&D market was much more lively because the consumer base was expanding. As much as people bitched about D&D back then, it actually did bleed enough people into other scenes to help spread some wealth around, and most people were more open-handed with buying all the retardedly expensive shit. Plus, overhead was much lower.

>>96896648
>TSR still managed to go bankrupt once
And that was mostly because the Blumes were incompetent crooks and Gygax was basically checked out, making deals and snorting coke in Hollywood while they robbed the till on his behalf before finally stealing the company out from under him. Only Daniel Kaye had any money sense, and when he died, TSR was doomed.

>>96896682
No, the actual bankruptcy was much later, when Lorraine Williams had driven the company into the ground publishing too many settings in too-large print runs, a D&D pyrograph kit, and Dragon Dice, not to mention that whole Buck Rogers exploitation attempt. The end result was D&D being sold to WotC.

The time you're thinking of is just when they had to bring in Lorraine to prevent a bankruptcy.

>>96896690
It's all part and parcel, IMO. Williams just delayed it via plate-spinning antics, publishing as much new vaguely profitable shit as possible to keep the lights on until the company finally bit the dust. The end started before her.

>>96896629
>>96896643
Speaking of Bastionland, passion projects and the viability of making a career out of RPGs Chris Macdowall, Bastionland creator, recently did a blog post about his career as an RPG designer. It's an interesting read.
>https://www.bastionland.com/2025/09/building-bastionland-career.html
>I designed games semi-seriously for 7 years before I sold anything
>I sold games for 6 years before I went full-time as a designer
>I’ve worked for 5 years as a full-time game designer and I’m still a company of one person with just five releases
It's sobering to think about how a career that can be considered very succesful on the NSR scene have taken 16 years to create, counting from getting his first piece of writing in print in 2009 to now.

>>96897003
Okay, having read that blog post he certainly doesn't sound invested in maintaining his creative integrity or honestly, even like he cares about having such a thing.

>>96888664
Questing Beast reviews anything as long as it isn't shit and you send him a physial book. Will he review it on time for your kickstarter? Who knows. But he if he has anything to say he'll talk about it.

>>96889386
try googling either bare bones or ashcan edition

>>96889578
>every piece of work gets reviewed and kinda promoted
not really, maybe 30% at the very best. Most of the time people won't know what you're talking about. Even in more moderated places where it doesn't devolved into meta discussion like here, there's not enough interest to cover so much material.

>>96890041
It's always surprising how much confidence people have about things so detached from reality. You live in a fantasy world.

>>96896532
>>96896612
>being this new
Mythic Bastionland was succesful because Electric Bastionland was succesful because ItO was succesful because Chris McDowal has been writing about ttrpgs since 2009. Not only multiple articles a month, interacting with other bloggers, making a discord when it was a new thing, selfpublishing, distributing, attendfing cons, collaborating with other creators. Do you think the SD woman was succesful because no other woman ever recorded herself or something? She's being doing this shit every day for years and year. That's the trick: being somewhere early, being cool enough that people like you and being constant. He still writes tables and mechanics on his blog multiples times a month for free.

The reality is that all the time spent in 4chan is time you could had spent building an audience or getting contacts. But we spent it fighting for schizo shit to people who'll never know who we are

>>96896643
>Typically lesser ones too relative to project size, because they've already embedded themselves in the industry and have all the means needed to cut costs. It's why they form in the first place, economy of scale. Didn't they teach you this in school?
are you from the 70's
corporations exist to bloat themselves and then sell the name to a bigger company and China (pre tariffs) made a print in the thousands cheaper than the best price TSR ever got.

>>96899060
>Anon begins an irrelevant rant about megacorporations because he is unable to separate his personal insecurities and angsts from the conversation
Sad.

>>96899082
how are shell companies and IPs exchanging hands related to my personal insecurities or angst? what could it have to do with anyone's personal life?

>>96899089
>How is my unhinged and irrelevant ranting indicative of my personal problems?
A bit of a self-answering question, anon. What you're saying is something I never stated anything contrary to, you know, it's just not relevant to the conversation.

>>96899116
oh, that's what you didn't understand
Mid size companies don't focus on selling products, the goal is having an IP popular enoguh for a bigger company to buy them. Instead of cutting costs they might inflate them to make the company look bigger without actually spending extra money. It's the syllicon valley model, but go watch The Profit to see people do it in every market possible.

>>96899278
>oh, that's what you didn't understand
I think you should be able to engage with the conversation before this.
>Starts ranting about irrelevancies once again.
Sorry anon, I understood all of this before you spoke. You're just too dumb and wound up to actually read what other people were posting.

>>96899311
You're the one refusing to connect what I'm saying.
Economy of scale only exists in certain fields, it hasn't been a thing in decades. All restaurants get their materials sources from the same place, Sysco usually. So you can open a new shop or have one for decades, your french fries will cost the same because they come from Sysco. That's why there are ghost kitchens in food apps popping up with the same production costs as a fast food company that's been at it for ages.

It's the same for ttrpg books. Economy of scale mattered when it was produced in the US by specialized printers. Now you can send it to chinese companies that even moving it around the world make it cheaper than any deal TSR got back in the day. There is no need for that much scale anymore, if you get the money from kickstarter or an investment you can hit almost the same margins as Hasbro. There are still people printing in the US, the Troike dudes are very proud about that.

Mid size companies no longer can dominate the market the way White Wolf did in the 90's because they can't offer prices or reach to potential writers. The only reason to have a mid size company is to build and IP to sell or selling the whole companuy. Like Talsorian and White Wolf did respectively.

>>96899394
>a million typos
>somehow Talsorian is fine
>Troika isn't

>>96899394
>You're the one refusing to connect what I'm saying.
No, anon, I simply do not care for your inability to follow a conversation.
>Starts talking about the food industry and thinks its 1-1 with how TTRPGs work
>Starts ranting about chinese companies and thinks we never outsourced to them before the 2000s
>Makes points that go completely against his own claims
>Thinks white wolf ever "dominated the market"
There are too many delusions to be worth dealing with or discussing. Sorry man, but you missed the discussion entirely and are having a rant about shit nobody here cares about while insisting we'd totally care and just don't understand (We do, you're just annoying and too dumb to realize we don't care).

>>96898952
>Questing Beast reviews anything as long as it isn't shit and you send him a physial book.
You also need to pay, generally speaking.

>>96899712
I know a couple people who sent him stuff and he reviewd it. But it took months.

>>96899794
Maybe he'll do it when it suits him. Like when he's short on unpaid content. Either way, not something you can rely on if you're in the promotion phase of your project.

>>96898952
>ashcan edition
No luck, but I did end up finding the rules reference for both, so thanks for the help. I like the art, but it gets in the way. Cyberdark kinda has a better layout.

>>96901787
The design totally gets in the way, but it's also informing you why the game is different from other stuff. It serves the purpose of those creative writing excercises WoD and other games had, and I prefer it over that.

I don't think they're particularly good games in a purely mechanical sense. The resolution mechanics are meh, the character creation is confusing for no reason (DiS replaces the convertion table for 1d4-1d4 and gives you the same results), and my main issue is that the HP is a pointless amount. It's 1 hit 80% of the time no matter what number your sheet says. Strangely when I played Pirate Borg we had 2 characters hit exactly 0hp to make the broken roll, but the 4 times I ran a MB game I didn't see that that happen even once.

>>96904045
eh, depends on how backward compatible you want to make it with original d&d:

the original used 3d6 for stats, where a +0 modifier happens about 50% of the time, while d4-d4 gives the same range but a different distribution, with +0 only happening about 30% of the time

same reason the Broken state is rare, original d&d had instant death when HP reached zero, so roll on an "exactly 0 HP" event is kinda rare, meant more as flavor than an actual, meaningful mechanic

you could change that, like Black Powder and Brimstone adds a proper death save "at 0 or negative HP roll Toughness DR12, on a success you are merely Broken"

it's like backward compatibility vs using whatever rule suits your table best, both seem fine.

>>96904779
I guess, but I don't really get the need to make it compatible tho. They could just take the mechanics they want and change everything else. Maybe they wanted some degree of similarity to propertly "fit" the OSR label and that probably helped promote the product when it was completely new. But MB hacks shouldn't be bothered by that, no one expects cy_borg to be close to OSR.

Mausritter Month is live https://www.backerkit.com/c/collections/mausritter-month
Anyone backing anything? I backed Junk City, Tales from Pwyll and might do one more but I'm not sure which

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it he Japanese edition more or less readable?

>>96907816
if the rest is in the same style, much more readable.

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>>96908551
yes

Looking for post-apocalyptic adventures ala Fallout/MadMax/Gamma World.
Preferably a dungeon crawl in a vault style system of old tech.

>>96909300
Ashes Without Number just came out.

Or is that too b/x to be considered Nusr?

>>96909442
>Ashes Without Number just came out.
Thanks, I'll pass

>Or is that too b/x to be considered Nusr?
I'd say it is NuSR, it's just not very good.

>>96910566
Oof, L take.

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>>96910682

>>96910597
I agree with him, SWN and WWN were both incredibly disappointing and lame. They were my introduction to OSR and made me write off the entirety of it as low effort garbage for a few years.

>>96911290
how exactly are xWN disappointing and "low effort"

>>96912321
>How exactly
Can't really prove a negative other than telling you they lack in many ways that I found egregious. I'd sooner ask why you think they're high effort instead.

>>96912429
>asked to substantiate on an OPINION
>it's like you are asking me to prove a negative or whatever anon
nvm you obviously have nothing worthwhile to say

>>96912880
>Asked to substantiate
Well like I said anon, my opinion is that it's lacking. There's not much to keep going on about.
I notice that you can't actually substantiate why it's high effort though. I wonder why :^)

Why is so much of this thread ppl arguing about nothing and insulting, like, literally what is the point?

>>96910566
>>96911290
The "Without Number" series is mostly praised for its tables and random generation. Do you find the games itself to be lacking or those tools for generation? Or both? One thing to note and that may affect any "review" is that like 80% of each game is available for free, so it "only" costs your time to engage with them.

>>96917467
Both, honestly. I was hopeful when I picked up SWN, and the ruleset is like B/X but worse, while the generators are like those from Traveller but worse. According to my taste of course. Not claiming to be objective in any way.

I've also tried to look at WWN, and I've found zero reasons to use it over any other retroclone or original edition.

>>96917467
>The "Without Number" series is mostly praised for its tables and random generation.
I remember, and I found it very grim that something so lackluster was getting praise.

>>96917541
Fair, thanks for elaborating. I did see that someone created a free online app that basically uses the SWN tables, but, you know, it's all automated. That's neat in a pinch.
>>96917738
Grim and lackluster in the sense that such content is unimpressive or unnecessary in general? Or just think that it wasn't accomplished in an actually noteworthy way?

>>96917804
Both.

>>96917541
>>96917738
SWN and WWN work best as supplements to other systems or games. They're very much the 1kg sacks of unbleached flour of RPGs. Not exciting, but useful structural material.

It's super weird to say the without number games are mechanically lacking in a thread dedicated to a subgenre of games that mechanically boil down to "roll a d20 high". If -WN are lacking, the Borgs are downright ephemeral.

>>96919357
>If -WN are lacking, the Borgs are downright ephemeral.
The Borgs are generally vacuous, yeah. They do have one thing though: Art and presentation, which at least conveys its own unique tones and expectations and does something the GM probably can't on his own.
Without Number? Any decent GM could get whatever it has to offer by spending a couple afternoons jotting down ideas for random things. Hell they'd probably do a better job at it, too.

>>96919687
>and does something the GM probably can't on his own
... You can't find cool art and describe things? Probably shouldn't be a gm.
>jotting down random things is the same as using a table
Not over time, really isn't. External sources for generation are key otherwise the gm's own material and setups become very derivative very quickly.

It always baffles me people looked at the XYZ without number series as rules for the game. That's not what it was for. They're tools for gameworld building and maybe some houserules to use if it fits.

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>>96829321
Terror Target Gemini.

I don't know If I like the massive damage threshold being your max HP on a rolled d8 followed by a saving throw if you pass the threshold. Normally, in OSR games, you just die at 0 hp. But in this game, at 0 HP, you roll a d20 with a 5% chance of not going down, a 45% chance of surviving KOd or a 45% chance of surviving KOd but being maimed and 5% chance of insta dying. But, then this mechanic sort of doesn't matter until players amass 3,000 wen (monies) and pay for level 3. Because most enemies deal 1d6+1 or higher damage vs your d8 HP, it basically translates to bypassing this roll on most level 1 and level 2 PCs. I dunno, I'm rambling, but generally, i'd rather have 0=dead than this weird "give the PCs hopium that they might make it" system.

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>>96921454

>>96920688
>... You can't find cool art and describe things?
Anon, Morkbork does not "find" art for you, and describing something is not the same as art. Are you daft?
>Not over time, really isn't
Sure it is, just assign random numbers to them. You could actually make more cohesive and functional tables than what Without Number offers that way, too. So not only can you get what it offers yourself, but you can get it in significantly higher quality.
>B-but you HAVE to use something someone else made for randomization because... Well just because!
Sounds like a skill issue.

Ha hah, i've noticed a lot of oldheads gushing over tables and thought it was weird. Like they even recommend books that are only tables. I have used tables here and there, but I cannot imagine just rolling for everything like some shoddily programmed roguelite.

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>>96922893
No, these older millenials/younger genx advocate you roll everything during the game and don't do any prep. it's weird to me.

>>96922630
Anon, you're actually retarded.
>find book with art in it
>not finding art somehow
You're trying to say you can come up with great ideas all on your own, but also that the coffee table art book does things you can't.
Post your high skill great ideas.

>>96923013
>Noprpep!
is a meme.
There are 2 varieties of tables. In-game and preparation based.
Both have uses. Neither stand on their own.

>>96923013
I'm not going to sit here and claim the be the most well read person in retard to this topic, but I read a couple of Osr/nusr adjacent and blogs and I never see people advocate for the kind of random generation you're talking about, beyond maybe wandering monster tables. Random tables are for prep, for forcing you to make connections between seemingly conflicting or disparate details.

>>96923077
>Anon, you're actually retarded.
t. Guy who thinks describing something is the exact same as a painting.
>find book with art in it
Morkborg doesn't do this either, anon. Unless you argue that looking at Morkborg is something you can do... WIthout Morkborg? Your arguments are senseless and it's obvious you're heated over a game you like getting derided by other anons.

>>96923077
It's pointless to argue with that guy, dude. The kind of person who cannot just say "eh, I didn't really like it/it didn't really grab me," but instead has to come up with a subjective yet vague reason for why something is bad is never going to have a coherent point.

>>96923114
Search any DnD topic and click on the oldest and crudiest looking guy you find. more than one of them will have some video named something like "How this book changed how I DM forever" and it's a long-ish video about rolling everything during the game with the help of some book that is nothing but tables. I used to get these when youtube decided to suggest me proffDM and his orbiters a year or so back and went out of control from there.

>>96923129
>The kind of person who cannot just say "eh, I didn't really like it/it didn't really grab me,"
This was said early on and anon insisted that you MUST back up all opinions with a dissertation of why you hold them.

>>96923129
>>96923077
>Say something retarded
>Immediately start samefagging to cover yourself
Shamelessly retarded. Might've worked better if that hadn't already been tried and this tangent wasn't started by you being giga-asshurt that some people dislike WN.

>>96923129
>>96923077
>>96920688
>>96919357
>>96912880
>>96912321
>>96910597
>>96910856
Something about these posts smells a little...
Fishy.

>>96923169
>>96923201
nou

>>96923310
Yep, it's the fishfag. Figures you'd be out here repping dogshit like WWN and SWN lol. How's your crusade over ACKS going since you got ran out of /osrg/ buddy?

>>96910682
>>96911290
>>96912429
>>96912429
>>96916503
>>96917541
>>96917738
>>96919687

Uh oh I guess the ACKSshill is super butthurt people are talking about another game in the thread.

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>>96922884
Tables are a useful way to present a lot of information in a compact form. There's no expectation to roll on every table, but they're useful to have. It's like flipping a coin to decide where to eat. Sometimes, while the coin is in the air, you realize which option you'd prefer. Same with tables.

They also keep things surprising for the GM. The whole "roll to find out" ethos.

>>96923331
Yes, everyone is fishfag, you figured it out, every poster in this thread is fishfag, so you should go so I can talk to myself in peace.

>>96933530
Not everyone, just the posts that are obviously by you, because you have a very distinctive posting style, fixations, and obsessions.

>>96933150
I also like to use tables to generate stuff zero prep at the table. Where I seem to disagree with many people is in what kind of tables I like to use. I enjoy entries that tend to have tangible game effects, and don't have much use and patience for those that focus on hooks, flavour, lore, and stuff like that.

E.g. I'm not a fan of the Tome of Adventure Design. It's not that I hate it, I just don't really need it, because the stuff it generates tends to be either random and nensical or generic and predictable. That's my experience at least.

>>96938212
>Irony: the post.

>>96938432
Good job finding your own posts

>>96938212
No, they are not "obvious," because you routinely misidentify people as fishfag, such as this time.

>>96923153
random tables is what draws me to all the NSR/OSR shit. i don't mean just "roll 1d6 for goblin" tables, i mean tables that are basically oracles, like a setting's built in i-ching or tarot. when a table is good it has the setting's entire philosophy baked right into it. you roll, and the result is interpretable and makes sense because the creator actually encoded the world's internal logic into the results, like it isn't just a random thing happens

Mothership's "Panic Effect" table is its soul, it tells you exactly what kind of sci-fi horror this is, shit systems just have lists of generic +1 sword crap.

This general has gotten somewhat slow. I'm just throwing out the suggestion that it be recombined back into the /osrg/, in part because the line between NuSR and OSR can often be blurry. As long as those the trolls are ignored, it should be fine, and help keep the board from splintering into too many increasingly niche and slower generals.
I understand if anyone here would prefer to remain separate though, especially wanting to be separate from the version of the /osrg/ that's rolling down a purity spiral. But, an /osrg/ that's returning back to the way the original /osrg/ was should have more than enough room for all the flavors of OSR, including NuSR.

>>96942575
Fuck off

>>96942575
eat a dick, fishfag

>>96942575
good point
there is no point in fracturing the already small community on this board
welcome home >>96938601

>>96942575
>>96942718
same/fishfag

>>96942575
Fuck off fishfag.

>>96942575
Weird, the post about shadowdark in both threads didn't come here. Woooonnnnder why? Could it have been a shitpost?

>>96943051
>NOOOO!!!11 why is no one using my trap troll threads I made and bump daily to fulfill my dream of becoming a hall monitor telling kids to stop running and having fun?
kekeke

>>96943123
>this mad being called out for shitting in the street

>>96942718
>I like the way Snrub thinks!
kek, he's so fucking transparent I don't know why he even bothers to samefag

>>96922884
It depends on the game, but I think in the popular ones it's not like a videogame because you have open ended items, more like prompts than guides. And you can just pick whatever you prefer after rolling.

You could say they are more like improv, especially compared to something with read aloud text

>>96923013
I though those were zines formated like an 8" floppy disc and I got waqy too hyped.

>>96942575
This whole thing has gotten so dumb.

I knew people on this board could be weird, but the BrOSR are lunatics when they don't get their way.

>>96923085
I've been in zero prep impromptu "games" and they were more like pushing someone along a dream they were having than a proper game.

>>96923153
check the ones you were thinking again and see if they were talking about solo games.
Also, there was a boom when the X without numbers line started . 6 years ago. Youtubers move in trends because that's how yt works. Saying that it's an OSR thing is like seeing the 67 meme in a rap song and assuming rappers are into the number 67.

>I'm gonan roll randomly
>I got this weird thing
>I'm gonna act the same way I do with every single character
why do people do this?
I don't think it's like morally wrong the just play yourself, it's fine, but if you agreed to play Troika or Bastionland and roll for a weirdo at least try to imagine how a witch made of paper or a cat burglar that refuses to touch grounds would act. Like, give it a shot for fucks sake. Attempt to role play in the role playing game, my dude, you can go back to not doing anything afterwards.

>>96947860
Same. I've played in and run various story games and more traditional style games with low prep. Its okay as a creative exercise but tends to end up being
>entertain everyone with your ideas and know when to wrap it up before it gets lame
sort of performance than a sustainable gameplay mode. Very different sort of roleplaying.
I've experimented with some of the more procedural gameplay stuff like Soloplay Scarlet Heroes but both players run the main character and their flunkie, making the story as we go. Its okay but a bit chunky. Like mixed co-op.
Been looking at Miru to try it in a similar way.

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>>96943893
>antisnrub

>>96948059
I thino some people have an ove the top negative reaction to improv games and party games, as if they were a challenge to their identity or made them somehow lesser if they played Everybody is John.
But it is a very different experience and if I'm in the mood for dungeon crawling Honey Heist isn't gonna give me my fix.

>>96948088
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRIt2-tWkgE

What's your experience with multiple success systems?
I've been listening to a Conan 2d20 AP and I like it, but it's way too confusing to run it. I tried some MYZ games, but I don't like them too much, I'd rather have something simpler and more universal. But I've never seen any lite game that gives you multiple levels of success with 2 rolls.

>>96950836
>I've been listening to a Conan 2d20 AP and I like it, but it's way too confusing to run it.
What's the AP, this is relevant to my interests.

>>96950981
Adventures in Lollygagging. I like how they do the theater kid thing but don't try too hard, it still sounds like a real table, they reference the rules (I think you even get a couple of "give me a minute, I'm checking the rule book, I'll tell you in a sec") and talk to each other like real people. They're pretty ugly so I would recommend the podcast over the youtube videos.

>>96951520
>They're pretty ugly so I would recommend the podcast over the youtube videos.
Harsh, man. They're not supermodels or anything but they're solidly in the middle of the curve for Americans. Post your face so we can compare.

>>96952402
I don't stare at random middle of the curve people for enjoyment, and probably being weirdos made them develop other skills and stuff. It's just that they are distractingly weird.

>>96951520
Ah, thank you. Looks like they've played a couple of games I'm interested in.

>>96950836
>What's your experience with multiple success systems?
Probably zero, how's it work in comparison to graded success systems?

>>96947860
>solo games
Oh... I see... This is gross. Not even a proper choose your own adventure book. Just bullshitting yourself. Masturbatory tabletop.

>>96957699
Lol ok faggot

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Isn't 24% towns high for a hexcrawl?

>>96964267
What do you think?

>>96964645
Nothing. If I trusted my opinion I wouldn't be asking. Bonehead.

>>96964677
You should give thinking a shot, then: It's not as bad as morons make it out to be.

But seriously, if this is something you came up with, certainly there has to be a reason you've picked that figure rather than another one. What's you goal? What do you want to do with it?

>>96964267
Really varies by the game being run with nusr stuff and how lethal it is vs how resupply happens. Off hand it seems high density though. You can likely extrapolate a similar ratio of whatever the dungeon empty rooms to other you're using.

>>96964267
A lot of medieval villages and hamlets were about 1 day or less between each other, if that helps

>>96964848
It's a published product. I didn't invent it. The default setting for terror target gemini is some final fantasy dragonball sandland fusion thing. In those settings, characters tend to need to camp often despite modern vehicles being available, so it feels high to find towns roughtly 1/4 hexes.


>>96965207
I guess this is the math the author used? You travel roughly 3 or 4 hexes per day, so. 24% is supposed to math out to a town every day or two on a streak of bad rolls. Still feels high for the setting.

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>>96965388
>I guess this is the math the author used? You travel roughly 3 or 4 hexes per day, so. 24% is supposed to math out to a town every day or two on a streak of bad rolls. Still feels high for the setting.
If that's the maths he used, it's wrong. If there's a village every 4 hexes, the distance between them is going to be about 2 hexes on average*, because you can travel in a bunch of difference directions.

Picrel is the MAXIMUM density you can achieve with a distance of four hexes between villages. Villages (red hexes) are equally spaced 4 hexes apart from one another, each one with its own area of arable land around it (green line). That's a density of about 1 village per 16 hexes*. IRL the distribution of villages would be less uniform, and thus there would be even FEWER villages than 1 in 16 hexes. So 6% or less, not 25%.

* It's not a coincidence that √4 = 2 and √16 = 4, by the way. If the average distance between villages is D, the maximum average density of villages you can have is 1 in D^2 hexes. The proof is left as an exercise to the reader.

>>96964267
...24%?
2/8 is 24%?

>>96970544
25%. Because 2/8 is 1/4, which is 0.25.

>>96965554
Thanks. I will probably rebuild the game's table with this information for the game i'm running. Probably put a confirmation roll into the settlement results that reduces their frequency.

>>96970922
yeah, fucking obviously. so why type 24?

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>>96971679
1% margin of error

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>>96972327
I'm gonna post some pages from this game. I dunno if there are any PDFs floating around. I don't think it threads new ground or anything, but I like the vibes.

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>>96976751

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>>96976756

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>>96976804

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>>96976806
If you stack enough advantage, you auto succeed the roll. You also auto fail rolls if you stack enough disadvantage.

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>>96976811

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>>96976816
The game uses MP, but it lets you cast on those "and then you explode" chaos tables NuSR games seem to like so much if you keep casting spells after you run out.

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>>96976822

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>>96976822
"and then you explode.". I dunno who popularized these.

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>>96976825

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>>96976831

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>>96976850

>>96976864
Thanks for sharing. I don't dislike artpunk and it IS neat art/world, but, like, it's also a pain in the ass to read. >:C

Hosted DCC's Portal Under the Stars for some coworkers, most of whom didn't know a d8 from a d20. I feel like I completely forgot all of my prep, but they all had a blast and were asking when we'd do it again. Yippee.

>>96977861
Glad it went well and you enjoyed yourself.
Your coworkers might not know much, but they clearly got the spirit.

I'm looking for a game I saw some years ago. Basically someone's heartbreak homebrew but a system that's evolved over the years for fantasy osr play.

I thought it was whitebox, but it wasn't.

Help me nsrg, you're my only hope

>>96978981
Oh I found it. Its Whitehack.

What are people's thoughts on it?

>>96979031
2cronch4me

I've been reading the classes, and its all attach to an animal, deft to a staff, vocation to group and what the fuckery. It's way overcomplicating what seems like simple rules with flowery TCG style language.

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Hello NSRG, The way this is phrased doesn't specify whether a downed PC remains out of comission after being stabilized, or if they spring up and get back to fighting, leading to a situation where going down is only a temporary issue for the players rather than a serious problem. Am I missing something? Should I just assume that my gut feeling is correct regardless of the actual meaning?

>>96980679
never played it, just took a look at the manual out of curiosity

seems they're back on their feet. the removal of the incapacitated status isn't mentioned anywhere, and the rules summary says 0 HP = incapacitated, so the status probably disappears when the character goes above 0 HP. still, the healer has to pass an ability check (with advantage for a healing kit) or a spellcasting check. it looks like only potions provide instant healing without a roll

what confuses me is the Zealot class feature "1/safe rest, heal an ally for 1d6/level HP as an active action". active actions are used in combat, so why is this ability limited to "1/safe rest"? it makes it sound like you're supposed to use it during the rest, not as an action in a fight, and also do you roll or not.

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>>96981687
>So why is this ability limited to 1/safe rest"?
This is used elsewhere, it means it can be used once per safe rest. See for example "Wildskin: 1/rest, active. Become a 1HP bird, rat, frog or tiny creature."
The problem is that there's a cantrip in the game that makes the stabilization automatic - Stable Touch - which turned my last combat into a funky kind of whack-a-mole.
The system's built off of 5e, and I only just now found out that in 5e 'stabilized' does not mean conscious. At this point I'm thinking about emailing the publisher to ask. There's more inconsistencies in the system, so I don't trust it too much and feel justified in houseruling it. Picrel for example implies that a PC who fails a resilience check in the wilderness has to be carried back to town to recover.

Anyone here play Choir of Flesh, Alex/Blackoath's new game?

>>96981796
In 5e stabilized is "at 0, but not dying". at 1 hp you get back up.

>>96982328
Maybe not. Well I’ll expand on why I’m asking.

I picked it up the other day, and the world and the flavour is cool as fuck.

But the D20/dynamic target number system has me scratching my head. I’m kind of new to TTRPGs, but I think there’s something seriously wrong here.

He says it’s not supposed to work like D&D, and the DTN is to make it so difficulty scales despite you gaining power. Right, ok, that makes sense.

But then you look at how it works. A character makes attack checks with STR for melee in most cases. So if I have 0 str, my average attack check has a target number of 11. That’s a 50% chance to hit. Right on. The game is supposed to be brutal and difficult and dangerous, I dig that, it’s fun.

But then a character with +3 STR has an average attack roll check target number of… 14. So again, a 50% chance to hit.
And a character with -3 strength has a target number of 8. So again. A 50% chance to hit. The roll is always an 11.

So basically, main stats do literally nothing. However, there are conditional masteries in the game that front scale your Target Number, but DO get added to your roll. So a mastery of +2 affecting your attack (only exists for two handed weapons for whatever reason) means your target number is still 11 and 0, but you get 2 added to your roll that doesn’t increase your target number like STR does.

There’s an attrition mechanic, where each minor injury a target takes, you get +1 mastery in attacks against them, so an initial hit might be a 50% chance to hit, but if it’s a major injury some cool effects can happen, and if it’s a minor injury then attrition quickly makes combat more dangerous for you and enemies. That’s really cool and I like that.

HOWEVER. Defence Rating is completely fucked in this ruleset. If I have no defence rating, then the average check (not easy or hard, which shifts TNs down or up) is 11 to defend. So a 50% chance. Right on.
…Continued …

>>96985038
But if I weary have ass armour and take a stealth penalty, and the armour has a high STR requirement, and the armour gives me DR+3, guess what my chance to take an injuring hit is? You guessed it: still 50%. TN of 11+3=14
So if I roll an 11, and my DR modifier adds to it, it’s the same effect as rolling an 11 with no DR. If I have some sort of Gift of the Flesh for +DR, or make an incredibly risky use of a prayer that could literally kill me as a consequence, to gain temporary +3 DR, it actually does literally nothing for me.

So the question is then: Why have armour in the game at all? There are shields, which grant you DR MASTERY, so it doesn’t increase your target number. But no armor grants mastery, only total DR. Which has a net zero affect on your character under any defensive circumstance.

I get that the world is supposed to feel hopeless and dangerous and you’re doomed no matter what. But armor having literally no effect, while requiring a proficiency to use and having downsides makes no sense at all.

Someone introduced a curved DTN table that makes it so main stats have a SLIGHT effect while still scaling difficulty as you power up. And Alex endorsed it and included it in the book. This results in you either having a +1 or +2 to your roll that isn’t a net 0. Or a -1 or -2 if a stat is negative. But it’s weird. 1 STR is +1, 2 STR is +2, 3 STR becomes +1 again, and so on and so forth. So why would I be encouraged to go from having 2 STR to having 3 STR? There’s no reason.
But it doesn’t address DR and armor, as you aren’t incentivized to equip armour past the most basic armor that grants you a cumulative +2 DR. And that might even get thrown off by you having DEX, since dex feeds into your total DR.

On one hand, I like how the world is dangerous and combat is a serious risk and you can’t become meaningfully powerful or hope to save yourself from the apocalypse. But on the other, I feel like armor should at least do SOMETHING.

>>96985093
>>96985038
Sounds like the designer either: Didn't know math or decided to go pants on head full balance and make everyone the same regardless of stats.

>>96985184
I’m pretty sure he knows math. Other Blackoath Games show it, and he usually uses a D100 system. He was trying to make a D20 system he liked for Choir of Flesh, and evidently, he was not successful and has said he’ll never do a D20 system again because people hate his DTN. I don’t hate it. I actually quite like it. It’s just that armor hasn’t bee properly represented in it, or if the point is you can’t protect yourself, then why have armor as equipment at all.

Each enemy has specific TN difficulties ranging from very easy to impossible for attack and defence, and specific TNs for specific stuff like STR or DEX to attempt push or grapple or trip etc.
I like it and think it works well, it makes it so an enemy who is very good at attacking is always dangerous to be attacked by.

But armor… it just doesn’t fit. I’m torn between accepting that DR doesn’t matter, or house-ruling it and making it so armor grants DR Mastery instead of base DR, and risking throwing off the delicate balance he’s built for the rest of the game around attacks and masteries and burdens and injuries and traumas.

>>96985220
Am I misunderstanding something?

>joe the barbarian has 14 strength and punches john the bandit
>needs to roll a 10 to hit
>ishmael the wizard has 10 strength and also punches john the bandit
>Needs to roll a 10 to hit
This is so bad at a base level that armor not working is the least of the problems in what was posted.

>>96985366
Yeah. That’s how it works. However, there aren’t really wizards in Choir of Flesh. There’s prayer and magic, but it’s ridiculously risky because you’re basically calling on the powers driving the apocalypse to help you and not fucking kill you.

So basically everyone is baseline either a melee combatant and/or ranged combatant, although if you’re only ranged you’re going to get fucked up when someone gets in melee range and stays engaged on you.

But yes, that’s basically it. It’s fucked up.

>>96985038
>>96985093
don't have the pdf, watched some page throughs on youtube. from what i've gathered, you roll against the creature's Defence Rating (DR). the base target is 11+ for an average stat of the creature, 9+ for easy, and 13+ for hard. the creature's armor adds to this target number: +1 for a gambeson, +2 for chainmail, or +3 for scale.

so, for example, fighting an average opponent (base 11) in chainmail (+2) with your +3 STR bonus modifier would mean the target number is 11 + 2 - 3. that's not a 50% chance.

when an npc attacks, you have to roll against their Attack value. the formula seems to be your DEX modifier + your armor modifier + d20 > npc's Attack value.

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>>96985500
Enemies don’t have armor, they just have a DR difficulty (average, hard, etc)
So if their DR difficulty is average, its base 11 TN. You are supposed to adjust that number wi try your attacking stat, so if you’re attacking with a mace, you’re supposed to adjust it with STR. If your STR is +1, the target number becomes 12, meaning you’re still aiming to roll an 11 because your STR also gets added to your roll.

Your roll only gets added to without your TN getting adjusted if you have + to a roll from a Mastery.

It’s fucking stupid. When you roll against an attack, you first determine the TN by adding your total DR to the TN, so an enemy with Hard attack is base 13. Say you have +1 DEX, and +2DR from armor for a total of +3DR, you add that to the target number. Your new target number to defend against the hard attack is 16. You also add your DEX and DR to your roll, meaning you need to roll at least 13 to reach the target number of 16.

It’s pants on head retarded.

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>>96985579
Here’s an example enemy.
The previous image details that TNs can be shifted up or down in difficulty, but the effects that grant that are rare, and there’s nothing that allows you to shift an enemy’s attack rating to make your defence more likely. And even then, the DR stat itself would still be meaningless and arbitrary.

He’s talked about it in discord but says he’s done discussing it and won’t comment on it anymore. His final say was that people are just upset because it doesn’t work like D&D, when it works a different way instead. But it straight up just doesn’t work.

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>>96985579
when attacking: d20 + STR modifier >= creature's DR
when defending: d20 + DEX modifier + armor >= Attack

like you're modifying your roll, not the target number, so like when defending it's, d20 + 1 DEX + 2 armor >= 13, and it's "roll above"

i think there's error in that Ismael example, or like confusing terminology where +2 "total modifier" makes the test harder, so his DEX modifier has to be -2. like attribute modifiers and target modifiers get confused.

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>>96985823
It’s not an error, it’s consistent like that. That’s the whole point of the dynamic table, as described here and in the next image

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>>96985859
Mastery numbers explicitly get added to the roll AFTER deciding the TN, because the non-mastery modifiers do affect the TN

>>96985871
eh have to go out, brb in couple of hours :(

typed funnel mothership into youtube and found this gem https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDPjmhDCwDc
>1 subscriber
now its 2

Gonna give Mausritter a spin. What should I start with other than the core rulebook? Planning on just starting with the hexcrawl in it and populating it with some adventures people have made to go in the hexes.
But I also saw the Hansen Expansion which seems like an awesome supplement to start off with. Any others that are good for starting off with?

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>>96985871
ok, i gave it a read, and i think the guy is on crack

i would stick to the static/suggested TN and disregard DTN. the suggested TN seems to be just DTN centered on a +3 modifier. maybe use the one for +0 instead, if rolls are too hard on average, but keep it fixed no matter what attributes someone has through the entirety of a scenario.

like, it could be actually interesting for balancing a game for different character levels or for how laid-back or hard you want to make your session, but for each and every roll separately? jesus christ. good thing it says DTN is optional.

>>96989008
>that image
That's literally the point where you are supposed to cut off a mechanic from your game. When you go "it interacts with like one other game mechanic in the whole book".

>>96989008
But they DONT actually interact with shifting the TN, because the same applies. You shift the TN, and the +0 goes from being 11 to being 9, and you still apply your + modifiers to the TN AND the roll, nullifying the modifiers.

Does he have a brain tumor or something. I hope not because he’s generally a cool dude.

>>96989059
his reasoning here (something about solo players): https://www.patreon.com/posts/creating-new-138230125

i still don't get it. other than that, the system seems solid.

Trying to decide on an RPG that I can play with my wife to introduce her to RPGs. I want to play with her, not just GM, but I figure I’ll have the pseudo-GM too. So I’m thinking a game that has good solo-friendly oracles or supplements/modules built for it or even into it so I don’t have to spend too much time and effort whipping through GME every other step of play.

I don’t know what to pick.

>>96985093
>>96985038
Surely you read something wrong and it's not so garbage as to actually have direct scaling and going from 50% to 60% odds is considered too strong, right?

>>96989008
Oh he's actually just mentally ill
Jesus

>>96989347
maybe a paragraph game, like Alone Against the Dark? could be fun playing it co-op, making all the decisions together, while you handle the character sheet, dice rolls, and combat.

for a dungeon crawl, out of things i've seen Cairn has the nicest random generators, and it's just a crawl, so the decisions won't be taxing. the genre is so generic that all the tropes are basically second nature for anyone by now, you could do that drunk and blindfolded.

>>96989347
You could do like a co-op playthrough of Barbarian Prince, I legit think that's one of your best options.

>>96989347
>>96989533
In that case, Dragons Down is an excellent option too.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/351648/dragons-down

As is Appendix A+B+C + Wilderness Hexplore, of course.

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>>96989391
>>96989411

>>96991390
it's a shame he fucked this up so bad, because the rest of the game is legitimately cool as fuck. good thing it's easily hackable.

>>96991390
>the goal of that table is to scale all challenges with your power
But that's a terrible goal? I mean, entirely aside from the fact that he's so mathematically illiterate that the way he made his scaling work is identical to just removing stat modifiers, *wanting* to scale the difficulty of challenges to the PCs in the first place is an idiot's ambition.

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I moved my group from a crunchier retroclone over to Black Sword Hack, but I still really wanna do domain play/mass combat stuff at some point in our campaign. Is the prospect not worth considering at all for a system that rules light? If no, should I jury-rig some kind of homebrew together, look for third party rules for BSH specifically, or crib rules from another system in the same family?

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>>96985579
>>96985664
>It’s fucking stupid. When you roll against an attack, you first determine the TN by adding your total DR to the TN, so an enemy with Hard attack is base 13. Say you have +1 DEX, and +2DR from armor for a total of +3DR, you add that to the target number. Your new target number to defend against the hard attack is 16. You also add your DEX and DR to your roll, meaning you need to roll at least 13 to reach the target number of 16.
That is terrible game design. You could just use a flat OD&D style one-size-fits-all matrix and ignore stats entirely.
And what does it even mean, in the fiction of this game's world? Enemies sense your power and get tougher?
>He’s talked about it in discord but says he’s done discussing it and won’t comment on it anymore. His final say was that people are just upset because it doesn’t work like D&D, when it works a different way instead. But it straight up just doesn’t work.
Succinct. You can't marketingspeak your way out of bad math.

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>>96992168
Just crib from OD&D. The whole system fits on a few pages, requires minimal math, and meets player needs. Domain level play is a concept that players love to imagine they'll enjoy, but never really do, so invest as little time and effort into it as possible.

>>96993069
seconding this
it sounds fun when they imagine a videogame, it's not fun when they have to process data.

>>96988998
It works best with one shots, maybe connected one shots. If you like an adventure just do that, no need to tie things together if you don't know if you'll like it.
It's just Into the Odd with item degradation and item slot spaces, everything else is flavor and you should focus a lot on that flavor because otherwise it'll feel like dumb Into the Odd.

>>96993020
in his defense, he left static target numbers in the manual (that people asked for) and added like an additional dynamic target number table with non-linear progression someone posted on discord that actually scales difficulty as you level up, preventing the game from being too easy for higher-level characters.

so you can play it in three ways1) as standard DnD with static target numbers 2) as an attribute free, skill based system, with the dynamic table nullifying attributes 3) with a kinda self balancing, progressive dynamic table

but it's never stated directly what the intent was, that you can play it in 3 different ways (maybe?). i'm not even sure if he perceives it that way. there's a massive failure in communication there. like, if the goal was to make a skill based game meant for one shots, you should get rid of attributes altogether, keeping the mechanics and intent clean.

>>96987844
You typed funnel mothership and didn't find about Hull Breach? Or the 0e one that's like 5-6 years old?
If you're gonna shill just shill.

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>>96993224
That sounds like someone who doesn't understand how to design a game, either in a "has a clear vision that the mechanics support" sense or a "can do math" sense.

>>96993069
Aren't OD&D's domain rules barely even there outside of a couple allusions to the concept in Men & Magic?

>>96997005
There's also a page on the costs of various castle parts in Underworld & Wilderness Adventures.

New thread when?