B-Roll Call!

I have released a new game about making B movies! It was originally inspired by one called It Came From the Late, Late, Late Show, but somewhat considerably expands on it, adds rules to things that were discussed in vague terms, and completely reworks most of the base architecture of that game. it can be found here!

My GMing Crowning Moment of Awesome

Prefacing (Skip to below for actual moment)

So about a decade ago, I was in the throes of Final Fantasy D6, the unauthorized fan indie RPG, before they switched to a 4 attribute 15 level system. I loved the original iteration of it. There was a blizzard that year so I had several days of boredom to contend with. I wrote all 30 levels worth of encounters for a world in which the apocalypse happened in 2012 because scientists were trying to figure out how to vaporize a single target with a nuclear bullet. They did something that messed with the way other dimensions interact with the earth, accidentally opened up a portal to the Farplane of the Final Fantasy series. 

They were able to contain the threat, but the monsters instinctively knew the veil between the two dimensions was weakened, so they gradually began testing it. In the summer of the next year, all bets were off after a Bomb attacked Mall of America and it made national news. By last year a woman named Cornelia would accidentally summon an eidolon called Alexander and save New York City, which would be renamed Alexandria (any other locations of that name are of no consequence in the alternate timeline)

Gradually old techs fail, and new (alternate Final Fantasy largely "mist punk") technologies prevail such that there are now airships and swords are capable of competing with firearms and so on. Somehow many people notable today survived the intervening 66 years, the most relevant one to the story being Jackie Chan.

Crowning Moment

So the party's trudging along and they all knew out of character it that they'd likely meet real world people. One of my players is a little more in on it than the rest so he lets me have his character go berserk and get beat up by Jackie Chan. He comes to his senses, and they have a nice conversation. One of the moogles gives them mail inviting them to Cornelia's 86th birthday. They reply saying that Jackie Chan is still alive because they'd heard she was a fan. So of course she invites him too.

He comes. The party had made gifts for the party. One was a luggage, Some I can't remember, and the third was a jetpack. I had planned on having the bad guys interrupt the party, so they did. I put on this song and tell them "Ok, so there's these two imperial dreadnoughts spitting out swarms of Remora airships (fighter jet equivalents.) You can either do half damage to the swarms, or full damage to the dreadnoughts. Spells do full damage to both. Jackie Chan puts on the jet pack and is going around kicking the [expletive] out of people flying the Remoras. Every time you year a scream, he's doing full damage."

One of my players asked "Why's he doing full damage" Everyone else simultaneously "Because he's [expletive] Jackie Chan!"

Dragging a body in d20

Never thought I'd do a rule for d20, but Pathfinder 2 has taken an identity stance I can respect so I'm willing to look into it a little deeper. So I'm reading the bulk section of Pathfinder Second Edition, and I noticed:

1000 coins is 1 bulk and 1 bulk is 5-10 lbs. This was confusing to me because of previous editions being 50 coins per pound, a bulk should be 20 pounds. Also with a medium sized creature being 6 bulk, that's only 60 lbs. at 10 per bulk. I noticed that making Medium Creatures bulk 8-10 keeping small creatures at 2-3, and having 1 bulk correspond to 20 lbs fixes all of these issues for medium and small creatures. Likewise, a large creature could be 12-15 Bulk (240-300 lbs), a huge creature 25-30 bulk, and so on. This does not obey the square cube law but it fits closer to what actual d20 creatures seem to want to weigh, so it works.

Also, side note: There is some text about how an object's bulk is somewhat affected by its awkwardness more than its actual weight, and generally I'm willing to concede the point that a longsword is only a couple pounds, and other such concessions and not change how the rule works overall unless something glaringly annoying comes up.