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Kavak posted:Reading this, I'm starting to think that Beast was not some huge misstep and that Onyx Path is slipping back into White Wolf's lovely old ways. The running gag in my gaming group when we discuss these train wrecks is "White Wolf. White Wolf never changes." LatwPIAT posted:I was somewhat horrified to read the writer's guide for nChangeling 2E and discover that it included things like "don't care too much about edge cases, we expect the STs to handle that" (paraphrased) and "I don't want more than 300 words on specific Tilts - instead there'll be a system for making Tilts" (paraphrased, but with less uncharitable interpretation this time). They seem to offload a lot of the development and even quality control on the STs, rather than providing rigorous and elegant mechanics - and I know they can do better; the WoD games have often been full of interesting emergent mechanics that help to create stories from simple interactions. One of my favourite examples is how Willpower and Vice interact in World of Darkness, where you need to spend Willpower to do difficult ~stuff~ and the best way to regain Willpower is to invoke your Vice. The result is that characters who face adversity get stressed and are tempted to succumb to their vices a lot, because investigating the supernatural is stressful and going out and getting drunk, starting a fight, or having a one-night stand is tempting.
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Jan 15, 2016 09:28
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The frustrating thing about M20 is that any criticism of it over how badly it screws its handling of transgender people was lost in all the people defending it from people yelling at it for mentioning them at all. Also, doesn't it kind of make the eurocentrism of the game worse if not only are there few non-European traditions (and those that are are awkward collage stereotypes) but they're all wrong and Chaos Magick ala Bruccato is the One True Metaphysics?
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Jan 16, 2016 07:40
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So while digging through google out of morbid curiosity, I found a Q&A Brucato posted on his own site: https://satyrosphilbrucato.wordpress.com/2014/03/23/mage-20-qa-part-i-what-is-mage-anyway/. It's full of some real hamdingers including his own Mazes and Monsters-esque beliefs that players losing themselves in their characters is a real danger, but here's the one that just made me stop and go "wut."Brucato posted:Considering that real-world occult practices also tie into deeply held cultural and spiritual beliefs, it would be insulting to trivialize them that way – especially if the game held up one specific belief-system as the “One True Magick.” Also, he has a picture of himself in that Q&A with the filename "satyr-of-ectasy.jpg" which just left me and a friend laughing for a good thirty seconds at how ridiculous it is.
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Jan 16, 2016 19:20
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Hm. A link or two across the blog, and: The funniest part about the later quote (which I found after doing my previous quote) is that it has a footnote... which is him hedging his bets about werewolves and vampires not existing.
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Jan 16, 2016 20:37
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You know, if you're going to savagely punish multiclassing before a certain point, maybe it would make more sense not to allow it at all before that point, because that sounds ludicrously crippling.
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Apr 19, 2016 19:06
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And yet the Exalted 3e books for all that care, still littered with rules ambiguity and the natural language issues. Exalted 3e rules text just drags for me trying to sort through all the fluff in the charms... And then I miss the fluff that's actually rules text.
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Apr 22, 2016 19:03
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Between Beast and the worst parts of the Exalted 3e kickstarter and development mess, the running comment among my circle of gaming friends was "White Wolf. White Wolf never changes." for most of last year. All I know is I got annoyed enough I'm pretty much not cutting them the benefit of the doubt on stuff again.
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Apr 24, 2016 07:13
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Go for the not-Shinji Ikari. Also, I have experience with being in a group trying to play this game. I look forward to you having to explain the mess that is the hilariously large chargen and the optimization step.
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May 6, 2016 17:44
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Doresh posted:That's why I'll only make one example character. Everything else is madness. Yeah, A Time of War is the ultimate combination of showing how high lethality and long chargen do NOT work together. And it doesn't even price Battlemechs particularly well or have that much integration into mech combat, IMHO. Also, the calculation to determine your piloting and shooting numbers in Battletech terms are hilariously hard to wrap my head around.
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May 6, 2016 20:14
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hyphz posted:And ugh, Shadowrun 4e characters. Half of the sample characters are allergic to gold for no reason at all - thus giving every munchkin player justification to take irrelevant disadvantages because "it's in the example!". I keep wondering if I should write up Ghost Cartels but just its characters would be enough: The Gold thing might be a reference to the bizarre randomly rolled allergies metahuman PCs had to roll for in SR1e, one combination of which could get you a Street Samurai deathly allergic to their own cyberware. And I'm pretty sure if you followed the book in order you rolled for this after doing the rest of chargen. I have no idea how they survived that long. Still a dumb thing to bring back in SR 4e.
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May 13, 2016 19:57
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Kai Tave posted:Well it used to be worse in the sense that in the original draft Beasts and other supernaturals were supposed to be best buds for reasons. True, but it's almost worse now that the text exudes an aura of "I'm so clever I wrote my way around all your petty criticisms while still keeping in the real message". The worst part is he's mostly gotten away with it.
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May 22, 2016 20:10
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Kurieg posted:Don't worry, I got your meaning. The sense I've been getting the past two weeks is "Thank god Kurieg is insane enough to review this poo poo because we need something to point at and go 'this, this is why'." from both this thread and my co-hosts. Yeah, keep it up, it's a useful thing to be able to point at when trying to explain this mess to people.
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Jun 4, 2016 05:23
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Alien Rope Burn posted:For those getting into the Slayers anime for the first time, bear in mind the quality of the various TV series / OVAs / movies / mangas varies pretty wildly. The first season of the TV series is probably the best thing to watch, but it slips in the second season and gets into pure nonsense in the third. I remember some of the movies (third? fourth?) being pretty funny but lean towards being pure lowbrow comedies (I imagine all the breast jokes wouldn't over so well with me these days). The worst for me was probably the (extremely loose) companion Lost Universe, which is probably one of the most boring and irritating pieces of garbage I've suffered through in 26 segments. One problem with the first season is that until a dozen episodes in it has a partially different dub cast than the rest of the series. While Slayer's dub is pretty great (especially for the 90's), the first twelve have things like monotone bored Zelgadis. Or you could watch it subbed, I guess, no biggie. The third season, while lacking in main plot (Valgaav is such a joke and not in a good way), it does have Jillas Jillos Jilles, who is an amazing case of "mundane character trying to optimize his way into fighting Wizards by increasingly large explosives" and probably my favourite Slayer's antagonist.
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Nov 19, 2016 05:41
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I don't know why one would choose a dub over a sub for an anime with Megumi Hayashibara as the lead, but I'm probably anime trash for saying that. I normally tend to roll with subs, but if a dub's especially notable I'll usually check it out and there's a few I think really enhance a series. (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Cowboy Bebop, Hellsing Ultimate, although the last is just for hearing a who's who of the English anime dubbing scene completely cutting loose with the ham.) Slayers felt appropriate enough to have a hammy 90's English dub, the actors are interesting to hear people who would go on to do the original Pokemon dub work with better material, and the two friends I watched it with insisted I should watch the dub.  EDIT: Also the Baccano and Mushi-Shi dubs. Mushi-shi's dub is so good at fitting the show the second season (which isn't dubbed) just felt wrong to me (although I think both versions went with different interpretations of the main character, which helps). Mind you, the second season has much bigger issues. gourdcaptain fucked around with this message at 07:09 on Nov 20, 2016 |
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Nov 20, 2016 07:05
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The problem with combat hacking in recent SR editions in my experience is it either: 1) Takes too much time for less effect than just shooting the guy if you have to spend a turn or two just to shut down a gun they have... And then they just pull out a secondary weapon. 2) Is used to trash gear the PCs spent huge amounts of resources on and can't get back, leaving them in an advancement hole. Mind you, I've used and seen used strategic scale hacking to great effect. Although that did result in the final part of my SR campaign run in Strike ending in the PCs doing a ritual spell to locate the McGuffin the villains needed about three sessions early and then just hitting the warehouse it was sitting in with remote controlled vehicles, drones with bombs, a bound spirit, and finally an orbital weapon they convinced the NSA to fire at it (long story). Queue me just telling them to narrate the result since I had no way I could think of out of it and the final plot ending halfway through the first session of it with no actual fights.
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Dec 2, 2016 07:18
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Well, it's nice to see absolutely nobody at Onyx Path with any pull has absolutely any desire to stop this disgusting mess of a gameline or clean it up in any way. And there's people on other message boards I've seen talking about how great it is! *sigh*
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Jan 22, 2017 06:43
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Crasical posted:Fourth Edition got rid of that, gave a huge emphasis on a wireless world, smartphone-like mini-computers (commlinks) along with pervasive Augmented Reality rising up to become an alternative to the ‘jack in and go floppy/limp’ Virtual Reality. Space travel was touched on as occurring in the setting periphery as well as nanotech manufacturing and new, experimental nanotech augmentation. It paints a world that I find as scarily plausible to things we will have fifty or sixty years down the line. There are certain folks (likely on this very forum, indeed) who think that the world update from 3e to 4e made the world ‘Not Shadowrun’, or ‘Not Cyberpunk’, and instead ‘Transhuman garbage’. Considering that the game’s fifth edition is a ‘Throwback Edition’ in a lot of ways (Think of how 5e DnD is in a lot of ways a throwback to 3e), apparently at least some of the developers agreed with them. I don’t agree. When I talk about how much I love Shadowrun, a lot of that is SPECIFICALLY fourth edition SR, and I want to make that really clear before I start. This is my experience with Shadowrun in a nutshell, complete with love of 4e, mess that it is. 5e's... really not my cup of tea, especially the editing, but the fluff choices and mechanical ones are flat out baffling in spots, IMHO. 4e's still a clunky mess, though.
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Feb 5, 2017 04:40
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LordAbaddon posted:Those people are so stupid and wrong that I barely even know where to begin with that bullshit. Is there a way to put wireless stuff back in? Shadowrun 5e has no idea what it wants to be. There's also rules giving you bonuses for hooking your cyberware up to the cloud so your Wired Reflexes has extra processing power or such. Nevermind network lag and such. Also, the pricing is completely insanely inconsistent, supposedly from rumors I remember that the developers were fighting back and forth over what kind of edition it would be and couldn't consolidate on anything. Mostly jacking the prices powered up magic relative to tech, which is not something Shadowrun needed a lot of. (It's been years, I'm probably wrong on something.)
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Feb 5, 2017 05:36
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Crasical posted:Overview from a hella biased someone who's better with 4e than 5e: Crasical posted:Also, the corporations cracked down on the free, open matrix, implement Grid Overwatch Division (GOD) who can find you anywhere on the matrix and come smack you down if you do too much illegal internet poo poo, as well as generally revamping the (still wireless) matrix. This brings back Cyberdecks, which are extremely expensive specialized computers needed to crack in and even attempt to do the things that would bring GOD down on your head.
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Feb 5, 2017 05:41
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Young Freud posted:Which goddamn blew all the progression that previous editions had worked on. 4e Hackers felt like a natural evolution on Deckers and Riggers, considering that they had been building up that merger in the Rigger books. I remember reading in Rigger 2, I think, where they say site security system managers acted a lot like riggers, except immobile, that a rigger could pull all sorts of tricks with building security if they had something to break ICE with. It was an inevitability that those classes would be merged together. The bit that shoves it over from just grogginess to completely weird is this is in the same edition that wants you to access internet giving off a signal while doing a stealth mission so you can operate gear as a free action or such.
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Feb 5, 2017 06:04
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Kurieg posted:Doesn't 5e still have the people with brains that are basically wifi nodes that are also for some reason completely incompatable with being a magician because GAME BALANCE but are also mechanically terrible in every single conceivable way? Yep. Technomancers are around and are more mechanically awful and unsupported in suppliments than ever.
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Feb 5, 2017 08:03
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I Savage Rifts also came out recently and while it's not perfect, it beats Palladium as a system any day of the week. Currently in a campaign of it under a newbie DM and it's going pretty well. Recently read that graphic novel (it came in a Palladium grab bag I got the DM of that game as a gag Christmas gift) and yeah, the art is great.
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Feb 16, 2017 19:04
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Savage Rifts is perfectly competent, it's true. I have some issues with it but overall it's much, much more serviceable than the Palladium system. I've been running a PbP game of it on the forums and it functions pretty well. Well, competent other than the bit where one character starts on the same page as another's ends with no title and a barely existent dividing line. Relevant to this thread, my current character's concept is kind of a Rifts Japan joke, in that they're a Ninja Cyborg Cowboy by way of Kamen Rider from Texas. His family has some kind of heroic legacy, it's just between rampant illiteracy, old movies blending into legends, and the apocalypse they're not quite working off actual records. When I brought this up in character (claiming to come from a line of Ninja Cowboys) the party Burster laughed, thought this was completely ridiculous, and is half convinced my character is a poorly programmed infiltrator robot.
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Feb 16, 2017 19:44
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Ha ha, sounds fun. I'm in the middle of working ahead on the western books and probably one of my favorite bits is the Sundance Kid rifting to the current future, but people don't believe that he's the real Sundance Kid because he says he has never heard of the Lone Ranger or Clint Eastwood. If he was really from the old west he'd have heard of them, obviously. A lot of Lone Star is terrible garbage (anything to do with the Coalition generally is) but that's a cute idea. Yeah, Sundance Kid in Rifts is a great concept. I've also seen a later book with the Most Wanted list in the area having a guy claims he's Butch Cassidy who isn't (crazy who watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid too many times) and Sundance put a bounty on him due to being annoyed by the fake. As far as Lone Star: 1) I'm using Lone Star as the stand-in for Shocker for my not!Rider complete with the DM sending animal themed cyborgs from them after me and ridiculous Showa Toku (EDIT: Think Power Rangers villainy for something less obscure) plans. 2) Said book is responsible for an in-joke in my Rifts group due to the stat block for Lone Star's head taking time to mention he's got a 98% SCUBA skill. We can't think of any possible circumstance this would be relevant as he's in Northern Texas in a secure faculty all of the time. Queue us discussing hypothetical SCUBA contests between Rifts villains. gourdcaptain fucked around with this message at 21:36 on Feb 16, 2017 |
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Feb 16, 2017 20:56
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Mors Rattus posted:Honestly, I have never seen getting a party to work together as difficult in RPGs. Indeed, it is much harder to get PCs to not work together, in my experience. I've had some experiences with hard to get to work together parties as a GM. The solution was to get rid of a bad player and get a better one.
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Feb 23, 2017 00:28
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Alien Rope Burn posted:At the risk of double-posting, yes. I covered it here. There are issues with a 1-for-1 conversion (mainly that old S.D.C. weapons and new M.D.C. weapons don't match up properly) but I've run it with some adjustments and it makes things less of a headache. Savage Rifts, while keeping Mega Damage as a concept, puts it on the same damage scaling as non-mega damage. They also cut back the weapons that can do mega damage to mostly melee and vehicular/anti-vehicular, although the assignment is wonky in some places. Then my DM basically house rules everything back to being MDC if it was in Palladium Rifts and made powers free to be MDC, and that seems to work out too so far, although it takes some of the bite out of things with MDC armor. (Did it for a bit of grogginess, but in a fairly harmless way and he's doing the more important stuff like not engaging in CS-boosting.)
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Mar 10, 2017 10:41
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Barudak posted:In perversely, enjoy RIFTS gear writeup summaries because theyre so dull. There are a apparently a hojillion books each with guns and like two of them do anything different other than "be worse than the best gun available" Also, I think Juicer Uprising is next, and the titular event is amazing for how much of a bizarre mess it is.
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Mar 20, 2017 16:14
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13A drives me nuts because it keeps coming close to something I would play, and then going in the near worst possible direction immediately thereafter. The thing that bothers me with One Unique Things is I don't remember the specifics but I find the sample examples kinda frustrating and it has me mechanical hook beyond "have the GM maybe make something up". Like a good chunk of 13A for me, it sounds like someone who read Fate but didn't get it. Ah well, a few years later Strike! RPG came out, and it is hilariously close to exactly what I want in many areas.
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Mar 25, 2017 17:37
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Cease to Hope posted:writing something that has no mechanical hook on your character sheet is the whole point of One Unique Thing. the idea is to deprogram D20 players from the idea that everything must have a specific rules implementation and statistical value in order to matter. I guess, but I've ran into a couple people toating the OUT as the best thing in 13A and it just confuses me because it's never incentives me or players in groups I'm in to do anything different. I just slap my character concept in there and move on. And yet despite having this, the game still has racial rarities because we don't want to let your character get TOO special. -_-
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Mar 25, 2017 18:19
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Night10194 posted:Every single I Dunno Make Something Up feat or power is something that didn't need to be a feat or power, just a normal function of gameplay with a GM. Yeah. It's just a bizarre incentive for the DM to screw over people wanting to improvise who didn't take over those feats, or make the guy who took them annoyed it doesn't do anything compared to what other people can do.
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Mar 28, 2017 00:38
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The Rifts Index & Adventures Volume 1 review is going to be delivered in an audio format. I wanted to do a bit of an experiment and this is a fairly safe space for that, due to the relatively tangential nature of this book. Also, I needed something interesting to distract me from being reminded of the utter meaninglessness in reviewing a book like Rifts Index & Adventures Volume 1, and the bottomless pit of melancholy which could easily result. It's very first podcast episode-y. It could have potential, but one-man podcasts are rough in general unless the host is really good in my opinion.
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Apr 1, 2017 05:32
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Thanks for the feedback! It's sufficiently niche that finding another person willing to talk with me about books like this feels unlikely - I was always kind of shocked occamsnailfile was willing to work with me on going through some books that are obscure even by Palladium standards. It's an experiment, though, so I'm willing to accept it might not be the best idea. Most of what I listen to myself are two or three person podcasts, so it's probably a stronger format in general. I realize the "single person rants about something" is strangely something I see a lot more on youtube than podcasting. I think the reason you see more of those on video platforms is it's easier to keep up energy when you have visual accompaniment - either someone taking about it onscreen and getting their mood across more strongly or being able to show visuals from the work in question. Also, if you do more of these it'd probably be worthwhile to get a better hosting platform than Dropbox especially if it's a free account (recently Strike had some issues with that, and maybe set up an RSS feed to make it easier to get into Podcatching apps. That's only if you decide to commit to this, though.
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Apr 1, 2017 17:43
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I have a weird viceral dislike of the 13A recharge mechanic - it's entirely too random for me and it drives me nuts.
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Apr 2, 2017 19:00
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13th Age really likes making everything incredibly random. Regaining powers? Roll. Want extra effects? Roll the right thing. Want to use your fighter powers? Roll to see if you can use them. Maybe even roll stats. Icons *might* do something each session, roll a die and see what comes up. It's so antithetical to my tastes in TRPG RNG use that it really doesn't work for me at all.
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Apr 3, 2017 05:49
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Barudak posted:The overlap between "person who wants to play a pilot of a robot mech that fights dragons" and "person who enjoys calculating man hours and weighted averages of metalurgical composition of specific conponents" is literally just the authors of Dragonmecg, isnt it. It also probably fits the people who use the advanced mech accountancy rules for Battletech. They exist and I've met some, although I don't get it.
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Apr 10, 2017 06:12
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Oh, Alien Rope Burn? I finished the set of audio reviews of the Rifts Index book, and while it was a bit rough, the final episode with the Hook, Line & Sinker analyses was probably the best of the set for me. It felt the most punchy and energetic, along with getting pretty funny.
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Apr 13, 2017 02:00
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The Lone Badger posted:What happens if a juicer pilots a mech? This book has a special juicer variant optimized for that. I don't know Palladium rules well enough to judge if they're good at it or not, but they exist. (I've mostly just read the fluff from Rifts books for entertainment/Savage Rifts inspiration. Savage Rifts Juicer is pretty rad mechanically from what I've seen of them and read, but I've only seen one used for one session.
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Apr 16, 2017 04:14
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Hostile V posted:Alright I won't lie, I love the idea of failing a Con check and then accidentally living out several years as a human because you shapeshifted badly and forgot you were a dragon. Just waking up one morning next to your wife and realizing "poo poo I LEFT MY HOARD ALONE FOR LIKE SEVENTEEN YEARS". "So that's why our kids have scales and wings and can breathe fire. Huh."
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Apr 17, 2017 05:26
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Psycho-Stalker O.C.C. This backstory of Psycho-Stalkers being created by a doctor just creating one for the hell of it out of a paperwork mix up (and according to the book, he just had this idea sitting around) is my second favourite thing in the book (my favourite comes much later). It's just ridiculous in an amazing comic book villainous super-science meets Brazil way.
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Apr 19, 2017 04:44
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Alien Rope Burn posted:You can tell it's Siembieda writing it because it's so amazingly contrived, but at the same time the fact that it comes out of a paperwork goof is pretty amusing. A lot of my Savage Rifts GM (the guy who got me into Rifts) and my enjoyment of the setting comes from the absurd stuff like that. (Also see our general love of anything involving ARCHIE-3 and Hagan, that failtastic duo.) It also helps for our game than the GM's personal vision of the CS when GMing comes from stuff like the Psycho Stalker, the end of this book which I will not spoil, and the other absurd stupidity they get up to from time to time. It's basically the opposite of tasteless CS fanboyism (which is the worst) and while they can be still threatening, he doesn't do them as hypercompetent or such. (Or even competent a good chunk of the time.) RIFTS is ultimately very Saturday Morning Cartoon from the 80's in a lot of ways, and he runs them as Cobra.
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Apr 19, 2017 05:04
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