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Brian Stanfield

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Brian Stanfield last won the day on June 21 2019

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About Brian Stanfield

  • Birthday 08/02/1971

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    : Southern Illinois

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  1. I played with players paying points for everything just for an experiment. I just treat every object like a power with lots of limitations. This way I don’t really have to sort out “magic items” as opposed to mundane, found items or purchased items, etc. it’s not a perfect system, but when I’m trying to teach points build to new players it helps them learn how things fit together. It rationalizes some of the usual problems, but ha its own drawbacks of course. the main problem is how to treat lost items. They get their points back of course, but special heirloom items or magic items may have more of a story arc built into retrieving them, and so on. Found and purchased items, of course, are the most problematic with this approach, so as @Dr.Devicesays, it requires some trust.
  2. My buddy keeps finding HERO books at Half Price Books, including Star HERO at one point. Keep your eyes peeled!
  3. Fantasy Hero, Space Hero, the three Villains books, Champions and Champions Universe.
  4. My buddy and I patiently waited for the countdown to reach zero, at which point we discovered people had already been registering for who knows how long?! Everything we wanted was already filled. I took three years off of Origins and hoped they’d get this stuff figured out, but it’s no different than any other year when I wasn’t able to register for anything! But I’ll be there anyway! What’s the “Lurking Fears” room?
  5. I'm going to potentially open up a can of worms here, but I'm going to suggest that you go ahead and learn the rules yourself and then port your players' characters into your setting so they don't have to learn all the character creation stuff. It's potentially overwhelming (many threads, some of them started by me, cover this subject ad nauseum). If you give them their characters with whom they are already familiar and then teach them how the combat and skill resolution works it will make the transition much easier. In the end it all comes down to 3d6, roll under, which is so utterly simple they won't believe it. This way you avoid the wall of text/barrier to entry/information overload problems that people always complain about. Once they learn that they can create their own magic, etc. etc., they'll dig into the creation rules on their own and at their own pace. And THEN you have 'em hooked. . .
  6. Forget it kid, you'll shoot your eye out.
  7. Something like that. Players like to roll dice because it makes them feel like they have control over their own fate. But sometimes you don’t want them to know the result. My guess was to use a box and let them shake it or something like that. Behind a screen works too. Mostly I was just curious if anyone has ever used a particular approach to doing this. For some reason this thread turned into some sort of “trust issues” rant.
  8. @Steve Long Maybe you should consider setting up a Patreon campaign or something like that. There are enough people here who I’d imagine would throw in a little cash on a regular basis to help support the Q&A forum.
  9. The opposite, actually: allowing players to make the rolls themselves, but keeping the results hidden (like in a covered box or a shaker or something). The idea is that if they roll a 9 on their Stealth Skill, they have a pretty good expectation of it having worked. If they roll a 16, they'll know it probably didn't. But if they roll a ?, it opens up for a lot of role playing possibilities. Did they hear me sneak into the room behind them? Do I keep hiding for a moment to be sure? Do I go ahead assume surprise and line up an attack? Can I take extra time to take aim without them noticing? That sort of thing. It was just an idea I'd been playing with in my head, and wondered if anyone had any experience with this sort of thing.
  10. Aaaannnnnnnd just like that, I came home from chemotherapy on Thursday and found myself eating crackers in bed . . . .
  11. Thanks everyone. I didn't mean to ghost my own topic. I had to start chemotherapy again with very short notice and my time and energy has been taken up with that. I always forget about the list of pre-rolled results made by the players themselves. That seems like an obvious solution to the mechanical problems I was having a hard time with. Lots of good input on when to do it as well. Thanks for the suggestions!
  12. It's been a while since I've posted, but I miss those long gameplay discussions with lots of great bits of advice. So here goes: I've been fiddling with the idea for a while to use hidden or secret die rolls for certain types of situations. I've never really liked having the GM do all the rolls behind a screen because it takes away, at least on the surface, from player agency (some of us remember the bad old days of D&D using this tactic). But sometimes you don't want your players to know if they've succeeded, or by how much. Some examples could be: a stealth roll while trying to hide from a pursuer. Did he see you hide around the corner? Are you sure? you set an explosive to go off at a certain time after you leave. Will it succeed? you want that guy at the bar to give up some information. You try to use a Persuasion roll, but did it work? you're absolutely positive that you take a right at the fork in the road to get back to the rendezvous point. You roll an Intelligence check, but did you succeed, or was it a critical failure? You get the idea. I want to avoid meta-gaming the rolls and to leave some doubt in the players' minds. There is a lot of potential value in these sorts of results remaining secret from the players. But how to conduct the rolls without leaving them feeling scammed? My thought was to use a box, throw in the proper dice, and let the players shake it without seeing the results. They get to make their own rolls, so they don't feel cheated, but they also don't actually know the result. Has anyone done this before? Am I missing some obvious drawbacks to this approach? Are there better ways of doing it? I'd like to pull from the collective experience of everyone here. Let me know what you've tried, what's worked, and also what hasn't.
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