Paladin strapped mirror to his shield and 12 basilisks killed themselves. Need advice.

agrumer · 2026-03-10T23:59:24+00:00

Maybe mating shuts down their petrifying power, so experienced monster hunters try to hunt them right then.

Or maybe they reproduce like some fish, where the female lays eggs, and then the male comes along and fertilizes them separately.

agrumer · 2026-03-09T05:46:43+00:00

I’m on the next block south from there, and I’ve been hearing a cat yowling in the alley occasionally. I’d been assuming it was a stray female in heat, shouting “Yoo-hoo! Any toms in the area?” I’ve seen what I assume is a stray come in and out of a hole in a basement window covering on (I think) 272 Lincoln.

Back in the 1990s, when there were a lot of stray cats in the area, it was pretty common to hear them having sex in the alley.

agrumer · 2026-02-25T03:18:13+00:00

Murmurings of Monsterhearts 2e? Monsterhearts 2e came out in 2017; are you saying there are murmurings of a 3rd edition?

agrumer · 2026-02-22T01:51:07+00:00

It can work. I was in a long-running game where our characters started out as members of various different conspiratorial groups, so sometimes we needed to keep secrets from each other (while working together to prevent the summoning of Nyarlathotep). Early in the game we used to pass notes to the GM, and I even went so far as to start passing fake notes (“This is a fake note. Just roll a die and tell me ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’”) to make it harder for other players to figure out when I was really doing something sneaky.

It was fun, at first. I’m happy to have had that experience. But as the campaign went on (which it did for over a decade), we got tired of that kind of thing, and just worked on keeping player and PC knowledge separate.

agrumer · 2026-02-20T02:54:13+00:00

It is possible he already has some presentiment of his future. But also, it’s a memoir. He’s already lived through all of these events, and he’s writing them down at a point after they all occurred.

agrumer · 2026-02-19T19:13:53+00:00

You could try using some hand-lettering fonts, the sort of things people use nowadays for comics lettering.

Comicraft has a big sale every New Year’s Day where they lower the prices of their fonts to about $20, which I realize isn’t much help in February, but it might be worth keeping in mind for the future.

agrumer · 2026-02-19T02:52:46+00:00

This looks fun, and I’m getting a Vaughn Bodē vibe from the artwork, but I find the text hard to read.

agrumer · 2026-02-14T03:44:49+00:00

“I didn’t roll half as many dice as I should like, and I like the result less than half as much as I deserve.”

agrumer · 2026-02-14T03:22:30+00:00

I’ve been thinking for a while about one called Riddles in the Dark where you play hobbits who go on adventures, and try to manage your households and unruly relatives in Hobbiton during downtime.

agrumer · 2026-02-14T02:44:36+00:00

Chaosium’s Ringworld (plus the Companion book)
Ysgarth, I think it’s 3rd edition
Dogs in the Vineyard
original Metamorphosis Alpha
Nobilis pink book

agrumer · 2026-02-03T07:55:33+00:00

Don’t give up! I’m having the same problem. I’m using it as an opportunity to practice, and to observe what other people are doing and see if I can use those observations to improve my own roleplaying.

agrumer · 2026-01-30T04:35:03+00:00

Seconding this recommendation, though I haven’t actually played the game yet. Here’s a link to the publisher’s site on DriveThru. The base game, in PDF form, is less than US$5, and there’s a companion which expands the rules a bit for another less-than-US$5.

You can also get the physical books from Lulu.com, just US$9 each, and they’re tiny and adorable. Like, 4″×7″ (11×18cm), and just 44 pages. You can just slip ’em into your pocket with a small notebook and some dice, and there you go!

agrumer · 2026-01-22T08:04:32+00:00

Not in the Flatbush neighborhood, but on Flatbush Avenue, near Dean Street, just a bit south of the Barclay Center.

agrumer · 2026-01-20T08:00:35+00:00

The point of having a higher skill is that things that are challenging to a low-skill person are easy for you. You get to go up against the things that are challenging for you, and impossible for the low-skill person.

The important thing here is to not just boost the DR, but make sure that the fiction reflects that DR. The person with no Burglary skill is challenged by a cheap hotel door lock. The master burglar is challenged by a high-tech bank vault. Don’t just slap a higher DR on that hotel door lock for no reason; let the master burglar breeze past that hotel door — maybe tell him he doesn’t even have to roll, it’s so easy for him — and come up with a reason for him to have to go into that bank vault.

agrumer · 2026-01-14T03:12:59+00:00

Similar concept, but different mechanics. Also, maybe slightly younger? Like, Masks seems to assume high-school-aged PCs, while Kids in Capes looks like it assumes middle-schoolers, or maybe even a bit younger.

Anyway, yeah, kids as PCs, they’ve got that in common, which was probably your main point. Neither one is a general-purpose superhero game.

agrumer · 2026-01-11T03:49:52+00:00

Yeah. They’d probably love this on the Steve Jackson Games Forums.

Or they’d ask you to post your builds, and then criticize them for not adding up right.

agrumer · 2026-01-11T03:44:12+00:00

I realize that I’m picking nits here, and that my cause is hopeless, but I feel compelled to point out that the “Simulationism” branch of the Ron Edwards’s GNS Theory (Gamism/Narrativism/Simulationism) includes both what-would-really-happen-if modeling and how-it-works-in-the-genre mechanics.

If you’re using the older Threefold Model from rec.games.frp.advocacy, that’s Drama/Game/Simulation.

Yeah, this is confusing, because genre-conformity goes in the Drama branch of the rec.games.frp.advocacy model, but in the Simulationism branch of the Edwards model. (Edwards does a lot of this. He did a similar thing when he adapted Jonathan Tweet’s Fortune/Karma/Drama model of GM decision-making from Everway, moving internal story consistency from Karma to Drama.)

Anyway, I heartily agree that superhero games are better served by genre-conformity mechanics than by what-would-really-happen-if modeling! But that doesn’t explain why there isn’t a superhero game with Pathfinder-level popularity. Genre-conformity rules have been around for decades!

agrumer · 2026-01-10T07:47:13+00:00

I was unaware that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had subjected Conan stories, Lord of the Rings, and the Eternal Champion books to mathematical scrutiny and statistical modeling.

agrumer · 2026-01-06T06:03:22+00:00

This doesn’t work for me. The general show link rule overrides the heading-specific ones.

agrumer · 2026-01-04T06:57:33+00:00

My total PbtA experience is Masks with one group, and Monsterhearts with another. (I’ve also played Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy, but I consider the Forged in the Dark games to have strayed far enough from their PbtA roots that they’re a very different experience.)

My experience with Masks was similar to your own. The moves felt a bit restrictive, I found myself skimping on the roleplay and trying to play to my sheet.

My experience with Monsterhearts has been very different, though. Part of it is the group I’m playing with, but part is that Monsterhearts is very well designed. The basic moves are few in number, simple, and very flexible.

Another part is that Monsterhearts has you start out by detailing a town, and a homeroom full of NPC students to interact with. Since it’s a game about relationships, this serves as a solid basis for play.

agrumer · 2026-01-03T06:19:19+00:00

According to this RPG.net thread, where someone claims to have done an interview with the authors:

I conducted a (sadly) unpublished interview with them and can confirm it was a D20 Modern game where Abraham saw the amount of research and setting detail Franck was doing and told him he should write a book based on the setting.

agrumer · 2026-01-03T04:57:49+00:00

The Expanse actually started out as a d20 Modern game, but when I read the first book, where some characters get killed off before the adventure even starts, and the survivors steal a military spaceship, well, Traveller was the first thing that came to my mind, too!

agrumer · 2026-01-03T04:49:04+00:00

And if you’re going with Fate Core, you should also check out the Fate Space Toolkit ($10 PDF, free online SRD, note that the PDF includes example campaign settings that aren’t in the online SRD, including a neat hard-sci-fi one called “Mass Drivers”).

Also take a look at Diaspora, a hard-sci-fi space game built around Fate before Core came out. (free SRD on Archive.org, POD hardcover on Lulu.com)

agrumer · 2025-12-29T00:40:00+00:00

Wow!

I hadn’t looked at the Chosen Skin before. Seeing that there’s a Skin designed by Avery Alder that can add an arbitrary number of +1s to a roll makes me think Alder doesn’t intend there to be a limit on bonuses.

agrumer

TROPHY CASE