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Any D&D/D20

Shadowrun

World of Darkness

Palladium

Other (feel free to post about it)

[Jimmy]

To be fair, a first level combat with my five man Pathfinder group can also take four hours, given their typical approach to combat.

Step 1: Spend about half an hour beforehand scouting/stealthing around looking for back doors and traps.
Step 2: Overthink things and try some insane gambit to bypass/distract/knock out enemies before combat.
Step 3: Spend a solid ten minutes getting Perception checks, Knowledge checks, Sense Motive checks and the like out of the way.
Step 4: Partially engage before every person charges off in their own direction instead of working together, including the one guy that goes off to fetch the city guard.
Step 5: Arrive to your turn unprepared with your actions, agonize over it for five minutes, have half the rest of the table shouting suggestions.
Step 6: Finally decide some kind of action, only to discover there's some rules question involved that is in debate, spend another five minutes looking it up.
Step 7: Repeat step 5 and 6 for each player's turn.

[NullForceOmega]

I'm talking about the ROLLING.  Not the planning, not the actions, just the GODDAMN ROLLING.

Declare attack, roll to hit, roll to dodge, over and over and over and over and over again because either no one can hit anything or no one can take damage, FOREVER.

And then absolutely everything has inordinate amounts of health, and absolutely NOTHING deals any meaningful amount of damage!

The highest damaging attack spell in the whole of RIFTS does around 1D6x100, and takes actual minutes of time to cast, but when your target has in the realm of 21,000 MDC it really doesn't amount to jack shit.

The best man-portable heavy energy weapon in the whole damned setting deals 3D6x10+10 MD, and takes an entire minute to cooldown between shots, each melee round is fifteen seconds, and the average character will have five to seven actions during that period, with reloads taking an action, dodging taking an action (unless you have autododge, which is used automatically against every single incoming attack), even if the only words spoken are; "I shoot it with my rifle" it still takes freaking HOURS to take down a couple of basic hostiles, nevermind a multi-thousand MD demon or dragon, and gods help you against multi-crewed combat vehicles, which might have twenty attacks each round with weapons that actually have some moderate punch, but almost never HIT anything.

Palladium is freaking broken beyond your ability to imagine unless you've actually tried to use it as written, and that is the most goddamn horrifying thing I can imagine doing, next to trying to play FATAL.

If those hours were used productively I wouldn't even have mentioned the length of time it takes, combat is a straight up nightmare in all Palladium titles unless you houserule the entire thing to flow in a vaguely sane format.

[Sirus]

At this point, I'm wondering why you even bother with it. Palladium doesn't sound very fun at all, and you seem to have nothing but complaints about the system.

[NullForceOmega]

Setting and material.  The mechanics have to be gutted to make it work but the core ideas are really compelling stuff.  I wish K.S. would hand the actual mechanical stuff off to someone with the right head for it, because once you've torn apart the bad parts (which is entirely badly constructed rules) everything else fits together nicely.

It's like buying a busted muscle car to restore, what you start with is a wreck, but once you've repaired and replaced everything, you've got a sweet ride.

I'm not going to lie tho', Palladium books is really frustrating as hell, because you can see what the settings want to be, but they're bundled with trash you really don't want to deal with.

[SalmonGod]

I like Palladium's lesser-known games that focus hard on an interesting setting.  But their most popular game is Rifts, which is sort of like a proto-40K.  Super over-the-top sci-fi setting that shoehorns in excuses to accomodate every idea ever dialed up to 11.  Thought that kind of thing was genius when I was a 14.  Now I see it as just a lazy cop-out to avoid having to write anything coherent. 

Rifts is probably the source of a lot of the mechanical problems NFO is referring to, because they try to develop all of their other games as being part of a multiverse, with the Rifts world as a nexus that ties them all together.  But it doesn't really work.  I think a lot of the shitty mechanics were developed as a shoddy effort to make all these things compatible when thrown together into Rifts.

I'll always refer to Nightbane as the example of what they do right.  Love the concept behind that one.  It's like X-Men, but with an apocalyptic omen as its origin event and mysterious celestial beings appearing at the same time to use earth as their battleground in some light/dark struggle.  And the book leaves it up to you to determine what these things mean, if you tackle it in your game at all.  There's no canon explanation, which I think is cool.  They have other good settings, but I couldn't recite any of them now.  Nightbane is the only one I own, and it's been like 15 years since I paid any attention to Palladium.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Anybody here ever play a game in the Midnight setting? I've been interested in it a long time, but like most everything published by FFG it's gone to the ether. The concept of a dystopian post-Sauron victory world resonates with me, but being that I'd have to drop $200 to get my hands on an actual book I don't know much more.

[Rolan7]

An... interesting... 3rd party class got released yesterday by tweet.  Old Spice couldn't say it was for DND 3.5, but it's totally for 3.5.
Yeah... Old Spice.  Like the gentleman on a horse.  That's... that's one of the class abilities, suddenly being on a horse.

http://comicbook.com/gaming/2018/02/08/dungeons-and-dragons-old-spice-/  (Where my friend found it, good summary)
https://twitter.com/OldSpice/status/961362988019064832  (Has download link, and some communication from the devs about possible errata)
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?550552-Old-Spice-base-class-The-Gentleman  (Because of course there's a GiantITP thread lol)

We got a laugh out of it anyway   It's an advertisement of course (as one of the class powers states), but a very targeted one.

[Jimmy]

Thanks for the link Rolan7!

Ultimately, I think if this was ever a real class, it'd be a cheap way to dip Charisma to AC for tanky pajama builds. This of course assumes the gentleman's uniform is not classed as light armor, which isn't explicitly mentioned. I can see something like a Monk 2/Gentleman 1/Fist of the Forest 1/Stuff to get Wis, Cha and Con to AC.

[Jimmy]

I gotta say, Pathfinder alchemists are brutal NPC opponents.

This week my group got to fight a cambion alchemist in an underground cave filled with magma, crossed by rickety rope bridges. Tossing five bombs a round for 6d6+11 damage against touch AC is a nasty combo. Ended up with one PC on 8 hp, another on 1 hp, and killed a third PC's cohort before they had to teleport away with the corpse to avoid losing them into the magma.

Hopefully, this will motivate the group to buy up more consumable protections like scrolls and potions for pre-battle prep. I've been giving them plenty of wealth in loot, but they're failing to spend any of it on small purchases, instead saving it all for big items.

[MrRoboto75]

Thanks for the link Rolan7!

Ultimately, I think if this was ever a real class, it'd be a cheap way to dip Charisma to AC for tanky pajama builds. This of course assumes the gentleman's uniform is not classed as light armor, which isn't explicitly mentioned. I can see something like a Monk 2/Gentleman 1/Fist of the Forest 1/Stuff to get Wis, Cha and Con to AC.

I'd take a level of wiz or sorcerer just so I can use prestigitation to give people and things the wonderful smell of Old Spice (tm).

[Rolan7]

Or just be a gnome, they get it as a racial ability!
...Seem like a fairly good fit for the class, too, being all about presentation/illusion/japes.

[Kadzar]

Figured it's worth mentioning here that Matt Colville launched a Kickstarter today for a strongholds guide for D&D 5e, which, as of this writing, is already over 1200% funded.

[wobbly]

At this point, I'm wondering why you even bother with it. Palladium doesn't sound very fun at all, and you seem to have nothing but complaints about the system.

Palladium has some fairly cool settings but shoddy mechanics. You can have some fun min/maxing characters for stuff like running speed. Stuff like running at 100 km/hr etc. Honestly I think they are just a bit lazy about cleaning up the final product. Still fun with the right group/setting.

[highmax28]

DM had us restart the pathfinder game he had with all new players save myself.

Setting is 20's/40's-style era where guns are commonplace and urbanization is starting to take hold.

Party consists of:

- Half-orc fFghter who's a cab/getaway driver for the mafia, uses acid rounds in his shotgun ans established as party tank
- Silph Witch widow who's deceased husband was with the mafia
- Catfolk rogue who owns a mafia-run bar/gambling den
- Ifrit alchemist who seems to be the mot level headed of the mafia bunch
- Aasimar sorceress who's with the local police force
- Pixie sorceress who's essentially deadpool
- Myself as human vigilante, and the only one who's played pathfinder before and used to how DM plays

Campaign is essentially us going around and lowering the crime rate of the city we're in in time for he world's fair and this world's equivalent of the world series. Our first task is finding a serial killer called the Clockwork Killer, who seems to be targeting clockmakers/vendors. Arriving, we search the building and are told he was stabbed to death, nothing was taken but a lot of the clocks were destroyed. A few checks later, we discover only digital clocks are broken (DM confirmed that Digital clocks came up around this era in real life), and searching the owner's room upstairs, we found two constructs in the closet who we confirmed were the killers. After a ridiculous fight involving the alchemist getting shot and nearly dying and nearly setting the building on fire, I took their weapons for analysis and we proceeded to continue our investigation. We found out that a lot of the clocks that were broken were made by a company owned by a gnome named Hamelton.

I ended up missing this part, but the party ended up breaking into Hamelton's HQ and found cocaine in his office (and pixie deadpool wanted to replace it with chalk she had on hand, but was told against it). By then, the day was late and we had to leave. Party met back up to meet Hamelton in his house and discovered a note with a riddle on it and that Hamelton was kidnapped. The note, upon discerning it, was discovered to be taken to a clocktower and at the strike of 8 he would be killed. We ended up finding him in record time and found him, as well as several constructs we fought earlier, in one of the clocktowers we guessed right away.

Interseting tidbit, this encounter was changed from vampires to constructs. For what reason? I don't know, but it suited what was going on. Unfortunately, it was at this point that, myself as a glass cannon, found out I had more HP and AC than the fighter who said he was our tank, and the encounter almost had us get completely destroyed. Funnily enough, Hamelton, who was being an asshole to us most of the time, wasn't in any immediate danger and was left dangling uncomfortably on cogs that would kill him if we weren't fast enough (a reminder that he was to be killed at 8pm, and we arrived at about 11am-1pm). So the entire fight, we were left with a very angry gnome yelling at us while we fought. During the fight, one of our sorceresses ended up casting a fire based spell and missed, causing her to hit gears and such while the other one, who focused on ice magic, kept missing as well, which started to cause the clocktower to malfunction and nearly collapse on us. We barely had time to escape and, being that I had potions of flying at my disposal, I ended up carrying the gnome by his leg and leaping out of the building and flying to the ground while the gnome cussed me out.

Hamelton gave us some names and we begun investigations from there. The first man we ran into was a halfling named Cogsworth. After a breif talk with him, we figured we had our lead (one of the others was known to be eccentric), but wanted to confirm so by visiting the other name. We found out that the next one, who was an elf, was still well off despite being run out of business and the party split up, with Pixie deadpool using a ring of invisibility to scope the place out and the rogue sneaking in and searching for things as the rest of us questioned the man. The rogue found a locked door and found a horrifying sight.

For some context, a huge war happened 150 years or so prior where the elves started a conquest of the world and almost won, if it wasn't for the dwarves, orcs and human nations allying together and repelling the elves. In the retaliation attack, it was discovered that the elves had made concentration camps for halflings, dwarves and gnomes, cementing the fact that the DM made the elves Nazis.

In this basement, they discovered not only was this clockmaker a nazi, but he had a shrine dedicated to the nazis in his basement, as well as pictures of himself seen as one of the high ranking officers causing these war crimes. After the questioning group cemented the culprit, the rogue went to the elf, disguised as another elf (she had disguise self at-will) and essentially convinced him that he was caught and that he should show up to her bar.

We ended up going to the last, and all but confirmed, culprit of this and found he wasn't home. We did, however, find bootlegger tunnels in his basement and we started to follow them. Our alchemist was trained in survival and started to follow signs of where this man went, only to hear strange noises the opposite way. The police officer turned and headed that way with the rest of us in tow, only to discover a naked goblin in the tunnels who ran up to the officer and punched her in the chest. What proceeded to happen was pixie deadpool casting hideous laughter which caused the goblin to laugh uncontrollably and the officer, who's player I discovered isn't exactly playing her character as a police officer, proceeds to try and drown the goblin in sewer water. I had to step in at this point, being the only character in this party that was actually "good" and scared the officer as I pulled the goblin out and cast him aside.

After the goblin incident, we ended up finding a ladder that was clearly out of place and climbed it, and at the top we found the culprit working on a construct that was colossal size. I attempted to intimidate him, but even with a 50+ on the die, his insanity made him immune to fear and we watched as he was torn apart and put inside the construct, which began to power up and attack us.

Here's where things went weird. Rothman (the criminal) nat 1's a save against the sleep spell, and we proceeded to set ourselves up for a heavy strike on him, only for him to wake up randomly without anyone knowing why. He then tries to attack the fighter but fails miserably, which leads into my turn where I realized how overpowered I seemed to the rest of the party since I had boots of speed and struck the construct for 117 damage with my swords (there was a crit or two in there). The construct freaks out and slammed into me, which brings me from 114 to 10. This is where I realize how screwed the party was since everyone was saying how dead I was, only for me to tell them I was narrowly alive. I quickly found out EVERYONE had less than 50hp, including the tank. I quickly sneak away and the officer then discerns how awful she is by saying she fires directly at me with a spell despite knowing I was there. Thankfully, I took the vigilante ability that gave me evasion and I took nothing, but then my turn rolled around and I fired off my revolvers, which lead to two criticals and a grand total of 224 damage. The DM described that despite being colossal in size, there wasn't much left of him after what I did to him.

We then started to gather notes we found as evidence when we heard someone singing and everyone proceeded to start floating as if gravity no longer effected them while also being paralyzed. One of our characters has an innate detect alignment somehow and discoverd that the one who came in and took the notes, and the body of the construct, was two alignments, one was described as Lawful Evil and the other was discerened as something beyond chaotic evil; something that "shouldn't be". We also discovered that this man, plus the followers that we found out were there with him, were all bards.

After the spell ended, we called in the guy who hired us and reported what we found. The party split for the night, which involved the rogue and pixie deadpool splitting on the pay everyone was supposed to split on, the two of them guilt tripping and killing the nazi, my vigilante taking the construct arms we found and turning them into wrist guns (I'm hoping to ask my DM to turn the blades into extendible wolverine claws), and starting another chain of events that leads to one of my favorite moments in the campaign the last time we played it (think Miami Vice but with magic).

[SOLDIER First]

The Aasimar cop's player sounds like a dick.