Posts made by Ominous

Anyone know much about Symbaroum, the swedish RPG? It's supposed to be a grim-dark, gritty RPG.

Mouse Guard is a great setting. I kind of want to steal it and use humans instead for it in order to file off the serial number of the IP.

Still the system itself is kind of specialized and board gaming, like many Burning Wheel derivatives, in that it ties the hands of the GMs in what they can do. At least that's how I remember it. It has been like six years or so since I last gave it a spin.

If I recall, Riddle of Steel doesn't handle 1 vs 2+ very well. As long as it is 1 vs 1, though, it's an interesting system.

I have the 2nd edition of WFRP. How similar are they?

@fatefan I supported their collector's edition Kickstarter and have been impressed ever since. I am just a bit miffed that Chaosium took back the RQ rights, so they had to change their name and weren't allowed to release Glorantha campaign setting book, even though they produced an initial set of like 500 books. They sold the 500 books Gencon and that was it.

Runequest 6 would work, but it's a little crunchy. It's known as Mithras now. It has five magic systems with their own unique flavors and mechanics, and the combat is lethal without reaching un-fun levels. I think the base rules are available for free too.

@acceleration said in What do you WANT to play most?:

Voted 'other'. Would love to see a no-holds-barred post-apocalyptic RPI with active and engaged staff. (Armageddon is not post-apoc, no matter how it bills itself.)

Is Horizon Zero Dawn a post-apocalyptic setting or a post-post-apocalyptic setting, since it's not a hellscape? Because I want me some robot dinosaur hunting, sun-worshipping RP!

I have been wanting to play/run a tribal MU* for a while now. Then HZD came out and I went "Well, that's what I was kind of shooting for, only its post-apocalyptic sci-fi instead of post-apocalyptic magical fantasy."

I try to look towards board games for ideas of how to handle mechanics in MU*s. Pen & paper RPGs is where our hobby was mainly birthed and draws the RP culture from, why not utilize the other side of the tabletop game hobby to inform our mechanics rather than trying to borrow from Crusader Kings, Civilization, etc. Our format seems much more suited for the simpler mechanics that board games have than the spreadsheets of computer strategy games.

I mentioned Republic of Rome in another thread as one game that has an interesting political premise. There is Twilight Struggle and it's mechanics for spreading and combating the spread of influence. Medici is a pretty simple and fun economic trading game. Pit is too. Pandemics, Dead of Winter, Forbidden Island, Shadows Over Camelot, etc. all demonstrate how to handle group management of limited actions and how to present a crisis needing organization with simple mechanics. A few of them also show how to keep a traitor element from detailing the game and instead snaking it more fun.

Now obviously just importing a game with no changes wouldn't work, but using these games as inspirations and references rather than trying to make Europa Universalis but with more roleplaying might be the better route to take.

You have an easy IC excuse for a slight change in personality. The weight of leadership has changed him.

And staff will work around that too from what I see. For instance Redrain recently had two people want to chargen brothers to Freja, Fergus, and Anze. Staff told them that that particularly immediate family is full and staff made them cousins from another branch.

War is the continuation of politics by other means.

Wow this thread has meandered. We have gone from 'was this an out of the blue banning?' to 'thralls seem thematically out of place' to 'Custodious is evil, huh?'

Kill the conversation! Kill it with fire!

Also, @Shayd , they typically warn you before showing you the door. At least they used to.

@Cupcake
I am one of the individuals who has seen the log. Now, I have no idea about the circumstances discussed in the log, so I can't say whether she lied about what was going or not and I don't know if the log was doctored or not or even if that log was the impetus for the ban. That aside, what I did read seemed reasonable and looked to be what I would tell a new player too. It was a lot of 'this is what has happened thus far, here is the situation and facts around it, and you might want to be aware of these potential pitfalls and dangers that are looming.'

I want a MU* based on the Republic of Rome board game. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1513/republic-rome

Xena and Hercules treated history with less respect than MU* players. They are the Star Trek: Voyager of historical settings.

I have been pondering a sci-fi game idea for a while that mixes Offworld Trading Company, Tales from the Borderlands, and a few others. Instead of being the space commies in your idea, the players are the space capitalists, arriving in a new system and trying to exploit it and each other.

@Lisse24 My suggested solutions were the 'rising tide' method (as in all boats rise with the tide) for making sure that new players have some basic @clues. After a @clue is known by X of people, it is automatically shared with everyone as general knowledge.

The second suggestion was that every time you got a clue that you would get a list of people randomly selected from the people who know related clues as well as a few red herring people who may or may not know anything related, giving a starting point for who to chat with about what you know.

@Sparks said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Ominous said in Coming Soon: Arx, After the Reckoning:

@Thenomain
@clues are mechanical means of tracking who knows what.

But they're not! I mean, the whole problem was that many of us (me included, as noted) treated them as if they were just a means of tracking who knew what. Which is why they spread so far so fast, and left poor Apos spending a non-trivial amount of time every week writing like 30 new ones.

They're supposed to be a mechanical means of tracking who has the proof of what.

It's possible to know something ICly without a @clue, after all; I could tell you something, and now you know that thing even if I don't share the @clue. It's when I give you the @clue—the proof of that thing—that you have the evidence to know it's right, or to potentially convince others.

At least, that's my understanding based on discussions of the system.

I suspect they originally were just for tracking who knows what. They didn't expect people to spread the info as quickly as they did. Again, just the feel I get. I think the expectation was that people would be a little more careful with who they shared info with, as demonstrated by the fact that Fable has basically become the Black Death with how many people are infected.

Then they realized that 'Doh!' people have diarrhea of the mouth and shit is being spread quickly. Again, just the impression I have. It's beta, though, and ironing out this stuff is what it is for.

@Apos I would argue that is a step beyond traitor mechanic and outright PvP. If players have mutually exclusive goals they are working towards that is a player-player conflict. It may not be quite 'I am going to drink your blood out of a cup made from your own skull' level of PvP, but it's PvP nonetheless.

@Sparks I can't help it but I am a PvPer at heart. Even in a co-op game I want a traitor mechanic somewhere. I need the paranoia and I think a game like this needs it too. If we are all kumbaya-ing, what's the point of all the factions and secret societies? Let's put aside all of that and go full military state. That's not fun though. What's fun is 'Oh my god, Cthulhu wants to eat us, the Oathlanders want to call another crusade on us, the Northerners are actually demon worshippers pretending to be tame 'shamanists', the Thrax want to enslave us, and hey this Lycene wine tastes funny.'

I never once thought about spreading around what I know. I keep that shit on lockdown. I trickle out the bits to folks that I feel they need to know to get the work done. They're not the High Lord, so they don't need to know everything. Just because everyone is supposed to be working together doesn't mean everyone needs to know everything. When you play a grunt, that means jumping when we need you to jump, not ask why you need to jump. Don't like that, don't play a grunt. We can use some spymasters too.

@Deviante
Sadly only 120. Fortunately no Fable revelations yet.

@Thenomain
@clues are mechanical means of tracking who knows what.

I was surprised at the spread of info too. I was treating each clue as a precious secret and only sharing with like one or two people at most and only if I felt they needed to know. Then I realized people were basically holding classes where info was committed at participants. I think a little more traitor element would help here, like in cooperative board games with potential traitor mechanics. Maybe have some agents of Fable amongst the PCs. Give them a clue and suddenly you forget all about it or maybe you start getting hunted down.