RPP Chat Thread 2.0

I'm sorry about that man. :C take time to take care of yourself patches.

Oh man, I'm so sorry Patches. Prayers are with your step-grandma and you :c

My sympathy as well. Take all the time you need.

That's entirely understandable Patches. I'm very sorry.

That's terrible. I wish you and her the best.

Everyone here should play Xenoblade at someone point in their life.

Oh? How much of a must play are we talking? I'd still need to go out and get a 3ds (I really should, I hear ORAS was pretty good)

I know better than to expect something like Planescape: Torment out of it, but what is it like?

It really interesting for one. Basically the entire setting is on these two behemoths, the bionis and the mechonis who fought each other until they both can't fight anymore. Then from the lifeless bodies comes life. From the bionis its the homs (humans), the nopon, and the high entia. From the mechonis it's the mechons. The creatures of both world's continue the fight of the bionis and The mechons. So the bionis is basically like earth and rock but the whole world,is,traversed by scaling up and down its limbs. You start at the back of it's calf and go up through caves in the knee and a cross the thigh and up The back. Its super neat. Basically The main character shulk's town is attacked and he swears vengeance for one of his friends who,died so he takes his other friend and the,monado which is like a manifestation of the bionis sword and can hurt mechon. A lot of The story revolves around figuring out why the mechon are attacked, what the monado is, and stuff like that, it's super cool. The party,system and the characters are super,cool too. Whenever you meet named npcs they get added into,this web and the more you talk,to them the more you find out about their thoughts and feelings towards other npcs and doing quests changes their opinions of them. Also if you use certain characters in your party they build affinity,for each other and at certain levels of affinity you can unlock special conversations between the characters. It makes you switch your party up,so you're not,just using the same characters.
Also the world's super expansive and the sheer size,of, area maps blows me away.
My only regret is that its so graphically limited on ninte,do hardware, but I,feel like everything else,makes up,for,it.
I'm playing it on the Wii right now, I'm about 70 hours in.

Sorry this is so disorganized I'm on my phone and can't be bothered to,fix the stupid errors it decides it wants to auto correct and really just fucks it up.

Fair enough. It sounds like you have quite the commitment to the game. I may have to watch videos about it.

I will admit though that I am still hugely biased towards Planescape: Torment, and totally need to pick up the Planescape setting book from 1994.

Inevitably they release a supplement containing the setting for each edition, I dimly recall passing through the 3.5 and 4th ed ones. May be best to pick up whichever one is used for whichever system you're using. The AD&D one might have been first, but they've mostly just been refining it.

There's a chapter for how the planes would work mechanically in 5e's DMG, but it isn't at all the same as running a planescape setting game. As far as I can tell, none of the post 2e books really get into the meat of the planes as an actual campaign setting, whereas I'm looking at getting the books more as something to make the planes come alive. Besides, while buying them all probably isn't cheap, it's not the most expensive thing ever. PDFs are about $10 for the central book.

Well, considering the nature of Sigil (If I'm remembering it right), getting into the meat of the planes isn't really that important, there are in many cases an ad hoc number of them equal to however many the GM can be arsed with. But each subsequent edition had books about the nature of Sigil, at least. (City of doors, you know what I mean.), which branches out into literally anything the GM wants, in a more powerful version than normal, considering Sigil allows planar hopping and dimensional ship jumping and the like.

But I get your point.

I meant include the meat of sigil, when mentioning the meat of the planes. Sigil is very underloved in later editions, getting only a single page write-up in 3e, and about 5 pages in 4e. In second edition, it had an entire book dedicated to itself. (Mind you, TSR did have some problems oversupporting too many settings in the '90s, but that's beside the point).

EDIT: Though it seems that the 4e DMG 2 (3?) apparently has a larger sigil section. Now, the impression I got was that it got rid of the philosophical aspects of Planescape, which is a bit sad. I mean, the whole point of the setting was that it was those drunken philosphy fights from college as a world.

Now I have an itch for a Star Wars game.

Star Wars with Elder Scrolls races and lore.

Star scrolls. Elder wars.

This sounds amazing, but the part of me that wants to dice roll everything makes me wonder what system it'd work best on.

I'd argue set in a scifi setting, elderscrolls' lore would lose all identity, and be basically pointless. (It'd be like worrying about the Romans in a generic sci-fi game. Sure that happened, but that was so very long ago.)

That depends on what you want to focus on... I'm always looking for a chance to break out the Edge of the Empire rules, but that forgoes the cheddar monks, but that's why most people like star wars, so that might not go over as well.

There's been several systems over the years. Although apparently there was one from the 90's or so that was fairly decent. (Though all I recall of it was a story of a guy trying to be a Jedi Hunter and completely making all the Jedi terrified of him)

My gosh, I want a cyan lightsaber glowstick. Wielded by a Dunmer, or anyone grey, really. Potentium, ho. (Ji probably has a point, though. I still need to read c0da.)

I don't know Edge of the Empire rules, but if you're thinking of GMing, Ji, I'll roll up a muggle happily.

Actually, I was just linked to this article by a Star Wars Galaxies designer on their scrapped plans for how to make Jedi scarce. Notably, one version would've allotted one slot per account to a Jedi character, who'd develop slowly and be subject to permadeath... usually inflicted by Imperial NPCs who'd chase them down for using those shiny Force powers in public places (or in front of untrustworthy acquaintances).

Doesn't help in a non-MMO context. But it's an interesting argument to present players with.

If I recall Fanatsy flight's going to work on a new edition that's supposed to work with the new movies, or something.

Edge of the Empire (to which I can link people to my, uh, legitimate copy, if need be.) is based around being a group of criminals/rogues/peoplejustinthewrongplaceatthewrongtime. The PCs share a ship, and each need to pick some sort of obligation to something, be it a code, a dependent, or owing money to a crime lord, then they're set loose on the galaxy (In the default star wars universe; on the 'Edge" of 'The Empire"), to make their way through life. The dice system is cool too, because it's not a pass fail, it's degrees of success and failure, that can coexist. So your missed shot, might say, blow a hole out the window, and during the rapid decompression on the space station before the bulkheads shut, everyone is thrown around, making all the enemies; and you, take attack penalties for the next round. It's really cool, and I've wanted to run/play it for so long. I could totally do it here.

But the game expressly forbids beginning as force sensitive, and taking it in play requires GM approval, so again, it wouldn't scratch a lot of people's itches in the genre. (And the setting I'd prefer to run it in, a custom setting I made up about a TV show during the 60's, about the Cold War, in Space, wouldn't even have the force.)

Nostalgia dump: KotOR's version of SW D20 was my first exposure to tabletop-derived rulesets. The complexity of combat didn't seem out of hand at all. From there, I 'learned' DDO and NWN2 flavors of 3.5e, and come to think of it, almost never actually ran a spell-preparing caster. Nor did I take any 5-foot steps.

That media blitz though. Doesn't Fantasy Flight already make... hm... eight different Star Wars games? At least some of which are really good, albeit approaching arbitrarily expensive?

Ooh. Not sure I've seen that approach to 'yes, but' previously, strangely - maybe implicitly, in resource management type affairs. Might you tell us more about this setting? FWIW, I'm more here for the morality play than for the space western. Unless those aren't different things, I don't know.

I've seen something similar in FATE, but the way it does it is very different, from what I can tell.

(I really need to find an excuse to play all these systems I hear about)

Yeah, FATE's cool, but it's so crunch-lite, it's a lot harder to feel like you're actually playing around rules.

I had the notes around here somewhere... three, four years ago, when I originally wrote the setting for a PBP thing back on the Sporum.

Not having my notes, what I had burned into my memory was:

The game starts at the turn of the century, it's January 1st, in the distant, far off year of 2000 AD. The cold war only escalated, until both sides claimed roughly half of the planet, as alliances became genuinely united governments. I forget what I renamed the factions to, but you had the Allies, and the Warsaw pact. Sometime around, I think it was the 70's, humanity had invented the hyperdrive, it was expensive, heavy, and was so top of the line, you had an entire 15.78% chance of making it to your destination without catastrophic meltdown. Man began to colonize the stars, each faction trying to gain the upper hand on the other (At some point, there was legislation approved by both sides that they would not lay waste to Earth, it was the prize and neither wanted to destroy it. Instead, all fighting would be done in space, or once they became a thing, other colonies.)

Eventually, aliens from the mandatory Galactic Federation (I called them the FIS, I believe.) accidentally ran into a military Skirmish over a primely colonizable planet. They forced both sides to surrender, and began first contact talks and stuff. Eventually uplifting both sides to the galactic standard, more or less. (Chances of Warpcore accidents are only 13% now!)

Then there was a fourth, and I think a fifth, faction vying for control of the galaxy, and there were some "those who came before" laying around somewhere, and I had a plot laying around here somewhere, but that was the gist. It was a semi-light hearted take on a cold war in space. And it was a TV show, I mention this, because I was going to keep track of the show's "budget", and as I ran out I was going to get progressively worse and worse special effects.

It probably wasn't going to have too much in the way of a morality play, or maybe it was, just less straight forward. I mostly just wanted to tell a fun Space Opera.

I could also simply run in the star wars setting, though I somewhat loathe doing so myself, or make up an entirely more rational sci-fi adventure.