>>178614
>>178616
Why WOULD they?

>>178614

Truly an urge not worthy of resistance.

>>177216
Man did that implode last night... reminded me of a Rogue Trader game (late in the story) where the party came up on a Tau and Eldar fleet about to engage with each other and the DM said we needed to pick a side since running away would be impossible due to us being smack dab in the middle and talking our way out wasn't a good idea since the two sides where already about to trade blows and where most likely aware that we had a dormant Nekron artifact on board and where both after it.
We debated out of character for over two hours and decided to try and be diplomatic. Turns out the Eldar and Tau decided that they should both secure or destroy the package themselves in the interest of galactic piece before declaring a non-aggression pact and moving in on us.
We yelled at him for a while and he sat there and took it before packing up his things without a word; he stopped at the door before saying "I will call you when I want to reconvene." and then left.
It wasn't until a little after a month when we finally met up again.


The moral of the story?: Sometimes, when the cards are down, and you're left with choices that seem terrible and cataclysmic; in-action is far worse than choosing between two evils. Also don't piss off your DM, that guy or gal works hard for you.

Some of you may remember me talking a year ago about converting Palladium's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness to Savage Worlds. Well, I finally finished the damn thing - it's archived on suptg:

http://suptg.thisisnotatrueending.com/archive/26468972/

Due to Palladium's interesting legal policy, there's a chance that I'm breaking copyright law by distributing this online. I'm going under the assumption that the policy only covers games that Palladium currently holds the license to.

>>178820

Do you have all the documents in a file or folder or anything? Because this combines two things I have loved for a long time.

So since it seems pretty enjoyed by my gaming groups, I'm trying to do a Pacific Rim RPG. Only catch is, I have to adapt an existing system because I don't have time to do it from scratch.

Would FATE work? I was thinking the Pilots would be able to grant the Jaeger one of their Aspets, giving it bonuses in certain situations and fights. For example, a pilot with something like "Tougher than a Nail Factory" could grant the aspect to a Jaeger that already has simple aspects like "Symbol of Wounded Pride" or "They Don't Build Them Like This Anymore."

On their own, the Pilots would have character aspects as normal. The "scale" aspects (like Rocket Punch) would only come into play in the cockpit, the rest of the time it would be Shatterdome stuff, maybe some intrigue and of course training simulations, sparring and the like. Game would likely take place near the downturn in the Kaiju War where the Jaeger program is under fire and losing momentum.

>>179000
Is everyone controlling one PC or a compatible pair?

>>179001

I was thinking players would each get one pilot. Cooperating movement/Drifting together would require some rolls and roleplaying, while anti-Kaiju combat would be more focused on filling the enemy's stress boxes without doing overkill (spreading the kaiju's poisonous blood everywhere.) There would probably be a lot of finesse involved, I'm still working on how to make it playable.

>>179000
Adpetus Evangellion seems a good start, its an adaption of dark heresy for giant robots fighting huge monsters.

Also, you should totally ask /tg/ on regular 4chan. They're good folks who will gladly help you out.

>>179093

In all honesty, I'd just go with your own sort of version of the universe. You could have individual pilots, or not you could keep the neural thing, but the kaiju attacks were very mathematical, with a limited number of monsters and attack times, and canonically they all have a jaeger that took them down. Then there's the fact that most of the Mark 1 jaegers only killed one or two kaiju before being taken down themselves, usually resulting in the death of both pilots. Even with the Mark 4, Striker Eureka, it only took down 11 (I think?) before it was decomissioned.

I understand that you'd like to focus on the Shatterdome parts of the movie, but I'm not seeing how you could run an entire campaign based off of that, with no external conflict for months on end as they wait to send the next kaiju, or mystery (because the mystery is solved by Newt at the end of the film).

Not to shit on your idea, because I think it's great, and if you can pull it off, I'll be super happy for you and your players, because Pacific Rim is great. The logistics of it are just really confusing to me.

>Starting a new game up with some acquaintances
>friends of friends, etc
>They play only ridiculous weird races from obscure supplementals
>The DM runs us across all creation with no rhyme or reason fighting shit that makes no sense being where it is
>Roleplaying is limited to doing something stupid and justifying it with alignment

Tolkien wrote the greatest adventure ever and he used just three races for players, goblins, orcs, trolls, and a dragon!

>>180459
Tolkien is overrated.

>>180461
Highly. He would've also been the dreariest and most railroad-y DM imaginable.

>>180461
Only because he's been rehearsed and refined a thousand times over.

In a way, he's overrated because he's overrated...but in a slightly deeper sense.

>>180461
>>180474
Your opinions and you're free to them. He'd probably have been better than Howard or Lovecraft who'd have TPK'd or driven characters insane respectively.

There's no railroad free adventure. The players need guidance and all roads lead to where the next part of the story is, eventually.
In a perfect world DMs would know that ideal ratio and execute it perfectly with great players, but that this ain't y'know.

>>180487
No, not at all. The reason he's overrated is because the works that get lauded by him aren't actually very well written. The Hobbit is actually a pretty solid book, and I have no serious complaints about it, but the Lord of the Rings and the Silmarillion are largely mental masturbation (and the Lord of the Rings, incidentally, is exactly the same story as the Hobbit minus the little personal touches that make Bilbo's journey so much more personal than Frodo's) by a man who was more interested in linguistics and how history affects the evolution thereof than he was in characterization.

If nerds were giving him all the love he gets because of the Hobbit, it'd be considerably less undeserved. But the Lord of the Rings was not even that great a fantasy story if you discount the fact that we've seen so much of it before now.

The Silmarillion, as dire as it was from a storytelling standpoint, I have to give him a bit of a pass on because it was unfinished and it's entirely possible he never intended to publish it. Or that if he did, it would've been as a better book than what came out.

So I'm looking to start up a quest on /tg/, but I've never done any DM/ GMing before.

Any tips, tricks or guides? I'll take anything from do's and don't, to how to set up a character sheet, to common pitfalls... anything that can help me not suck.

>>180489
>and the Lord of the Rings, incidentally, is exactly the same story as the Hobbit
Really.

>>180496
...the difference being that Hero's Journey stories don't use the same characters to fill the archetypes mentioned in there--the fact that Gandalf was the Gandalf in both stories, Elrond was the Elrond in both stories, and two of the characters who weren't explicitly reused were Generation Xerox relatives of the two characters who filled their roles in the Hobbit--Frodo being a less-well-developed copy of Bilbo, and Gimli being a copy of his father Gloin who journeyed with Bilbo. The movie is going to make this even worse when Legolas gets to play Legolas in both, and by making Sauron a more significant player in Bilbo's story.

Incidentally, bringing up the Hero's Journey (beside being literally Middle School level literary criticism, and a poor defense against bad writing given how the majority of badly written stories use the Hero's Journey as a template--c.f. Eragon) only brings my point home further--the Hobbit gets by because Bilbo's characterization is fuller and makes his story his own, because it's so much about Bilbo himself rather than being something where any character could have been put in his place and had it be the same story. Whereas in Lord of the Rings, you could have replaced Frodo with pretty much any other Hero's Journey character--Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter, Gilgamesh, Moses, anyone--and the story would have been exactly the same. Do the same thing with the Hobbit, and it's an entirely different story, because Bilbo is so much more his own character than Frodo is.

The Hobbit was a story about Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo happens to be going on an epic quest to defeat a great evil in a far away land. The Lord of the Rings was the story of Going On A Quest To Beat The Evil King, and Frodo happened to be the one who had to do it. This is why the Hobbit is a better story than the Lord of the Rings, despite having nigh-identical plots and sharing much of the same cast.

>>180499

The Hero's Journey is not intended as a defense of bad writing, or as a proscription for how to write a story. It's a piece of structuralist literary theory, meaning that it is an observation about a set of stories which dissects them into parts as if they were machines to be disassembled, and notes commonalities between them. It's useful less as a way of understanding specific stories, and more as a way of understanding stories generally.

Joseph Campbell is a brilliant scholar - for fuck's sake, he almost makes Finnegans Wake make sense! - but the abuse his work on the Hero's Journey has been subjected to by popular understanding just makes me sad.

I've always liked what Neil Gaiman said about The Heros With a Thousand Faces, the text in which Campbell published his theory of the Hero's Journey:

"I think I got about half way through The Hero with a Thousand Faces and found myself thinking if this is true—I don’t want to know. I really would rather not know this stuff. I’d rather do it because it’s true and because I accidentally wind up creating something that falls into this pattern than be told what the pattern is."

>>180501
The very simple observation of college students around the world is enough for me.
"My Literature Teacher puts more thought into the book than the author did."

>>180504

Well, as a student of literature myself, I don't agree that, even assuming that that's the case (it's not for something like Ulysses, but it's fair enough to say about a lot of books), that that's a problem. We don't study a text to figure out what's going on in the author's head (or at least, not exclusively for that purpose), we study them as cultural artifacts and look at how they interact with the cultural zeitgeist.

What I like about the Gaiman quote is that it shows that he totally gets it. Campbell's theory is utterly useless in analysis of a text that deliberately and consciously tries to emulate the narrative that it sets out, because Campbell's work is, from the get-go, premised on the elements of the Hero's Journey being unconscious tendencies that get passed along socially.

>>180522
Gaiman's overrated.

>>180499
Ok, what if...
What if LotR isn't Frodo's story, but Sam's?

>>180526

Which has what to do with the price of fish, exactly?

>>180530
It's slightly improved if you interpret it that way, because Sam is clearly a more fleshed out and sympathetic character than Frodo, and is his own character separate from not only other hero archetypes but from Bilbo as well.

But the amount of noise to signal in the book continues to plague the story even in the "Sam is the Hero" version, and maybe even worse than it does for Frodo because Sam isn't treated like the hero by the focus of the narrative, even if he is perfectly acceptable as the hero from a plot and characterization point of view.

>>180531
Nothing, but let it diminish whatever he says/does for the rest of the discussion at least an equal amount it has Tolkien.

>>180582

But we're not talking about his work at all. Just something that he happened to say about Campbell.

>Every author you ever liked is overrated

Great, I love this discussion! Who's next, Pratchett? Or perhaps Chris Wooding? I know, lets do George RR Martin!

>Making a Giant slayer for 4e D&D
>Modelling them off of Shingeki no Giant Cannibal Retards
>Essentials Ranger Scout, all mobility powers
>Windlord theme from Elemental Chaos
>Speed of 10, can fly 10 as an encounter power and make attacks during this move

Am plagiarizing right /cog/

>>180818
Not an expert on either things, but the "fly-and-attack-once-an-encounter" thing sounds about right.

>>180697
Yes, everything you like is bad. Let's get it out of the way.

>>180818
>4e
>Essentials
>supplementals
>shitty animu
*>BARF<*

>>180867

u sound mayd anon

>>180873
Mayd? No. Very judgemental? Yes.

>>180867

>using carets and asterisks together to emote
>using them together for any reason

It's like you're literally broken, on the genetic level

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/820113175/404-law-not-found

This is a boardgame I helped playtest once, designed by a guy I met once. He seemed nice, and the game was pretty good too.

They've met their target, but they're about $800 away from reaching their next stretch goal, and about $9000 away from making sure they don't lose too much money on this. I know it's a lot, but you can get the whole game for $45, free shipping (provided you live in the US and UK).

>>180937
>using them together for any reason
How about math, dunkass?

>>181242
You would have them separated by numbers, at least.

The issue here is how it's a typographic monstrosity when they're right next to each other, right?

Hey I didn't ant to start a new thread for one question so I thought I would ask it here.

I bought Baldur's Gate Enhanced Edition while it was on sale and am thinking about installing it, messed around on the original as a kid but this time I wanted to do it properly.

I was thinking of running with Cavalier, but does anyone have any advice for a good build and the stats I should be aiming for? I'm not learned in the nitty-gritty of older editions of D&D.
Also feel free to throw out any suggestion for party members, I think before I used CHHARNAME, Imeon, Jhahira & Khalid then finally... an elven ranger and a human paladin who's names I cannot recall?

(Also of note I have no intention of moving onto BG2, if that makes a difference for the build)

>>181514
There was Minsk, a badass human ranger who went berserk all the time. Hilarious character.

Never learned much about the Cavalier, but likely the Strength is an obligatory stat, and very useful. Intelligence and Wisdom aren't usually too useful for warrior types, and Charisma for... well, anyone pretty much.

If I recall, Constitution and Dexterity don't make that much difference if they're under 15, and Strength if it's under 16. Also keep an eye at which stats you need a 16 in, to get a bonus 10% on XP earned.

>>181594
Cavalier is a Paladin-Kit, I get the feeling Charisma and Wisdom are more useful to it than for fighters.

>>181603
Charisma wasn't really useful for Paladins if I recall. The problem is, Charisma 17 is a requirement anyways. Wisdom might give bonus spells on high levels, and also on saves vs mind-affecting spells.

Are their any good mods for BG-Enhanced Edition?

Also I was thinking of making my own party members using the multiplayer-trick.
I was thinking I would make 5 characters and leave one space for NPC's, usually Imoen as the part thief but it would also give me the option to leave her somewhere and pick up a different NPC for sidequests. (on that note, which NPC's do you need to have in the party to do extra quests?)

Whats the best way to dual-class Imoen in terms of levels of Thief and Mage? Would anyone recommend keeping her straight Thief?

>get invited to a new 4e game
>hear from one of the other players that an NPC was raped during a previous campaign by the same DM
>immediately roll a lawful good minmaxed paladin with the ability to spit acid

Bring it, sadist cunts.

Anyone else take a special sort of pleasure in putting the party on the straight and narrow? Ambiguous anti-heroes are almost always an excuse for chaotic stupid behavior. . .

>>186952
I have more fun playing the evil character and trying to keep the party on the straight and narrow.

>>186952

I played a Gnomish Paladin once, kept frustrating my group by talking us out of situations. Second DM I ran that character with later pitted us against "Lawful Good" bosses who were mind-controlling an entire town of evil people. At one point I was in a temple for some evil god whereupon walking in, I fell to the ground in a fetal position and couldn't move or speak. No saving throws either. That guy was kinda frustrating.

>>186965
>That guy was kinda frustrating
Says the person who admitted to kickfucking the rest of the groups fun right in the teeth.

>>186974

Hey that's how I roll...play.

Say what you will, it's within the scope of a Paladin's personality to favor negotiation (plus, it turned out that mind-control was in play, so I was right.) This other DM was just big into "Evil! Brou-hahaha!" side of things, and it showed. Very railroad-y, too, after the session he told me "You're not playing a Gnome right, I'm gonna race-change you, okay?"

That guy sounds like a dick but at the same time if the rest of the group wants to kick in doors and wreck face, that's maybe not the best campaign to be playing a negotiator in.

>>186977

It was really more two or so specific people who liked the rolling/combat stuff more than the walking around and talking stuff, and it's not like we didn't have plenty of both through the campaign, I was just pretty good at diffusing a situation where the other players would have just rolled for initiative.