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PurpleXVI posted:Wasn't Taffy 3 when miscommunication and general bad decisions by the US Navy lead to a pretty outmatched force facing the Japanese, and then managing to punch remarkably above their weight? In part because they didn't turn and run when they knew they were screwed, but instead started punching and kicking with everything they had, landing blows that made the Japanese think they were in for way more of a fight than they actually were? Yeah. It's been a while since the mechanics, but could you build a talent that can hit anything with a gun, even if the shot would normally be one in several million? Because there's a story about that in there.
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Jan 26, 2017 07:28
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wdarkk posted:Yeah. It's been a while since the mechanics, but could you build a talent that can hit anything with a gun, even if the shot would normally be one in several million? Because there's a story about that in there. Escort Carrier took out a heavy cruiser with a 5 inch deck gun that hit the Chokai's torpedoes. Oxygen torpedoes were fantastic torpedoes. But extremely volatile.
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Jan 26, 2017 07:33
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PurpleXVI posted:Wasn't Taffy 3 when miscommunication and general bad decisions by the US Navy lead to a pretty outmatched force facing the Japanese, and then managing to punch remarkably above their weight? In part because they didn't turn and run when they knew they were screwed, but instead started punching and kicking with everything they had, landing blows that made the Japanese think they were in for way more of a fight than they actually were? Edit: Nah, let's separate that into another post. NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Jan 26, 2017 |
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Jan 26, 2017 07:33
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NGDBSS posted:Basically; in the absence of guns that could match the Japanese they basically settled for speed, subterfuge, and superior fire control. Among other things, they pioneered the much-hated-in-World-of-Warships tactic of "smoke cloud raining shells at you" using that whole "radar fire control" thing.
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Jan 26, 2017 07:35
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They also ran out of bombs and so resorted to trying to drop depth charges on ships. There was also a tiny little Destroyer Escort that actually managed to get into a fight with and hold off a heavy cruiser in a slugging match. Taffy 3 is every ridiculous action movie last stand except totally real.
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Jan 26, 2017 07:44
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Night10194 posted:Escort Carrier took out a heavy cruiser with a 5 inch deck gun that hit the Chokai's torpedoes.
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Jan 26, 2017 07:51
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There were a couple times in the Pacific theater where an aggressive commander who siezed the initiative caused the enemy to disengage for fear of a larger force. Samar is a great example of a properly motivated CVE force punching at the weight of true fleet carrier elements. They may have only been escort carriers, but there were still 13 airstrips working at that fight. wiegieman fucked around with this message at 08:37 on Jan 26, 2017 |
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Jan 26, 2017 08:35
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theironjef posted:My city is either dunked underwater and taken over by fish people or just nuked first in every fictional future story. Plus we just lost the Chargers. Ah hey, by the way, if you want a history of RPGs as a hobby you might want to look into picking up Shannon Appelcline's four-decade four-volume series Designers & Dragons. Despite the reference in the title it does make a go at covering the whole of the hobby.
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Jan 26, 2017 15:16
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Night10194 posted:Escort Carrier took out a heavy cruiser with a 5 inch deck gun that hit the Chokai's torpedoes. The Chokai had one weak point though, it's highly volatile and shock sensitive torpedo launchers that were practically unarmoured, circled in red here:  At the time, naval gunnery still consisted of getting shells to land both ahead and behind the enemy ship, thus indicating that eventually one would fall in the middle and strike the target so hitting a rowboat sized object would already be impressive if 1. There was actually more than a single gun so it was actually possible to determine what the center point of each volley is. 2. The firing ship also isn't manoeuvring wildly to throw off the aim of the gunners manning the more numerous and larger cannons on the other ship. In the end, the White Plain reported hitting the Chokai six times across the entire battle, five of which struck the armour and glanced off to little or no effect before the torpedo launcher was hit.
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Jan 26, 2017 15:20
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Also the White Plains was, you know, a CVE. Ships where the only consideration was 'can we get planes on it'. White Plains was at least designed to be a carrier, rather than being a converted merchantman like some CVEs.
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Jan 26, 2017 15:38
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marshmallow creep posted:This is from months back, but I'm reading the thread and wanted to say that I'm intrigued about a game where every Bethesda glitch you can imagine is happening in the "real" world. The players obviously can tell something is wrong, and in their investigations discover that the world was supposed to end centuries ago, but questing heroes have stopped apocalypses so many times, essentially extending and "patching" the universe to keep functioning, that the code that handles reality is coming apart at the seams, and they need to decide if they're going to keep going patch-jobs to stave off the end, or if perhaps there's a better solution in starting with a fresh build. Sorry, this is just Demon's/Dark Souls.
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Jan 26, 2017 15:42
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Kurieg posted:It probably didn't help that the previous few times they were invaded from the sea a giant gently caress off hurricane scuttled the enemy fleet. marshmallow creep posted:This is from months back, but I'm reading the thread and wanted to say that I'm intrigued about a game where every Bethesda glitch you can imagine is happening in the "real" world. The players obviously can tell something is wrong, and in their investigations discover that the world was supposed to end centuries ago, but questing heroes have stopped apocalypses so many times, essentially extending and "patching" the universe to keep functioning, that the code that handles reality is coming apart at the seams, and they need to decide if they're going to keep going patch-jobs to stave off the end, or if perhaps there's a better solution in starting with a fresh build. wdarkk posted:Yeah. It's been a while since the mechanics, but could you build a talent that can hit anything with a gun, even if the shot would normally be one in several million? Because there's a story about that in there. If you just want to kill people, Hyper-Coordination and gun Hyperskills are probably the way to go, unless you're playing a spy campaign where you're often unarmed. There's no point in buying a Harm power that's about as dangerous as a Rifle, unless you're looking forward to upgrading it later. Compared to most miracles, Hyperstats and Hyperskills are cheap, and Hyperstats have multiple uses. But like I said, being superhumanly skilled with guns, knives, and fists is limiting. A rifle bullet ain't gonna pierce a tank--or a Talent with Heavy Armor, or a Containment field. All offensive Miracle powers are expensive ways to kill someone, because you're buying your die pool up from zero--you don't have a base Stat+Skill pool to start with. Harm is as expensive as a power can be, but it Defends, and you can buy lots of modifiers for it. You won't be able to afford it at character creation, but if you want to hurl bolts that kill everything in a 10-yard radius and blast tanks apart, you want Harm. The non-mechanical downside is that everyone will notice the guy firing bolts of lightning from his arse. Instant Death is cheaper than Harm, it's reliable, and it even ignores armor and cover as long as you can see any of the target! But it doesn't do poo poo to anything nonliving, or anyone who has total cover, so you're useless against tanks. (You'll be amazing at clearing gun emplacements if you can actually get a look at the guy manning it. Very possible for a MG42 nest, almost impossible for a pillbox or 88mm. This sorta thing is why the Allies developed the tactic of teleporters dropping dangerous Talents into gun emplacements.) It also doesn't Defend at all. Break is specifically designed to wreck heavy armor, but if you're getting in fistfights with tanks I hope you have some defensive Miracle power as well. Disintegration not only Defends, the target's armor and wound levels don't matter because you erase them from reality. But it's expensive as Harm, and tricky to use. Killing someone with Teleportation requires touch, so it's not very useful on a battlefield. You can wreak all kinds of havoc by teleporting grenades, rubble, etc. though that's kind of situational. Using powers like Create, Control, Dampen, Transmutation, etc. to kill people is possible, but it's an expensive way to go about it if combat prowess is all you want. For example, if I was your GM and you said you wanted the power to turn people into stone, I would just have you buy Instant Death instead of a Transmutation power with a bunch of specific limitations on it.
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Jan 26, 2017 16:18
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FMguru posted:Japan's failure to plan for a long war was critical, as you mention. My favorite example was the Japanese approach to pilot training, which was incredibly difficult and had something like a 98% washout rate and so only the absolute best of the best graduated and flew Japanese planes. Which meant that at the start of the war Japan had arguably the finest pilots in the world...and a system that could only graduated 80 or so replacements a year. Meanwhile, the US quickly built out a system (hiring former barnstormers to teach basic flying at local airfields) that cranked out 50,000 trained pilots every year. That's a real weird system if you also order at least some of the best of the best to deliberately crash their plane into ships and stuff. Ouch. FMguru posted:That seems of a part with a lot of Japanese military stuff. Carrying the glorious fight to the enemy - everybody wants in on that and spends 24 hours a day thinking about it and preparing for it. Logistics, damage control, training, communications, signal security, escorting convoys, field medicine - bah! A warrior cares not for such things! So pretty much all the boring and unglamorous (and necessary) parts of the army and navy were filled with mediocrities who weren't good enough to be in the real military, and who were treated as such, led by dispirited officers who were all passed over for combat commands and forced to do un-warrior like things while other people got to have all the glory. Now here's a big influence for the Clans of BattleTech. Except it kinda works there because everything caters to the MechWarriors. marshmallow creep posted:This is from months back, but I'm reading the thread and wanted to say that I'm intrigued about a game where every Bethesda glitch you can imagine is happening in the "real" world. The players obviously can tell something is wrong, and in their investigations discover that the world was supposed to end centuries ago, but questing heroes have stopped apocalypses so many times, essentially extending and "patching" the universe to keep functioning, that the code that handles reality is coming apart at the seams, and they need to decide if they're going to keep going patch-jobs to stave off the end, or if perhaps there's a better solution in starting with a fresh build. This almost sounds like a setting for Godbound. The world broke because too many people glitched through the floor. It also turned out that the Heaven raid dungeon was not particularly stable. Now a few of the players still bothering with this mess of a server have suddenly gained mod powers. Doresh fucked around with this message at 21:33 on Jan 26, 2017 |
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Jan 26, 2017 21:28
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Doresh posted:This almost sounds like a setting for Godbound. The world broke because too many people glitched through the floor. It also turned out that the Heaven raid dungeon was not particularly stable. Now a few of the players still bothering with this mess of a server have suddenly gained mod powers.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:40
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Doresh posted:That's a real weird system if you also order at least some of the best of the best to deliberately crash their plane into ships and stuff. Ouch. There was one Japanese ace who was ordered to Kamikaze and told his bosses to get hosed, his job was shooting planes down, not crashing. He was just popular enough a propaganda hero to get away with it.
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Jan 26, 2017 21:52
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Dude didn't work his rear end off to be a glorified missile.Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Better yet, the Heaven raid's final boss wasn't intended to be beaten so the legendary heroes of the land have disappeared, locked in an eternal battle with a thing that will not, can not die. I was just about to mention that EverQuest incident. I guess that's what the Uncreated horrors are.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:28
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What's the Everquest incident?
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Jan 26, 2017 22:46
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Evil Mastermind posted:What's the Everquest incident? A server-wide event involving a ghost dragon super boss. The developers purposely gave it enough HP and damage output to be essentially unkillable. Then a giant horde of players wailed on it for hours, bringing it dangerously close to getting killed - freaking the mods out and causing them to despawn it at the last minute out of fear that its unplanned death could wreck havoc on the server. It's possibly the first video game instance of "If it has stats, it can be killed" that happens when a writer decides to give gods statblocks. Doresh fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Jan 26, 2017 |
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Jan 26, 2017 22:49
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I think Jon & Jef discussed that on System Mastery, because they had an Everquest nerd as Guest Co-Host.
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Jan 26, 2017 22:53
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Evil Mastermind posted:What's the Everquest incident? Here's an in-depth article about it.
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Jan 26, 2017 23:57
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Halloween Jack posted:I think Jon & Jef discussed that on System Mastery, because they had an Everquest nerd as Guest Co-Host. Probably. It was one of those crazy events that then became legendary with MMO people. The flip side was an FF11 boss where you were ostensibly supposed to fight it but the guild trying to kill it had to quit after 18 hours of being combat with it. Old MMOs are terrible.
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Jan 27, 2017 06:55
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Grnegsnspm posted:Probably. It was one of those crazy events that then became legendary with MMO people. The flip side was an FF11 boss where you were ostensibly supposed to fight it but the guild trying to kill it had to quit after 18 hours of being combat with it. Old MMOs are terrible. On the flipside, there was the time Asheron's Call players decided to defend a big macguffin boss and beat the admins when they tried to kill them http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-most-elaborate-dick-moves-in-online-gaming-history_p5/
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Jan 27, 2017 07:06
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Kavak posted:On the flipside, there was the time Asheron's Call players decided to defend a big macguffin boss and beat the admins when they tried to kill them http://www.cracked.com/blog/the-7-most-elaborate-dick-moves-in-online-gaming-history_p5/ It continues to make me sad that the Everquest lineage was the one that survived, rather than the Asheron's Call one. I suppose AC's spiritual successors are single-player games, which is maybe for the best. But just roaming around that giant world finding weird lore and stuff was great.
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Jan 27, 2017 07:57
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For everyone that loved Planescape, be sure to check out Jason Pitre's new Kickstarter, Sig: Manual of the Primes. It's Planescape using a FATE-like ruleset that's designed around exploring and influencing beliefs. a go-go!
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Jan 27, 2017 16:01
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SirPhoebos posted:For everyone that loved Planescape, be sure to check out Jason Pitre's new Kickstarter, Sig: Manual of the Primes. It's Planescape using a FATE-like ruleset that's designed around exploring and influencing beliefs.
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Jan 27, 2017 16:11
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Evil Mastermind posted:For some reason this game popped into my head earlier today while I was trying to think of games to run at an upcoming Games on Demand. How is it? Does it work well for one-shots? My own experience was a brief session with the base systems' setting creation engine, and it was pretty entertaining. But if you want a better measure, Oneshotpodcast.com just did a three part episode covering the game.
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Jan 27, 2017 16:21
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How fate-like? Fate and I aren't friends
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Jan 27, 2017 16:41
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Cythereal posted:Flamethrowers as a military phenomenon, as it turns out, are really an almost exclusively American thing Not really. Flamethrowers saw wide use in the hands of many nations. Germany put them into use throughout WWI, and in WWII it was used by all sides of the war, and the Germans used them extensively. Even after WWII the France and the Soviet Union would continue to develop flamethrowers, mounting them to tanks as late as the 1960's. The Soviet Union and Romania both pioneered the use of incendiary rockets as infantry weapons, and the IRA and South Africa used them operationally in the late 80's. The Brazilian Commando support units fielded a domestic flamethrower design as recent as a decade ago.
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Jan 27, 2017 18:22
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The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG Part 16e: Obfuscating mechanics Pretty much everything in the book has been fluff up to this point, so now it's time to get into the crunch. The general rules chapter kicks off with a description of the Living Land's axioms. As always I brought these up in the first post for the book, so let's revisit. Evil Mastermind posted:Magic axiom: 0 Magic simply does not exist in the Living Land. Period. Any use of magic at all is a contradiction. It's interesting to note that this is the only reality that has an axiom level of 0 in anything. Now we come to what are, in a manner of speaking, the Living Land's World Laws. I mentioned this before, but when the game line started not every reality had World Laws. In the core set, only the Nile Empire and Nippon Tech had Laws, and everyone else got them in their respective books. Except for the Living Land, since it was the first realm book and was released before they started giving everyone World Laws. Instead, it had some new mechanics for overall effects that permeated the realm. When the Revised Corebook came out, these were listed as World Laws even though that's not what they are. Regardless, next up are the new realm-specific mechanics. First is the Deep Mist and the Compass Curse, which I admit sounds like a bad Harry Potter ripoff. The Deep Mist is the thick smoky fog that permeates the Living Land and all of Takta Ker, apparently created by Kaah a few months after the invasion and brought down from the cosm question mark? It's not presented very well and I don't get why it needs to be Kaah's creation rather than a natural effect of the world, but whatever. The Mist has a number of effects on the realm. The first is that it sort of overwrites the weather patters inside the realm. Because of the mist, the Living Land is always humid and warm regardless of the time of year or the weather outside the axiom zone. Of course, this environment is perfectly fine for the edeinos, but for humans it's a bit of a hassle. Under a clear sky, the Deep Mist reduces visibility to 30 meters, and if it's overcast then you can only see about 20 meters out. Either way, detailed vision is cut off at 10 meters; past that you're just seeing silhouettes. At night, you can only out see out to 10 meters max regardless of light source. These effects apply to everyone, human and edeinos alike. The edeinos do have access to miracles that can allow them to see through the mists, though.  Tunnel vision is always a problem regardless of draw distance. The light diffusion of the Mist makes navigation via celestial objects very difficult. Because the Mist extends up about a mile, it's almost impossible to navigate by celestial means. In the daytime the sun's light is so diffused all you can really tell is if it's rising or setting, and at night it's drat near impossible to see the stars or the position of the moon. The second major effect of the Mists is the "compass curse", which is an effect that Kaah recently built into the Mist via the use of his Darkness Device. quote:The effect of the miracle is that any navigational device that depends on the magnetic poles to determine direction will notwork. The object itself is not affected, but the flow of Earth's magnetic fields through the area bounded by Living Land stelae is. The miracle takes the flow of the magnetic fields and randomly twists them around. That's right. A decade before Third Edition D&D, Torg had direction sense skill. Direction sense is based off Perception and is "developed by a character over a long period of time." It's used in Torg's equivalent of an overland travel system. The way the whole thing works is that the GM sets a travel time from where the PCs are to where they want to go. Then as the PCs travel, the GM makes a secret direction sense roll for them every 15 minutes using one of the character's skill rank. The difficultly of the roll starts at 6, but gets modified based on the following chart:  The GM then compares the result to another chart to see how on-course they are and specifically what he tells the players.  If the PCs want to boost the skill roll, they have to spend Possibilities or play cards blind because that's fun. Anyway, unless the roll is made by 3 or more, then the group is "defined as lost" and they need to try to get back on track by continuing to make rolls and hoping for a C or D result on the second chart there for each flubbed roll that got them lost (a.k.a. the "wander around until we figure it out" method). On the plus side, if they're retracing their steps then they get the -3 to the difficulty. So if the were lost for four failed rolls, they'd need to succeed at four rolls to get back on track. Which is an interesting idea, I guess, but it feels like it wouldn't work well in practice. Apart from the kind of mother-may-I blind rolling, there's a problem of time. To wit, you have to make navigation rolls every 15 minutes of travel time. Okay, fine. But what if you're trying to get somewhere that's two hours away? Three hours? What happens if people keep tanking rolls? The book does tell the GM that they can throw encounters in the mix for people to stumble over, but at the end of the day it's a "keep rolling until you figure it out" thing.  Not really relevant, but funny. The second "World Law" is Lanala's Love of Life, which is also tied to the Deep Mist. In the Living Land, when something organic dies, it rots incredibly quickly. It doesn't matter what it was; a creature, a person, an apple falling off a tree, once it's cut off from its source of life it will begin to decompose immediately, completely rotting away within 24 hours. Edible substances will only provide nourishment for about the first third of whatever its lifespan it. If something dead in the realm has been sealed in an airtight container (like canned goods left in the ruins of a supermarket), then it will begin to rot when exposed to the Mist. The longer the item has been "dead", the faster the decomposition. Basically, for every day since it was killed, the time it takes the item to decay triples. So if you prepare some food, and bring it into the Living Land three days later, it'll rot completely in a little under an hour. Note that food and such will only be affected once "exposed" to the Mist. Stuff that's in cans or vacuum-sealed won't begin to rot until the seal is broken and the stuff inside is exposed to air. Unfortunately, anything that's been prepared over a week ago will rot in 18 seconds, so it's not exactly practical. It turns out that completely artificial foodstuffs (like soda and junk food) aren't affected by the Mists, but obviously you can't live on them. At least, you can't live on them for long. On top of that, food brought in from outside the realm doesn't seem to be affected by the Mist, which has caused a booming business in what's called "realm running": freelance truckers and transporters who bring news and supplies to survivor colonies. It's a very risky job, but it pays really well. Since food can't be stockpiled if you're not getting it from realm runners, survival is very much a day-to-day affair. It's not uncommon for colonies on the major realm runner routes to stockpile canned goods as emergency supplies and use hunting as their primary food source. In order to keep this interesting, the survival skill gets a few modifications in the Living Land. The basic way the survival skill works is that when you're searching for food and water, you make a roll with a difficulty based on the type of environment you're in. If you make the roll, you forage enough supplies to get you through at least one day before you have to make another check; the more you beat the difficulty by, the longer you can go before making your next roll. If you fail the survival roll, then you take a wound due to lack of food and water and make a new survival roll the next day. Easy enough. In the Living Land, the difficulty of the survival roll is 10 if you have rations available, otherwise it's 12. For reference, "high mountains" are difficulty 8, and "desert" is difficulty 12. Higher rolls still earn you however many days of supplies, but you can share those supplies with other characters who've failed the rolls to "give them your days", as it were. So if I make the survival roll and get two day's worth of food, then someone else tanks the roll and would take a wound, I can give them my extra day and they're fine. But here's the thing. Passed survival rolls assume that the characters are foraging small bits of food as they go; berries, small game, things like that. As soon as someone fails their survival roll and takes a wound, then it's assumed that the group is running low on food: for each day after the first that someone takes damage due to starvation, the difficulty of everyone's survival checks from that point on goes up by 2. The only way to reset this modifier is to spend a whole day hunting big game. And of course since this is Torg, we have rules for hunting and setting traps. Hunting something involves making Perception rolls at a difficulty of 8 to get on the track of something. Once you've got a lead on some big game, from there it's just making tracking rolls to hunt it down. Trapping big game is a little different; each trap you want to make requires two and a half hours to dig a pit or whatever, then everyone who made a trap makes a survival roll. The better the roll, the more people are fed by the trapped game. Admittedly I'm not an outdoorsman, but I don't think that's how trapping game works.  Sometimes, everyone tanks their tracking roll. The third "World Law" isn't really named until the Revised corebook, where it's called Law of Lost Valuables, and is really just a way for the GM to gently caress with characters. Basically all this means is that living beings will be separated from their non-living possessions. Why? Who knows? Examples of ways things can get lost that are given are having your camp being attacked in the middle of the night, your vehicle crashing, or the giant lizard you're fighting slashing your backpack open with its claw. The way this works is that every time there's a chance someone might lose something, the character makes a difficulty 12 Mind roll. Success means that they realize that they're about to lose an item and thus have a chance to grab it before it's lost. quote:The gamemaster is under no obligation to remind the players that their characters are about to lose something important. Only if a player mentions it does a character have a chance to make the roll. The player must declare what his character is trying to rescue. Another player might try for the same object, to increase the chances of recovery ,or grab for another object. After all the rolls have been made, if there is anything left that could be destroyed that matters to the group, or if an item was temporarily forgotten about (i.e., the Mind roll was failed) the gamemaster should determine a way to get rid of it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bKy6BtAbTU8 Anyway, two more sections to this chapter. The first (and shorter of the two) is about Eternity Shards in the Living Land, and they come in two general types. The first type are the shards native to Core Earth. Because Kaah has spread his territory around one of the major cultural centers of the United States, there are a lot of shards in the Eastern Land. Things like the Declaration of Independence have maintained Core Earth axioms and have gained strength from people's believe. On top of that, the are places like the Smithsonian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art that have scores of artifacts that are tied to the world in general, not just American culture. As for Living Land shards...these are a bit different than the shards from other worlds. Due to the nature of the Living Land, eternity shards are actually living things. There are some incredibly rare species of plants that are naturally occurring eternity shards. Even the rumor of one of these existing is enough for Kaah to send out an expedition to claim it. All that said, there's maybe only about a dozen eternity shards all told throughout North America. Of course, none of them are detailed at all. The chapter closes out with an in-depth discussion of the Living Land's low social axiom, which is actually nice because more than any other realm in the game, it's hard for people like us to really "get" the Living Land's social limits affect things. The thing to remember is that the low social axiom doesn't make people stupid, which I suppose is how a lot of people would view it. What the axiom effects is peoples' ability to understand the ways we communicate with each other or the concept of a social group outside your immediate peers. quote:Here's a brief recap of some major concepts no longer available to someone from Core Earth living under the Living Land's pure axioms: economic concepts such as capitalism and communism, federal governments, nation states, arbitrary systems of time (such as minutes and hours), renting of property, news services, libraries, money, arithmetic counting, kings. Like time. The edeinos don't really have a concept of measuring time outside side of a day/night cycle. This can be a problem when a Core Earther is, say, waiting to do something at a specific time. He won't forget what his watch is, necessarily, but he won't understand what it's measuring. So he wouldn't be able to do something in, say, "15 minutes from now" or "at 5:32 pm" because those are artificial social constructs he wouldn't understand anymore. He'll get ideas like "at sunset" because that's an observable concept, but beyond that he wouldn't understand what his watch is doing. Likewise, the Core Earth concept of government doesn't work in the Living Land either. To the edeinos, there's your tribe, there's other tribes, and you're all doing your own things. And while each tribe will have a "chief" and maybe a senior Jakatt, they don't have the concept of a tiered command structure, or how their chief is answerable to a more important chief five tribes "up the chain". At most they all answer to Kaah, but even then it's a direct leadership role. Now, that stuff all applies mainly in pure zones, because those are the places where ords transform quickly and P-rated characters have to create reality bubbles. In a Living Land dominant zone, people can keep their original axioms in mind, but the ideas will get fuzzy around the edges. Take the concept of money and trade, for instance. Someone in a dominant Living Land zone would understand the concept of trade well enough ("if you give me your food, I'll give you this weapon"), but would have trouble with the related concept of buying something with money ("if you give me your food, I'll give you $50"). Basic trade works on a simple principle of equivalency, but once currency enters the picture, you run into a problem: currency doesn't really work without the idea of government backing. A person in the Living Land wouldn't accept money because there's nothing to spend it on, but because they don't get why you're insisting these green paper rectangles have any inherent value. And while PCs can overcome having their ideas limited by the low social axiom, ords don't have that luxury. Which can cause all kinds of fun problems with trying to get NPCs to understand things like "we're here from the US government to help you" or "give us ten minutes, then make a run for it." Amazingly, the GM is told to not use the low social axiom as a blunt instrument against PCs. Instead, you're supposed to keep it light. Dealing with survival colonies should be more about funny misunderstandings than getting screwed over, or when the players are planning a big coordinated attack reminding them "what's a minute again?" quote:Remember that in the world of Torg, Earth has been invaded by competing realities. Part of what fighting this war means is that when you go into conquered territory you start playing by the bad guys' rules. It's weird, but that's the Possibility Wars for you. NEXT TIME: Praise be to Lanala Evil Mastermind fucked around with this message at 22:13 on Feb 6, 2017 |
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Jan 27, 2017 19:33
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Evil Mastermind posted:The storm has a name... - Let's Read TORG The rules for Limbo have a similar clause. This is basically telling the GM to behave like a Kender. As such it is bad and the writers should feel bad.
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Jan 27, 2017 19:54
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An awful lot of 90s game designers seem to have had bad experiences with either PCs carrying massive unstoppable artefacts, or PCs kitted out to the nines with plot-derailing survival gear.
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Jan 27, 2017 20:24
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The thing that really gets me about the Law of Lost Valuables is that no reason's given for it. Even with the Compass Curse, they state that Kaah did mystic wonkery with the already-existing Mist to create the effect. But the Law of Lost Valuables has no logic behind it apart from thinking it's thematic (it's not). It really is artificial difficulty; you're just taking away things like maps and ammo and so on to make things more difficult for the sake of making things more difficult. Thankfully, they're getting rid of that concept for Torg Eternity. The really funny thing? In one of the upcoming three SPOILER realms, there's a "tone enforcing" World Law that's even dumber.
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Jan 27, 2017 20:39
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I probably bring this up a lot, but Drow are the classic example of Designers/GMs trying to teach their party who the really cool people are here, with spell resistance and cool magic equipment that turns to dust in sunlight so the party can't loot it.
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Jan 27, 2017 20:39
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wiegieman posted:I probably bring this up a lot, but Drow are the classic example of Designers/GMs trying to teach their party who the really cool people are here, with spell resistance and cool magic equipment that turns to dust in sunlight so the party can't loot it. Well they can't be the coolest anymore because I loving killed them all. 
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Jan 27, 2017 20:47
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I'm thinking about things like that ridiculous countdown sequence in the introductory adventure, and that climactic battle against 200 P-rated enemies. I can understand tone enforcement to a degree, with the World Laws and all, but those kinds of things felt like they were trying to force the kind of tension there would be in, say, Luke nuking the Death Star, rather than realizing that kind of thing is emergent in a situation where randomness rules.
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Jan 27, 2017 21:10
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Bieeardo posted:I'm thinking about things like that ridiculous countdown sequence in the introductory adventure, and that climactic battle against 200 P-rated enemies. I can understand tone enforcement to a degree, with the World Laws and all, but those kinds of things felt like they were trying to force the kind of tension there would be in, say, Luke nuking the Death Star, rather than realizing that kind of thing is emergent in a situation where randomness rules. And then it turns out that if the drama deck didn't like you, you could just straight up end up with zero chance of actually stopping it even if you were teleported directly to it and knew what to do and the skeletons cheered you on instead of trying to kill you.
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Jan 28, 2017 00:00
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 Polaris RPG(2016) Part 9, Book 1, Chapter 1: The World of the Deep, section 1.2: Civilizations of the Deep We're halfway through the major nations. Our next one will be the second longest one after the Hegemony and the thing longest piece of background overall, behind the Hegemony and the independent stations, which take up 12 full pages but that's a matter for the future. For now, we''ll be visiting the setting's Protagonistan which is the best at everything and where all cool and good things come from with... The Coral Republic  And they even have a flag without a trillion tiny background detail, even if their main crest is still a little messy. The Coral republic lives in and around Australia. It's entire territory is covered by it's namesake polyp colonies(that are also wizards) and modern communication systems. History The Coral Republic is the oldest nation in the world, starting out as being the breadbasket for the Genetician Empire with it's livable climate and many agricultural stations. After their fall, the Azure Alliance established their capital, the imaginatively named Azuria, here as well, which remains the world's most beautiful city to this day. When the Alliance fell apart, Azuria was the last city to remain a part of it and eventually renamed the entire region Coral, after it's predominant terrain feature(no poo poo). The next 18 years are spent fending off pirates coming to loot the riches of the old Alliance until 268, when the coral becomes strong enough to destroy invading ships. With their homeland secured, the Republic goes on the offense and the High Council promotes politician an former pirate William Gallasteno to the leader of the Coral Fleet. He reforms the military to small, mobile combat groups and relegates the Republic's capital ships to protecting cities and offered carefully selected pirate kingdoms along the Ring of Fire an alliance in exchange for their help with dealing with their neighbours. This plan is a wild success and in ten years, fully 15 pirate states are destroyed or outright absorbed into the Republic and a little bit later in 282, Gallasteno was elected Council president at age 59. The good times didn't last however and after the remaining pirates had a civil war amongst themselves they united against the Republic, starting with the assassination of two admirals, five councillors and Gallasteno in 284, followed six days later by a full scale invasion. The war raged for 12 years, including the destruction of Azuria(you may notice that this is not what the book said about Azuria's history less than a page ago) and most of the Republic's coral until 12 February 296 when pirate fleet suddenly found themselves under attack from an unknown source that disabled their sensors and jammed their communications. This attacker turned out to be the coral itself(note: this is not even remotely what coral does according to the Travelling back in time to 333, Alec Fanstorm receives word from the spokesperson for the Coral that it has been exhausted by it's intensive use of it's powers and can't sustain them much longer. In response, Fanstorm started a large rearmament program for the fleet and hired the first of what would be the Republic's many mercenary units. The Coral gradually scaled back the use of it's wizard powers as more Republic ships were built until 359, when it reached current levels. Alec Fanstorm was replaced by Helena Triasse, a mutant and scientist who discovered a workaround for the sterility virus so blatantly loving obvious that it makes everybody else's ideas like the Hegemony rape prisons entirely pointless: Cloning people. Yes, really. It's not a secret and they've been doing it for 200 years with success. There's no reason for anybody else to not copy it and use it instead of whatever bullshit they themselves have going on. Oh and the Coral also told her how to transplant chunks of it into both humans and machines so everybody from the Coral Republic and all their stuff is straight up better than everybody else. These inventions caused a population surge not seen since before the first apocalypse and revolutionized science in the Republic though at the start of the seventh century, these advances would still prove insufficient to save humanity. Welp, guess there's a fourth apocalypse scheduled 30 years into the future. Dead end metaplot reference count: 11. "Today" in 566(note: 566 is not the setting's "present day"), Coral is an integral part of everyday life in the Republic. Back to the year 360, a treaty was signed with the Red League(Red League section disagrees and says somewhere between 340 and 356), trading food for minerals, which the Republic has a hard time extracting because of it's omnipresent Coral and the Republic fleets fought together with the League against the Hegemony until 375 when the League broke off the treaty. Admiral Piotr Devrac got tired of Urik's paranoid behaviour, the civilian massacres on both sides(earlier in the book this was a Hegemony only thing) and he needed to teach the pirate states back home another lesson so with the Parliament''s support(wait what happened to the Council?), he joined the Cult of the Trident and invited the fleets of the warring powers to a showdown at Equinox. Nobody knows what exactly the connection between the Cult of the Trident and the Coral Republic was that caused this deal to happen, since the latter worships it's wizard invertebrates and not magic itself like the Cult does. After Devrac's wildly successful plot, the Republic's last remaining problem were pirates that had discovered how to sneak across the Coral fields without waking it up and getting annihilated. The Republic used this time to expand their agricultural industry and become the world's largest food producer, as well as finally convincing the Coral to move it's rear end and vacate the mining sites, followed around 500 by expanding their operations to establishing mining bases on the surface. In 544, the current leader of the Republic, a mutant named Laelia Trenton was elected, focussing mainly on trade and international cooperation. She is the most important person of yet another hitherto unmentioned Equinox institution that will never come up again, the Equinox Council, which advocates merging all human into one big alliance to combat some unknown threat in the future. You know, completely unlike the three other Eqiunox based pan-human circlejerks. Dead end metaplot reference count: 12. The Republic stayed relatively quiet aside from the occasional pirate raid until 568, when weird poo poo started happening. First a pirate named Red Hand Meslar made a shocking discovery aboard a Coralian ship owned by the research company Palia. The authorities destroyed the ship and Meslar is now the most wanted man in the Republic. Word on the street, and among the intelligence headquarters of other nations is that the cloning experiments involving Coral have resulted in a discovery that might destabilize the entire world. Dead end metaplot reference count: 13. Palia and another company called Cortex have been discovered to be involved with several notorious pirates, paying them to capture human test subjects for mysterious experiments. Finally, towards the end of 568, a curious illness has started spreading through the Republic's ports, which causes it's victims to be found completely dessicated, as if affected by accelerated aging. Dead end metaplot reference count: 14. Society The Coral Republic is the odd one out of all major underwater societies with a severe gender imbalance among it's 127 million inhabitants caused their cloning program being mainly aimed at woman due to fertile wombs being the largest population growth bottleneck and now that they've overcome it, they have the fastest growing population of any nation. They're also the most tolerant to mutants and thus have the highest ratio of those too. The upper class is formed by Coral empaths who wield no official power though the Coral's words carry great weight in the Parliament, the Republic's governing body. The Parliament elects a president and issues recommendations for the city governors to follow, which, when not instructed otherwise, are free to rule their cities as they wish, resulting in a highly diverse society. The Parliament also directly oversees the Intelligence Bureau, which handles security, espionage and counter-espionage though it's action department called Fragment, the Special Research Department, which handles all food and medical research, the Polyphemus Department, which does military stuff and is the black sheep on the bunch due to the presence of the Coral and mercenaries, the External Relations Department, which is where foreign diplomacy happens and finally the Genetics Division which is in charge of Ctrl+C babby Ctrl+V babby. Coralian citizen live pleasant lives with the world's best healthcare, high food security and no weird dictatorships ruling over them(though the means by which Parliament is elected is curiously absent from the book...). Most of it's male population is polyamorous due to the gender imbalance and mutants have equal rights to regular humans. The Republic's largest internal issue is a steady increase in crime and it is suggested that the issue would be solved if the fleet stops trying to annex pirate stations into the nation. Next time: the other half of the Coral Republic section. e: sentence got cut off Asehujiko fucked around with this message at 00:20 on Jan 28, 2017 |
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Jan 28, 2017 00:06
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I had a few WEG Masterbook system games, and I can't imagine actually following all of Torg's rules with the Drama Deck to boot.
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Jan 28, 2017 00:33
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Halloween Jack posted:I had a few WEG Masterbook system games, and I can't imagine actually following all of Torg's rules with the Drama Deck to boot. Know, in your heart of hearts, that someone did, and tremble at the fate of man.
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Jan 28, 2017 00:35
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Zereth posted:It didn't even really work for that in the introductory adventure, because as I remember Evil Mastermind's explanation of it, the countdown was in no way communicated to the characters. And thus no way for the players to know other than the GM just telling them. wiegieman posted:Know, in your heart of hearts, that someone did, and tremble at the fate of man.
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Jan 28, 2017 00:55
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