Ziggurat

@Ziggurat@sh.itjust.works

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Ziggurat ,

But I do think Blades is my favorite “rules light” system

I've read "Beam saber" which is supposed to be Forged in the Dark, and I wouldn't call it "Rule light", the core is simple, but there is like 200 pages of rules, with "position", "consequences', flash back, downtime. Looks pretty heavy for a "rule light" system

But I still need to play-it to see how it runs, feel like there is a lot of "unique" concepts and that we'll need 2-3 one shot to get a feel how it runs

Ziggurat OP ,

Interesting, because I wouldn't thought about D&D/Pathfinder as game easing the GM job but indeed, well written module/campaign are really helpful, especially for a busy GM. Also a well balanced system is also a great tool

Ziggurat ,

Unlike heroic fantasy, there isn't one big sci fi games.

At the moment, I see mostly people playing Alien and Coriolis. I played only a couple of one shots, so have no strong opinion on them. But Alien's tension mechanic is neat.

Eclipse phase has an amazing lore, However, the system sucks, if you like the lore get the FATE of the eclipse version, not even that FATE is great, but it's a functional system unlike the D100 one

Ziggurat OP ,

A few thoughts on my side.

  • The sniper : At a shadowrun game, created a sniper with an interfaced gun, like never miss a target, it’s pretty cool, I stay at long range while providing cover to the PC. This turns out in The PC are having fun doing the mission, my character stays out as support, time to play tetris because for the next 2 hours I won’t do anything
  • The Malkavian : If you take the VtM lore as written, it’s great you’re dangerous, wise, borderline frightening and could explode at any moment. Practically, it’s hard to play madness properly, especially on a frightening way, it’s even harder when you’re the clan without clear “combat discipline” meaning that other PC won’t really fear you, and without a GM giving you “secret informations to handle”. I tried a few time but never got a satisfying result
Ziggurat OP ,

Some of my plan

  • Run a Mecha campaign, still not sure on the game, currently reading beam saber, which looks quite heavy for a “rule-light” game
  • Play a heroic fantasy larp, Since covid I’ve been more in high immersion parlour game
  • Find a seat at a World of Darkness table
Ziggurat OP ,

get into space RPGs. Anyone got any recommendations?

I played a lot of Fading Suns at the start of the century, we’re closer from Dune/Babylon 5 than from Star wars or Star treck in term of concept. The game isn’t new (well there was a 4E released recently), and Is a game from the late 90’s whose authors worked on Werewolf the Apocalypse this simple sentence tells a lot about the game (Faction who hate each other, imminent doom and more) if it’s your stuff go for it.

I played a couple of one shots of Alien and Coriolis, worked fine but I don’t know enough the game to have a hard advise on it

and as I said, I plan a Mecha campaign, Lancer seems to combat/crunch heavy so I plan to try Beam saber soon

Ziggurat OP ,

Unrelated question but for my culture

Set in the near future, it centers on junior high (middle) school-teacher

Is the Junior-High / Middle difference a regional split ? Or a administrative/legal jargon versus everyday’s dialect ? thing ?

Ziggurat OP ,

I would call it year of the one shots, being a big busy IRL (started improv theatre class last year, pretty great but it’s one more evening where I go to bed at midnight letting less room for RPGs) I didn’t wanted to commit to a campaign (well, at least not any campaign) so I played/GMed a lot of one shots/micro campaign (the longest was 5 sessions) with may be 20 session over the year

The good surprises were the Borg series(played Ork Borg, bought Cy Borg) , it’s actually rule light, efficient, and quite modern, not what I was expecting from an OSR, also played and GMed several 10 candles sessions.

Finally played some D&D 5e, it was like 10 years I hadn’t played D&D, still not my cup of tea, but was a fun one shot with a GM doing D&D but different

Pulled back a couple of old games from my shelves just to play a One shot, so fun moment too

Bad year larp wise, not a zero larp year, but just one small game (parlour larp) 40 persons over one night. Many games on my radar got cancelled, feel like many of us were worried about covid restriction leading to cancellation or not actively planning their season

Ziggurat ,

Rolling under ability, is nice and easy, to grasp, no wonder why it’s one of the most common mechanic in RPG, knowing that I have a score of 60 means that I have 60% chance of success.

However, mechanically, system, I feel like Multi-dices, like WOD/Shadowrun work better. A big issue with single-dice system is the flat probability distribution meaning that an untrained person are a pretty high probability of success while a trained person as still a pretty high probability of failure. I like more mechanics with less randomness.

Ziggurat ,

Indeed,

3D6 works way better than 1D20 as it makes character with a bad score, worse, character with a good score better, and character with an intermediate level decent. For a game, I replaced the 1D20 by 3D6, and I felt like it was an improvement, as suddenly outcome were more predictable.

At least with my player (at the time) it reduced tendencies to over optimize character, and frustration where these optimized character fail. It’s an easy house-rule that I would recommend when possible.

Ziggurat ,

Rolisteam is a FOSS VTT.

Let’s be honest, it was very great in 2010, before roll20, when the alternative where either Super-heavy maptool, and expensive fantasy ground, but the project hasn’t evolved much since then. But it does what you expect from a VTT including

  • Shared white-boards, with or without grid and background image (aka map), on which you can draw, and put tokens
  • Roll dice with any possible way
  • Group text chat, and private text-chat
  • Shared notes
  • Shared character sheets

It’s definitely less modern than stuff like roll20 or let’s role, but it’s still doing the job even though it hasn’t evolved much in 10 years. Also it’s a FOSS project using Qt and C++ , so I am sure that if someone wants to contributes it’s possible

Ziggurat ,

I am not sure the OGL debacle is really a reason. There is I don’t know how many thousands RPG published each years. If I do a search on kicksrarter for RPG in boardgame category I get above 6000 matches.

So tons of new RPG are being published each day, most of them are forgotten, some are good enough to drag a small but existing community, and may-be a dozen of games are big enough to provide a living revenue to their authors, while one game per decade really change the way we play (Basically D&D, Chtulhu, Vampire, Fate, Apocalypse world) so not sure there is something new under the sun.

The D&D player will keep playing D&D, the non D&D player will keep not playing it, and with the marketing power of Hasbro will keep having a long time telling beginner that there is more than just D&D or that tweaking D&D into a horror games where weak humans face cosmic error takes more work than buying COC

Ziggurat ,

I am from that player generation who played the WOD games in the early 00’s. Like nobody around was playing D&D, it was VtM, Dark-age, Werewolf, Eastern-Vampires, Mage, hunter and so on.

These games are greats, the system has a good balance between light and crunchy, the setting is amazing with a shit ton of secret, and the idea of playing power struggles as the apocalypse comes was pretty cool.

That said, these games also have their own issue. A big one is their tendency to behave like D&D with tons of sourcebook. Moreover each sourcebook/game are written by different people leading to contradiction in the lore, not a big deal except when everyone pretends to be an expert on the lore. Another big one is that you sell a game where you play monsters struggling to keep their humanity and political power game, and you end up having a system about killing and fiighting I believe the 5th edition solved some of these problems. A last one is that it’s really hard to get player to cooperate, not necessarily a big deal if everyone is aware of it, but there is the point where No, I don’t see why I’d play that quest, especially with these people comes to the table.

But still a very great set of games

Ziggurat ,

I don’t really get this obsession for “system” that some of the community has.

A system is there to support a lore, to take a cliché example, if you want character being normal human dealing with cosmic horror D&D is a bad choice, but if you want zero to hero campaign with character having Dragonball like power where they can destroy a whole planet with their fist, Call of Cthulhu won’t be a proper choice. Then the GM can really turns a good game into a bad campaign and the other way around.

With the amount of “PTBA” games (with all quality level) it’s hard to make any general statement, Iron sworn, Monster of the week, and kult are very different games concept.

A thing that disapoint me is that PTBA is seen as “rule light” when it’s actually pretty heavy rule wise. You need to give player helpsheet with moves, check table to see the consequence, definitely the opposite of rule light. It’s not necessarily a bad thing and playing by the rules is cool, but if you want simple rules where player would get the principle is 5 minutes it’s not the right choice.

Ziggurat ,

What does FKR means ?

It’s a pitty that the paper misses that point. It seems to be a variant of OSR with more weight on character and more free rules but no idea what it means practically

Ziggurat ,

I would still think that AI generator are the easiest. Stable diffusion is free (as in free speech, and as in free beer) and runs on your own PC provided you have a GPU. You can check the !imageai community to get some ideas on prompts and the kind of result you can get.

Then there is learning to draw, but expect a couple of years of classes, but someone who went from “can’t draw to can draw a character” know betters how much time is needed

Ziggurat ,

Congrats,

We need more normies sharing normal maps, most-of-us are intimidated by these professional grade maps we can see online. In the end, sometimes a simple map is a nice narrative support. Also it looks pretty nice, better than mine, everything is there and clear so no need for fancy lighting and high-details sprites

With the same logic, there is nothing bad in just having a sketch on a whiteboard, or even no map at all. People have been playing without map for decades.

Ziggurat OP ,

Thanks all for your feedback, Here is my typical technique

Run a couple of “discovery” one shots, the goal is for me to get some practice with the rules, and for the PC to discover the game without any other request.

Do a long post on the forum (my club still use those), where I explain the kind of campaign I plan, including duration and agenda, and no show policy

Based on the answers, the one shots, sometimes feedback from other people, I set a group. (Usually, it’s not that much choice anyway)

Session zero is a last “cleaning” moment, where sometimes we see that people aren’t aligned

But I already got group exploding mid-flight.

Also sometimes, I take the freedom to remind the shy players that “XXX talks a lot, but feel free to stop them” so they don’t feel left out

Ziggurat ,

My club is old school and has a forum. It’s still work quite well at announcing new games, and tracking ongoing games.

When I GM, I post a reminder 2-3 days before the session, but try to set up campaign at fixed dates

Ziggurat ,

On VTT, the one I use the most (I don’t play tactical miniature games but roleplayung games, maps are indicative but not critical) are a set of alphabetic A-Z tokens it’s incredibly versatile. Shall I buy a physical set, I’d go for something like that rather than any objet I would need tzice a year

Trying to fix a lack of Sci-Fi battlemaps on the web

I don’t see many Sci-Fi battlemaps being posted so I thought I would help out a little bit. I have been running 2 sci-fi rpgs concurrently for 3 years and have amassed quite a few decent maps that I have made in DungeonDraft. They are nothing special, but considering how rare sci-fi maps can be, I hope someone finds them...

Ziggurat ,

Thanks a lot.

We need more people to share their map. Even though, I rarely use battle map, it’s always helping building the ambience and avoid misunderstandings.

It’s great to have professional grade map, but even amateur maps are a nice addition to the community.

Ziggurat ,

I want rpg book to be complete and self supported. Rules are IMO less important than setting, so I expect rpg books to contain less rules than than lore.

I don’t want to use calculus to estimate damage, and realistically a big table of bonuses/maluses for an action is useless in real life as the GM has to set up a difficulty without breaking the game flow. But I want to know about that lady who rules her noble clan by poisoning her opponent, that cult of Eunuch monks who can see the future and the new religions who spread and is about to kick out the new God. These are the elements I need to create story.

Rules are an element to make the setting alive, and sometimes a whole part of that setting, for example D&D alignment and mage who forget their spell are a huge setting choice

World building: what cyberpunk tech would you make with room-temperature superconductivity?

Room-temperature superconductivity looks like it might be a step closer to becoming a reality. I need to steal some ideas, what technology would you put in a cyberpunk world that makes use of zero-resistance electronics without the need for massive cooling? Super-fast computers? Super-powerful magnets? Maglev? Railguns?

Ziggurat ,

Back to the future style hooverboard, it fits both in the punk aspect of cyberpunk and has that retrofuturist vibe. A nice video on the topic using high temperature superconductor (high temperature in the sense works in liquid nitrogen)

On the Dystopian side, room temperature supra-conductivity will reduce the price of MRI or even allow open ones, what about a building which use an MRI scanner at entrance like airport have metal detector nowadays

You could do cool stuff with maglev train, better electric engine or cheaper particle accelerators but it lack that the cyberpunk vibe.

GMs, how have you used ChatGPT to help run your games?

ChatGPT has been a lifeline for me as a GM with little spare time to prep and far too grand ambitions for the scale and scope of (D&D) campaign I want to run. I'm curious how other GMs have found ChatGPT and similar AI tools useful or helpful in running their own games. I'll share my own workflow below as a comment, and I hope...

Ziggurat ,

I did a couple of try with mixed result.

When pre-generating PC for one shot, I like to have some backstory and individual objective which might conflict with each other (e.g. adding a love triangle, or a cop infiltrated among the robbers). and I try to use chat GPT to turn bullet points into a whole paragraph of text.

I would say it’s more or less working, but still require some work to review/rewrite the text afterwards. I’ve seen chatGPT adding some "imaginary’ facts to the paragraph, and revealing “spoiler” to someone.

On the big picture, I am not sure that I saved that much time compared to writing it myself

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