Pencil-and-paper roleplay games anyone?

[sirherrbatka]

The same as difficult level: game master (you) need to think about it and it's quite lame. It's a lot easier to think about mod to test like +2. That's the way fading suns works: you attribute+skill+mod (if any), compare it with D20, if you roll below you get success. Also you take number you rolled and that's your success points to determined how well you did (WoD style).

But maybe I'm a little abnormal because of years playing WH.

Besides: it's harder to control difficulty dice then difficulty level.

My own system was using difficult level but I consider this as a flaw. :-/

[ezzetabi]

I see your point, but I think it is part of the simplicity and the design of the game: rolling dice is fun.

So when you get a challenge DM and you throw dice... it is fun!

[psi29a]

I enjoyed playing D&D, AD&D (2nd ed) and Mage: The Ascension. It was easy to find a group of friends (or even family) and I usually ended up DM/GMing which was cool as I could tell stories. After university, the time to do that went away and was replaced with boardgames.

I did manage to do an impromptu D&D session with my step-son (8y) for an hour recently, that was fun. He enjoyed killing giant rats in the cellar and giving them to the barkeep to make his 'famous' stew.

The last PnP that I 'played' was HOL, I cannot recommend that game enough, it is utterly fantastic and hilarious. I think the longest my PC ever lived was 10 minutes.

For example, possible skills are:

Operate Starship and Chew Gum at the Same Time: A Greymatta skill that says it all.
Repair Toasters 'n' Stuff: A Greymatta skill for fixing things.
Turn Radios into Howitzers: A Greymatta skill for MacGyvering things.
Organize Fundraiser: The Mouth skill based art of coaxing money and other goodies out of people.
Make Someone Stop Living With Your Fist: The Meat skill for bashing in skulls while unarmed.
Making Sharp Things Go Through Soft Things That Scream and Bleed: A Meat skill. Self explanatory.
Scathing (Ooooo, Big Word!) Sarcasm: A Mouth skill for humiliating your foes into piles of tears.
Whining Until You Get What You Want: A Mouth skill that forces victims to give in to your demands.
Make Everything You Say Sound More Important Than the Voice of God: A Mouth skill for fast talking and persuasion.
That Psycho Bruce Lee Shit: A Feets skill for dazzling your enemy with martial arts.
Withstand/Enjoy Hellish Agony: A Nuts skill for remaining conscious after being tortured by watching Barney & Friends for 24 hours straight. Closely related to "Withstand Bagpipes."
Spot Wastit: A Greymatta skill. Only useful if you enjoy keeping your face intact. As stated in the core rulebook, a character without this skill cannot tell the difference between a wastem and a wastit, even if the wastit is walking away from a mutilated body with a bloody knife in its hands.

[yshi]

@BrotherBrick That looks absolutely fantastic, I may have to find this HoL.

As far as my own experiences: I've played a little Palidium, mostly Dead Rising with a splash of Rifts(friends bailed while we were finishing making our characters), D&D3.5,4.0 and Pathfinder.

Recently I mixed up Pathfinder because it was handy to make a bit of a more chaotic gameset. It's set up as a giant dungeon crawl where small groups are competing and/or joining to get to the top. Char creation involves rolling 2d4 to determine your mentality and class, and if you fall too hard outside your mentality bad things happen. Kind of a meta computer rpg twist on tabletop.