hopefullygoodrpgideas

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

"Oh, but the fat person is less aerodynamic" If you want to bring aerodynamics into this your twink is also on fire from running at Mach Fuck with no heat shielding. Either we have to stop caring about this or all your speedsters turn into fast moving plasma and die immediately on discovering their powers.

I think the weirdest form of fatphobia I keep bumping into is writers suddenly becoming deeply concerned with physical realism when a fat character is involved even in contexts where everybody's physical capabilities are explicitly bullshit. "They're fat, it wouldn't make sense for them to have super speed" and it would make sense for the 98-pound twink to be able to run at Mach Fuck? That's something skinny people can do in real life, is it?

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

Because no one involved in writing these has seen a horse up close. They still don't have bite attacks either do they?

Why do draft horses in d&d 5e do less damage than riding horses? Big solid lad with huge feet kicks you and does 1d4+4 (min 5, avg 6, max 8) damage. Skinny greyhound of a horse with tiny feet kicks you and does 1d8+3 (min 4, avg 7, max 11) damage. Both hurt but why does little horse kick stronger than big horse

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

You can be a pixie scientist but only if you're high on magic cocaine during every shift at work. This does noticeably affect the quality of your work.

Actual Stupid Pointless Bullshit by Game System

D&D: There's a purely good aligned spell that only good people can use. It causes an extremely contagious disease that makes people so horny they straight up die.

World of Darkness: Scientists radiate an aura of pure boringness so strong it kills pixies and that's why you don't see pixies anymore.

Chronicles of Darkness: "Actually, the psychic abuse monsters spawned from our nightmares are doing us a favour by beaming our worst fears directly into our brains until we die."

Call of Cthulhu: Fetishes are on the Insanity Table that you randomly roll on when you lose sanity so there's a chance you see Cthulhu and immediately develop a foot fetish so intense you have to be hospitalised.

Powered By The Apocalypse: Mechanically, everyone is pansexual. Everyone has to be pansexual. If you don't want to be pansexual, tough! We're married and you're in love.

Pathfinder: Inexplicable archfiend who specifically embodies the act of luring children into dark alleyways with candy to kidnap them.

Mutants and Mastermind: "So, we need enemies for a silver age superhero comic book game. What we got?" "Well, I've statted up a super-scientist gorilla, and an evil clown, and the vengeful souls of everyone killed in the very real Hiroshima Bombings. How's that?" "Yeah, that all seems tonally consistent."

Warhammer 40k: Hoo boy, how much time you got?

Warhammer: I don't think I can top vaporizing the fucking setting and killing everyone in the world for copyright reasons.

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

Have you ever wanted the MVP of your party to be a sheep? Surely yes. Everyone loves sheep. I've only played DCC once but mostly we won because @caratgeuse showed up with three sheep and proceeded to use them to solve every single problem except for the poison gas. Also if it's a funnel you've got more ability to be silly. There's a lot of freedom to poke the darkness with a stick. If the darkness eats you, you have three other characters.

followers, how do i pitch dungeon crawl classics tonight? (been wanting to run a funnel for a while now and it's ttrpg night at the enby social) - paper

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

Actually then I have to account for the other problem. If I lend my friends the rulebook I need to find a new mousepad. I've been using the back of Rifts Collectors Edition since 2017.

There's an evil twin to "has only ever played Dungeons & Dragons and thinks all tabletop RPGs are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons" that lives somewhere in the vicinity of "went straight from Dungeons & Dragons to rules-light storygames and thinks Dungeons & Dragons represents the high end of tabletop RPG complexity". Like, buddy, you have no idea.

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

I have been contemplating running a 1st ed Rifts game and wow you can really tell this predates this hobby existing long enough for people to have invented how to format rulebooks. I expect to have fun but I don't know if I can sell any of my friends on even just reading the entire rulebook.

There's an evil twin to "has only ever played Dungeons & Dragons and thinks all tabletop RPGs are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons" that lives somewhere in the vicinity of "went straight from Dungeons & Dragons to rules-light storygames and thinks Dungeons & Dragons represents the high end of tabletop RPG complexity". Like, buddy, you have no idea.

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

I understand that when folks criticise the self-labelled "cozy" genre as an effort to produce "games about nothing", they're talking about trying to opt out of having opinions by producing a game with a perfectly politically neutral premise (which is impossible), but whenever I see the phrase that gremlin voice in the back of my mind is like:

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

Detect evil but it becomes increasingly clear that whoever calibrated it had some really weird moral stances.

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

Remember, if you're giving them seed sentences that you're fleshing out, it's pretty hard for them to end up with complete nonsense unless they're acting maliciously. If they're acting maliciously, you probably don't want to play with them anyway.

(tbh this could go here or on @probablybadrpgideas depending on execution and on how many of the players value continuity)

Instead of working out ALL the lore for a setting, work out the bare minimum and let the players do the rest for you. Any time someone does particularly well on an intelligence-based check to see what they know about a particular thing, tell them like 1 or 2 sentences about the thing and then let them just make up the entire rest of the lore about it

I'd personally say collaborative worldbuilding is a good idea

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

If it's trying to use the alignment grid to explain things, it's probably automatically a bad take.

Walks around with a t-shirt that says "ASK ME ABOUT MY OPINION ON THE D&D ALIGNMENT GRID"

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

"i hope they both lose" or whatever parks and rec meme phrase you use to express that sentiment is not a good analysis of the disney-universal midjourney lawsuit because it is a legal case, not a football match -- the stakes are not abstract, nebulous "wins" or "losses" for the (all certainly very loathsome) parties involved but a specific legal precedent that if set will vastly expand the scope of u.s. copyright law (which because of its position as global hegemon, affects the whole world). it is not about if disney or midjourney Win, it is about whether or not the legal basis for transformative work is comprehensively eroded to an unprecedented degree!

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

Ooh go on, I do love to see bad takes on the D&D alignment grid

Walks around with a t-shirt that says "ASK ME ABOUT MY OPINION ON THE D&D ALIGNMENT GRID"

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

Hmm. So, given this is Some Snuance I'm going to give two answers. 1: I really love a well executed demon. I think that a good demon should be a genuine source of evil and corruption that cannot be safely interacted with, only destroyed. I love situations where people go "what if there was nuance" and get killed for it because no, this time there really wasn't, when we said all consuming world eater that turns your bones into slime we meant it. Sorry about your bones. 2: For factions where you are intended to kill them thoughtlessly regardless of if this would actually be a moral action if we thought about it, I personally really love D&D goblinoids. There's a bunch of different types and shapes of them and it's seemingly random what type a given child will be? That's so fun. For 3.5 alone I can think of seven different phenotypes that I have stats for in my non-extensive collection, which means that unlike orcs, it's easy to produce a bunch of fun variety in the goblin village that you're Lawful Goodly putting to the torch. Orcs you tend to have to give them jobs, which tends to bump the power level pretty hard. Goblinoids let you have a bunch of interesting variety and variance in challenges for your level 3 characters, which I think is really important. Finding interesting low level challenges can be difficult in D&D and games who want their combat to look like that.

Oh yeah sorry forgetting about No Nuance (N)Friday again, was busy at the Final Fantasy prerelease, and then forgetting to do Full Nuance Saturday yesterday so I guess now we're doing

Some (S)Nuance Sunday

Many games feature some faction that you can kill without needing to think about the moral implications of it (Matt Colville refers to them as 'orcs' due to the history of the genre). What's your favorite 'orc'?

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

Honestly many community issues overlap. There is absolutely the kink equivalent of the guy trying to play an elf druid in VtM.

BRB, starting discourse about how, since one of the basic structural premises of most tabletop RPGs is that other participants can make bad things happen to your character without your explicit buy-in by invoking the correct "rule", and typically the only acceptable way to decline these outcomes is to call a time-out on active play and negotiate with the table (i.e., effectively safewording out), playing Dungeons & Dragons is technically a form of CNC.

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]

I've said it before and continue to do so. Too many RPG safety tools are from people too awkward to admit that they know the traffic light system already and make worse tools by feeling forced to reinvent the wheel. Just admit that it's a safeword and move on with your game.

[hopefullygoodrpgideas]