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Playing Runequest on Roll20


Beorne

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I will set up a dedicated Roll20 game where people can play with macros and other features. It will be separate from the other test game mentioned here as that is specific for testing character sheet modifications.

I will post the link here, as I see people joining I will make them GMs.

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Okay, there is a simple setup, one adventurer & NPC. PM me your email address and I will invite you to the game. Due to the potential for abuse in this particular setup, please do not invite anyone to the game. If anyone appears that I don't recognise, I will shut the game down.

It's not my intention to actually add anything to this. Feel free to add your own macros and adventurers.

This is an experiment.

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51 minutes ago, Scotty said:

Okay, there is a simple setup, one adventurer & NPC. PM me your email address and I will invite you to the game. Due to the potential for abuse in this particular setup, please do not invite anyone to the game. If anyone appears that I don't recognise, I will shut the game down.

It's not my intention to actually add anything to this. Feel free to add your own macros and adventurers.

This is an experiment.

I cannot imagine this being massively active but it should be useful for spreading useful work.  I have a similar set up for  HERO game and I promise to copy over a number of macros I have been using online.  Much less fancy than what David produces but I think useful...

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Regarding weapon skills over 100% one thing that has come to mind is there  a lot swapping in and out of modifiers when one character is using a single weapon skill for attack and parry against someone who has an a lower skill in their attacking weapon and a higher skill in their parrying weapon skill?

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10 hours ago, dvdmacateer said:

Regarding weapon skills over 100% one thing that has come to mind is there  a lot swapping in and out of modifiers when one character is using a single weapon skill for attack and parry against someone who has an a lower skill in their attacking weapon and a higher skill in their parrying weapon skill?

RQG characters tend to the powerful side anyway. I often have players with skills above 100%, especially when Weapon Trance is in play, but NPCs generally tend to lower skills in published material. So the modifiers usually tend to be on one side, and usually fairly consistent.

In terms of needing to make constant modifiers, repeated parries/dodges is more of an issue for me. Is that the 3rd parry (at -40) or the 4th (at -60)? And have I reached the point where the reduction is “all but 5%” yet? 

Edited by Arcadiagt5
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The interesting thing (to me anyway) is that all the Roll20 character sheets I have seen (admittedly not a huge selection) tend to be simulating the pen and paper character sheets.  There seems to have been little evolution to take advantage of the medium.

Now, obviously, there are benefits, making rolls appear in the chat bar in some beautiful packaging and combining rolls (hit AND location) and determining specials and critical in places.  There seems to be little innovation beyond those quality of life improvements.

I was wondering whether my observation here is a non-technical dream that has no practical basis or simply that it is so much work just to convert that actual design innovation is too much to expect outside a paid environment (I do realise the majority of these are unpaid labours of love and hugely appreciate those efforts).

Stephen

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3 hours ago, StephenMcG said:

The interesting thing (to me anyway) is that all the Roll20 character sheets I have seen (admittedly not a huge selection) tend to be simulating the pen and paper character sheets.  There seems to have been little evolution to take advantage of the medium.

I was thinking the same. There is already blurring between TTRPG with PC gaming/tools.  Roll20 certainly allows remote gaming but it (and other applications) may have a roll to play to 'computer assist' TTRPG. Imagine being able to select spirit magic and the various modifiers just play through automatically.  You cast a Shimmer 2 and the negative modifier is automatically applied to the NPC attacking you.

D&D has an app (D&D Beyond?); there are various RPG campaign management tools.  I have heard (but not verified) that the Free League games have excellent implementations in Foundry VTT. It's good to see this innovation. Imagine being able to play a (TT)RPG like RQG without really having to know the rules because so much of the mechanical aspects are taken care of for you. That lowers the barriers to entry and creates a greater addressable market e.g. PC gamers.

I can see aspects of VTTs that may well be of service even for a face-to-face TTRPG session. For example, having a map on which to move virtual characters and NPC's.

I'm looking forward to what this phase of innovation delivers.

 

Edited by RandomNumber
Typo
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3 hours ago, StephenMcG said:

The interesting thing (to me anyway) is that all the Roll20 character sheets I have seen (admittedly not a huge selection) tend to be simulating the pen and paper character sheets.  There seems to have been little evolution to take advantage of the medium.

 

Examples?

 I was a database programmer but my programming skills have long decayed.  The vast majority of sheet creators are amateurs usually learning JavaScript, html and CSS as they go and add to that learning how do this on Roll20 VTT framework and using Github to release sheets.  Very few have any graphical skills and that is why paper sheets get  get used as base anything else would mean considerably more time .  Sheets with any serious automation take hundreds of hours. 

Expecting more is the realm of paid professionals, all of who will want to get paid a not too inconsiderable amount of money  and there is likely to be zero portability between VTTs.  If you are looking to turn it into near video game levels of "computer assist" this an order of magnitude greater.  This will all be tied the VTT operator and if they go out of business or take a dislike to you say goodbye to your VTT game rulebooks/compendiums.  Also most TTRPG publishers are physical book publishers. If full automation is available why buy a physical book.

Another thing to add to this is the push to mobile which will mean more design input and more than likely simplification of sheets.

 

 

Edited by dvdmacateer
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15 hours ago, Arcadiagt5 said:

In terms of needing to make constant modifiers, repeated parries/dodges is more of an issue for me. Is that the 3rd parry (at -40) or the 4th (at -60)? And have I reached the point where the reduction is “all but 5%” yet? 

I have been thinking about adding a separate parry modifier and parry button

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1 hour ago, dvdmacateer said:

If you are looking to turn it into near video game levels of "computer assist" this an order of magnitude greater.  This will all be tied the VTT operator and if they go out of business or take a dislike to you say goodbye to your VTT game rulebooks/compendiums. 

I suspect I wouldn’t be playing RQG at all if it wasn’t for the development you have done on the character sheet. My players are hugely impressed at how seamless the player experience is - attack, damage and location rolls are efficient, even some stat augment spirit magic is built in.  Thank you. Gamechanging - literally.  Given my only RPG opportunities are virtual, I will only be playing games that are digitally enabled.  Thankfully, Chaosium’s game are to some extent.

Running with your train of thought, it seems plausible that most of the development in this space will come from the big guns. Which I guess means Hasbro/WOTC - they have the resources to innovate and their recent results call showed that D&D is performing very well.  Very much of anything else for any other system would have to be more in the ‘labour of love’ space.  I have been a Chaosium fan-boy for 40 years but if I had the skills, time and needed to get paid, I would probably innovate/start-up for D&D. Bigger market.

VTTs are super interesting because platform economics may be starting to emerge.  If more and more people are drawn to RPG through a VTT then the power could start to shift to the VTT from the games companies as owning the customer relationship. App Store, Netflix etc.

I’d wager someone at Hasbro is already staring at Roll20 and figuring out whether they should vertically integrate. Then they can build out more content, enablement, subscription services etc without Roll20 clipping the ticket. So I’m looking forward to the innovation, recognising that it will be monetised.

 

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2 hours ago, dvdmacateer said:

Examples?

 I was a database programmer but my programming skills have long decayed.  The vast majority of sheet creators are amateurs usually learning JavaScript, html and CSS as they go and add to that learning how do this on Roll20 VTT framework and using Github to release sheets.  Very few have any graphical skills and that is why paper sheets get  get used as base anything else would mean considerably more time .  Sheets with any serious automation take hundreds of hours. 

Expecting more is the realm of paid professionals, all of who will want to get paid a not too inconsiderable amount of money  and there is likely to be zero portability between VTTs.  If you are looking to turn it into near video game levels of "computer assist" this an order of magnitude greater.  This will all be tied the VTT operator and if they go out of business or take a dislike to you say goodbye to your VTT game rulebooks/compendiums.  Also most TTRPG publishers are physical book publishers. If full automation is available why buy a physical book.

Another thing to add to this is the push to mobile which will mean more design input and more than likely simplification of sheets.

I was thinking that the character sheet might simply be a series of macros, not sure whether the sheet might provide macros.  For example, an attack button on the main screen which would give you a drop down containing your weapons.  A battle magic drop down for your spells. I reckon allowing certain skills or actions to come with customised quotes would be cool, that might mean putting editable text boxes on the sheet that get called when the skill is used. It might be cool to have an option to have spells with a cool down (though possibly more useful in games like D&D which gave a more traditional round system.  There are probably dozens of features that would enhance play, leveraging the electronic environment.

You make a good point with regard to the different skills and non-portability of the work. But I think I said that I thought a lot of this might come down to paid work either than labour's of love. 🙂  I do appreciate the work that has gone in and, I have said in other threads, that I would be content to buy access to enhanced character sheets.  I think creators should be able to monetise things just as much as Roll20 does.  I think the sheet creators are short-changed compared to asset creators.

 

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5 hours ago, dvdmacateer said:

I have been thinking about adding a separate parry modifier and parry button

That sounds great. Would the parry modifier also apply to dodge? I do sometimes see players shift between various weapons and/or dodge and the modifier is based on the total number of defensive actions previously taken, regardless of which type of action it was.

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31 minutes ago, Arcadiagt5 said:

That sounds great. Would the parry modifier also apply to dodge? I do sometimes see players shift between various weapons and/or dodge and the modifier is based on the total number of defensive actions previously taken, regardless of which type of action it was.

That's another kettle of fish and would mean they need to reset every turn and mean even more time before they can get to back to the Cheetos or scrolling on their phones.

Edited by dvdmacateer
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Parry mods and multiple defenses 

parries.jpg.eaf5f574f9ff1869927f190fede3a6d2.jpg

No functionality has been added to this yet. The parry button will automatically apply modifiers based on the previous defenses value which will also be applied to dodge.  The players will have to reset this to zero themselves as it would be nightmare to try and get it to reset based on the modified skill being less than 5% or something. There is a tooltip  on the parry button. I have to reduce the size of the melee weapon and skill used inputs.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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On 8/5/2021 at 3:29 PM, dvdmacateer said:

Added a resistance roll button. Not sure about the R.  The buttons take into consideration all the already supported buff spells.

How did you do that?

Is there a macro behind it?

 

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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29 minutes ago, soltakss said:
On 8/5/2021 at 3:29 PM, dvdmacateer said:

Added a resistance roll button. Not sure about the R.  The buttons take into consideration all the already supported buff spells.

How did you do that?

Is there a macro behind it?

I managed to generate a macro that seems to work:

/roll {(1d100-(?{Attacker|0})*5+(?{Defender|0})*5)}<50

 

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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4 minutes ago, ffilz said:

Thanks, I just added that to my campaign.

Here's a slightly more informative macro:

/me Resistance Table Roll
Attacker ?{Attacker|0}, Defender ?{Defender|0}
/roll {(1d100-(?{Attacker|0})*5+(?{Defender|0})*5)}<50

 

It isn't perfect, as it doesn't take into account 01-05 as an automatic success or 96-100 as an automatic failure, nor does it cope well with extremes (30 vs 5 or 5 vs 30) but it works for normal ranges.

image.png.6b318e01f87b5e6920d8ac6023e25825.png

Simon Phipp - Caldmore Chameleon - Wallowing in my elitism since 1982. Many Systems, One Family. Just a fanboy. 

www.soltakss.com/index.html

Jonstown Compendium author. Find my contributions here

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1 minute ago, dvdmacateer said:

vs.jpg.d32761695ab3cb5beae83f63ddd6d5fc.jpg

Does that make more visual sense?

I'm just thinking of the language that we use when playing the game. I'm pretty sure we say make a Strength vs Siz or a POW vs POW, etc. I don't think I say make a resistance roll with your strength or make a Strength resistance roll.

Much like a CON times 4 roll, my players seem to understand what the x? means (although one did say it should be x n or *n, But ignore that)

What do others say?

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