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How will May react to the shirt Marigold brings her?

horrified facial expression trying but unable to stammer out a response
¬_¬ "Ok. Yeah, I deserve this."
"Huh? I don't get it. Whatever." Then, Friday we cut back to May cursing as whatever the meaning is slowly dawns on her.
the above except the shirt signals strange/creepy individuals to start talking to her everywhere she goes, much to her consternation.
"Heh. That's great."
she loves whatever horribleness it is so much she hugs Marbear and thanks her
she holds it up stares at it in silence, then turns to Marigold and apologizes
"Sven is not a mooch?"
other

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Author Topic: WCDT strips 4366-4370 (Oct 5th to Oct 9th 2020)  (Read 18164 times)

BenRG

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Re: WCDT strips 4366-4370 (Oct 5th to Oct 9th 2020)
« Reply #150 on: 10 Oct 2020, 08:31 »

FWIW, the dev team behind the last released version of Paranoia (v.4 or 'XP') seems to have accepted a lot of the criticisms of the intrinsic problems of Paraoia, introducing the 'Paranoia but not' 'Straight' game form that encourages reduced lethality, greater player engagement, more complex game environments and allowing the running of campaigns with multiple different player classes including retail staff, vid stars, researchers and rescue workers, all in a complex sci-fi satire of modern media-dominated society.

Personally, it is a hobby of mine to attempt to adapt the extremely streamlined WEG d20 RPG system (intended to encourage rapid and easy play free of complex statistics and rule-juggling) to other environments. My current project is an attempt to adapt it to the Fallout and XCom universes.
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oddtail

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Re: WCDT strips 4366-4370 (Oct 5th to Oct 9th 2020)
« Reply #151 on: 10 Oct 2020, 08:53 »

@BenRG: the version of Paranoia I primarily played *was* XP. It didn't win me over. I think I'm just not the target audience for the game.
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sitnspin

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Re: WCDT strips 4366-4370 (Oct 5th to Oct 9th 2020)
« Reply #152 on: 10 Oct 2020, 09:12 »

Personally, most of the time, if the choice is between playing D&D and not playing anything, I'd rather not play anything. In general, it's just not a game that appeals to me on any level. Same with Pathfinder, which is basically the same thing.

I am fortunate to have a group of people to play with that like mixing it up with different systems.


Interesting side note: I've never actually eaten at McDonald's.

Oh, yeah, they're fine internally, and the base system is nice and clean.  I also kinda want to try out the fan-made "Genius: The Transgression".  And yes, Pathfinder is, to both its benefit and detriment explicitly designed to give players as many options as possible, and even if a refinement on D&D 3.x in so many ways, inherits some of that system's flaws.

From a design perspective, I find that if you want to maximise player options, your best course is to reduce the amount of rules rather than increase them. Streamline the system to as few types of rolls as possible and just flavour the narrative to fit what you want to do. PF tries to make a rule for every possible circumstance and it just makes the system a mess and bogs down play.
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hedgie

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Re: WCDT strips 4366-4370 (Oct 5th to Oct 9th 2020)
« Reply #153 on: 10 Oct 2020, 11:07 »

A problem that comes out of the wargaming roots that D&D first started out with.  The first-end DMG was insanely thick, and had tables for everything, including matrices of modifiers for certain weapon types against certain armour types/AC values that were largely ignored by the people who didn't keep a dog-eared copy of the Necronomicon in their bag for casual reading.  Others were quite useful, especially in the pre-internet days for generating npcs/dungeons on the quick.

I'd say that out of anything I've played, "Mage" had fairly streamlined hard rules, and basically infinite possibility, but it was really hard to find a group that could do it properly. 

WRT to fast food, the closest I get even remotely sober is one of the local taquerias (not either of the good ones, but a chain with varying quality).
« Last Edit: 10 Oct 2020, 11:14 by hedgie »
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Dock Braun

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Re: WCDT strips 4366-4370 (Oct 5th to Oct 9th 2020)
« Reply #154 on: 10 Oct 2020, 13:59 »

to maximise player options, your best course is to reduce the amount of rules rather than increase them.
My favorite had the game-master laying out some simple principles, from which the rest are uniquely inferred, calling it CSARPN (read sharpen; I recall A, N meaning abstract nonsense and C meaning concrete, but RP not meaning role-playing). I'm drafting an outline for playing obsessions vying for their host mind's focus.
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Gyrre

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Re: WCDT strips 4366-4370 (Oct 5th to Oct 9th 2020)
« Reply #155 on: 10 Oct 2020, 21:20 »

And given at the rate that even groups that do successfully start end up exploding within a few months at the best of times, most people only are going to be willing to learn a couple of systems.  In that case, I'd say "run Paranoia, the players aren't supposed to know the rules anyway", but half the fun of that game is getting *away* with knowing the rules and exploiting them.

Plus, not everyone will dig Paranoia. It's a game that will not appeal to people with a certain gaming philosophy. And I think it'll turn off a lot of relatively casual RPG players.

(and not just casual ones - I'm *really* into RPG, been for 20+ years, and I *loathe* Paranoia. I'd rather play just about ANYthing else - I can think of only one professionally made game that I like even less.

And on GMing side, I think I'd rather run *no* game than a Paranoia game)

Honestly, I suspect a good portion of that is who exactly happens to be GMing Paranoia. I've had a blast with one GM in a 5 hour one-off. And it was a complete slog with a different GM for a 3 hour one-off.
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oddtail

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Re: WCDT strips 4366-4370 (Oct 5th to Oct 9th 2020)
« Reply #156 on: 11 Oct 2020, 05:55 »

And given at the rate that even groups that do successfully start end up exploding within a few months at the best of times, most people only are going to be willing to learn a couple of systems.  In that case, I'd say "run Paranoia, the players aren't supposed to know the rules anyway", but half the fun of that game is getting *away* with knowing the rules and exploiting them.

Plus, not everyone will dig Paranoia. It's a game that will not appeal to people with a certain gaming philosophy. And I think it'll turn off a lot of relatively casual RPG players.

(and not just casual ones - I'm *really* into RPG, been for 20+ years, and I *loathe* Paranoia. I'd rather play just about ANYthing else - I can think of only one professionally made game that I like even less.

And on GMing side, I think I'd rather run *no* game than a Paranoia game)

Honestly, I suspect a good portion of that is who exactly happens to be GMing Paranoia. I've had a blast with one GM in a 5 hour one-off. And it was a complete slog with a different GM for a 3 hour one-off.

Possibly, but all the games I participated in were by a GM whose games I otherwise enjoy a lot. Maybe he wasn't a good fit for Paranoia, but given the range of games we've played together, I suspect the game is just not something for me.
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Gyrre

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Re: WCDT strips 4366-4370 (Oct 5th to Oct 9th 2020)
« Reply #157 on: 11 Oct 2020, 17:39 »

That's completely fair.

I need more roll play practice before properly returning to the decidedly non-combat-centric Call of Cthulhu.
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a real-ass gaddam sword
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"Broken swords and dragon bones scattered on the way back home."

Too stubborn to die, just like the rest of my family.
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