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.
 
Maxwell Lord
Dec 12, 2008

I am drowning.
There is no sign of land.
You are coming down with me, hand in unlovable hand.

And I hope you die.

I hope we both die.


:smith:

Grimey Drawer
To be fair, it's not like best-selling authors or top filmmakers think in terms of "what do the critics think I should do?" But to be a good artist you have to have a level of self scrutiny and perfectionism that means you're not easily satisfied with your own stuff, so you refine and rework it just to meet your own standards before anyone else even gets a look at it.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Monathin
Sep 1, 2011

?????????
?

if I ever get done with Exalted, I'll probably do a F&F Review on 13th Age. I like examining the classes, and I have a few biases I want to take out on it (like the lackluster Paladin class being like 60% Cleric)

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?
I wish I knew OSR, I'd love a rundown of which retroclones were good and in what ways. How they differ, what their unique draws are, etc. Right now, the only one I have more than a passing knowledge of is Beyond the Wall, but just staring at a huge list of them doesn't really tell much.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Poison Mushroom posted:

I wish I knew OSR, I'd love a rundown of which retroclones were good and in what ways. How they differ, what their unique draws are, etc. Right now, the only one I have more than a passing knowledge of is Beyond the Wall, but just staring at a huge list of them doesn't really tell much.

There is an old school gaming/retroclone thread you could ask around in.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

The single biggest flaw in 13th Age is the idea of 'some classes will be complex, some simple' as a design goal. It's just not a good idea at heart, because it translates into 'some classes will have interesting things to do, some will not.' It's still a really good replacement for d20, though, and definitely very playable and pretty easy to run.

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?

Night10194 posted:

The single biggest flaw in 13th Age is the idea of 'some classes will be complex, some simple' as a design goal. It's just not a good idea at heart, because it translates into 'some classes will have interesting things to do, some will not.' It's still a really good replacement for d20, though, and definitely very playable and pretty easy to run.
Ideally, every class or concept would have some simple options and some complex options, so you wouldn't be shoehorned into or out of certain roles based on your preferences, and they'd be at least roughly balanced.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
Probation
Can't post for 12 hours!
I'm not convinced that "Dumb babby class for Timmy!" is anything any sentient being in the history of the universe has ever actually wanted or needed.

Monathin
Sep 1, 2011

?????????
?

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm not convinced that "Dumb babby class for Timmy!" is anything any sentient being in the history of the universe has ever actually wanted or needed.

Sometimes you want to run a game for friends who don't/rarely tabletop, and having more simple options is better for getting people -into- the game.

Ultiville
Jan 14, 2005

The law protects no one unless it binds everyone, binds no one unless it protects everyone.

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm not convinced that "Dumb babby class for Timmy!" is anything any sentient being in the history of the universe has ever actually wanted or needed.

Not in so many words, but it's a primarily social hobby for some and I have met players who genuinely like being able to focus on story and socializing over mechanics. "I hit him" is not my speed but it is the speed of some players.

The question is how to make that interesting, or if your game just isn't for those players.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Maxwell Lord posted:

To be fair, it's not like best-selling authors or top filmmakers think in terms of "what do the critics think I should do?" But to be a good artist you have to have a level of self scrutiny and perfectionism that means you're not easily satisfied with your own stuff, so you refine and rework it just to meet your own standards before anyone else even gets a look at it.

The big difference is that the TRPG industry is so small and incestuous that unlike novels or movies, you're more likely than not to run into a given creator at any given point if you regularly attend conventions.

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread. Shame, Despair, Solitude! These had been her teachers, stern and wild ones, and they had made her strong, but taught her much amiss.
Clapping Larry

Nancy_Noxious posted:

If you people want to REALLY be consistent about warning people about horrible games through FF reviews, you should always include a link to the FF of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook after EACH post about the Beginners Box (someones first RPG should not be Pathfinder) and the Adventure Paths (themes might make that pile of poo poo seem nicer than it really is).

You say drivethru Beast reviews are misleading. Well, latest posts about Pathfinder on this thread have been trying to sell it as a good, not-lovely game as well, which seems just as dishonest.

Pathfinder is a game. Beast is a crime scene in training.

Crasical
Apr 22, 2014

GG!*
*GET GOOD

These are :gonk: but in a good way?

Honestly I'm not much for horror but these gave me a pleasant chill.

Asimo
Sep 23, 2007


Alien Rope Burn posted:

I don't get why people hate on 13th Age, so much, probably because it got propped up as a savior initially. And then when it turned it had actual flaws, people lost their poo poo because they felt betrayed, somehow. Like I said, I don't get it.
I don't really hate the game, it's fine for what it does, but I do have a big issue with a certain part of the fandom for it who were all "it's the new D&D 4e!" before its release despite the fact the game has literally nothing in common mechanically with 4e beyond the usual fantasy elf stuff. 13A is a somewhat loose and narrative game, while 4e was a fairly tightly designed and tactically heavy combat game.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Asimo posted:

I don't really hate the game, it's fine for what it does, but I do have a big issue with a certain part of the fandom for it who were all "it's the new D&D 4e!" before its release despite the fact the game has literally nothing in common mechanically with 4e beyond the usual fantasy elf stuff. 13A is a somewhat loose and narrative game, while 4e was a fairly tightly designed and tactically heavy combat game.

I don't hate 13th Age either, I'm just not sure why I'd want to play it over virtually any other game. If I want tactical crunch I'd rather play 4E or Strike-obligatory-exclamation-point. If I want something freewheeling I'd probably go with Fate. Something more abstract but still with a pleasing amount of crunch? Spellbound Kingdoms looks like it fits the bill.

13th Age is a d20 elf-and-dwarf game in a market absolutely saturated with them, and after playing it I can't identify anything it does notably better than any of those other options, and it also makes some of the same old mistakes that characterise d20 games. I mean, we're talking about a game that literally gave Fighters fewer skill points "for tradition's sake" in the earliest draft.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
I like 13A's fluff, but its class design has always frustrated me and there are places where you can see the seams straining because the designers come from very different schools of play.

I'd probably salvage the concept of Icons and the One Unique Thing for other games, along with the living dungeons and similar silliness, and borrow that incrementing combat bonus system if I was ever shanghaied into playing D&D again.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

I always found 13A's fluff so bad that I never bothered running in the Dragon Empire except as a joke campaign. And I've never quite gotten the praise for Icons and One Unique Thing because they have almost nothing to do with the mechanical meat of the game and OUT is basically just a Feng Shui melodramatic hook/character elevator pitch.

unzealous
Mar 24, 2009

Die, Die, DIE!

Crasical posted:

These are :gonk: but in a good way?

Honestly I'm not much for horror but these gave me a pleasant chill.

Honestly this quote from Stephen King is very insightful as to how horror should be handled in media.

Stephen King posted:

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...

The third is arguably the hardest one to pull off but the most effective in terms of atmosphere.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Ultiville posted:

Not in so many words, but it's a primarily social hobby for some and I have met players who genuinely like being able to focus on story and socializing over mechanics. "I hit him" is not my speed but it is the speed of some players.

The question is how to make that interesting, or if your game just isn't for those players.

There's no excuse to try to channel those people into the same class every game. Games can be designed with variable complexity for every class or option. Even that weird guy that's there to just socialize (seriously, I've never met this guy, where the hell is he) is going to eventually get bored of playing fighter every game.

Halloween Jack posted:

To be fair, in the end nobody forced Mike Mearls to make 5e a boring love letter to ENWorld. It's a shame that much better designers receive much less recognition, but that's nothing new.

Wait, is 5e the Superman Returns of RPGs?

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



theironjef posted:

Even that weird guy that's there to just socialize (seriously, I've never met this guy, where the hell is he) is going to eventually get bored of playing fighter every game.
I think this kind of over-simplifies this particular taxonomic role. (And obviously, the guy who just plays D&D to hang with his pals isn't likely to post here in TGD.) I imagine this is more 'the person for whom the appeal of the game is hanging out with his friends, primarily.' Obviously they have preferences and would certainly like to do fun big stuff in the game, but that isn't what puts their butts in the seat.

Count Chocula
Dec 25, 2011

WE HAVE TO CONTROL OUR ENVIRONMENT
IF YOU SEE ME POSTING OUTSIDE OF THE AUSPOL THREAD PLEASE TELL ME THAT I'M MISSED AND TO START POSTING AGAIN

Hostile V posted:

I always enjoy how the sample plots of God Machine range from weird/sinister to outright apocalyptic.

I like them, but for such an original setting a few are blatantly based on other things: Dark City, The City in the City, a few Doctor Who episodes (we're two lines away from Weeping Angels). Still, that's an awesome tone to take, and I love that there's a flaneur (city walking) merit, even if it's not called that.

Great writing and art too.

I met one of the original miniature makers for Dark City. She works in a charity shop and gets annoyed when people bring up sci-fi or her old life. What was she really building? Why did Alex Proyas career tanks after he made a movie predicting the apocalypse? And what are those little models the woman sneaks in late at night?

Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 01:43 on Jun 5, 2016

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Nessus posted:

I think this kind of over-simplifies this particular taxonomic role. (And obviously, the guy who just plays D&D to hang with his pals isn't likely to post here in TGD.) I imagine this is more 'the person for whom the appeal of the game is hanging out with his friends, primarily.' Obviously they have preferences and would certainly like to do fun big stuff in the game, but that isn't what puts their butts in the seat.

Yeah, the thing that puts their butts in seats is their ability to hang out with their friends for an evening. The game could be a block of wood labeled "Pizza at Mark's House: The Game" and it would cover that market segment. Why advertise, design for, or even worry about that market? Personally, I think the whole "simple class for beginners or less-interested players" thing is an RPG shibboleth. You never see in anywhere else because other game designers know that players who want to play will just learn to. Heck I was just trying to think of examples, and every other industry has better ways to deal with this. Fighting games often have an easy mode that lets players that aren't well-trained still do rad stuff. So like press A for a fireball instead of QCF-P. Turns every character into easy character, and yeah, that market more or less demands it that way. Otherwise your tightly tiered fighting game has 27 good characters and "Guile, for little brothers."

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EitZRLt2G3w

Not quite related, but very close.

Count Chocula
Dec 25, 2011

WE HAVE TO CONTROL OUR ENVIRONMENT
IF YOU SEE ME POSTING OUTSIDE OF THE AUSPOL THREAD PLEASE TELL ME THAT I'M MISSED AND TO START POSTING AGAIN
Overwatch has Soldier 76, who is a Call of Duty soldier in a game with a space monkey, a healer DJ, and a robot ninja. He's explicitly designed to teach new players the game, and I used him that way yesterday. Dark Souls has the pyromancer. Tons of games have starter characters or classes. Tons of games have starter warrior classes or whatever.

girl dick energy
Sep 30, 2009

You think you have the wherewithal to figure out my puzzle vagina?
Still, I don't think 'easy class' should have a monopoly on any concept as broad as "person who hits things with a sword". Neither should 'complicated class', honestly.

Wrestlepig
Feb 25, 2011

my mum says im cool

Toilet Rascal
Wizards aren't hard anyway. You pick a thing from a list and do what it says. There's just some simple book-keeping.

Ultiville
Jan 14, 2005

The law protects no one unless it binds everyone, binds no one unless it protects everyone.

theironjef posted:

There's no excuse to try to channel those people into the same class every game. Games can be designed with variable complexity for every class or option. Even that weird guy that's there to just socialize (seriously, I've never met this guy, where the hell is he) is going to eventually get bored of playing fighter every game.

I've met players like that, but I'm a professional event organizer for a big store and still met relatively few, which is why it's possible it's not actually worth a lot of design work.

That said, I think one of the reasons I like things like FATE or *World so much is related, which is to say that the crunchier RPG systems are creating a lot of problems by effectively mixing genres. A lot of players are primarily interested in RPGs specifically for the story and social aspects. Being gamers, most of us are also glad to engage with rules systems, so the extreme "always plays the simple class" case is pretty rare. But that doesn't mean the general issue isn't a real one. As soon as you start rewarding player skill in a collaborative game, you start running into problems. 3.x had it in mid- to high-level play where good characters and bad characters couldn't productively interact with the same monsters, but 4E, much though I love it, had a problem where if you weren't good at the tactical game you were better off just letting someone else tell you what to do there, which is not all that much fun. And it was a complicated enough tactical game that there was a lot of room for that kind of skill variance.

You sort of poke the bear of the problem when you intentionally design easier/harder builds, because once you open the skill-based box, it's virtually impossible to make everyone happy with how it turns out. If it's much easier to play a simple build optimally, people who enjoy the skill-based part of the game get upset if you balance the simple builds and the complex ones to be as effective with optimal play. But if you don't do that, then you end up with all the simple builds being learner-only, with the expectation that everyone who really likes the game eventually graduates to a more complex one. Which leaves people feeling frustratingly ineffective in a mixed-skill group, or just frustrated if they like the flavor of the simple build more. (You can solve the second issue with varying build complexity by flavor, but you can't solve the issue of frustration for people who just aren't as skilled or invested as their friends.)

It's an interesting conundrum, and I feel like most of my favorite RPGs have avoided the issue (perhaps rightly!) by being about story rather than play skill, rather than solving it.

Ultiville
Jan 14, 2005

The law protects no one unless it binds everyone, binds no one unless it protects everyone.

chaos rhames posted:

Wizards aren't hard anyway. You pick a thing from a list and do what it says. There's just some simple book-keeping.

They're not hard for people who are going to read a thread like this. But they heavily reward investment. If you aren't the kind of person who likes reading RPG books for fun, thinking about weird uses of spells, or at least researching them on the Internet, you lose a ton of the power of the class. People who just show up to play every day and don't think about the game much between sessions are going to take a long time to get the most out of a class like that.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Count Chocula posted:

Overwatch has Soldier 76, who is a Call of Duty soldier in a game with a space monkey, a healer DJ, and a robot ninja. He's explicitly designed to teach new players the game, and I used him that way yesterday. Dark Souls has the pyromancer. Tons of games have starter characters or classes. Tons of games have starter warrior classes or whatever.

As someone who's been playing a shitload of Overwatch since it came out, categorizing Soldier 76 as "the dumb newbie class for newbies" is frankly pretty shortsighted. His origin may be kinda jokey "hey, what if we made a CoD/Halo shooter character?" but there's more actual tactical depth and learning how to play him well and maximize his abilities than there is to be found in any "obligatory basic Fighter for plebs" class, and also lol if you think new players don't overwhelmingly gravitate towards the hitscan sniper that's all about scoring sweet headshots, dual shotgun guy in a skull mask, the cowboy with the ability to melt any other hero in the game whose ultimate ability is "if I wait for about two seconds I can wrack up triple/quad kills and the play of the game," or Bastion, gimme a fuckin break.

Like, I'd actually planned to bring up this exact example when I got back from work only to say that Soldier 76 is a great example of a class that is, compared to everyone else in the game, "mundane" in theme but not really mundane in execution...he's basically a tough guy with an assault rifle in a game full of mecha pilots, moon apes, robots, ninjas, and all kinds of crazy exotic stuff, but his abilities and the things you can actually do with them mean that he isn't the same sort of "turn your brain off and spam basic attacks/negotiate with the GM in the Theater of the Mind" approach that most tabletop RPGs take with your common variety basic martial types. "Hold shift to sprint" seems like a pretty laughable ability to give a character in a wacky game like Overwatch until it turns out that he's the only person in the game that's figured out how to run faster which actually gives him the ability to flank from avenues you'd usually only expect dedicated skirmishers to come from, his ability to deploy healing fields that anyone on your team can make use of turns him into an effective off-support capable of reinforcing groups under attack and rallying them instead of everyone either dying or being pushed back to scramble for health packs, and despite literally being an aimbot his ultimate ability still requires actual skill to use effectively. Unlike your common variety fantasy heartbreaker fighter, Soldier 76 fulfills multiple roles and requires actual player skill to get good at instead of simply skill at charop to figure out how to maximize your Trip quotient before spamming it over and over.

edit; like the idea that new players are going to pick up a game and go "woah, I don't want to be overwhelmed, I'd better pick the most pedestrian, boring-looking option available to get some practice in first" is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature or naive optimism, I can't tell which. Like no they loving don't, new players gravitate towards the coolest looking poo poo first. That's like saying that every person who picked up Mass Effect et al for the first time went for the basic Soldier class right away, no they didn't, they went Vanguard so they could shoulder-tackle people into next week because that's so loving awesome.

Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 06:36 on Jun 5, 2016

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.



BRAVE NEW WORLD: DELTA PRIME

Introduction

Brave New World: Delta Prime is the sourcebook for Delta Prime and playing a Primer. The first half of the book is, as per usual, intro fluff. The second half of the book is, as per usual, new power packages, enemy statblocks and setting secrets. However, we have a new addition this time around! Updated info and rules for Gadgeteers and Gadgets are included in this book, rules that give structure to making new items and rules for new premade items. I mean I won’t lie, there are only eight pages for that. But hey that’s good. Probably.

I’m not gonna lie: there is a lot of repetition from previous books in regards to Delta Prime. Let’s just briefly skim that:
  • Delta Prime was formed after the Delta Registration Act after a bunch of guys in power armor tried to kill JFK.
  • Delta Prime recruits from Delta Academy (schools for empowered children), Delta Squadron (the army) and regular people who fill out the DRA.
  • Delta Prime is supposed to do two things: protect against Delta threats and loan their members to the alphabet departments of the US government as needed. If you’re enough of a fuckup or untrustworthy, they will loan you to corporations or have you just do whatever in a work-release program.
  • You don’t have any rights as a registered Delta; you can get drafted for Squad or whatever whenever they want you.


The Delta Prime insignia, a Delta logo mounted on a shoulder.

There’s some new information too which, to save time and attempt to consolidate this all into something much more coherent/readable, will generally be posted as a list of relevant points of information.

Shiny, New Important Information:
  • Bobby Kennedy was the original Director of Delta Prime until he was assassinated in 1968.
  • His replacement, an Alpha named Bill Wallace, lasted until 1976 when he disappeared due to that Alpha bomb.
  • The current Director of Delta Prime is Ronald Wilson Reagan.

    Yeah.

    Originally Reagan was thrown from a horse while shooting a Western in the 1960s. He walked away from the near-death experience as a Charmer, ignored the Yellow Journalist’s recruitment pitch and joined Delta Prime. He worked his way up from Research Assistant to Administrator to Director. Director Reagan’s main stance is, uh, Cold War Defensive Aggression. He’s the one who is pushing for more funding for the government to make nukes that are later used in 1988 and is paranoid about the USSR and other “evil empires”. He’s still pushing for more nukes and doesn’t always have to answer to JFK.
  • There was a Project Delta, then a Project Alpha, dedicated to studying Deltas and Alphas. There has never been a Project Omega and its non-purpose was not to try and push Alphas to an impossible ascension.
  • Delta Prime has 20,000 employees spread out among 7 regional locations across the US and countless branch offices. The regional offices are the only ones that are important.
  • In Delta Prime, your superior is always right. Pretty much everything else is secondary.


Transform and combine: Prime Time Double Feature!

Ranks in Delta Prime
  • Recruit (red Delta symbol on shoulder badge): Lowest of the low, lasts until you complete your first mission or a year passes. The year requirement was rule-patched in because some people couldn’t succeed.
  • Agent (Orange): Anyone not a recruit. They generally do all missions.
  • Sergeant (Yellow): Lead and coordinate teams of agents.
  • Lieutenant (Green): Command sergeants and agents, answer to the upper management, do a lot of paperwork. They’re between Management and Grunt Work, still doing dirty work but getting involved in office politics.
  • Captain (Blue): Controls divisions of lieutenants. The majority of them are desk jockeys and don’t leave the regional office often unless they’re really powerful and skilled.
  • Assistant Director (Indigo): Run the regional office and respond directly to the Director. There are only seven ADs and not all of them are Deltas.
  • Director (Violet): Reagan.


Honk honk, time to fly sons of bitches.

Departments of Delta Prime

The Departments each have a different color and don’t necessarily have any superiority over the other. If your rank is shown by the color of your badge, your clothing shows what department you’re in. All of the uses of colors were put in place by Bobby Kennedy for…reasons.

  • Enforcement (Red): Explicitly described as “redshirts” (ugh), Enforcement does pretty much everything from grunt work to fighting people.
  • Interrogation (Orange): Some interrogators can sense the truth, some can beat the crap out of a suspect, some do both.
  • R&D (Yellow lab coat because oh boy a piss-colored lab coat): R&D is broken into teams with assistants. Each team is a Genius using actual science while a Gadgeteer applies the theories to a creation. They work on a variety of projects that are probably damned to failure because Gadgeteers have to maintain upkeep daily.
  • Operations (Green): Operations are logistics for the whole operation. They do laundry, they buy fuel, they make sure the cafeteria has orange juice. They also have the Legal Department, so you can live out your She-Hulk fantasies in Delta Prime.
  • Investigation (Blue): Investigation does police work, runs intelligence and surveillance and also includes the Watchdogs, Delta Prime’s Internal Affairs.
  • Management (Indigo): Public relations, paperwork and the general brains of the operation.
  • Violet (Violet): Not a department, a color. Sole property of Ronald Reagan.


You will never see or hear of any of these people.

The Political Situation in America
  • JFK’s decrees are rules and laws. Congress and the Supreme Court exist as advisory boards. There are no more checks and balances.
  • Carry your registration papers at all times and if you are travelling 50+ miles from home, tell the government. Your papers are part of a permanent record including your DNA, fingerprints and dental records on file that get updated regularly.
  • There are mandatory curfews. Citizens under the age of 16 cannot leave their homes from 9 PM to 5 AM without an adult. Adults can’t be out between 2 AM and 5 AM without proper authorization.
  • Businesses can just do whatever; the government doesn’t interfere with capitalism.
  • You don’t need to be guilty to go to jail. They just need a reason to think you should go there.
  • No civil rights. Do what you’re told or go to jail.


Is your Delta power messed-up arms?

The Arrangement of Crescent City Primer Headquarters
  • Roof: helipad, guns on the corners of the roof.
  • Floor 100: Reagan’s office when he’s in, observation deck when he’s not. Yes, the entire floor.
  • 99-86: Management’s floors.
  • 85-81: Interrogation’s holding cells and interviewing rooms.
  • 80-61: R&D’s floors. 10 floors have been retrofitted to act as a flight deck and hanger for jets and Armorgeddon suits. Jets are launched with catapults and caught with brake wire when they hand.
  • 60-51: Investigation’s headquarters that includes the mainframe that holds all of the government’s files on its citizens. The mainframe has redundant backups elsewhere in the US.
  • 50-21: Operations. Their floors also includes a mall, restaurants, daycare, post office, video game arcades, movie theaters and more that provide services to Primers. God imagine joining Delta Prime only to have to work at their Best Buy.
  • 20-1: Enforcement. There is also a dedicated gym for Primers and a few floors have an in-house hospital for medical emergencies.
  • Sub-floor 1: The subway that passes beneath the building for Crescent City. It’s full of security stops and transfers to other trains because the place used to be the prime entry point for anyone who wanted to gently caress with Delta Prime until they added more security.
  • Sub-floors 2-10: Guest parking 2-5, 6-10 is employee parking.
  • Sub-floors 11-15: In-house barracks. While the other departments have sleeping areas, the barracks have the luxury of solid stone walls and lots of foosball tables.
  • Subfloors 16-30: Training facilities where every Primer spends 12 weeks learning the ins and outs of their powers.


The chili in the cafeteria is killer.

REGIONAL OFFICES

Whoo, let’s drop the lists so I can break it down region by region. The seven offices are Crescent City, Denver, LA, Miami, NYC, Seattle and DC.

Crescent City: We’ve already got a clear picture of CC so the book focuses on its Assistant Director Mike Trudgeon. The game throws his name out there like it’s something I should recognize (I do not) so I looked back in Ravaged Planet and it mentions the chief officer of Delta Prime being a woman named Charlene Parker. I have no idea if the chief officer is something different than the assistant director. Maybe it’s just a continuity error. Anyway Trudgeon is a regular human who got the job through politicking and also runs the recruitment program for all of the US. He’s not a politician but he’s more politically-minded than most people in Delta Prime.

Denver: Denver covers from the Mississippi River to Montana down to Texas. The Primers tend to think of themselves as high-riding lawmen. The Denver office is also home to Project Delta and a lot of R&D. The AD is Phil Nensel, a Gadgeteer. He invented the Armorgeddon suits, the computer system that runs all of the citizen info, the internet and he’s also focused on Project Delta. Nensel is brilliant but he’s spread pretty thin; he runs all of R&D across every location so he doesn’t tinker as much as he supervises. If someone wanted to get at Prime’s tech secrets, they would go after him.


Delta Primer vs. the insidious Defiant agent know as "Captain Frond-Leaf Fern".

Los Angeles: Delta Prime relocated to LA after the San Francisco regional office was wiped out by the neutron bomb. The whole building is earthquake-proof and reinforced and in downtown LA. The AD is…

*sighs* It’s Charlton Heston. Heston, and I am not making this up, got his powers after an accidental shooting in his own home and he joined Delta Prime. Now he’s the face of Delta Prime and runs the PR and advertising for the whole country in Los Angeles, acting in commercials and putting his face on billboards.

Miami: Like LA, Miami used to be Atlanta until Atlanta was turned into a crater. Miami is the smallest regional office, located in South Beach. Plenty of places to go surf and tan or buy cocaine from drug dealers. The AD is "Dapper" Dennis Yanez, a party animal who used to be a hardcore party animal until he had to clean his act up. He still fucks around Miami and let's be honest: Yanez is appropriate for Florida considering its long, storied history of corrupt public officials who like to party.

NYC: Primer headquarters for NYC occupies the entire Southern World Trade Center building. In BNW, the north tower fell because of Devastator's collapsing lair so they transformed the south as a point. They also control Ellis Island as an Enforcement base and Prime focuses on Manhattan's Deltas. The AD is Brian Kristofek, a diplomat who became a Phaser after an IRA bomb nearly killed him in Belfast. He's the biggest diplomat in Delta Prime, focusing on trying to make nice with the other countries.


Welcome to NYC, where everything is in a state of half-melt.

Seattle: The base in Seattle was formed after Emperor Hirohito took over Japan again and a lot of people fled to Seattle. Seattle has a complex in Renton with one of the best medical programs in the country for Deltas and regular folks. The AD is Patrick Tepe who was a dental student until a bar fight left him with the Delta power of Healing. Because Healing is better with any medical training, he ended up becoming Surgeon General of the US for a while until he became AD. Now he controls the medical program.

Washington DC: Actually situated in Alexandria, Virginia in a converted munitions/torpedo factory, the building is the home of the entire agency's decisions and it's heavily fortified. The AD is Pat Cooney who got the power of Flight after a Defiant threw him off the Washington Monument. He coordinates everything between all of the offices so he's Reagan's second hand man, keeping the entire operation running.


Welcome to Alexandria, now gently caress off.

THOUGHTS ON THE INTRODUCTION: I sincerely think that the interesting parts of this are directly overshadowed by the fact that loving Reagan is the second most powerful man in America and Charlton Heston is there too. Like, okay. I am completely willing to accept poo poo still lining up in synchronicity because gimmicks in an AU but I'm not down with such blatant overuse of famous historical figures. Is Nancy mentioned? gently caress no. Keep in mind that in real life in 1999, Reagan is in the throes of Alzheimer's and retired from the public eye. Did a Healer heal him? Does he still have these issues? gently caress if I know, why would you touch upon that.

Hell what does using Reagan and Heston even add to Delta Prime? Is it to make them Delta Prime look bad because of their political histories? Are these versions of them competent and intelligent? You'll find out more in the secrets section but it's just wholly irrelevant to me and yet I can't think of anything else. Okay no I'm wrong. I can't stop thinking about Paranoia. This is what happens when you base your promotion system code on ROYGBIV. I would really like to play Paranoia now, that game is fun. Yeah I'm sorry I don't have much more to say, some of this is interesting but most of it is very dumb.

NEXT TIME: New powers and new Gadgeteer rules and premade items. It does not get better.

Hostile V fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Jun 5, 2016

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Night10194 posted:

I always found 13A's fluff so bad that I never bothered running in the Dragon Empire except as a joke campaign. And I've never quite gotten the praise for Icons and One Unique Thing because they have almost nothing to do with the mechanical meat of the game and OUT is basically just a Feng Shui melodramatic hook/character elevator pitch.

It is kinda funny how the writers give themselves a pat on the shoulder for something that is barely connected to the rest of the game mechanics.

Ultiville posted:

They're not hard for people who are going to read a thread like this. But they heavily reward investment. If you aren't the kind of person who likes reading RPG books for fun, thinking about weird uses of spells, or at least researching them on the Internet, you lose a ton of the power of the class. People who just show up to play every day and don't think about the game much between sessions are going to take a long time to get the most out of a class like that.

And it's not like "D&D for dumb babies" classes like the Fighter don't ideally have you map out your Feat investment from start to finish in advance to be anything but a sub-optimal waste of space. At least the Wizard and Cleric let you "respec" your spells each day.

Doresh fucked around with this message at 07:21 on Jun 5, 2016

unseenlibrarian
Jun 4, 2012

There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.

Kai Tave posted:

ariety fantasy heartbreaker fighter, Soldier 76 fulfills multiple roles and requires actual player skill to get good at instead of simply skill at charop to figure out how to maximize your Trip quotient before spamming it over and over.

edit; like the idea that new players are going to pick up a game and go "woah, I don't want to be overwhelmed, I'd better pick the most pedestrian, boring-looking option available to get some practice in first" is predicated on a fundamental misunderstanding of human nature or naive optimism, I can't tell which. Like no they loving don't, new players gravitate towards the coolest looking poo poo first. That's like saying that every person who picked up Mass Effect et al for the first time went for the basic Soldier class right away, no they didn't, they went Vanguard so they could shoulder-tackle people into next week because that's so loving awesome.

TBF according to Bioware like 85 percent of people picked "Male Soldier Shepard with the default appearance" for all playthroughs, so, uh, yeah, a lot of folks -do- jump to the default basic guy. It's why they randomized race/sex/class for the default in DA:I to see if that'd impact things.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Adnachiel posted:

Echidnists

Echidnists are handled in the same way as Argus Society members. (While an Echidnist can be any kind of witch beforehand, they always have these templates.) Their base stats are D6s in everything but Social (D4) and Magic (D8), 28 pre-selected mundane skill points, 21 magical skill points, and a heritage that is a little hard to decipher due to no editing and bad image layering.

Does the foot really overlap the rules text? That looks terrible.

Nancy_Noxious posted:

If you people want to REALLY be consistent about warning people about horrible games through FF reviews, you should always include a link to the FF of the Pathfinder Core Rulebook after EACH post about the Beginners Box (someones first RPG should not be Pathfinder) and the Adventure Paths (themes might make that pile of poo poo seem nicer than it really is).

You say drivethru Beast reviews are misleading. Well, latest posts about Pathfinder on this thread have been trying to sell it as a good, not-lovely game as well, which seems just as dishonest.

I think it's fair to say that the Pathfinder Beginner's Box is one of the better products as an introduction to the hobby and/or the specific rules system, while acknowledging that the rules themselves are still just a warmed-over 3.5e.

I've also sort of mellowed out on the Pathfinder hate - WOTC took away Paizo's ability to continue doing what they did for a living, and if they didn't react by producing a product whose licensing rights they controlled forever-and-ever, they would have gone out of business.

For all the times its been said that you actually need business acumen and not just "I like RPGs! Yay!" if you're going to survive in this industry, Lisa Stevens did something that allowed them to stay and even flourish in the market.

Perhaps it's the juxtaposition with D&D 5th Edition that's so stark: the rules are arguably even lazier/worse than Pathfinder's Core, they're purely banking on the popularity of the D&D name, and yet they're not even making good use of the brand's continued popularitu. Paizo at least leveraged their market share to keep churning out adventure paths and modules and supplements - WOTC actually ended up shutting down their Organized Play program and shuffled off all the publishing to the DMsGuild.

Asimo
Sep 23, 2007


unseenlibrarian posted:

TBF according to Bioware like 85 percent of people picked "Male Soldier Shepard with the default appearance" for all playthroughs, so, uh, yeah, a lot of folks -do- jump to the default basic guy. It's why they randomized race/sex/class for the default in DA:I to see if that'd impact things.
Yeah, in fairness I'm not sure that's less human nature to pick the "boring default" and more the human nature of "click through all this boring stuff to get to the gameplay ASAP". I mean it kind of looks the same from a distance and a lot of people mistake the latter for the former, but they aren't really the same. It's why, right, almost every MMO and similar game randomly picks classes/races for the initial selections to avoid a glut of one particular type.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

unseenlibrarian posted:

TBF according to Bioware like 85 percent of people picked "Male Soldier Shepard with the default appearance" for all playthroughs, so, uh, yeah, a lot of folks -do- jump to the default basic guy. It's why they randomized race/sex/class for the default in DA:I to see if that'd impact things.

I think that might be partially Bioware's own fault. They have always plastered Default Shepard's face all over the place every time they marketed/promoted Mass Effect. It's very easy to see him has an actual character like Gordon Freeman or Nathan Drake instead of an avatar to be tinkered with however you choose.

I'd say more people would be willing to customize the crap out of their Shepard if Bioware went the Fallout and Dark Souls route of doing promotions with a bloke in full armor that doesn't have a "canon" face.

Doresh fucked around with this message at 08:47 on Jun 5, 2016

Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



unseenlibrarian posted:

TBF according to Bioware like 85 percent of people picked "Male Soldier Shepard with the default appearance" for all playthroughs, so, uh, yeah, a lot of folks -do- jump to the default basic guy. It's why they randomized race/sex/class for the default in DA:I to see if that'd impact things.

Granted but playing Overwatch I can tell you that in any given game 90% of people are playing Honzo, Genji, Reaper, or Widowmaker, or at least it seems that way.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Also Overwatch has come into existence in a day and age where unless you've literally never ever played so much as a single hour of a contemporary FPS, perhaps one of the most successful and popular video game genres for many years running now, chances are you don't need a basic dumbed down character to walk you through the concepts of aiming your gun and shooting people. Of course Blizzard isn't going to deliberately snub those brand new gamers for whom Overwatch is their first foray into FPS/competitive shooters, but if we're assuming that prominent characters have an influence on who new people are likely to default to then Soldier 76 is at a minimum in terms of being a touted part of the Overwatch Brand Experience, it's Tracer and maybe Winston who get the most facetime (Tracer is even on the box art) and if someone does a casual search on what this Overwatch thing is about they're going to run into people talking more about McCree the cowboy and Bastion the robot that transforms into a turret than they are the guy with an assault rifle.

In my admittedly not world-spanning experience with TRPGs, what I've seen happen is new players come to the table, seem overwhelmed by options initially, and then someone else will suggest to them that they should play a simple character and the new person, wanting to get along, agrees to doing so, but I've never once encountered someone who was like "hey I'm new so please give me the most simplistic, non-interactive option you have until I can wrap my brain around the complex notion of pretending to be a wizard."

Ratoslov
Feb 15, 2012

Now prepare yourselves! You're the guests of honor at the Greatest Kung Fu Cannibal BBQ Ever!

Also, during the tutorial they do hand you Soldier 76, and that's actually a bad thing. See, every character does something different when you hit L-Shift, but Soldier 76's is a standard FPS run. Which means that new players may easily make the mistake of thinking of L-Shift as the Run Button rather than the Miscellaneous Ability button.

Cthulhu Dreams
Dec 11, 2010

If I pretend to be Cthulhu no one will know I'm a baseball robot.
Reagan running Delta Prime is so terrible. In 1999? What an amazingly wasted opportunity.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Ratoslov posted:

Also, during the tutorial they do hand you Soldier 76, and that's actually a bad thing. See, every character does something different when you hit L-Shift, but Soldier 76's is a standard FPS run. Which means that new players may easily make the mistake of thinking of L-Shift as the Run Button rather than the Miscellaneous Ability button.
They really should have run you through at least two characters in that tutorial.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

Nancy_Noxious
Apr 10, 2013

by Smythe
This thread is really great! Let us exacerbate 13th Age's flaws and stay mellow about Pathfinder's because

Someone said upthread that it's better to have people playing Pathfinder than playing no RPGs at all. I used to think like that. Today I disagree. After trying to sell 13th Age, Apocalypse World and 4E to a Pathfinder group I used to play boardgames (bad boardgames, like Zombicide) with, just to be rejected everytime because "not realistic enough", "this is too confusing, how come NPCs do not have defense numbers?!" and "this is not a real RPG, we play Pathfinder, D&D's true heir " respectively, I came to believe that Pathfinder is, at least for me, worse than no RPGs at all. It actively poisons people against the games I'd like to have a group to play with.

The fact that Beast's success makes this Pathfinder-loving thread mad makes me glad. Not that I like Beast, I find it worse than bad, I find it uninteresting (like Geist, or Awakening Mage), but the way you people react to it (and the way you put down games I like such as 13th Age) is making me warm up to it. Ripping MRAs to shreds is just icing to the cake.

(Kai - I agree that, design-wise both Strike and Spellbound are more sophisticated than 13th Age, and in an ideal world I should be wanting to get a group to play those. But as much as I enjoy 4e, the square grid is not my favourite part, the balance and variety of "buttons" (i.e. powers) to push during combat is. Also, I am not really married to DTAS. Furthermore, PDQ# is one is my fave systems, so 13th Age's backgrounds plus abstracted distances in combat is like PDQ and 4e lite had a baby, and it hits a sweet spot for me. Plus gorgeous books, I love the hand drawn feeling of the art and the CONSISTENCY you get by having only two illustrators doing the whole thing. Strike's art and layout, on the other hand, are both weak, and I like pretty things. Can you now imagine why would someone go for 13th Age instead of Strike?)

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5