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Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



Weird as that is it isn't him just making up his own doctor who fan stuff. It's the actual name used in the Immortals Handbook, an entire book of stupid math porn.

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Green Intern
Dec 29, 2008

Loon, Crazy and Laughable

And it's Omnicompetent, so it can probably fix your roof or something too.

Edit: What's Scientific Notation? That'd just get in the way of NUMBERS!

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wonder if someone can build a Hulking Hurler that can throw a rock big enough to kill the Mortiverse. And conceive of a big enough rock.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

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

Terrible Opinions posted:

Weird as that is it isn't him just making up his own doctor who fan stuff. It's the actual name used in the Immortals Handbook, an entire book of stupid math porn.

I just assumed he slapped a doctor who template in there while he was applying literally every other template.

Green Intern
Dec 29, 2008

Loon, Crazy and Laughable

I'm getting really mad just looking at the Mortiverse's stat block because of how incredibly ugly it is. This is the true power of the Mortiverse; a gaze attack against the reader.

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



Kurieg posted:

I just assumed he slapped a doctor who template in there while he was applying literally every other template.
Nope it's all from the stupid immortals rules exactly as written. Now the guys writing the immortals stuff were probably doing stupid Dr Who stuff, but all the references were small enough to not be sued.

Esser-Z
Jun 3, 2012

Halloween Jack posted:

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I wonder if someone can build a Hulking Hurler that can throw a rock big enough to kill the Mortiverse. And conceive of a big enough rock.

Make it a species that doesn't age, give it enough levels to also get Cancer Mage, get it the dieases that gives +2 strength a day, get a faster time plane, and wait.

Green Intern
Dec 29, 2008

Loon, Crazy and Laughable

Esser-Z posted:

Make it a species that doesn't age, give it enough levels to also get Cancer Mage, get it the dieases that gives +2 strength a day, get a faster time plane, and wait.

The Corprus Disease method.

Esser-Z
Jun 3, 2012

Alternatively, you could just Polymorph Any Object your Hulking Hurler into that thing. It won't last very long, but it'll last long enough.

wdarkk
Oct 26, 2007

Friends: Protected
World: Saved
Crablettes: Eaten
Goad the DM until he adds a second Mortiverse to the encounter, then throw one at the other.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Plague of Hats posted:

poo poo, if they could spell correctly the magic would've worked and you'd have to buy their books.

Phew!

I think TSR did a similar thing when they rebranded their Devils and Demons in 2nd edition. Or when GW decided to call their demons "Daemons". The occult is still strong in the industry after all.

theironjef posted:



Even our System Mastery standard podcast needs to have a Halloween episode, so here's The World of Tales from the Crypt! Please pretend I put some puns here, I'm completely spent on those.

Man, the "Can't use any improvised weapon without training" is bonkers. No wonder this system never took off. Though the card deck sounds interesting in concept.

Night10194 posted:

Vermintide both continues to inspire and impede my attempt to review.

More WHFRP 2E, The Lores of Magic!

I find it pretty weird how there's no Lore of Ice (or at least no longer). This makes me a very sad Dark Omen player.

NGDBSS posted:

Luckily ENWorld isn't deleting its archives like WotC, so digging up a nine-year-old post isn't so hard. There's nothing quite like utterly silly and insane number porn for its own sake.

It's Neutral Evil. Time for some cosmic smiting!

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

Doresh posted:

I find it pretty weird how there's no Lore of Ice (or at least no longer). This makes me a very sad Dark Omen player.

When we get to the Kislev book, there is a ton of fluff for, specific careers for, and a full lore for Ice and it is mega-badass.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Doresh posted:

Man, the "Can't use any improvised weapon without training" is bonkers. No wonder this system never took off. Though the card deck sounds interesting in concept.
Masterbook is a pretty fiddly loving system derived from TORG, though thankfully not nearly as fiddly as TORG itself. The only thing it really has going for it is a unified action resolution chart that actually handles different kinds of damage and advantage/disadvantage in action scenes in a pretty elegant way. I might do a brief review of it on the way to reviewing one or two of the games that used it, but it's a pretty boring set of rules.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Doresh posted:

Man, the "Can't use any improvised weapon without training" is bonkers. No wonder this system never took off. Though the card deck sounds interesting in concept.

It's especially funny because that's a bolted on rule. If you were playing Masterbook core rules and you wanted to swing a chair at someone, your DM would just impose a penalty for non-proficiency and give it damage from one of the book's many hundreds of charts. But then you install Tales from the Crypt and all of a sudden you can't just pick stuff up and swing it around, because you've lost the ability to discern what stuff might be heavy or handheld. It's pretty great.

Personally, I just love the image of improvised weapons training. Like you show up to class and the teacher is just slowly shaking his head at some yellow-belt trying to brain his sparring partner with a plastic colander.

Halloween Jack posted:

Masterbook is a pretty fiddly loving system derived from TORG, though thankfully not nearly as fiddly as TORG itself. The only thing it really has going for it is a unified action resolution chart that actually handles different kinds of damage and advantage/disadvantage in action scenes in a pretty elegant way. I might do a brief review of it on the way to reviewing one or two of the games that used it, but it's a pretty boring set of rules.

I thought the card system was pretty interesting. In close view, it's not, but there's the seeds of good ideas in there. Plot alterations, big swingy changes to character motivation, in a game that was built to support that sort of thing the card mechanic could have been neat.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

theironjef posted:

It's especially funny because that's a bolted on rule. If you were playing Masterbook core rules and you wanted to swing a chair at someone, your DM would just impose a penalty for non-proficiency and give it damage from one of the book's many hundreds of charts. But then you install Tales from the Crypt and all of a sudden you can't just pick stuff up and swing it around, because you've lost the ability to discern what stuff might be heavy or handheld. It's pretty great.

Personally, I just love the image of improvised weapons training. Like you show up to class and the teacher is just slowly shaking his head at some yellow-belt trying to brain his sparring partner with a plastic colander.

Improvised weapons training should be a perk and not a requirement. There's a difference between hitting someone over the head with a broken chairleg and using a toothbrush Oldboy-style.

Grnegsnspm
Oct 20, 2003

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarian 2: Electric Boogaloo
In actuality, Improvised Weapons Training is just the ability to use improvised weapons without the penalties associated with them. So like if I had the melee skill and then picked up a rolling pin, I could still swing it at someone but it would do poo poo damage and I wouldn't be as accurate with it. Having the Improvised Weapons skill means when you pick up an improvised weapon, you get to use your full skill and it ends up doing more damage than it might otherwise. Like a screwdriver would normally be pretty poo poo damage but if you have the Improvised Weapon skill, it turns into the same damage as a dagger because you are so rad at using it. Given that the skill also provides you with a difficulty 8 (or average difficulty) roll to find an Improvised Weapon where ever you are, it's almost better to just put all your points in that rather than melee and just be the master of always looking like you're unarmed and then loving people up using the scenery.

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



wdarkk posted:

Goad the DM until he adds a second Mortiverse to the encounter, then throw one at the other.

yes

Green Intern
Dec 29, 2008

Loon, Crazy and Laughable

Grnegsnspm posted:

In actuality, Improvised Weapons Training is just the ability to use improvised weapons without the penalties associated with them. So like if I had the melee skill and then picked up a rolling pin, I could still swing it at someone but it would do poo poo damage and I wouldn't be as accurate with it. Having the Improvised Weapons skill means when you pick up an improvised weapon, you get to use your full skill and it ends up doing more damage than it might otherwise. Like a screwdriver would normally be pretty poo poo damage but if you have the Improvised Weapon skill, it turns into the same damage as a dagger because you are so rad at using it. Given that the skill also provides you with a difficulty 8 (or average difficulty) roll to find an Improvised Weapon where ever you are, it's almost better to just put all your points in that rather than melee and just be the master of always looking like you're unarmed and then loving people up using the scenery.

So it's the Jackie Chan skill.

Grnegsnspm
Oct 20, 2003

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarian 2: Electric Boogaloo

Green Intern posted:

So it's the Jackie Chan skill.

Pretty much. You just wander around and then when a fight breaks out you grab a shoe that now has the damage rating of a light mace and beat the crap out of your assailants. A ladder would have to count as a decent polearm or something.

Green Intern
Dec 29, 2008

Loon, Crazy and Laughable

Grnegsnspm posted:

Pretty much. You just wander around and then when a fight breaks out you grab a shoe that now has the damage rating of a light mace and beat the crap out of your assailants. A ladder would have to count as a decent polearm or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrRFzwPE0d4

It's clearly some kind of staff.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
Rifts Dimension Book 3: Phase World Sourcebook Part 13: Pew pew space combat



So, we have dealt with cruisers, which are very easily a match for anything else ever printed in the line to date plus a crap ton of additional support vehicles to make a mess out of combat. Now we shall address their even bigger siblings, the Battleships, Carriers, & Dreadnoughts. Gigantic space vehicles are a mainstay of space opera and so these are expected to be here, and they’re all as gigantic as advertised, some apparently clocking it at up to ‘two miles’ in length. Additionally, since space fighters are all VTOL, the role of ‘carrier’ is often mingled with the battleship, especially since the authors didn’t take relative sizes of any of these ships into account.

The first is the Protector Class of the CAF. It’s a flagship class. The CAF has eight active fleets with 1 or 2 of these, so there aren’t a lot of these around. This is in contrast to the ‘thousands’ of cruisers they have in service. In addition to its fighter complement, it has 2500 troops, 48 tanks, 60 IFVs, and 240 power armor or robot vehicle units.


this is so unlike Long’s usual style that it has to be from reference, but I don’t know what.

Its main body has 250,000 MDC. At this point you might as well wrap back around to ‘hit points’ as a unit of ship armor and complete the time loop, it’s not a number with much meaning in actual play. Its weapons are a lot weaker though, focus on those. Said weapons include the main guns, ‘40 inch laser cannons’, which can do 4d6x1,000 damage. They have a succession of smaller guns but only the G-Cannon railguns give small (fighter-sized) targets +2 to dodge. It can also fire 128 cruise missiles per round with 2560 in payload, and then there are long-range missiles which apparently can be reloaded from the cargo hold in ‘1d6 minutes’. It also carries 42 fighters and 48 Silverhawks (separate from the ground forces I guess), 6 Battleram robots, and 4 CAF assault shuttles. It is stuffed to the gills with things to roll a million dice for.

If you feel like the Protector’s complement wasn’t enough, you’re in luck. The Packmaster ‘carriership’ is here for you. About a mile long, they carry 500 fighters, 350 power armor/robot vehicle units, and an armored division with shuttle support. There are apparently 90 of these in service, total. Being basically a thin candy shell wrapped around a huge number of other crunchy little units, it only has 80,000 MDC and relatively limited weaponry. Its force comes from making your slowly starve to death at the table while you work on completing a single combat round. It carries supplies for a full year, two in a pinch.


packmaster is one mile long, hunter destroyer is 300 ft, i guess this is reasonably to scale?

So the CAF has some suitably large vessels to defend truth and liberty. The Empire has the Doombringer Dreadnought. It’s like, three miles long man! It doubles as a carrier with over 800 fighter ships and there’s 23 of these in Imperial service and 1 that was taken by the Free World Council that has permanently lost 10% of its MDC. Because the Empire is ever-paranoid of putting too much power in the hands of a single commander, these dreadnoughts are never attached to normal fleets, but instead are sent out alone, or with an escort commanded separately. I’m sure that causes no problems of organization for them. Also, anyone who wants to fight the Empire tends to aim straight for these huge, obnoxiously-shaped targets.


this was a two-page spread and i think a bit got cut out of the middle, this is the best i can do to merge it

The main body has 350,000 MDC--the guns on the Protector will do an average of 12,000 a round, which is impressive, but this thing can take a long-term beating from those. Its weapons are also a bit more beefy than the good guy counterparts but are still a lot more vulnerable than the body. Unless the ship combat rules change it up substantially, there is zero reason not to shoot your enemy’s guns off first.

The main guns of this ship do 8d4x1,000 damage. Yeah, shoot these off. They again have a succession of smaller guns, slightly fewer than the Protector. They also have cruise missiles, but only 200 total though they can supposedly also reload these from the cargo hold in ‘1d4 minutes’. In addition to guns and missiles, they have 900 loving fighters and 6 troop transports. So this is the end boss of the ship levels, have fun.

After this we get into the much-touted Ship Combat rules. I think these should have been before the ships, rather than after, but that’s Rifts for you. It acknowledges that the massive stats and numbers involved in capital ship fights require something besides regular resolution, and states that this is not meant to be a complex wargame, but a genre emulation of things like “Star Wars, Japanimation, and other cinematic settings.” There’s also a specific note that Robotech stuff has different stats and penalties because their stuff tends to be even larger still and the GM should either choose one system for both, or just use Phase World for Phase World and Robotech for Robotech and mash the two together, this could not cause problems.

Firstly, we talk a bit about the weapons systems on ships. The main guns are not meant to be used against single fighters. These weapons give very little in the way of targeting bonuses: +1 from the weapon systems skill and +2 from computer targeting. For another, it’s apparently very easy to see a giant laser coming towards you and get out of its way.

Volley attacks are addressed next. Since there are so many dang guns, it’s easier to roll them as single volleys (which is also ‘realistic’, it says.) which hit or miss as a group. I feel like a little more granularity would be good without needing to model each individual gun. Then, you roll the damage for one blast and multiply it to avoid rolling handfuls of d6s or whatever. Another way is to take the maximum damage and apply 60% of the total. And of course, if the damage involved would destroy a ship no matter what, just destroy it, skip the rolling.

Also, under the volley rules, we learn how many attacks per round most of these ship guns get: one. It’s good to have this stated somewhere, since it wasn’t entirely clear if it was based on the gunner (as fighter weapons are) or not. For some reason, you also can’t do more volleys per melee than ‘the total number of weapon systems divided by three’. :shrug:

Targets larger than 400 ft give +3 to hit with big guns. Then there’s a table listing by size that ranges from +11 to hit (20,000 ft or larger) down to -12 (man-sized or smaller) with energy weapons. Also, all entities smaller than 150 ft gain an automatic dodge against ‘large’ weapons, though the cutoff for that is not explained.

Large vessels also cannot really fatdodge very effectively. They can make a normal dodge roll (Do they spend an attack? Who has to do that? The pilot(s)? Is that separate from the gunners?) and if they succeed they negate one-half of the damage by maneuvering to take a glancing blow. Given the bonuses to hit large ships, it seems unlikely there’d be much successful dodging going on. Also, bonuses to dodge traditionally come from physical skills which...seem less applicable here, aside from it not being clear who’s doing the rolling.


i feel like this would be improved if the robot were holding a guitar instead of a gun

Missile combat is next. This is an important inclusion since missiles are an overwhelming alpha strike for a lot of vehicles. Missiles cannot be dodged or maneuvered against since they’ll just loop back around for another go, they have to be shot down by point defenses. Nevermind ECM or whatever, space people don’t use that.

Missiles get their own table with +14 to hit 10,000 ft or larger down to +3 for ships as teeny as 200ft, +5 if the missile is a ‘smart bomb’. (No missiles are listed as being smart bombs.) 200 ft or smaller ships simply cannot be hit by a volley of ten or more missiles, unless again it is a ‘smart bomb’ or point-defense system like mini missiles. But 9 is okay? Okay.

Another tactic described is the Random Missile Assault, where a bunch of guided missiles are just launched and their targeting systems figure out the rest. This requires at least 10 missiles to be fired at once, and 1d4 per ‘10 or 20’ will home in on each single target. The example is a barrage of 40 missiles at 6 Silverhawks; 2d4 is rolled for each, giving 2 on the first, 6 on the second and third, 8 on the unlucky fourth, and 4 and 3 for the last two. That accounts for 29 missiles, the other 11 are considered ‘stray’. The Silverhawks can then try to dodge or shoot down the missiles as normal, this seems like a waste of a lot of missiles when it doesn’t cost anything to target them individually.

Missiles also have an optional rule against forcefields of large ships: Since these vessels are so large, their fields are 20 to 40 feet clear of the hull, which means that even if a missile strike defeats the field the hull is left relatively undamaged. Ships 200 ft and smaller don’t get this benefit. If a strike penetrates a field, divide the damage by ten, and this does apply to the whole volley rather than just individual missiles. This rule lets forcefields reduce the immense alpha-striking capability of missiles against larger ships quite a bit.


fire carefully calculated volley of torpedoes!

Now we get to variable force fields and how they recharge. Finally! A normally functioning ship can restore about 5% of its field per round--if you are using this with the missile rule above that just about negates the value of missiles entirely since they just splat out the field each round unless you shoot it with something else first. If the field is knocked down, it doesn’t regen till the next round.

Crew damage is another consideration. The bridge of the Enterprise must shake. Fighters use the Impact Rule in Rifts. Crew in ships under 1,000 tons have a cumulative 10% chance per round of taking 1d6 SDC for every 100 MDC that directly impacts the hull. 1,000 to 10,000 ton ships do this at 500 MDC, and the largest at 1,000. There’s no mention of killing crew by destroying the bridge which is suggested in the damage headings on the larger ship classes but doing that still reduces the ship’s responsiveness overall.

Lastly, there’s an optional “Random Damage and Effects” table. These are various bad things that can go wrong. That’s all fine but there’s no indication of when you should use this. When a ship takes a certain percentage of its total hull capacity? When the enemy crits? When they fumble a dodge? Fail a piloting skill check? Just kidding, skill checks are never specifically called for.

Those the entirety of the starship combat rules. They’re extremely barebones and some of them are just the common sense basic solutions that a lot of tables will come up with to preserve sanity (roll a few dice and multiply, etc) in the face of hundreds of combat entities. These rules are slightly better than the fighter combat rules but there’s still a lot of stuff unexplained, like how many attacks per round smaller weapon systems are supposed to get, how many dodges ships can attempt, what qualifies as a ‘large’ weapon for hitting purposes and when you are supposed to use their random damage table.

The Sourcebook ends there, fairly abruptly, leading to the experience tables and in-house promos. There’s some helpful material in this book if you’re going to run Phase World, and some dross. The endless listings of ships and weapons systems were really starting to make my eyes glaze over but I know some people really get into that kind of thing. It’s just that a lot of the stats are so useless. But anyway, at least they listed out some big ships if you’re into that kind of thing. The fact that these ships work on a completely new scale from anything else in the line is a separate problem, but a very Palladium-ish one. Previously we did some blank staring at the immense MDC numbers for gods, now we have battleships with even more--and much more massive damage capacity. It’s just more crazy on the pile that is the Megaversal system.

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

theironjef posted:

In order to review Witch Girls, I had to buy a pdf of it off Drivethru. Then I read it and realized it had never been edited by anyone ever. Even the logo had misspellings in it. We made great and happy light of this on the show.

Then it came to pass that because I bought the drat book, I'm on the Witch Girls mailing list. So hey, here's an email about them:

Hang on, I thought I sent you WGA together with Noumenon. Did you end up buying one of the supplements or something?

Or does DTRPG add the recipent's e-mail address to the customer register when you buy an item as a gift? That could be.. awkward.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
I wanted to say there was a rule in the corebook that said 'all missiles of X type are smartbombs', but instead it only says 'these specific types of LRMs are available as smartbombs'. So whee.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

occamsnailfile posted:

Rifts Dimension Book 3: Phase World Sourcebook Part 13: Pew pew space combat


i feel like this would be improved if the robot were holding a guitar instead of a gun

This is copied from Mutants in Orbit, and ends up being misplaced, since Phase World doesn't have glitter boys like the one pictured here, IIRC. But I guess one fell through a rift along with all the earthly spacecraft here. Rifts!

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

hyphz posted:

Hang on, I thought I sent you WGA together with Noumenon. Did you end up buying one of the supplements or something?

Or does DTRPG add the recipent's e-mail address to the customer register when you buy an item as a gift? That could be.. awkward.

You're right, you did! Sorry about that! I haven't actually bought much on drivethruRPG, just second copies of some books when we have had to read and travel. I'm pretty sure the solution is the second one, since gift recipients have to register to access their library of content. It's not an issue, just adds fun stuff to the promotions tab, especially in this case.

The Vosgian Beast
Aug 13, 2011

Business is slow

theironjef posted:



Even our System Mastery standard podcast needs to have a Halloween episode, so here's The World of Tales from the Crypt! Please pretend I put some puns here, I'm completely spent on those.

I do think the shell system is kind of cool. You can do stuff like "Before you were in a spooky circus, but now you're in a spooky swamp" and have an easy transition. It also forces your characters to figure out a situation where they don't even know what role they're inhabiting yet, which could be cool. You and your party members get put into some shells, and then it turns out one of you is supposed to be the cult executioner.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

The Vosgian Beast posted:

I do think the shell system is kind of cool. You can do stuff like "Before you were in a spooky circus, but now you're in a spooky swamp" and have an easy transition. It also forces your characters to figure out a situation where they don't even know what role they're inhabiting yet, which could be cool. You and your party members get put into some shells, and then it turns out one of you is supposed to be the cult executioner.
One of the suggested scenarios has the characters trapped in an elevator. Then the Cryptkeeper whispers into their heads "By the way, one of you is a werewolf."


The main problem with the shell system is that it does not in any way allow you to keep to the spirit of the show, which pretty much demands one-shots.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Oct 28, 2015

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Night10194 posted:

When we get to the Kislev book, there is a ton of fluff for, specific careers for, and a full lore for Ice and it is mega-badass.

Gotta keep that in mind. There's so many WFRP2e books, I barely know where to start.

theironjef posted:

Personally, I just love the image of improvised weapons training. Like you show up to class and the teacher is just slowly shaking his head at some yellow-belt trying to brain his sparring partner with a plastic colander.

And I have the image of an improvised weapons master running around the kitchen and complaining about how the knives aren't improvised enough.

Halloween Jack posted:

Masterbook is a pretty fiddly loving system derived from TORG, though thankfully not nearly as fiddly as TORG itself. The only thing it really has going for it is a unified action resolution chart that actually handles different kinds of damage and advantage/disadvantage in action scenes in a pretty elegant way. I might do a brief review of it on the way to reviewing one or two of the games that used it, but it's a pretty boring set of rules.

Well if anything, talking about the games' setting could be interesting.

occamsnailfile posted:


this is so unlike Long’s usual style that it has to be from reference, but I don’t know what.

A pointy Star Destroyer with (relatively) tiny warp nacelles. I've got nothing.

Seeing how Palladium is no stranger to using different damage scales, would it have killed the writers of Palladium to come up with a scale above Mega Damage for a slight chance to actually use these ships without going insane?

quote:


i feel like this would be improved if the robot were holding a guitar instead of a gun

Did Robotech or at least Palladium ever make it to Macross 7?

And what is that... thing between the robot's legs? Looks like a weird cross between a satellite, a WWI fighter plane and a valve o_O

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Doresh posted:

And what is that... thing between the robot's legs? Looks like a weird cross between a satellite, a WWI fighter plane and a valve o_O

I believe those are the laser death satellites that kept people from Rifts Earth out of space. There's another one in the background.

The Vosgian Beast
Aug 13, 2011

Business is slow

Halloween Jack posted:

One of the suggested scenarios has the characters trapped in an elevator. Then the Cryptkeeper whispers into their heads "By the way, one of you is a werewolf."


The main problem with the shell system is that it does not in any way allow you to keep to the spirit of the show, which pretty much demands one-shots.

Tonight I learned M. Night Shyamalan is a thief.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015
I wonder if this shell system could work in D&D.

"Oh, and by the way. One of you is a quadratic wizard, the rest are linear fighters!"

theironjef posted:

I believe those are the laser death satellites that kept people from Rifts Earth out of space. There's another one in the background.

So those are the fabled satellites that somehow keep all that MDC down on Earth. Intriguing.

Grnegsnspm
Oct 20, 2003

This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarian 2: Electric Boogaloo
Due to my overwhelming love of all things Quantum Leap, I was obviously going to be on board with Tales from the Crypt's shell system. I just wish they had actually codified that that was how you had to play so they could further change things to incorporate that. Like your character gets 34 stat points instead of 68 because you only need to worry about your mental stats and taking away certain Advantages and Compensations that do literally nothing when you are jumping from body to body but maybe add in some new ones. Maybe a scaling Advantage that when you jump into someone's body you can access some of their memories/knowledge and the higher the column of Advantage, the more you can access. As is, it was a really fun idea that got slapped onto a system and then never developed.

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

theironjef posted:

You're right, you did! Sorry about that! I haven't actually bought much on drivethruRPG, just second copies of some books when we have had to read and travel. I'm pretty sure the solution is the second one, since gift recipients have to register to access their library of content. It's not an issue, just adds fun stuff to the promotions tab, especially in this case.

Well, I just got their daily promotion. It's another Halloween special, which was the dreadful Harquinli book last time. This time it's a book enhancing the magic rules. It focuses on one particular kind of spell. You have one guess what type that is. http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/154683/The-Principia-Permutationis

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

theironjef posted:

I believe those are the laser death satellites that kept people from Rifts Earth out of space. There's another one in the background.

That would be it. Mostly they rely on a debris field to shred anything hitting orbit at escape velocity, though.

I can't help but think the best way to do Tales From the Crypt would just be a horror-themed variant of Once Upon a Time where players just take up the roles of the Crypt-Keeper, Vault-Keeper, Old Witch, or other GhouLunatics (apparently that's their collective name). It wouldn't be an RPG anymore, but that's probably no loss from the available evidence.

Lynx Winters
May 1, 2003

Borderlawns: The Treehouse of Pandora

Grnegsnspm posted:

Due to my overwhelming love of all things Quantum Leap, I was obviously going to be on board with Tales from the Crypt's shell system. I just wish they had actually codified that that was how you had to play so they could further change things to incorporate that. Like your character gets 34 stat points instead of 68 because you only need to worry about your mental stats and taking away certain Advantages and Compensations that do literally nothing when you are jumping from body to body but maybe add in some new ones. Maybe a scaling Advantage that when you jump into someone's body you can access some of their memories/knowledge and the higher the column of Advantage, the more you can access. As is, it was a really fun idea that got slapped onto a system and then never developed.

The second edition of Hong Kong Action Theater was vaguely similar. If that game the players made their Actors that they played as from story to story, and their stats represented things they usually take with them into every movie, like Jackie Chan would have Improvised Weapons Training because he's gonna use it in every single movie he's in. At the start of each movie, the players would bid on the Role they want their actor to portray. The Roles for each story were basically a bunch of perks, extra skills, merits/flaws, etc that went on top of your actor's base stats, but only for that story. So if your actor had Martial Arts 2 and their role had Martial Arts 2 then for that story they have Martial Arts 4. If a role had some perk like Disposable Sidekick then you knew your buddy Sean Bean wasn't going to make it to the credits, but if an actor has the same perk then they pretty much get a Sean Bean buddy in every movie. Kind of a neat system, but then it was stapled onto Tri-Stat so whoops.

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Lynx Winters posted:

The second edition of Hong Kong Action Theater was vaguely similar. If that game the players made their Actors that they played as from story to story, and their stats represented things they usually take with them into every movie, like Jackie Chan would have Improvised Weapons Training because he's gonna use it in every single movie he's in. At the start of each movie, the players would bid on the Role they want their actor to portray. The Roles for each story were basically a bunch of perks, extra skills, merits/flaws, etc that went on top of your actor's base stats, but only for that story. So if your actor had Martial Arts 2 and their role had Martial Arts 2 then for that story they have Martial Arts 4. If a role had some perk like Disposable Sidekick then you knew your buddy Sean Bean wasn't going to make it to the credits, but if an actor has the same perk then they pretty much get a Sean Bean buddy in every movie. Kind of a neat system, but then it was stapled onto Tri-Stat so whoops.

Oh, I remember that book. The one snag was that the roles were defined in the story/movie/adventure/whatever and because of the bidding system, it was possible you'd lose the auction and end up with a completely mismatched role. Even in the starting scenario make your big buff strongman actor, lose the role auction and end up as a kung-fu ballerina with now barely-average stats in Strength and Agility because the role and actor didn't stack anywhere.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine

hyphz posted:

Oh, I remember that book. The one snag was that the roles were defined in the story/movie/adventure/whatever and because of the bidding system, it was possible you'd lose the auction and end up with a completely mismatched role. Even in the starting scenario make your big buff strongman actor, lose the role auction and end up as a kung-fu ballerina with now barely-average stats in Strength and Agility because the role and actor didn't stack anywhere.

This is the worst because the idea of the 6'5 Linebacker Ballerina is loving stellar.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

hyphz posted:

Oh, I remember that book. The one snag was that the roles were defined in the story/movie/adventure/whatever and because of the bidding system, it was possible you'd lose the auction and end up with a completely mismatched role. Even in the starting scenario make your big buff strongman actor, lose the role auction and end up as a kung-fu ballerina
If a game can result in accidentally playing out The Tuxedo, you definitely want to reexamine the design.

Capfalcon
Apr 6, 2012

No Boots on the Ground,
Puny Mortals!

Halloween Jack posted:

If a game can result in accidentally playing out The Tuxedo, you definitely want to reexamine the design.

...So you can figure out where you went so right?

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Alaois
Feb 7, 2012

Kurieg posted:

I may be a little harsh on him, but it's mostly because of his absolute refusal to accept criticism of any kind, constructive or otherwise. An art teacher tweeted at him with some genuine advice on how to avoid burning himself out, and Diaz's response was to Dox him and point out that the critic had been fired from his previous job and therefore didn't know what he was talking about. He doesn't want help but he absolutely adores talking about how much he needs it.

Yo this is from like fuckin 8 pages back or so, but I'm pretty sure you're talking about me, and you're vastly overstating what happened. Diaz put out a stupid "weh my art sucks everyone compliment and validate me" pity party tweet, I thought it'd be funny to respond with actual criticism, he threw a hissy fit and blocked me, but not before screencapping my tweet to complain about it for another 2 tweets. It was one of his followers who decided I was an art teacher(???????????? I am the furthest thing from an art teacher you can find) and nobody doxxed me.

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