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Steve

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Posts posted by Steve

  1. In your average TTRPG group, even with just a handful of players, if each of them takes DNPCs, Hunteds, Contacts and Followers, that can quickly become a cast size that could overwhelm a GM.

     

    So, how many NPCs is too many? Should a limit exist on the number of NPCs a group can bring to the table as their supporting cast?

     

    How about an individual player? What if one player’s supporting cast is significantly larger than those of other players? Should a limit be imposed to keep their NPCs from taking over the campaign?

  2. 29 minutes ago, assault said:

    I think this game would be improved by it being possible to overthrow the Dark Lord. Not easy, but possible. And within a reasonably short period of play time. 9-12 sessions, to pull a number out of my hat.

     

    The less astute players might not realize this, and just keep committing atrocities, but the smarter ones will, and that's when things get interesting.

    Obviously, Kal-Turak wouldn't be a suitable Dark Lord for this kind of game, but I find him supremely uninteresting anyway. I suppose he could be used if you include a suitable Deus Ex Machina to take him out for a millennium or so. "He comes back!" is fine if it is long after the PCs and their meaningful descendants are dead.

    Politics could also make this even more interesting. Evil organizations could keep the PCs quite busy without them ever leaving the Fortress of Doom.


    Does the Dark Lord have children? Are any of the PCs his children? Are there other lieutenants or henchmen? Do they plot and scheme against each other? Will they try to involve the PCs? Do they want to get rid of the PCs and usurp their place at the Dark Lord’s right hand?


    The Dark Lord’s beautiful but treacherous daughter may try to use her femme fatale wiles to ensnare a PC in between her time spent pining for the unattainable Hero. Does the PC get jealous and sally forth to stomp on their Hero rival? Perhaps the Dark Lord has more than one daughter from his various mistresses, and they are struggling with each other in the pecking order. Perhaps the Dark Lord’s eldest son is a powerful brute but dim of wit, but the younger son is clever but physically weak.

     

    Are there rival factions in the Legions of Doom trying to pawn off their failures on the PCs or get them to do the hard work? Do the PCs have someone lower in social status trying to suck up to them?

     

    You could get quite the soap opera going with only a little bit of effort. The PCs may end up having so much going on in the Fortress of Doom that they don’t seem to have much time to get out and enjoy some looting and pillaging.

     

    And then there’s the paperwork. It’s all fun and villainous to march around and tyrannize the peasants, but you haven’t seen real evil until you’ve had to deal with the Dark Lord’s bureaucrats. They have ways to make you suffer without ever lifting a sword or wand.

  3. An alternative to the nation-conquering version of Deathstroke might be to have them be the “secret masters” of a large town or small city they took over in the intervening years since their last appearance. It would give them a base of operations and set them apart a bit from other villain teams with more grandiose plans.

     

    They could have secret IDs as upstanding citizens and maybe even be raising their kids with powers as the future of their operation.

  4. 2 hours ago, Grailknight said:

    I don't have anything to add to the damage and CV advice above. It's pretty thoroughly covered.

     

    But you do need to also decide how super you want your supers to be.

     

    Are the police and petty criminals a threat? Are conventional military forces?

     

    If you want them to be, then you may need to stay lower than the 12 DC guideline given here. You can run a perfectly fine Supers campaign with DC's in the 8-10 range and lower CV and Def. That 400 starting points total will go further towards fleshing out characters with skills and side powers also.

    I would also add to this that subtracting a point of SPD from all characters could also help stretch points. So 3 SPD Bricks and 4 SPD Energy Projectors. Agents could be built cheaper too.

  5. In addition to Hugh’s analysis, there are also the defensive powers Damage Negation and Damage Reduction to consider.

     

    Damage Negation should probably be limited to a third or a quarter of the DCs being thrown about. If a character has Damage Reduction, the odds of being stunned drop a lot and should be limited as well.


    A character with both Damage Negation and Damage Reduction should have a pretty low PD/ED number or they would become functionally invulnerable.

  6. There’s also growth in power to consider. Are characters fixed in their ability maximums or do those increase with time?

     

    It’s easier to plan the campaign if you have fixed maximums as that forces characters to spend points on different things unrelated to combat, like buying skills, bases, vehicles, followers, etc.

  7. I'm wondering what the purpose is for Inventor and the unnamed KS skill on the INT Skills list. Is that for Secret ID usage?

     

    Maybe the above human ability amounts for CON, PD, ED, REC, END and STUN could also go under the Asguardian Strength list?

  8. 7 minutes ago, Cygnia said:

    Well, that’s gotta sting quite a bit. After blowing their own faces off with their stupid attempt to bully the RPG industry into compliance, followed quickly by tens of thousands of D&D account cancellations happening, the fans then go and buy record amounts of other RPGs instead.

     

    I wonder if someone’s getting fired over this? D&D is (was?) one of Hasbro’s biggest cash flow IPs.

  9. 9 hours ago, Old Man said:

    Been spending some time in D&D forums due to the OGL scandal, and that scandal has inspired a number of discussions about what people don't like about D&D.  The most (un)popular aspects seem to be:

     

    - The power disparity between martials and casters

    - The power disparity between subclasses--e.g. sorcerers and most rangers are underpowered while paladins and hexblade warlocks are OP, and so on

    - Saving throws.  (Why this mechanic has persisted for almost fifty years is beyond me.)

    - A very poorly defined skill system.

    - Mundane combat is boring.

    - "Vancian" magic.  It turns out almost no one likes the magic system(s) in D&D.  It's confusing for new players (spell level vs. character level), the memorization mechanic is likewise hard to understand, and it forces players to ignore 3/4 of the available spells which are too specialized or too underpowered.  Also, there is a large subset of players who want to play themed spellcasters, like ice mages, and of course this is impossible in D&D unless the DM lets them change the special effects on spells.

    And yet I suspect the vast majority of them will continue using D&D rather than try another system (or maybe shift over to Pathfinder). Who knows? Maybe GURPS will experience a Renaissance or some new players will come here.

     

    I'm now torn on whether I want to see the upcoming movie or wait for it to hit streaming. While I’d like to see more D&D movies, I don’t want to reward Hasbro and WOTC for their bad behavior.

  10. 10 hours ago, Chris Goodwin said:

    A lot of people played it as Vampions.  

     

    Dean Shomshak wrote the Cabal of Flamboyant Justice, a Mage the Ascension chantry whose purpose was to perform magic openly by pretending to be superheroes.  It was awesome! 

    That does sound awesome! I found the posting where it is linked, but the download link doesn’t work.

     

    I could imagine insane Marauders warping reality to make a superhero paradigm around themselves wherever they go.

  11. 1 hour ago, Hugh Neilson said:

     

     

    To me, the lesson of 4e was "slapping a D&D logo on it will not automatically cause gamers to change". If 4e had captured the gamers, and they all moved away from 3e, third party publishers would either have to stop publishing (not enough market for 3e material if 3e is obsolete) or move into 4e.

     

    There's a chicken and egg element here.  AD&D 1e and 2e did quite all right with no OGL.  Many games did. But WOTC realized they needed adventures, and they did not want to publish them.  Meanwhile third party publishers just filed off the D&D serial numbers and published adventures. So OGL legitimized those 3rd party adventures - and hoped that this would be the focus of 3pp.

     

    Then they moved to 4e and decided they wanted to publish more adventures (turns out older gamers have more money and less time, so buying rather than designing adventures is more popular - the market changed), so we'll shut down Dungeon Magazine (now licensed to Paizo anyway) and remove the OGL.  SURPRISE - Paizo did not lay down and die, but leveraged that OGL to publish Pathfinder and keep a version of 3e alive and well.  There were gamers who kept playing 2e, 1e and BECMI, but they didn't have a lot of published support.  Switch, or do it yourself.

     

    Now there were gamers who liked 3e more than 4e and did not have to switch to keep access to other published resources.  If 4e had been recognized as a better game, a lot of gamers would have moved there, and Paizo would not have had the same market available.  But many gamers did not like the 4e model, so they stuck with "3e under a new publisher". Lack of an OGL for 4e did not hurt WOTC nearly as much as the existence of an OGL for 3e enabling their competitors.

     

    5e brought back an OGL, but, although 5e did much better than 4e, it did not seem to hurt Paizo, who kept right on publishing 3e even when they had the option of moving to 5e.  It doesn't seem like any major 3pp would threaten to continue 5e when D&D moves into 6e.  And Paizo made a brilliant move saying "hey, come publish for our game instead of starting a 5e clone to compete against it".

     

    What did Paizo have to lose?  If shutting down the OGL means other publishers can't keep producing 3e-based product, it means they can't either.  Their mechanics aren't really their IP anyway.

     

    But now, of course, WOTC has a marketing problem.  Paizo has exacerbated that through their own shrewd marketing.
     

     

    Like the webcomic Penny Arcade pointed out, D&D is a culture, not a brand. WOTC was already making money hand over fist thanks to MTG and D&D, but that wasn’t good enough. Oh no. The suits at the top (who aren’t gamers by the accounts I’ve read) wanted to have more money flowing into their coffers and boost their share price and annual bonuses.

     

    Paizo: Come play with us! We support the gaming culture and want to keep going with what’s been working. Buy books from us and the other creators you like and keep on playing.

     

    WOTC: We aren’t making enough money off this game system and want to charge everyone at every game table a monthly fee to play with our new VTT and access our digital libraries. If you don’t have a DM, we’ll even provide an AI to act as one. Oh, we’re also going to kill the OGL that brought us to the top of the TTRPG world and gave D20 mechanics about 85% of the TTRPG market because it isn’t bringing _us_ enough of the money being spent on gaming out there. All your dollars belong to us.

     

    WOTC caused themselves a self-inflicted wound by deeply angering the RPG fandom and Paizo skillfully stabbed them in the face while they were down.

     

    Well played, Paizo. Well played.

  12. 13 hours ago, Hugh Neilson said:

    First off, while I accept that businesses exist to make money, I do not accept that they are made up of soulless corporate shills who care nothing for their customers or the quality of their products. There are ethical and unethical people in business, as there are throughout life.

     

     

     

    If I accept that everyone in a corporation has no purpose other than to gouge the customers of that corporation, I must also accept that every person who accepts employment does so entirely for their own self-interest. No teacher cares one bit for a student, nor a nurse for a patient. And that their customers will make every possible effort to rip them off as well. Sadly, that is the Lawful Evil version of capitalism and, while it is all too common, I do not consider it to be universal.

     

     

     

    To the WOTC issue, I am very curious what the actual legalities are.  Contracts at law, as I understand the law, require consideration by both sides. WOTC did not contract with anyone using the OGL.  Users provided no consideration.  They did, however, leverage WOTC’s IP, which WOTC had invited them to do.

     

     

     

    As I saw the original OGL, WOTC wanted to see others take on the low ROI production of adventure modules which would support their game, and the higher ROI products (like splatbooks) that they would produce.  As I recall, a lot of early OGL products were adventures, and WOTC produced few outside Dungeon magazine.

     

     

     

    With hindsight, the OGL stagnated gaming. How many innovative new games have been produced since its inception?  Have we seen interesting new game mechanics and task resolution systems, or have we simply seen “I’ll just use d20”?

     

     

     

    What I have seen is people come to the Hero boards and ask where the free SRD is so they can play the game without paying one red cent to its developers. That is just as entitled and selfish as any unethical businessperson. Why would anyone develop new game systems and mechanics if that is the likely end result?

     

     

     

    I don’t think WOTC went about this the right way. However, I also don’t think believing they have a right to generate income with the IP they created, building on the IP they paid for, is immoral or unethical.

     

     

     

    In fact, much of the outrage seems directed at the suggestion that WOTC can just TAKE what I CREATED and use it to make money WITHOUT PAYING ME – how could anyone think that is right?  And the rest is that WOTC wants me to PAY for the use of what THEY CREATED – how could anyone think that is right?

     

    The problems going on with WOTC right now are due to decisions made by their upper management, which _is_ a who’s who of soulless corporate shills hired from Microsoft and other such companies, where the bottom line and stock valuations are the be all and end all of their existence. One of them admitted she doesn’t even play D&D and seems to view it like a video game franchise. In contrast, the creative types working for the company were hired from third-party creators and are aghast at what is going on now, and they are the sources of leaks being revealed to the public.

     

    One important thing to remember about the OGL is that it was a brilliant bit of viral marketing. You mentioned that the OGL stagnated gaming. This is true. Why come up with a new system when you could use d20 mechanics? So their share of the TTRPG industry went from around 50% in 2000 to around 85% today, and helped earn WOTC a BILLION DOLLARS in revenues per their public reports. They earned Hasbro MORE revenues and net earnings then their toy lines did.

     

    The consideration WOTC earned from enacting the OGL was gaining them an army of third-party publishers and the legions of rabid fans of those companies acting as their advertisers and proselytizers for the d20 system and helping people play the game using those mechanics. These creators took a chance and invested their own money to publish their works, print and online, each of which contributed to ever growing numbers of D&D core books sold. Sales of the core books were driven through the roof by this. Rather than paying for the uncertainty of advertising, they instead gave third-party publishers some crumbs of the pie without spending a dime of their own money.

     

    Now that its grown so large thanks to those independent efforts, they want the whole pie, and they have an army of lawyers ready to do their bidding in court to see that they get it.

     

    Will they win? Maybe. But it seems like it will be a Pyrrhic victory that fractures the gaming community into a myriad of competing d20-like systems, and other mechanics selling what books they can in the margins.

     

    The d20 OGL changed expectations of how a company publishing game mechanics can operate these past two decades. Those that don’t follow this model are in danger of being marginalized and left on the ash heap of gaming history. Gaming culture works on a principle of proselytizing by fans, and that is a big part of what enabled D&D to be where it is now, the most well-known TTRPG in the world.

     

    I do what I can to support Hero, buying books and using the mechanics in the games I run, as I’m sure other fans of the system do, but it seems to be a losing battle in the face of what the d20 OGL culture has wrought.

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