Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Gamerlord]

I just checked the rtd thread, you did NOT PM me. At all. I have no PM from you in my index. So what we gonna do?

[superBlast]

I just checked the rtd thread, you did NOT PM me. At all. I have no PM from you in my index. So what we gonna do?

O.o Seriously? I sent you two... or atleast i thought i did. The second was because I wasn't sure if the first one got through. Check your PM's one more time. I'll send some random one and see if you get it.

Edit:
Have you checked your emails recently? I think I just realized I sent you emails not PMs.

[Gamerlord]

I keep my normal emails and my bay12 registered email different because of notifications and overflow. Didn't think to check it in a while. Sorry about that. So what's going to happen? I'm happy to go back to the bottom of the waitlist...

[superBlast]

Yep your on the waitlist again. Next time I promise to actually send PM's this time.

[Kadzar]

After sort of heroically dying in Looter's Delight, I'm interested in seeing a game that literally runs on shonen action series tropes. Like you'd get a bonus from friendship in certain situations, or there'd be a big bonus, either for your final act or your friends afterwards. And maybe there'd be player-controlled villains, so there'd be the opportunity to have Defeat Equals Friendship.

Another idea would be a world that's mostly empty, like a infinite (mostly) featureless plane with a couple of things in the area where the players are, and they have to make due with what's there, for the most part, although there would be some means by which new stuff would come in occasionally (and maybe old stuff would leave). I think maybe the players should maybe have different special powers (probably nothing too spectacular, just stuff like the ability to change size slightly or make small amounts of water freeze) or be possibly be weird creatures. Inspired a little bit by what were my future plans for Looter's Delight and a lot by the webcomic 1/0.

[Harry Baldman]

Had an RTD idea today. Here goes:

March of the Forest Gnomes!

The idea of the game is such: each and every one of the players is a forest gnome. They live in treetop shacks in the woods of the American Mid-West, are three feet tall, use crude wooden tools and generally do stereotypical elf things, except they are shorter and more reclusive, as well as far less attractive to humans. They usually live in harmony with nature and lead pretty boring forest-oriented lives. Note the "usually" part. Because that period of their history is over. There's a new King of the Forest Gnomes, and he favors an aggressive foreign policy. And by "an aggressive foreign policy" I mean "a single-minded devotion to the subjugation of humanity". And you, the players (organized in strike teams of 6-8), will be the lucky gnomes chosen to perform various subversive, strategic and occasionally openly hostile actions against the nearby human populations.

On the humans: the year is 20XX, and modern technologies rule society. They have guns, cars, bombs, poisons, phones, trained attack dogs and many other delightfully deadly artifacts. However, you are not entirely defenseless against them - in addition to your sharpened sticks, bows, nets, traps and similar other things, you also wield a power unheard of among humans - the whisper. All gnomes are tuned in to the spirit world to some degree or another, but a precious few - the Whisperers - show exceptional talent in these areas. They can use their talent to both question the wise spirits and make them grant aid in certain occasions. Also, you may eventually figure out how to use some of your enemy's weapons and artifacts against them in certain ways.

Spoiler: Character System (click to show/hide)

So, here's my idea for the character system - you have two different sets of stats - Talents and Skills. Talents are very powerful and far-reaching, but you do not get to change them in any way after character creation. Skills, on the other hand, can be obtained and perhaps even lost at any point in the game. They can also help mitigate a lack of talent in an area. It works like this - at character creation, you get 4 talent points to spread amongst your 4 talents. A 0 in a talent means a -1 to all associated actions, 1 means no bonus or penalty, 2 means a +1, 4 means a +2. These are the talents:

Body: encompasses feats of strength, dexterity, agility, speed, endurance.
Mind: encompasses wisdom, intelligence, willpower, perception, the ability to use human technology as well as use your limited assets as creatively and efficiently as possible. Each point above 1 gives an additional skill to start with.
Guile: encompasses ability to remain inconspicuous and sneak around, perform feats of misdirection and meaningfully interact with humans (or your fellow gnomes) in any way - persuade, intimidate, lie, taunt and so forth.
Whisper: encompasses ability to whisper to the spirits and impose your will on them.

All actions you can roll for are associated with a particular talent - a lack of say, physical talent will affect your dodging, lifting of objects and so on. Same applies for bonuses - they apply to everything associated with the talent.

You also get two (plus your Mind score minus one) free skills - a skill can be active (gives you an ability, for instance, to make a particular kind of trap) or passive (gives you a bonus or augments an existing ability, like letting a wrestler wrestle humans at no penalty due to size). Skills can be of many kinds - combat skills, social skills, crafting skills, even whisper skills - and you gain a total of (1 + your Mind score) points to spend on skills at the completion of one of the Gnome King's missions. Skills can also be taught (this once again depends on the gnome's Mind score) and gained through persistent successful use.

So the game would be mission-based, with an away team of 6-8 gnomes performing mischief in human-populated areas and contending with the police, gun owners, pets, appliances, angry people and their own problems as they struggle to subjugate a race more technologically advanced than them.

EDIT: Once again, if anybody wants this idea, they can have it. I have about two other RTDs I'd like to run before I'd consider this one.

[Xantalos]

I might join that.
Scratch that, if it gets up I'm joining.

[IronyOwl]

That looks fairly fun. I still prefer my gnome cagematch/arena idea, though.

Also gaining skill points equal to your Mind score for everything concerns me. I guess it's a good way to avoid it being a dump stat, but I'm worried you could make a 4 Mind gnome that then mastered enough skills for his crippling physical, spiritual, and clandestine deficiencies to be more than compensated for in anything he'd care to do.

[Gamerlord]

Harry, does every idea you have turn out great?

[Tsuchigumo550]

I'm sort of wanting to do a "Black Ops" RtD. No, not the Call of Duty one. No, not anything from a game.

The idea is, I'm taking a lot of players. Like, 12-16, maybe even 20. Now everyone is like "WTF, your RtDs die with FOUR people. What makes you again think you can keep up, with MORE?"

Not everyone plays at once. 4v4 deathmatch styled games that affect the way the game's plot works.

Teams are:
Russian "Volk"
US "Blackbirds"
China's "Lotus"
European "Knights"
"Individuals"
"Noblesse Oblige"

The two sides without a team are specialty squads- Noblesse Oblige a terrorist force against global governments as a whole, and "Individuals" make up a -very- special squad: literally four well-armed Chinese soldiers who broke off from the main force, and have been classified "MIA". They're actually holed up in the wilderness, after they wrote a program named "Individual 11", which wold silently infect the systems today's soldiers now utilize, turning them into sleeper cells, martyrs linked by only two things: the virus, and their last words: "I am a true individual!"

Generally, the EU/US and RU/CH forces don't fight one another. The US and EU are great friends, while the Russians and Chinese have a less stable "agreement", Russians fork over weapons, the Chinese give soldiers and tech in return.

The other two groups fight everyone.

Turning points can and would happen. If the "Individuals" go unchecked, tensions will rise, and friends may become enemies. If a co-op mission goes too far wrong, it could be the beginning of the end.

However, teamwork can also happen. For one thing, capturing an enemy alive isn't an instakill, rather, they become part of your force:

1. You interrogate the captive. You get a great deal of information, but nothing they wouldn't know.
2. They work for you, if you can share a relatively important goal. They'd suicide over helping you kill their compatriots, but taking down someone like the "Individuals" is a great way to keep assets alive.

Other factors can also come into play. If an op goes wrong and people find out, this is often worse than a "both teams are wiped out" scenario. Expect giant mission-changers, such as leaving someone alive with a radio? Suddenly, the op is a failure. Why not just cruise missile the area? Not like anyone will know, as both nations involved are playing the game. It's a VERY fast way to destabilize everything.

Furthermore, "total war" options become unlocked as nations become more and more powerful. Lets say that RU has been doing extremely well. They're buddy-buddy with China, who receives a small benefit from the whole deal, but Russia decides that Europe needs to stop being a player in the game. They have three options at their level, "false terrorism", "Intelligence Leaks", and "Missile Strike."

False Terrorism is a way to make a nation's people feel much less safe. Causing panic in a nation increases the likelyhood they're clandestine operations will be found out, and start the fuse on the powder keg.

Intel Leaks are a more direct "light the fuse." Suddenly, everyone knows what they're government is doing... from what another country thinks.

Missile Strikes are upright dirty. If a nation is weak enough to lose it's defenses, a Missile Strike will end it forever, but if it can successfully defend suddenly EVERYONE hates you and your own people have doubts. It's dangerous but nation-ending.

[Harry Baldman]

Also gaining skill points equal to your Mind score for everything concerns me. I guess it's a good way to avoid it being a dump stat, but I'm worried you could make a 4 Mind gnome that then mastered enough skills for his crippling physical, spiritual, and clandestine deficiencies to be more than compensated for in anything he'd care to do.

You could. But it probably would take a while, plus you'd be really, really weak at first at everything (-1 to all, and I do mean all actions that aren't Mind-associated - that's attacking, dodging, stealth, whispers, intimidation, bluffing, withstanding damage) except for in about 4 very narrowly defined areas (as in, "you're good at using a spear defensively" is another example of a skill) that they would be sorta not entirely terrible at. However, if they don't die immediately, they might compensate it later with much faster skill growth. So you could consider it a legitimate way to build your character. It's a learned skill versus talent sort of thing, you know? You could also make a 4 Whisper gnome that knows magic and nothing else, though that would be far trickier to make viable. Or even a 4 Physical or 4 Guile gnome. Each would have their own playstyle and each could potentially be able to keep up with other characters.

[Tarran]

Okay, I'm in a bind on the rules of my possible upcoming RTD.

I want to make it impossible to completely escape failure on rolls (i.e, 1s and 2s on 1d6s, though I'll be using a different die), but leave the ability for players to reduce the chances of failures by giving their players skills and attributes without giving them the ability to make it impossible. However, I'm not sure how to go about this, though I'm sure standard RTD straight up bonuses from attributes/skills won't work. This has to work with both competitive rolls (for example, offense and defense in melee) and singular rolls. Anyone have any ideas?

And no, overshoots do not count as failures in this case.

Also, I'd like to avoid both using different systems for different rolls, and avoid Westlands+D22-style chances for bonuses.

[SeriousConcentrate]

Maybe just make it where, even if you have something ridiculous like a +5 bonus to your rolls, a 1 is still a failure? Not sure what you'd do in a competitive situation, but you could always give the edge to the guy with the bigger bonus in that case.

[Tarran]

Maybe just make it where, even if you have something ridiculous like a +5 bonus to your rolls, a 1 is still a failure?

That's too rigid and simple for my tastes. It's also not that effective. Plus I have the sneaking suspicion that such a simple rule is doomed to face technical problems further down the road.

Not sure what you'd do in a competitive situation, but you could always give the edge to the guy with the bigger bonus in that case.

Well obviously if your system is using straight bonuses you would just roll, add all bonuses, and see who got the highest like most if not all other RTDs do.

[SeriousConcentrate]

That was based on the assumption that one is always a failure. And I don't really see what technical problems could arise. I mean... you rolled a 1, the worst possible outcome, your roll fails (unless you're using like a d100 with a roll-under rule in which case 1 is the best and 100 is the worst or whatever, but I shouldn't have to be so pedantic to get my point across). Also, I believe that's the way it works for skill checks and such in D&D (with the opposite but equal rule being that 20 is always a pass IIRC), so take it up with WOTC.