What roleplaying game would you say has fairly difficult combat?
I mean, legitimately difficult combat; not just unfavorable dice probabilities.
I'm also not looking for needlessly complicated or obfuscatory rules, especially not ones that use complexity to mask a lack of actual decision-making; I'm not looking for a poorly edited series of random tables.
I mean, what roleplaying game features deep combat with broad decision branching and meaningful consequences?
>>48247004
From another time, another land
>>48247213
So the fundamental challenge of GURPS combat is risk vs. reward.
You take penalties to attacks (increasing your risk of missing) in order to deal more damage or disable your target.
And you have to risk turning your back on enemies in order to go after more desirable targets.
>unironically being outsmarted by Orks
>unironically accepting ''cultural exchange'' from Dark Eldar
for a promising young race they are very unpromising and daft
Every picture of a Tau defeat warms my heart.
>>48246555
More like inexperienced.
You don't know that the Dark Eldar are relentless assholes the very first time you meet them. They don't often get a chance to prank the shit out of someone who hasn't heard of them before, so they tend to be on their best behavior at first just so they can twist the knife. Thats when you learn they can't be trusted and are rape-o-holics.
As for the Ork thing, ironically that happened because they had gotten so used to fighting orks that they took for granted the fact that orks were stupid and usually have the tactical skill of a goldfish. So when they finally did run into a warboss that was actually halfway intelligent, they got caught offguard because it took them way too long to warm up to the fact that they were dealing with a competent enemy commander instead of disorganized rabble.
Both of these are the sort of things that catch you with your pants down the first time it happens, but after that you know what to look out for.
Lets be honest, chances are good that during the human age of expansion the first couple colony ships that ran into the Dark Eldar didn't end up so good either. But we had the foresight to burn our entire civilization to the ground twice since then, so no one remembers OUR embarrassing failures.
>>48247322
If Tau were too dumb to realise guys who look like THIS might not be trustworthy then there truly is no hope for them.
So tomorrow I'm running a game of Everyone is John for some friends (or multiple games, I don't know how long they last). We're fairly experienced with tabletop and I've GM'd before, but none of us have played this game yet. Does anyone have tips for GMing?
Also general Everyone is John thread or something I guess.
Prepare for multiple ones, a game is very quick.
I don't have much to say along the lines of GM tips, it's a simple game and not very serious so it's pretty easy to just improvise yourself through.
General fun stuff, good improv on your part is a must.
Last session I did lasted 2-ish hours with 2 players with relatively simple obsessions. They won by completing all goals without me killing them, even after a very blatant nuke attempt.
You may or may not have a player that ONLY 6s the entire game.
>>48245866
It is a competitive game. Make sure the players understand that from the beginning.
Anything that is further than 10 minutes away will never be visited. Plan your locations accordingly.
Don't take your end to be the end. If you have nothing prepared, improvise. John fell off a building? What happens on the way down? John drowned? Maybe he's saved by mermaids. Shift genres as you wish if the players make you. Play the afterlife and try to fight John's way out of Hades. Only end the game when the player are out of points to spend.
Who epic here?
>best tank coming trough
>>48229103
>The road is your friend
Manticores should be fired off asap.
Consider them one shot weapons since your opponent rarely will let you fire a second salvo.
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>Character Listing
>http://pastebin.com/quEvqdRy
>Terminology
>http://pastebin.com/KZhsJX1G
>Factions
>http://pastebin.com/dFqnSs45
>Archive
>http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive.html?tags=Wulin+Hero+Quest
>https://twitter.com/Braylock100
>Sky's Character Sheet
>Cultivation: C+
>Internal Arts: Heaven's Blessings (B)
>External Arts: Endless Sky Forms (B), Carefree Saber (B), Golden Qilin Sword Skill (B)
>Techniques: Heaven's Blessings [1rst Form: Yin-Yang Rotation, 2nd Form: Traversing the Instant Path, 3rd Form: Dragon Qi Enlightenment, 4th Form: Scattering Thunder], Golden Qilin Sword Skill [1rst Form: Qilin Striding Sky, 2nd Form: Qilin Spearing Sun] The Mighty Kamushin
It's cold. The river, that is.
You never thought about it before, but it's true.
The Yangzhe which gives your family so much wealth (or used to anyway) and prestige (or it used to, anyway) has an icy, firm grip that saps the power from the muscles and takes away your breath, rendering the most powerful youxia crippled once sunk underneath it. And you are NOT the most powerful youxia.
As you flail in the icy cold water, trying in vain to swim despite your horrible injuries and stare into the unfathomable depths of the river, you wonder what other secrets the water holds? How many mysteries? How many dead bodies? Just like you.
Because, you realize, as your ribs hit a stone as you are forced by a brutal current into it, your ribs cracking like porcelain and forcing bloody red air bubbles from your lungs, you ARE going to die here.
There's nothing you can do about it now.
Maybe something you can do about it afterword, though.
>>48244041
Wulin Hero Quest? Awesome!
The river crushes the life out of you like a duckling thrown into the rapids, and soon the pain becomes such a universal part of your body that it's almost a relief, a constant ache you can more easily ignore. It seems fair that there should be LESS pain as you die, not more of it.
Suddenly your torment ends as you cough and sputter into the air, too delirious and injured to even work out if it's day or night, only that there's sand on the ground.
Someone stands above you; he's younger then you are, but he holds himself with an unmistakable aura of pride and strength.
A youxia.
You cough again, one hand struggling through it's crippling injuries to accomplish it's task as you cough out a single garbled two words as you circulate the last of your qi before you die, pushing bloody river from your lungs and out your mouth as you finally succumb.
"Avenge.....me!"
>YOU ARE NOW PLAYING AS SKY
So there you are minding your own business catching fish for lunch by the river when a dead guy washes up right freaking next to you and babbles out for you to avenge him and scratches the dirt with his fingers before kicking the bucket.
"Oh," you say dryly. "Super."
Like you don't have ENOUGH problems already.
Yanking back the long line on your bamboo fishing rod and winding the line around it (not going to catch any fish NOW) with a single swift tug that you put your internal energy into, you glance around at the lake.
It's a early summer afternoon, and the lake is placid and calm, no rapids or whitewater anywhere nearby. Lots of boats though; this is perfect fishing weather, which is why you thought you'd catch some lunch, maybe dinner if the haul was good enough.
So how he hell did this guy fall in and drown if the river's so smooth today?
>WDYD?
>[Examine the body]
>[Examine the scratching on the sand]
>[Call out to the nearby boats if they lost a crewman]
How would you change the Tau to make them more properly grimdark without forfeiting what makes Tau Tau, what makes them attractive to their fans?
How would you bend them to fit better without causing a newcrons kerfuffle?
>>48242794
Elaborate on the sick shit they do to the races that join the greater good. Make it a fact that working together is all lies, humans aad Kroot are used as cannon fodder, their worlds slowly sterilized and so on.
Make it official that Eatherals are actually working for their own goals and the Greater Good is just a slogan they use to mindwash other Tau.
Basically make them space best Korea turned to 11, as befits W40k.
I wouldn't.
Half the fucking problem with 40k, are the fans who don't think "X race is grimderp enuff". Whether it's Tau, Ork, Eldar, Guard, what the fuck ever. Yeah we get it. You hate whatever fucking army. But for all your autismal whining, all it does is drive potential sane players away.
The other half of 40k's problem is the shit rules and complete disregard for game balance.
>>48242794
Emphasize that it's not just new races that get absorbed getting shafted. Everyone involved, from the Ethereals to the Vespids are getting eugenics and having their rights forfeited. Everything is for the Greater Good, to an extent no human being would be comfortable with. It's a conspiracy to create the perfect society, but the people at the top are just as involved as the people at the bottom.
Basically just Brave New World turned to eleven.
I'm going to get BTFO aren't I?
Opening
I guess it's working out
>>48259748
What client is that?
>PCs walk into the town tavern
>there is a group of loud thugs drinking there
>they harass the barmaid and start a brawl
>players must stop them!
>>48257219
>Random encounters.
>the villan is a magic caster
>first encounter are goblins
>there's an adventure with an antagonist, combats and danger
How fucking predictable can one get?
>group of Mages living together
>everything goes horribly wrong
My DM is running scenarios from Dragon Age Origins thinking no one else has played the games. I'm torn between being That Guy and fucking up the story lines or just suffering in silence because the other players are really enjoying themselves.
How useful would a guy with a machine gun be in a generic sword and sorcery setting?
>>48256286
That depends largely on whether or not he could get more bullets.
>>48256286
Depends on the writer.
One end of the scale:
>Muh guns beat everything all the time! I kill the king and his entire royal guard instantly!
Other end:
>Haha, an automatic weapon doesn't save you from an arrow from an ambusher and can't get through a magical barrier~
Then there's how the author treats it's effectiveness against mythical creatures...
>>48256305
Small scale replication possible with magic or an exceptionally talented artificer, but it's tough. You won't be able to make more than a handful of rounds a day even if you can find someone with the skill to do it.
What d6 success count system would you recommend?
Burning Wheel, Mouse Guard, and Torchbearer.
Older versions of Shadowrun can be fun too, even if they can be incredibly cumbersome.
>>48255808
I like 2d6+bonus against target difficulty number.
>>48255808
>>48255914
Degenisis too is quite good.
There have been a plethora of great character art threads over the last week, so it's time for something different. Time for the other side of the fence, for the things with claws and fangs and exorbitant XP values. Post whatever monsters you like, but please try and keep the dragons to a minimum. While they're one of the most iconic of beasts, and lots of great art exists of them, they tend to dominate threads like these and hedge out other cool stuff you can use.
What do you get when you mix a Gunslinger, a Ranger, and an Archer together? What the fuck do you call that?
>>48251211
Range specialist?
>>48251211
Texas Ranger
An Adventurer.
How would you run a Tom Clancy's The Division(c) ttrpg? Yes, the vg game is absolute trash. But I know quite a few people who liked the concept and would enjoy having the freedom ttrpgs give in the setting. Discuss.
Also, mention some other settings you'd like to give a crack at running. Maybe some helpful anon can give an idea of how they'd go about it.
>>48250880
I liked some of the concepts presented in infamous. I.E. city locked down and subject to plague, people developing super powers. Government trying to keep the city quarantined if not due to the disease than due to the outbreak of super humans.
Wasn't very fond of the way the series ended (either with the protagonist killing all the other super types in the world and sacrificing himself or leading an uprising of super powered types to genocide normal humans)
could be neat to present people trying to survive under martial law and developing super powers.
What's the Division about anyway? Something involving new york under lock down due to a bioweapon?
>>48250956
Yeah, and some secret government organization given the power to murder the disenfranchised people left behind in the wake of a large scale bio-terror attack after Black Friday. Manhattan is locked down, the middle of the city is pretty much a lawless hell hole full of contaminated corpses, gangs, and all the best loot with your fellow government agents looking to kill you for your shinys.
Lastest DLC added instanced dungeons and the next one focuses on the winter in NYC taking a turn for the worst, with supply drops stopping, food and water becoming even more scarce for the government joint task force, the pyromaniacs, the gangs freed from Riker's Island, and the paramilitary nutters sent in to protect Wall Street assets.
>>48250880
GURPS could do The Division pretty well.
You could do sort of a parody setting with it if you wanted, with PC's having 500 HP or so and enemies having 30,000 HP and attacks that deal 120 HP damage.
In plague filled New York, the greatest enemy is falling asleep before the boss runs out of HP.
Got two twelve hour flights coming up next week, and I wanna pick up some MTG Novels for it. I know that the Brothers War is one of the best, along with the rest of the Artifacts Cycle, but what else is there? Are there planeswalker novels like Purifying Fire any good? Which ones are bad, and which ones are hilariously awful?
>>48250400
The block novels that used to come with fat packs are pretty decent I hear. The only one that I can think of that was "hillariously awful" would be Zendikar, especially with the Nissa-Sorin interactions, mostly due to how Nissa somehow never realizes he's a vampire until near the end.
>>48250451
From what I read on MTG Salvation, Mirrodin cycle, Quest for Karn, and the Alara book were all pretty bad, but given how serious they are over there, there might be stupid fun in those books like in Zendikar.
>>48250400
Kamigawa was a pretty sweet story, Toshi was a very loveable rogue and there was plenty of backstabbing, avarice and bitchy treachery abound. Hidetsugu was a BEAST. Kyodai wincest. Onslaught block is... Acceptable but not very good. Brothers War was a real drag in the middle when the war got really drawn out but otherwise opening and ending were pretty solid.
Just don't read Mirrodin.
You watch the swamps through the keen eyes of gargoyles, the small Reconstructed perched and hidden in the dark trees that bled a white sap. The rains continued leaving everything it touched with an oily sheen and touch. A tall tripodal creature stalked through the brackish water underneath a gargoyle, spearing a wriggling organism their with harpoon like tongue that disappears into a blunt beak. It continued on its way only to run afoul of a juvenile of the same creature you faced the day before leaps out of the water snapping its beak at its legs.
The gargoyle watched the creatures struggle, the juvenile speared by the striders sharp tongue over and over as it nimbly avoids its graceless lunges. There was a sudden rumbling boom that shook the trees sending small creatures flying with buzzing wings, the gargoyle launching into the air to land on top of the canopy. It's keen eye sways and surveys the bleak sky, the noise being too powerful for simple thunder.
Through its eye you see it as it descends through the clouds towards the plains you had derailed the train in. At first you could not tell what you were looking at until it finally breached the cloudbank, leaving a gaping hole miles wide that let the pale sun shine through to illuminate the floating city. Even through the Reconstructed from where you sat on the frigates bridge you could sense it, an immense beacon of necrotic might that would give even Jadyk pause.
A city of twisted, misshapen spires drifts down from on high completely dwarfing the pair of the cruiser-sized floating buildings that flanked it. Bolts of sickly green necrotic energy crackle periodically from underneath the city as it travels across the plains toward the city the train had been bound. One of the cruisers departs from its side, descending to where the wreckage of the train lay scattered on the plains.
You ponder once again just where in the universe you were flung and just what the future held in store for you.
>>48249956
I'm betting whoever's inside won't help us out without some high impact convincing.
Woah dude, where have you been.
Or have I just been missing threads this whole time?
>>48249956
Wait, we're running tuesdays now? Not that I'm complaining, this is like a surprise sweet thread.
![452px-Mccree-portrait[1].png](https://i.imgur.com/iv7NalW.png "452px-Mccree-portrait[1]")
