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Apr 10, 2016 00:58
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Dammit Who? posted:we must remember our true heroes Lmao.
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Apr 10, 2016 01:01
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Ferrinus was arguing with Holden twelve years ago? Sounds like this thread has finally delivered.
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Apr 10, 2016 01:21
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Remember, if your game doesn't inspire dozens of pages arguing about a single chunk of rules, it's not a real game.
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Apr 10, 2016 02:04
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Remember, if your game doesn't inspire dozens of pages arguing about a single chunk of rules, it's not a real game.
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Apr 10, 2016 02:13
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:And if you learn any lessons from those arguments when you're in charge of the game later, you aren't a real designer. Could be worse. They could've written Beast.
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Apr 10, 2016 02:59
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Bedlamdan posted:Could be worse. They could've written Beast.  Please don't remind me of Beast's existence.
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Apr 10, 2016 03:40
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MonsieurChoc posted:
I have a horrible suspicion that Beast was a stealth dry-run of 3E Lunars; whether it was or wasn't, I hope the Exalted devs take note of it as an object lesson in what not to do there.
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Apr 10, 2016 03:45
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Thesaurasaurus posted:I have a horrible suspicion that Beast was a stealth dry-run of 3E Lunars; whether it was or wasn't, I hope the Exalted devs take note of it as an object lesson in what not to do there. I don't think the problems with Lunars and Beast are really that similar. Beast ran aground because the authors started with the idea of heroic Beasts versus beastly Heroes, and then weren't willing to start over from the foundations when people said "ugh, these Beasts are awful and I support the desire of Heroes to kill them." I'm not going to list the long history of what was wrong with Lunars, but given that the goal of the Silver Pact in 3e is more or less "let's burn civilization to the ground until there's nothing left for the Realm to hit us with but pointy sticks", I don't think they're in danger of becoming the Misunderstood Secret Heroes Except The Mean Old Sidereals Keep Sending Hit Squads Because Their Lives Are Shriveled And Empty.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:15
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Beast is more like what you'd get if you tried to write Infernals as the misunderstood, downtrodden protagonists without actually changing anything about their existing writeup.
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Apr 10, 2016 04:25
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Beast is more like what you'd get if you tried to write Infernals as the misunderstood, downtrodden protagonists without actually changing anything about their existing writeup. Yeah. Infernals might have been somewhat like Beast if the back half took the same approach as the front half and studiously ignored questions like "so why would I want to hand the world over to these lunatics?"
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Apr 10, 2016 04:42
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Rand Brittain posted:I don't think the problems with Lunars and Beast are really that similar. Aww gently caress. I loved the 2E take on Lunars with the Thousand Streams River. 
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Apr 10, 2016 05:05
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MonsieurChoc posted:Aww gently caress. I loved the 2E take on Lunars with the Thousand Streams River. The Thousand Streams River is actually pretty compatible with what I've read of the 3E Lunars. It's just the default assumption is that most Lunars that build up civilizations will being doing so for more utilitarian or pragmatic reasons, rather than out of utopian vision.
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Apr 10, 2016 05:16
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Schwarzwald posted:The Thousand Streams River is actually pretty compatible with what I've read of the 3E Lunars. The fact that Lunars didn't generally just have a power arc which terminated in "Yeah, you can just do anything" also seemed to ground the struggle without taking away the weird surreal empowerment factor.
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Apr 10, 2016 05:23
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Bedlamdan posted:I mean, the guy who said it played Shadowrun 5E before, and the one who agreed runs d20 modern, so I guess in comparison? I dunno. Probably a good comparison, SR5's rules are poo poo.
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Apr 10, 2016 05:52
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MonsieurChoc posted:Aww gently caress. I loved the 2E take on Lunars with the Thousand Streams River. So you have the 1e "We are insane rape barbarians that put pipe to puppies and have our hordes of beastmen monsters ready to tear down civilization!", which you can only respond to with "lol you used to run this bitch now you are a bitch and are threatening me with your puppies, you are adorable.". 2e is "We are going to experiment on tons of civilizations to see which ones work and which ones don't in order to find a way to give meaning to our pointless existence", which at least bumps them up to "The world is slowly dying and your grand plan is to do nothing while taking notes? Stop loving animals and start building an aqueduct or something you colossal losers!". There really isn't a lot of "epic" there. You have hundreds of them hiding in the middle of nowhere, unable to even protect their own castes, just sort of passively letting the Sidereals do whatever they want and getting bossed around by hordes of DBs. And that's what they basically have to be, because the reality is they are Celestial Exalted and nobody really likes the Bronze Faction in Yu-Shan all that much. If Lunars just decided to storm that bitch en masse and slaughter the enemy Sidereals, who would care? Most Sidereals don't even like the Bronze Faction. Of course if they do that, there's no setting for the Solars to step into. And it's the Solar's game [In many senses], everyone else just plays with it from time to time. So no matter what motivation you slap on Lunars, they can't be very good at it. There is no reason hundreds of beings of their power level shouldn't be able to accomplish their goal, or at least vast swaths of it. If they want to take their vast knowledge of technology and essence use and the mysteries of the universe and use it to have sex with a capybara and lead around a bunch of spastics with bone axes, whatever, they should totally have burnt a Direction to the ground. If they want to test out various civilizations and see how they work, well, that's a stupid idea but they should be able to effortlessly influence every single civilization on the planet. They don't burn down the East or utterly control the West because then you can't have a game where the Solars come back to fix [Or destroy utterly] everything that's left. And nothing they do really matters to the Solars coming back or what they do going forward, because in the face of the Solars nothing really matters. This leaves you with an entire sub-section of Celestial Exalted that just sort of spend their entire existence doing sweet gently caress all, and then you are supposed to pretend that after someone unpauses history that *now* they are cool and matter. You have Elders filled with rage that do nothing, moderates that let 'people' like Ma-Ha-Suchi and Raksi by because in spite of all the rape gangs and baby eating they have racoon molesting tenure or something, and centuries of effort toward an end no more functional than any other large cities and nations in the rest of the setting. Lunars are basically hobbled in every conceivable way that one could be to keep them from being cool in their setting, I don't know if anyone will ever be able to entirely walk back their irrelevance. e: Also their power niche just isn't that interesting in comparison to the others. Mulva fucked around with this message at 06:06 on Apr 10, 2016 |
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Apr 10, 2016 06:01
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2E was already a step in the right direction, I feel, with many civs being presented as successful TSR projects (Halta being the big one). Also the big reason for the hands off approach of te TSR was that they wanted to create a society that didn't need the Exalted to keep going, because the end of the First Age had shown that that doesn't work. Kinda pointless to take over when you're trying to do the opposite.
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Apr 10, 2016 06:21
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I also got the feeling that the whole project was more like "unifying threads of people comparing notes and cooperating or keeping out of each other's ways" rather than "the unified dictate of Lunar High Command." So even if it was like, thirty Lunars actually doing that poo poo full time, and another thirty helping out periodically, mostly in the fringelands of Creation and prone to getting either killed or driven into extreme paranoid caution - I can see that not making a vast dramatic impact. Of course then once Solars start rocking the boat a lot of them can pop up too. Etc. Examining it, I think a lot of why I'm fond of Lunars is because they don't have an apparatus of oppression backing them up, like, collectively, the way every other major splat did. There wasn't a heavenly conspiracy, an Empire, or the Divine Booking Mandate to Push Solar Reigns backing them up.
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Apr 10, 2016 06:38
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TSR is a perfectly fine idea. It is more flexible than 'barbarian idiots' angle not to mention less culturally insulting. I liked that you could either go full 'territorial werebeast' with it and just spend a lot of time cultivating a small group of mortals or you could do more of a classical nation building thing with it. The problem with the 2E TSR wasn't the idea, it's just that Lunars, in all their time, hadn't really done anything yet.
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Apr 10, 2016 06:39
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The biggest issue is that one Solar with a few Crafts charms could effectively pull off the TSR in a month by literally creating an ideal area, civilization, and people from the Wyld.
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Apr 10, 2016 07:40
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MonsieurChoc posted:2E was already a step in the right direction, I feel, with many civs being presented as successful TSR projects (Halta being the big one). My problem with the Thousand Streams River is that the most successful Lunar projects, like Halta and the Haslanti League, already existed as of 1E. So stuff like airships and san-beasts weren't legitimate developments of a nation, but rather only happened because the Lunars were playing puppet-master. Stuff like Chiaroscuro was better, but for the most part the TSR just took what already existed and gave Lunars the credit instead.
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Apr 10, 2016 15:01
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The real irony is how a project to uplift mortals retrospectively made mortals less capable.
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Apr 10, 2016 18:43
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Is there any place that condenses all of 2.5 into one place without needing to know to ignore poo poo and replace other poo poo? Just curious.
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Apr 13, 2016 19:15
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Covok posted:Is there any place that condenses all of 2.5 into one place without needing to know to ignore poo poo and replace other poo poo? Just curious. Just play 3rd edition. There is no hope of salvaging, condensing or clarifying the terrible mess that is 2e, even 2.5. Nothing you could possibly gain reading 2e stuff is worth it.
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Apr 13, 2016 19:53
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Kaza42 posted:Just play 3rd edition. There is no hope of salvaging, condensing or clarifying the terrible mess that is 2e, even 2.5. Nothing you could possibly gain reading 2e stuff is worth it. I neither own nor can own 3E at the moment.
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Apr 13, 2016 19:57
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Well, some of the setting books are good. Otherwise yeah gently caress 2e.
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Apr 13, 2016 19:59
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Covok posted:I neither own nor can own 3E at the moment. 2.5 is Not Worth It. Find the leak,  the backer pdf, or just play something - anything - else. 2.5 is bad, and there is no way to salvage it, let alone a condensed easy to use tool to do so.
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Apr 13, 2016 20:00
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As far as I know, there's no integrated version of Exalted 2.5, which is too bad, because cross-reference building between the corebook, Ink Monkeys, Glories of the Most High, and Scroll of Errata just to make a solar may as well have been a Great Curse to bedevil Exalted players.
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Apr 13, 2016 20:10
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SunAndSpring posted:Well, some of the setting books are good. Otherwise yeah gently caress 2e. I dunno. While the mechanics of 2.x are a garbage fire, there's a lot of cool mechanical ideas. Infernals is one of the best for this and in my mind is the best book in the line ideas-wise if you take an X-acto knife and remove all of Chapter 2, then burn it. It is a chapter from another, altogether worse book which some idiot published in the middle of a pretty cool book.
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Apr 13, 2016 20:23
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Kaza42 posted:2.5 is Not Worth It. Find the leak, So, is 3E a good game, according to goon-census?
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Apr 13, 2016 21:28
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I've had fun times gming and playing. Hop in!
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Apr 13, 2016 21:37
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Covok posted:So, is 3E a good game, according to goon-census? 3E is a game, which is far more than can be said for earlier editions.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:37
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The 2e hate is pretty exaggerated here. The game had problems but it wasn't any more unplayable than any other crunch-heavy game of its era.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:44
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If you ask me, the main black mark against 2E's playability is the importance of multiattack flurries to combat.
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Apr 13, 2016 21:54
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cheetah7071 posted:The 2e hate is pretty exaggerated here. The game had problems but it wasn't any more unplayable than any other crunch-heavy game of its era. Running 2e broke me. Do not play 2e.
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Apr 13, 2016 22:56
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Ferrinus posted:If you ask me, the main black mark against 2E's playability is the importance of multiattack flurries to combat. I mean, I played in a couple of campaigns that lasted over a year, based pretty much on the setting alone; combat was a complete poo poo show. Do not play 2E, or 2.5E. It sounds like they're going to have a book for you to order in a couple of months, and in the meantime, you can just 3E. It isn't perfect, but it is SO MUCH BETTER than 2E or the Scroll of Errata.
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Apr 13, 2016 22:58
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cheetah7071 posted:The 2e hate is pretty exaggerated here. The game had problems but it wasn't any more unplayable than any other crunch-heavy game of its era. I liked it at the time but I cant honestly go back
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Apr 13, 2016 23:01
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Paranoia Combat/Mote Attrition was the worst aspect of 2E, among many other somewhat less worse aspects. You had to adhere to a specific metagame that would go so veeeery slowly, round by round. Not to mention tick combat, copy-pasted 1E charms that flat out do not function in 2E, charms that reference subsystems that do not actually exist in the book, and non-sensical rulings like how perfect defenses can't be used against Sorcery according to the dev team at the time because they did not grasp "blocks anything, even if it's otherwise unblockable." 2.5 ameliorated some of these issues but didn't make what was there super-enjoyable anyways. Bedlamdan fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Apr 13, 2016 |
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Apr 13, 2016 23:07
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cheetah7071 posted:The 2e hate is pretty exaggerated here. The game had problems but it wasn't any more unplayable than any other crunch-heavy game of its era. In order for 2E to not break down it requires a group where both the GM and players mark off certain bits of the optimal way to do things and don't go there. 2E is in many ways an utterly terrible game, and we shouldn't lose sight of that fact, even for those of us who sincerely enjoyed playing it.
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Apr 13, 2016 23:12
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Covok posted:So, is 3E a good game, according to goon-census?
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Apr 13, 2016 23:13
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