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Christ, the guy who wrote Black Tokyo and the spooge hate monster couldn't even bother to get his loving mechanics right either. That shouldn't surprise me, though. I'm loving the whole Mutant thing, reminds me of early Gamma World versions. Not that d20 trainwreck, but the old box stuff. What's sad is I used to hear about the WORLD'S LARGEST DUNGEON on ENWorld and Circus Maximus all the drat time. They were talking some serious poo poo, and it's kind of funny to me to see that it's like Undermountain's retarded cousin. That goblin section is just terrible, and that first level is pretty terrible too. Their playtesting was horrible as gently caress, and when they were working on it, there were all kinds of people who were familiar with the d20 scene willing to do playtest and give it looks over for free. People who had products already out there that were selling pretty good. IIRC there were even people who where willing to do artwork really cheap for pieces that normally charged like $100 for. They have no goddamn excuse for that horrible shitpile they put out. Not after all the bragging they did, all the help they were offered, and all the buzz on ENWorld and other places about how this was going to be the greatest dungeon ever, even better than Undermountain, Castle Greyhawk, everything. Hell, when they mentioned having a whole section with a goblin kingdom down in the dungeon, there were shitloads of suggestions and it looks like they took exactly none of them. I guess it shouldn't surprise me that the World's Largest Dungeon is the World's Shittiest Dungeon.
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May 8, 2013 15:47
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 17:47 |
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Yeah, you loving throw out anything to do with that lame-rear end England World Book Camelot. It's practically unusable and doesn't fit within the world. It was during the "Oh ho ho ho, these guys you thought were good are actually alien intelligences! Everything you know is wrong! BWAH HA HA!" phase that the game went through. I can't wait till you get to the "Knights of the Round Table" section, because between the alien intelligence and those guys, most of the England book was just an excuse for the GM to act like a total cock toward the players and say "Oh, it's in character" as well as screw over every part with alien intelligences in every loving closet. Want to know WHY the CS is human supremist who refuses to deal with DB's? Because of alien intelligences, that's why. gently caress it, halfway through those books, the CS really really starts to look like humanity's last best hope, and not that bad.
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Jun 4, 2013 21:06
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quote:It also specifies that there are just a handful of large kingdoms and none of them exceed 20,000 people, which, well, we were already told New Camelot is humanity’s A-game in the British Isles so yeah. This is one thing that always pisses me off about RPG's, and particularly Rifts books. 20,000 people? That's a LARGE kingdom? Sembedia couldn't pick up a goddamn book and check populations or call a loving medieval history university instructor and ask? The Roman loving Empire had like 70 MILLION citizens. Just London in 1500 had 50,000 people in the city alone, and it didn't have the benefit of Rifts science. The exact number is debatable, but with a kingdom only 20,000 population, you'd be looking at a lot of birth defects cropping up in small towns and villages. Goddamn it, Sembedia, read a loving book!
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Jun 6, 2013 14:42
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The best part is if you have a GM that can't read further than the NPC's MDC and stats the 4 Horsemen are really easy to beat. We had a GM tried to do the whole Four Horsemen thing, and in a showdown between my drug abusing alcoholic biotechnowizardry implant sporting 12th level Temporal Warrior with Ninjas & Superspies martial arts, rune gauntlets that gave him a total of 65 Supernatural PS, autododge, and a serious superiority complex, War got his poo poo pushed in. In one on one combat. If done correctly, Africa is impossible to do. If the GM doesn't know what the gently caress, it's super easy. Very rarely do you play in games where it is manages to skirt the whole thing. I've done it twice successfully and tried a half dozen times. Honestly, my favorite Rifts threat book is Mechaniods, because you can stretch the Mechanoid War out for months, with doomsday cults and poo poo. Hmmm, I might want to take this up in the Rifts Thread after I'm done with my "Let's Rebuild the Core Books" project.
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Jun 7, 2013 09:35
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Oh God, Pepsi the Immortal Douchebag. After War's humiliating defeat at the hands of my Temporal Warrior he sicced Pepsi on us. Every loving week. Every time he got this 'clever' look on his face we knew we were about to attacked by Pepsi because... well... we couldn't actually kill the son of a bitch. So we did stuff like a permanent Carpet of Adhesion inside a pocket dimension and throw him in a cesspool, shrink him and sell him as a magical rune statue, poo poo like that. He's soooo loving annoying. No personality, no characterization, just basically a generic dragon bad-guy that you can't get rid of, who right in the rules says he constantly tries to defeat those who once defeated him. So basically he's a trailer park bully who never goes away. Then Thoth, that rear end in a top hat. He's the reason we came to Africa, we did this big adventure to gather up greatest relics to fight the Four Horsemen, and when we managed to retrieve them from the ancient African vault, Thoth and his butt-buddies were there. They tried to have us turn over the relics 'for the greater good of the goodly races' instead of keeping them. One person did give them over, our sweet natured Ley Line Walker, and Thoth immediately destroyed all of the items she gave over. When I was asked to give over the gauntlets and rune-sword as well as the magical/technowizard items of my own design, I was kind of "No thanks." Africa will always give me a bad taste in my mouth because of Pepsi and Thoth and the rediculous poo poo we haven't gotten too yet. Still, loving the write-up, Alien Rope Burn.
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Jun 10, 2013 21:21
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That "total number of troops" thing hosed one of my old Rifts GMs when he was running Africa and we got tired of the Gods of Light dicking us, treating us like poo poo (Honestly, we were treated better in Atlantis than by the Gods of Light, mainly because we had lots of cash to buy poo poo, big guns, and cool poo poo to sell), and having us act like errand boys and having Thoth & Assholes Inc. constantly order us around and flex their muscles about how we weren't poo poo. We had to sit through a 30 minute "briefing" by Thoth & Assholes Inc about the Pheonix Empire and my mind went "Wait, 7K, spread out over Africa and the Middle East? With only 22K irregulars? Mostly a human slave army? Ooooh..." and we all got together and plotted when he threw in details like how they were a coordinated military and had bar codes and all that poo poo and we even more powerful than the CS because of... umm... monsters? He didn't figure out what we were doing until too late, luring in patrols and letting them get off a radio message before jamming them and slaughtering them. Getting the medicine men and shaman armed and ready to fight, and playing Rambo against the Pheonix Empire. We kept careful track of their numbers, playing hit and run, ambushing them, blowing up vehicles. We'd killed War, Pestilence, and Famine by the time we rolled into the Pheonix Empire, and spent five months real time blowing up every loving military base and convoy in the Pheonix Empire we found. Artillery strikes on barracks, destroying training facilities, destroying stockpiles, just basically tearing poo poo up like Sherman through Georgia. He was one of those rules lawyering fucks as a player and we'd discovered he was even worse as a GM (we rotated with various GM's claiming world books) or we wouldn't have made a huge issue out of it when he started gloating that the whole Pheonix Empire military was going to come down on us like a hammer. He'd also just whipped out some bullshit about "The Ghosts of the Four Horsemen!" to invalidate everything we'd done, and how the medicine men and shamans had just gone "Whelp, the Pheonix Empire is just too big to fight, let's go home!" and how the Gods of Light said we weren't helping against the Four Horsemen and told the rest of the Forces of Light that we shouldn't be helped by anyone any more. (Because we told Thoth & Assholes Inc. to take his plans and go gently caress himself) We responded with "What army?" and whipped out the numbers. We'd asked him repeatedly if they were recruiting (making it seems like we were trying to infiltrate) and he'd said "No. They don't see the need to!" and laughed at us for "wasting ammunition and time" when we were blowing up the factories that produced Pheonix Empire war material. He kind of threw a fit and quit GMing (thank loving God, we were SICK of Africa), so we rotated to a new GM and invaded the Gargoyle Empire to help out Triax and had a blast replaying Rifts Anzio MDC Firefight and Rifts D-Day Landing With Big loving Robots! so gently caress Africa all to hell. Seriously, if you have a new GM or a temp GM and he wants to do Rifts Africa, beat his loving skull in with a copy of Conversion Book One and move on.
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Jun 17, 2013 05:40
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Erebro posted:Fare thee well, Great One. May your long journey bring you other, halfway competent GMs, where your insane genius will be appreciated. Wasn't my plan. I was just part of it. I was playing a Rogue Scholar, not one of the combaticons. I've been handed my rear end more than once as a GM, which is always pretty cool. As you can tell from that Rifts Africa writeup, that book is just the loadout for a perfect storm of wankery, stupidity, half-assed ideas, colonialism myopicness, and just plain piss poor writing. I think I've seen one good Rifts game come from the Africa book, and that was modded so heavy it wasn't even funny (I think all that got used was the word Africa). From the overpowered Thoth & Assholes Inc. to the dumb rear end Four Horseman to the loving Pheonix Empire, the book is something any GM can skip, since about all they get out of it is a Rifts Earth map of Africa that's worth a poo poo. Christ, any time you see that Africa book being used, loving run. That writeup does a good job of showing just how hosed up and stupid it is. Everything falls flat, like Alien Rope Burn said: most of the Pheonix Empire tech is just Kittani knock-offs and the African people are just kind of there to be victimized and saved by the all mighty whitey.
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Jun 17, 2013 07:29
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Pussy Cartel posted:The developers of Cthulhutech and Eclipse Phase are actually friends, from at least as far back as when both games were being published by Catalyst. Why the creators of a genuinely good game like EP are so chummy with the guys behind Cthulhutech of all things is beyond me. Indie solidarity? Sometimes there's a huge disconnect between what people write and who they really are. That and you can be friends with people but not exactly want them banging your sister, you know? I can understand how you can be friends with people who write terrible stuff. Thinking that people who write terrible things are terrible people is the same kind of thinking that actors who play terrible people are actually terrible people. RPG writing is all about writing fiction, except you aren't writing a tight plot, deep characterization, there's no heroes journey. It's just world building, background characters, setting, and metaplot. I don't know the guys from Cthullutech, and I won't claim to know what kind of people they are. I will admit that the stuff in Cthullutech I've seen in here isn't my thing and I find it kind of revolting, but that stuff does have a market, and there are people who will play it just because of the shock value stuff.
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Jun 24, 2013 11:56
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FourmyleCircus posted:
AHAHAHA! They used Hero Machine, ala 2008 or 2009 to make that. I made that exact same character for Shadowrun.
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Sep 18, 2013 04:23
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 17:47 |
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deadly_pudding posted:I can't tell you how pumped I am about the MONEY update. This game flew so close to the sun with approximating modern finances, but close examination of the system instantly melts its "makes any drat sense" wings. Oh, God, between "Wealth" and the goddamn Hardness on military vehicles, during playtests with this I ended up spending a lot of time screaming back and forth. I can't remember who it was, but the argument for military vehicles, hell, military vehicles at all was "Well, we want the PC's to have a chance if a tank comes at them no matter how they are armed!" and one excuse was "Well, when I was in Desert Storm a tank got knocked out by small arms" and when pressed the the guy admitted that it wasn't so much "got knocked out" as "deadlined because the antennas and lights for broken." Then there was the screaming over weapon ranges, and it finally boiled down to "Real weapon ranges aren't fun because REASONS!" and they were throwing out all kind of stats, but when it was put out that there's no way a first level character could even outshoot someone who passed military Basic Training and that the ranges were 1/3 of what they needed to be, they mumbled "BALANCE AND REASONS!" for basically no reason. Holy poo poo, soooo many arguments over d20 Modern and d20 Future it was obscene. They'd said they'd put an option in for straight cash, but then they backed out and basically said: "Look online for actual cash values!" because it felt dumb as hell saying "OK, you found a briefcase with a whole PLUS TWO WEALTH in diamonds" instead of "The briefcase has $2 million in DIAMONDS!" So much got screwed up that couldhave made huge differences in how d20 Modern came out.
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Oct 26, 2013 00:34
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