It’s a 2d20 system, where the GM determines the difficulty of a Challenge, and the Attributes and Disciplines it involves. The player then rolls 2d20s, and if they get under the total of their Attribute + Discipline, they get a success.
It moves things along fairly well, but yeah, there’s not really any kind of incentive not to play it safe.
The scope of your adventure and your motivations are that you’re trying to be good at your job. It’s not for glory, or revenge, or some personal justice, it’s to do your duty.
I had the same thought about how this doesn’t play like most Star Trek episodes I like. I think part of it is what you described about having characters willing to bend or break rules, to act outside of policy, for some greater ideal.
The other part is just that there are curveballs thrown at the cast during most episodes, aspects of the mystery that evolve or escalate. The nanites kill that guy, the conspirators are full of space worms, they realize they’re in a loop. Something changes or is revealed.
I think it takes a system that is prepared to throw a monkey wrench every commercial break.
Oh yeah I totally read this game before and I was really nonplussed. 2d20 is very much the ‘we have a license and people who want license won’t care if the rules are kind of a nothingburger’ system.
At least it doesn’t take a billion dumb specialty dice like Fantasy Flight Star Wars.
I have a draft of what I call the best star trek rpg that is designed around this very idea, that any given episode has multiple crises happening at once that all intersect in different ways and tend to evolve or escalate, and like “the doctor character solves the medical emergency by themselves” cannot happen
like, I think the conference room scene where characters talk through a problem is an essential part of a good star trek (tos or tng) but not when its reducible to just duty assignments or following a chain of command. They’re moments for the characters’ personalities to shine through outside of a one-on-one scene!
I completely agree, there are typically two or three meetings had, each dealing with the new way the situation has evolved or escalated. That shit is key to the drama going somewhere, building up, driving towards some kind of satisfying catharsis.
As much as I dislike grimdark nuTrek, I do like a recognition of the fact that their universe is full of insane, powerful, horrifying shit, and anything short of a crew of consummate professionals will not survive a week out there. The meetings are a constant touch-base on handling situations that are never close to routine or familiar.
Characters not interacting might be a separate issue with this GM and group in particular, where they are not the sort who sorta embody their character, they talk in generalities about what they should do, and then their character does that thing. We don’t get the dialogue often, and thus, no room for character work. For a player like me, this is 2 hours in the agony booth.
Imagine never seeing Kira have a conversation with anyone, or watch Data puzzle through and verbalize something that’s confounded him. Madness.
My brother made a great homebrew Engineer class. I have been spending the last hour or so coming up with inventions to build by combining items from the items list.
BUBBLE BELLOWS (bellows+waterskin+soap)
SNIPER RIFLE (rifle+spyglass) for Cadillac
BOMB (cooking pot+caltrops+black powder)*
ALARM (twine+small bell)
FIRESTARTER (mirror+lens)
SOUNDBLASTER (bellows+horn)
*For Mechanism: Tinderbox+Beartrap to make LANDMINE, or twine to make a fuse. Otherwise it could be shot at a distance.
Figured out a way of rolling for random cock measurements. 2d4, which tends toward average but allows for small and huge cocks. For more comical results, use exploding dice. With this method I have gotten a 20 incher!
speaking of exploding dice, my favorite dice roller on android (Sophie’s Dice) has a very fun exploding dice rule. Instead of re-rolling on max, it rolls a DX where X is the number that appears on the dice, as long as it’s not 1.
So if you roll a D4 and roll a 3, then a D3 explodes out of it. You can make these recursive as well, so that D3 could propagate another D3, then finally a D2 (coin flip).
It’s stupidly fun to roll four exploding D20s and just see what happens.
that is fucking infuriating thats [was] one of my favorite articles on game design and i had no clue the writer was being a petty pos about it even before greedily trying to shift the credit to himself. fuck that guy if he thinks im ever gonna call that style of dungeon design anything but Jaquaysian. i’ll be happy to continue mining that article for inspiration and not even bother to lob him the credit for writing it from now on. prick.
RIP Jennell
edit seriously i cant overstate how incandescent learning this makes me especially not a half hour after reading about yet another horrible antitrans legislature moving to senate in the US this world that loves to treat trans women like shit has no problem cannibalizing their cultural output at the same time
that article he wrote about dead naming, for fucks sake the tortured justifications cis people will go through for why they just cant respect the autonomy of trans people fucking AAAAAARRRRRRGHH
I’d like to do a nice little space battle in my Spelljammer game, but the existing 5e Spelljammer space fighting mechanism sucks ballz and most fixes I’ve seen either vastly overcomplicate it, or turn it into “just jump off the boat and do hand-to-hand”
My friend ran a Labyrinth Lord game these past two months, which essentially lets you play o.g. D&D modules with some fixes and improvements (i.e. Clerics can use spells starting at level 1, races are not classes):
The module we ran was Against the Cult of the Reptile God:
The thing this DM loves about older editions is the lethality of it, which I do have to agree makes for a lot more memorable moments. Narrowly retreating from bad situation, regrouping, and going back at it with a better plan is very rewarding. The high amount of character death also means every roll has weight, and sometimes you’re just fucked.
We also enjoyed the “here’s a town, go explore it, that’s it” element, where you weren’t given a ton of guidance and it was just up to the players to form a plan and follow through. This was a bit mixed because sometimes you just go to a place before the thing that justifies its existence happened, so it’s common to go to a house, talk to everyone inside, and find nothing for a while session. On the other hand, when you DO find something or figure something out, you feel like you earned it.
Probably the biggest laughs of the campaign came from the fact that four player characters died to a REGULAR SNAKE, across two separate encounters. In one of them, we just didn’t notice the regular-ass snake as it snuck up and bit a character on the heel, killing her with its poison instantly. The second time, the troglodytes hurled a cage containing a snake into the middle of our team, which ended up seeing three player characters eat shit in as many turns. Those who survived were raining blows down upon it, only to find it had as much HP as any boss. Amazing.
The dungeon-crawling was pretty enjoyable in that there was no real way to tell where the fuck you were, like, no maps or anything. We ended up buying paper and making a map as we went, which we got a real kick out of. The downside is that sometimes you just wander aimlessly and don’t find anything for a session.
I think overall, I would definitely do another game like this. The parts I didn’t like where how limited combat becomes, and how unremarkable and uninteresting the Greyhawk world is. You essentially go to town, buy the optimal armor and weapons for your guys, you get one spell a day (randomly chosen), and that’s what you have to work with. Really little room for creativity with that few tools at your disposal.
That said, I made an elf who was obsessed with burning things, and crafted molotov cocktails, hurling them at most enemies with a 50% success rate (the other 50% I lit a teammate on fire). That was about the extent of what you could do with the very limited variey of items available, so, that made combat become pretty samey:
With this module specifically, they also give you this very powerful NPC wizard that sorta trivalizes the big boss encounters… not sure why that’s in there, I’ve heard it’s a problem with older D&D books.
Anyways, had a lot of fun, I’d love to do another, though ideally not in Greyhawk again. Dark Sun kinda did this way better.
OSR combat really needs a good DM. If your DM just runs the game like a computer following rules it’ll be boring. They need to be more like someone that leads an improv session with dice rolls that twist it one way or another.
Dope you played LL though. I want to try all different kinds of OSR games but it’s so hard and I feel like they’re all kinda the same…
yeah when i ran a rules cyclopedia hex crawl game i would translate all of the odds to percentages in my head, especially when coming up with difficulties on the fly, and try to channel disco elysium as much as possible
Is there anything more conspicuously uncool than third party “compatible with Mork Borg” Kickstarter projects?
The original book shouts out Sunn and Eyehategod and was a breath of fresh air, but every time I see a wacky supplement about pirates or “punks” or whatever I smell a guy who saw dollar signs when he realized he could get away with like 12 really big words in different fonts on a page, and would tell you about how talented Weird Al’s guitarist is if asked about his favorite bands.
The only exception is dukk borg, which manages to still be good because its a simultaneous callback to the judges guild duck based runequest adventures and the carl barks/don rosa comics
