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Robindaybird posted:I can't remember if that was actually in text, or a conclusion I came to after reading it and seeing the anthology where a Beast tried to force a Humanized Promthean into becoming a Promthean again - but it's not too far fetched to believe they will hand Changelings over to True Fae base on things as written. wonder no longer because i found it "Beast: the Primordial page 227' posted:The Gentry, for their part, see Beasts as curiosities: they’re so yeah Beasts actively help the fae hunt down mortals and escaped changelings for their rape dungeons
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Jan 17, 2017 01:59
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LordAbaddon posted:I'm wondering this myself, are we sure DaveB or Rose didn't ghost write it? Rose wrote the setting bible and outline for Demon. She basically created the idea for it, and she and Matt shared the pre-work for it, the long no-status-update work I'm doing for Deviant at the moment. Timeline worked out that Demon was being written at the same time as Vampire 2nd ed (like, exactly the same time. I wrote on both, and was hopping from one chapter on one to another on the other and back again) so Matt Developed Demon's corebook while Rose Developed Vampire. I think they alternate Demon sourcebooks between the two of them; I only worked on the Player's Guide and Interface, which were both Developed by Matt. He also wrote, like, every single Embed and Exploit in the D:tD corebook. Strictly by wordcount, Matt actually wrote (as opposed to developing, which can entail varying degrees of rewriting) way more of Demon than he did of Beast.
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Jan 17, 2017 01:59
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And again, we have to ask McFarland why Beasts should be considered protagonists.
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Jan 17, 2017 02:02
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On one hand, that quote indicates that it's the Gentry who tend to respect Beasts, rather than the reverse. On the other hand, Beasts having the wary respect of the Gentry while also warping the Hedge in the same way that they (or high-Wyrd changelings) do is a big ol' warning sign for any of the Lost. It's the GET OUT mysteriously scrawled in blood on the wall of a backwoods cabin they've just inherited. Emy fucked around with this message at 03:13 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 03:11
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Bear in mind as a publisher all we are is naysayers, as long as people are buying it, it doesn't matter too much what we think. Unless Onyx Path started seeing a boycott of their other games, the fact that some lines are run badly doesn't really matter as long as they hit their bottom line. There's no accounting for taste, but there's often a profit to be made by ignoring it.
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Jan 17, 2017 03:14
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NutritiousSnack posted:Sometimes great writers can create massive piles of poo poo not be aware of it, especially if the work in question reveals a character flaw. In Matt's case it's that he responds poorly to trolling, political arguments, and humanizing political opponents. Really now? I don't consider pointing out how Beasts are horrific abusers -- and glorified for being so -- being a troll, or making a "political argument", or "humanizing a political opponent". But McFarland sure had no problem flipping the hell out and basically calling me and everyone else in those rpg.net threads MRAs and worse for daring to not toe his party line and accept Beasts as pure and justified. Ditto those of us who were horrified by the passage where upsetting players at the table was held up as a good thing. None of that shitshow had anything to do with trolling, or politics.
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Jan 17, 2017 04:04
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taichara posted:Really now? You forget: we live in a world where criticizing something is considered "trolling", and acknowledging that non-straight-white-males exist is considered a "political statement". Humanity is pretty much hosed at this point.
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Jan 17, 2017 05:08
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This XCrawl game seems like a pretty good idea. The devil of course is in the details. OGL was a garbage format for this and it's clear they held the player's handbook with tweezers throughout. But seriously that premise is killer. We reviewed the D20 variation, of which we have a fancy special edition with a natty dust jacket.
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Jan 17, 2017 05:54
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theironjef posted:This XCrawl game seems like a pretty good idea. The devil of course is in the details. OGL was a garbage format for this and it's clear they held the player's handbook with tweezers throughout. But seriously that premise is killer. We reviewed the D20 variation, of which we have a fancy special edition with a natty dust jacket.
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Jan 17, 2017 05:59
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Evil Mastermind posted:The thing that bugs me most about XCrawl is that it would have been perfect for 4e, but of course they didn't make a 4e version. Of course, given how bad the mechanics they came up with for 3e were, that's probably for the best. We came to a similar conclusion. The nature of dungeon design in 4e would have been perfect. Of course the only part of the game really worth stealing is the core concept and that's easy enough to do for any other ruleset.
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Jan 17, 2017 06:07
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Kurieg posted:It is worth noting that unlike Beast, Conquering Heroes has absolutely zero reviews on DTRPG, and the only comments on it are choice quotes from the character description of the Blind Man (Which is a thing I would thank everyone to not spoil, it needs to be experienced properly) so it seems other people are at least realizing that this isn't healthy. Dammit. The only kind of joy I got out of Beast were these hilariously stupid reviews along the lines of "Beast is the best introduction for new players into the WoD!" or " A great build-your-own-monster toolkit!" Double Plus Undead posted:Seriously this thread is littered with reworks of Beast in a desperate attempt to make it a good game. Let it go. Whenever I try to "fix" them myself, I end up cutting out so much stuff they end up as very shallow magical girl villains. The Nightmare Teachers of Dark Mother, or something. I have a hard time treating these guys seriously. MonsieurChoc posted:I'd rather have a new Street Fighter RPG. I should get working on those Fight! supplements... LordAbaddon posted:Why does Macfarland have the audacity to pretend that Beast's are in anyway redeemable when they apparently hand over the rape victim stand-ins to their rapists so they can go BACK into their sex dungeon. Thats hosed up on enough levels that I can barely fathom. Gotta teach dem Changelings a lesson to not escape from their masters 
Doresh fucked around with this message at 11:06 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 10:41
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Here is my Beast rewrite: Each player is some sort of tortured royalty cursed into a monstrous form for some personality flaw. They must find true self-actualization to break their curse. Also the crockery sings a lot.
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Jan 17, 2017 14:45
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Evil Mastermind posted:The thing that bugs me most about XCrawl is that it would have been perfect for 4e, but of course they didn't make a 4e version. Of course, given how bad the mechanics they came up with for 3e were, that's probably for the best.
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Jan 17, 2017 15:07
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Something like that, yeah. I remember that it took multiple rounds to pull off a signature move, partially because of poor design skill and partly because standard/move/minor wasn't a thing yet. It also had the Athlete class, which was like the poster child for pointless classes.
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Jan 17, 2017 15:16
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I don't think d20 ever figured out 'this takes multiple rounds to do' almost universally equated to 'this is worthless'.
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Jan 17, 2017 15:20
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Especially when combined with "...and you have to make a skill/attack check each round or start over."
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Jan 17, 2017 15:21
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It occurs to me that you could probably do something interesting with XCrawl 13th Age's design space, but I doubt the designers are capable of working outside of a d20 landscape.
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Jan 17, 2017 15:22
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Halloween Jack posted:Especially when combined with "...and you have to make a skill/attack check each round or start over." "What do you mean the odds are bad? You only need a 6 on each check, so what if you have to make 5 of them!?"
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Jan 17, 2017 15:25
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Just keep rolling dice until you fail.
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Jan 17, 2017 15:47
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X-Crawl reminds me of a series of /tg brainstorm threads where instead of pro-wrestlers dungeons are delved by professional sports teams. My one disappointment was that setting fluff basically obliterated the area corresponding to the NFC North (the OP said he was from Detroit and wanted to avoid injecting his favorites).
SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 17:07 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 16:42
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Evil Mastermind posted:It occurs to me that you could probably do something interesting with XCrawl 13th Age's design space, but I doubt the designers are capable of working outside of a d20 landscape. Isn't there a Hero System version of it? No research on my end but I did see a Herosystem logo on a few art pieces while looking for those. Halloween Jack posted:XCrawl is one of the D20 books that showcases everything wrong with D20 design thinking. Didn't doing a Special Move require paying something for it, and then you had to do some combination of spending a round posing, spending a round making a skill check, and of course actually succeeding on whatever roll? It's free to do, it just has associated risks. The first round is the Call, then you have to choose two actions to take, and they can't be the same action, which have to be performed successfully over the next two rounds. They receive a +2 bonus to either hit or the skill check (since you can put things like acrobatics in there). If you succeed at both you get a fame point. If you kill a target you get three fame points. If at any point you fail any check or if an attack fails to deal damage you lose three fame points. The only other benefit besides the +2 bonus is that if you succeed at the whole thing you get a +6 to your next Mugging or Grandstanding roll, provided you make it immediately. My favorite part is that rogues can incorporate sneak attacks in, but are unlikely to since the audience has to be able to see the call and will react to it accordingly. Even if you chance upon a sleeping monster the crowd going wild during your one round of doing the people's elbow warmup will wake up the target anyway. And my second favorite part is that since casters have a variety of options that can't miss or fail, signature moves work great for them. If your signature move is casting Mage Armor followed by Magic Missile, grats you get a fame point, every time. theironjef fucked around with this message at 17:03 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 17:01
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theironjef posted:Isn't there a Hero System version of it? No research on my end but I did see a Herosystem logo on a few art pieces while looking for those.  quote:They receive a +2 bonus to either hit or the skill check (since you can put things like acrobatics in there).
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Jan 17, 2017 17:07
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Also at some point jef you need to review a Pro-Wrestling RPG (if I still had my copy of the WWE RPG I'd send it to you)
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Jan 17, 2017 17:08
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WWWRPG is the good wrestling RPG, for the record. One of the best PBTA systems.
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Jan 17, 2017 17:12
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Mors Rattus posted:WWWRPG is the good wrestling RPG, for the record. One of the best PBTA systems. Though confusingly, there's another WWWRPG that's actually Know Your Role 2.0
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Jan 17, 2017 17:30
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Evil Mastermind posted:I know they recently did a Pathfinder version, only this one has six new classes! Ugh and Athlete was such a wet fart of a class. It was bare minimum OGL class design at it's most raw. A scaling skill bonus, a selection of bad bonus feats, and dismal save/BAB progression. Why they didn't just introduce it as a new NPC class like the Expert is a mystery to me. Not to mention the prestige classes were uniformly worthless, unless you were desperate to play as trappers instead of crawlers. I'll look into wrestling games! Based on a perfunctory googling, it looks like the PBTA one is both too good and too new for our purposes, but I bet there's some terrible ones out there. theironjef fucked around with this message at 17:48 on Jan 17, 2017 |
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Jan 17, 2017 17:46
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Get the WWE Know Your Role RPG if you can find it. It also uses the d20 system and makes a bunch of new classes.
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Jan 17, 2017 17:56
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The first pro wrestling product in roleplaying was just called Professional Wrestling, released in 1977 by a fly-by-night publisher who never did another product. I can only verify it by entries in databases, and can't even find a cover image. Apparently it was the kind of product that was published as a universal rules supplement, with the implicit assumption that you're going to use it for D&D. I'd love to see a copy, since we're talking about a book from not just another era of game design, but a very different era of wrestling.theironjef posted:It's free to do, it just has associated risks. The first round is the Call, then you have to choose two actions to take, and they can't be the same action, which have to be performed successfully over the next two rounds. They receive a +2 bonus to either hit or the skill check (since you can put things like acrobatics in there). If you succeed at both you get a fame point. If you kill a target you get three fame points. If at any point you fail any check or if an attack fails to deal damage you lose three fame points. The only other benefit besides the +2 bonus is that if you succeed at the whole thing you get a +6 to your next Mugging or Grandstanding roll, provided you make it immediately. I was surprised how much youse guys liked Urban Arcana. Seems like it works best as a horror game. Did Nightlife strike you as similar in a lot of ways?
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Jan 17, 2017 18:02
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Doresh posted:Though confusingly, there's another WWWRPG that's actually Know Your Role 2.0 Wild World Wrestling is Know Your Role 2.0 and is the better version of Know Your Role but you still roll for each wrestling move you attempt and then do damage which is not good and about as non-pro-wrestling you can get in 2017. Still, for an OGL game, it did a good enough job stepping away from classes. It did step into a bottomless pit of feats, with a lot of feat-tax tossed in there for good measure. World Wide Wrestling is the PbtA one, and it's pretty good in general but definitely has a few breaking points. It's made, like most good PbtA games, for short campaigns or using your later advances to switch roles/characters/etc. The second book, International Incident, actually gives suggestions on ways to make it so people don't just pile up stat increases over and over again and never fail anything. It's also a PbtA game without much mechanical innovation, which means if you really don't like the system, you probably aren't going to like it.
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Jan 17, 2017 18:02
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Most wrestling games make the mistake of being skill based in a specific technical way, like you have Brawling 3 and Suplexing 4 and High-Flying 5 and whatnot. Which, among many other problems, doesn't account for all the guys whose finisher is the only top-rope move in their arsenal.
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Jan 17, 2017 18:20
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thelazyblank posted:Wild World Wrestling is Know Your Role 2.0 and is the better version of Know Your Role but you still roll for each wrestling move you attempt and then do damage which is not good and about as non-pro-wrestling you can get in 2017. Still, for an OGL game, it did a good enough job stepping away from classes. It did step into a bottomless pit of feats, with a lot of feat-tax tossed in there for good measure. They kinda went in the same direction as Mutants & Masterminds, but didn't quite want to go all the way towards fully effects-based stuff. Halloween Jack posted:Most wrestling games make the mistake of being skill based in a specific technical way, like you have Brawling 3 and Suplexing 4 and High-Flying 5 and whatnot. Which, among many other problems, doesn't account for all the guys whose finisher is the only top-rope move in their arsenal. I think this can be traced back to the Street Fighter Storytelling Game, where you can put points in stuff like Kicks and Punches. You probably don't want to put points in both.
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Jan 17, 2017 18:37
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Halloween Jack posted:I was surprised how much youse guys liked Urban Arcana. Seems like it works best as a horror game. Did Nightlife strike you as similar in a lot of ways? The thing I liked so much about Urban Arcana was that it managed to take a deeply boring ruleset out of D20 Modern and actually make it seem fun. It would work fine as horror, especially if you lean heavy on the psychic horror and mindflayers and so on, but it could also make a really good comic game what with the ridiculous excuses for monsters not being seen by the general populace. I loved the whole "world of magic happily existing right under everyone's noses" thing.
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Jan 17, 2017 18:59
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Beholder with an elaborate wooden body-dummy hanging from it, wearing a hat.
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Jan 17, 2017 19:12
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Mors Rattus posted:Beholder with an elaborate wooden body-dummy hanging from it, wearing a hat. Beholders would obviously appear as drones with a balloon on top.
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Jan 17, 2017 19:23
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Unfortunately, Urban Arcana never spent much time on that. It was more concerned about telling you how hot the drow in the author's pet band are.
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Jan 17, 2017 19:24
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wiegieman posted:Unfortunately, Urban Arcana never spent much time on that. It was more concerned about telling you how hot the drow in the author's pet band are. True, but for every three gross cheesecake pictures of Maddie dressed like she's on My So Called Life you get one picture of Leonard the bugbear or Deacon Micklethwaite the gnome.
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Jan 17, 2017 19:39
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Urban Arcana was far better than d20 Modern deserved.
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Jan 17, 2017 19:41
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Know Your Role is actually a pretty good game for a d20 product. The big problem I always ran into is defining what a Savvy (i.e. Charisma-based) move is. If the People's Elbow is a Savvy move, does that mean any move can be Savvy if you tack on enough showing off? If you want a genuinely questionable wrestling game, check out Kayfabe. It has some interesting ideas -- players are supposed to play both the writing staff of a wrestling show *and* the wrestlers themselves. But I can't see how it would work out in real play.
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Jan 17, 2017 19:50
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theironjef posted:True, but for every three gross cheesecake pictures of Maddie dressed like she's on My So Called Life you get one picture of Leonard the bugbear or Deacon Micklethwaite the gnome. And lest we forget... 
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Jan 17, 2017 20:01
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Doresh posted:I think this can be traced back to the Street Fighter Storytelling Game, where you can put points in stuff like Kicks and Punches. You probably don't want to put points in both.
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Jan 17, 2017 20:01
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