The hack we used is Retail Magic by Ewen Cluney, ftr
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Is it just momentum for why people like Justin Alexander?
Yes, and for a while he was one of the “less bad” DnD bloggers
When the alternatives are ‘rapist’, ‘neo-nazi’, or ‘friend of rapists and neo-nazis’, pre-transphobia JA was largely tolerable if often wrong about things that didn’t matter. (He was one of the more ardent 4e haters and made up one of the stupidest terms in dnd land, “dissociated mechanics”)
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mm those things are pro “decent enough dude” traits albeit of the sort that should be the bare minimum. part of my withered feelings toward him is all of the “issues” (i.e. criticism) he’s had about Janelle Jaquays arise directly from not being able to empathize with a trans lady. he dragged his feet on her name and pronouns and then tried to overwrite her name from his writing. that’s ugly shit.
4e seems dope like you got my FFT in your DnD, i would rip parts of it off if i wanted to do a homebrew 5e inspired campaign. Nothing wrong with giving every player in this game something fun they can try every round, granted that it might feel like an MMO cooldown power
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oh, and 100% agree. No one should read his blog anymore, he made it clear what kind of person he really was when he engaged in constant weaselly transphobia.
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“Jaquaysing the Dungeon” is like a catalogue of another creators good choices & instincts anyway so i’ll continue to reference it while citing her
i would love to see some of the odder categories in that article expressed more in videogames (and would try to jam them into my own TTRPG dungeons) like multiple entrances/exits, discontinuous/divided floors, sub-dungeons nested within dungeons etc. like i can come up with limited examples of each of those but i NEED MORE
like i love reading about Castle Greyhawk and knowing somewhere in there you can get transported to fucking Wonderland. i love the Village of Hommlet as a “tutorial map” that PCs were encouraged to explore before going to the Temple of Elemental Evil. Wild shit like that where your tabletop campaign can become something totally different than advertised in the course of a session
again have to qualify that im not immersed in ttrpgs or aware of any scenes, but i always want tabletop and videogames to talk to eachother more. as opposed to videogames acting like the old friend of tabletop thats too cool to talk to them anymore lol
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I’m shocked to say that the FFXIV tabletop RPG from what I can glean may be the hybrid of 5e streaming and 4e combat that I have been looking for.
It’s funky how it uses MMO terminology for everything but it seems like a potentially cool thing to exist.
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yeah i really wanna play the ffxiv ttrpg I WANT TO PLAY IT SO BAD
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justin alexander is a right schmuck
i keep playing Mothership, this game is obscenely good. i got so many modules im geekin’ out.
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Looking through this. Haven’t played yet. Does not include a system for ‘leveling up’ in the core, though I don’t really mind since I kinda feel like a lot of rpgs are spoiled by the drive to make the numbers go up all the time. There is an optional advancement system in a separate document though. Seems flexible enough. Look forward to trying it out. Like that each side gets the same amount of actions within limits, so that being outnumbered isn’t that huge of a hinderance.
Got a cheap distressed copy of fist in the mail when I was ordering something else and the rule book is one of those ones that’s super light on rules and heavy on setting related text.
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So I’ve been asked to run a game for a friend and some of her friends who are in need of post divorce distractions and whatnot. They asked if I know 5e d&d and I asked if they’d be cool with one of the earlier versions. Sounds like it’s up to me.
Leaning toward od&d. The actual original white box rule books are a mess and require chainmail but that $4 “white box” paperback on Amazon (boo) seems pretty useable. There’s also some online rules called delving deeper that feel like the middle ground between the original prose and wb’s update.
They get into all sorts of nuts stuff like how wind direction affects surprise rolls and what the morale modifier is for a henchmen who inherited a pc’s stuff then had to give it back when the pc was resurrected. Inheritance tax is covered in that situation too (it’s paid twice).
This all might be a wild over correction after that dark souls rpg mess that fell apart after the guy in the group I was closest with had a bunch of babies.
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oh the wind direction surprise rolls is about being able to smell someone coming, right?
I haven’t read delving deeper, my fav 0e clone was Epées & Sorcellerie, which deviated from the original rules in a few ways that I preferred. One of the more radical changes is switching to 2d6 instead of d20, so that the game only uses d6s
It had a second edition that was unfortunately never translated into english so I don’t know what all was in it besides the addition of a thief class
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i can understand wanting to change the distribution for mechanical reasons, but d&d clones which only use d6s are getting rid of one of the fun parts of the game.
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Exactly, it’s strictly for animals too. I kind of love how Calvinball some of these super situational rules are, and also how ignorable/make-able up on the spot they are if you just want to keep things moving.
And yeah it was news to me that everything but the d6 and the d20 are out the window. The weird dice seem so intrinsic to the game. On one hand I appreciate further streamlining it (after all the even weirder/harder to source dice are what’s keeping me from trying to get some strangers into DCC) but I also feel what @nettle is saying.
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My plan is to be a bit less stingy with magic items to balance out player expectations with all the fancy class abilities that newer iterations of the game have (and maybe also to shift the balance rather than relying on everyone having a revolving retinue of expendable henchmen infringing on the spotlight and generally being narratively problematic).
Should be a fun exercise. I figure if it goes south we can shift rulesets.
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I’ve found it is fun to be not stingy with magic items so long as the magic items are all interesting, weird, or situational
We’re at level 20 in no rangers allowed so everyone is at the top of the power curve and its really fun to throw in magic items like the bollock of extinction (a bollock dagger that kills 50% of the species that was stabbed, one time use)
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I gotta get caught up on what’s been published! You were so good at handling that sort of stuff in those old eps. Total notes taking time for me.
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really flattering me here, thank you! Because of how many sessions we’ve played, most of my references to things we’ve done in NoRA are things that haven’t yet been published
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