#mwchase

[prokopetz]

I saw your post on The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T a while ago, and just recently watched the movie with my wife. That weekend, we saw two movies. One of them was a nightmare of psychedelic imagery full of distorted perceptions and unexpected blending of fantasy and reality. The other was Videodrome.

The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T is the reason they only let Dr. Seuss write a live-action movie the one time. After that they knew better!

[prokopetz]

My wife and I have been talking about tabletop rp with just us, so I'm looking for a system for me to GM, with a setting she created. I tried to narrow it down in terms of how she’d like to play, and got: she likes classes, she wouldn’t mind having NPCs in the party, she’s fine with NPCs being simpler than PCs, she wants to approach it first as an actor playing a role, second as trying to maximize points, and she liked the sound of 4e D&D as a sequence of action set-pieces.

I wouldn’t try to play straight D&D4E in single-player mode -- the party dynamic is built into its mechanics at a pretty fundamental level. Even two players and one GM takes a great deal of work; one player and one GM is going to require so much low-level tinkering you’d basically be writing a whole new system.

My recommendation would be to look at systems that are explicitly designed for one-on-one play -- that way you’re not constantly going to be tripping over bits of the game that have unstated assumptions about party size baked into them. I’ve put together a recent post on the subject that you may find helpful.

In particular, I’d encourage you to think about whether you’re wedded to having one player and one GM, or whether you’d be willing to consider a two player co-op approach. Something like Ironsworn (discussed in the linked post) could be a good fit for what you’re describing if you’re interested in trying co-op.

[prokopetz]

I have vague memories of seeing an RPG in which character creation was just putting together two pre-filled halves of a character sheet. Is this ringing any bells? (This question inspired by having played Smash-Up once, and coming away with far fonder memories of putting together a deck than actual play, which felt way too cerebral, coming off of mashing up incongruous bits of pop culture.)

If you heard about it on this blog, you’re probably thinking of Danger Patrol. Character creation consists of taking a pile of printable Style cards and a pile of printable Role cards and distributing them to the group. either by selection or random drawing; each Style card forms the left half of a character sheet, and each Role the right, so when you tape your Style to your Role you have one complete character sheet between them. In this way you might end up playing a Robot Professor, a Ghost Detective or an Atomic Commando.

It’s unfortunately an unfinished playtest draft, and given that the last update was in 2010 that’s not likely ever to change, but it’s at least worth mining for ideas.

[mistermangas]

Are... are you roleplaying dubstep?

holy shit

mary jane

is that

is that what we were doing

because idk

[lyraeon]

Max: So, I was talking about what western expansion of the rail system would look like...

Max: That can be our mission statement:

Max: "We'll probably tunnel through a mountain or something."

Thank you so much, Max. you randomly going off about minecraft and *gasp* actually making sense for a change really made my night better and brought me back out of the rage I was getting into. Thank you.

[lyraeon]

Meanwhile in Max land:

Mwchase: Whoa.  Trying to remember the name of a particular animal by translating part of its lifecycle into human terms can be a very bad idea.

Mwchase: I am going to get the worst targeted ads from Google now.

[autisticsouda]

Just wanted to weigh in on the whole being scared of smartness thing. I've got a genius-level IQ, a full-ride merit scholarship, and the last thing I said in chat was "Oh man, I binged on thin mints earlier and now my burps are /delicious/." I feel like it would be horribly wrong of me to judge you for any reason that it might occur to you for me to do so. On another note, Rex Duodecim Angelus + your background = TRIPPY AS BALLS.

Hey I have a genius-level IQ too. I don't think it means balls, though. It's not my intelligence as much as my knowledge. I don't know how to word things eloquently, know anything about WW2, know who Joan of Arc is, know anything about physics or how light and speed and matter work, know what proper grammar is, know anything about Shakespeare or required reading or famous literature, know about any given musician, pop culture, or anything. I don't know what Democrat and Republican mean or foreign policy or economics or how to balance a checkbook or what a 401k is or how taxes are handled or what liberatarian, socialist, liberal, conservative, etc mean in politics. I don't know nearly what you need to know to function in society and learning on my own is difficult for me because lol NLD.

I don't know very much at all. 

Fortunately, getting ridiculously high/almost perfect scores on the GED and entrance exams for college apparently doesn't require ever having actually gone to high school. Good thing, huh?