Thread 96575647

welcome to the New School Revolution General, the thread dedicated to games derived from the OSR movement

>What is the NSR?
the NSR is a subcategory of the OSR, it mostly follows the same play style but experiments further with the mechanics and settings
*broadly NSR games*
*have* a gm, a interesting setting, living world
*are* rules light, deadly
*and focus on* emergent narrative, external interaction and exploration

>What is this thread for?
this thread is for system, adventure, setting, mechanics, ongoing campaigns, anything that related to the *actual* game
POST ART ALSO, inspiration and for the tg threads

>What is this thread NOT for?
meta discussions or drama of the games and its creators aka shadowboxing with twitter, reddit and the OSRG (frens with osrbros)

>games
shadowdark, into the odd, mausritter, cairn, mörk borg (and its hacks), dungeon crawl classics, mothership, knave, troika!, whitehack, blackhack, old school essentials (we know this is just a retroclone)

>links, resources, more games!, etc:
https://pastebin.com/0W8WmbCk

>previous thread:
>>96552850

White Hack or Black Hack?

>>96575810
Brown Hack Superpower 2030, clearly.

>>96575810
Blackhack has no DM rolling so that's kinda a deal breaker for me.

>>96575810
They're not really opposites. Which is unfortunate, beacuse they should be. White hack should be super forgiving and really easy to GM, Black hack should be super deadly and a total pain in the ass.
Instead, they're just... different.
>>96575838
Does it really matter who does the rolling?

>>96574870
>All you mentioned was a setting that didn't solve your main issue, worlds are still too big to deal with them and the play remains the same.
The basic idea is that if you wipe out almost all humans, then you can have (say) 3 points of interest on a planet, and then you can very easily use some simple structure - beacons, scans, whatever - to direct players to those points of interest, with an understanding that the rest of the planet is uninteresting wasteland and wilderness. If there are hundreds of millions of people on the planet, you need some other assumed structure to try to direct players to the content.

Think of like, Noveria in Mass Effect: there's the empty frosty wilderness, the port, the Rachni-infested area, and (theoretically) a handful of science outposts. Much more easily to turn into a TTRPG supplement than something on the scale of modern Earth.

I offered a Mothership open table for tonight and only two people signed up. Someone might pop in at the last minute and I plan to run it anyway, but do you have any advice in case it's just two players?
I usually let them fuck around and get hurt before explaining that most enemies have a chance to one or two shot a player, but I feel I need to put on the kid gloves for such a small group.

>>96575979
Two players is unironically my favorite sized group and I miss it so much. All my best two people groups have had one or more people invite a plus one and fucked things up because the plus one is always just baggage.

>>96575810
White hack, I guess. I did really like Black Sword Hack, and it lets the GM roll a bit which is a plus because I agree with >>96575838
>>96575950
Rolling is fun, I like rolling. I never understood the people who want to reduce it to a minimum.

>>96575950
>Does it really matter who does the rolling?
Games are not just mental, they're visceral. Rolling the dice is borderline ritual.

>>96576003
But I don't know this people, they might suck.
A couple weeks ago I had 6 players and it was a blast, I could jump from one to the next and use them to rush each other. Way more exciting.
2 players feels kinda intimate. Should I go for that tone? Any tips?

>>96575810
what are their differences even?

>>96576091
Two players means you can focus on building up a dynamic between them. The reason I like 2-person groups so much is that they end up becoming foils for each other, and foils are really helpful in allowing characters to form and present their identities. It also just generally means each character gets way more time to shine than in a larger group, and there's also less arguing/discussions, so you really don't need to rush as much and still get lots of stuff done.

I really wouldn't stress on anything other than making sure you balance attention on both players, and maybe encourage some comradery. It's really a gamble either way whether they're any good and whether they work well together, so there's no point worrying about that.

>>96576121
The main difference that makes people pay White Hack is the magic system, it's like the selling point. But there are differences in the minutia: WH has modifiers for some rolls and saves by class while BH is entirely roll under, WH has ascending armor while BH has them work as extra HP. I don't recall if WH uses depleating die for amunition or if that's BH only.

>>96576196
Never played either, but I'm gonna say White Hack.

>>96576263
Great.

Now you can die on that hill.

>>96576292
Why? He could go bat for the Green hack or the Blue Hack or Macchiato Monsters, I can't even tell the difference between those.
And then you have The Rad Hack, The Pink Hack, The Indie Hack, The Mecha Hack. Some of those are not even similar to B/X.

>>96576356
Still waiting on the Good Hack.

>>96576191
Both campaigns I ran for two people ended with one player betraying the other.
Not saying it's inevitable, but if the campaign goes long enough...

>>96576449
The Good Hack sounds like a christian take on whitehack.
>Hello, have you heard of the The Good Hack?

>>96576505
I've run one shots for more people that ended in betrayal.
If anything, it's a kinda badass way to end a one shot.

>>96576577
>it's a kinda badass way to end a one shot.
And halfway to a good pun.

>>96576196
My favorite hack is Blue.
No wait, ye-

>>96573524
Colonizing Mars is a neccesary proof of concept. If we can't colonize a planet within proverbial arm's reach that is relatively tame as far as how dangerous planets could be (compared to Venus, for example), there's really no way we'll have any success with planets that are light years away.

>>96576981
Don't bother anon, he's a 'Whitey on the moon' type by the sound of it.
'How dare you attempt to achieve or reach anything higher, don't you know you need to care about my bullshit? Humanity cannot advance until after I'm satisfied that my personal hobbyhorse is ridden enough.'

>>96575647 (OP)
just came in to say that's a cool mouse

>>96576981
The reason we cannot have success with planets that are light years away is that FTL is not real. If FTL is real, then we can have much easier success by picking planets that haven't had their entire atmosphere boiled off, and already have near-Earth conditions (biosphere, ~1g, ~1atm, free atmospheric O2, etc).

>>96576356
Man I fucking love Macchiato Monsters. Ran one of my groups favorite campaigns in that.

>>96577429
I prefer my mice a little more weeb.

>>96577711
>If FTL is real, then we can have much easier success by picking planets that haven't had their entire atmosphere boiled off
There is zero evidence to suggest it would be easier to adapt to entirely foreign biospheres than recreating the same chemical processes on Earth.

>>96578378
There is plenty of evidence, actually. Mainly, we don't have to eat the stuff in the native biosphere, we can just gengineer things that can turn local detritus into something edible to humans - if it's even necessary to do so before planting crops.

The thing that has zero evidence is that industrially mining an entire atmosphere out of the surface of Mars is somehow a necessary precondition to doing this.

>>96578398
>we don't have to eat the stuff in the native biosphere
This is the possibly the smallest non-issue. Because not only can you not eat it, you may not be able to even breathe vaguely near them without dying or causing an ecological catastrophe that makes the place unlivable.
>But i'll just genetically engineer it out!
No, you won't. Your lacking understanding of that topic makes it amount to "we can magically change the properties of any living thing as if we were omnipotent", but it doesn't work that way and there's no evidence that even some omnipotent magical "gene" altering that works for us would work anywhere or on anything else.

And obviously if we have access to omnipotent magic, colonizing mars would be hilariously easy.

>>96578398
What we really just need is atomic level alchemy, something we've really only scratched the surface of in the last two hundred years. We're already transforming elements into other elements, albeit in horrifying, dangerous and impractical ways where the best we're getting out of it is some energy and the worst we're getting out of it is incredibly deadly materials which will persist for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years.

Once we get to the point where we can say something like "Hey, lets take these heavier elements and convert them into lots and lots of the (safe) gas we need alongside lots and lots of energy", then we'll be able to radically transform Mars while also mining tons of cryptocurrency in the process.

>>96578480
It really depends on how aspects of that work out. If you can just transmute any element into other elements with no practical limits on scale and without energy requirements being a problem it's basically just post-scarcity. This is also probably impossible and the real requirements would be too prohibitive to be useful for concerns of mass.

>>96578554
With Fission, or splitting heavier elements into lighter elements, energy is released. With Fusion, fusing lighter elements into heavier elements, funnily enough, energy is also released. While modern methods require lots of energy input to get going, with fusion in particular having some insane requirements, in the end the process can be a net positive as far as energy is concerned.

>concerns of mass.
That's really all there is to it, once the technology is refined. Changing one element into another means we need material. The good news is that Mars has a lot of it no one's using for anything else. And, if we really need a lot, there's a belt nearby with a good amount of asteroids.

>This is also probably impossible
Difficult, but nowhere near impossible, and certainly more possible than FTL. The technology is still very much in its infancy, with practical Fission and Fusion only having been discovered within the last century, and the best we've managed to do as far as elemental transformation is create unwanted byproducts while focusing on capturing the energy released.

We're still in the incandescent lightbulb stage, where we were not creating true "light" bulbs, but heat bulbs that happened to also generate light. But, we are moving forward, and likely within two hundred years we'll be performing "safe" and stable transformations of one element into a desirable other element.

We've already turned lead atoms into gold atoms for a fraction of a second using particle accelerators. The principle of the matter is possible, it's figuring out how to do it in a useful way that's the tricky part. Thankfully, considering near-post-scarcity is behind that door, there's a strong incentive to work towards it.

>>96578802
>in the end the process can be a net positive as far as energy is concerned.
We have no idea if this is true for fusion yet but with fission it's debatable. Nuclear energy in particular has a very poor return on investment, though it's obfuscated by its advocates as much as possible (And by the fact that it's still useful for weapons production).

>>96578814
>We have no idea if this is true for fusion yet
The sun exists.

What we don't know is when fusion energy technology will be commercially viable. We know that it's potentially possible, it's just we haven't figured out the whole "get more energy out than you put in" problem yet.

They keep saying within the next twenty years every twenty years, so not likely within our lifetimes, but still, it's a coming.

>>96578851
>The sun exists.
And it took far more energy to create the sun than the sun will output.

>What we don't know is when fusion energy technology will be commercially viable
I really doubt it will be. We've been chasing after working fusion for 80+ years now in the hopes of revitalizing the economy.

>>96576505
A long time ago, I had a long campaign end somewhat abruptly with one player betraying the other. It was about fifteen years ago, with one of them stealing an airplane and leaving the other on an island.
A few months back, one of the two brought up that game to reminisce a bit, and eventually we got to the elephant in the room: the ultimate betrayal. The weirdest thing happened though, with both of them convinced that they had been the one who had flown off.
The more they argued, the less certain I was that I had remembered the event correctly, and when it finally came to them asking me which of them was right, I told them I could check my notes and we could know for certain.
The problem was that since it had been such a blow out of a final game, I never wrote down what had happened in that last event, and when I showed them the document, they immediately renewed their argument. From their arguing, it seems like both of them had been planning to betray the other for quite some time, so it really was just a question of who did it first.
By that point though, I knew for certain which of them had been the betrayer, but since it became very clear that both of them had staked a lot of their ego on having been the one to come out on top, I thought it would be best if they were both allowed to believe whatever they wanted but without complete certainty.

>>96576505
>>96579642
Excellent. Adversarial play is based and has been based since Braunstein, OD&D, and Gygax's AD&D.

>>96575647 (OP)
If I used Fate to run a dungeon crawl, is that NSR?