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Numtini

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Everything posted by Numtini

  1. I ended up as a player for TTH. As a player, it felt both over the top and a letdown at the same time. A letdown because you just can't beat seeing an Elder God, but over the top because the moon felt more like "that's ridiculous" and not so much like "wow that's cool." It also felt like we had no agency for ep 6. We didn't discover the plot, we were told about it, and we were sent to fix it, despite being a bunch of college kids when FOC had paramilitary folks available. I love the idea of reversing 5 and 6. It fixes all these issues. Blowing it up and ruining their fun could also be connected into why the cult goes crazy and destroys everything, which I found pretty disconnected from the whole Mi-Go thing--a problem I had with the whole campaign. Have a cylinder warn the players about the moon, but tell them it will probably result in retribution against Cobb's? That adds a nice moral aspect to it. Yeah, you saved the world, but Little Johnny is cooking up his parents at the diner and that's partially on you.
  2. I should probably wander into this forum more often. I am currently sitting at my desk at town hall, about 15' from the tax window where I can hear people paying (and complaining about) their taxes (due the 1st so there are additional fees plus interest). Everyone's missed one of the most important things for investigators. Town Clerks hold vital records: birth, marriage, and most importantly for investigators death certificates. So if you want to find information about someone dying young or a pattern of deaths or anything like that, this would be a great place to look. Marriage records could tell you what families intermingled what what others. Records prior to around 1920 are also sort of rambling, usually handwritten in a large book. Town halls also (even today) end up as a nexus for town gossip. Town Hall would really be a primary research location in a scenario set in New England, right up there with the library or newspaper offices. Governmental structure of Massachusetts towns is that a Board of Selectmen act as a sort of "collective" mayor. They're the executive and run day to day operations, not officially the legislative branch. Nowadays, most towns have moved to a professional town manager who runs things day to day rather than moving to a mayoral system, but in the '20s, the Selectmen would be actively involved and probably stop in Town Hall every day or so to sign this or that. Even today, we can't mail our bill payments until 3 of the 5 Selectmen show up at Town Hall and physically sign off. Town Meeting is the "legislative" branch and consists of all the voters in the town. It's held once or twice a year and voters gather and vote on articles written up in a warrant. In the old Four Freedoms painting by Norman Rockwell, the little blue books are the warrant. (15 years of Town Meeting have left me cynical as hell. Just looking at the guy, I'll bet good cash money that he's asking about something that's explained in the warrant, but he hasn't bothered to read it.) A truly excellent source for getting a view into small town New England is to peruse some Town Reports. Archive.org has a lot of these from the 20s and 30s digitized. For example, Hamilton sits roughly where Arkham would be, though it's smaller than I perceive the Arkham to be based on Chaosium publications. Here's their 1921 town report. You'll find the payments, what is tracked and taxed, and you can see the warrant. You can figure out a lot here. For example, most areas had phones by this point, but many rural areas even in New England weren't electrified. Well, if there's a line item for "lighting" then you know they were electrified. If there's only one for fuel, then probably not.
  3. I answered map and handouts, but exactly this. I'll draw something on a mat/roll20 but it's not used for miniatures or meant to be to scale. It's just a visual depiction.
  4. Well OGLs that I've seen are generally rules with the setting removed, so it's unlikely you'd see them put the settings into one anyway. Having said that, it hasn't been litigated to my knowledge, but Lovecraft's material is generally considered to be out of copyright. There's a likely-spurious claim from Arkham House, but they don't seem to be defending it or sadly doing much of anything else these days. Derleth and others works are, I believe, still under copyright and off the top of my head, there's a few critters that appear in Lovecraft, but are only named by Derleth or others, so you may need a license for some of the names we commonly know. But that could be worked around. Byakee become winged-ones or whatever. On OGL rules in general, I don't get the impression that Chaosium likes the concept, which is a shame because you can't copyright rules systems and given the number of d100 games that are operating outside of license, it's obvious that the cat is out of the bag. It seems to me that OGLing the BRP would effectively focus attention back on Chaosium rather than diffuse it and is unlikely to cost them any sales.
  5. I answered map and handouts. However, sometimes there is no map, and sometimes we'll make limited use of some kind of token/miniature to show where people are. The map is just a visualization tool though, to make things clear. There's never any sort of using a grid of measuring things or worrying about movement--other than by eyeballing it.
  6. I think that's a bit misleading. Money was only an issue for me in that people tell me there's something really great about FG, but with the demo (which claims to let you do everything but invite other players), all I've seen is a cluttered, confusing, outdated interface and a lot of paywalls. Maybe there's something more there, but I'm not going to pony up to find out. Roll20, to me, was very intuitive to start with. There's a grid, there are drawing tools to use it like a battlemap or I can drop a graphic on it, there's a dice roller. There are character sheets and you fill them out and click on skills and it rolls for you. You can import things to the grid tabletop to use as maps or visuals. You can do handouts that are visible to some or all of the players. It has built in audio and video. People may prefer one or the other system, but this is not simply that some people are too cheap to pony up for the "good" system and are making do with something lesser.
  7. Roll 20 works great, the character sheet does auto-rolling complete with bonus/penalty dice and success levels. I think the best way to learn it is to jump into a one shot. Having used it a couple of times as a player, I had no trouble running a game. I used the "table" for maps, but just as a visual aid, not for a "miniatures and grids" thing. It's really helpful to just be able to ping a spot and say "I'm hiding there" the way you would with a handout face to face. I didn't find it hard to adjust at all and I was particularly unsure about how I would deal with all the dice as I really really love dice. But the auto-rolls (you click on the skill and it just rolls for you) are easy and it all feels like a real game. I've had good luck with the built in audio and video as well.
  8. Well, I'll be the counter-anecdote because I pretty much lived the phenomenon that MOB is talking about. In the 82-84 period I was running two RQ sessions a week. Sometimes more. We ran through Griffin, Borderlands, and Pavis/Rubble. At the time it was The Game that all the cool kids were playing, not to mention rambling on about in A&E and so on. I ran RQ3 once or twice and then basically dropped the system entirely. It wasn't what I was looking for. We moved on to CoC as our primary game. Honestly, I haven't run or been in a RQ or Gloranthan game since. It wasn't just the support though. My general feeling were the changes were not for the positive and I found the multiple books difficult to work with. One can mark this as petty, but the physical product was poor and my first thought even today about RQ3 is "books made of tissue paper."
  9. Please do a pre-order. I think you're going to be surprised at how many people missed the 13G and want in.
  10. Three books is a big investment. It's easy to capture the old die hards, but that's a heck of an investment to ask people to make who are new to the game. I think one of the big positives about CoC is that while there are two core rulebooks, you only actually need one.
  11. Or not. Since posting that I received a shipping notice and my spare Keepers guide got here today.
  12. As someone who loves the changes, if anything, I tend to perceive here and Yog as more critical of the changes than among casual CoC players. Nobody seems to be bothered either way. I should say love the changes except the ablities going from 3-18 to percentile because I was used to converting them in my head and now in 7th I keep finding myself unconverting them then reconverting to percentages in my head. I realize this means I probably failed a SAN roll somewhere.
  13. Is this for pre-orders from back in May?
  14. The Chaosium site seems to have redubbed it as The 7th Edition Rulebook
  15. Way back in the day, Borderlands came out when my characters were already rather hostile to the Lunars to say the least, so I had it set up that a Runelord in the exile underground requested they sign on with Raus and report back whatever they could about why he was exiled and if he was truly loyal to the Lunars or might sit out a rebellion.
  16. My copy arrived yesterday on Cape Cod. It was well packed and looks wonderful, though it's a bit weird to see it without years of wear on it. I was in the cult of the cheapskate who just got the hardcover + GM shield, not any of the supplements if that makes any difference to anything.
  17. On the Runequest = Glorantha, I couldn't agree more. There was a thread on reddit with someone considering RQ as a system and they expressed that they felt like it was missing something to make it all make sense and pretty much everything they mentioned makes perfect sense once you add the Glorantha in. It's not ancient Rome or Greece, it's Glorantha and it just makes sense.
  18. This is starting to get funny, to be honest. Both the stubbornness and the feeling it's something that has to be addressed. The reality is that we're really talking about the internal/insider shorthand, not what goes on the cover. RQ4 is clearly a hill that Chaosium has decided to die on, so that's that. But I suspect it will always be conveyed to newcomers asking about RQ with an asterisk explaining that RQ4 is the one that comes after RQ6 because reasons.
  19. The biggest concern I have with a new RQ is whether or not it's approachable. I remember RQ2 as being a really fun game with this great background of plucky barbarians, an evil empire, and a bunch of easy to understand Gods that kind of felt like classes in other game, except so much better. HQ Gloranthan materials, on the other hand, often leave me feeling like I'm in a test and I haven't read the material. There are ways to make Glorantha very approachable--the merchant's travelogue in Cults of Prax comes to mind, but I feel like that hasn't been the direction that Glorantha has been heading in for a very long time.
  20. Unfortunately, the problem is best avoided before a player ends up losing 20% of their sanity in a day. If the players didn't back off after a bunch of shocks, I'd probably push them to take a night of R&R and possibly even adjust the scenario. Late in a scenario, having someone lose it may very well be worth it for the narrative effect, but if someone is that fragile really early in the investigation, it may be time for them to retire to the laughing academy in favor of another character. No player is going to want to, week after week, effectively play half a scenario and then end up incapacitated. Also, no characters in "real life" would keep dragging them along on the investigation if they were that fragile.
  21. I'm not great at some mathematical stuff, but isn't a penalty/bonus die within a few percent of halving/doubling the chance? FWIW, I love the 7th changes and I date from the 1st edition.
  22. I don't think they need to adopt systems if they're not needed. I do, however, think that if CoC has an elegant way of handling something that RQ2 currently doesn't, that ought to be the first "go to" for the solution. If it doesn't work, well it doesn't work, and you move on.
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