Twists on Existing Games

fans of catan: is the seafarers expansion worth the cost?

Starting Premises

• Mutants & Masterminds is a really good superhero RPG. (I've been invited to take place in a "round-robin" shared world campaign, so I've been doing some investigation.)
  
• In the rules as written, skills are overpriced at one character point per rank. This is not much of a bug in traditional four-color superhero games, where Super-Attributes make up the difference. (Reed Richards doesn't need to buy lots of ranks in every science skill; he buys Super-Intelligence and gets a similar effect.) In lower-powered games, or ones closer to street level, it becomes noticeable. And it's hard to build the Batman, or other characters with a diverse array of linked skills.
  
• The solution of having one point buy two or three skill ranks is inelegant. I like points to be "atomic", and spending half a point here and there annoys me. Plus, it nerfs feats like Skill Focus.

So, here's my solution. The Super-Skill power remains, for what it's worth, but is supplemented by ( Super Specialist.Collapse )

What do you think?

I've been playing this game for over half a year now and have a couple of variants for the opening bidding. Each of these are best if you have players who have played a few times and thus have a decent idea of the rackets and crooks. They can be used individually or together.

1) Buy a Boss. Whoever would go first has the option to pay 10G and go through the deck to grab the person they want for Boss. Each player then has the choice to do so in turn. You only get one shot - bid or pass.

2) Buy a Racket. Same as 1) but with a single Racket of your choice.

Bear in mind that if you use both of these options, come bidding time you will have people potentially ranging from 10Gs to 25Gs (or 30Gs for the Vegas Bunch). This will change the bidding and add a bit of uncertainty.

There's one more option you can use for smaller games: choice of Mob. With 4 or fewer players, deal out two Mob cards to each player; each player has their choice of which mob they take.

Hi there!

Terribly sorry to bother you guys with this, but we just created a community for the card game Munchkin, and since this community has 'munchkin' listed as interest we were hoping you'd be interested in our community as well. That is, if you meant the card game when adding that interest, ha ha.

Basically, we'll be talking about news, strategies, questions regarding rules, tips, and possible meetings to play. We started out with a group of friends who adore the game, but hope to grow and become larger in time.

Would you like to take a look and consider joining munchkin_sjgame? Thank you! :)

Love, Cherry.

hey! i stumbled across this group and, as a rabid wargamer, thought i would drop in and give my two cents.

we have several house rules for Munchkin, because Munchkin is just to cool of a game not to have house rules. the simplest house rule concerns the supermunchkin and half-breed cards: simply, if you have two supermunckin cards you can have three classes; three supermunchkin cards you can have four classes. the same is true for half-breed. you can very easily become a third-breed or a fourth-breed.
another favorite house rule for Munchkin concerns the wannabe vampire. if a cleric chooses to make the wannabe vampire run away by saying "booga booga" he is required to stand on his chair, extend his arms above his head and say the words in the most haunting manner he can come up with. if the chair is unstable and will not support his standing weight, he is required to stand on the table.

in BANG! the first game you play you are required to say "in heaven there is no beer, that's why we drink it here" whenever you drink a beer to regain health. you are also required to say "i shot the sheriff but i did not shoot the deputy" the first time you shoot the sheriff. However, if you do either of these things more than three times, the other players have the right to glare at you and tell you what an idiot you are.

in another favorite game, Guillotine, (the Revolutionary card game where heads will role and you win by getting a head,) whenever the Bad Nun is turned face up and again when she looses her head, everyone playing the game is required to chant "Bad Nun! Bad Nun! Bad Nun!"

along the same lines, in Circus Maximus, the chariot racing game, whenever someone is trying to take out an opponents horses with his cart, as he is warming up the die roll, the other players (even the one being attacked) are required to chant "Alpo!"

in Vinci, you are required to refer to the little colored chits as "men." politically incorrect jokes about "the white men," "the black men," "the yellow men," or "the red men," are acceptable, but the first person who tries to work in "the blue men," or "the green men," gets a beating.

in Diplomacy you are encourage, though not required, to speak with the accent of the country you rule and to rename your country based on something else historical or personal, as long as it makes sense. this is how we get games of Diplomacy with The Byzantine Empire, The Scottish Realm, Prussia and Those Damn French.

in Napoleon in Europe, if you ever have a large army that lacks infantry, cavalry or artillery, the other players are expected to mock you.

in Warhammer, you are expected to mimic what the models are saying if they are moving into a place where they know they will be exposed to enemy fire, or when they are actually being fired upon. this rule does not usually apply if your units are human, but applies doubly if the units in question are goblins or if you are especially good at doing voices.
also in Warhammer, all goblins are named Skragget.

in D&D, especially when all of us are chaotic neutral, if you are not able to attend an adventure, expect your character to be controlled by someone else in a fashion where your character is the one who kicks down all the doors, sets off all the traps, and charges blindly at the foes. also expect your character to take the blame for things like when the high level fighter comes along wondering who took the magical sword from his father's crypt.

finally, on a more serious note, there is the game titan (which i am assuming at least one of you has heard of, seeing as it's on the interests list). because the game is so big, takes so long to teach and so much longer to play, i haven't actually been able to convince many of my gaming buddies that it's worth playing. when we do play, however, we always have balanced starting towers after that disaster of a game where our starting towers turned out to be right next to each other.
with the lack of people willing to play Titan being commonplace, i stumbled across a java version of Titan called Colossus, and it contains numerous variants, a few of which are even worth playing, though the effort to make enough little tiles to play the variant on the board would be too much effort, it is still fun to play.

so that's pretty much all i can think of now. i love gaming, and i think it's great that i found a community where i can post some of my gaming quirks.

This is beyond silly, and PG-13 past the cut. You've been warned.

( A friend of mine was talking about Settlers of Catan...Collapse )

If you're interested in running a tabletop game at Arisia 2004 this year -- and possibly get comp'ed for it -- you'll need to follow the instructions in this post. Only a few more days to do so.

As posted on http://www.hatrack.com:

The most important rule change is that you are allowed to leave territories empty. This allows you to create buffer zones so an enemy can move into a territory but has to stop, instead of the enemy being able to keep rolling the dice to take over country after country. In short, it eliminates blitzkrieg and incredible lucky streaks. If you are the sole hold of territories in a continent, you collect for that continent and count yourself as owning all the territories on all the continents that you control, not just the ones you occupy with armies.

We also allow an unlimited number of moves at the end of a turn. That is, you can move every single army exactly one territory, but no more.

We also play without the cards.

Those are the key modifications. It's a different game when played this way - far more strategic and far less dependent on chance. It's also slower and talkier and alliances (both kept and broken) become far more important.

One of the fun variants listed in the Deluxe Illuminati rulebook is the Hidden Illuminati variant. Basically, you play with your Illuminati face down. Nobody knows your group or your goal, but they can use an action declaring you to be a certain Illuminati. If they're right, you turn your Illuminati face up.

You can declare your Power or Income to be up to 1 higher than it actually is and you can always elect to make it lower. But you can't use any special Illuminati powers.

Where's the fun in that?

The variant: In addition to the power and money changes listed above, before anybody draws any Illuminati to use, they draw an Illuminati and are able to use that Illuminati's special powers until their real Illuminati is exposed. If they draw Bavaria they can make a privileged attack for 5MB once per turn; if they draw Cthulhu they get +2 to destroy. If they draw the UFOs they can use their power twice *and* have the Secret Goal! However, as soon as the real Illuminati is exposed these special powers are gone and vanished.

Aside from this change, the rest of the rules for Hidden Illuminati apply.

I've always wanted to play a three-way Yu-Gi-Oh! duel before as well as a tag team match like the Para and Dox vs. Yami and Joey match in episodes 17-19. I like the idea of more cutthroat competition in a game of so many twists and turns.