Alien Rope Burn posted:

Hello! I'm Alien Rope Burn, and my first post for SA was a FATAL & Friends writeup, and

PurpleXVI posted:

The Technocracy books are largely pretty alright, the Void Engineer one in particular is quite solid. It's just that it's already an extremely schizophrenic game. On the one hand the technocrats are evil... on the other hand they make medicine, computers and microwave ovens work. On the one hand the technocrats have to be playable... on the other hand the Technocracy itself has to be irredeemably corrupt so the Tradition books aren't wrong. And so on. Ultimately their solution was to go "The Technocracy itself is utterly evil and 99% of the people involved are bad, even when their technology is doing good things, it was developed with immoral means. So you can either play a villain or you can be the lone voice of logic while most of the Technocracy is either subsumed by outside entities(PS they basically fund Pentex for ?????? reasons) or their own madness."

It honestly feels like the whole thing would've worked better if there was no word-of-god on who was the good guys and the whole thing was just filled full of unreliable narrators like the oVamp clanbooks were, so people could make up their own minds and grab the plot hooks they liked the most.

Kurieg posted:

1st edition Glasswalkers were basically the italian mafia because technology was bad and they still hadn't figured out that giving the Vampire Factions fur coats wasn't the way to differentiate themselves. It wasn't until 2nd ed and the GW Tribebook where they actually started to put some credence to the whole "Use the weavers tools against her" thing and technofetishes showed up.

Remember Rage Across Australia has that bit where the White Man is being divinely punished for planting Cereal Grains rather than subsisting at a hunter/gatherer level.

Cythereal posted:

And yet, isn't the point of the Traditions that if they won, you'd need leeching or prayer in some specific way or the like to recover from illness or injury? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

Cythereal posted:

To me, it also screams of the overly romantic views of low-technology (generally vaguely medieval - see most fantasy settings) life that started to become influential after WW1. Maybe not so much Luddites as a group like the Amish or Mennonites. A lot of the loudest voices clamoring for a "return to rural simplicity" and the like have never been without civilization's comforts, or realized just how much work and stress and hardship go into low-technological life.

That Old Tree posted:

If I recall correctly, cWoD was adamantly "Hitler was just human omg man's inhumanity to man!" Nephandi and Wyrm werewolves and racist regular werewolves and ultimate mind control Technocrats and whatever were just hangers on all the way to the end…somehow. Which might sound reasonable in light of recent tangents, but considering he's basically the only one who gets that sort of treatment it comes off as cheap edgelord posturing. Like many of oWoD's problems, it could've been solved by just having some goddamn restraint.

grassy gnoll posted:

Seriously though, someone run a Weird WWII game.

Rand Brittain posted:

On another note, people said some things earlier about editing and how RPGs tend to not get it. I'm wondering what the right thread would be for a discussion on editing in RPGs and how to do it right and why most games don't.

Rand Brittain posted:

The thing is, the Guide to the Technocracy also mentions how the Technocracy employs mandatory obedience brainwashing because without it people keep defecting.

The GttT is pro-Technocracy but it's also barely-veiled satire, which people on the internet have been intentionally ignoring them for ten million arguments.

Bieeardo posted:

I'm beginning to think that Brucato's problem is less that he has goofy ideas, but that he presents them as incontrovertible fact with nothing to show how he gets from point A to ~, even while he's busily bloviating elsewhere.

Terrible Opinions posted:

It doesn't explicitly say that, but they're still based on appeals to Romanticism, and just like real life Romanticism leaves many implicit problems floating around unaddressed. Either the Traditions have a solution to the god-king problem that they aren't telling the class or they don't think the wizard god-king s a problem.

Nessus posted:

It seems entirely reasonable to me, and it's not like I feel the various fictional teams of wizards and vampires need to have a rationally considered plan and proposal for the reordering of society for the greater benefit of Joe NPC in order to have a positive or heroic role.

HOWEVER, by making it such an explicit part of the Technocracy's pitch, I think you'd have to have a nod at it, even if that nod is "Yeah, you're full of poo poo, and also running water was invented four thousand years ago. Rather unreasonable of you to act like you've got the patent, don't you think?"

AmiYumi posted:

_{^{*Way to double-up on examples and still manage to gently caress up the rules, jackass. Is making breakfast "Easy" (Diff 4, one success) or "Complete" (diff ??, 3 successes)?}}

Mors Rattus posted:

In fairness to Donald Trump, he also has not murdered people personally.

Tasoth posted:

When you put it this way, Beasts sound like they would have been a really interesting splat for Hunter where you start out as a Hero and eventually breakdown from trying to be a last source of hope in the World of Darkness. Beasts result from a specific set of hunter's gifts that warp the user so badly they become an entity so vile and evil other monsters stop, take note and decide to do something about it. Stick in rules for making Beasts as NPC opponents for the other lines towards the end of the line.

Evil Mastermind posted:

Christ, that reminds me of the time in the last Exalted thread when someone pointed out that using mind-control charms to seduce someone was pretty much rape, and one of the game's writers said something along the lines of "well, it's their fault their willpower wasn't high enough" or something.

Holden Shearer posted:

Without commenting on appropriateness:

Most of this cascade can't actually do anything to you until -after- Hot Dracula Guy seduces you, and I think there's a grand total of one Charm to help him get that ball rolling in the first place. If you thought it was a good idea to sleep with Hot Dracula Guy, yeah, you may find your life getting complicated and unpleasant later.

Daeren posted:

He failed around the time he talked about the playtest game where one of the players was an emotionally abusive Makara who lured people into relationships and abused them until they absorbed the lesson that some relationships are toxic and should be excised from your life. But it was okay, she wasn't a stalker or anything, and didn't stop anyone who tried to leave her, so really, it was on them.

I'm not exaggerating a loving word of that.

As a man who has been in an emotionally abusive relationship before that was so bad I wasn't able to register it as abusive until she dumped me and I had a panic attack when she texted me a few weeks later asking to hang out as friends, that was the precise moment I went from "maybe he's just really screwing up his intended message" to "Even if you give him the benefit of the doubt, whatever his intended message was doesn't matter."

OvermanXAN posted:

I've been considering how to try to fix Beast quite a bit myself while reading this,

Doresh posted:

What a perfect fit for the Beasts. No we just need to isolate these two into their own little sub-setting and forget about them.

SirPhoebos posted:

I forget, what did M20 do?

NutritiousSnack posted:

Beast literally is the dude shouting at Hitler while he goes "wow, I just want to murder all the Jews. Looks like you got to learn buddy"

Count Chocula posted:

I'd feel better about all the Beast hate, justified though it may be, if so many White Wolf fans in this thread didn't have detailed fantasies about playing the Technocracy and Hunter and gruesomely crushing Mages and Changlings with overwhelming technology and state power.

Why don't Werewolves- anti-modern eco-terrorists and gangs with a Klingon/Viking concept of 'honor' and a hair-trigger temper - get the same hate? They're the ones who'd justify all that Technocracy gun-wank.

Hell if you want straw man reactionaries to fight, the guys who'd probably support building a wall around their territory, doing everything to make their territory great again, and who's entire lives are built around hunting trips with friends are probably your best bet.

Bedlamdan posted:

The fact that so many people are willing to buy into Beast as written does show that what is supposedly a demented parody still has some traction with people.

Adnachiel posted:

Night10194 posted:

Also, snake people with no hands? What the hell is with that.

Night10194 posted:

It's simple: Those settings don't ask you to accept that the monsters/gods/whatever need to stay hidden partly because if they don't normal humans will push their poo poo in.

The oWoD was a setting where basically nothing in it had much real reason to stay hidden because humans were so deeply irrelevant.

Hostile V posted:

Little known fact: it is incredibly hard to differentiate a sufficiently motivated Vampire from a loose hamster, ferret, squirrel, pet rat, wild possum, mouse, raccoon or a boa constrictor in a frat house that someone left out overnight. Helpful methods of detection involve checking to see if the creature is capable of speech, likes human blood, dislikes the sun and has thumbs or limbs at all.

Crasical posted:

Shields exist to justify science-fiction sword fights, but they do it in a really lazy way.

That Old Tree posted:

I certainly won't deny that Dune can be pretty obtuse, and that shields rely a little too much on an almost total lack of terrorists existing (though that's a little bit the point), but I don't think it's a really standout example of dumb world-building. It's especially eyebrow-raising to act like Metal Gear has a leg up on it because of the in-universe bullshit that justifies a cyberninja, but if you take a step back it's still all hanging on the most ridiculous premise about nuke-spitting mecha anyway that's only compelling (?) because Kojima is a master of Infowars: the Soap Opera.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Let's not forget Metal Gear Rising wasn't written a half-century ago and has that much more technological knowhow, yet it also has stuff like Monsoon or Armstrong who are essentially magical for all the handwaving they do about science. I never particularly glommed on Dune but it's not like they're genre peers in any sense.

LatwPIAT posted:

I suspect it has to do with the influence of Objectivism on American punk. The punk in Gothic-Punk is not the anarcho-socialist, anarcho-syndicalist, socialist punk of the British punk scene, but those ideas filtered through individualist anarchism and Objectivism into what would become American punk; a cynical and nihilistic rebellion that puts the individual at odds with the an unfair society of sheeple, rather than the working class at odds with the state. It explains why the Gothic-Punk is so contemptuous of the poor and disenfranchised in the WoD, instead of rallying behind them. The poor are insufficiently übermensch, and therefore it is OK to use them as disposable snack.

And who better to sell your pseudo-Randian game to than the well-off white middle class, who've never needed food stamps or food kitchens, and have always had health insurance?

The Sin of Onan posted:

Gilgamesh is good. It is also the only legend I know of to feature a man throwing a bull's arse at a goddess. But Mesopotamian myth is weird in general (see also; the myth where Inanna is so proud of either her sheepfold or her vulva - the words are the same in Sumerian - that she decides to show it to her father, who agrees that it's the best sheepfold/vulva he's ever seen, and then throws a party for it). Much comedy ensues.

e: sorry, not father; great-uncle.

Halloween Jack posted:

You don't, like, think this hasn't happened in real life, do you?

Okay, so you just posted XCrawl today. I swear I thought I remember you guys making fun of the dungeon cheerleaders in the podcast. I must be confusing you making fun of the Rave Drow from Urban Arcana with another review.


Hey buttholes: If you want to burn your brains out trying to fix a game, fix XCrawl instead of Beast. What are you gonna do, brother, when Umber Hulkamania runs wild on you???

wdarkk posted:

Only on Okinawa and maybe the Marianas (although not much), which were actually pre-war Japanese territories. The pacific islanders had a lot of history with Europeans and knew roughly how they actually were.

LatwPIAT posted:

The megahypercorps have enslaved about half the setting's population through predatory indentured servitude contracts because slavery is apparently economically attractive to them/they want to subjugate the poor so they can feel rich?