What does /tg/ think about Ars Magica?Does anyone think about Ars Magica anymore?
I just read the corebook and I love the setting and magic system, but I'm a little hesitant at how... extensive some of the rules are. Also, my group's never done troupe play before.
It's fun. Don't upset the apple cart, or else the Vatican comes for you. And then if you manage to fend off the Vatican but don't shape up anyway, actual Angels buttfuck you.
>>44221613
Yeah, it's pretty rare to see a game where the dominant, ruling power of the setting is unambiguously Lawful Good. I have no idea what that'll do for player agency, but it certainly gives the game a unique flavour.
>>44221502
Troupe play isnt required but it is novel and great if you've a group to handle it.
The game is godlike even if you're not a history major taking the boot to some satanists or making deals with the fae Ars Magica is a great time.
Welcome to Banished Quest!
You take the role of a young mage labeled a criminal by his people and cast out into the wider world. In the last thread you were railroaded like a motherfucker.
It is currently the 24th of Svarthi, in the year 936 NH.
Character Sheet:
http://pastebin.com/8wLGz3HQ
Inventory:
http://pastebin.com/9mxDQn7N
Companions:
http://pastebin.com/tWc3Zjje
Spellbook:
http://pastebin.com/Tu1sVEnQ
Runic Library:
http://pastebin.com/7zQt9XLy
Current Missions:
http://pastebin.com/rzD5PPsU
Dice:
http://pastebin.com/nhswziq6
Magic:
http://pastebin.com/aYPzn0aU
http://pastebin.com/2iHKTQTS
Combat:
http://pastebin.com/e1peu2ih
http://pastebin.com/1niidZEa
Enchanting:
http://pastebin.com/jUQKQLLx
Fluff:
http://pastebin.com/ydKwNLba
http://pastebin.com/sijmZSSf
http://pastebin.com/UygnkCBe
http://pastebin.com/gR0sgiFu
Archives:
http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Banished%20Quest
Twitter:
https://twitter.com/Quidam_Asinus
Ask Page:
http://ask.fm/Quidam_Asinus
Tumblr:
http://somaqm.tumblr.com/
IRC Channel:
#BanishedDiscussion on Rizon
Notes:
Using names or trips in this quest is heavily discouraged. While it is impossible for me to prevent you from doing so, I ask that you not. I will also not count any votes made while using names or trips.
You're getting real tired of this creature conversing with itself as if you're not even here. “If you'll permit me a few questions, just what is this Paramatma, and what in Pani's name would incorporating my memories even entail?”
There's a long silence before the lower mouth speaks. “We apologize. It has been quite some time since we encountered a suitable mind. The Paramatma is our greatest work. It is, or rather we are, a collective composed of copies of the greatest minds to ever walk the sands of Pidjata. It was tradition for those greatest enchanters to journey to our temple and add themselves to us before their deaths. This orb was constructed to facilitate exactly that, mobile so that it might be brought to the most distant and secluded of our number. Incorporation is painful, we cannot lie. It is the last thing ingrained into all of our memories, one last moment of mortal struggle before ascension.”
You don't know if you like the sound of that. “What happens to me, to my body I mean? Am I just left a soulless husk?”
The bottom mouth speaks. “No, you are merely copied. For the rest of your brief existence there will be two of you, one joined with us and one walking the Gods' dominion. We understand that a connection to the cage which houses you is normal, but trust us. Once you have ascended you will not miss your mortal form. You will be as the Gods are, unconstrained.”
Okay, maybe that doesn't sound so bad. Still, he said it would hurt. They said? “Why are you even interested in me? I am barely past the age of boyhood, and inexperienced as an enchanter besides.”
(1/3)
This time it's the top mouth that speaks. “Over the course of the past thousand years I have determined only six eligible candidates.”
The bottom mouth takes over. “Yes, Mikhael. You must understand that we thrive on new ideas and new insights. Fresh minds are perhaps the most valuable contribution a mortal could make, and it seems as though in our time dwelling outside of the Gods' creation the arts of enchanting have been forgotten, or at least the traditions of the Paramatma have been lost to time. We cannot afford to pick and choose.”
You're a little offended. The only reason they want you is because you're the only one available? “Well, what exactly is my connection to this 'intruder'? How would I be able to go about weakening that connection?”
The bottom head draws its brows together, the first expression you've seen any of the Chimera's three heads make. “Mikhael's connections to this creature are complex. It is not like anything we have ever seen. We believe that a thread was woven through the husk and the shell to join itself to the shard and joining Mikhael to the interloper, who uses the shard to leech from him some small portion of divinity. Over time this thread has grown so interwoven with, and integral to, the shell that to remove it would shatter the shell, thus exposing the shard. Weakened as it is, the shard would in all likelihood shatter once exposed to base reality.”
Why did it switch back to referring to you in the third person? Some of that went a bit over your head. You think you got most of it, the husk is the outermost layer of the soul and the shell is the inner layer, with the shard obviously being the shard of divinity. You don't really know what it means by 'base reality', though. Nor do you understand why the shard would break upon being exposed to whatever it is.
(2/3)
After a brief pause the bottom mouth speaks again. “We believe that you ought to be able to weaken the thread by weakening the husk and the shell to the point that pulling the thread will not shatter them, merely strain them. A tenuous balance must be achieved, for if you weaken the shell too severely then you risk shattering the shard in your attempts to save it. You might try mending the cracks in your shard, but that is a lengthy and time consuming process. You might also attempt to sever the cord at some intervening point between you and the interloper, but you would need to locate it. The thread is not in phase with base reality, it could exist on any of the two hundred sixteen layers of existence, or on several at once.”
>Write-inBe back soon, running out for food.
What are some interesting things to do with dominoes?
Yell "Blank never loses" whenever you play a blank domino.
Click two of them together repetitively right next to your ear.
>>44221365
Aren't mahjong tiles better for that?
>It's a PC with no goals, motivations, traits or quirks.
If you're not going to roleplay, go play Diablo II
>>44221090
>>PC loses a limb, immediately makes new character.
If you're not going to roleplay, go play Diablo II
u mad bro
>>44221112
>PC loses a limb
>Offer them a prosthetic
>Offer them a magical replacement
>Offer them magical regeneration
>Tell them of the various ways their character can deal with this loss
>Nope, I'm rolling up a new character!
There are two main schools of health system in RPG: hit points, and what I'm going to call wounds. Wounds includes FATE stress boxes, Savage Worlds, and the Harm from Apocalypse World, for the sake of this discussion. Hit points includes GURPS, D&D, Star Wars d20's Vitality and Wound Points, and so on.
The defining difference (and trade-off, in my view) between these systems is that hit points allow more flexibility and simplicity, at the cost of having to track them (which slows down mass battles). Wounds systems generally involve very little bookkeeping; once a combatant's Toughness is exceeded, they are out of the fight, or wounded in the case of player characters and other "specials". Or are "stunned" or "shaken" in the case of Savage Worlds.
What do you prefer, /tg/? Do you like a system that uses hit points, or one that uses "Toughness" and wound boxes. What advantages do you think each has?
pls take strawpoll, because why not: http://strawpoll.me/6289191
Wounds that are gained by being inflicted a threshold amount of damage in a single turn/short amount of time.
>>44220937
I'm a fan of the hit point system because it lets me fluff the damage as... for example, overexertion. In real life we would typically go down in one or two hits but hit points seem contrary to that... but if you fluff it different, your halfling who scurries around and "attacks" by getting enemies to accidentally hurt themselves will start running out of luck, and your graceful swashbuckler will get tired of sidestepping all the enemies blows. This has the added bonus of making warlord style heals entirely about inspiring your allies to fight harder, push just a little more. Y'know?
>>44220937
I like hitpoints when abstracted into plot-shield and fatigue, because it's the most cinematic system I've encountered
OK /tg/ can someone clarify something for me?
Cause I talk to people about these two words and what I gather is:
Narrativist indicates your game follows principles set down by the ideas of the genre it is attempting to emulate while simulationist indicates your game follows principles set down by ideas of the setting it's in and that these two are intrinsically opposed to one another.
But isn't a good narrative something consistent with the rules established by the setting anyway? And isn't a good setting one that understands its genre and creates its rules in accordance with it?
If you followed purely simulationist philosophy then the rules of your setting would be completely chaotic and nonsensical. You could just make up whatever crap you wanted, say "it's like that because the setting is like that its to emulate the settings rules" and make something that's just weird and random and not particularly well thought out. You could just throw down random numbers and say "It's like that because it's like that" and arbitrary decide how 90% of the conflict resolution goes in your game with no indication as to why it's like that.
It seems like these two elements should ideally be working with one another. Genre and narrative providing the guiding principles of the setting while the setting exists to provide context to your action. Trying to remove one of these from the equation would just lead to random nonsense.
And this obviously not accounting for setting agnostic systems which have to basically pull double duty of providing both in general assumption.
it's a real fucked-up state of affairs when I see a civil and relatively well-thought-out statement like this and my gut reaction is "this is probably someone trying to bait people into a screaming match"
>>44220379
>>44220379
>And this obviously not accounting for setting agnostic systems which have to basically pull double duty of providing both in general assumption.
but this is generally where the "intrinsically opposed" part comes in, so I'm leaning slightly with >>44220466 here.
In GNS theory Simulationist means "game I don't like" Narrativist means "Game I like" and Gameist means "Game I don't really like but I'd be ruined if I insulted"
40k lore question.
Soul is a very real and a very importan thing in W40k, so I was wondering - what happens to one's soul when said person is transformed into a servitor?
Remember that they are portrayed differently in different sources, but basicaly they are lobotomised humans, not just robots with fleshy parts.
I kinda feel that asking when does a sevitor stop being a human and becomes a machine, amd his soul departs his body, is similar to asking when does a fetus become a human and is killed, not aborted...
It's still very much there. Hell, it's probably there even when living tissue is used in lieu of computers in various tech. While the "machine spirit" might only get about as smart as a dog that's probably the ultimate source of it. They have living parts inside them, it probably attracts or grows a soul (or however souls form in 40k) and warp magic takes care of the rest.
You could ask the same question about, say, any member of the adeptus mechanicus. They love replacing their own bodies with machine parts. I think the answer is really, "when they can no longer be corrupted by chaos". I've never heard of that happening, though.
>>44219485
There's no hard answer. If you ask two different tech priests, you'll get at least two answers.
>>44219485
Servitors are essentially zombies, except it's electronic reanimating them rather than sorcery. Soul departs the body during the process of transformation.
How does /tg/ prepare their notes? It seems one of the esoteric sagely GM subjects that never gets much discussion. Everyone seems to develop their own methods and indeed it seems a very personalised process, but that shouldn't stop us from sharing and stealing good idea from each other.
I usually do some incremental world building stuff, basically jotting down how NPCs and factions are reacting to the PCs and their actions or how they're continuing to enact their plans if the PCs have had no effect on them. This involves some annotated maps and dot-points of motivations and enacted and future plans. I'll do this every three sessions or so.
For each session I usually dot point goings-on or adventure hooks that the PCs are likely to run into, and top it off with some story questions like "How will PC A react to NPC B defiling the church?". I'll stat any thing I think they're likely to run into but I tend to go for rules-light systems so I can stat on the fly anyway.
Most of the time these session notes are a third of a A4 page or less, as lots of the session I improv. This seems to work pretty well for me but I'm often finding my notes disorganised if I go looking for something, or just too sparse if I don't have enough energy for good improvisation on the night.
>>44218707
I have a single page of paper with different factions, and a key for my shorthand in case I forget what something means.
Then I have a bunch of index cards with characters or locations on them
>>44218918
I see index cards recommended a lot. I guess it'd stop me digging through pages when some thing I wrote a few sessions ago becomes important. And you'd wind up with a sort of priority heap as the most-used cards keep getting placed on the top
>>44219188
I use index cards for all of my character sheets notes and maps. That includes both Savage Worlds and 3.5 D&D characters.
Meanwhile on dragon /tg/.
What are you talking about you are on dragon tg
I imagine custom dragon keyboards would both be large, bulky, and expensive.
>>44218475
Dragon Han Solo dies at the end Dragon Star Wars
Hey /tg/, im thinking of starting a campaign set in the Dragon Ball universe. Can anyone recommend a good system to run it in?
It needs to:
>Support high powered characters.
>Support temporary transformations.
>Large, sudden increases in power.
>and I'd also prefer somthing that isnt rules heavy.
someone done made a dballz RPG broner, look it up.
>>44218517
DESU, it was only marginally better than the published ones.
Man good luck, Goku and Vegeta are on god levels of power now. You might as well just play Scion: God and not use any of the perviews except for maybe a modified Sun and crap for Spirit bombs.
The rest of the Z fighters would basically just be Hero level characters now. DBZ is batshit now.
With the child I’d rescued out of danger, I throw myself into helping dig out the pit that my master had specified, the constant thud of rocks raining down in our direction ever present behind us.
Thankfully, the boggart is too busy feeding on the already dead corpses, stone-chuckers being rather single minded in their behaviours; kill, eat, repeat. From what I’ve seen at least, this one isn’t even a particularly powerful one, it can only lift boulders larger than a man, compared to higher tier boggarts, that’s getting off easy.
With the pit dug to the right depths, a panicked sheep is lead into a barn, letting out noises of terror every time a particularly loud thud slams the earth, before it’s cries are cut off.
It’s blood is set to drain into a large bucket, while the rocks ease off slightly, the boggart on the hill focusing more heavily on feeding clearly.
“Once we bring the blood out, it should make it’s way over here.” I explain. “So everyone else should clear the area.”
Most of the farmers back off, as I jump into the pit, applying the iron solution to the walls, necessary to drain the beast’s power once it’s in the pit.
By the time I’m done, Mr Johnson has arrived, a stonemason close behind him, with a large flat bottomed stone in the cart. The ‘lid’ of the boggarts’ trap, needs to be lowered completely level, to seal the beast in… leave a gap the size of a pinhead, and it could squeeze itself out… and likely be very pissed off at whoever was attempting to seal it.
Mr Johnson snaps his fingers at me, dragging me up out of the pit. Up on the surface, the farmer who’d rung the bell back home splits off to talk with Mr Johnson, Marmalade rubbing herself against my leg for a moment, before following after him.
With just the blood draining to wait on, a woman grabs my arm, the same woman who’s boy I’d rescued, “Thank you boy.” She squeezes my arm softly, “Don’t know what I’d do if I lost both of them in the same day. You’re a hero.”
>I’m just here for the pay, really.
>Thank you, appreciate it.
>At least someone appreciates spook work.
>Write in
>>44217568
>At least someone appreciates spook work.
>>44217568
>Don't worry about it, just glad I could help.
Last thread
>>44187740
I finally made a PDF with the big lines of this homebrew. Almost nothing is stat-ed yet, I just fill it up when inspiration hit me. I'll put it in the following post.
I use RuneQuest for almost everything in this homebrew. If you want to see what is already half done, go directly to Starting Classes, Characteristics & Attributes and Covenants. Game mechanics is just me throwing my vision of the game and the end of it is more incoherent rambling about bad players.
Now for the questions and suggestions:
-How could we successfully include skills (climbing, ropeworks, mechanics, blacksmithing, etc) in the game? Is it even worth it? (Because, I feel the bullshitstorm coming with some players)
-We need perception checks and a way to make them fair, when it come to traps and ambushes.
-In what's already there, what is missing according to you?
Same OP as last time, by the way.
Here's the pdf
>>44217171
thanks OP, gonna give it a read
>>44217171
Off to a good start, mate.
Take your time and work steadily. Go over to the home brew thread if you need advice
Stop murdering children in your game
Don't worry m8, all the child murder is either in backstory or an implied side effect of genociding a space station.
It's not mu fault if those elves were considered children
Why would you use soldiers for ground combat instead of robots if you're a spacefaring civilization?
>>44216813
Robots never got any less garbage at walking around without falling over all the time.
>>44216813
The Human rulers of Human nations consider using people in combat unethical, and their military consists of robots. Conversely, the AI rulers of robot nations only have meatbag soldiers, as they think using robots in combat to be unethical.
>>44217136
this would make a pretty good twist for an episode of outer limits or twilight zone. Just start with the human and robot soldiers fighting each-other.
>You are a young man named Lloyd from the frozen Northern mountains of Tordo, on the continent of Teege. After a youth spent learning magic, you and your girlfriend spent some time as bandits after your home was destroyed, but have recently taken a chance to escape that life into a legit one... As sellswords, admittedly, but it's better than nothing.
>Your exact goal will change from thread to thread, most likely involving some job or another you've been sent on.
>The questmasters are Octoling (myself), and Grandflaw. There's no particular rhyme or reason to who posts when, and sometimes one of us might not appear all.
>Character Death is always a possibility and sometimes an inevitability (this is Fire Emblem after all), but your actions can very easily influence who lives and who dies.
>Voting periods will last an average of ten to fifteen minutes, but this may be increased, decreased, or generally changed at any given moment based on voter turnout.
>The previous threads are archived on suptg. A link to the most recent (coupled with summary and a handy list of names) is pasted http://pastebin.com/Rhxd2izZ
>Our update twitter is https://twitter.com/qmgrandflocto and you can shoot us questions at http://ask.fm/qmgrandflocto
>An up-to-date link to all threads currently archived, both for this quest and its precursor: http://pastebin.com/Q77ts75m
You've had a rather slow couple days. Sometimes you just have... A few days where nothing in particular happens, but at least you've had some smaller, shorter-term jobs in the meantime.
At one point, you decided you ought cheer everyone up by introducing those who stayed in Marrius' Group to the delicacy that is Silver Wyvern eggs, but... All of the ones you thought you had left were gone. Thanks, Leigh.
"Yeah, I'm... Not gonna leave the company or anything," Lyeim tells you on the way home after a job in a town not far outside of Elza Oasis (possible threat of bandits interrupting some local celebration. A single impressive display of your Spirit Charmer dark magic scared the leader away), "I just... Feel like all that's happened has made me realize how fast people you know and care about can just... Die, or drift apart from you, so... Yeah, soon as Calof gets back, I think I'm gonna take some time off, go back home."
"We're... Kinda understaffed as it is."
"Yeah, I know," Lyeim says sadly, "and that's why I'm at least waiting for Calof to get back." You did receive word that Calof was finally headed back earlier. Business in Ulir took longer than expected, but he hasn't forgotten your bounties for Helena and her pirates.
That's... Aside the point Lyeim is making, though. He continues, "but I mean, if you really need me here, I'll stick around. I'll understand."
You're REALLY not sure how you became the effective second-in-command of this group, but people really take your word on things.
Then again, you're sure Irene would just let Lyeim go whether it was for the best or not. Maybe he knows that.
>A. Let Lyeim visit Neir
>B. Advise him against it
>C. You have no input
>>44216780
Vote time renewed.
>>44216780
>A. Let Lyeim visit Neir
