unseenphil

[unseenphil]

Just had the realization that katanas are on the weapons list for classic and have a 2H profile no. I am not going to make my potential werebear viking phantom thief use a katana and a trenchcoat. Probably.

Playing with Rolemaster Classic chargen for reasons and eyeballing the companion additions.

I had forgotten about the Bear Tribes. I think it may be time for Bear Tribes and seeing if I can get one of the randomly generated background options that lets him go full Beornling. (Probably not.)

As for class: one of the semi-spell types like Ranger or Paladin or Nightblade. Nightblade would be very funny in terms of aesthetics as a huge hulking dude who may literally turn into a bear whose skill developments and spell list are for a sneaky magical thief

One of the nightblade spell lists, for example, has entire chain of spells that are literally just 'vanish in a cloud of smoke and light and reappear anywhere from 30 to 300 feet away.'

What if Arsene Lupin was built like a pro wrestler and might turn into a bear.

(Ursine Lupin)

[unseenphil]

So apprenticeship skills! I now have 37 DP instead of 33, so I'll...basically duplicate my adolescent spending, with the remaining 4 points to get to 3 ranks in Distractions, making my spell gain roll a whole +15.

So my skills, currently:

Armor (Soft leather) 4 ranks. This means he's at the minimum penalty of 0 for AT 6, which is probably where we'll stop at.

Body Development: 2 ranks, which lets me add 2d10 to my base hits. Your base concussion hit points are going to be your Constitution/10, (round normally) +a bonus of your base hit totalx (your con bonus/100) My CO is 90, so my base hits are 9. We add 2d10 and get...19. I'm not going to complain, for a total of 28. As a bear tribesman with a CO of 90, my bonus is 25, so 28 x .25 is 7, and my total concussion hits come out to 35. That's...a lot of math. There's probably some optional rules in a companion to streamline ths.

Pick Locks 2 ranks

Disarm traps 2 ranks.

Ambush 2 ranks. Ambush is an interesting skill: if you sneak up on someone, attack them while they're unaware, then crit them, you can change the crit result by your ranks of ambush, either up or down. For example, this means that if I were to roll a 68 crit you can push that into the "Oh, this guy's gonna die screaming" 66 result instead. You may not want that as a stealthy murderer, mind.

Climb 2 ranks.

Stalk and Hide: 4 ranks.

Two-handed weapons: 2 ranks.

And we make our final spell gain roll at level 1 for 1d100+15 and get...69! Nice, but we still haven't learned any magic yet.

Rolemaster does give you a free choice of up to two normal weapons you have ranks in, (Since I only have ranks in one weapon, I only get one.) clothes, and belts/scabbards/personal effects etc. Then 50 Silver pieces+1d100. I rolled a 17, so I have..67.

6 of that goes to a leather coat (AT 6).

For our free normal weapon we're going with a two-handed sword.

1 SP for backpack, heavy bedroll, flint and steel.

3 SP for 50 feet of superior rope with a grappling hook.

We'll keep the remaining 57 SP for now- actual amount of supplies like food and etc may or may not be important at the start depending on the game.

And that is basically the process!

It's a lot.

I might do one for a different game later.

Playing with Rolemaster Classic chargen for reasons and eyeballing the companion additions.

I had forgotten about the Bear Tribes. I think it may be time for Bear Tribes and seeing if I can get one of the randomly generated background options that lets him go full Beornling. (Probably not.)

As for class: one of the semi-spell types like Ranger or Paladin or Nightblade. Nightblade would be very funny in terms of aesthetics as a huge hulking dude who may literally turn into a bear whose skill developments and spell list are for a sneaky magical thief

One of the nightblade spell lists, for example, has entire chain of spells that are literally just 'vanish in a cloud of smoke and light and reappear anywhere from 30 to 300 feet away.'

What if Arsene Lupin was built like a pro wrestler and might turn into a bear.

(Ursine Lupin)

[unseenphil]

So the first one I actually watched was probably Robotech or probably some movie in heavy rotation on Sci-fi channel in the early nineties, but I was not really aware of anime at the time, as like, a specific thing.

The first series I watched with an actual awareness of "Oh, this an anime series" was a bunch of real audio files of Utena burned to a CD at like 3 in the morning while running a 104 fever, which is either the best or the worst way to be introduced to the concept of Utena.

[unseenphil]

Also, and I cannot stress this enough, the remaster rules have generalized the old half-elf/half orc rules to be just...any two ancestries. You can in fact be a goblin who's half skeleton.

I have seen several posts about your dislike for D&D and I wanna know if it's the same for Pathfinder? I love pathfinder but in my eyes it's just a crunchier D&D. (Though admittedly the "canon" worlds for Pathfinder are far more interesting to me)

Obviously that's a very baseline view of the two but I wondered if it's possible to like one and not the other due to their similarities.

P.S. I hope you've had a good week!

Truth be told, I don't dislike D&D! I dislike people treating it as a universal game when it's a very specific type of game! Note: what that specific type of game is also depends heavily on edition! But regardless, D&D will end up sucking big time if you don't play to its strengths!

Now, my opinion on Pathfinder is basically that Pathfinder 1e leaned in on some of the worst designs of D&D 3.5 (a quirky game that still had a lot to love about it): towards the tail end of D&D 3.5 its designers were at the same time getting really nutty with the design and coming up with some really inventive designs (Binders, Tome of Battle, a lot of individual systems in Complete Champion and Complete Scoundrel) but at the same time they were running out of ideas and they came up with the Worst Type of Feats: feats that made a thing that anyone could theoretically do into a thing now gated behind a feat. Player's Handbook 2 for D&D 3.5 had a few of these.

And Pathfinder 1e for some reason decided to really lean in on this type of feat. I will never shut up about the feat that allows gnomes to request their captors to loosen their shackles.

Now Pathfinder 2e is a much better game in my opinion because it seems to have largely rejected that type of design and focused on being a really crunchy D&D clone. It feels like a better successor to D&D 3.5's design ethos instead of Pathfinder 1e, that was ultimately a collection of D&D 3.5 house rules (some of which imo made the game worse than D&D 3.5!) coupled with following some of the worst design trends of D&D 3.5.

Also I refuse to ever shut up about Pathfinder 1e literally having feats that didn't do anything like Monkey Lunge and Prone Shooter. But anyway Pathfinder 2e actually looks like a fun albeit crunchy game instead of just being D&D 3.5 but somehow blander and with worse rules-writing. (now of course D&D 3.5 also kind of sucked in its own ways, but it kind of sucked in a "hey these example characters don't actually qualify for the Prestige Class they're supposed to be representing" type of way instead of a "our FAQ accidentally made it so you could qualify for the Eldritch Knight Prestige Class simply by virtue of being a Tiefling" type of way)

[unseenphil]

Thirteen Years? Could be the same surprise I got last week, which, was, uh. Remembering 'Oh yeah, I did back Far West'

I just got a shipping notice for fulfillment of physical Kickstarter rewards at an email address I have not used in thirteen years.

I could probably dig through my message history to figure out what the fuck this is about, but at this point I'm inclined to let it be a surprise.

[unseenphil]

So I'm a big fan of everything Fragged Empire (Even Fragged Seas, which even the developer doesn't like as much as I do) and I'm really excited at the possibility of there being a chargen/character tracker app to make it more accessible.

If nothing else it'll facilitate me making loads of characters for a game system I almost never get to play.

#ttrpg #fragged empire

[unseenphil]

#Jupiter Jones of the 3 investigators. Because a fat kid with a loud mouth and too smart for his own good definitely spoke to me at that age. #And he was one of the protagonists #A fat kid whose entire personality wasn't food! #It was fucking dazzling let me tell you

[unseenphil]

So this has ended up happening, and my nine foot tall PC in magical heavy armor now has both stealth and larceny charms that make him really hard to pick out in a crowd or place at crime scenes and even investigation attempts are harder to do. People have just stopped answering questions about the nine foot giant who passed through town. "Yeah, we had someone like that maybe, but I don't think he was your guy. Might be he was only seven or eight feet" sort of answers.

So I'm playing in a text only but scheduled Exalted game on Sundays and tonight we learned that not a single one of the players put any points in Larceny. As the Dawn caste Solar I'm already built into my specialties pretty well (Resistance Supernal and a focus on melee charms, while other folks are more social focused or leaning into sorcery so it's looking like I'll be expanding into the 'stealthy one' niche so we're covered on that front.

That's all well and good.

There's one small problem, in that my character is a nine foot tall giant in heavy artifact armor so he's the last person you expect to be good at stealth.

Fortunately, Solar Larceny is really good at making people go "Oh, him? I mean, he might have been there? Really, it could have been any nine foot tall guy, I can't be expected to remember his face when it's way up there?"

[unseenphil]

I'm honestly not sure! So much of the discourse around 2E and video games existed in a place...where it was largely about video games based on 2e instead of "Oh this is just game X"

The funny thing about contemporary discourse regarding whether trying to adapt roguelike video games to the tabletop represents the videogamification of tabletop RPGs is that tabletop RPGs randomly generating encounters and dungeon layouts using stacks of big stupid lookup tables is actually older than Rogue (i.e., the game the roguelike genre is named after). Heck, depending on how you define your terms, the hex-crawl – a style of tabletop roleplaying revolving around the logistics of overland travel across a hex-gridded map where the contents of each hex are randomly generated – may well be the earliest form of tabletop RPG to fully distinguish itself from historical wargaming. Like, this style of play is not novel to the medium; it's the literal, historical foundation of the hobby.

[unseenphil]

Not that this stopped anyone from complaining on usenet that the big list of random lookup tables in the AD&D DMG made the game more like Rogue despite predating it by a few years

By that measure, complaining that people are turning tabletop games into video games is also foundational to the hobby.

The funny thing about contemporary discourse regarding whether trying to adapt roguelike video games to the tabletop represents the videogamification of tabletop RPGs is that tabletop RPGs randomly generating encounters and dungeon layouts using stacks of big stupid lookup tables is actually older than Rogue (i.e., the game the roguelike genre is named after). Heck, depending on how you define your terms, the hex-crawl – a style of tabletop roleplaying revolving around the logistics of overland travel across a hex-gridded map where the contents of each hex are randomly generated – may well be the earliest form of tabletop RPG to fully distinguish itself from historical wargaming. Like, this style of play is not novel to the medium; it's the literal, historical foundation of the hobby.

[unseenphil]

Catholic Elves are probably too busy fighting dragons to get mad about the dwarves.

If stock fantasy dwarves are Scandinavian and stock fantasy elves are vaguely Celtic with some Roman elements, does this mean that at some point there was or will be a religious war between Catholic elves and Protestant dwarves? Or that's where thir eternal rivalry comes from?

I've been staring at this ask for like five minutes completely dumbfounded. Like, not in a bad way, I think anon might be cooking. But this has just shaken everything about how I see the world to its very core.

[unseenphil]

So I backed a kickstarter...

...Nearly 13 years ago, and it failed hard. It was one of first early 'big successes' in the RPG kickstarter field, earning nearly 50K (You've got to understand, that was -huge-, 5-10 times the amount of similarly successful kickstarters at the time, and was fairly early days for kickstarter itself.) But a combination of delays, aggressive defensive behavior on behalf of the developer and some legal action for refunds led by the state of Washington, lead to basically everyone writing it off.

It was called Into the Far West and I got the published book in the mail on Friday.

Is it any good? Friends, it's the d6 system from WEG Star Wars with Fate aspects bolted on awkwardly. A lot of the art is a photoshop sepia layer over what's probably movie stills. One of the factions is just "What if the rangers the Lone Ranger belonged to were an orthodox kung fu sect that was betrayed and destroyed with only a few wandering heroes who take up apprentices here and there.' There's a destruction of Shaolin homage that references the musical Oklahoma.

It never had a chance of being good, but there's good -bits-. For a start, "Wanderers of the Dust Road" as a name for an Old West version of the Wulin is pretty fucking good, honestly. Maybe even great.

#ttrpg #god help me I kinda want to make a pc in it

[unseenphil]

IIRC this also had a thing where if you -still- didn't meet the stat minimums for a class after rolling you could just set the stat to that minimum anyway, which seems like it'd be a faster way to accomplish the same thing.

(And is also why my favorite random stat option is Gamma World 7E, where you randomly roll your two types of mutation, those set the relevant stats to 18, then you roll 3d6 down the line for everything else. )

Let's do a poll of little consequence, I'm curious about something. In Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, it was suggested that players should not roll their abilities as they used to in the original game, 3d6 in order. Instead there were several alternative methods introduced, one of which is still in wide use today.

Method I: This one's gonna be familiar. You roll 4d6 and drop the lowest die, repeated six times. Then you arrange these numbers intoy your ability scores as you wish. Became the gold standard in 3rd Edition, although has since been overshadowed by point-buy (yuck).

Method II: This one also allows you to arrange your scores as you please, but you roll 3d6 twelve times and keep the six highest scores.

Method III: You roll 3d6 six times for Strength, picking the highest score. Repeat for the other five. Usually gives you better scores than straight 3d6 down the line but allows you to be surprised by what character you end up generating.

Method IV: This one probably takes a while. You roll 3d6 in order, old style. But you roll up twelve sets of six scores and choose one of the sets.

Unearthed Arcana later introduced one more.

Method V: Only usable for human characters. You pick your class before rolling, then roll a variable number of dice for each ability, keeping the highest three. For example, a fighter would roll 9d6 for Strength but only 3d6 for Intelligence. Rolls that are somehow below the class's minimum scores are raised to said minimum.

[unseenphil]

There's like 20 species who look like some variant of human with pointed ears, and at least one of them lives exclusively in forests, but, and this is the key bit, none of them are elves, and you have to remember that.

In much the same way there are also no humans, or at least, nothing called human.

Thanks to the odd marketing for the game, the only thing I know about Talislanta is still that there are no elves in it.

[unseenphil]

Fighter who stays a fighter becomes a Lord, and gets additional class features associated with Town.

I think we should make the Ultimate D&D, built on the best concepts and mechanics from the game's history, one that truly supports the Three Pillars: Dungeon, Wilderness, and Town.

[unseenphil]

So the basic idea of this character is that he comes from a fantasy raiding culture who sometime turn into bears and for some reason decided "Actually, I don't want to be a barbarian warrior, I'd like to sneak around and throw magical smoke bombs and steal things. Possibly he was inspired by reading a story about something that happened in the larger fantasy cities and has a slightly askew idea of what a nightblade even is. Maybe he's self-taught and has natural psychic/mentalist abilities that lean that way.

So I thought I'd used the background options rules to see if they'd tell me anything.

Well, I did some background option rolls, using the options from the companion: Two rolls on skill at arms, two on skill at magic. I'm not actually a fan of these results, because they make him just kind of boringly good at his job:

The rolls on skill at arms 13: +25 to stalk and hide checks. Somehow the massive wall of muscles is, in fact, the sneakiest one there is. And 50, which is...+15 to your agility modifier? So it kind of ended up that he probably got pressed into going nightblade because he's got a natural talent for stealth.

The rolls on skill at magic. I'm going to be honest, the reason I went for these is in hopes to get shapeshifter and be able to turn into a bear.

I did not get that.

Instead, I got: 62 +15 to presence bonus- again, a boring +numbers boost to his job skills, and 11:Trancendence: No armor penalty for casting spells.

This one would normally be -really good- for a semi-caster, especially a paladin (who need to train in a skill to wear plate or chain and match the class fantasy.)

Except Nightblades are mentalists, so all this means is that he can wear whatever hat he wants.

I will set these results to the side for now, and possibly just talk to the GM about one of the options to 'Spend two options to pick off the list' in order to to live out the dreams of a stealth bear.

So adolescent skills: Based on 7-02 in Classic character law, I have 33 development points to spend on skills.

We're going with 2 ranks of stalk and hide for 6 points.

A rank of pick locks for 2,

A rank of disarm traps for 3

A rank of Ambush for 3.

A rank of climbing for 3

A rank of body development for 3

A rank of two-handed weapons for 3.

Two ranks of soft leather maneuvering in armor for 6

And one rank in the level 1-10 of the Nightblade "Distractions" base list.

That's all points spent. I went with two-handed weapons as his primary weapon category for a few reasons:

I really like the 4E Avenger class, which was a sort of light armored divine rogue type that favored hitting people with the biggest fucking axe they could get their hands on.

It seems culturally appropriate for a guy from a people who turn into a bear.

And he'll probably be okay at it honestly.

So first, I make my spell gain roll. I am extremely unlikely to make it, and I don't. Then it's time for my first stat gains, where I see if my potentials increase (And possibly affect my development points for apprenticeship.)

So potential rolls!

Constitution: 84: rolled 64, +6. New Co: 90. New DP 8

Agility 90: rolled 71, +5. New Agility: 95. New DP 9.

Self-discipline 55. roll 56, +10. New SD: 65. New DP 6

Memory: 78, rolled 66, +7 New Memory: 85. New DP 8.

Reason 72, rolled 90!...this changes nothing, as reason's potential is also 72, but at least it doesn't go down. DP Stays 6.

So for apprenticeship, I'll have 37 points.

Oh, and potentials for the non development skills:

Strength 99, rolled 51, now 100.

Quickness 93, rolled 24, no change.

Presence 90, rolled 47, now 93.

Intuition 56, rolled 31, now 62.

Empathy 53, rolled 36, now 57.

So next time we'll do apprenticeship skills and try and get him kitted out.

Playing with Rolemaster Classic chargen for reasons and eyeballing the companion additions.

I had forgotten about the Bear Tribes. I think it may be time for Bear Tribes and seeing if I can get one of the randomly generated background options that lets him go full Beornling. (Probably not.)

As for class: one of the semi-spell types like Ranger or Paladin or Nightblade. Nightblade would be very funny in terms of aesthetics as a huge hulking dude who may literally turn into a bear whose skill developments and spell list are for a sneaky magical thief

One of the nightblade spell lists, for example, has entire chain of spells that are literally just 'vanish in a cloud of smoke and light and reappear anywhere from 30 to 300 feet away.'

What if Arsene Lupin was built like a pro wrestler and might turn into a bear.

(Ursine Lupin)

[unseenphil]

No worries! I have been poking at making a character in other posts just to try and remember Classic chargen so we'll see how that turns out.

I think I may have enough time in my calendar to consider running Rolemaster. Here are a few ideas I have:

Gonna run Classic. It's the simplest version and it's already a complete game; no need to wait for Creature Law like with unified.

Might use some of the optional rules backported into Classic from some of the Companions. Actually, might use some of the optional rules from the companions regardless. I love that there's a second-based combat system like in Hackmaster.

Not gonna use an official setting but instead something of my own creation. Working inside out: sketch a small region of the world and fill in the greater context of the world as needed. Something that can accommodate everything from Rolemaster mechanically but possibly with some things being reflavored.

To account for the fact that I don't want to make coordinating schedules too difficult I will probably run this using an open table format: I will run games intermittently (aiming at around once a month) and whoever can make it can come and play. I work a nine to five job so games will take place on weekends (probably Saturdays, starting no earlier than noon and going no later than 10 PM my time which is UTC+3 at the moment)

Also related to that open table format, I will try to prep enough content so players will have meaningful choices as to which places to explore. There'll be no grand overarching narrative as such, but a focus on exploration and adventure for its own sake.

Anyway tagging in @maniculum @hanavesinauttija @unseenphil @summoningspark because you four had at least expressed some interest uh how does that sound to you?