Fools who can't come up with their own topics

Y'know what I find funny? When somebody who claims to hate rpg.net with a raging huge hard-on, and yet still has to steal topics from there for their own forum. Yeah RPGdipshit is at it again.

Does it bug you when a player has been participating in a game for several sessions, and still doesn't know how to do basic things in spite of having done them multiple times, and had it explained to him multiple times?

Would it make a difference in whether it bothered you if the guy was generally dim, or if you had the sense that he just doesn't care enough about learning the rules? Or if you got a sense that he won't learn the rules specifically because he knows everyone else will tell him how to do stuff?

An amazingly obvious copycat thread starter like this one over on the old big purple.

What do you do when a player simply won't learn the rules of the game.

He lacks so much in originality that he has to lift ideas from the place that he is constantly bitching about. Well the number of threads being updated per day seems to be down so I guess it is about time for him to start doing this in an attempt to get posting back up. He did the same when rpghaven was first trying to start up.

Guess that what has to be done when your raging epeen filled with anger online persona stops attracting the folks.

The Other Side: Skill resolution mechanics

Skill ranking and mechanics idea. One main goal is to just use six sided dice since they are my preferred die type and easily available.

Most likely I'll be using cascade style skills like out of Unknown Armies or broad traits like Over the Edge. Either way there will be three rankings when you choose them skilled, adept and expert. This will tell you how many dice you roll. But you only keep one, the highest. Unless you are trying something you have absolutely no skill, in that case you keep the lowest.

unskilled roll two dice and keep the lowest
skilled roll one and keep the highest
adept roll two and keep the highest
expert roll three and keep the highest

Some skills would be listed as NA for unskilled and impossible to do without possessing it.

Target numbers would depend on the action. Some would be based off a preset difficulty. For example with lockpicking the lock would have its own number that needed to be reached. 2 for the easiest and 6 for the hardest. Others such as dancing would depend on a number determined by the GM, with 2 being easy and 6 being the hardest.

Target numbers for hitting somebody would depend on the weapon and range/actions of target. Examples: Long range would add one, moving target would add one, duress would add one, weapon is low quality adds one, things like this. So if you are trying to hit a perfectly stationary target at normal range the difficulty would be 2. But a target at long range that is running and you are being shot at also (duress) would be a 5.

Of course this could make combat pretty deadly with expert fighters. But then again, shouldn't it be that way?

Thinking of some sort of instant success choice with easy task. Like the take 10 and take 20 rules from 3rd Edition D&D. Where a skilled character spends extra time to make sure he is doing it correctly and is careful.

The Other Side: The Sight

The Sight

In the world of The Other Side there are people who have a gift of sorts. It's a gift that allows them to see what most others cannot, they can see through the veil of our reality. The structure of our world has a tendency to try and protect those who reside in it. First step in protection is simply hiding what does not belong. So the cracks in the walls, creatures who have slipped through, people who have figured out how to use powers that are seeping in; all of these, they are covered up. Only those with the Sight can see or detect them.

They, of course, are the player characters.

Hopefully this will allow the game to be ran in a few different ways by game masters. From a group of monster hunters, to a occult detectives and people thrown into the power struggles between beings from another world who are using our reality as a battleground. It will also add in the extra antagonists of law enforcement agencies and such who will see an assault against an otherworldly humanoid predator as an assault on a strange acting homeless man. So there can be plenty of material to work with.

Now of course not everybody can see as good as the rest. The Sight will have a skill rating and anything that is hidden by the veil will have a difficulty number to beat in order to see. But everyone with the site can see the cracks, of course that's not necessarily a good thing since by seeing them you risk getting pulled though without a choice.

Why some people are able to see like this and others are not is a subject of great debate... among those who know of it. Common theories are human evolution in defense against a growing enviromental threat, influence by some as of yet unknown race from the Other Side who are secretly aiding us, even some think that it's caused by the amount of dependency that we have on avenues of escape from the world on a daily basis. The actual truth is nobody really knows. I don't even know and I'm never going to make a set reason. This is something of the cosmological setting in the game that will be left open for GM's to fill in for themselves if needed. Or they can use the same answer I will be 'nobody knows'.

Again idiots keep babbling on

The RPGdipshit continues his usual tirade showing his true colors. Basically this post of his boils down to 'run games like I do or you are running it wrong!'.

The Swine mistrust both setting and players.

Look at the Call of Cthulhu Swine, when they insist that players should not be allowed to have a high percentage in gun skills, or want to actively punish those who do. That's distrusting the player, and/or the setting. Its assuming that the player will not themselves have the sense to know when to use the weapons or not; or for that matter, the setting won't have the sense that if a player doesn't use his judgment about when to shoot or not to shoot, the setting will kill him.

But the Swine have never cared very much about emulation, I guess.

So yeah evidently all players all over the freaking world are just like his players (okay some of his are probably imaginary). Sorry but some GMs have to put some of their own rules in place to make their games run how they like them. It's an age old tradition in gaming called 'house rules' he may want to check those out.

The Other Side - The good, the bad, and the ugly.

Pulling the name from my never finished system for Dark West on this one. I've always been a fan of having advantages and disadvantage in my games. It helps add depth to the characters and gives the GM a bit more insight into what the players actually want to do with them. So nearly any system I come up with is going to have these. Just sometimes how they work may vary a bit. Here are some details on how I see them working in The Other Side at the moment.

The Good and the Bad.

First thing out of the box I am not going to allow these to give the PC's any sort of financial or material gains. Turns it into more of a 'look what I get to start with!' situation. Instead they will be about their actual body of the character. Things that will affect their physical, mental and social abilities. They will be subdivided down into those three categories as well (hat off to the old WoD on this).

Now what I haven't decided on is how to figure out how many of each the players can choose. There is always the point buy method of varying degrees. Massive point pool to buy the entire character with, but this doesn't fit how I see the rest of character generation. Point swap, where the Bads would give you points to buy the Goods with, this has potential. Then there are a few random methods as well. Rolling dice for the number you get is an easy out but lacks flair. Or maybe even the lifepath set up that is used in games like Cyberpunk 2020. I just want to make it match the feel of the game somehow, exactly how to do this is the big question.

The Ugly.

Now this idea is lifted pretty much straight from the Kult rpg and honestly it's probably the main thing about character creation that I loved in it. Every character has something they don't want others to know, part of their past that makes them what they are today. They all have a dark secret. Nearly anytime I've ever ran anything horror related other than Kult I wished that I had put this into it. So much to use is just handed over on a silver plate to the GM. So I am damn sure going to be putting this into The Other Side.

Now I always like it when players make their disadvantages/advantages all cross into each other and with their dark secret. Suffering from nightmares from when they were the victim of a medical experiment, cold blooded because years back they were in a situation where they had to kill other people to survive, these sorts of things. So I'm going to work in a way to reward players for doing this. Depending on how I end up making the resolution mechanics it may be chances to reroll per game, extra dice in die pools, or bonuses. Maybe even all of them based on how the relation is done.

I want character generation to make the players think about how they want their characters to really be. All the way to the core. This seems to be a good step in that direction.

Old post from livejournal.

Fired up my old livejournal account and was looking back through some of the posts. Now over there is where I first started using the 'stupid shit' tag for special posts that just really made me go "What an idiot.". So after looking at a few of these I figured I would repost one of the old ones here. So dating back from April 23, 2009 here is one I titled 'What a twit....'.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Marcus King, the owner of the retail store Titan Games and Music, bitches about companies giving discounts on their pdfs but not to the brick an mortar stores. The article is here:

http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/14705.html

Now I would like to add that the reason these publishers gave these discounts is due to the fact that WOTC pulled all their pdf titles down and the publishers were trying to help the pdf sellers 'keep afloat' or some such. Basically they are trying to keep another seller of their product healthy.

Now back to Marcus. I've met Marcus once at a con, didn't seem like that much of a dick. But after reading this article I've got to say he really looks like one now.

Bitching that he wants free copies of Exalted to give away. Guess all the point of sale boosters like posters, quick play guides and discounts for buying quantity at release points don't matter. Oh lets not forget the free VTES starters they gave out there for a while, or the free promo cards they used to give out. Shit guess he forgot about all that.

I used to play the hell out of the Cyberpunk CCG. I got into it when the local shop gave me and a buddy a couple of decks that he was sent FREE. Once we got a few others playing the shop sold several boxes of the game. 7th Sea was the same, walked into the shop and the owner handed us a couple of free starters he got from AEG.

You see many publishers have been BENDING THE FUCK OVER BACKWARDS to help out the brick and mortar shops for years now. I've seen it. Seen free books sent to shops, free give away stuff, free this and free that. Discounts at conventions to retailers buying straight from the publishers there. So when they go and try and help the pdf shops he gets all pissy about it.

Fuck him. I hate people with selective memory who forget things to make their own arguement more valid.

You don't see him bitching about internet discounters cutting into his bussiness though do you? Amazon sells a metric assload of rpg stuff for cheaper prices than the shops. But since he sells on amazon I guess he keeps his mouth shut there.

Liquid Television back on the air, well at least the net.

MTV has finally did something really good for once. They created a Liquid Television website and uploaded, as near as I can tell, everything that ever aired on the show. This included a lot of animation made by very small studios, films that were a labor of love for these people. This included...

Aeon Flux.

Still one of the most surreal cyberpunkish series of shorts that I have ever seen.

Liquid Television - The alternative to reality.

Hell I still love that tagline for it.