Book Layouts

[Trill]

even if it wasn't made by the game company.

Seeing CGL it's likely because it isn't by them that it works

[phlapjackage]

I was able to handle quite the range of house-rules on Shadowrun through Chummer - even if it wasn't made by the game company.

Yeah, this was the very first thing that sprang to mind when thinking about moddable char generators. Chummer had it all...almost too much, actually. I feel it started to fall prey to the "too many options" problem.

[Grek]

Go try to use Chummer with Ends of the Matrix. I'll wait.

[Trill]

I did
Most of it was just changing a few items/adding new ones.
But it wasn't much more work than e.g. putting Tachikomas in

[virgil]

I did. There was a change in cost (which custom pricing exists), but otherwise the actual changes were in gameplay/resolution, which isn't Chummer's job.

[phlapjackage]

For fuck's sake, Chummer is pretty much the gold standard for a character generator (and it's free yo). If Grek's not happy with Chummer, they're not going to be happy with anything.

[echoVanguard]

Champions and Feng Shui both have reasonably good descriptions of how to create adventures, but those games are literally series of setpiece encounters held together with genre tropes and mind caulk.

Isn't this true of all modern RPGs? It could certainly be applied faithfully to most games we discuss here.

echo

[Grek]

For fuck's sake, Chummer is pretty much the gold standard for a character generator (and it's free yo). If Grek's not happy with Chummer, they're not going to be happy with anything.

And so my stated dissatisfaction with all character generators for RPGs. The nature of the medium makes them inherently insufficient as far as I'm concerned.

[Ferret]

Discounting the quality of the actual rules, how do you guys think the D&D 4e books worked out? Both the original core set and the Essentials compendiums?

[Username17]

Champions and Feng Shui both have reasonably good descriptions of how to create adventures, but those games are literally series of setpiece encounters held together with genre tropes and mind caulk.

Isn't this true of all modern RPGs? It could certainly be applied faithfully to most games we discuss here.

echo

There's a difference between a game like Shadowrun that is nominally a sandbox and a game like Champions which is basically a fighting game. In Shadowrun there are areas and you decide how to interact with them. In Feng Shui the characters start in a tea house and then that tea house gets attacked by demon ninjas.

Basically, in classic D&D, the players have the choice of going left or right and that's supposed to influence the outcome of the adventure. In games like Feng Shui and Champions you don't usually make much in the way of meaningful choices until the combat music starts. Those games aren't wrong, but obviously writing adventure guidelines for them is way fucking easier than it is for other games in which the stuff "between" combats is also meaningfully part of the interactive portion of the adventure.

Discounting the quality of the actual rules, how do you guys think the D&D 4e books worked out?

4e is basically a legend in how it wastes more textual space than was previously even possible. So a single character class takes up about 12 thousand words, which is pretty obscene. And then the abilities you get are arranged in a way that is easy to explain but doesn't actually come in the order that things show up in. Just the fact that your class powers come before the paragon powers even though the order you actually get them is sandwiched with alternating selections from the two lists makes me want to kill myself.

A typical 4th edition ability is extremely boring but also takes like twice as many words as a much broader and more interesting Shadowrun spell. And the arrangement of things is a fucking nightmare. I don't think I could handle 4th edition D&D at all without a searchable pdf. Linked items are rarely in the same fucking chapter.

-Username17

[mlangsdorf]

Ignoring the awfulness of the game design and the writing, the lay-out of the 4th edition PHB is pretty good.

Starts with Credits.
Has a Table of Contents with a reasonable amount of detail.
Discusses what an RPG is, and how you play one, including an example of play.
Introduces the core mechanic early on.

The section on character creation goes through the procedure for creating a character first with a summary of all the options, and then explains why you might want certain options and not others.

Most player facing mechanics are described in the player's guide, so in theory you know that you need Investigate to search for traps, and Perception to spot hidden monsters.

There's an index which is too short and sparse, but it exists.

The DMG is a little less well laid out. The first two chapters are basics on how to be a GM, then there's three chapters on running combat encounters, building combat encounters, and non-combat encounters. Half the stuff on running combat encounters should have been in the PHB and the rest re-organized into building encounters and running encounters. Then there's sections on adventure design, quest rewards, campaigns, designing a game world, miscellaneous GM advice, and a sample campaign site and mini-adventure.

I think if I were writing a new game, I'd want to mimic a lot of the organization of the 4e PHB and the user friendliness of the writing, with lots of bits about why you would want to pick an option for your character. The actual rules for combat in chapter 9 of the PHB are decent - I think they're at least as clear as the 3e rules and would make an okay replacement for the 3e rules if you wanted something a little less fiddly.

The real failure of 4e was every other rule chapter: non-combat encounters sucked. Classes sucked and are way too wordy and poorly organized. Magic items and quest rewards sucked. The sample adventures were all linear combat grinds that didn't support skipping encounters. But the PHB lay-out was pretty good.

[K]

I'm surprised that there was never any pics of the dev team in RPG books. I mean, conventions were a part of the hobby, so I'd think that for marketing purposes you'd want devs to be noticeable.

[nockermensch]

I'm surprised that there was never any pics of the dev team in RPG books.

And I'm not.

[K]

I'm surprised that there was never any pics of the dev team in RPG books.

And I'm not.

Sure, he's not going to be starring in any Hollywood films any time soon, but have you seen any Kickstarter videos?

You don't have to be a heartbreaker to be a game designer. You don't even have to be one to be someone who can promote games at a convention.

[Koumei]

You don't have to be a heartbreaker to be a game designer. You don't even have to be one to be someone who can promote games at a convention.

I dunno, if I made a game that I was going to try to properly market and get it sold, I would absolutely have the promoters be strippers, J-pop bands (Baby Metal if I could book them for it. Spoilers: I couldn't) and particularly handsome pro wrestlers like Kota Ibushi.

Yes that might just come across as super-shallow, but if you get them really well-read on the subject matter such that when someone asks a question they have an answer, that should handle that.

[brized]

Yeah. Sex sells:

https://movieweb.com/last-jedi-reasons- ... beautiful/

[OgreBattle]

I was staff at a game jam last week, was asked to cosplay so I went as a generic konoha ninja 'cause I got a sweet jounin vest from Amazon.

One of the professors was dressed as 2B from Nier, her students bought her the costume. That student then got a nosebleed from her costume.