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ZeroCount posted:I feel like the whole frankenstein deal is distracting us from the fact that this grim n gritty ultra-mortality shitfarmer game lets you reattach severed limbs by slapping a poultice on it.
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Dec 1, 2016 08:37
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ZeroCount posted:Middenarde might have the worst gap between theme and mechanics that I've ever seen. hyphz posted:Also a Watt is a measurement of energy over time - a joule/second. If you're Frankensteining it up that is usually portrayed as a delivered in a single instant in which case you'd need less than 20 joules to raise the dead, which you could probably get just by sliding the body down a hill since the rule doesn't say the power has to be in the form of electricity. Middenarde  Now, what we've all been waiting for... to see how high-mortality our high-mortality game really is! 7 - COMBAT  Timg'd because it's page-breakingly wide. Open it up, though, it looks awesome. 7.3.1 Normal Attack posted:A normal attack may be made as a full-round action with either a melee or ranged weapon. The attacker declares a target, and then enters the attack phase as per section 7.4. I mean, actually attacking someone is relatively simple, as it turns out, but the writing does everything it can to make EVERYTHING sound more complex and technical than it is. STILL ATTACKING posted:Arrows that hit targets may be recovered by picking them up. A Visual Acuity check (DC 16) will return a number of missed arrows equal to the roll minus the DC, plus one. A ranged weapon will take damage as though it hit even if it doesn’t hit, so roll the weapon’s damage dice regardless. We're getting fifty kinds of garbage bookkeeping rules before we get to actually learning how to finish off our drat attacks. I don't give a poo poo about my arrows, just let me know how to hit someone. Also joke's on you if you think that's the next thing you're gonna read because you're at point 7.3.1 and attacks are just over at 7.4! Because there's another 22 subheadings in the way. And then we get to the actual attacking because I skip all of the loving idiot intervening points and I want to get to the action. I'm instructed that an attack consists of rolling the ATTACK DICE POOL vs the EVASION DICE POOL. I've never been told what these are. Scroll back, find rules for INCREASING the pools, but not what they start at, realize that it's yet another thing only shown on the loving online character sheet. Either pool starts at a single D6, and you can invest in increasing your pool(by adding a d4, though keep in mind, for weapons, it's only for a single type of weapon, you have a separate pool for each type!), or bumping up one of your dice in the pool to the next level(d4 to d6, d6 to d8, d8 to d10, and that's the max). When rolled, the pool totals are ignored, and instead the two highest dice are compared to each other in value. Ties resolve in favour of the defender, and if the attacker rolls poorly enough, the defender gets a free counter-attack. Though no word on whether this can, in itself, trigger another counter-attack if flubbed badly enough, trapping two characters in an eternal loop of missing each other. Now, if we hit someone, we roll 3d6 to determine hit location(rather than just using 3d6+static modifiers from skills as our initial attack, allowing us to determine the hit location and whether or not we hit in one go.), then we roll damage(both to our weapon and our enemy/our enemy's armor. Also as far as I can see, shield bashing is almost always aa more effective weapon than, well, actually using a weapon), assuming our damage penetrates, we then apply damage to the location we hit, and to our opponent's total vitality points, calculate whether we sever or cripple a limb, make a second attack and dodge roll if there's enough damage to sever to determine if we do sever the limb, and if we do sever a "minor" limb or a head, the defender may additionally choose to roll to only lose part of that hit location rather than all of it(also bafflingly, it's harder to cripple a bodypart than it is to entirely cut it off?). And then we may also have to roll for bleeding. So, in a worst case scenario, for a single attack defense, assuming no infinite counter-attack loop, we're going to be rolling 2(attack and evasion) + 2(counterattack + evasion) + 1(hit location) + 1(damage) + 2(extra attack and evade to determine severing) + 1(losing a minor part rather than severing) + 1(bleeding) = 10 rolls for a single attack. And we have to alter weapon durability, armor durability, maybe VP and potentially stats(from losing body parts) with every attack, so at least 2 values, possibly 4. And that worst-case scenario isn't even particularly unlikely. We can assume that there's no counter-attack, which would at least reduce the rolls by 2, but almost every sharp weapon can cause severing and bleeding, and all of them have the damage values necessary to sever a limb if you don't gently caress up the roll completely. The game does live up to high mortality, though, if you aren't wearing any armor, most weapons can kill you in two blows(or one if they lop off a limb and you bleed to death, or just cut your head wide open). Of course, that's assuming you ever get hit, if you've got a pavise(which is also one of the best possible weapons, damage-value-wise, except that shields sadly don't get any special attack knacks), you're unlikely to ever get hit by anyone since that gives you a 2d10 to block attacks with(rather than using your evasion pool). Also for the cost of either of the two most powerful weapons(great axes or two-handed swords), which do tops 2d8+8 or 2d6+6 damage, you can buy two attack dogs, each of which can do 2d6 damage. And there's an Animal Handler knack that allows you to permanently upgrade an animal's attack damage(+1) and its attack dice(adding to the pool or simply increasing the dice it attacks with), meaning that the optimal strategy is to hide behind two pavises while a swarm of dogs(or bears, you can train wild animals, too, at that knack level), does all the fighting for you. To speed things up, the Animal Handler then trains a bird(I'm not making GBS threads you, you can do this) to be an animal handling assistant of his own skill level. It can do all the animal training while he's out, and when he's back training some particularly difficult wild animal, it can assist him, boosting his own animal handling by 50%. The only thing slightly limiting the power of an animal trainer is that there are cumulative penalties to training the same animal over and over, but considering that dogs are already pretty powerful and just need to be better at hitting... no great issue(considering how cheap cats are, though, they may be more cost-effective because enough attacks will eventually break ANY armor or fortification). Sadly, it doesn't specifically say that the bird also gets the knacks allowing it to boost animal combat stats, only that it gets the trainer's skill points, otherwise you could entirely farm out the entire process to a bunch of hawks or pigeons. But you could teach a bird to be a surgeon, a blacksmith, a wizard, an alchemist... any non-combat skill, really. So if you can catch enough birds and train them, you can replace paid human labour with free bird labour. Just as long as you don't teach any of them Mercantile so they can negotiate for better wages. I'd also like to note that "Heft," the skill for increasing carrying capacity, is non-combat, so with enough personal ranks in it, and enough birds to train, you could create, say, a flying fortress, or an airship. Or just get carried everywhere by your trained blacksmith birds. But anyway, sorry for that aside. Back to combat. If you lose your arms, it sucks. If you lose your head or torso, you die. If you lose your legs, don't worry, you'll be penalized while missing them, but medieval prosthetics will restore full functionality, according to the game's rules. There are also optional morale rules, but any group of 17 or more, with a leader, will never retreat. Alternately, anyone who can see 9 or more allies on the field, will never retreat either. Because literally the only modifier for morale rolls is how many men the leader is commanding, or how many friends you can see, not how many of your buddies just got gorily disembowelled. Did you start out at 500 men and just watch the remaining 491 get demolished by a horde of dogs and birds, lead by a madman on the back of a bear huddling beneath two shields? Doesn't matter! There are still nine of you left, you're invincible! Zereth posted:I wonder if it actually has rules for losing limbs in the combat section. Does it EVER. The only thing preventing you from relatively easily lopping off someone's arm with an ordinary knife is that daggers lack the "severing" tag. Pretty much any axe or sword hit that actually HITS, if it hits someone unarmoured, is extremely likely to chop something off unless it hits the torso, which has a comparatively high(but definitely not insurmountable) threshold to being lopped in half. I can post the numbers, if people care.
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Dec 1, 2016 08:59
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"Your honor, please note that we shant be held accountable for the construction of these firearms and what followed. Twas Crackers who forged the weapons, twas Jingles who sold them to the Frenchmen and twas Rufus who motivated the Frenchmen into acting against Duke Weatherly." "I see, but as trainer of these birds, are you not responsible for their actions?" "No sir, for they are not my birds." "Explain." "They are emancipated, sir, in the court of Hillshire county." "Who was responsible for drafting the documentation of this avian emancipation, I wish to speak to them before this matter goes any further." "Hillshire county's lawyer, Miss Coco Banana Buddy."
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Dec 1, 2016 09:23
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Can the trained birds use their Animal Handling to train more birds?
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Dec 1, 2016 09:26
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Zereth posted:Can the trained birds use their Animal Handling to train more birds? So you can kickstart the Avian Apocalypse?
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Dec 1, 2016 09:28
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PurpleXVI posted:I'd also like to note that "Heft," the skill for increasing carrying capacity, is non-combat, so with enough personal ranks in it, and enough birds to train, you could create, say, a flying fortress, or an airship. Or just get carried everywhere by your trained blacksmith birds. 
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Dec 1, 2016 09:33
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PurpleXVI posted:[...]Did you start out at 500 men and just watch the remaining 491 get demolished by a horde of dogs and birds, lead by a madman on the back of a bear huddling beneath two shields? Doesn't matter! There are still nine of you left, you're invincible! I just had a laughing fit so hard that my coworkers looked at me funny. Made my day. I mean, who wouldn´t feel invincible with 9 buds at his back? And who knows, maybe those 491 guys were really really frenchy?
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Dec 1, 2016 09:40
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Zereth posted:Can the trained birds use their Animal Handling to train more birds? Yes and no. They can train more birds, but they can't train more birds to have skill levels, since that requires a knack. Now, you could probably argue that the birds, being birds, start at 0th level, and would level up pretty quickly, being able to snatch a knack each level... but there aren't any explicit rules for followers and their levelling up. Now, since there are no rules SPECIFICALLY for followers, you could probably argue that means they follow the same levels as PC's, especially since pre-made NPC enemies often have levels, and use the same stats as PC's... It's a basically one big gray area since none of these things are ever addressed in the rules, nowhere I've found, at least.  Gaining XP posted:Generally, characters receive 10 XP times the level of an enemy defeated in combat, for each enemy, divided equally among all characters in a party. If they complete a task someone else has given them, they may receive 20 XP if it was easy, 50 XP if they encountered problems, and 100 XP if it was very hard. Also I guess technically the players can all cap out their levels in the first session just by asking each other to pass the salt in very dramatic ways, over and over. PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 09:54 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 09:48
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Hostile V posted:"Your honor, please note that we shant be held accountable for the construction of these firearms and what followed. Twas Crackers who forged the weapons, twas Jingles who sold them to the Frenchmen and twas Rufus who motivated the Frenchmen into acting against Duke Weatherly." See, this is where you need a Bird Law expert. Check the local pubs.
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Dec 1, 2016 10:22
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PurpleXVI posted:Yes and no. They can train more birds, but they can't train more birds to have skill levels, since that requires a knack. Now, you could probably argue that the birds, being birds, start at 0th level, and would level up pretty quickly, being able to snatch a knack each level... but there aren't any explicit rules for followers and their levelling up. Now, since there are no rules SPECIFICALLY for followers, you could probably argue that means they follow the same levels as PC's, especially since pre-made NPC enemies often have levels, and use the same stats as PC's... And at four skill-trained birds, one could help the bird doing the preliminary training, and one help you impart the skills. As for the capping out, didn't the leveling up rules require you to sleep, and then it sets your current XP to zero so you need to gain your second level the next day? It'd take a whole twenty days to cap out! Reminds me of Synnibarr's poo poo like "escaping from a pursuer" giving you XP. Hostile pursuer not necessary, so you just have the party play tag or hide and seek or something for a while. (While classes with more specialized methods of XP gaining can practice those over and over, like computer intrusion or pickpocketing, which also don't require you to do it to enemies.)
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Dec 1, 2016 10:34
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Zereth posted:Well, it seems like that'd still help, since you could have the birds trained in bird training train birds, then you handle the specific step of training them to have the skill, so with even one bird you could train skilled birds twice as fast! Skill Assist posted:Other characters may attempt to assist you in using a skill. Anyone may attempt the Difficulty Check alongside you and add half of their skill ranks to your bonus (rounded down) plus one, but any person after the first incurs a -2 penalty for each person beyond the first, because too many cooks spoil the broth. Animal Handling, like most skills, caps out at 10. Meaning you can convey 10 ranks to your magpie buddies. The first magpie adds +5, having two magpies adds +8, and having three magpies adds +11. So with three birds assisting you, you've more than doubled your natural skill level. This applies for anything, really... including those "hide poo poo from people"-skills we laughed at earlier, so you could GENUINELY make anything utterly invisible, mind control anyone(either with debate or with money), paralyze anyone with psychology, etc. This explains why Odin keeps Hugin and Munin around, birds are the source of divine power levels. I'll also note that it says you can't teach them any combat skills, but never defines any particular skills as combat or non-combat. Obviously, you could say, disarming, blocking and attack bonuses are combat skills. But what about a damage resistance skill like Stoneskin? You could make invincible birds(or not quite invincible, but about as good as decking them out in masterwork plate, with none of the encumbrance or issues with it ever breaking. Definitely also a skill you want to max out yourself). Looking back to see what you can break the game with, I also noticed that the knack Trailblazer, which improves the party's travel speed(not under any particular conditions or after any check), just straight increases travel speed by 25% for the entire party. There's no party size limit, there's no "isn't cumulative"-note. The average walking speed is ~3.1mph, however, it doesn't say this is our travel speed with any particular method of travel. So, you know, gently caress it. Think of the fastest medieval method of travel you can, a bunch of fast horses, sailing ships, or, hell, the 250 years ahead we can go with Anachronism. What was the fastest method of travel invented in the year 1700? Then tell me how many Trailblazers we'd need to propel that method of travel past the speed of sound, or light, or some other arbitrary absurd barrier. How about escape velocity?
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Dec 1, 2016 10:50
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PurpleXVI posted:So, you know, gently caress it. Think of the fastest medieval method of travel you can, a bunch of fast horses, sailing ships, or, hell, the 250 years ahead we can go with Anachronism. What was the fastest method of travel invented in the year 1700? Then tell me how many Trailblazers we'd need to propel that method of travel past the speed of sound, or light, or some other arbitrary absurd barrier. How about escape velocity? Assuming a nice slow stroll of 3 mph (converted to 4.8 kph) and an increase of +25% with each Trailblazer, a group of 41 people would clock 45,138 kph -- which is 12.5 km/s, which is just slightly faster than the 11.2 km/s required to achieve escape velocity at sea level. I did some sums with some super-fast 1700s ships too but it only dropped the group size down to ~32. It's probably easier to grab another 10 Trailblazers than it is to buy a ship, so.
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Dec 1, 2016 12:02
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PurpleXVI posted:Middenarde So if I fired off one arrow, then rolled a 17 on my Visual Acuity check, I'd find two arrows? Bonus!
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Dec 1, 2016 13:32
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In the grim darkness of Middle Ages Europe a small duchy is terrorized by local Birdlord who keeps sending his swarm of Trailblazer pigeons to join the parties of hapless travellers and immediately propel them into the stratosphere
ZeroCount fucked around with this message at 13:39 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 13:35
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ZeroCount posted:In the grim darkness of Middle Ages Europe a small duchy is terrorized by local Birdlord who keeps sending his swarm of Trailblazer pigeons to join the parties of hapless travellers and immediately propel them into the stratosphere Once again this game is genuinely missing its potential for hilarity. I have to say, Middenard is a lot more...harmless and silly than hateful. Like, it's dumb, sure, but look, BIRDLORDS can come out of it.
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Dec 1, 2016 14:20
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Night10194 posted:Once again this game is genuinely missing its potential for hilarity. Has anyone ever done an everything-is-awful medieval era RPG that actually worked? WFRP and Vampire: the Dark Ages are the only two that come to mind.
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Dec 1, 2016 14:37
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"We cannot challenge this party! It contains both a Timetaker AND a most diffident Birdlord!"
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Dec 1, 2016 14:47
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Every time I try to put out a warrant for the Birdlord's head a crow appears outside my window and psychoanalyses me so hard that I spend 2d6 hours as a completely helpless wreck.
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Dec 1, 2016 15:20
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ZeroCount posted:Every time I try to put out a warrant for the Birdlord's head a crow appears outside my window and psychoanalyses me so hard that I spend 2d6 hours as a completely helpless wreck. Does it wear a tiny little set of spectacles on its beak? 
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Dec 1, 2016 15:25
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It strikes me now that there is room for Peasant With A Railgun: The RPG about exploiting silly rules loopholes and attempts at 'realism' to make a wacky cartoon world of birdlords, peasant railguns, and trailblazers to the stars.
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Dec 1, 2016 15:30
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The fact that Middenard has actually turned out to be "accidental Exalted" is nothing short of amazing.
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Dec 1, 2016 15:37
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ZeroCount posted:Middenarde might have the worst gap between theme and mechanics that I've ever seen.
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Dec 1, 2016 15:45
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Night10194 posted:It strikes me now that there is room for Peasant With A Railgun: The RPG about exploiting silly rules loopholes and attempts at 'realism' to make a wacky cartoon world of birdlords, peasant railguns, and trailblazers to the stars. I once said some mean things about this idea on these very forums. I would like to retract those words, and apologise to the poster who wanted to take D&D3.x to its illogical conclusion.
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Dec 1, 2016 15:51
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I get a real Elder Scrolls vibe from this game. Trying to be Very Serious, but the engine has enough glitches and edge cases that you can make all sorts of ridiculous cartoon weirdness happen just going strictly by the book.
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Dec 1, 2016 15:54
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At least they aren't shouting hands back on. I mean, really.
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Dec 1, 2016 16:25
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Halloween Jack posted:Generally speaking, the more a ruleset tries to be "realistic" and model reality as some virtual-world physics engine, the more you wind up with these weird edge cases where you can throw a baseball ten miles, and whatnot. Like, you don't see people doing this with PbtA games, is what I'm saying. Bieeardo posted:At least they aren't shouting hands back on. I mean, really.
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Dec 1, 2016 16:34
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Halloween Jack posted:Generally speaking, the more a ruleset tries to be "realistic" and model reality as some virtual-world physics engine, the more you wind up with these weird edge cases where you can throw a baseball ten miles, and whatnot. In the mind of the ultra-realism RPG designer, the ideal RPG system is thus a large stack of physics textbooks. What should I do if I need to know the velocity of the particle at coordinate (2176.24871,740.2874)? "Ask your GM"
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Dec 1, 2016 16:35
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You can certainly try to make your abstractions in such a way that they reward real-world tactics, mind. Like how fixing people with suppressing automatic fire and then moving to flank or grenade was a standard and completely essential part of combat in Albedo, and one of the reasons that game gave you a whole squad of lesser NPCs to allow a single player to set up those kinds of moves and to emphasize that an effective officer who can keep their soldiers fighting in good order under pressure was a better fighter than a lone wolf turbocommando.
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Dec 1, 2016 16:37
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FMguru posted:Has anyone ever done an everything-is-awful medieval era RPG that actually worked? WFRP and Vampire: the Dark Ages are the only two that come to mind. I think HârnMaster probably comes closest. Maybe Ars Magica for everyone but the wizards.
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Dec 1, 2016 16:51
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Evil Mastermind posted:What's weird is that people still haven't figured out how that's the case. The whole idea of RPG rules being a physics simulator as opposed to an abstraction is one of those ideas you'd think people would figure out once they try to mechanically band-aid over yet another weird edge case. Playing PbtA games starts with the assumption that games are stories and that the manipulable mechanical bits in the game have thematic meaning, rather than being just objects in an imaginary virtual space. (And even then, you see bad PbtA games that have 15 Basic Moves, playbooks that are too specific, fiddly patch rules, and so on. No flexible system is immune to having people miss the point of the design space it creates.) It's pretty telling that people who've never played RPGs before seem to pick up "storygames" a lot better than they do games that try to model the differences between .40 S&W and .357 SIG. I think there's a good argument to be made that the way most RPGs have been designed for decades, when played from a young age, actually has the potential to miseducate people in how they read stories--always asking the question of how some science-fictional, fantastical phenomena works in terms of a mechanistic virtual reality. ...Which is not to say that tabletop gamers are a uniquely wretched lot because of [offensive disability metaphors courtesy of Ron Edwards]. Especially when it comes to any kind of geeky media, the average person seems to have little understanding of why they like and dislike things. This shouldn't be surprising given that few of us are taught how to read fiction in school beyond being required to memorize a list of conflicts (man vs. nature, etc.) and plot the arc of a short story. Cinema is very important to most people, and almost no one is taught to read films in school. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 16:57
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So what you're telling me is that Middenarde is as bad about physics as HSD was with biology and economy. Why yes the Cogs do still piss me off, why do you ask?
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Dec 1, 2016 17:14
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Halloween Jack posted:With video games, you're stuck with what the engine gives you. Are different types of characters terribly balanced? Did bad design result in emergent gameplay that makes knives better than guns and grenades? Every player will eventually see it, none of them can change it, and a consensus will probably develop that this was a bad idea. Because RPGs can be customized, many will endlessly blame the player or the gamemaster. The funny thing is, I don't actually like PbtA! I don't like full 'storygames' and prefer crunchier rulesets, with a more traditional separation between player and GM. But I only like the drat things when the abstractions and things provide gameplay that is A: Enjoyably complex (I like to have things to fiddle with) and B: Fits a theme. The reason I was eager to cover Ironclaw and Albedo, besides them being obscure, is both games are highly mechanically complex but fit their themes. Albedo especially, I think, with the inevitable PTSD and harsh mental consequences for combat and the strong focus on being the clear head that keeps everyone together while modeling the pressure and stress of both being shot at and how horrible it can be to have to take a life, yourself. I like the idea that a powerful weapon might be limited not by the fact that you can't find ammo or afford it, but by the fact that killing another person by blowing them clean in half with an anti-tank rifle can destroy your PC psychologically because they still have basic empathy, or that taking the gifts that fully insulated you (as much as you could be) from Awe actually lowered your social skills and made you legitimately scary to other people. I like heavy mechanics when they're geared towards enhancing a story, rather than the ridiculous idea of simulating reality. Using an abstracted but omnipresent rule to get across the exhaustion and misery of extended modern infantry combat is a good idea. Using it to differentiate between 5.56mm and 7.62mm NATO rounds is not.
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Dec 1, 2016 17:53
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ZeroCount posted:Kill a man by calling him fat. We can both walk away, no one here has to get owned Player with a d20: gently caress you
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Dec 1, 2016 17:57
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I agree on all your important points. For games that aren't Monsterhearts I just like having more tactical bits to play with than PbtA or FATE provide. Albedo seems like the kind of game that would play very differently, and lose a lot of uniqueness, if you don't use all the rules. Much like early editions of D&D, which are very logistical and tactical if you actually use the rules for hirelings and whatnot instead of playing it as heroic fantasy. I would definitely play Albedo. (Speaking of which, I tried to find some of the comics. Why are they so obscure now? Seems like you have to buy single issues from Amazon Marketplace or eBay or whatever to read it.)
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Dec 1, 2016 17:59
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Halloween Jack posted:It's pretty telling that people who've never played RPGs before seem to pick up "storygames" a lot better than they do games that try to model the differences between .40 S&W and .357 SIG. I think there's a good argument to be made that the way most RPGs have been designed for decades, when played from a young age, actually has the potential to miseducate people in how they read stories--always asking the question of how some science-fictional, fantastical phenomena works in terms of a mechanistic virtual reality. In two chapters from "now" in the Torg Aysle review, we get into the nitty-gritty of magic, how it works, and how you design a spell. Now, Torg magic uses a bunch of skills and everything is based off four general "types" of magic: conjuration, abjuration, divination, and apporation. Each one of those is a skill. The chapter leads off with eight pages of fiction of a teacher in Aylse in front of a class explaining "Magic 101" and this is how a spell works and this is what the skills represent because they're known in-universe and how X interacts with Y in-universe and why you can't actually be affected by two ongoing spells at a time and so on and so on. It's completely unnecessary. But why is there so much info validating how magic works in the game? Because a) the game itself is trying to simulate reality, but also b) the magic system (particularly the spell creation system) was written by a physicist.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:08
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Halloween Jack posted:It's pretty telling that people who've never played RPGs before seem to pick up "storygames" a lot better than they do games that try to model the differences between .40 S&W and .357 SIG. I think there's a good argument to be made that the way most RPGs have been designed for decades, when played from a young age, actually has the potential to miseducate people in how they read stories--always asking the question of how some science-fictional, fantastical phenomena works in terms of a mechanistic virtual reality. The same trait also manifests in one of my least-favorite nerd mindsets - the way that so many nerds can only engage and critique things is by calling out plot holes, things that are "unrealistic", or ways that it contradicts canon or the original work it's being adapted from. Nerds love doing it because it's 1) objectively provable/disprovable and 2) a great way to assert how much smarter you are than the creator. Dear God, the number of people I've heard rant about the Duracell battery analogy and the laws of thermodynamics as their entire takeaway from the first Matrix film...
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Dec 1, 2016 18:09
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Halloween Jack posted:I agree on all your important points. For games that aren't Monsterhearts I just like having more tactical bits to play with than PbtA or FATE provide. I don't know, I never actually read the comics. From what I understand, they were written in the 80s and kinda predated the whole 'furry' stigma because furries didn't exist until the INTERNETS. That might also explain why they're hard to find. They were a niche comic from a pre-internet era and I think Albedo never became popular the same way as Usagi Yojimbo (which I assume was more popular because I remember my older brothers having tons of issues of it back in the day). E: One interesting thing I learned from a friend who did really like the Albedo comics ages ago is that the system actually collapses. The meddling and fiddling by the powerful and the inaccurate information they feed the Net means the perfect AI necessary to make their socialist paradise/command economy work kinda enters a death spiral and the EDF and ILR both collapse completely, leading to isolated, surviving colony worlds with relatively little means of FTL travel or communication. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Dec 1, 2016 |
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Dec 1, 2016 18:09
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FMguru posted:This particular nerd trait actually predates RPGs - I see it in things like the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe and the Star Fleet Technical Manual and even the appendices in Lord Of The Rings. That 1978 Poul Anderson essay On Thud And Blunder captures the mindset pretty well. The idea that there's a concrete, consistent, concrete foundation underlying your favorite stories that you can engage with is a really seductive part of fantasy worldbuilding. Also I know trap sprung, etc.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:13
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There is a tendency not to look past mechanism to theme. And also an unwillingness to engage a work on its own terms, at least conceptually (which I am very much guilty of sometimes). You see a lot of that in the idea of comparing the power levels of fantastical or superhuman characters, rather than whether or not it fits that one can beat the other at this point in the contest/narrative. Like, of course either character can prevail in a conflict; they're fictional characters being written by an author. What matters is whether or not it's fitting to the story for one or the other to prevail at a specific moment, and whether that climax feels earned. Batman doesn't manage to defeat Superman because Batman is simply more powerful, he does it because the author wants to say something (whether that be Batman Is Awesome, Suck It Superman Fans or something more complicated like Ingenuity Can Defeat Blind Power And Hubris or just 'Man it would be really cool if they had a big fight scene and the guy you didn't expect to win pulled it out'). The author is always in control of what happens (though not the interpretation of what happens) and there is no concrete mystical reality the author is just 'reporting'.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:20
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Terrible Opinions posted:It certainly doesn't ruin a very good film, but the batteries was a really dumb change mandated by executives to the script. Which also leads to things like TV Tropes, where engagement with art is done entirely by trying to reduce it to a series of pre-constructed tropes. That movie was nothing special, it was just a Five Man Band with a Will They Won't They central dynamic that gets subverted by the Double Betrayal by the Gary Stu.
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Dec 1, 2016 18:21
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