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[Tarran]

Double post, but with a legit questionish idea.


I've been working on the Small Mercies system, and I just finished writing the basic rough of the Dual Wielding (Ranged) skill. Thinking about it, I worry that the penalties at start are too severe, and the penalties at max skill are perhaps too light.

Right now, if the character has no weapons training and they attempt to dual wield hand-and-a-half weapons (weapons that could, conceivably, be wielded in one hand but would definitely need two hands to reload/aim/use according to warranty) they take a base -15 penalty on a d20.

I haven't finished the accuracy effecting skills yet, but, ballpark, it looks like a character with complete mastery of the relevant ranged skills would have a base accuracy modifier of between -1 to +1 on the exact same task.

The question essentially boils down to: Should I go a little closer to reality, or should dual-shotgun messiah be a viable character build?

My opinion is you should make it very difficult for someone to become nearly reality-defyingly good at something, but not impossible if someone really wants to prioritize something massively.

Hey, you said you were militantly openminded, so shouldn't your system be too?

I don't know much about the game you're working on, but I'd go for the first option.
Dual-wielding always strikes me as incredibly silly and unrealistic, outside the occasional situation where it might be viable. (i.e: 17th century swordsmen, fencing with a sabre in one hand and a dagger in the other.)

Judging by a quick search, it's a futuristic sci-fi. I think.

In that case, it could be conceivable that in the future there could be lightweight automatic shotguns (or some other lightweight, close combat weapon) where dual wielding two would actually be a reasonable tactic in close combat.

[Digital Hellhound]

Or you could have, say, four arms and quad-wield instead. Perfectly feasible with scifi.

[IronyOwl]

Man, I really wish I could keep RTDs going for longer.
Some of my short-lived attempts at running them have actually been rather fun.
Maybe it's time to try again, and hopefully not be so useless and lazy this time. Anyone have any ideas for what I should try to run? I was thinking about some sort of heist RTD, or perhaps something involved futuristic cyborg assassins. Or maybe an epic adventure where you play as an assortment of children's toys, setting out to rescue their young owner from the monster under the bed! (idea shamelessly stolen from The Stuff of Legend.)

Or perhaps just some generic medieval fantasy? Generally pretty easy to handwave one's way out of explaining things in too much detail if you have a vague enough setting. That's generally what gets me, I get all bogged down in the details.

You could follow ffs' sage advice to me on this subject, and just add EVERYTHING you like. Play as some futuristic cyborg assassin children's toys in an otherwise generic medieval fantasy setting trying to pull off heists.

Double post, but with a legit questionish idea.


I've been working on the Small Mercies system, and I just finished writing the basic rough of the Dual Wielding (Ranged) skill. Thinking about it, I worry that the penalties at start are too severe, and the penalties at max skill are perhaps too light.

Right now, if the character has no weapons training and they attempt to dual wield hand-and-a-half weapons (weapons that could, conceivably, be wielded in one hand but would definitely need two hands to reload/aim/use according to warranty) they take a base -15 penalty on a d20.

I haven't finished the accuracy effecting skills yet, but, ballpark, it looks like a character with complete mastery of the relevant ranged skills would have a base accuracy modifier of between -1 to +1 on the exact same task.

The question essentially boils down to: Should I go a little closer to reality, or should dual-shotgun messiah be a viable character build?

I'm not familiar enough with the system to say how much of an investment "complete mastery of the relevant ranged skills" is, or how much of a reward dual wielding is.

But if the question is just whether to be realistic or dual-shotgun messiah, I think the default question is "Why not?" If it clashes too badly with your intended setting, scrap it. If it doesn't, it's not really hurting anything and might be helping some things, on that axis.

[lawastooshort]

Oh, Yoink, why not a heist RTD with a difference.

I had two ideas – one was medieval fantasy heist – you choose between say a fighter (+1 to attacking), a mage (can do fireballs) and a rogue (+1 to rogueing).

The other was INTERNATIONAL SPORTS HEIST, where you assemble a crack team of international sports stars to pull off a heist. Say, an American football player gets +1 to defence, an English cricket player gets +1 to throwing and to attacking with blunt weapons but is polite, so always has to let someone else go first, an ice hockey player has the psychopathic trait and gets +1 to attack and to wounds but has to keep attacking everyone in sight until they’re all dead, once he starts.

If I’d written it down at the time it came to me there would be more detail, but I didn’t.

[darkpaladin109]

The first one. There are so many minor details that I have no knowledge about, and it drives me mad.
In Blacktree Trail for example, I wasted hours just trawling websites trying to find out average prices for various goods from that time period, even as the rational part told me to stop worrying about it and focus on the story.

Completely silly and unnecessary, I know, but that's the sort of stuff that bugs me constantly when I try to write something in a realistic setting. Bah. I really need to get over that.

I also have problems, mostly since I constantly overcomplicate them, at least that's what I feel like.
That said, I decided on a rough idea for an RTD: A RTD in the Mega Man universe, or something similar to the Mega Man universe.

[Harry Baldman]

Okay, got an idea. Time to flesh it out!

Neo-Darwinian Apotheosis: The Universal Game

In The Beginning...

The nebulous void of the universe is, contrary to most reports, hardly a void at all. In fact, right now it seems to be more of a soup than anything - reality has thickened all over, pregnant with strange combinations of phenomena electromagnetic, thermodynamic and straight-up aetheric. What is up with all that, no mortal mind can comprehend - not that any exist, of course. The universe is still in a bit of an uncertain state, and the laws of physics don't quite apply like they should. This is good, because conventional laws of physics are going to be violated in a big way by what happens next. Or what has already happened - within the soup of muddled reality one can, if one happens to be blessed with omniscience, perceive something! A particle, or more accurately a corpuscle, to be exact, with some highly interesting aggregation abilities. And when these corpuscles aggregate, the resulting mix has even more interesting properties.

Firstly, their configuration holds the potential for information storage. Secondly, certain aggregates work to replicate others. These two abilities have resulted in the corpuscle's proliferation throughout the nascent universe. And now that the universe is slowly becoming more orderly and its innumerable dimensions begin to resonate more powerfully, a third property of the corpuscles begins to shine - the potential for change. And it is this third property that will ultimately prove crucial for the emergence of what we may know, through our own experience and imagination, as the gods. What follows is a tale of their adaptation, diversification and, of course, speciation.

How Is This A Game?

Simple! It's basically a suggestion game where the players are the universe. Their job is to collectively be changeable and adversarial, as well as coldly impersonal, kind of like the real universe is. It runs on RTD rules that govern adaptation to universal events on the part of the self-replicating godly corpuscles that may or may not be the ancestors of more complex divine life. The corpuscles, in case you're wondering, function basically like RNA, and their mutation happens both on its own and when they get blasted with chaotic cosmic energies.

The power of universal events is decided by how much support they garner - one suggestion is a local event (universally speaking, of course), and it scales upward with each vote of support and decreases in power with each vote against. Since the universe is so huge it may as well be infinite, there's probably no limit to the size of an event. Speaking of, the universe can't really create anything, just set off certain processes, like star formation, rapid expansion, accumulation of matter, progressive distortions of space and time, any sort of balderdash that sounds lightly plausible, that kind of thing. Each event, if it happens to either encourage separation of corpuscles or threaten a certain subset of them, will encourage divine evolution. Especially apocalyptic events! And just for fun, turns would be called epochs instead, because those sound more divine.

Furthermore...

Actually, that's pretty much all I got. Hard to define anything more since the premise of the game is its setting constantly changing to facilitate change in what its focus is. Hopefully the general path of the game would involve divine biochemistry gradually becoming divine biology, and from there divine ecology (personal hope: divine parasitology and virology). But there's no way to predict what'll happen by the end.

It'd presumably be fun to write, and good exercise for the imagination. Quite thought-provoking for an idea I got from an Onion article. Any thoughts?

[TamerVirus]

So basically it's a pseudo-intelligent design game? Sounds like a lot of random and awesome outcomes can happen.

[Draignean]

Hey, you said you were militantly openminded, so shouldn't your system be too?

Heh. You have no idea. Seriously.

Anyway, not thinking of doing away with the dual-wielding, just re-balancing it. Which I'm thinking less and less of.

I don't know much about the game you're working on, but I'd go for the first option.
Dual-wielding always strikes me as incredibly silly and unrealistic, outside the occasional situation where it might be viable. (i.e: 17th century swordsmen, fencing with a sabre in one hand and a dagger in the other.)

Science fiction, themed in a mixture of dark-future and daring-do, mercenary style. More comic book in reality style than my previous games, which is what makes me lean towards permitting dual wielding extremes. As an example, this the flavor text for the Dual wielding,

  Khannet sprawled on the floor of the fighter bay, taking a break from Travian's melee training with a story. "So there we were. Ceradi was standing there with his flippers out, looking pretty fucking surprised that his negotiations weren't working, and the goddamn 'security force' lowered their weapons on us. We were out in the open, flatfooted, and they had automatic weapons. We all should have been dead right then."
   Wallflower blinked. Evidently there was more to the story, considering that Khannet was still breathing. "What happened?"
  "Blackjack happened. 'Cap had been trying to talk better 'passage' terms with the security boss when they decided to piss in the drink and turn weapons on us. He'd been 'negotiating' for an hour or two before Ceradi tried his hand with underlings, and apparently the way you negotiate in the sector involved a lot of drinking. So, Captain drinks their boss under the table, and then hears the commotion we make as we're all about to get our collective asses shot off. So he grabs his shotgun, grabs the unconscious officer's rifle, and marches straight out at the enemy force, balls out. He looks at the security force, which had gotta be at least ten claws and crows strong, and demands their surrender! Crazy bastard."
  "...And they surrendered!?"
   "All hells, no. They pointed their weapons at the captain. So he makes a big show of switching his safeties off. Trouble was that he couldn't tell the safety from the firing stud for the underslung launcher on the assault rifle he borrowed. Blew up half the security force and sent the other half scrambling long enough for us to get an offensive going."
   "That's... I mean..." Travian scratched his head, searching for something to comment on. Thrilling heroics had never been his interest. "I know it wasn't the point of the story, but why did the captain have to have a rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other? Wouldn't it have been easier to just focus on aiming the rifle grenade?"
    Khannet opened her mouth to reply, but Blackjack interrupted her, casually leaning on the overhead catwalk. "It would have been easier, but I was drunk off my ass, and having one in each hand seemed like a good idea at the time." The captain shrugged and smiled. "By the way, when you tell that story again, make it a squad of twenty enforcers and a mech that had us pinned. More interesting for the listener."

I may rebalance slightly to make it absolutely clear that you NEED to invest a chunk of experience before you can get even remotely good at dual wielding, but I'm thinking of leaving it mostly intact.

[Fniff]

Idea I had. I'm feeling kinda blocked at the moment so I'm not going to do this for now, but maybe in a few months.

The GM Must Die!
One player out of the group is chosen to be the GM. The players must kill him. The GM has the advantage of being able to shape reality and having a lot of HP, but cannot act independently (always rolling in reaction to the players). The GM also has the ability to use GM Dice, all of which have terribly unfair results (The current one I have has only one success result). The players have low HP but have player skills that force the GM in certain circumstances to use the actual die. Whoever lands the killing blow on the GM takes over from the GM. In this RTD I'd most likely be a referee type who keeps track of health and such.

I imagine in this one respawn would have to be fairly fast since the game would be rather unfair and possibly similar to a Paranoia game if all goes well. What do you guys think?

[TamerVirus]

Idea I had. I'm feeling kinda blocked at the moment so I'm not going to do this for now, but maybe in a few months.

The GM Must Die!
One player out of the group is chosen to be the GM. The players must kill him. The GM has the advantage of being able to shape reality and having a lot of HP, but cannot act independently (always rolling in reaction to the players). The GM also has the ability to use GM Dice, all of which have terribly unfair results (The current one I have has only one success result). The players have low HP but have player skills that force the GM in certain circumstances to use the actual die. Whoever lands the killing blow on the GM takes over from the GM. In this RTD I'd most likely be a referee type who keeps track of health and such.

I imagine in this one respawn would have to be fairly fast since the game would be rather unfair and possibly similar to a Paranoia game if all goes well. What do you guys think?

This sounds very similar to the "Roll to GM" thread I'm running. Only with more structure

[Fniff]

Yeah, that thread did inspire me a bit. I thought a more competitive angle could add to it.

[lawastooshort]

So I though what if aliens came to Earth and invaded, and they had some kind of scanning machines which according to their own criteria evaluated all the beings on the planet, wait, I've skipped a bit there - so obviously these future-aliens have read Sun Tzu and realised that, heavily outnumbered, the best way to conquer Earth would be to divide it, so they tried to turn various species against each other.

So, with their scanning machines and more pertinently their own intelligence-criteria the future-aliens decide that sea lions are the second most potentially dominant species on Earth, so ally with them to topple humanity, and this is where the players come in: Roll to Sea Lion. Basically the players would be a squad of sea lions fighting against the might of humanity, but with rayguns.


That's one that I really wish I had the time to write up a proper OP for.

[darkpaladin109]

So I though what if aliens came to Earth and invaded, and they had some kind of scanning machines which according to their own criteria evaluated all the beings on the planet, wait, I've skipped a bit there - so obviously these future-aliens have read Sun Tzu and realised that, heavily outnumbered, the best way to conquer Earth would be to divide it, so they tried to turn various species against each other.

So, with their scanning machines and more pertinently their own intelligence-criteria the future-aliens decide that sea lions are the second most potentially dominant species on Earth, so ally with them to topple humanity, and this is where the players come in: Roll to Sea Lion. Basically the players would be a squad of sea lions fighting against the might of humanity, but with rayguns.


That's one that I really wish I had the time to write up a proper OP for.

...Wait, that gives me some inspiration.

[IronyOwl]

That sounds amazing. Almost like reverse X-COM.

[lawastooshort]

...Wait, that gives me some inspiration.

Well you can take that idea, if you want it. My current games are already exceedingly slow.

That sounds amazing. Almost like reverse X-COM.

Thanks - I was actually at the zoo today and naturally I ended up considering what it'd be like to wrestle a sea lion. Terrifying, I imagine - they're right big feckers with fangs the size of bananas, pretty much, and they're just made of blubber, so have no vital organs to speak of. Can you imagine?