1
Forum Games and Roleplaying / Name-based Ship-forger at shapeWright
« on: March 07, 2015, 02:52:56 pm »
I getted you a thread of your very own. Here is the thing in question. Put in your name, get a spaceship out.
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2
Forum Games and Roleplaying / RPG Campaign Generation Game
« on: August 16, 2014, 04:05:12 pm »
Simple game, here, ripped directly from 4chan. You must run an RPG campaign based in some way on the last book you read, show you watched, and game you played. Describe the game you'll wind up with.
For instance, between Arms and Influence, Aldnoah.Zero, and Magic: The Gathering, I wind up with a surprisingly generic anime - a bunch of teenagers in mechs must resolve potentially violent international crises with matches of a children's card game. I'm not sure what system to use for this - it might require homebrew of some kind. Field effects based on political scenarios that might adjust the effects of certain outcomes (swinging back and forth between competitive and cooperative gameplay), you have special abilities based on your mech and parent nation, and perhaps use actual Magic cards for gameplay resolution. Probably a heart-of-the-cards kind of thing where you can spend heroism points or whatever to draw a particular signature card at a useful point, I dunno. More work than needs to be done in this thread, at any rate.
For instance, between Arms and Influence, Aldnoah.Zero, and Magic: The Gathering, I wind up with a surprisingly generic anime - a bunch of teenagers in mechs must resolve potentially violent international crises with matches of a children's card game. I'm not sure what system to use for this - it might require homebrew of some kind. Field effects based on political scenarios that might adjust the effects of certain outcomes (swinging back and forth between competitive and cooperative gameplay), you have special abilities based on your mech and parent nation, and perhaps use actual Magic cards for gameplay resolution. Probably a heart-of-the-cards kind of thing where you can spend heroism points or whatever to draw a particular signature card at a useful point, I dunno. More work than needs to be done in this thread, at any rate.
3
Life Advice / Procedural Glyph Generation?
« on: February 27, 2014, 07:12:20 pm »
Anybody know of a resource that can produce new glyphs, whether randomly or from some kind of seed? The closest I can find is some of the links on this page, but all relevant things are dead links, contain dead links to vital components, or are incomprehensible to me for one reason or another. The best I've found is Inkscape's Alphabet Soup extension, which is based on this project. The problem with Inkscape is that it insists on making recognizable versions of an input string, when I want unrecognizable strings. The original code on the project allegedly does this, but I can't figure out how to actually do anything with the source.
Google is unhelpful, since most results have to do with creating fonts from pre-existing image files, editing existing fonts, or otherwise converting existing data from one form to another. It's very hard to phrase what I'm looking for unambiguously, but I refuse to believe this is something nobody's actually done before.
Google is unhelpful, since most results have to do with creating fonts from pre-existing image files, editing existing fonts, or otherwise converting existing data from one form to another. It's very hard to phrase what I'm looking for unambiguously, but I refuse to believe this is something nobody's actually done before.
4
Other Games / The Overseer Project [Homestuck]
« on: February 02, 2014, 02:34:43 pm »
So apparently there's some sort of text-based Homestuck RPG kerjigger that's been clogging up the MSPA thread for the last 10 pages. In an attempt to let it die with dignity until the Ultimate Update, I thought I'd create a thread here to contain it. I've never played it but it sounds pretty rad.
5
General Discussion / Aesthetic Vulgarity?
« on: November 29, 2013, 12:52:07 am »
Can expletives serving as interjections or generic nouns serve a purpose beyond meaningless filler in language?
I say yes. "I hate that fucking wrench" carries a difference in meaning from "I hate that wrench". A difference of degree is still a difference!
I say yes. "I hate that fucking wrench" carries a difference in meaning from "I hate that wrench". A difference of degree is still a difference!
6
Life Advice / Getting a BS in Comp Sci, but where?
« on: November 21, 2013, 07:26:41 pm »
Anybody have good suggestions for a university to attend for a Comp Sci degree? I've got two local ones, plus MIT as a "Ha ha, yeah, no, I can't afford that" option, but I'm looking for 2 more to add to the list of places to apply to. I don't really want any more than that, because figuring out what credits from my biology degree actually transfer is nasty business. Very likely I'll wind up going back to the one I got that degree at, just because I'll be able to breeze through faster on account of already having all the Gen Ed stuff done, but options are good to have. My second local option looks like I'd be able to knock out even a combined BS/MS within 3 to 3.5 years through the weight of transfer credit, but I expect the conversion rate to be worse out-of-state, not to mention the higher cost. Even so, I'd like to give it a look.
Consumer applications or security are things I'm interested in, as far as goals go. If a Comp Sci degree isn't even the right choice for either of those, that would also be good to know. Or I need to be more specific than either of those for good suggestions.
Thanks!
Consumer applications or security are things I'm interested in, as far as goals go. If a Comp Sci degree isn't even the right choice for either of those, that would also be good to know. Or I need to be more specific than either of those for good suggestions.
Thanks!
7
Forum Games and Roleplaying / Page 45 Love Life
« on: October 27, 2013, 08:58:51 pm »QuoteMeme: Pick up the nearest book; first sentence on page 45 is your love life.
Just figured we ought to move this over here. The Happy Thread is filled to bursting.
8
Other Games / Magic: The Gathering
« on: September 01, 2013, 11:03:53 pm »
I figure I should stop cluttering the Happy thread. Looks like they're taking top-down design seriously. I'm incredibly pleased.
9
Creative Projects / A Desktop RPG: Big Damn Heroes
« on: July 19, 2013, 05:24:25 pm »
So, I, like every other tabletop gamer, am working on a game. This one's designed for play over the internet, and I'm planning to build a client for the game that will connect to other players, display character icons and information, provide helpful pointers for common tasks like attack rolls, and an interface for chat and dice rolling. After being way too slow about assembling this*, I am starting to actually make progress. The first couple of pages of this thread were posted before that was the case. I'm currently posting small snippets of the rules, with the first post that's relevant to the current incarnation of the game here. I'm looking at Big Damn Heroes as the working title, although I expect that to be copyrighted to hell and back. It's just a good description of what I'm going for - the core assumption is that you're playing exceptional people doing exceptional things, saving the day left and right.
What that means can vary from game to game - the setup runs from level 1 to level 10, and is meant to be nonlinear about it. At level 1, you're an ordinary child. At level 4, you're a huge badass. At level 10, you're a living legend, a being of transcendent power and might, on par with the greatest deities and the fiercest horrors from beyond the furthest stars. It goes without saying that the game should feel very different at each level, and a default assumption is that character advancement does not imply level gaining. You'll still improve your statistics and such, because this is an RPG and that's kind of a big part of the genre, but you can't expect to start out slaying rats and wind up slaying nightmarish demons within a month.
The game is also about being a goddamn hero, and I'm setting out to model that with an enormous emphasis on a heroism point mechanic, which in addition to the standard "manipulate luck" powers that go standard with such a thing, are required for efficient advancement, unlock special powers in times of trouble, and let you manipulate the story in order to make it your story. Hopefully I pull this off in a way that does what I really want.
What I really want is a game that underscores that the rules are a framework for telling a cooperative story. They aren't an obstruction to get in the way when you want to do something awesome. They aren't sacred text to keep the players (or the GM, for that matter) in line. They're a springboard to get you where you want to be - having adventures with your buddies. They're there to provide inspiration, guidance, and shared assumptions about what the story is like. There aren't too many games that try to satisfy both gaming and storytelling perspectives, and I've heard a lot of people insist that they're inherently antagonistic camps. I disagree, and hopefully I'll produce some evidence one of these days.
*When people say you should not start your game design career with the One True Game, they're fucking right. This project has been razed and rebuilt from the ground up at least twice, and not a scrap of the rules text from when I started remains.
The below spoiler holds previous contents of this post.
What that means can vary from game to game - the setup runs from level 1 to level 10, and is meant to be nonlinear about it. At level 1, you're an ordinary child. At level 4, you're a huge badass. At level 10, you're a living legend, a being of transcendent power and might, on par with the greatest deities and the fiercest horrors from beyond the furthest stars. It goes without saying that the game should feel very different at each level, and a default assumption is that character advancement does not imply level gaining. You'll still improve your statistics and such, because this is an RPG and that's kind of a big part of the genre, but you can't expect to start out slaying rats and wind up slaying nightmarish demons within a month.
The game is also about being a goddamn hero, and I'm setting out to model that with an enormous emphasis on a heroism point mechanic, which in addition to the standard "manipulate luck" powers that go standard with such a thing, are required for efficient advancement, unlock special powers in times of trouble, and let you manipulate the story in order to make it your story. Hopefully I pull this off in a way that does what I really want.
What I really want is a game that underscores that the rules are a framework for telling a cooperative story. They aren't an obstruction to get in the way when you want to do something awesome. They aren't sacred text to keep the players (or the GM, for that matter) in line. They're a springboard to get you where you want to be - having adventures with your buddies. They're there to provide inspiration, guidance, and shared assumptions about what the story is like. There aren't too many games that try to satisfy both gaming and storytelling perspectives, and I've heard a lot of people insist that they're inherently antagonistic camps. I disagree, and hopefully I'll produce some evidence one of these days.
*When people say you should not start your game design career with the One True Game, they're fucking right. This project has been razed and rebuilt from the ground up at least twice, and not a scrap of the rules text from when I started remains.
The below spoiler holds previous contents of this post.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
10
Creative Projects / Tabletop RPG Combat Systems
« on: June 06, 2013, 10:08:35 pm »
So, I'm hashing out some of the unspoken assumptions I started writing a game with, and this is one I can't really work out for myself. So, I've decided to harvest your opinions.
When you're fighting* something in a tabletop RPG, how do you think the game should handle actions?
In the traditional turn-based system, each participant in combat has a turn on which to act, and there's a fairly orderly process to going through battle. Usually, there are sharp limits on what you can do outside your turn, and the most important one is that you usually can't take actions that render somebody else's retroactively useless. For instance, you can't usually decide to move after a fireball is lobbed your way so that you're no longer within the radius of the burst (although there are often countermeasures you can take, they're usually contested themselves and require you to give up your own turn in order to make them happen). This system is very straightforward, and its prevalence in almost all kinds of games makes it very intuitive to new players. How actions resolve is usually fairly clear, and this makes it relatively quick to play with. On the other hand, it can create strange situations that don't make sense unless you specifically reason in terms of the turns, and drastically increases the incentive to go first since it means you have an opportunity to make sure your opponent never gets to go at all. It also tends to make the game less interesting whenever it isn't your turn, because you can't often do much but wait.
In the "impulse"-based system, a term I'm using from the Wikipedia article on the subject, actions are resolved at least partially simultaneously, allowing players to react to other players within a single turn. In the version I'm considering, each player decides on a series of actions to take, and then everybody's actions are taken simultaneously (I seem to recall something similar being used in Burning Wheel). This is less straightforward, and will take more explanation for new players. Resolving actions can get complicated, so a system will need to be put in place to work out how actions interact with other actions - such a system is likely to get fairly complicated, particularly if I try to make things interactive so that counterattacks and such are a part of the game. On the plus side, once the mechanics are grasped, the results can be made fairly intuitive, since it approximates real-time to a certain extent. It doesn't necessarily make it mandatory to have the best reflexes, since your action will still go through even if you're defeated by your opponent's first decision, and it's essentially everybody's turn at once, so it's got less of a vibe of "Long periods of boredom punctuated by short periods of excitement" that turn-based games produce.
Personally, I am leaning toward the latter option, but I don't know if that's just me latching onto something new or if it's a genuinely good idea. Is it worth the at-the-table complication to make it happen? Reasons for voting, suggestions, or alternatives are welcome replies.
*Combat's the default here, but any competitive encounter would use the same system.
When you're fighting* something in a tabletop RPG, how do you think the game should handle actions?
In the traditional turn-based system, each participant in combat has a turn on which to act, and there's a fairly orderly process to going through battle. Usually, there are sharp limits on what you can do outside your turn, and the most important one is that you usually can't take actions that render somebody else's retroactively useless. For instance, you can't usually decide to move after a fireball is lobbed your way so that you're no longer within the radius of the burst (although there are often countermeasures you can take, they're usually contested themselves and require you to give up your own turn in order to make them happen). This system is very straightforward, and its prevalence in almost all kinds of games makes it very intuitive to new players. How actions resolve is usually fairly clear, and this makes it relatively quick to play with. On the other hand, it can create strange situations that don't make sense unless you specifically reason in terms of the turns, and drastically increases the incentive to go first since it means you have an opportunity to make sure your opponent never gets to go at all. It also tends to make the game less interesting whenever it isn't your turn, because you can't often do much but wait.
In the "impulse"-based system, a term I'm using from the Wikipedia article on the subject, actions are resolved at least partially simultaneously, allowing players to react to other players within a single turn. In the version I'm considering, each player decides on a series of actions to take, and then everybody's actions are taken simultaneously (I seem to recall something similar being used in Burning Wheel). This is less straightforward, and will take more explanation for new players. Resolving actions can get complicated, so a system will need to be put in place to work out how actions interact with other actions - such a system is likely to get fairly complicated, particularly if I try to make things interactive so that counterattacks and such are a part of the game. On the plus side, once the mechanics are grasped, the results can be made fairly intuitive, since it approximates real-time to a certain extent. It doesn't necessarily make it mandatory to have the best reflexes, since your action will still go through even if you're defeated by your opponent's first decision, and it's essentially everybody's turn at once, so it's got less of a vibe of "Long periods of boredom punctuated by short periods of excitement" that turn-based games produce.
Personally, I am leaning toward the latter option, but I don't know if that's just me latching onto something new or if it's a genuinely good idea. Is it worth the at-the-table complication to make it happen? Reasons for voting, suggestions, or alternatives are welcome replies.
*Combat's the default here, but any competitive encounter would use the same system.
11
Creative Projects / I Need Help Naming Ability Styles
« on: April 14, 2013, 11:37:19 pm »
So, I'm coming up with subdivisions for categories of special powers characters can have in a tabletop game. For instance, Sorcery, a school of magic, has Conjuration, Enchantment, Illusion, and Motion. Nonmagical groups are proving somewhat more tricky, possibly due to a failure on my part to have the proper vocabulary. For instance, under the Tactics discipline, which is all about using particular weapons (I couldn't actually come up with a proper name for that, even), I've got Archery (for your bows), Brawling (for unarmed combat), Sharpshooting (for crossbows/guns), and Swordplay (should probably change to blade-something? need daggers in here, too). But I'm having trouble coming up with a word that properly describes the use of a Axes and Hammers (that'd be one group), and one that describes the use of Polearms. Any ideas? Everything I've thought of sounds ugly, stupid, or is way too specific.
In a related vein, I'm trying to think of a fourth category for the use of Language. I've got Charm, for all your bluffing and convincing needs, Intimidation for when you absolutely have to coerce every motherfucker in the room, and Leadership for when you need to give good advice or an inspiring speech or song or what have you, but I'm having trouble figuring out another conceptual niche that has applicability. It has to be nonmagical, because I'm full up on magical stuff right now, otherwise I'd just stick truespeechly things in or something. Something involving writing is appealing, but I can't actually see applications. Storytelling and other bits of lore-use falls under a different discipline entirely, as well. Thoughts?
In a related vein, I'm trying to think of a fourth category for the use of Language. I've got Charm, for all your bluffing and convincing needs, Intimidation for when you absolutely have to coerce every motherfucker in the room, and Leadership for when you need to give good advice or an inspiring speech or song or what have you, but I'm having trouble figuring out another conceptual niche that has applicability. It has to be nonmagical, because I'm full up on magical stuff right now, otherwise I'd just stick truespeechly things in or something. Something involving writing is appealing, but I can't actually see applications. Storytelling and other bits of lore-use falls under a different discipline entirely, as well. Thoughts?
12
Life Advice / Surface Graphing
« on: November 10, 2012, 03:07:39 am »
Let's say I have a list of a 500 3D coordinates, and I want to visualize the surface they form. How can I do this efficiently without learning a new programming language or paying dollars? I'd like something I can just copy-paste the data into, if such a thing exists. I can probably format it appropriately without too much trouble.
13
Life Advice / Open Office "next cell" character? [Solved]
« on: October 06, 2012, 02:06:22 pm »
Does a character exist in Apache OpenOffice that is interpreted to mean a column break in the same way that a line break takes you to the next row? I'm attempting to hack together an efficient way of transporting output from a Java program that is in the form of a 10x10 table, and I'd like to have each piece of data pop neatly into its own cell; line breaks are preserved, but everything as I've currently got it gets slotted into a single column, and I do not have great interest in manually fixing it if there's a way around, so I'm looking for a character I can have it print that will do the job for me.
EDIT: Family member reminded me how to use delimiters. Problem solved, albeit by a different route entirely.
EDIT: Family member reminded me how to use delimiters. Problem solved, albeit by a different route entirely.
14
Life Advice / Dead External HD
« on: September 17, 2012, 02:43:56 am »
An external hard drive of mine recently died, and the errors I've been getting have suggested that the problem is with the boot sector, or something to that effect - no OS can mount it, etc. I honestly don't know a lot about hardware, so I'm kinda going off a vague impression. I'm running a program that might be able to reconstruct the boot sector (to be specific, the RebuildBS option of testdisk, through the Ping linux distro, something I just sort of found while searching for something I could do). It's throwing a shitload of errors as it scans the HD while doing so. In fact, one error every 8 sectors, the last sector in every "logical block" (not sure what that really means, but since the problem sector is always 8*the logical block, that's what I'm going with).
The error is, without fail:
The error repeats 8 times, then moves to the next one.
I'm guessing this is probably totally insufficient to diagnose the actual problem, but I figured I'd check. Anybody have an idea what this means? Is the disk totally toast? Is it a reparable hardware error? Is it a reparable software issue? I'd really like to get the data off this thing, but at this point I've written that off as unlikely. I just want to be sure about it before I give up.
Given all the 8s, Vriska is clearly to blame. HUUSSSSSSIIIIIEEEEEEE[/homestuck]
EDIT: Nevermind. It's a brick now, apparently.
The error is, without fail:
Code: [Select]
end_request: critical target error, dev sda, sector <number>
Buffer I/O error on device sda, logical block <number/8>The error repeats 8 times, then moves to the next one.
I'm guessing this is probably totally insufficient to diagnose the actual problem, but I figured I'd check. Anybody have an idea what this means? Is the disk totally toast? Is it a reparable hardware error? Is it a reparable software issue? I'd really like to get the data off this thing, but at this point I've written that off as unlikely. I just want to be sure about it before I give up.
Given all the 8s, Vriska is clearly to blame. HUUSSSSSSIIIIIEEEEEEE[/homestuck]
EDIT: Nevermind. It's a brick now, apparently.
15
Creative Projects / Tabletop RPG Mechanics: Philosophy Thread
« on: April 12, 2012, 11:43:22 pm »
Okay, so I'm starting this thread primarily to milk you guys for advice on a single question. But, I figure I might as well give something back, so if anybody cares to keep talking, we can expand this topic into what the title implies: a comprehensive discussion on how to design good tabletop game systems. For instance, how would a given decision impact the flow of play at the table. In fact, that's what I'd like to talk about today!
I'm designing my own homebrew system, and I'm having a hard time striking a balance I like between a bunch of different, conflicting ideals. I like rolling fistfulls of dice all at once, for instance, but I don't like slowing down the game while a player counts up dozens. I also like a system that lets heavily focused characters succeed almost all of the time, but I don't want one that accidentally drops off the random number generator until you're extremely dedicated. I also want something that uses a single notation or other mode of die rolling to avoid feeling like you've got a bunch of disparate mechanics hashed together (like if you roll d20s in combat, but a bunch of d10s for everything else, or something), but I don't want it to feel like every die roll is the same thing over and over again.
So yeah, a balance is hard. Here's a rough draft I've written up of what appeals to me right now, but I find myself thinking it's too complex for play at the table, and I was hoping I could get some thoughts. It's also going to take care in setting target numbers to prevent the aforementioned dropping off of the RNG, and some thoughtful ability construction to keep dice number inflation from racing out of control until implausibly high campaign power levels.
Note: while d6s might be more convenient, d10s I hope work a bit better for a system based on adding dice, since it means I can scale target numbers by 5 every time I want you to have an extra die to keep your chance of success even, as long as I'm willing to have a persistent bias toward success built into the system (which I am, within reason; I might have to throw in the odd scale by 10, but the point is that it makes numbers a lot easier to whip up on the fly than basing them on multiples of 3).
I'm designing my own homebrew system, and I'm having a hard time striking a balance I like between a bunch of different, conflicting ideals. I like rolling fistfulls of dice all at once, for instance, but I don't like slowing down the game while a player counts up dozens. I also like a system that lets heavily focused characters succeed almost all of the time, but I don't want one that accidentally drops off the random number generator until you're extremely dedicated. I also want something that uses a single notation or other mode of die rolling to avoid feeling like you've got a bunch of disparate mechanics hashed together (like if you roll d20s in combat, but a bunch of d10s for everything else, or something), but I don't want it to feel like every die roll is the same thing over and over again.
So yeah, a balance is hard. Here's a rough draft I've written up of what appeals to me right now, but I find myself thinking it's too complex for play at the table, and I was hoping I could get some thoughts. It's also going to take care in setting target numbers to prevent the aforementioned dropping off of the RNG, and some thoughtful ability construction to keep dice number inflation from racing out of control until implausibly high campaign power levels.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
Note: while d6s might be more convenient, d10s I hope work a bit better for a system based on adding dice, since it means I can scale target numbers by 5 every time I want you to have an extra die to keep your chance of success even, as long as I'm willing to have a persistent bias toward success built into the system (which I am, within reason; I might have to throw in the odd scale by 10, but the point is that it makes numbers a lot easier to whip up on the fly than basing them on multiples of 3).