brianbloodaxe.bsky.social
Role-player, husband, parent. Woke PoS. He/him.
Staff at Ancient Robot Games in Edinburgh.
Why you are rolling the dice is far more important than which dice you are rolling.
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Yeah, ok. That's weird.
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Anything can call itself osr.
Roll under odds not required.
Core mechanics are not recommended.
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In that case simply you being willing for the potential client to talk to your existing client might have been enough for the potential client to trust you.
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Well it's 10% chance of [crit or fumble] so for example if you've got a skill of 35% then you have a 3% chance to crit and a 7% chance to fumble. It works out pretty well imo.
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I wouldn't say so no. 1d6 has six possible results, 10d6 has 51. 10d6 is almost certainly going to produce a result in the middle of its range of possible outputs but it isn't less random or more predictable.
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Unknown Armies and Mothership both work this way. Delta Green too I think. WhiteHack does the same with a d20 but without the crits. (It works with any linear dice roll)
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Yeah, roll high but not over works really well. Like you say contests are super easy and doubles for crits means that you have 10% chance of either a good or bad critical and the split between food and bad scales with skill level.
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Surprising results are another aspect of dice rolls which can be fun, although I've certainly seen people annoyed with a surprising result which they didn't want.
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Adding more dice always makes results more random, the narrowing of expected results is only narrower relative to the range of possible results.
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Sure you know for certain that a d6 is going to roll between 1 and 6, but if you are taking d6 damage and you only have 4 HP then you can't predict if you are going to survive (even if you do know the exact odds of surviving).
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Doesn't the average play time kill any possibility of speedrunning an RPG? The fact there are multiple players doesn't help either. I guess you just need to abstract it more so that the retry loop is pretty quick.
You are right that random would be a bug not a feature in that situation though.
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Realistically, the replay would be influenced more by foreknowledge of the situation/story than by the preselected randomizers.
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The first play through should be indistinguishable from randomzers. Trying to re-run with the same seed would probably still be unique because skipping one test, or making an additional one would knock everything out of sequence.
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Sounds like a Toad.
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This may sound like splitting hairs, random and unpredictable are equivalent in practice right? But I think it says something about why we like our randomizers in our RPGs. It's not because we want things to be random, it's because we want things to be unpredictable.
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It’s just an unnecessary extra step in the process. I guess it’s a way to drastically limit randomness while still letting players roll big numbers. But that’s not a good thing imo.
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Whenever you don’t want to choose the answer to a question yourself.
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It's a complicated situation and as ever nuance in 300 characters is hard. I don't think it's a stretch though to say that yes, republicans are actually fascists.
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It's true.
Certainly I've never read one.
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Isn't that one of those things that we all know but we aren't supposed to say?
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It looks pretty indistinguishable from MgT.
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It's definitely a fuzzy line though!
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I think Mongoose Traveller is a little too defined to be old-school. There isn't the freedom of interpretation that you get in Classic Traveller. So while you could run old school Pirates of Drinax with '77 Traveller, I don't think Twilight's Peak with MgT would have that Old School play.
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Nope. I do get the shift in when we start play, and the shift out when we stop. I guess it's a slow slide.
It's similar to watching a film in the cinema.
- The films finally starting pay attention
- Slowly more and more engrossed
- Oh, it's done *blink* What time is it?
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Details and explanations (history and factions) are described later in the books after I'm already keen and paying attention.
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Coriolis and Coriolis The Great Dark both managed to draw me in as soon as I opened the books. Gorgeous art of space, people and places hooked me and then the books do a great job of telling me what exciting stuff is going on right now.
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I wonder if proximity to Star Wars is making them more cautious?
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This means that dice or cards can have a lot of effects on the overall play, effectively giving players agency at a mechanical level rather than just in the fiction. Sometimes that's wanted, sometimes it isn't.
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Sorry, maybe I'm not being clear. I'm only talking about the resolution, where rolling a dice doesn't require any skill to get an output, but choosing a card to play can give players the chance to influence the output.
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For sure, that was just an example of the sort of things player heads can be full of.
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I'm not against cards, I just think it's hard to make them work well. Players are already trying to hold a whole world (with other PCs and some NPC and probably some feelings too) in their head, asking them to also play a card game can be a lot and it's not always obvious how they relate.