#Rpg asks

[hellofromthehallowoods]

Clarification about the pricing for the open D&D campaigns. It's $25 for each individual session?

Yes indeed; Startplaying charges players each session the night of the game, so it's good to be aware up front. Though there's a Session 0, character creation, scheming, etc. that is just part and parcel for joining the campaign.

[the-storm-chaser]

❤ Party!: Kled!

RPG Journey (Event #3)

Disheartened by the lack of a coffer, the woman was able to shrug off the loss...but what came next? Oh boy, she wouldn't forget this-

The light starting to dim, the adventurer reached a clearing, one in which was supposed to signify the half-way point to the next town...well, she was very much behind schedule, but this was only going to get worse as she heard angry yelling come from the trees.

Before her very eyes, a yellow blur scurried onto the road, running toward the woman with a screech. The appearance scared the girl, the pendant crackling around her neck as her hand went to her blade. Instead of coliding, however, the creature came to a halt, incoherant yelling being heard from above...and that's when she spotted it.

A...yordle? It had to be, right?

Her frame remained tense as the creature stabilized, shifting so furball could get a better look at her (after adjusting his oversized hat of course), and the words that left his mouth confused her.

'YOOOOUUUUUUU'RE TRESSPASSIN' !'

The woman looked confused at the creature, remaining silent until its steed screeched, bringing her back to reality.

'I...think you are mistaken? This is a public track to traverse. This isn't owned by anyone-'

'IT'S OWNED BY ME! PRIME NOXIAN REAL ESTATE, NOW BEAT IT, LADY!'

....

For what felt like an eternity, the trio squabbled until a tentative agreement was reached. Sky could proceed, but only if escorted by the meddlesome Admiral...uh...Colonel?

Oh, and Skaarl.

[invisible-goats]

🌤️ for ye Pyrates :)

🌤️Share your favorite mechanic from a game you’re working on

You can pay money to have permanent changes to your genotype, and roll to see if it changes your phenotype (eg. growing antlers if you get deer genes). Naturally you can choose to fail this roll :-p

[gimmickblog-taxonomist]

How do you become a gimmick blog?

step 1: think of a gimmick

step 2: blog

[dailyhatsune]

This

with a regular miku on the side for comparison because Huh

[akanemnon]

That's two jailbreaks in one day!

FIRST - PREVIOUS - NEXT

MASTERPOST (for the full series / FAQ / reference sheets)

[horsegirlwithnoname]

I love that the four corps in Lancer are like ... Amazon, Pfizer, Lockheed-Martin, and then like a Discord server filled with trans women with fursonas and felony hacking convictions

[appleciderjulie]

siffrin if they were cool (oh wait they are)

[vexwerewolf]

If I could ask you for some advice, what do you think helps the flavour text of a mech or piece of equipment sell a player on the fantasy of using it?

I'm finding it frustratingly difficult to do so with my own homebrew content: I can come up with lore and backstory easily enough, but re-reading it feels dry, and I can't help but contrast it with how the descrptions in official content and other supplements is more evocative, at least for mechs.

Let's observe some corebook Lancer flavour text and examine the various varieties it comes in.

Purely Functional

While it's usually not the most fun type of flavour text, this just tells us what the weapon is, and - if it has any particular tags or on-hit effects - why it's like that. The Hand Cannon is a good example: here's what it is (modified pistol), here's why it does more damage, and here's why it has Loading.

The main advantage of Purely Functional flavour text is that it provides space for other types of flavour text to breathe. Flavour text is a great place for jokes, but it's not good for every piece of flavour text to be a joke - the pauses between notes in music are just as important as the notes.

Obfuscating Vendorspeak

The Bristlecrown Flechette Launcher this is a great example of dark humour that Lancer uses quite often: marketing fast-talk to cover up something really unpleasant. The joke here is based on us understanding precisely what the equipment does mechanically, and then seeing how the manufacturer tries to sell it. There's a bunch of dense technobabble here meant to obfuscate the fact that this weapon fires knives in every direction specifically designed to kill infantry.

Deadpan Weirdness

The joke here relies on describing something extremely weird like it's the most natural thing in the world. Wait, you're telling me that in a world where I can just print new parts if the old ones break, they put DRM on my fucking knife and I have to apologise to the fucking knife maker to get a new one? What the fuck, dude? Why are you acting like this makes any sense?!

My sword uploads fucking what to the Space Internet?!

Third-Act Twist

This type of flavour text disguises itself as something else - most often Purely Functional - and then hits you with Third Act Twist. It makes you go "wait, what?!" It's very classic setup-punchline stuff. You're telling me my mech can rot?!

As a side note, Lancer loves to use this for its NHPs.

WHY DID YOU PUT THAT IN SCARE QUOTES, LUCIFER

Worldbuilding

This is similar to the Purely Functional, but instead of just describing technical specifications of the weapons, it puts the weapon in the broader context of the setting's history. Okay, so we know what this weapon is and what it does - why was it built? What was the original use case, and why? Most importantly, what can the existence of this weapon tell us about the world that build it?

Whimsical Aside

This is the insertion of a light-hearted, humanising little insertion regarding how this piece of equipment gets used in the field. This serves to remind us that soldiers aren't cold, unfeeling killing machines: they can be as emotional, irreverent and silly as the rest of us, and they do things like name their mobile bombs...

... or call resupply drones "mech snacks."

The Ominous Out-Of-Context Quote That Explains Nothing And Only Raises More Questions

As I've said in multiple textmash memes, this is basically Tom and Miguel's shorthand for "this technology is Intensely Fucked Up in a way that it is more fun and scary not to explain." This is essentially Lancer's version of SCP's [REDACTED].

You might think this is the domain of HORUS, and you'd be right, but every single manufacturer indulges in these - although IPS-N had to wait until NRFaW to get theirs:

What the fuck do you mean by that, Lancer?

[gigizetz]

For context I was fighting an art block and I thought drawing someone’s character would help, and surprise your dnd character Abbi helped me with the art block, I really do love her design a lot and she’s very gorgeous, I do hope you enjoy it

OMG I LOVE IT SO MUCH SHE LOOKS AMAZING THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU-

[draculancer-flow]

We pilotin Hydras. We labellin each of our turns as distinct geological eras. Homeboy tried to front to my Tempest Drone and failed his Agility save so hard he saw the curvature of the Earth. I'm feral. I'm a fuckin dog. That OROCHI disarticulated my shit so hard I live in sixteen ZIP codes. We straight smokin the Overshield from Invigorate. My drones have extra HP so I can fuck 'em longer. If the pussy don't smell like ozone I don't want it. I bust a nut in her and then bust another at the start of my next turn as a protocol. This shit ain't nothin to me, man.

We damaging the GM directly with how much time our turns and reactions take

[the-storm-chaser]

//I believe that's all the rpg asks for now?

Thank you so much for them! That was honestly hilarious

Yordles am I right?

[invisible-goats]

Storm cloud for the ask meme?

🌧️Share something melancholy from one of your games (name the game, or let me choose)

oh too easy :-p This is from the Magic section in Chymus

Melancholic magic hides itself in the occultists' humours, and hides other things with it. Any effect that hides can be done with melancholic magic, as can effects that involve deception or illusions. One can become invisible, change your appearance or make people believe falsehoods. The melancholic humour can hide from anything that watches. It might shield you from bureaucracy, make a machine give false readings or evade magical detection. Melancholic overshooting leads to it hiding too much, rendering the occultist unable to be found even if they want to. Whatever illusion it casts can't be lifted, for better or worse.

[prokopetz]

It's actually kind of striking how tightly wedded most major genres of tabletop RPGs are to the decades when they were popularised.

Trad fantasy tabletop RPGs – even those that aren't positioned as revivalist – are so intent on emulating the sword and sorcery literature of the 1970s that the only reason they don't come off as quaintly nostalgic is because nobody reads sword and sorcery anymore.

Cyberpunk tabletop RPGs are, at this point, essentially an exercise in retrofuturism, endlessly polishing a vision of what people in the 1980s thought the year 2015 would look like.

Urban fantasy tabletop RPGs might include smartphones and electric cars in their equipment tables and mention 9/11 in their lore chapters, but culturally and aesthetically, most of them are taking place in a world where the 1990s never ended.

I don't mean this as a criticism – I'm just fascinated with how this tendency is so strong that, for example, a brand new urban fantasy RPG written in the year 2024 is liable to end up being a 1990s period piece at heart even when that was 100% not the author's intention, simply through the inertia of the medium's well-established tropes.

I'm mostly curious what the characteristic tabletop RPG genre of the 2020s is going to end up being thirty or forty years from now, and I hope I live long enough to find out!

[ardentinwoe]

More mechs

[thestuffedalligator]

A Zelda game where Hyrule castle is invaded before Link can be reborn and the hero’s spirit inhabits and animates a doll Zelda had in her bedroom.

Same open-world exploration as Breath of the Wild, just on a smaller scale. During the final boss you kill Ganondorf after climbing him Shadow of the Colossus style and stab him in the eye with a fork