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Syrg Sapphire posted:Talents from lost histories are beginning to reappear in humans, and the three boys, all ta'veren (they bend the Pattern around themselves, causing strange events in their vicinity... more when they're clustered together, and Rand being the strongest ever seen), are now shaking up the world massively. I love how the world has a mechanic for being the protagonist and covering yourself with plot armor. Can you imagine trying to explain to a little kid "No, you're not ta'veren, so nothing you do will ever matter and you'll never amount to anything in the grand scheme of things..." Of course, uncapping the unintended consequences of some of Jordan's other world inventions would take an entire thread of its own. I had this book as a kid, and I must agree, d20 was not the best system to represent this world.
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# ¿ Apr 3, 2013 16:12 |
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# ¿ Mar 19, 2024 13:13 |
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Kurieg posted:A word of warning: Although hengeyokai characters can be blended into groups of Westerners, you should do so very carefully. If hengeyokai immediately start popping up in septs and packs across the West, the flavor of the book - the flavor of exoticism - is lost. After all, how special can the Kitsune be when every group of players has at least one in their ranks? Ah yes, "Asia," that exotic and unique flavor shared by only 4,140,336,501 (2011 census numbers) (~57% of the world's population) people... Truly a mysterious land of mystery and not at all something so utterly common and normal to most of the world that Westerners and their world view ought to be the exception if we're going by Mage's "consensus creates reality" rules.
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# ¿ Apr 7, 2013 06:51 |
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Bieeardo posted:This. This is something that's always annoyed the unholy gently caress out of me about White Wolf. This... hate-on the writers and the lore have for human achievements and the human condition. This woman isn't abusing her children because they're an inescapable reminder of their deadbeat father, and it's the only form of control she's found in this tragedy that's her life, she's possessed. quote:She shakes her head, still looking at the floor. “Haven’t seen him for months. He left us.” It is the answer I was afraid to hear. I know it is a blindness on my part, but these situations are so much easier to deal with when there is a man to blame. http://www.harkavagrant.com/?id=341
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# ¿ Apr 12, 2013 23:22 |
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El Estrago Bonito posted:The Technocracy was a terribly written bad guy faction. They couldn't have any kind of grey morality because if you did that they would be instantly the good guys and totally reasonable people. I think that was what made the Guide to the Technocracy so much more compelling than the original mustache-twirling/soul-crushing Convention splatbooks. They did a great job selling you on the idea that the mages really were these awful selfish people who couldn't care less about the people they hurt and the societies that they trod underfoot in their quest for more domination over reality. The image of an ivory tower that's cracking apart from the inside because each of the 5 Conventions seriously believes its the one really in charge and has the other 4 fooled is such a perfect image for a conspiracy that it's stuck with me ever since, as well as all the sidebars about playing a real person who wants to save the world, but happens to have hitched their wagon to a group that's really not doing the best job but is also so deeply intrenched that it can't change course or stop due to sheer bureaucratical momentum, but has also managed to (somewhat) keep all the horrors of the past tamped down and given all that magic to the masses in the form of science that they can learn... Shame all that disappeared in the clusterfuck of 3rd edition. I'll take magic James Bond who needs to worry that maybe his bosses are as bad as the guys he's fighting over half-baked mystic kung fu guys and 1337 Computer Haxors. It was everything I wanted out of Hunter, without all the baggage that made Hunter not as fun as it could have been. If my copy wasn't halfway across the country, I'd do a write up of it. quote:Torg drama Oy, the metaplot stuff? I didn't get into the game until the early 2000s, and played one of those casual games where only one guy owned all the books and you just kinda went along with the rules as he GM'd. Managed to have a blast, too. Didn't learn until years later that we were playing the game "Wrong". Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 05:53 on Apr 13, 2013 |
# ¿ Apr 13, 2013 05:50 |
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Alien Rope Burn posted:My big issue with TORG was an issue with how crossing over the worlds worked, where certain PC abilities just stopped working from world to world depending on the metaphysics there. It seemed like the most unfun mechanic, and it's the main reason I never got into it. I don't want to be told I can't be a werewolf during some adventures! Yeesh. We always played that PCs were the exception to that rule. If you're a werewolf or a steampunk engineer, your powers work because that's who you're playing right now. RAW sounds really unfun...
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# ¿ Apr 13, 2013 16:18 |
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Simian_Prime posted:I love me some gaming. But when I think about poo poo like Black Tokyo it makes me want to throw my hands in the air and say "gently caress THIS HOBBY." I don't get why this poo poo seems to pop up so often in the tabletop industry, or why anybody making these games would think there is a market for them. It's just embarrassing for all concerned. If it's any consolation, this kinda thing crops up in any endeavor that involves the slightest amount of creativity. A casual amount of time spent browsing DeviantArt and FanFiction.net will stand as low hanging fruit testaments to that, as will enough time spent browsing any "pulp" genre where there's almost no discerning audience provided it hits a few genre check boxes and little if any editorial oversight. quote:
This also happens in one of Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius books. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 05:48 on Apr 14, 2013 |
# ¿ Apr 14, 2013 05:35 |
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pospysyl posted:
Yep, that's the Orestia's first part, Agamemnon, in a nutshell. They're leaving out Clytemnestra shacking up with Agamemnon's cousin, who is the other heir to the throne, though, as well as her murder of Cassandra. Clytemnestra is presented as a pretty awful person in the play, honestly, and every bit as bad as her husband. As far as Greek morality is concerned, it would be weird if her son didn't kill her and her lover, especially after Agamemnon commands him to from beyond the grave. And, well, to quote Wikipedia on the ending of the trilogy... quote:During the trial, Apollo convinces Athena that, in a marriage, the man is more important than the woman, by pointing out that Athena was born only of Zeus and without a mother. Athena votes last and casts her vote for acquittal; after being counted, the votes on each side are equal, thus acquitting Orestes as Athena had earlier announced that this would be the result of a tie. She then persuades the Erinyes to accept the verdict, and they eventually submit. Athena then leads a procession accompanying them to their new abode and the escort now addresses them as "Semnai" (Venerable Ones), as they will now be honored by the citizens of Athens and ensure the city's prosperity. Athena also declares that henceforth tied juries will result in the defendant being acquitted, as mercy should always take precedence over harshness. Hardly the straw-feminist interpretation they would like the story to be, what with their primary goddess being the instigator of the whole thing, and the ending hinging on women being worth less. There's a beautiful translation of the whole bloody trilogy by Robert Fagles (famed for his Iliad and Odyssey translations), but it's old enough that there's a ton of public domain ones also. edit: there are a bunch of other versions of the story, too, including many where a deer is sacrificed as a substitute (which usually just makes Artemis angrier), and sometimes Iphigenia is transformed into a goddess afterwards, or haunts the same island where Achilles' ghost is (because her family told her she was going to marry him to lure her to the site of the sacrifice), etc. Aeschylus' just happens to be the most complete, and (in my opinion anyways) most wonderfully poetic. Greek myths are always full of alternate versions and contradictions... Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 18:09 on Apr 19, 2013 |
# ¿ Apr 19, 2013 18:01 |
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DRAGONLANCE® Adventures Part One - "You can certainly enjoy this book without playing the game -- but what a game it is!" I've had this book on my shelf for years and years now, but haven't picked it up since high school. My LanceLore is similarly dated, as my attempts to reread the books have mostly been met with failure, so this is going to end up being a lot of "text as is" review, rather than connections to the novels and world at large. Please feel free to correct and add where I'm falling short! Introduction We open this tome with a very pleasant Not quite as bad as Paizo's constant shilling for all the other products you can buy, because there's no implied guilt about continuing the traditions of the One True D&D, but still, we're only on page one guys... They close by telling us that everything that's actually relevant to running the game or the AD&D system has been offset in little grey boxes for easy reference. We'll see if that actually holds true or not as we go... Chapter One- The Realms Above Fizban the Supremely-Powerful-God-Who-Likes-to-Pretend-to-be-an-Absent-Minded-Wizard gives us an overview of the cosmology of the DRAGONLANCE® universe. Basically, there were gods who were the children of the High God. This was all well and good, until it was decided that a new time and place would come into being. There was primordial chaos, and Reorx the Forging God beat it until it was a universe. This attracted spirits from all over, and the gods fought for possession of these spirits. The gods are divided along the usual D&D lines, with Good, Evil, and Neutral gods all embodying their stock interpretations. The good gods gave the spirits life, physical form, and dominion over the world. They hoped that the spirits would bring peace and order, and spread righteousness. The evil gods created hunger, thirst, and the need to work to satisfy these things, in the hope that they could dominate the spirits through starvation and suffering. The neutral gods come off horribly here, though: they decided to give the spirits free will, so they can choose between peace and order, or starving to death in subjugation to the forces of evil. Yep, quite the choice there The gods then create Krynn, the planet on which the spirits will live. This alignment system is baked into the world at its very core, by the way, in something called the Great Triangle. Good, Evil, and Neutrality are the pillars upon which the world is built, and the gods who stand at the points of the triangle will constantly angle to "maintain progress in the universe they have brought into being." This whole section is actually pretty well written, without a lot of the usual Gygaxian adjectives and purple prose, but my freshman philosophy paper sensors are blaring full blast throughout when it comes to the ideas they're writing about. Suffice to say this system of ethics leaves more than a little to be desired, regardless of potential for storytelling. See, evil can't be defeated because if good wins then...? Well, uhm. We'll get there when we get there. The different groups of gods then favored their own special races: the good gods favored the Elves, because as we all know elves are just plain better than you. They live longer, have awesome magical powers, and are highly resistant to change. The neutral gods favored the humans, which embody free will with their shorter life spans (making life precious) and their limitless ambition. "Thus, men give the world motion." The evil gods favored the ogres, who were initially the most beautiful creatures in existence before their hungers devoured them. They are selfish and cruel, and delight in inflicting pain. The High God then created animals, who are a balance of all three alignments. Dragons rule them. The animals are free to chose which side the back. The book then contradicts itself in literally the next paragraph, saying that the animals are most favored by the neutral gods Finally, there are the spirits called the Maran, The whole section on favored races reads like two different drafts that were cut together without proper editing for continuity, to be honest. Next, there are four laws which must be obeyed at all times: 1. Good Redeems its Own: good seeks to advance its goals through redemption, compassion and justice. 2. Evil Feeds Upon Itself: evil seeks to advance its goals by conquest and subjugation, natural selection style, with the weaker beings losing and dying. Chaotic evil people like raw strength without any moral consequences, and lawful evil people like the "rigid application of a morality of strength." 3. Both Good and Evil Must Exist in Contrast: without the two sides standing in opposition to one another, the world would be either all light or all dark, and there would be no contrast to bring focus or purpose. "Neutral's objective is unity in diversity." 4. The Law of Consequence: If you follow the law, you will be rewarded by the High God. If you break the law, you will be punished by the High God. The High God is a dick, and will sometimes wait years before punishing or rewarding you. And we reach our first grey box! quote:A proper DRAGONLANCE® game bases its campaigns and its morals around these principles--promoting the power of truth over injustice, good over evil, and granting good consequences for good acts and bad consequences for bad acts. Which is really just a reiteration of Law 4 when you get down to it. Is it relevant to running the game or the rules of AD&D? Eh, kinda. To say that the ethical system leaves a lot to be desired is almost belaboring the point. The obvious Doylian answer is that by making it so evil can never be defeated, there's always another adventure for the PCs to go on and another book to sell you. The Watsonian answer is a little trickier, because the two sides are so blatantly stacked in favor of good that the system has to resort to the "born evil" option to get villains most of the time. What they seemed to be going for was a Moorcock style Law vs. Chaos, where if Law wins the entire universe is calcified into predictable roles and progress and change end, and if Chaos wins the world descends into formless madness and all structure is impossible (a much more interesting debate with good points in favor of each side), but couldn't quite pull the trigger due to their choice of genre tropes and the assumptions of the game at the time. The players don't want long philosophical debates about the nature of morality, they want bad guys they don't need to feel bad about slaughtering. Tacking on a late night freshman philosophy conversation based on the PHB's "True Neutral characters do their best to avoid siding with the force of good or evil, law or chaos. It is their duty to see that all of these forces remain in balanced contention" is usually enough to give the illusion of depth. This whole thing would be better handled in Planescape, but that's a very different game, to say the least. I'd normally give the game a pass on it, because ill-thoughtout morality systems are a dime a dozen in RPGs, but the intense focus on alignment the book has (including actual mechanical penalties) makes it really hard to ignore. Next, characters!- Heathen clerics and druids can go suck it, or, The game is over at 18th level. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Apr 21, 2013 |
# ¿ Apr 21, 2013 08:29 |
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DRAGONLANCE® Adventures Part 2 - “Yet in the beginning you start with a certain lot in life -- a classification as to who you are and what you may become.” Characters in Krynn are caught in a weird form of predestination, one that implies that you still have free will despite being born into a very well defined role in the world. You are free to determine who you are and what you become, despite being saddled with your “Lot in Life” and being (for all intents and purposes) stuck in your character class because this is a 1e supplement. We are then treated to a healthy dose of pretension: quote:Some of these character types are universal, and exist not only in Krynn, but also on other worlds far away from the sight and the knowledge of the True Gods. Still others are unique to this world of Krynn and exist nowhere else in the universe. What are these truly sweet classes that don’t exist anywhere else? We'll get to that in a second... This entire section is written a little weirdly, with brief descriptions of the classes in white as part of the 2nd person psudo-framing story they began in the last section, and pretty much the same descriptions with mechanical details in a big grey box right afterwards. As you’ll soon find out, there’s a big focus on loving over characters who are transported to Krynn from elsewhere. Cleric (Heathen) - Don’t worship the True Gods? gently caress you. No powers, no gods, no nothing. “They are powerless and receive no blessings from the gods.” In the Gray Box, we learn that they can adopt the worship of a compatible True God. This may piss off your original deity if you ever get off Krynn, but at that point the DM is loving with the cleric so badly that s/he might get punched. Druid (Heathen) - See above. Your nature has no power here, non-Krynn native. Why this has any effect at all, since druids worship nature and not any particular deity, well... Holy Order of the Stars - Clerics native to Krynn. There are no fewer than 18 gods scattered throughout the Magic Triangle of Alignment you can choose from. Fighters - Yep, they exist. Barbarians - Usually from the North. See your PHB. Rangers - See PHB. Cavaliers - May be candidates for entry into the Knights of Solamnia, but as the rules for multi-classing into the Knight of Solamnia class are just awful, I’m not sure how this is ever going to be worth it. Non-native Cavaliers can join by starting off by roleplaying, then starting a 2nd XP track and working at their old Cavalier level until they’ve earned enough XP to get their levels of Knight of Solamnia class equal to their previous level of Cavalier. “Note that it is far easier for an experienced knight to gain experience points and go up in levels than it is for those who are truly first level. Paladins - Much like heathen clerics, you lose your powers if you worship a non-Krynn True God. You can enter the Knights of Solamnia class in the same manner as a Cavalier. Knights of Solamnia - Hybrid paladin/fighters, who branch off into one of three various orders (Crown, Sword, and Rose). One starts in the Crown, then can join the Sword at 3rd level through roleplaying, and a Sword can join the Rose at 4th through roleplaying. More on them in a bit. Magic-User (Renegade) - Those who attempt to use magic “outside of the moderating influence of the Orders of High Sorcery. These are earnestly hunted down by the order to entice them to join or destroy them if they refuse. Renegade wizards have a short life expectancy on Krynn.” Illusionist (renegade) - see above. Wizards of High Sorcery - There are three types: White, Black, and Red, which correspond to good, evil, and neutrality respectively. Why neutral is red and not grey, I have no idea. They control all magic on Krynn, and kill anyone who practices it without being one of them. Thieves (Handlers) - Thievery is punished severely on Krynn, unless you happen to be a Kender. quote:These diminutive people Thief/Acrobat - see PHB. Don’t see you favorite class listed above? Well... quote:Characters of other classes revert to their major classes when they enter Krynn, with experience points equal to the mid-point of their current level. Monks, for example, become heathen clerics of equal level. There are no assassin characters in Krynn. They would become thieves. Who wants to play your favorite class when you could play as knights who are in Orders? Or magic-users who are divided into opposing schools? Or thieves who are annoying? I bet I could never, ever find characters as unique as that, not anywhere else in the entire universe... Other Special Limitations Want to go past 18th level? Too bad! The gods remove you from the world and reassign you to another world. Those who are allowed to remain are What’s Your Alignment? quote:In most AD&D® campaigns, the player chooses the alignment of his PC and then tries to act accordingly. Alignment in Krynn is handled differently. The alignment of a PC is determined by his actions, not the other way around. In the back, a nice chart is provided for the DM to track the PCs alignments along the scale of Good>Neutral>Evil. You begin at the midpoint of your alignment, and can shift up and down on the scale depending on your actions. If you move enough ticks in any given direction (the good and evil should wrap into one another, if I remember correctly), you enter a “Grey area,” and receive the following penalties: -1 to all attack rolls +1 to Armor Class 10% chance of spell failure 20% chance for a cleric, paladin, or spell-casting Knight of Solmnia to not be granted a given spell by his gods when preparing it. If you move enough to actually shift your into a new alignment, you are placed at the center of that alignment so as to keep you from bouncing back and forth too much. You are also expected to be judged by the strictures of your new alignment, and will be penalized in accordance. Note that this actually makes it harder for you to regain your old alignment, as you've got an entire trek through a different alignment's rules and the accordant penalties to deal with during the transitionary "grey area". quote:When a change in alignment occurs, do not inform the player that his PC has changed alignment. Wait until he tries to perform an action that depends on his alignment, then tell him it doesn’t work. It’s up to the player to realize what happened and how to fix it. Clerics who change to an incompatible alignment immediately lose two levels and all spell-casting ability until they find a new god to worship. Wizards likewise lose two levels, and change the color of the robe they wear to suit their new alignment. Knights of Solamnia lose all positions and abilities by falling from grace and are treated as fighters until they redeem themselves. As you may have guessed, I hate this section, because it embodies pretty much everything that is wrong with alignment as written. Want to play a guy who fights against his natural inclination to do evil? How about a well intentioned extremist who does evil actions for the greater good? How about something simple and cliche, like Han Solo? Well, here’s a host of mechanical penalties and lost levels as your reward for not playing as a straight-jacketed alignment fanatic coupled with passive-aggressive DM’ing. It weirdly rewards you for playing an evil PC, if you know how to game the system, because you can do pretty much whatever you want provided you justify it as being evil in the end or part of some long term plan. So, to sum us thus far: we’re trapped in a Manichaeistic nightmare of predestination, where only extremism is rewarded by the cruel and distant gods. Somehow evil still exists despite being utterly unappealing and the High God directly rewarding good actions and punishing the bad. We are the playthings of the supreme powers, who cast out any who approach their might, and rule their triangle with an iron fist of conformity. We’re having fun, right? This is the light and fluffy high fantasy setting, especially when compared to Dark Sun and Ravenloft, right? Guys? Good thing there’s an entire Angelfire page devoted to Dragonlance Humor to break all that tension up! Next - The Knights of Solamnia Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 05:28 on Apr 23, 2013 |
# ¿ Apr 23, 2013 05:20 |
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ThisIsNoZaku posted:I am shocked! "Old-School" modules weren't play-tested either.
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# ¿ Apr 24, 2013 17:06 |
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Kurieg posted:Go ahead if you want, I only meant that they're not really meant to be sympathetic in any fashion, it just so happens that also makes them hilarious. I tried to find the Black Dog Games picture earlier but failed. The Best Game Company. edit: Apparently Thai Cuisine is also evil?
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# ¿ Apr 30, 2013 06:25 |
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Kurieg posted:...which lead to the Bootstrapping rules. Which also allowed you to one day wake up and suddenly have more Pure Breed than you did the day before. Would love to hear more about this.
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# ¿ Apr 30, 2013 16:42 |
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pospysyl posted:
This juxtaposition doesn't jive at all. Is there anything even remotely weak about awesome Revolutionary War Soldier Wolf smashing a guy with the butt of his rifle? That said, that opening story stuck with me every since I read it in high school. It was one of the first experiences I had with the idea of the "working poor," and the unrelenting trauma of trying to maintain even a passable lifestyle on minimum wage hit home despite the cheesy "and he was actually a werewolf so it was actually awesome in the end" twist. It wasn't that I had no idea about how hard it was to be poor, as my folks were pretty poor for most of my childhood (in that strange time when you still believe that your parents just "go to work" and it's all fine, fullstop), but that there was something wrong with the system that even allowed someone to work 80 hours a week and still be scraping by to make rent and eat ramen noodles. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 04:54 on May 8, 2013 |
# ¿ May 8, 2013 04:51 |
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quote:Glass Walkers: “Can they survive out of their fishbowls?” () "Fishbowl" is faux-hippy slang for an office. Surrounded on all sides by glass, looking out at the world from within, etc.
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# ¿ May 28, 2013 19:49 |
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ThisIsNoZaku posted:The name for these lovely death-dealers is BattleMech (often shortened to 'Mech, including the apostrophe). These aren't your candy-rear end, delicate, graceful mecha out of your Japanese animes* Unseen! Unseen! Or is it a reseen now?
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# ¿ Jun 12, 2013 21:56 |
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Hipster Occultist posted:At the same time, none of it as actually a "challenge" as the only way to get through it without prior knowledge is be a goddamn telepath constant scanning your dm's mind. Bullshit isn't a challenge, it's boring DM Fiat. Well, considering the target audience was the DM's son and the best D&D player ever (the guy literally responsible for Fighters not receiving any special powers or abilities, because Robilar didn't need them), I wouldn't rule out their ability to predict exactly the kind of thing Gygax was going to pull at every twist and turn.
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# ¿ Jul 13, 2013 06:22 |
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Kurieg posted:
The armor's proportions do make the wearer look kinda goofy, but I still can't explain what's up with "Tiny Arms" Kelly there. A police officer wearing the armor after the battle, unfortunately not Kelly himself If you're interested in learning more, Peter Carey wrote an amazing novel about Kelly and his life and times.
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# ¿ Jul 30, 2013 16:50 |
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Kurieg posted:Hive of the Poisoned Lungs Are we sure than "grown-up Captain Planet with werewolves!" wasn't the stated design goal for early werewolf?
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# ¿ Aug 2, 2013 19:54 |
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Kurieg posted:
And the award for "Statements Which Are Positively Horrifying Outside of Context" goes to...
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# ¿ Aug 15, 2013 17:51 |
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goatface posted:Vibro-blades make a sort of sense. Ultrasonic blades certainly exist (though mainly in the textiles & food industries from what I know), the vibration stops the material sticking to the blade, so it cuts exceptionally cleanly. You can buy a decent one for $70 these days, under the name "Oscillating Multi-Tool". I just used one to build bookshelves, and it cut through both wood and old screws without any hassle, and it apparently goes through drywall better than any other tool on the market. It could probably vibrate its way through a piece of plate or chain armor given enough time... Scale that up to the future tech specifications, and I could see it going through super space armor.
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# ¿ Aug 29, 2013 23:13 |
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Part One - Dr. Good Order, How I Learned to Stop Worrying Love the Maneuver Chart You’ve heard about this one, haven’t you? The most complicated role playing game ever made. “Chart Master”. F.A.T.A.L. 1.0. “Three Hours of CharGen so you can die in the first round of combat.” What have our own people been saying about Rolemaster? FMGuru posted:And remember, MERP is a simplified version of the Rolemaster standard rule set. ThisIsNoZaku posted:I made a Rolemaster character once, with a guy who was a big fan of it. He was using a custom fillable sheet that was something like 20 pages long. Bieeardo posted:I remember a guy telling me about his group's encounter with a room full of crazed whores. They (the group) were all in plate armour, so the ladies couldn't really do much to them, but the table the prostitutes rolled on kept coming up 'knocked down'. Rolemaster is the granddaddy of Fantasy Heartbreakers. Beginning originally as a series of add-ons (crit chars, spell casting systems, etc.) that you could theoretically staple into any pre-existing fantasy role playing game, and finally culminating in an actual boxed set with all the books together. It was created by a bunch of guys who thought that D&D didn’t have enough realism, didn’t take into account enough details in combat, and didn’t mechanically represent every last loving thing in the entire goddam universe. They also got their hands on the license to produce the Lord of the Rings RPGs, and did some legitimately awesome source books that fill out the rest of Middle Earth, even if it’s attached to a really weird system. It’s a big old hot mess of ideas, some good, a lot terrible, a ton completely useless, and some that leave you scratching your head. And it’s about as 80’s game Design as is possible. What’s 80s Game design? Ratoslov gave us an awesome definition a few pages back. Ratoslov posted:Very 80's: Graph paper. D100 random tables. Typesetting is done by physically cutting and pasting bits of type and art onto the page. The game is probably a box-set, and may well include a bunch of dice in the box that you need to draw the pips on yourself. Random chargen is big, much like hair. Oh yeah! Regan’s in the White House and New Coke tastes great! Put on your mirrored sunglasses, jean jacket with the air brushed dragon coiled around an 8-ball, and turn up that Man-O-War tape. I don’t care if your mom wants you to turn it down because you’ve got church in the morning. We’re talking Rolemaster, bitches, and we’re playing by I.C.E’s house rules. --- History From here: http://www.icewebring.com/what-is-rolemaster/ quote:There have been four versions of the game produced, which fall into two major groups. First Edition and Second Edition Rolemaster belong to the first group, usually just referred to as RM2. There was then a fairly major revision to the game when the third version, Rolemaster Standard System was released (RMSS). This was then reorganized somewhat, with very few actual rule changes for the fourth version, Rolemaster Fantasy Roleplaying (RMFRP). Lists with cover images of the all the products for the various Rolemaster versions can be found at: In this review, I’ll be covering the version I’m most familiar with, Rolemaster 2nd edition (“RM2”), which lasted from 1984-1994, most of which are pretty easy to find online through eBay or Amazon. This version lives on in the somewhat similar Rolemaster Classic, in the same way that AD&D 1st ed. lives on in Dark Dungeons, only you get to pay I.C.E for a physical copy of the books. --- Now, as with many games and supplements from this period, the concepts of “comprehensible book flow” and “new player friendliness” were some far flung and bizarre ideas that never occurred to anyone working on the game. They all knew how to play it, after all. Thus, the first book you should read in the box, Character Law & Campaign Law, after a brief introduction to what RPGS are, spends 30 some pages boring you to death about the various ways you can die, how long it takes for your character to heal from wounds, poisons that can kill you, diseases you can catch, how moving will tire you out, and what things you can buy. Seriously, check out this table of contents: You’ll notice that we are supposed to learn about skills and gaining experience to level up before we cover how to generate a character. gently caress. That. Unlike many Fatal and Friends reviews, we’re going to tackle RM2 as a whole, focusing mostly on Character Law, Spell Law, Arms and Claw Law, and the 7 Companions, in an attempt to show how the game is actually played, not how a bunch of dudes in the 80s compiled their house rules together. Think William Goldman’s The Princess Bride. This is Rolemaster: the Good Parts version, though we will be certainly be making fun of it a great deal for being a gog-mine of unnecessary awfulness when appropriate, and tearing it a new one where it needs one torn. --- To begin, we’ll start with what they should have started with. Dice Mechanics. Rolemaster is actually not that difficult a game. It is complicated, but it is not difficult. Reading Finnegans Wake is difficult. Understanding Heidegger’s concept of dasein is difficult. Calculating the ever changing weight-to-thrust ratio that will put a satellite into orbit around the Earth via multi-stage rocket is difficult. Doing some long addition, percentages, and cross referencing on charts is merely complex, and gets easier with repetition. The basics of Rolemaster are as follows: roll a d100, add your relevant skill, add or subtract any modifiers, and check against the difficulty to see how well you succeeded or failed. If you roll 96-00 (“open ended”), roll again and add that new roll, and if you rolled another 96-00, do it again, until you roll a 95 or lower. If you rolled a 01-4, roll again and subtract the number from your skill. At its core, no more difficult than d20, eh?. Forum favorite Monte “The Moon” Cook was a big Rolemaster guy in the 90s, before he hit it big, and a lot of his fingerprints are all over this game, as we’ll see when we get into classes. Mostly what you'll be doing with the dice are maneuvers and combat. We'll cover combat in the third part of our review, but let's tackle skills now to show how the die system works. There are two types of skill maneuvers, static or moving. Static are things like picking a lock, remembering the king’s favorite book, hitting on a barmaid, and other things that generally won’t result in you tripping over and killing yourself. Moving maneuvers are everything that can result in you tripping over and killing yourself. To succeed on a static maneuver, you need to roll over 100. The modifiers added or subtracted have to do with the difficulty or ease of the task. For example, a cheap skeleton key lock giving you a +20 to crack it, while a master-crafted Elven puzzle lock that relies on Sindarin puns to open might give your human thief a -70. Unsurprisingly, there is a chart for this, which details common situations for each skill (Difficult locks, good illumination to sneak past, how much damage you’ve taken, etc.) and what penalties to assign. Or you can just make them up on the fly, like a good GM. To succeed on a moving maneuver, you must check our first big chart: Now, I can already hear you crying “HOLY gently caress NO! LOOK AT THAT THING! YUCK!” but I swear it’s not really that bad. Now, how do we set difficulties? See that list of adjectives across the top? The GM will have assigned the maneuver you want to do a difficulty of somewhere between “Routine” (A trained acrobat making a 5’ jump) and “Absurd” (a fat out of shape guy doing ninja moves). The GM decides which one what you’ve just described is, and tells you how difficult is it. You then have the option to try something else, or attempt the action. You then take your roll with all its totals and cross reference it against the difficulty column you were assigned. The number is what percentage you have succeeded by. The above examples with numbers, Pierrot Lunaire, master acrobat and thief, is escaping from the palace with the royal jewels. He wants to leap the chasm between buildings. His jumping skill is a masterful 82. The distance between rooftops is only 10 ft., and he has a running start, and really this sort of thing is old hat for a guy like this, and he’s not being chased by the guards or anything yet (he made his Stalk & Hide rolls earlier), so the GM rules that this is a Routine leap. He rolls a 40, for a total of 122. Checking the chart, he succeeded with 120% success, easily clearing the gap with room to spare and continues his silent disappearance into the night without any trouble. On the other side of town, 300 lbs. Albert von Goonovitz is trying out the skills he learned from the ninja wall climbing YouTube videos he watched earlier to break into Lauren Faust’s house to steal her pony drawings undetected. He has no training in the climb skill, which gives him a penalty of -25, and his Agility stat isn’t very good (only a +5), so Albert is starting off with a base modifier of -20. The GM thinks that an out of shape man with no athletic prowess silently stealing things is Absurdly difficult, and tells the player so, but Albert’s need for original pony art will not be undeterred, so he tosses his hook and begins his ascent. He rolls the dice, and gets a 96! He rolls again, and gets a 42. Subtracting the -20 he has for being an unskilled, overweight klutz, Albert has a 122, the result the Pierrot had when he was stealing the jewels in our last example. Surely our corpulent cat burglar will have his ponies tonight! But wait, the GM ruled that this was an absurd maneuver. Checking the 122 against the “Absurd” column, we find that Albert has only succeeded at 30% of his maneuver. The GM rules that he gets about 1/3 of the way up the rope before his huffing and puffing awaken Ms. Faust and the loud racking of her shotgun means that combat will surely begin soon. One of the nice things about the system is that there’s always a chance you’ll succeed, small as it may be. The odds of rolling a triple or quadruple open ended are really really slim, but I’ve seen it happen. --- Next Time: Monte’s Dream, or many of the character classes are either traps or designed for anal retentive GMs who need to extensively stat out every NPC for some reason. What I need from you: Two stock fantasy characters. We’re going to make two different characters to show how the character creation system works, and how easy it is to fall into traps and make a completely unplayable one if you’re not careful. We can make pretty much anything, provided it falls onto the usual Human-Elf-Dwarf-Hobbit-Half-Orc spectrum of races, so beyond that don’t be afraid to suggest something crazy. I'm sure with a little poking around online you can find a list of the various professions available in RM2, if that's your thing. Rolemaster is dangerous in its flexibility. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 09:01 on Nov 21, 2013 |
# ¿ Nov 21, 2013 08:44 |
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Siivola posted:Hold up. So in Rolemaster, you get a bonus to your roll for being awesome at a thing, and because you're awesome at a thing, it follows that the difficulty of the roll is low? Sort of. This depends very much on the quality of your GM. If you've got a good GM, the sort who can take into account who your character is and what they are capable of with their skill set and history, then applying that sliding scale of adjectives to how difficult it would be to seeing that character doing that activity, then yes, you are essentially getting a bonus for being good at the skill. This helps a great deal in the lower levels, where, as you'll see in the next day or so when we do character creation, it's actually pretty hard to get your skill numbers up into the 60+ range unless you've rolled really high stats, which is why the light and easy maneuvers start to give you 100% success on rolls of 65-70. At level 1, you're basically a glorified poo poo farmer, so most of your static actions are going to prove impossible until you've got some expierence under your belt. If you've got Jason "Spent a part of the morning tying my mouse to my hand by the cord and figuring out how tricky it was to get the thing back in my hand. Its not impossible.. but its not a swift action." Bulmahn for a GM, you're never going to see the Routine-Light side of that chart, and you should probably find a new GM.
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# ¿ Nov 21, 2013 16:13 |
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Part 2 - Character Creation, Part One: “Yesterday They Were Businessmen. Today They’re Cowboys. Tomorrow They’ll be Walking Funny.” Character creation is an involved process, with more than a couple charts. It is harder than AD&D or 4e, but a bit simpler than Champions or GURPS, straddling about the midpoint between GURPS and 4e for me personally. First up, appropriate music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl1rroJOZzw Yeah, alright. Now that’s some Tolkien inspired German power metal to do math to, alright. We start with the 10 different Character Developmental Statistics (“stats”): Constitution - affects your starting Agility - affects ranged combat, maneuvering in armor, contributes to melee combat, and other movement based skills. Self-Discipline - affects meditating, being a zen master, avoiding temptation, and sneaking. Memory - affects memory based skills and learning. Reasoning - affects wisdom and thinking based skills. These five stats each contribute to your Development Points (“DPs”) pool. You will spend these points to buy skills, which cover everything from swinging your sword, having hit dice, casting spells, and wearing armor, to knowing who the king’s long lost brother was or identifying different types of trees from very far away. Strength - affects melee combat, your carrying capacity, and skills like climbing, playing sports, doing martial arts. Quickness - affects your movement rate, gives you your innate defense bonus, and contributes to a couple skills that involve running. Presence - affects your spell casting if you are a Mentalism (“Psionics”) realm caster, your skills having to do with charisma and social interaction like acting or lying, and gives you a bonus or penalty to resistance rolls against mentalism spells. Intuition - affects your spell casting if you are a Channeling (“Divine”) realm caster, your skills involving knowing things before they happen, like perception, dowsing for water, and divination, and gives you a bonus or penalty to resistance rolls against channeling spells. Empathy - affects your spell casting if you are an Essence (“Arcane”) realm caste, your skills involving relating to other people or animals, like anthropology or animal husbandry, and gives you a bonus or penalty to resistance rolls against essence spells. There’s also the super special optional stat Appearance, which doesn’t really do anything outside of roleplaying. A buddy of mine played a caster specializing in fire magic with an appearance of 01. We quickly nicknamed him Handsome Jack. Unlike in D&D, there are no obvious dump stats. You can get away with a dumb fighter or a weak caster, but between the amount of gear you want to carry, the poo poo you need to know to survive, and the bonuses you’re going to want against spell casting, you can’t safely tank any of the stats. In terms of priority, the stats that affect how many DPs you get are a bit more important, because dumping them mean that your character will get fewer skills overall, but if drop the others you’ll leave yourself either completely vulnerable to one of the three schools of magic, always go last and get hit easily, or be unable hit things and carry back any treasure from the dungeons. Unfortunately, this isn’t a perfect world, and you are at the mercy of the dice to determine the numbers you get to assign. Without cheating or really good luck, there is no way to make a character that doesn’t have some hole or gap you’ll really want to fill. Such is life. To generate the rolls, we’re going to be generous. Our house rules are as follows: roll 3 sets of 10 stats, rerolling any number under 40, chose the best set, and arrange as you chose. The book wants you to just roll once, rerolling any under 20s, and assign as you like, but we’re big enough children to understand that we want to play fun characters, our verisimilitude won’t be destroyed if Conan, Aragorn, Merlin, and Hercules are all at the same table together, and besides, the original stats chart is kind of a hosed up bell-curve so it doesn’t hurt to aim yourself towards the 90s with those rerolls. Here’s what the better stat bonus chart looks like: This is the smoothed stat curve from RMC1, which evens out the bonuses a little bit. The original formula from Character Law for calculating the bonuses is “Stat - 50/2 rounded down”, which means that over half the numbers (25-74) give a bonus of +0, which really kinda stinks. There are ways to deal with that, though, and a low roll on the initial set of states doesn’t necessarily doom your character forever. We’ll talk about that in a moment. code:
The most important thing you will learn when making a character is that You Will NEVER have enough Development Points to do everything you want to. Anyways, lets look at our rolls again. The numbers we rolled are our temporary stats, and they represent how our character is right now. After we stick them into our attributes, we’ll roll on the Stat Potentials Table to see what the maximum possible stats are for our character. This means that every stat will have a temporary value, the one you’re using to calculate your skills right now, and a potential value, which is the maximum it can go without special help. Each time you go up a level, you’ll go down the line on your skills, rolling on the Stat Gain Table and cross referencing the difference between your temporary and your potential values to your die roll to see how much your stat went up by. If you rolled a 01-04, the temporary values instead goes down by the number that you rolled. Some monsters and poisons and stuff can also reduce your temporary stats, but when you gain another level, you’ve got a chance of them going back up towards their full potential. The potentials table is geared towards making it much easier for character with low numbers to grow into high ones, and characters with high starting stats to just stay that way, so starting with a series of low rolls doesn’t necessarily mean you’re completely boned. There’s also a skill you can buy to raise your stats, but it’s pretty expensive, so we’ll save that for when we cover leveling up. --- To show off how the rest of character creation works, we’re going to build some sample characters, which will probably take the next post or two. And you know what, gently caress it, I know I said two, but we’re making four characters, and mashing up some of your suggestions to really show y’all what the system does. The first will be the most involved, going through every step of the process in full detail, with the next three touching on bits like spell casting realms, trap options, bad professions, etc. Zereth posted:Make as Invincible an Invincible Sword Princess as you can in Rolemaster. Siivola posted:A human Ser Diana of Steece, the Hyena of the Battlefield, is level 1 high-man Cavalier. We want her to be able to bash things with an axe, slay dragons, raid dungeons, ride a horse, know the history of her people, and seduce handsome bartenders. Let’s lay out her stats. Being a warrior type, we want Diana to be strong and tough, but because of how we’re picturing the character we want to play, not stupid or uncharismatic. code:
Now, you may have noticed that I stuck the 42, our lowest roll, in Constitution. Isn’t Co terribly important for a warrior type? Yes, definitely, and I’ll explain why we did this in a moment. For a race, since she’s a noble woman, we’ll make her a high-man. Racial modifiers are a little bit different than in most games. Rather than providing a raw +2/-2 to a pair of stats, they instead provide a series of bonuses and penalties to the stat bonuses, not to the temporary or potential stats themselves. Being a high-man gives Diana a +10 to her St, Co, and Pr, and -5 to her Qu and Ag. Looking at the race chart, she’ll be using a d10 for hit dice, will have a maximum of 150 hit points, will start knowing 3 languages, and will get 4 background rolls. Now that we have our stats laid out, we’ll chose a Starting with Companion 1, they stopped putting professions into one big unwieldy chart, and started putting them into a nice box, with some references to the old charts. With companion 2, it got a even easier, because the boxes stopped being 90% “Look at the master development point chart”. Unfortunately, they never went back and put the old original classes into nice boxes like this, so if you want to play a straight fighter or magician or cleric, you’re stuck using the big chart. C’est la vie. Each profession has a pair of stats as their Prime Requisites. These are the two most important stats for the profession, and if the player chooses, they may replace whatever die roll they put into the stat with a 90. This is nice because it means that, no matter how badly you tank your die rolls, you can stick your two worst rolls into your Prime Requisites and be alright at your chosen profession. Now, because we rolled pretty good, and because we’re going to be doing a lot of killing, we’re going to want our warrior princess to have that 99 in St. But a 90 in Co is just fine since we’re going to be wearing pretty heavy armor to help soak up hits. So we can scratch off that 42 and replace it with a 90. Character Sheet Check: code:
Each rank in a skill give you a +5 bonus, for the first 10 ranks, then each one give you a +2, until you hit 20 ranks, then it’s a +1 until you hit 30 ranks, and then it’s +1/2 ranks forever. Warrior professions, like the cavalier here, have a slight difference in that their combat skills go +5/+4/+2/+1, to represent just how much better they are in combat than other professions. Unlike many other games, there is no such thing as a “class only” skill, merely skill that cost an awful lot more or less development points depending on what profession you are. You may have noticed that, even though she's a warrior, Diana could take “Spell List Acquisition” as a skill and learn to cast some spells, but it would cost her a hefty 20 DPs for one rank. As we only have 36 DPs to spend per level right now, we’ll leave that trap option alone for the moment. That’s one to use when you’ve reached higher levels and your options are “spend points to get an extra +0.5 to add to my already +300 basket weaving skill” or “learn some of a spell list”. It’s not for new characters like us. That is, of course, different for spell casters, whose SPA skill costs them 1*, or semi-spell casters, who are 4*. The difference between 20 and 1* is a yawning chasm. Before we spend any DPs, we should roll on the Backgrounds chart to see what bonuses we get. Each race gets a number of rolls on the charts to balance out how big their bonuses are. The mixed men and dark tribes get a lot, because their stat bonuses aren’t super great, while the half-elves and high elves get very few because their bonuses are awesome. As a High-man, Diana is entitled to 4 rolls, which is middle of the road. There are two different charts, found in Companion 1, and mostly they provide additional stat bonuses. 1-10 are penalties. 11-40 are fun background buffs. 41-00 are stat buffs. There are a bunch of other charts throughout the various companions that will allow you to start with magic items, or a bunch of trade off kinda buffs “You are farsighted, giving you a bonus to ranged combat, but take a penalty to learning to read and write”, but I like these two charts best. Rolling 4 times on the “Skill at Arms” table (the “Skill at Magic” one wouldn’t do us much good as a non-caster), we receive the following bonuses: 37. “Eye of the Tiger” - The PC can prepare the Adrenal Strength maneuver with a slightly modified difficulty to gain a bonus to attacks and defenses next round (paraphrasing here because the specifics don’t matter right now, as we can't really use this until we've gained a couple levels). 44. +15 Ag 17. Natural Faculty With Armor - All armor development costs are cut in half. 98 +20 St. This is a pretty sweet set of bonuses. Ag and St are the lifeblood of most Fighter types, the 1/2 cost armor skills is going to save us a ton of DPs, and the ability to charge up our attacks with a skill check could be good once we get enough ranks to activate it well. Next, we’ll total up our development points, and spend them on skills. Totaling up our development point granting skills, we come to a total of 35.6, which rounds up to 36. At level 1, to represent the slog from adolescence to adulthood, we are actually supposed to start by building a level 0 character, then leveling them up to level 1. What this means in practice is that you get double the DPs at level 1, and can buy two ranks of any skill you like before paying extra. Any GM weird enough to do the math required to say “Hey, you spent this set of numbers incorrectly, therefore you didn’t do your level 0 correctly!” is probably not a person you want to play with. Because Diana is a fighter type, weaponry is going to be her most important consideration. Looking at the big box, we see that weapon skills is followed by 6 numbers. We get to assign these numbers to the 6 weapon categories that Rolemaster has: 1-handed slashing, 1-handed crushing, 2-handed, polearms, bows, and thrown. Once we’ve assigned costs to the broad categories, we’ll then buy ranks in the weapons. Diana here likes axes, so we’ll put her 1/5 in 1-handed slashing, and spend 2 DPs to buy 2 ranks in it. To calculate what her skill in Axes is, we’ll take the stats that 1-handed slashing runs off of (the average of her st/st/ag is 45), add that to her skill bonus (2 ranks is a +10), but there’s one more thing to take into account. If you look down at the bottom of the big box, you’ll notice a section marked Level Bonuses. Each skill is divided into a certain category, and you get a bonus to certain categories each level just for being in the class. Diana gets an additional +3 to arms law combat for being a cavalier. 45 + 10 + 3 = 58. For a level 1 character, she can kill things with axes really well. Now, if we wanted to, we could sink another 5 or 10 points into her Axe skill and have her be even deadlier, but we still have a lot of other things we need to buy. One of the nice things about the Rolemaster system is that the things you want your character to do (your fighter to swing swords, your cleric to cast spells, etc.), they get to do at a pretty severe discount, so you’ve got points left over to do other things. Next up on the list is hit dice, which Rolemaster calls “Body Development”. Being a fighter type, Diana should expect to get hit, and take damage, and she’ll need concussion hits to soak that up. Because she’s tough, she can buy them at 1/4. For comparison, a paladin pays 2/5 for his body development, and a magician 8. We’ll buy 2 hit dice, which gives us 2 d10 to add to our base HP, and the bonus +3 we get from the cavalier level bonuses. After that comes armor. In Rolemaster, anyone who wants to can wear a suit of armor, and said armors are divided up into 20 categories. Each of these has a description and a set of penalties associated with it, which we’ll go into in greater detail when we get into combat. Right now though we’re just going to look at the chart: When you wear a suit of armor, the maximum maneuver penalty is applied to all of your movement maneuvers. This is to represent how difficult it is to jump around in a suit of heavy armor without practice. As we all know, historical knights trained night and day in their armor, and were able to do cartwheels and leap onto their horses from the ground in full plate. Just because Jason Bulmahn can't do it with a couple hours practice doesn't mean it's impossible. To represent this, there are a series of skills, Maneuver in (type) Armor, that reduce these penalties for each rank we purchase in them. 17-20 are the heavy armors, your steel breastplates and plate mails, and since Diana is a knight in shining armor, that’s the range we’re looking at. This category falls under the skill “Maneuver in Plate Armor,” and ordinarily she would need to pay 2 DPs for each rank in the skill she bought. But because we rolled that cool background, we get to cut that number in half and only pay 1. Time for a little calculation: At 1st level, we probably can’t afford a full set of plate of half-plate, but the AT 18, a steel breast plate with greves is well within our budget. The maximum penalty for AT 18 is 110, which is basically an auto fail for any maneuver, so we definitely want to buy that down. The minimum is 20, to represent that wearing an extra 20 lbs of metal on your body is going to affect your poise and grace a bit, and we don’t want to overshoot it and spend too much. That’s a difference of 90, which is 18 skill ranks. But before we drop in 18 DPs, let’s double check our stats. Maneuver in Plate is an Ag based skill, and a combat skill, so we start out with a pretty good bonus even if we just put one point in (untrained skills are at a -25, so our untrained base of 7 (29 ag + 3 level bonus - 25 untrained) jumps to a 37 with just 1 rank). Do a little math, and we’ll find that 12 ranks hits 90 right on the nose, putting us exactly at the minimum penalty for AT 18 (110 - 20 = 90). We’ve spent 16 of our 72 DPs so far, and we’ve already got kill things, wearing armor, and not dying covered. What else should we be able to do? It’d be nice to have some ranged capabilities, so we’ll assign our 2nd weapon category to “bows” and put 2 ranks into Crossbow, which we can use without worrying about the missile attack penalty from armor. This costs 4 points. We’ll also buy two ranks in Brawling, in case we’re ever caught without an axe handy. This makes more sense than martial arts, because she’s not a kung-fu princess or something, and also lets us fight with broken bottles, chair legs, shoes, and other Corwin of Amber type poo poo. Brawling isn’t listed in the Big Box, so we need to look it up on the Master Development Point Chart, which is a pain in the rear end, but we find that it costs 3/7. Six points well spent. 26 of 72, and we’re done with combat. We haven’t even spent half our points, and unless we really want to sperg out and also make her a sword mistress and poleaxe pundit, we’re ready to buy other things. Because she’s a big brawny athletic girl, Diana is going to be good at swimming, jumping, tumbling, and acrobatics, and it’s worth it to buy at least a single rank in those skills to offset the -25 penalty for having the skill untrained. This costs us 9 points total. She wouldn’t be much of a cavalier if she couldn't ride a horse, so we’ll of course buy 2 ranks in riding, and 2 in animal handling. These cost both cost 2 a rank, so we’ve spent another 4 DPs here. Cavaliers get Lore skills as a pretty good discount, 1/5, so we’ll pick up a rank each in Demon Lore, Dragon Lore, Demon Lore, Fauna Lore, Herb Lore, and Undead Lore. 6 points total, and we’ll be able to tell one monster apart from another. We aren’t amazing at any of them, only a +9, but that’s much better than the -24 we had before, and having ranks in the skill gives the GM justification to adjust the difficulty downwards towards light and routine on our maneuvers. We’ll then learn a little about the history of our people (Racial History: High-men), Military Organization, and Leadership, all of which are things any warrior princess should know, and which cost 3, 1, and 1 respectively. 49 points spent, 23 left. Because we want to survive our adventures, we’ll buy 2 each ranks of General Perception, Sense Ambush, Body Damage Stabilization (one of those system mastery picks, which allows your character to put themselves into a kung-fu master coma if they take too much damage and stay alive while waiting for medical attention), and Detect Traps. That’s 10 points spent. Because I’ve got a bit more system mastery in me, I know to buy ranks in Stunned Maneuvering, which allows you to overcome one of the most common conditions in combat, so we’ll spend another 4 points to get 2 ranks of that. 9 Left. Because she’s not just some shallow combat monkey, we’ll buy 2 ranks in Music, allowing her to compose symphonies with a rather skillful +40, and a rank in Streetwise so she can fence the magical goods that her adventuring party keeps being back up from the dungeons. We’ll roll our 2d10 for gold, spend it on equipment, and we’re good to go. code:
Because of the way the skills are calculated, it can be a bit of a pain to do them on the fly. You have to do the average of the skills, plus any applicable level bonuses, then the subtraction for the untrained penalty. What these huge character sheet guys are doing is printing out every skill in the game, with their character’s current modifiers already calculated. My present GM has put together a pretty nice Excel sheet that comes to about 9 pages long when printed, and does contain all the skills calculated properly. It does save a lot of time not needing to do the math for each skill, but sometimes seems like a waste of paper and ink when 90% of the skills will never, ever see use in a game. A roll on the height/weight chart tells us that she stands 5’9”, with a heavy build, and therefore weighs 190 lbs. It's all muscle, though, so don't go calling Shine and the YLLS crew. Punching numbers into the encumbrance algorithm, we find that Diana has a weight allowance of 19, which is 10% of her own weight, and because her St bonus is +53, she can carry up to 8x that without any penalties. Our girl can lug around 152 lbs. of treasure without breaking a sweat, and is operating at only a -17 to maneuvers when lugging around her full body weight. She’s a loving brick. A Qu of 62 means she can move 55’ a round, which is dead center average. Now, after all this, we reach something that sounds like a neat idea on paper, but is actually kinda dumb in practice. The game wants you to “pre-level-up” to level 2, spending all your DPs in advance, but not changing the numbers yet, to represent the things that your character is working on in the period between this level and the next. It’s a cool idea, I’ll grant, and kinda realistic in that it prevents the guy who just found the spellbook and levels up from saying that he’s read it and is now buying ranks in Spell List Acquisition immediately. Unfortunately, in practice, it’s a lot of unnecessary bookkeeping and no one at my table really cares enough to take the game that seriously. So we’ll skip this step and roll for hit points instead. We’ll roll out 2d10 for hit points, add that to our base hit points of 12 ( 1/10 of your Co, so 9, + her body development level bonus of +3). I rolled a 4 and a 6, so she starts with 23 hp. We’ll then spend our gold on a battle axe, some AT 18 armor, a full shield, some healing herbs and beef jerky rations, a sack to put treasure in, and a riding corgi to head into battle upon. Next Time, Casters and Traps, they aren’t always the same thing! Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 11:28 on Nov 22, 2013 |
# ¿ Nov 22, 2013 11:12 |
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Zereth posted:Not some shallow combat monkey? What the hell do you think an Invincible Sword Princess IS? We'll have to wait until we reach the Combat portion of this series for me to show y'all how this will play out, and then when we can talk about how changing professions works to see how dangerous we can really make a character. Right now, though, we're about as dangerous and tanky as level one character can get without cheating and claiming we rolled 10 100s. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Nov 22, 2013 |
# ¿ Nov 22, 2013 17:56 |
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Part 3: How the hell do you make a character, part 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold Last time we went through all the steps involved with making a character. It was an involved process, what with all the different formulas and tables that went into calculating how your skill modifiers were determined and the differences between temporary and potential stats, but what we left out was a major aspect of all fantasy gaming: Magic. Spell Casters are divided into three broad categories in Rolemaster: Pure, Hybrid, and Semi. There are three realms of magic in Rolemaster: Essence, which is your arcane spelling slinging magician type magic, Channeling, which is your divine undead turning type magic, and Mentalism, which is your psionic brain exploding type magic. Spell casting is run off of a Power Point (PPs) system. Each Realm keys off of a Stat, which in turn gives you a number of PPs per level. There are magical items which will multiply the number of PPs you get, as well as items known as “Spell Adders,” which give you a number of free spell castings, regardless of cost, X number of times per day. A Pure spellcaster will specialize in one and only one realm. A Hybrid spellcaster will mash-up two realms, with some DP cost penalties for this lack of specialization. A Semi spellcaster will mash-up any one realm with the realm of Arms (non-casters), providing your professions which are adept at both fighting and spell casting, like Rangers and Paladins. Casters get their spells by taking a skill called “Spell List Acquisition,” which they get at a supreme discount when compared to non-spell casting classes (remember that there are no “class exclusive” skill in Rolemaster; anyone can take any skill they want). For Pure and Hybrid casters, this skill will cost 1*, and for Semis it costs 4*. According to the rules as written, you are only allowed to take Spell List Acquisition for one spell list at a time, and each time you level up, you make a check, adding you SLA skill ranks to your casting stat bonus, and if your result is higher than 101, you learn the list. If it is less, then you must wait until the next level before trying again. As a house rule, my group always let you work on multiple lists at a time, because really, having to wait until at minimum level 10 before you even got all your base lists seemed needlessly penalizing to an already difficult to play series of classes. Spells are divided into thematic lists, which go from 1-50, and are divided into three different categories (noticing a theme here yet?): Base, Open, and Closed. Base lists are class specialities, the things that a particular class does best and can only be learned with great difficulty by other classes. Open lists are the easiest tricks of that particular realm, and anyone can learn them. Closed lists are the more difficult spells that, while any pure caster can learn them without trouble, others will have some trouble. Each spell costs a number of power points equal to its level to cast. Spell Law boasts that it contains over 2000 spells, which, well, you already know if you're the target audience for that kind of thing or not. The lists are very specific, with separate lists for healing bones, muscles, organs, and building magic prosthetic limbs, separate lists for each element, and even a set of evil lists for the vile versions of the Magician, Cleric, and Mentalist. How evil, you may ask? Specifically evil! To cast a spell, the caster first determines which class the spell will fall into. As you can see, it takes a long time to cast a spell, and you need to get to a pretty high level before you can start tossing off spells. Even then, it still takes a full round for the spell to go off, giving everyone else in combat a chance to tag you and interrupt your casting. The noted exception, instant spells, are almost always defensive spells like Deflection, Aim Untrue and Bladeturn, or movement based spells like Leaping or Balance. None of them are attack spells. Aim Untrue, arguably the most important spell in the game, makes any one ranged attack in the caster’s field of vision automatically miss. I like to imagine the verbal component goes “Nuh uh.” Let’s take a look at a sample spell list to see how well this is going to work out. We’ll look at one of the Magician’s base lists, as the Magician is the most basic of the casters and considered a pretty flexible combatant: As you can see, he begins the game being able to spend three rounds boiling water, and can advance to the more useful heating of swords and lighting of buildings on fire. He doesn’t get a fireball spell until level 6, and even then, it will take three full rounds of combat before it goes off, giving the fighters and rogues ample time to clear the battlefield. In the interests of full disclosure, the Magician does get a small lightning bolt spell at level 2 if they learn the list “Light Law,” but until they reach level 5, again, it’s taking 3 rounds to get off, and then it’s 2 until they hit 8. There are also number of casting classes that don’t have any combat capabilities at all. The Astrologer, for example, does a lot of long range scrying, telling fortunes, and detection. The Alchemist can create items and imbed spells. They seem like they could be neat, and in a pinch you could always rely on the somewhat combat oriented lists in the closed and open lists, like Spirit mastery, or just hang back and take pot shots with a crossbow. But wait, I can hear you saying, why is that a bad thing? Delayed gratification and creative thinking should be the highlight of the role playing experience, shouldn’t they? To explain that, we’ll need to briefly touch on XP, which I wasn’t going to go into in depth until part 5. But for now, you only need to know two things: 1, the majority of XP comes from killing things, and 2, only the person who kills the thing gets XP for the kill. This simple oversight manages to invalidate the majority of the interesting non-combat oriented classes, because they’ll never advance at the same rate as the killing PCs. They are, quite frankly, a Trap. (In the interests of full disclosure, this isn’t the Moon’s fault. He didn’t sign on with the Rolemaster crew until 1989, working on Creatures and Treasures II, and the Rolemaster Companions 4-7. The problem existed before he was there, but it plays out just like in his famous essay on Ivory Tower game design. Since you can take these caster’s base lists as another profession if you can find their tomes at a cost of 3* on a pure caster (a common house rule which is actually presented in Spell Law itself), there’s no reason to ever actually play one.) So, let’s make some casters! I’m not going to go through the process in depth like we did with Diana, merely going to present the characters with notes on how and why I’d build them the way I did. AmiYumi posted:Hipster Elf Scholar, who was into everything you like before you were even born Dr. Romelle Dregolas, MA, PhD, M.D., DDS, FRAS, FGAR, is a highly trained elven scholar, who knows everything there is to know about everything. Certainly more than you, anyways. He is a level 1 High Elf Sage. The Scholar class from RMC2 is a neat idea, a non-combat oriented class that gets all the academic skills at a pretty good discount. Unfortunately, it is 100% overshadowed by the Sage, a mentalism caster from that exact same book, which has almost 1-for-1 costs on its skills as well as a host of spell lists that help it magically identify and know things. The reduced Rogue skills that the scholar gets will be overshadowed by the invisibility and telekinetic spells that the Sage will be able to pick up. In the end, though, neither will end up being a great idea. We'll understand why later. I imagine the sword is bloody from the Sage stabbing the Scholar in the back and stealing his role in the game His spells allow him to store any scene he is in for recreation with a spell 5 levels later in the list, which will be useful if he is ever needs to recreate the scene of a crime or even if he just wants to spruce up his camping tent, read texts in any language, but only get the basic jist of them, gain a permanent +20 to his RE bonus, and learn anything he reads or sees as if he had a photographic memory. This will be great if there is any mystery or exploration aspect to the game, but could also end up being completely useless if its a more hack n’ slash game. He can also talk in a hypnotic, droning manner that soothes all the listeners into a passive calm, which will be good for keeping him safe if he doesn't run into anyone with good mental defenses. Just in case, though, he paid his 8 DPs for a single rank in longbow, as what Elf in his right mind doesn’t know his way around one? Dr. Dregolas will be the smartest character at the table, in any case. Plague of Hats posted:It's unfair since I know what's up, but I really want you to make a Gilbo Saggins, general lay about and farmer’s son, stumbled onto the wizard’s spellbook at the county fair one day, and whether through luck or coincidence, knocked all the milk jugs over with the wooden ball enough times to take home his prize. With a few months of study, he mastered the rudiments of the magickal arts, and is now a level 1 Halfling Farmer. The farmer class is a variant on the fighter that gets some pretty boss discounts on agricultural skills in exchange for some of its fighting prowess and ease at wearing armor. It pays 20 DPs per rank of Spell List Acquisition. Non-casters can learn the Open spell lists of any one realm from 1-5, and no further. Looking at Mr. Saggins essence casting stat, Empathy, we find that he has a 91, which is pretty high (+11 bonus). He buys a rank in one of the spell lists from his book, which costs about 1/3rd of his total DPs at character creation, and gives him a +5 to his SLA roll. Hobbits get a -5 to EM, so his EM bonus is currently a 6. Adding the 5 from his skill rank, he has a total of 11. He’d need to roll a 90 on a d100 to acquire the first 5 spells on the list. When compared to Dr. Dregolas up there, who had a 99 in his PR (the mentalism casting stat), which is a +23 bonus, an extra +10 from being a high elf, and a +15 from the 3 ranks he was able to easily afford as his SLA only costs him 1 DP per rank, at each level the good Doctor has to roll a 53 or more to get the list he has put points into, a much better chance at a much cheaper cost. With a chances at level 0 and level 1 during creation, Romelle easily gets 6 of his 10 base lists, a little more than half, while Gilbo ends up not hitting either of his 10% shots. Comrade Koba posted:Runebeard the Resplendent, dwarf master wizard. wdarkk posted:Make a dude who summons monsters to fight for him because gently caress getting his hands dirty. That poo poo is beneath him. Corpulent Conjurer Dupree Duquesne, of the Resplendent Runebeards, dreamed of the day when his demonic devotees and elemental allies would wait on him hand and foot, fulfilling his every request and tearing those who oppose him to shreds. No more toiling in the mines like his father, and his father before him! That poo poo is tiring! He is a level 1 dwarf conjurer. Unfortunately, it’ll be a while before he can actually summon more than his cat familiar and the demonic raven that it constantly tries to eat. He can spend a minute drawing 1 foot radius magical circles of power on the ground which will cause anyone crossing into them to fall asleep or will keep animals away, which will be great for protecting the party at night if they can find a room with a narrow doorway, and which will be much more useful once he gains a few more levels and can expand that radius (it grows up to 1’ per level, but takes 1 minute per foot to draw). He can also identify any spirit he comes into contact with, but cannot do anything to it yet. If he can get to level 2, he can start summoning animals, and monsters and demons as he gets higher and higher. Until then, he’ll have to rely on his dwarven crossbow to take things out, because unfortunately, cats aren't nearly as lethal to commoners as they are in D&D. Xelkelvos posted:An Orcish jester/clown, trained to beguile or bemuse his opponents while entertaining, invigorating and sometimes enraging his allies Humbug Scoolbus posted:A Half-Orc Barmaid Warrior Monk that was raised by Hobbits on a fishing boat. Scribda the Unweidly is a Half-Orc monk, a semi spell caster of the realm of essence, mistress of the martial arts and fisherwoman extraordinate. Though she dresses like an oversized hobbit and acts like a country fishwife, her demeanor changes the moment she enters combat, the rolling gait suddenly an unhittable bob and weave, the bumbling shuffle a blindingly fast dash, the arms which spin to keep her balance slamming like a hammer driving stakes. All her spell lists have to do with movement, dodging and jumping, supernatural senses, or self-healing. She can leap 10’ into the air to swing from chandeliers and branches, hear things twice as well as a normal half-orc, add 50 to any roll involving balance, stop herself from bleeding by concentrating and standing still, and leap either 50’ horizontally or 20’ vertically instantly. She also takes ranks in martial arts, which gives her access to a special set of critical charts that we will cover in the next section on combat. Next Time: Combat! or, Yes, that picture with the pile of hacked off limbs is pretty accurate... Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 07:42 on Nov 27, 2013 |
# ¿ Nov 27, 2013 07:22 |
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ibntumart posted:I'm pretty sure Cook is thinking of Zulfikar (also more accurately transliterated as Dhu 'l-Fiqar), a sword famous in Islamic tradition as belonging to 'Ali. The name means "bifurcated" and is usually depicted as a sword that starts as one blade and winds up with two blades (often curved outward) at the end. Pretty cool looking sword. Would be much easier to describe as "A scimitar with a forked end" though.
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# ¿ Dec 11, 2013 22:23 |
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# ¿ Mar 19, 2024 13:13 |
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Libertad! posted:Calling all board Hindus, we've got 3.X stats for Parvati! Did T. Catt thoroughly butcher her, or was his interpretation mostly accurate (I’m putting my money on the former). Close but no cigar. Not a practicing Hindu here, but I dig comparative religion and have read a bit on the subject. Full cop that I may have made an error or two in the specifics, though. Catt nailed the glance-thought-Wikipedia summary points (wife of Shiva, mother of Ganashea, etc.), and the devotions are pretty good if we're taking into account Parvati's other incarnations (the Rage is for Kali, I'm guessing), but very idea of Parvati associating with anything like a free love cult is about as absurd as Jesus palling around with a group of pantheists. She's a loving spouse and devoted mother, and the idea of cheating on her husband or being in an open relationship wouldn't even occur to her. Replace the Carnal domain with, I dunno, Family? Healing? Knowledge? Destruction to represent her Kali incarnation? Meditation would certainly belong on any god of the Hindu pantheon... Anything but Carnal and you're much closer to the holy mother and wife that Parvati is. Her alignment would shift wildly depending on incarnation, also, but I'd peg Parvati as closer to Neutral Good. Kukri isn't great for a favored weapon; it should probably be a trident or scimitar, or, as a bit of a stretch, a mace whose head is flattened and polished to shine like a mirror. The whole "Gods who are multiple Gods" thing doesn't translate into D&D well at all, so how you would handle the shift to other incarnations of the divinity, some of which are kind of at odds with their selves is anyone's guess. For example, in her Kali incarnation, her domains would be something like Destruction, War, Gluttony, Death, and Time. And with Kali's central importance to Tantric yoga, you'd have a much more compelling argument for the sexual angle, even if that's a pretty minor aspect in the legit practice blown way out of proportion here in the West, but even then it's not the free for all love whomever that it's made out to be. But overall a rather puzzling choice for a sex goddess from the Indian pantheon, with some odd choices in the adaptation that make her seem not quite authentic. There are many better choices. Some effort was put in, but not quite enough to really "get" the goddess. Mechanical adaptation fits the vision, but that huge glaring error early on taints the work something fierce. Overall D+/C- work. Toph Bei Fong fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Dec 24, 2013 |
# ¿ Dec 24, 2013 08:35 |