Godbound General - Non-Autistic Edition

I'm going to download it for the sole purpose of cannibalizing it. I have a huge stack of RPGs (both physical and digital) that exist for the soul purpose of being inspiration for homebrew.

I probably won't play it because my weekly game is already rotating between three different systems/campaigns.

Cpmparing Godbound to Exalted, as anyone familair with Exalted will inevitably do, Effort is one thing I really like. I don't mind Exalted's crunchiness, but committing Effort for varying lengths of time is just so much more elegant than Exalted's way of requiring you to keep trak of multiple resources whose values fluctuate constantly.

>increased defensive ability

First class is best class. Done. Dex bonus? You go up in class, move toward the head of the line, baby.

Godbound looks good, but I haven't had any luck finding a game, so I can't speak from personal experience. Maybe one of these days.

What's everyone's favorite Word? It seems like you could get up to some shenanigans with Knowledge or Time.

Za Warudo is obviously the best kind of magic in every system that has it. Even if time travel and time stop are not allowed. It has insane potential for shenanigans.

20 minutes :'(

>Za Warudo
Time + Alacrity + Might. Smash the opponent's face in before they can blink.

I'm not sure Time is even important for this, but I'd take it just for completeness.

Fate + Luck + Time = God of Permission

Nobody succeeds without your say-so.

Swap Luck for Knowledge for literally Path to Victory.

>get into Godbound game
>have generally decent first session in which we fight Timeworn monsters raiding nearby villages
>next session GM is nowhere to be found, has unfriended me and deleted the Discord server in which the game was held

God fucking dammit, am I gonna be forever GM if I wanna play anything that isn't fucking garden variety D&D

Yes. That is generally how it goes for non-mainstream games.

>Blatant Exalted Conversion Rules
I haven't read that section, but surely it can't be all that
>Exemplars
>Proteans
>Elemental Scions
>Undestined
Oh Kevin you shameless bastard.

Although Proteans are a more interesting theme than Lunars, which have always struggled to go much further than "literally just oWoD Werewolves".

Also, congratulations on getting one of these threads off the ground.

I know that feel. Best bet is to find a friend who likes new systems as much as you do and switch off with them. I did that with Shadowrun and others. (I ran Fantasy Craft, he ran Eclipse Phase.)

>descending AC
Change AC 3 to AC 17 (that specific AC comes up a lot, doesn't it?) and use the by-now conventional "don't add your opponent's AC to your attack roll" rules and you're done. It's not hard.

Personally, I don't see the need aside from nostalgia for ADnD. There's an argument about keeping the numbers from getting insane, but 5e manages to keep AC20+ from being anything other than rare as fuck without having "low is good" be true of some stats and not others.

>Oh Kevin you shameless bastard.
I don't mind it too much. Given the really obvious inspiration, it's something of a necessity; and the additional Godbound types help flesh it out a bit.

>Also, congratulations on getting one of these threads off the ground.
Absence of autismofag helps. No doubt he'll be back on Monday.

>autismofag
Who? And don't give him attention next time.

Point made.

>Well, it's very new (corebook just come out) and the system is descending AC, which some consider pretty much the same thing as bubonic plague of the cock, and not without good reason. But it's worth it.

What I wonder is why it uses descending AC. I can get it with Crawford's other projects, since that makes converting oldschool modules over easier, but I somehow seriously doubt that's a consideration with Godbound.

Oh, if you really genuinely hate descending AC, it's an easy thing to fix: just subtract the descending AC from 20, and that's your new AC.

Crawford actually recommends it in Stars Without Number as an alternative.

The other bugbear I have with Godbound is the damage system.

>PCs get Hit Points as per usual, because demigods.
>NPCs get massively reduced Hit Points equal to their hit die, because not demigods.

So far so mildly confusing but not annoying. BUT! This means that any random sword swing auto-kills half the creatures in the game. So...

>Damage gets rolled against a table.
> 1 or less: Nothing
> 2-5: 1 point
> 6-9: 2 points
> 10+: 4 points
>
>Except for some things and Gifts and shit that roll straight damage.

So end result is, most things STILL die like chumps against Godbound but the players & GM have to memorise a damage table too. Except when they don't.

It's just really messy and seems like a lot of work to solve a problem the designers mostly made for themselves.

Also the enemy Hit Dice are still referred to as Hit Dice, despite actually being Hit Points, just to make matters even more confusing.

My main problem with Godbound is that they, for some reason, seem to assume 6 man parties as the standard, and build their enemies accordingly.

The design document was literally: "Fuck you, Holden & Morke. I'm gunna go make my own, with blackjack, and hookers."

Then he actually did it.

Same here. For a game where the PCs are literal gods, it seems like they're individually outclassed in combat by pretty much everything that isn't some random mortal.

...I said "same here" but I'm not sure that's exactly what you meant but whatever.

They're demigods, not literal gods.

Why do people keep pushing this shit on Veeky Forums?

There seems to be an assumption that the game is built around a Pantheon, yeah. Also that the pantheon will have at least one GB with Sword, Endurance, Alacrity or some other no-sell Word to just tank the fuck out of the insane number of attacks some of the enemies have.

In terms of HD, though, most enemies seem if anything a bit fragile once you can actually hit the buggers. But getting past all that Effort is gonna be tough at low levels.

That said... if running Exalted all these years has taught me anything, it's that players can and will steamroller through enemies you thought would be a major problem. Don't know how well that applies to GB yet,

OP here. I actually learned about it from Veeky Forums.

I decided to post this because I realised that the user that's been shitposting dumb threads about it all week had gone away for a while so an actual thread about it might be possible,

And, y'know, it is Veeky Forums.

Using hit dice imparts extra info to the GM that hit points don't. If you know a creature's hit dice, you know its attack bonus (equal to HD), how much damage it takes to kill it, how much nastier it is than a regular 1 HD human, and what it's saving throws are (15 minus half its HD). If you use hit points, you still have to supply the GM with a separate hit bonus, saving throws, and general badassness metric because HP alone won't tell you those things.

Plus, it makes it easier to just flip open an old-school bestiary and pull a monster out of it without having to recalculate anything.

The worst part (for Holden & Morke) is that it's better. Hookers & blackjack notwithstanding.

It's still barely a good game, of course. It will never be considered great. But that's not a bad thing.

I'm going to have to disagree. As much as I enjoy Godbound, I still prefer Ex3 both in terms of system and setting. There's a dynamism in Ex3's combat system that's just a lot more exciting? And stunts are always something that get people excited.

Godbound is mostly used by me to get an Exalted-like game with groups who will only play d20.

So, they gonna make supplements and other stuff for this game? I feel like it could use a little more, but it's still very solid.

As much as the comparison is extremely obvious, I feel like they are actually quite different in execution. The more I dig into Godbound, the more I feel like it scratches my old In Nomine and Nobilis itches rather than Exalted.

Thing is, I was running an Ex3 campaign until recently and now all I want to do is run Godbound. Which is making the woman who really badly wanted into my Ex3 game when it restarts very unhappy.

Tiny ass print crammed into 243 pages, falling asleep after reading first few pages, munchkin wet dream game, character sheet looks gay. Ain't got time for this sheeeeit.

>As much as the comparison is extremely obvious, I feel like they are actually quite different in execution.
Yeah, I felt the same. Godbound looks an awful lot like Exalted on the surface, but when you get into it, it's not really the same game at all. It has a similar premise and fluff, but the system takes things in another direction.

I think I'd pick Exalted if I had to, but I like (and have problems with) both systems.

>So end result is, most things STILL die like chumps against Godbound but the players & GM have to memorise a damage table too. Except when they don't.
>It's just really messy and seems like a lot of work to solve a problem the designers mostly made for themselves.

I've played a lot of Scarlet Heroes (a preceding game that used the same damage system) and it works extremely well in practice for making you feel like a total badass. It's mechanically much smoother than cleave or multiple attacks as a means to make heroes capable of absolutely wrecking the shit of groups.

Likely for the sake of compatibility with other OSR games.

Yeah, that terminology is just there as a nod toward using material from other games.

I found myself imagining a pack of these things, suitably nightmared up, as Uncreated monsters pouring out of a Night Road.

d20srd.org/srd/monsters/manticore.htm

Converting them seems pretty easy when the guidelines are
> Don't go nuts with the AC
>Everything else stays.

That ranged spine attack for six lots of 1d8+2 seems like it'd be lethal as hell, sovI might just change it into a volley weapon, i.e. it deals 1d8+2, but that's rolled straight for mobs) rather than a "no seriously, you take 6*(1d8+2) damage, sit still while I roll that" sort of attack.

It has 6HD, so it'll probably take two attacks or one Straight attack to bring it down. I like the concept for pack hunters that Godbound can fight but the armies of Ancalia would be horribly unable to deal with. I could leave its AC where it is at 17 (or 3 if you like descending AC).

Wait, Godbound doesn't have stunts?

D R O P P E D

That's like the best part of Exalted. Makes the players actually put effort into their actions.

Get better players.

Easier said than done. And good players can make any system fun.

I just like the mechanic because it makes players better. We need more of those.

I like the concept for stunts, but in practice they always take more time than they're worth.

"I attack" is boring. "I weave my sword cane back and forth, kick a bucket into the air, hit the bucket toward my opponent, then attack him" is boring and makes the game slower. That's an example from a campaign I played, by the way. Sometimes people have nothing to add with a stunt but empty adjectives and aimless flourishes, but they feel like they have to say them anyway because they're mechanically incentivised.

Stunts are a nice idea, but attaching a bonus to them means encouraging them even if they're bad.

Sure, but that works on every RPG problem. Probably those better players have better people to play with than any of us. No one on Veeky Forums is getting an invite to Matt Mercer's table, and those guys look like they're having a great time.

>stunt but empty adjectives and aimless flourishes
Then you don't give them the full bonus.

I dunno, it really is inapprpriate to talk about role-playing games on Veeky Forums.

That doesn't change anything. Fundamentally, the system is bribing the player to add a big sentence to the flow of the game in the middle of combat. The fact that there's a bit of quality control at the end of the sentence doesn't mean the player isn't encouraged to add a sentence to every action.

If the system offered nothing for 1 and possibly 2 point stunts, it'd avoid this issue. My last 5e DnD campaign effectively did that with those Inspiration tokens. (It wasn't what you'd call a high-RP campaign, so the suggested Inspiration for acting in character was replaced with "did you do something cool or funny?".) No one felt pressured to try to entertain on every single action they did, but we did come up with the occasional extra narration anyway, and it was good.

But then, that's just . I'm sure Exalted's stunt system can work fine if players don't constantly narrate terrible stunts. And I've been in games where players narrated terrible stunts regardless of being bribed to do it.

(Fun story, I had a girl playing a half-vampire mystic swordfighting drow in a BESM game I was in a very long time ago, and she insisted on narrating her transformation sequence every time a battle started. She wasn't the worst part of that game. God bless the mad bastard who decided to run a game for 12 players at the same time. Anyway, since we were playing BESM there were enough anime fans that we eventually settled on the Sailor Moon rule; you're only allowed to play your stock footage once per episode. I'm pretty sure Exalted has a similar rule for not using repetitive stunts, but as I mentioned earlier that's not good enough when everyone wants a stunt bonus on every action.)

I think the theory is that it can draw on other settings and supplements pretty easily.

so how can I use this to play nardo?

>what's your favourite nation from the corebook?
I like Ancalia. It doesn't have much to it other than DOOMED, but something about that appeals to me. When the entire setting has DOOMED lurking in the background, being a character from a place where the DOOM already happened seems like it has a lot of potential for roleplaying, as well as an obvious source for short/mid/long-term goals.

The other thing that doesn't hurt about that is that I love the concept of the Mesmer from Guild Wars 2, an illusionist who is also potentially a melee powerhouse and doesn't do any singing, dancing, or other Bard-like silliness. And the humans of GW also have a ruined homeland.

Alacrity, Deception, Sword, and lots of purple butterflies, on a wandering noble from Ancalia.

There will be a supplement about Ancalia.

>That doesn't change anything. Fundamentally, the system is bribing the player to add a big sentence to the flow of the game in the middle of combat.
If nothing else, I think 3rd edition made this better by changing the system so that players aren't so heavily incentivized to aim for 2-point stunts every action, and making it explicit that you shouldn't be handing them out that often. Ideally that leaves the players trying for 1-point stunts, which you basically get by default if you're describing your action at all.

But then, I tend to play online games, where spending 5 minutes typing out your action seems to be the norm regardless of system.

One of the subtle ways that 3e made the stunt system better was by changing the bonus so that regardless of what sort of stunt bonus you get awarded you're rolling the same number of dice. 2pt stunts don't give you more dice than 1pt stunts, they give you an automatic success. You can physically roll your dice faster when you know with a certainty what you're rolling.

Doesn't make rolling buckets of dice any faster, though. This is a point Godbound has in its favour; when you have a system that gives characters the ability to automatically succeed at low-level challenges, then you already have the main benefit of a big bell-curve-inducing dice pool. Big dice pools are slow to roll and slow to read, so Godbound's d20 system and Gifts seems to get the best of both worlds. Exalted really doesn't need both auto-success charms and a big dice pool system. If it were cleverer, it would have dice trick charms that made rolling faster rather than slower (e.g. don't make a charm that gives cascading rerolls on every Melee attack also be cheap to the point that players will want to use it constantly).

Man, I'd hate for Godbound to end up as the new World Engine, ie, system that can be brought up in any thread to troll it because some over-enthusiastic idiot can't help bringing it up at all times.

>over-enthusiastic
It's false flagging, not enthusiasm. And you could never talk about World games on Veeky Forums, from long before that particular shitposter started acting out, so I wouldn't worry about it.

Aside from Exalted and... whatever that not-really-started system which mentioned Godbound in its OP copypasta, I haven't seen this one mentioned in any other threads.

I guess this system isn't quite popular enough to generate healthy Generals, which causes it to bleed out a bit into other threads. Since I learned about this in one of those threads, I don't really mind that.

No, there was a time about three years back when we could even talk about Dungeon World and still have good threads. PDF related, I and some other folks helped the creator work on this, right here on Veeky Forums. This was in mid 2014, right about the tail end of that period, when virtualoptim showed up and began shitting all over the threads with stupid image macros, and posting links to his terrible rap.

>what's your favourite nation from the corebook?
Ulstang, undead vikings ruled by witch queens. I love a nation that just bleeds Evil with a capital E.

>links to his terrible rap.
I just... what? I mean...

>I guess this system isn't quite popular enough to generate healthy Generals

Well... this one ain't doing too bad, is it? I take your point, though, I can't see us stretching to more than one a week at most.

Google virtualoptim dungeon world rap, I believe he uploaded it to youtube. Or better yet, don't google it, you'll sleep better tonight if you haven't heard that shit.

assuming Godbound works the same as Stars Without Number, same creator and all, they actualy made decending AC make sense. Your target number when attacking is always 20, and the enemy's AC is added as a bonus to your to hit roll, so lower AC, lower bonus to the guy shooting you.

On the other hand, I, at least, think that buckets of dice have their charm. It's, like, a measurement of your character's power you can actually feel in your hands. Rolling buckets of dice all the time gets old, though.

This is correct. iirc some of the best AC arnor or words are +3, but I also haven't finished reviewing rules on the God walkers/Mecha or artifacts.

I'm thinking the domain game would support one-offs using the Commoner and Hero rules.

I'm also seriousy thinking that you could totally us this game to play Full Metal Alchemist: The RPG using those same Hero level characters, and that is also how all my Bright Republic NPCs will be cast.

It's definitely one of the more interesting subsettings for the game. Some of the others feel a bit one-note. Like the Patrian Empire; nothing about it stands out as being more than just the Roman Empire again.

I like the Oasis States as well for not being straight up Arabian Nights and making water and magic be part of the society, so it occurs to me that both it and Ulstang have a bit more of a flavour to them by drawing inspiration from older pulp sources. Ulstang's witches remind me a lot of Fafhrd's homeland from his origin story (the only place I've seen skiing presented as a badass way to get around), and the pyramids, dead gods and fire priests feels like the sort of place Conan might want to trash at some point.

Integrating magic into the sub-setting is a good thing. The Patrian Empire doesn't. It has all those slaves, and not even a mention of how magic might interact with that. No mind control, no procedure for ensuring that magic-using slaves are properly screened, no sorcerously augmented slave rebellions... it's a bit of a missed opportunity.

>Integrating magic into the sub-setting is a good thing. The Patrian Empire doesn't. It has all those slaves, and not even a mention of how magic might interact with that. No mind control, no procedure for ensuring that magic-using slaves are properly screened, no sorcerously augmented slave rebellions... it's a bit of a missed opportunity.

There's a definite sense of pointlessness in a lot of the Patrian Empire description. You could replace most of it with "It's Rome, innit?"

Maybe that one should be second sourcebook after Ancalia. Although I kinda want to know more about the Thousand Gods.

Interesting debate there, whether it's better to work on something which already has something interesting to it or to work to replace something that's sort of bland.

Sticking with the theme of Rome, there are a few ways you could do something interesting within the setting. There's the clash of greco-roman polytheism and christianity, which you could access with the Unitary Church vs the Made Gods (here the monotheistic religion is the older one, which is a bit of a flip). You could also tie that into the slavery element; with slaves from every corner of the realm, you'd get a great clash of religions within the empire.

You could also push the "Only War" aspect even harder and have it basically be Roman Starship Troopers.

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