Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
  • Locked thread
Davin Valkri
Apr 8, 2011

Maybe you're weighing the moral pros and cons but let me assure you that OH MY GOD
SHOOT ME IN THE GODDAMNED FACE
WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR?!
Right now it sounds like Golden Sky Stories with a lobotomy...or maybe a trepanning. The viewpoint characters would probably prefer a trepanning. Stupid 1990s; I guess all that existential angst that went out with the Soviet Union had to reestablish itself somewhere.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Golden Sky Stories is all about helping people with their problems though, including mundane problems like "Susie has lost her favorite bracelet in the woods, can you help her find it before dinnertime?" Changeling: the Dreaming, as far as I can tell, is basically a game about being evangelical otherkin fighting against the tyranny of science, 9-5 jobs, and librarians.

GSS is a game about helping people, C:tD's characters are inherently selfish and self-absorbed. You can almost see how, with just a slight change in perspective, Dreaming could be a game akin to Vampire where the point is that you're playing a monster and exploring the consequences of that...but the writers instead play it painfully straight and it comes off as completely insufferable.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Mors Rattus posted:

In fairness, it has at least seemed to have limited itself recently to Mummy and Exalted.

Exalted I know way too well, but what's this about Mummy?

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Kavak posted:

Exalted I know way too well, but what's this about Mummy?

Mummy is basically the nWoD game that has decided not to learn anything from oWoD. It's not terrible the way Exalted is, it just lacks self-awareness and elegance and much of the stuff I've come to expect from nWoD.

Kellsterik
Mar 30, 2012
The big downside of Mummy for me is just how extremely complex it is. I almost turned my group off when we played it because character creation was so involved with so many choices, and there are a dozen fiddly subsystems to keep track of.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Mors Rattus posted:

Mummy is basically the nWoD game that has decided not to learn anything from oWoD. It's not terrible the way Exalted is, it just lacks self-awareness and elegance and much of the stuff I've come to expect from nWoD.

I didn't see anything really off in the core book, other than its approach to setting information. Onyx Path wanted to try something different and I can respect that- if it falls flat, oh well.

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

TN changing.

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012

Night10194 posted:

Every single time they try to make a Hunter type character a villain in White Wolf games, they almost always seem to come off as the hero. That police officer is the actual protagonist, these loving faeries need to get brained.

Well, they're gonna double up on this, presumably, with the villains of Beast: the Primordial (I forget and it might still be pending) whose nemeses are called Heroes.

vvEdit: Thanks

Xelkelvos fucked around with this message at 03:31 on Nov 15, 2014

Rand Brittain
Mar 25, 2013

"Go on until you're stopped."
Primordial.

That Old Tree
Jun 24, 2012

nah


I had a whole lot of fun with CtD back in the day, but it was definitely the most "ignore that, and that, and that... you know what just loving do whatever" of the oWoD.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 4 hours!
I'm curious as to what you guys mean about Mummy. Are we talking up-its-rear end-pretentious because they didn't learn from oWoD, or trenchcoats-and-katanas because they didn't learn from oWoD? Because I'm fine with the latter in measured doses.

Gazetteer
Nov 22, 2011

"You're talking to cats."
"And you eat ghosts, so shut the fuck up."




The Gargoyle

I’ll just leave this here for you to listen to while you read. Because, I think we all know what the primary inspiration here is.

The Gargoyle a living statue or other inanimate object that walks and stuff for half the day, then turns back into stone or whatever for the other half. They guard the building they’re a part of from anyone who would try to harm it. The metaphor here is that they’re someone who takes “school spirit” a little too seriously. I get what he’s going for easily enough, but it doesn’t feel super evocative to me, I guess -- that aspect is just not played up strongly enough in the skin itself.

Origins include “animated statue”, “curse victim”, and my favourite, “cornerstone sacrifice.” They’re actually pretty good and provide some neat backstory hints -- that’s more or less what origins are supposed to do.

The Gargoyle’s good stats are Cold and Volatile -- that’s a pretty dangerous combination. Similarly to the Dark/Volatile “social idiot” combination, with these stats you’re normally limited to negative interactions in order to influence others. Unlike Dark/Volatile, however, Cold/Volatile can apply and remove conditions with Shut Someone Down and Hold Steady, making them more dangerous in social situations, with a strong Volatile stat for the more direct approach. This is the same combination that The Ghoul has, for reference. It means that the Gargoyle should theoretically be pretty good defensively, but when they want to go on the attack it’s going to be with their fists rather than their words.

The core mechanic for this skin is pretty poorly thought out, in that it’s just plain unfun unless you take a specific optional skin move as well. Some of the other moves also suffer from the “this is a cool thing that this monster should do” syndrome, without really contributing to the core theme as well as they could. It’s hardly the worst thing in this book (that’s still The Beast), but it’s a pretty weak entry overall.

Skin Moves

You start with School Spirit and two other skins moves.

School Spirit
For half the day you’re Dormant, which means you turn into a statue and can’t do anything. The rest of the time, you look like a regular person. It doesn’t need to be a literal statue -- just has to be a vaguely humanoid piece of artwork. You decide whether you’re Dormant from from sunset to sunrise or from sunrise until sunset. When you’re not Dormant and you Lash Out Physically in order to defend your school building or grounds, you treat 6- rolls as 7-9s and 7-9s as 10+s.

So, this move loving blows. Why? Because it means one of the players at the table by default cannot do anything for half the day. So that means that either you get to sit around doing nothing while everyone else is like, sneaking around in the graveyard and making out with vampires, or the MC takes pity on you and skips over night time scenes as much as possible. Which not only makes the restriction kind of pointless, but also seriously damages the mood that MH MCs are encouraged to set (if you decided that you’re dormant during the day, that’s probably going to be even more annoying because it means you can’t participate in any of the school room drama bullshit that is half the point of the game). There is a very good reason why The Vampire doesn’t have a move stating that they can’t move around in sunlight, and it’s not just because Twilight did it -- it’s because it’s not really fun for anyone involved when half the time one of the characters can’t do anything.

I’m also still not a huge fan of just flat out not being able to fail a certain kind of roll that consistently. It’s possible to achieve that with other skins, but usually only if you’ve invested a lot of time and experience into it. Flatout removing your ability to get hard moves just isn’t interesting.

Babewyn
You can turn into your human form during your Dormant period if there’s another person on the school premises. You can also do this if there isn’t anyone else on the school premises, but you take 1 harm as a result. If you leave the school grounds, you automatically know if someone else goes onto the school grounds or threatens the school in any way.

I’ve used the term “feat tax” for some of the SftK moves in the past. I’m going to use it again here -- basically this is a move that only exists to make School Spirit not suck. It should either have been part of School Spirit, or you should start out with both School Spirit and Babewyn.

Grotesque
You can transform from your human form into Animate form. While Animate, you are basically your Dormant form but you can move around and do stuff. While you’re Animate, you take one less harm from everything (can go as low as zero) and you always get to carry 1 forward to Lash Out Physically. Remember that this stacks with School Spirit’s “you cannot fail Lash Out Physically rolls to defend the school” bonus.

A gargoyle skin really needs a move like this, I think, because without it you’re kind of just a kid who is weirdly obsessed with their highschool and turns into a fully inanimate statue sometimes. This lets you turn into a big stone monster (or an animated mascot costume, if you want to relive Five Nights At Freddy’s in Monsterhearts) and go beat up some people. It makes you very dangerous in physical confrontations while you’re trying to defend your school, and I wish that it had some kind of drawback to counter that, mostly.

Kirkgrim
People associated with your school (students, employees, etc.) count as part of your school for the purposes of School Spirit.

This is interesting and I like it in concept, but in practise this is going to mean most of the cast if your school is a literal school, which kind of turns School Spirit’s bonus into “never fail to Lash Out Physically if you can tie it back into defending someone.” The problem there is more or less that School Spirit’s bonus is still not interesting, so any move that works off of it is going to suffer for the association.

Gullet
Oh good, another superfluous damage dealing move. You can vomit (Topher’s words, not mine) a stream of freezing water or fire from your mouth. When you do this, roll Volatile. On a 10 up, you do 1 harm to your target and they must Hold Steady. On a 7-9, choose one from the following list:
  • You do 1 harm to your target
  • They must Hold Steady
  • You Take a String on them
On a 6- (sigh), you miss and they take a string on you.

Once again, dictating the outcome of a hard move, not going to waste time explaining why I hate that again. This has kind of similar problems to the Fury’s Firestarter, though -- you don’t really need a second damage dealing move for a high Volatile skin, and you definitely don’t need one that kind of just does the same basic things that Lash Out Physically already does. Especially since things like Grotesque and School Spirit specifically give bonuses to Lash Out Physically that would therefore not apply here. In that sense, this is just an inferior choice when you could just Lash Out instead.

Hatchery
You can create an “egg” out of a single object found in your school. You can only have one of them at a time. If you die, you are reborn from the egg at the beginning of your next active period (at sunrise or sunset, depending on what you picked for School Spirit), with a new Dormant/Animate form, based on what you used to make the egg. Mark experience when you’re reborn.

Or you could take the Ghoul’s Short Rest for the Wicked as a “Take a move from another skin” advance, since that’s already an option. The Heir from Skins for the Skinless has a special death/reincarnation mechanic, but as a result it explicitly says in the text that you cannot take Short Rest for the Wicked. This is both less interesting than what the Heir does and less useful than Short Rest. But, uh, you get to mark experience, I guess.

Hunky Punky
You get some of your dormant form’s durability in your human form. When you take damage, Hold Steady. On a 7-9, you take 1 less damage. On a 10+, you take no damage and mark experience. Presumably this is in addition to the ordinary effects of Hold Steady.

This isn’t a terrible move. It’s a bit weird that you only get to mark experience on a 10+ -- I’m pretty sure that was just added because taking more than 1 harm at a time is relatively rare. It’d be more interesting to give an actual drawback to the 7-9, I think. Like, part of your true nature is revealed in the process of defending yourself. When the dumb jock punches you, your face briefly takes on the texture and appearance of stone. That kind of thing is usually more interesting than “on 7-9 you win, on 10+ you win more”, and more in the spirit of fail forward game design.

Rival Schools
Attacking a rival school or a person associated with a rival school counts as defending your school for the purposes of School Spirit.

This move should probably establish “you have a rival school” before just dumping this mechanic onto you -- I mean, if your MC refuses to include one after you take this move, they’re a lovely MC, but it’s still more in the spirit of the system to explicitly spell it out, maybe give some fun options about the nature of the rivalry. This isn’t really a bad move in concept (just in execution, a little), but it does hinge on School Spirit, which is still a bad move. I also wish he’d find a way to tie moves back into defending your school other than just making School Spirit’s bonus more expansive or your character tougher. I don't know -- maybe something that rewards other players for provoking you by harming the school.

Sheela na Gig
Did you think we were going to get through this whole skin without a “roll x instead of y” move? I actually did for a bit there. :smith:

You can roll Cold instead of Hot for both Turn Someone On and Manipulate an NPC… but only if, and I quote “your genitals are exposed.”

So this move is based on a kind of Irish stone carving of women flashing their genitalia -- there's no other reason for this, because there’s no real gameplay related reason why you’d want this skin to walk around naked or whatever aside from this move. It is incentivising behaviour that doesn’t make sense with the rest of the skin.

The Ghoul already has a perfectly good “roll Cold instead of Hot to look sexy” move too, we really did not need an additional one that can trigger off sending people dick pics.

Sex Move
When you have sex with someone, they count as part of your school for the purposes of School Spirit. Which means nothing if they’re one of your classmates and you have Kirkgrim already. You also cannot Lash Out Physically at them at all. This lasts until you have sex with someone else or they do something to hurt your school. So, technically, if they do something that hurts themself, that means you don’t have to protect them anymore, since they count as part of the school. Likewise, if you have Kirkgrim, they can’t do anything to hurt any of your classmates by default. So… this is super easy to get out of.

Oh, and it specifically says that you cannot have sex while you’re in your Dormant or Animate forms. Thank Christ.

Kirkgrim makes this sex move feel redundant, and parts of it don’t seem like they’re super well thought out.

Darkest Self
You basically start going after anyone who might be a potential threat to your school, physical or otherwise. “The basketball team that beats yours in the playoffs, the school board member who wants to cut funding, the teacher who molests her students -- they’re all enemies, and they all have to be punished.”

UM, you can probably punish that last one without going into your darkest self. Because, uh, one of these things is not like the others!

This works pretty well as a Darkest Self, honestly, weird examples aside.

Other Stuff
The Gargoyle’s gang advance is… “a stone flock.” Okay. That’s both weirdly phrased and slightly generic.

I’ve noticed that Topher is really into themed naming for skin moves -- it’s a pretty big detriment here. At least with the Fury, the film references still tell you loosely what the move does. Here, unless you’re really up on your different types of gargoyle, it’s not so easy to keep track of them.

Oh, and, yeah -- a number of these moves specifically do nothing if you don’t already have School Spirit, so once again they’re pretty worthless for other skins.

Next Time: The Minotaur -- You're a bully, but you're also a bull, get it?

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth
I've always liked Gargoyle, but yea we always fold in the 'you can wake up early if someone's at school or just take a little damage to do it' into the core move.

Also in fairness I think the 'rival team, lovely board member, or child molester, they're all enemies' thing was meant to be more like 'you treat the first two as if they're as bad as diddling kids' rather than 'or EVEN a child molester, crazy right!?'

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

Seriously, none of the Dautains except for 'I wanna be young' can be really seen as evil.

I mean look at what made the cannibal snapped One night, after a particularly harrowing joke involving some baling wire, matchsticks, a pickup truck, and a Wayfare cantrip - that don't sound like a joke, that sounds like a murder attempt.

That's the problem with CtD, is all their whimsy and wonder examples sounds like horrific gaslighting and murder to people who aren't complete psychopaths

RocknRollaAyatollah
Nov 26, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

Robindaybird posted:

That's the problem with CtD, is all their whimsy and wonder examples sounds like horrific gaslighting and murder to people who aren't complete psychopaths

That was pretty much how the Hunter the Reckoning writers went about it and it worked. I don't even remember there being a story that presented them as something other than monsters.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

That was pretty much how the Hunter the Reckoning writers went about it and it worked. I don't even remember there being a story that presented them as something other than monsters.

I hate a lot of the mechanics but I will always loving love Hunter for existing and being about 'Actually, all these self-absorbed shitheads deserve a shotgun to the face.'

It helps that when I played it, our GM accidentally gave us the stat spreads for a starting Vampire, so our group of juvenile delinquent runaways had the stats of actual action heroes and got to do stuff like killing a neonate with a shovel, setting a vampire hitman sent to drag us back to the feeding camp on fire by flicking a cigarette into a puddle of gasoline, and eventually talking local werewolves into accompanying us and a firetruck full of holy water back to the camp to save the other kids and become known as the Four Horsemen of Baltimore. In the spirit of the setting? No. But it was one of the best campaigns I ever played in.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

That was pretty much how the Hunter the Reckoning writers went about it and it worked. I don't even remember there being a story that presented them as something other than monsters.

It's how Changeling: the Lost does it too. The fae are bastards, faerieland is not a magical place of rainbows and lollipops (except when it is, then everything is awesome...until the fae that brought you there gets bored of you and tosses you out, or decides to make all the lollipops poisonous as a prank, but don't worry, they won't let you die because they aren't done playing with you yet.)

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm curious as to what you guys mean about Mummy. Are we talking up-its-rear end-pretentious because they didn't learn from oWoD, or trenchcoats-and-katanas because they didn't learn from oWoD? Because I'm fine with the latter in measured doses.

It's more the former than the latter. Mors Rattus touched on it with regard to, for example, their decision to reintroduce variable TNs back into the system for no real reason other than "we just felt like it" despite not actually considering how that interacted with anything. Also I vaguely recall the lead on the project being kind of a tool for some reason.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
Honestly, from anecdotes in the books and related media, the average Redcap was a goddamn serial cannibal.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Kai Tave posted:

It's more the former than the latter. Mors Rattus touched on it with regard to, for example, their decision to reintroduce variable TNs back into the system for no real reason other than "we just felt like it" despite not actually considering how that interacted with anything. Also I vaguely recall the lead on the project being kind of a tool for some reason.

Did they bring back the merits that lowered target numbers as well? Because they removed those things from revised for a *reason*. Any one of those with a relevant specialization and 4 in the attribute and skill made it almost impossible to fail at the given task.

Flavivirus
Dec 14, 2011

The next stage of evolution.

Kurieg posted:

Did they bring back the merits that lowered target numbers as well? Because they removed those things from revised for a *reason*. Any one of those with a relevant specialization and 4 in the attribute and skill made it almost impossible to fail at the given task.

Nah, nothing like that. To be honest, mummy has a lot of good ideas but it's incredibly poorly organised, badly edited, and the overall management of the line is sorely lacking. Plus, they're embracing oWoD meta plot with gusto - the core book goes out of its way to avoid talking about ancient Irem where the mummies were created, but it's obvious there's an actual truth they're planning on revealing gradually as the line goes on. This means that if you're playing in an ongoing game each subsequent book is going to get more and more useless to you as it creates a canon that diverges from your own.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


Flavivirus posted:

Nah, nothing like that. To be honest, mummy has a lot of good ideas but it's incredibly poorly organised, badly edited, and the overall management of the line is sorely lacking. Plus, they're embracing oWoD meta plot with gusto - the core book goes out of its way to avoid talking about ancient Irem where the mummies were created, but it's obvious there's an actual truth they're planning on revealing gradually as the line goes on. This means that if you're playing in an ongoing game each subsequent book is going to get more and more useless to you as it creates a canon that diverges from your own.

It's also (I think) operating on nWoD 1st Edition rules while every other line has been or will be updated to 2nd Edition rules. I feel like they're letting some of their writing staff do their "dream projects" in an effectively dead edition. It would explain why the Dark Era for Geist is 1950's New Zealand.

That Old Tree
Jun 24, 2012

nah


I seem to recall that nMummy isn't 2E compatible because it was well on its way to completion before CCP approved that direction.

Edit: In fact, it looks like Mummy came out before B&S, and since the latter was the "stealth pilot program" for the new editions, it's unfortunate but absolutely not surprising.

I like the game for the most part, though I agree with most previously mentioned problems. My big complaint is that it goes hog wild on laundry lists of fiddly new bits.

That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 10:30 on Nov 15, 2014

Gazetteer
Nov 22, 2011

"You're talking to cats."
"And you eat ghosts, so shut the fuck up."

Tatum Girlparts posted:

I've always liked Gargoyle, but yea we always fold in the 'you can wake up early if someone's at school or just take a little damage to do it' into the core move.

Also in fairness I think the 'rival team, lovely board member, or child molester, they're all enemies' thing was meant to be more like 'you treat the first two as if they're as bad as diddling kids' rather than 'or EVEN a child molester, crazy right!?'

That's honestly a pretty good point. I hadn't thought of it that way.

Luminous Obscurity
Jan 10, 2007

"The instrument you know as a piano was once called a pianoforte, because it can play both loud and quiet notes."

Kai Tave posted:

It's how Changeling: the Lost does it too. The fae are bastards, faerieland is not a magical place of rainbows and lollipops (except when it is, then everything is awesome...until the fae that brought you there gets bored of you and tosses you out, or decides to make all the lollipops poisonous as a prank, but don't worry, they won't let you die because they aren't done playing with you yet.)

Dauntain are basically proto-Lost, from the sound of things.


Flavivirus posted:

Plus, they're embracing oWoD meta plot with gusto - the core book goes out of its way to avoid talking about ancient Irem where the mummies were created, but it's obvious there's an actual truth they're planning on revealing gradually as the line goes on. This means that if you're playing in an ongoing game each subsequent book is going to get more and more useless to you as it creates a canon that diverges from your own.

I think they pretty much dumped most of what they were sitting on with Book of the Deceived, and even then the whole story section is written by an unreliable narrator and its all kept pretty vague.

It's a really good book, though. Kind of like Curse's equivalent to Tome of Mysteries.

Small Strange Bird
Sep 22, 2006

Merci, chaton!
Hunter: The Reckoning sounds like the only WoD game I would actually want to play. No metaplot? No complex networks of paranormal society to negotiate? Shooting vampires and werewolves in the goddamn face? Seems good to me!

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Payndz posted:

Hunter: The Reckoning sounds like the only WoD game I would actually want to play. No metaplot? No complex networks of paranormal society to negotiate? Shooting vampires and werewolves in the goddamn face? Seems good to me!

The entire game is designed around you failing and dying, mechanically, if played normally. Creatures will regularly get 4-5 turns to your one, soak damage way better than you do, arbitrarily ignore their own weaknesses, etc.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Also Reckoning had metaplot. If you want strings-free monster hunting then what you want is Hunter: the Vigil from the nWoD.

Reckoning also suffered from having a pretty serious mismatch between what the art promised and what the game was actually like. The art, especially the pieces they previewed running up to the game, was full of stuff like badass dudes casually slinging double barrel shotguns over their shoulder and Buffy-esque vampire slayers, but the actual game itself is about un-badass people being imbued with very minor supernatural gimmicks and then being thrust into a world they're completely ill-equipped to deal with and may not even be sure they aren't just having a schizophrenic breakdown when the literal voices in their heads start telling them to kill the guy next door.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Also, if I remember, the crazy Messengers giving you the powers were loving Exalted.

RocknRollaAyatollah
Nov 26, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

Payndz posted:

Hunter: The Reckoning sounds like the only WoD game I would actually want to play. No metaplot? No complex networks of paranormal society to negotiate? Shooting vampires and werewolves in the goddamn face? Seems good to me!

There's metaplot and not only that but it's runoff from other lines, mainly Wraith and Demon. The complex network is also an old style BBS full of crazies.


Night10194 posted:

The entire game is designed around you failing and dying, mechanically, if played normally. Creatures will regularly get 4-5 turns to your one, soak damage way better than you do, arbitrarily ignore their own weaknesses, etc.

This too. Even with rank 5 edges, which your character will probably never get and require a special contract with an entity, you're not doing more than any other supernatural can already do by the point. Most supernaturals, except mages and changelings, shrug off everything except for aggravated damage. Vampires only take bashing damage from firearms and even if you're using the alternate rules for firearms where they do lethal on head shots, you're taking so many penalties it's not worth it. STs have to also run werewolves differently than how they should be because even fighting a pack of rank 1 werewolves is a game wiping encounter. The normal antagonist groups like the Sabbat and the Black Spiral Dancers are out of the question as well and they would conceivably be the most likely groups Imbued would go after.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

It may come as a surprise from WHITE WOLF, but Hunter: The Reckoning is another case of rad concept, lovely execution.

I swear, I hate White Wolf. A lot. But I've rewritten more of their base games to use for something of my own than any other company I've encountered. More than anyone else, all their games are full of ideas that could be so goddamn cool, ruined by their execution, that I can't help trying to salvage.

FMguru
Sep 10, 2003

peed on;
sexually

Kai Tave posted:

Also Reckoning had metaplot. If you want strings-free monster hunting then what you want is Hunter: the Vigil from the nWoD.

Reckoning also suffered from having a pretty serious mismatch between what the art promised and what the game was actually like. The art, especially the pieces they previewed running up to the game, was full of stuff like badass dudes casually slinging double barrel shotguns over their shoulder and Buffy-esque vampire slayers, but the actual game itself is about un-badass people being imbued with very minor supernatural gimmicks and then being thrust into a world they're completely ill-equipped to deal with and may not even be sure they aren't just having a schizophrenic breakdown when the literal voices in their heads start telling them to kill the guy next door.
HtR usually wins the discussion when it comes to the biggest divergence between "what a game promised" and "what it actually delivered"

Night10194 posted:

Also, if I remember, the crazy Messengers giving you the powers were loving Exalted.
Exalted 1E was explicitly designed to be the mythic pre-history of the WoD, and all of the Exalted splats nicely mapped to WoD supernaturals. Once the game took off and it was clear that it didn't need a link to the WoD, that stuff was largely cast off, but you can still see the traces, even today.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Night10194 posted:

Also, if I remember, the crazy Messengers giving you the powers were loving Exalted.

Yep! Hunter didn't just have metaplot it had meta-metaplot as for some reason the writers of various lines at the time felt the need to figure out how Exalted would eventually become the World of Darkness Earthdawn-to-Shadowrun style. Hunters were imbued with teeny-tiny fragments of Solar Exaltations except without anything that made being an Exalted even halfway cool to play as.

Reckoning was basically "Frailty: the RPG" in practice, which disappointed a lot of people who actually wanted "normal humans get sick of insufferable monsters making GBS threads everything up and shoot them in the face."

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

It would've been a good chance to actually put their money where their mouth was about the whole 'Oh, every supernatural has to hide because this is really the humans' world!' bullshit they kept trying to push, even after it was incredibly clear that wasn't how any of their games had ever played. Watching normal people stand up to the self-absorbed bullies and shitheads who served as protagonist in every other WW game would've been very cathartic.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:
HTR has a fun situation where the videogames are more in line than most players expectations than what the actual game was. Since the videogames are gauntlet clones where you slay hordes of zombies with your amazing powers.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Again, Hunter: the Vigil is basically everything that people actually wanted Reckoning to be in practice...a metaplot free, more "toolkit" approach that lets you play anything from blue-collar Joes and Janes banding together to keep your neighborhood safe to elite government operatives with ultraviolet lasers to people with supernatural gifts, all about hunting down monsters and loving their poo poo up.

Luminous Obscurity
Jan 10, 2007

"The instrument you know as a piano was once called a pianoforte, because it can play both loud and quiet notes."
Hunter: The Vigil is so good.

Night10194 posted:

It may come as a surprise from WHITE WOLF, but Hunter: The Reckoning is another case of rad concept, lovely execution.

I swear, I hate White Wolf. A lot. But I've rewritten more of their base games to use for something of my own than any other company I've encountered. More than anyone else, all their games are full of ideas that could be so goddamn cool, ruined by their execution, that I can't help trying to salvage.

You might want to look in to Onyx Path Publishing. White Wolf grew up, basically. To the point that they've printed actual apologies for some of their past stuff. NWoD is in the middle of its 2E update for all the lines and its totally rad. Also the 20th Anniversary CWoD books got/are getting cleaned up pretty well, last I checked.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
Given that 2E Changelings got buffed to the point where they ended on par with or better than other supernatural splats, I wouldn't be surprised if there was editorial interference keeping the nasty, brutish mundanes from holding a candle to the elder lines.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the mechanics for Reckoning were just shittily conceived.

I never read the Reckoning, because by the time that and Demon came out I'd written the company off entirely. Did they do the shorthand cross-splat mechanical translations that every other splat had in its back matter ("werewolves have high Potence, Celerity and Fortitude, good luck") or were they actually brazen enough to direct you to stat adversaries using their native rulesets?

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Bieeardo posted:

Given that 2E Changelings got buffed to the point where they ended on par with or better than other supernatural splats, I wouldn't be surprised if there was editorial interference keeping the nasty, brutish mundanes from holding a candle to the elder lines.

On the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised if the mechanics for Reckoning were just shittily conceived.

It's up to your GM to decide which interpretation is correct.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Kai Tave posted:

Reckoning was basically "Frailty: the RPG" in practice, which disappointed a lot of people who actually wanted "normal humans get sick of insufferable monsters making GBS threads everything up and shoot them in the face."

Yeah. I remember playing in a Hunter game briefly using the oWoD and playing a firefighter-turned-hunter, and learning "axe to the face" ends up being more effective against classic vampires than pistols and rifles. It turns out a neonate with a little Fortitude can still wreck most mortals' poo poo, to say nothing of vampires with actual powers.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 4 hours!

Kai Tave posted:

Reckoning was basically "Frailty: the RPG" in practice, which disappointed a lot of people who actually wanted "normal humans get sick of insufferable monsters making GBS threads everything up and shoot them in the face."
Especially when the art mostly delivered on "Shoot monsters in their stupid faces."

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Nov 16, 2014

  • Locked thread