#fantasy flight

[best-character-named-x-poll]

have you done your daily click

[cabletwo]

Cable Two highlights are back! One year since the first video and premiered 2/22, a new mega edit of last year's April Fool's Special!

[artofjim]

Yydram Dhuq, my Twilight Imperium TTRPG character. He's basically an Xxcha escort/bodyguard. Excited to bust some heads with this fella

[mrkapao]

Picked up 'Elder Sign' with all the expansions for a REALLY good deal!

The base game was only $5! All I need now is the promos which I kinda doubt that I'll be able to get anyway.

[coners88]

#ArkhamHorror El Juego de Tablero 3a Edición 🤓 después de echar unas pocas partidas con un par de investigadores me parece muy buen #ArkhamFiles un juegazo en general 😍 pero la preparación de cada partida cuesta demasiado 🥴

no vendría mal una revisión o una cuarta edición con app o algo para agilizar algunas cosas, pero lo tienen abandonado, parece que están muy liados contando billetes de los juegos de cartas 🤑

[foobar137]

Genesys Dice Stats

So, after the post on @prokopetz's blog about statistics and dice rolling and the difficulty of modeling rolls for Fantasy Flight Star Wars/Genesys, I wrote up some Swift code to do just that. It's ugly code right now, and I plan to clean it up a bit and post it somewhere.

Part of the issue is that there's a huge number of distinct results from any given roll. As an example - a stock roll where a character with an attribute of 3 and a skill of 2 rolls against an average difficulty task has 171 distinct results that can come up.

But, I've been working on grouping these results meaningfully, like this:

Pool: proficiency, proficiency, ability, difficulty, difficulty 51640 (70.041%) : Total Successes 14322 (19.425%) : Total Successes with Advantage 21564 (29.248%) : Total Successes with Threat 8928 (12.109%) : Total Success + Triumph 0 (0.000%) : Total Success + Despair 14478 (19.637%) : Total Failures with Advantage 2376 (3.223%) : Total Failures with Threat 2974 (4.034%) : Total Failures + Triumph 0 (0.000%) : Total Failures + Despair 2961 (4.016%) : Total Fully Cancelled 73728: Total Results, 171 Distinct Results

Some interesting things come up from this. First off, there's 50% more success-with-threat than success-with-advantage. This actually makes sense - most sides that give successes don't also give advantages, and the difficulty dice that aren't giving you failures are instead giving you threats. (Similarly, failure-with-advantage is six times more likely than failure-with-threat, and 2/3 of failures have advantage.)

About 75% of the rolls with a triumph are successful. This is slightly higher than the base success chance of 70%. Again, this makes sense - you know there's at least one success that was rolled.

4% of the rolls completely cancel or are entirely blank.

The problem from here is that it's hard to produce, like, a chart of results. Even if you just focus on total success rate, you still have six dice types to take into account, and six-dimensional charting is not my forte. Although there is the advantage (FSVO) that there generally aren't more than about 5 dice of any one type in the pool.

The next step is probably to see if the code runs on Linux, and clean it up for posting somewhere. After that, I may create some spreadsheets of results.

[monstermonger]

Spring songs 🐦‍⬛🎵

[dukeofriven]

I find games often devolve into freeform RPs when the mechanics of a game prove a poor fit for the story the players and GM find themselves trying to tell— a lot of D&D games fall into this simply because people have wildly incorrect beliefs that D&D is a 'one size fits all' system and they've asked Reddit for homebrewing options to do their steampunk western in 5e rather than look for something designed for steampunk westerns. And because there's such a fundamental disconnect between design and goal, you roll less and less and consult the rules less and less because D&D fundamentally isn't designed to give you a satisfying high-noon standoff, a train chase, or a saloon brawl, and the techno-steam skin you've slapped on D&D's already idiosyncratic Vancian magic feels hopelessly mismatched, and you can put a big black hat and a mustache on a Tarrasque but at day's end 'Lair Actions' just don't feel right for a corrupt local sheriff and his posse of goons whose "lair" is the clapboard back room of a brothel. Best RPG I was ever in was a Lancer campaign, but as the years went on we touched Lancer less and less because outside of the robot fights we kept negotiating ourselves out of fighting, the mechanics gave us nothing to play with in the complex social/political/intra-party stories we were telling and loving (and that the worldbuilding is seemingly designed to encourage, but that's a different gripe)—indeed, the mechanics of Lancer were sometimes an active impediment to anyone having fun. You'd roll for the first time in several sessions, and be cross that the result was so mechanically unsatisfying, or worded so specifically that its use cases made it pointless. The "game" because an RP session because the mechanics didn't engage the players in furthering their own stories and sense of play. Whereas the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games I've run use a cumbersome, messy, hair-pullingly unituitive system - but when it clicks with my players they fucking love not just rolling dice but building their dice pool, leverging every square inch of their character sheets—skills, talents, past experiences, inventory, cunning schemes—that make roles tenses, engaging, fun, wonderful. It's not great at selling its full self to players (I think its a failing of density and layout from an editing standpoint), but man the parts that click really click, and I've had players with no TTRPG experience have a great time both RPing and getting into the mechanics of the system - because the mechanics, the system, and the story we're telling all align.

I think a lot of folks in indie RPG spaces misunderstand what's going on when people who've only ever played Dungeons & Dragons claim that indie RPGs are categorically "too complicated". Yes, it's sometimes the case that they're making the unjustified assumption that all games are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons and shying away from the possibility of having to brave a steep learning cure a second time, but that's not the whole picture.

A big part of it is that there's a substantial chunk of the D&D fandom – not a majority by any means, but certainly a very significant minority – who are into D&D because they like its vibes or they enjoy its default setting or whatever, but they have no interest in actually playing the kind of game that D&D is... so they don't.

Oh, they'll show up at your table, and if you're very lucky they might even provide their own character sheet (though whether it adheres to the character creation guidelines is anyone's guess!), but their actual engagement with the process of play consists of dicking around until the GM tells them to roll some dice, then reporting what number they rolled and letting the GM figure out what that means.

Basically, they're putting the GM in the position of acting as their personal assistant, onto whom they can offload any parts of the process of play that they're not interested in – and for some players, that's essentially everything except the physical act of rolling the dice, made possible by the fact most of D&D's mechanics are either GM-facing or amenable to being treated as such.*

Now, let's take this player and present them with a game whose design is informed by a culture of play where mechanics are strongly player facing, often to the extent that the GM doesn't need to familiarise themselves with the players' character sheets and never rolls any dice, and... well, you can see where the wires get crossed, right?

And the worst part is that it's not these players' fault – not really. Heck, it's not even a problem with D&D as a system. The problem is D&D's marketing-decreed position as a universal entry-level game means that neither the text nor the culture of play are ever allowed to admit that it might be a bad fit for any player, so total disengagement from the processes of play has to be framed as a personal preference and not a sign of basic incompatibility between the kind of game a player wants to be playing and the kind of game they're actually playing.

(Of course, from the GM's perspective, having even one player who expects you to do all the work represents a huge increase to the GM's workload, let alone a whole group full of them – but we can't admit that, either, so we're left with a culture of play whose received wisdom holds that it's just normal for GMs to be constantly riding the ragged edge of creative burnout. Fun!)

* Which, to be clear, is not a flaw in itself; a rules-heavy game ideally needs a mechanism for introducing its processes of play gradually.

[lillidigest]

Board Games That Women Will Want To Play

I’m a middle aged woman who enjoys a good board game and I’m not ashamed to admit it. When I met the man who would later become my husband, he was BIG, into board games. I’ve always enjoyed games but, I was unaware at the time just how big this industry really is. On one of our first few dates, he took me to a board game store, the kind with the tables set up in a backroom. We played Talisman and…

[shitpostingkats]

Thank you for your service, king.

[tomoleary]

Wally Wood Weird Sex-Fantasy Portfolio "Venus Fly Trap" Plate Illustration Original Art (Collector's Press, 1977)

Source

Source

Weird Sex-Fantasy Portfolio Cover by Wally Wood

[last-flight-of-fancy]

The Third Promise

[camelidae]

Was the movie The Flight of Dragons a formative experience in anyone else’s childhood, or was it just me? The dragon designs enthralled me. The scene where the wizards flew in on their regionally different dragons, and the scene where the dragon flock was falling asleep in the sky absolutely activated previously untapped parts of my brain as a child. All those different styles of dragons. Their camel-like faces, their big balloon bodies - the biological explanation for how they flew and breathed fire! I think it may have started my obsession with naturalistic fantasy creatures, honestly. (Smrgol is an S-tier dragon design, btw)

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Unshakeable Will by Tatsiana Maksimuk

[madcat-world]

Flying Dragon - Unita-N