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Nick J.

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Posts posted by Nick J.

  1. On 3/31/2020 at 1:39 AM, Newt said:

    I'll have to check this out  I've recently got back into online gaming and was considering using Roll D20, since its commonly used.  With OQ3 on the way perhaps now is the time to consider support. . 

    If anyone finds anything that is ready made please let me know. 

    The nearest I've found to an OpenQuest character sheet on Roll20 is the Renaissance sheet (which of course is based on OpenQuest). Perhaps the author of that sheet would be willing to do a conversion, but honestly I have no idea about the ins and outs of what it would take to get that done.

    With all of my gaming done online these days, and the imminent release of OQ3 (loving what I've seen in the backer copy so far) having at least some kind of Virtual Table Top support would be great (whether that's Fantasy Grounds, Foundry VTT, or Roll20).

     

    • Like 1
  2. On 2/21/2021 at 11:50 AM, rsanford said:

    I wonder if Osprey would be willing to do something like MU with Jackals. It has a lot of the same appeal as Magic World but much better production values. Jackals might be the new Magic World. What do y’all think?

    What makes it, "The new Magic World" in your opinion? I know it's based at least in part on OpenQuest, so I assume that means Total Hit Points, static armor damage reduction, etc., but isn't it fairly well fixed in place as a psuedo-Bronze Age setting game? What does it do to fill the niche that Magic World might occupy as a less complex, general purpose D100, fantasy game?

    • Like 1
  3. 7 hours ago, Simlasa said:

    I've always liked the idea of hit locations, but not always how they're implemented... depending on the nature of the attack.

     

    Yep, I'm perfectly content with simulating it with variable armor and major wound tables (ala Magic World, Elric!, etc.). Locations do matter, and there's more than one way to get there.

    • Like 2
  4. 2 hours ago, Zenith Comics Presents... said:

    Can you elaborate? Pretty please? 🙂

    Sure

    [quote]When using hand-to-hand melee weapons the attacker may freely select the location where the blow lands, as long as that location is normally within reach.

    If using ranged weapons Choose Location is a Critical Success only, unless the target is within close range and is either stationary or unaware of 
    the attacker.[/quote]

    So in a nutshell, a higher level of success let's a character aim where they wish, which is exactly what you'd expect in a fight (unarmed or otherwise).

    • Like 2
  5. 5 hours ago, RogerDee said:

    Yeah they did.

    At no point in 30 years of budo, and numerous real fights have I ever aimed at someone's head and hit their knee, nor their stomach.

    So yeah, hit locations are garbage.

    It is absolutely possible for someone to mis-read a strike and then move into the strike instead of away from. Hit locations are only okay to use with say weapons if it bounces off it slides along it into another body part.

    For instance I blocked a mid level bokken strike poorly such that it rebounded off it hitting me in the eyebrow. But for fist fights, hit locations are plainly false.

    "Choose location" special effect in Mythras is pretty neat-o. 

    • Like 3
  6. 2 hours ago, jackleg2010 said:

    I had been looking at it. The price is nice, so I ordered the print version. They also included the PDF. 🙂 I was wondering, is there any major errata to look for in the book?

    The PDF should be edited to include all of the errata. but here's the errata (as of 2016) 

     

  7. 1 hour ago, Vile said:

    [...] , in more "serious" games like MW it's rare you come across a player who can really pull off a convincing non-human character.

    In my experience, it's usually just "people in funny hats" syndrome when you get right down to it, but I've got a couple of people I play with currently that try to lean into it. The grimalkin in the current campaign seems to be a favorite, but then again, these people own cats so they've got plenty of source material to fall back on. Personally, I've never been any good at playing a non-human convincingly. (Of course that never stopped me from constantly rolling up wood elf rangers in AD&D 1st ed. games in junior high and high school all those years ago -- gotta get them sweet racial bonuses and hiding abilities!).

    • Like 2
  8. I've only ever read one good take on Halflings

    Quote
    Most importantly, halflings breed from spawn sacs much like goblins (though unlike goblins, halflings are not all functional self-fertilizing hermaphrodites) and halflings have little regard for their offspring.  It is possible that this general lack of parental impulse is cultural, but even then this  is understandable, as a halfling spawn are self-sufficent (if stupid, animalistic and vicious) within hours after birth, scurrying about on all fours and almost immediately hunting small animals and insects to devour.  In Denethix and other large human towns the attics, basements and alleys of halfling neighborhoods are often filled with spawn sacks and cruel little pods of cannibalistic halfling infants.  The same holds with most rural areas, except spawn sacs cluster in out of the way hollows or copses of trees that only the unwise to venture into and which can be lethal if one is not prepared to fight a pack of snarling children.  Halfing childhood is dangerous, and few survive the predations of their older siblings, wild animals or the harsh life of small fleshy creatures living in the open.  Yet this may be a good thing, as without this high infant mortality halflings would vastly outnumber the other races of man, and spread locust like, depleting land after land in their hungry hordes.
     
    At about four years of age the feral halfling infant has developed enough intelligence to begin skulking around the fringes of civilized society, living as a scavenger and hunter of alley cats, but also picking up the rudiments of language and behavior.  By the age of ten most halfling infants have mimicked enough culture to become beggars and street thieves, running with a pack of their own kind until they are strong and smart enough to be noticed by older halflings and drafted into the adult halfling community as something other than vermin. The halflings’ feral childhood, a product of alien biology, explains much of the scandalous rumor about halflings and is the basis of many of their bizarre behaviors.

    In my Dolmenwood game (running on top of Magic World) I've got Coblynau, which are are replacement for dwarfs, being more akin to earth spirits, elves are in fact changelings or may have a hint of fey blood (but don't have their own culture), goatmen, and grimalkin (master cat, "Puss in Boots" style cat-folk), wodewose, and veggie-based moss dwarfs. True elves (sidhe) are frequently cruel and capricious and always NPCs. I also nicked a lot of the bestiary from Val-du-Loup, and there's there's plenty of fey that come in various shapes and sizes, that people might call goblins, trolls, ogres, etc. but aren't easily classified as a race or species unto themeselves.

    By and large I really don't like the D&D-style humanoids as savages, and prefer monsters to be truly alien and monstrous.

    • Like 1
  9. 1 hour ago, Nikoli said:

    Nick above also posted a reformulated Deep Magic glyph and spheres table, if I recall. They were ordered in a more logical way, with more logical opposites and adjacent spheres. (I think I have the file as Deep Magic Revised.) I would also use that if using Deep Magic.

     

    I did. I can't remember if I did anything other than upload the revised graphic, but if anybody is interested I'm happy to upload my Deep Magic house rules (It's nothing special, just some minor tweaks that were inspired by @rsanford's Deep Magic revision). Also Ignore some of the fluff; it's strictly related to my Dolmenwood-Magic World game.

     

    Deep Magic Revised.pdf

    • Like 1
    • Thanks 1
  10. 19 minutes ago, g33k said:

    I'm kinda-sorta in that space, but still a bit annoyed at player-cheating.

    I also add that I feel a responsibility to my other players:  if they object to their "peers" cheating in this way, if the cheating interferes with THEIR fun... then I feel not just entitled but obligated to step in and stop it.

     

    I was being a bit flippant, but you're right of course. I do find cheating annoying, and thankfully I haven't really spotted any in the wild since I played way back in the olden times of high school (aside from a GM whom I caught fudging dice rolls to save PCs -- which killed my interest in the game).

    These days I've got a very stable online group, and everyone seems to be there for the same reason and that's to have fun and (presumably) let the chips fall where they may. To be fair the only real option to cheat at dice is during character generation where I usually let people roll up their characters on their own and then submit it to me (especially if it's a replacement character), everything else is handled with a dice roller where almost all dice rolls are done in the open

  11. 3 minutes ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

    Maybe they are not sad loser, maybe you story telling skills are so great, and your story so gripping, that the players can't bear to fail at the most inopportune moment! 😮 

    If that's true then those people picked the wrong guy to run them through a game. No stakes, no game.

    • Haha 1
  12. 8 hours ago, rsanford said:

    Well if using Discord you could ask for a dice roll and then wait for it to be displayed on the Discord dashboard. I don't remember if it is time stamped or not but you can tell when something has been rolled.

     

    You just have to add a dice roller "bot" to the server; I think I googled around or maybe found one mentioned in a Reddit threat. The one we use is called Dash Delta, and I think it's a pretty good one (has macro support, exploding dice, etc., etc.)

  13. Here's what I think of cheating. If your life is so sad and pathetic that you have to cheat at make believe then all I ask is that you don't make it obvious. I used to be super uptight about making sure all rolls were done under careful observation, and then it finally struck me that I really don't care if someone cheats in a RPG. I'm not scripting a story that must go "just so", and we're not playing for money, so it's no skin off of my nose. That said, if I ever catch somebody cheating in a game I run, I'll probably ask that person to not come back . . . not out of anger, but because I don't want to hang out with sad-sack losers in my free time.

    • Like 2
  14. 5 hours ago, rsanford said:

    @Nick J. what’s your opinion of the rune/tattoo magic in the book? I  like the idea but I think it would require a lot of development.

    Frankly, I don't know. On the one hand it allows for some long duration glyphs/runes that can be triggered long after they are etched (which means they might be suitable gifts from an NPC Runecaster to PCs without ready access to sorcery or other magic). On the other hand it seems like kind of an odd fit with the normal sorcery rules in place (at least insofar as it being an attractive choice for the average player). I assigned Rune Magic to the Coblynau (aka. knockers, aka "dwarfs") in the Dolmenwood game and since nobody has chosen to play a Coblynau (nor even encountered one yet) it's been a moot point. In retrospect I think it would have made a lot of sense to restrict it to NPC-only magic, but if you or anybody else decides to play a Runecaster I'll certainly allow it and see how it plays out.

    I think a simpler solution would be to make all sorcery castable as runes (or scrolls, or whatever) that can be triggered at a later date by having a sorcerer spend a point of POW to bind that spell to the rune-etched surface. At whatever point the spell is triggered, the rune fades, and the spell runs its normal course and the point of POW returns to the caster.

  15. As @rsanford says I have allowed Deep Magic for the past couple of Magic World campaigns I've run, but I'm not sure I'm sold on it. the player who pushed for it, also has a tendency towards power-gaming (which isn't a bad thing per se, since he's also a talented, role-player), but it's a headache more often than not when I feel like I'm constantly having to adjudicate it so it doesn't become too powerful/unbalanced with respect to the other PCs and the challenges they typically face.

    As for the rest I think the Arete rules are the biggest addition to the game, and I use all of the other bits with Fey Magic restricted to they Fey (obviously), Rune Magic is the provenance of the dwarfs (who are more akin to Cornish knockers than Tolkien pastiches), and the rest is sprinkled around the rest of the setting as the mood takes me.

    • Like 3
  16. 2 hours ago, Vile said:

    How do you all feel about this? Personally I'm quite happy to let players roll 2D6+6 seven times and allocate as they see fit. Back in my D&D / RQ2 days of 3D6 everyone I gamed with universally rolled 4D6-drop-the-lowest. Either way, of course, when individual characteristics start diverging from the standard 3-18 range you can't freely swap things around. Not too bad in MW, because I don't encourage non-human adventurers anyway.

    Hmm ... straying into house rules territory here, but you could also roll all the dice and then just allocate them individually to characteristics as you wish ... 🤔

    Say what you like about low-characteristic adventurers being character-building (and I don't necessarily disagree with the sentiment),  but in my experience most players are happier with an above-average character.

    On the topic of degrees of success, it seems a lot of us prefer more variation (à la MW Critical / Special / Success / Fail / Fumble), but at the same time no-one is really happy with  the fiddly calculations involved. In practice I find them easy enough to remember after a while, but that's not ideal. Another issue for me, after many years of fumbled attack rolls, is how repetitive the combat fumble tables get after a while. Skill fumbles didn't really become a thing until relatively recently, which may be why they're just guidelines for the most part (except for Sailing). Also, it would take a page per skill to have fumble tables for each one, and you'd still run into the most-used ones getting repetitive. I guess the trouble with combat is that the risk to life and limb is more immediate, so there might be a problem with the referee just arbitrarily deciding the result of a fumble. Is there a happy medium? I don't now.

    Why are we happy with just one result for a critical or a special, but we need lots of variation when we fumble? Is it psychological, i.e. a win already has us hyped, while detailing the fumble  turns it into a roleplaying experience rather than just a simple downer?

    On characteristics: The 2D6+6 method is how I handle it (for human characters). It definitely skews towards above average, but the difference between the RAW method and the Elric! method isn't so dramatic as it might be in a D&D type game where attribute bonuses seem to have a much higher influence on success or failure (particularly in the beginning).

    On Fumbles: I think the the thing with wanting fumbles to be a little bit random is probably rooted in the same part of my brain that enjoys blooper reels (or Jackass) -- I like a little bit of chaos and "Three Stooges" prat falls in my games. That said, I find myself increasingly drawn to the Mythras method, whereby you stack special effects based on the differential level of opposed rolls between attacker and defender; it feels like it solves the issue of table look-ups and gives characters and GMs a little more opportunity to kind of narrate the outcome in a (hopefully) entertaining way.

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