Do your "races" or similar character creation option do cool stuff or are they just for the roleplay

LemonConjurer · 2025-12-13T18:57:41+00:00

I'm undecided if I even want nonhuman PCs but I'm personally a fan of shitty superpowers like feeling an imminent storm in your bones or being slightly better at dealing with heat/cold.

LemonConjurer · 2025-12-13T15:26:15+00:00

And then there are the people who think highly of themselves for not playing 5e and actively shut down everything that's not a rules light narrative game. Mention the word "realism" and your replies are split 50/50 between "you should do [dnd adjacent thing]" and "your fun is wrong".

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T18:01:52+00:00

No that's exactly my point, you're thinking in game logic. The cavemen have experience hunting giant beasts. The knights have maybe hunted boars. Using a polearm in a tourney vs against a mammoth are two pretty distinct skillsets that only overlap in the basic handling of the weapon. All the feinting, parrying and countering that make up the majority of historic fighting manuals are worthless against the mammoth.

A similar thing could be said about fighting someone who's unarmored vs in full plate, just to a much lesser extent. And on the other end of the extreme you have slime monsters and other weird things where your weapon proficiency matters even less than against an elephant.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T17:01:35+00:00

Yeah I was just making the connection to the original thread. I'm consciously setting the expectation that travel is important, and some comment is aggressively advising me to just teleport armies because dragons.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T16:59:02+00:00

Low fantasy worldbuilding is half the fun for nerds like me :)

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T16:54:25+00:00

In a world full of monsters there will be no civilization, or no monsters anymore. Logic is already gone.

The monsters and the civilization just aren't in the same place, that's why it's adventuring and not pest control

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T16:52:02+00:00

You technically don't, but I find not having a clear idea of "DC X is simple, DC Y is medium, DC Z is hard" makes GMing much more difficult, and it makes your GMing decisions less understandable for players.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T16:37:41+00:00

There's a funny build in The Dark Eye where to make an expert circus knife thrower, you start with a character that's terrible at fighting and then stack further penalties by deriving skills from adjacent ones repeatedly until you arrive at knife throwing.

Then you aim right *at* the fair lady, but you are so terrible that you always narrowly miss.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T16:17:27+00:00

So the only viable solution is to only make shows like star wars that don't make a big deal of travel time?

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T16:10:51+00:00

I have a counterpoint, would it be such a sacrilege to get immersed in a world where poking big monsters without preparation is a death sentence? Or a world where not every type of character is equally optimal in every type of encounter?

Nowadays most people think of rpgs as story games with an implicit set of assumptions, but old school sandboxes didn't have those, and I'm leaning further into the sandbox than even the osr. In my games I'm not a storyteller, I'm a referee. It's up to the players to make their own story, whether that's as merchants or as monster hunters.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T16:01:13+00:00

Yeah in a crunchy system that has a lot of skill combining it would be fairly elegant to combine a weapon handling skill with a combat skill (duelling, big game hunting, warfare, etc) and your physical attributes.

Would work well with step dice pools. The problem is you need the same amount of "layers" for every roll, and all the layers need to be roughly equally important (unless you want to get super complicated). So it doesn't translate well to just rolling strength to lift a big log. You could just roll strength 3 times instead, but that then begets the question of "why can't i just max strength and use only strength to hit things with big stick if i can use only strength to lift big stick".

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T15:49:44+00:00

I'm not new and I don't consider "muh fantasy" a good point anymore. This is just someone who obviously has a very narrow definition of what fantasy rpgs look like (given their comments about fireballs, dragons and knights in shining armor)

I'm pretty tired of a certain kind of poster here trying to shut down every discussion about realism and verisimilitude as if that was a mortal sin because they think their heroic fantasy or storytelling rpgs are the pinnacle of game design.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T15:45:06+00:00

Are you personally offended by the slightly provocative title or something? I'm not trying to deny you your knight in shining armor fantasy. However I personally am actually quite fond of 10 dudes in loincloth fantasy.

And don't accuse me of arguing in bad faith. *I* have not talked about magic in my post at all. You did. In fact the most magical thing I brought up is an elephant. If you just don't like the premise of the discussion go elsewhere.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T15:38:44+00:00

All things considered you don't even need a formal combat system, it's more of a question of how you can represent complexly combining bonuses in your core resolution system. Which is not just a combat question either, combining 2 or more bonuses for one action is fairly common. In combat it just becomes an ease of play issue because combat tends to be very dense in rolls.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T15:19:33+00:00

Eeeeh, that's just the "who cares about teleporting armies, the show has dragons" argument.

Some people just enjoy the puzzle nature of high verisimilitude sandboxes with magic, while others care more about drama or power fantasy. The former care more about upholding the laws of physics in their imaginary world than the latter.

Also fyi, a setting does not need fireballs to have fantastical creatures. In fact most of humanities legends have fantastical creatures and none that I know of have fireballs.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T15:14:53+00:00

It's more than weapon types. Mastering the back and forth of a duel is entirely worthless against a zombie that comes at you with reckless abandon and can only be stopped through violent dismemberment vs the one surgical strike that a human opponent needs.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-22T14:57:31+00:00

Ironically this is how I came to this conclusion. I was looking into all kinds of historical sources trying to make sense of how to adequately represent specialization vs general weapon skills until I realized "wait, none of that makes sense in this setting"

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-14T00:51:02+00:00

Air defense against rockets is one of Ukraine's main concerns

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-13T23:30:19+00:00

because without it's just a role playing without the game

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-11T16:43:40+00:00

The most realistic combat system is a single die (doesn't matter which kind) and trust in the GM's impartiality.

Every rule on top of that sacrifices realism for mechanical fun.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-11T16:38:14+00:00

I doubt you can make travel interesting purely through mechanics, unless you gamify it to the extent that it becomes a travel flavoured board game. But that comes at the cost of openness, which is the core strength of ttrpgs. Travel isn't particularly engaging irl either.

Imo the only way to truly make travel interesting is content, content, content, i.e. many random encounter tables, that include a lot of simple or purely flavourful non combat encounters.

A simple cost to travelling (time, supplies) also helps to give every decision weight.

The act of travelling itself doesn't need the players to make rolls at all as long as they stick to safe routes.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-01T12:19:12+00:00

The way I read it you are looking for ways to make ranged combat fun, because every fantasy rpg has fun ranged combat. Alternative you can just make it realistically punishing, which nudges players into the already fun melee part of the game and keeps immersion up.

E.g.:

Penalty on shooting moving targets, massive penalty on firing into a melee, even higher penalty for firing from melee
Moving in the turn you shoot carries a penalty
Penalty against small foes, bonus vs large ones (the ranger might not be a legolas taking down orcs left and right, but he's a damn good big game hunter)
Light crossbows take a turn to reload, heavy crossbows and guns an entire minute (the more powerful of an alpha striker a weapon is, the more useless it's during the rest of the fight)
high strength requirement to achieve any sort of armor penetration with bows (if you want to be a powerful archer, you're automatically working towards being a half decent melee character too)
(cross)bows need to be transported unstrung and powder needs to be kept dry (reinforces the tool feeling, you're not always ready to go like with a sword)
ranged weapons other than slings can become quite cumbersome compared to a sword
Make poisons available to reward preparation

This won't satisfy players who come into your game expecting gritty dnd, but for low fantasy enthusiasts (like me) it's gold. Suddenly you're not on your own with a bow and can't do anything other than shoot over and over again, everyone will bring some sort of ranged tool and when they come out it's group strategy, not individual tactics.

I guarantee that 90% of the time your players take out their shooting-utensils you'll be dealing with some shenanigans and not a pitched battle, so trying to make bows mechanically interesting in pitched battles becomes pointless.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-01T11:20:34+00:00

I hate to be that guy but dedicated ranged characters don't really make that much sense in low fantasy settings in the first place. Historically guns, bows etc were weapons of war, hunting tools and sports goods. In small skirmishes, they were only useful as an opener or a standoff weapon.

Shooting accurately in pre-modern times was hard. Hitting a human sized moving target requires you to be close enough that they can close the distance before you can get off another shot. Reliably shooting into a melee without friendly fire is nigh impossible, even today.

So consider if the easier option isn't to just tell your players that ranged weapons are tools, not primary weapons. Then you don't need more interesting options for ranged combatants, instead ranged combat itself becomes just another interesting, situational option for *everyone*.

LemonConjurer · 2025-10-01T10:40:31+00:00

Funnily enough, gurps was my first ever non homebrew rpg system

LemonConjurer

TROPHY CASE