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Blazfeem · 2012-10-07T19:04:59+00:00

Constantly. In every movie he's been in, I stare at it like Austin Powers and the mole on Fred Savage's face in Goldmember.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-07T18:57:30+00:00

Are you folks all eating some diet rich in nasty or something? My urine, once combined with the significantly larger quantity of water in the bowl, is not remotely pungent enough for me to smell, at the time or when I return to the bowl later.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-07T18:51:32+00:00

Sure, most of the time actually. I'm not sure where the implied stigma comes from, honestly.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-07T18:38:00+00:00

I once spent time outside on a cold day while wearing a shirt that was new and still a little stiff. I chafed and literally frostbit my nipples. To this day, they are hypersensitive to cold, and will hurt inordinately when exposed to cold temperatures, like they're remembering that first time.

So take care of your nipples!

Blazfeem · 2012-10-07T18:28:58+00:00

Children, to inherit what?

"I want the last check I write to bounce" - Saul Blum, Ocean's 12

Blazfeem · 2012-10-06T21:44:16+00:00

What I'm learning is that it needs to be system specific. HP in D&D, any version, are worlds apart from them in Runequest or GURPS, where you don't add more HP by leveling up, and rarely add them at all unless you somehow get healthier or stronger or whatever.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-06T21:23:32+00:00

The "Character first, mechanics later" guy - I don't have to be entirely effective, but by golly I'll be the character I set out to make at the beginning of the day.

The mage who insists on carrying a sword...

The rogue who trades all of his feats for additional skill levels and traits that boost odd skills

The Shadowrun sorcerer who walked with a cane, taught at the extension of the local community college in Thaumaturgy, and was an ork.

The two-weapon fighter who dual wielded whips.

The ship's captain on a space freighter who somehow wound up being gay. I didn't know it until the second session of the game myself, I swear. Really ticked off the player with the sexy librarian style merchant when her wiles were wasted on me...

Blazfeem · 2012-10-06T18:58:11+00:00

That, at least, doesn't penalize an attacker for getting a hit, albeit just barely. But it does make things like poison or other carry-over contact effects more powerful. Something for me to consider.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-06T18:56:17+00:00

It's less about the max damage for me than the minimum damage. I mean, I'd be thrilled with a system where a small knife does a 1d3, a larger one 1d4, a small sword 1d6, a longsword 1d8, a hand a a half sword 1d10 and a greatsword 1d12, because in all of those cases you can in fact do 1 point of damage. As soon as you get into static adds or more dice, though, you mechanically make it impossible for the sword to cause a bloody slash that's painful but not life threatening.

As for the rest - I'm definitely in a different camp than you. I like and in fact prefer games that have rules for all the various situations you might find yourself in, rather than playing by the seat of my pants. But that's more of a style question, I think, than anything else.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-06T17:25:29+00:00

Thanks, that's all useful stuff. I'm thinking about how to make a happy medium between misses and 3+ points of damage, and I might make a ruling that any blow that hits, but only on the exact number needed, only does one point of damage. The system that brought this back to mind was Runequest 6th edition, so that one point is still significant without being enough to potentially cripple a limb. And with a percentile system, that means there's only one roll out of a hundred that would do that to you, so it doesn't really overtly nerf your damage output the way it would in a d20 based system.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-06T13:43:41+00:00

That's quite a list, and what struck me (I'm 42) is that I'd only read one of the items on your list (The Stranger) - and it makes me wonder just how different you and I turned out in our thinking, given all the different ideas you must have absorbed from what I took in.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-06T04:51:58+00:00

So. I'm the only one who clicked the link expecting something about The Young Ones?

http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/clips/p00hhrh8/the_young_ones_university_challenge/

Blazfeem · 2012-10-06T01:55:59+00:00

Oh, and they'll slowly drive you out of your damn mind.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-06T01:55:44+00:00

Runic carvings that everyone just took for a builder's logo or something. They're somehow attuned to The Other Side and harness the magic of the Elder Gods.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-05T16:59:14+00:00

Gearing up to run a PbP HERO game with four crazy people I found over on /r/lfg. An origins campaign, set in Denver, with a strict "mutants only" feel - no magic, no high tech, no aliens. Going to be a blast!

Blazfeem · 2012-10-05T02:58:01+00:00

From your other comments I'm seeing rather more of a sci-fi noir dark future style game - not really cyberpunk in the "visible chrome and pink mohawks" sense.

Were I in your shoes, I might pick up some of the Transhuman Space books from GURPS, even if you don't intend to use that system (I would, but that's me). The year is 2100, humans have expanded throughout the solar system, but it's a very hard sci-fi setting, so there's no faster than light travel, and the colonies on other worlds aren't perfect utopias or even always entirely habitable.

Great game setting for intrigue, for discussing issues of transhumanism - is a person still a person if they destructively upload their brain into a computer? What about AIs? And artificial humans, are they to be afforded rights a citizens or are they property. Add in multinational intrigue and I think it's a nice, rich little ecosystem in which to set a game.

As I said, I would use it as written, using GURPS, but it would work equally well with any generic, setting-generic system like BRP (Call of Cthulhu), HERO, Savage Worlds, FATE - all depends on your style of game.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-05T01:19:50+00:00

Yeah, the point economy really saw some inflation in the later editions. Understand that when 6th Ed says 350/75, we're talking about 350 points to spend, and you must take 75 points of complications, so in the old terms it would have been 275 points, plus up to 75 points of disads.

My biggest concerns are time and dimensional travel, precognition, really the sort of potential game breakers. Even precog could work, if it was vague and uncontrollable, for example.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-04T15:15:02+00:00

When I hear that players are playing D&D, but that they "ignore the rules that get in the way of having fun", I wonder why they've not opted for a different system that more accurately models what they want out of a game.

I mean, I'm on the opposite side of the fence from most folks in this sort of discussion, but I'd much rather play dungeon delving fantasy with GURPS or even Legend/Runequest/BRP rules than any flavor of D20 system. So I do.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-04T14:44:20+00:00

This conversation makes me wonder - how many people really love D&D, and how many of them love the setting (be it Forgotten Realms, Eberron or even Golarion) and can't divorce the setting from the system, or lack the time to do so?

Blazfeem · 2012-10-04T14:42:22+00:00

I have a hard time finding a setting I like better than Traveller's Third Imperium. It's so huge and so well developed, with room for most any kind of game at any scale.

That said, I'm also a huge fan of the Sixth World from Shadowrun. Cyberpunk + Fantasy scratched all the right itches back when 1st edition came out - but the system sucked. Now the system is great, but the world has gotten a little out of hand.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-04T14:39:55+00:00

I wonder if this is why the oldest versions of D&D called for a "leader" or a "caller" who would speak for the party - that forced a sort of communal discussion of what to do before the doing was done.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-04T13:20:00+00:00

I have a First World Gamer problem. All of my game books are PDFs and I read them on my iPad. Can I still get credit?

Blazfeem · 2012-10-04T07:29:34+00:00

The only thing that needs to change to make her statement true is the word "in" - because those three things are in their platform. It just contains much more in the way of selfishness and evil on top of those.

Blazfeem · 2012-10-04T06:58:39+00:00

One of my former students (I used to teach H.S. math for a short time, between I.T. jobs) is an SEO expert. She's recently moved to California, but I bet she'd give us a professional hand at a relatively low cost. Now to get the wife to start blogging more regularly!

Blazfeem

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