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Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games (RPGs) Discussion / Re: Orcs vs goblins
« Last post by Zenoguy3 on March 27, 2024, 10:49:54 AM »
Orcs are pig faced and fully material, goblins are fey creatures which are more material than other fey, but still a lot less material than regular creatures.

Material is probably the wrong way to describe that, but I can't think of somethign better, hopefully yall get what I'm saying.
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You're a shining example of someone being highly intelligent, and extremely educated, then letting ideology turn your brain to shit.

The absolute nonsensical BS you'll twist your mind into knots excusing is truly a sight to behold.

We really do need a Like button....
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If the player characters come to a door that is stuck, I don’t make them open a physical door in the real world.  Nor do I have the players bend bars, lift portcullis, pick locks or move stealthily around the gaming table.  So of a player tries to fast talk a guard, I will ask to describe roughly what the character says and if it is reasonable, and believable, I’ll make a reaction roll and add modifiers as I deem fit.

If the player wants to method act his way through the encounter I’m cool with that as well. 
The reaction roll is always there when I need it. 

That's pretty much how I run charisma-based encounters, too. Player narrates or acts out their goal and general approach. And then depending on how likely I think that approach is to work, I'll either just reason out the NPC's response or modify the dice roll accordingly.

Intelligence challenges are a little more difficult, because no matter how good the roll is, you don't want to just give away the answer. Kind of defeats the point of the game. In D&D-likes, I usually use intelligence as a memory/knowledge stat.  Depending on their character background, a PC can use it to get lore info, identify items, guess at NPC motivations, etc. Wisdom I use as a perceptiveness and intuition stat, so read faces, spot hidden details, and so on. I usually use mental stat rolls for things that can't be solved through roleplay/narration.

For most attribute/skill checks I prefer a system where it's easy to do rulings + rules. Something where the score on the character sheet still matters, and it's easy to modify the difficulty of a check up or down based on the player's approach to the problem.

It's a little off topic, but the way I see it, the dice are there to represent all the variables that are out of the character's control. So if a character with a good climbing skill fails to climb a wall, it's not because they somehow turned into an amateur. The mortar in the brickwork suddenly gave out or something. If the 18 Cha dashing hero fails to seduce the barmaid, it's because she's married, or in a bad mood or whatever. Point is nothing you said was going to work on her. There's nothing more annoying than investing points or whatever into making your character good at something, and then getting screwed by the dice and having to listen to the GM narrate how they're an incompetent boob at what's supposed to be their specialty
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Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games (RPGs) Discussion / Re: Orcs vs goblins
« Last post by blackstone on March 27, 2024, 10:36:24 AM »
I'm afraid it just depends on the game.  I lean towards tribes and cultures having different names.  So they call them orc over here and goblins over there.  Sometimes different variations will exist.  Still, I generally associate goblins with faerie and I don't associate orcs with that.  But if I'm running Middle Earth the goblins are just smaller orcs and if I'm runnning Yrth they're totally unrealted species.

Agreed. Depends on the setting, so I can't really vote.
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Those are all categories I felt would be things related to knowledge and performance where the capabilities of a PC would differ from a player without impacting the decision-making element for the player in the same way that a being stronger than the player doesn’t impact their decisions of what to do with said strength.

Say the character encounters a puzzle or riddle or has to interpret a clue.  They have to engage in some form of logical problem solving.  Does the character's smarts stat figure directly into this or is it the player solving it?  Does the character's intelligence matter here in a mechanical sense?
If elements of it are relevant to Arcana, Lore, Engineering, observable patterns (Insight), Nature or Medicine they would get information the player would get additional information based on their areas of expertise; but Intellect expressly isn’t the stat for “performs cognition” in my games.

As I describe under Insight, it’ll help you see patterns (this is connected to this) or note what doesn’t fit (okay, he had means and motive, but there’s no evidence he had any opportunity… there’s something we’re missing).

It (usually*) doesn’t give you outright answers. The player still needs to make the cognitive leap from “Ted’s body was found out on the lawn this morning, he had been stabbed to death, you found blood on Jane’s coat hidden in the back of the closet, no one knows where she was last night, and one of the kitchen knives is missing” to “Jane stabbed Ted to death last night.”

Your mental attributes will supply you lots of information, but it’s not cognition. Cognition is for the players to do.

* sometimes something is meant to be so obvious no roll is needed (the ice cream is gone and little Bobby has ice cream stains all over his face and shirt), but if a player really doesn’t make the leap I make them roll in front of everyone as I say “DC 0”** to drive home how dense (or more likely distracted) they’re being before giving them the answer.

** Ironically, I HAVE had that roll fail because they had a -2 modifer and rolled a 1.
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The RPGPundit's Own Forum / Re: Biden's Cascade of Failure!
« Last post by Daztur on March 27, 2024, 08:15:40 AM »
It was always about getting unelectable Harris in by the back door. I believe they're surprised he didn't die yet, as they were planning for V.P. becoming interim President, then incumbency leading to 8+ years of President Harris.

Why would people be invested in Harris specifically? She's not popular among the democratic base (for doing horrible things like fighting against the release of a man who had already been proven to be wrongfully convicted: www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/daniel-larsen-murder-conviction-overturned-innocence-project/2058098) and there's a hundred other establishment politicians who could fill the same role as her.
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  San fran has made many crimes non crimes.  Just like NYC.   There is NO policy that will fix urban crime problems caused by teens and youths.   Let's see how long NYC stays "low crime" with their new influx of "immigrants".    Chicago and Detroit are well known success stories in the lowering of violent crime in Illinois and Michigan.

I was talking about homicide rates, which are the most clear-cut among crime rates for comparison.

For policy, you say there's no fixing crime, but crime rates went down by nearly half across the U.S. from a peak around 1990 to the early 2000s. Rates have risen some since then, but are still below their 1990s peak. That's nationally. For specific states and cities, there are some different patterns of change. So something changes crime rates, though I wouldn't claim I know what does it.

As far as immigration, NYC and SF have been centers for immigration for essentially all of their histories, and certainly since the trend of rising immigration since 1965. Yet their homicide rates have gone down over the past few decades. I'm open to being shown otherwise, but it looks to me like the high immigration rates don't correlate to high crime.

Also there was a large decrease in murder in 2023 with murder rates seeming to be going back down to pre-pandemic low levels. Unless something else happens to make murder rates go up and down murder rates should stabilize as the people who had their brains fucked by leaded gasoline are too old to get up to much murder these days.
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Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games (RPGs) Discussion / Re: Tips for Running Cyberpunk?
« Last post by S'mon on March 27, 2024, 07:36:13 AM »
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Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games (RPGs) Discussion / Re: Orcs vs goblins
« Last post by The Spaniard on March 27, 2024, 07:23:24 AM »
Piggy faces!  In my campaign, Orcs are a separate race.  Goblins and Hobgoblins are related, and much like in LOTR, Hobgoblins (Uruks) dominate goblins when interacting.
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Pen and Paper Roleplaying Games (RPGs) Discussion / Re: Tips for Running Cyberpunk?
« Last post by S'mon on March 27, 2024, 06:20:40 AM »
@Simple cheers!

@Tenbones - I think in my setting Kessler Syndrome following the Last War will pretty much prevent manned space flight currently, but I do want to bring in exotic locations over time.

I came up with the following this morning:

Space in 2064

War debris Kessler Syndrome has closed LEO to humanity, probably for at least the next two decades, and the Starlink global satellite network did not survive the War, but further out in Geostationary Orbit 35,785 km (22,236 miles) over Nairobi Kenya, the vast ESA-owned, publically accessible Crystal Palace station is battered but still largely intact, and still inhabited - sort of. As well as the teams of hundreds of ESA and Corporate reconstruction workers, technicians, security and scientists, there are rumours of radiation-crazed cannibal cults, rogue killer drones, bioenginered space monsters, diehard Russian Cosmo-Spetsnaz still fighting the Last War ... in Space, everyone will hear you scream. 
  ;D

Officially Crystal Palace is at the Earth-Moon L1 point but that seems very far out (326,869 km), and only useful as a staging point for large scale lunar colonisation. The way it's described as functioning it feels much closer. (I think the authors confuse the Earth-Sun L1 with the Earth-Moon L1).
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