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gourdcaptain
Nov 16, 2012

Kurieg posted:

Doesn't 5e still have the people with brains that are basically wifi nodes that are also for some reason completely incompatable with being a magician because GAME BALANCE but are also mechanically terrible in every single conceivable way?

Yep. Technomancers are around and are more mechanically awful and unsupported in suppliments than ever.

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wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


Technomancers are only awful if you try to play them like a decker. They're more like a Shaman, they should be using their Sprites and their Complex Forms way more than they should try to deck.

Count Chocula
Dec 25, 2011

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

quote:


Later tonight, we'll cover how cutting yourself is evil, and the mechanical benefits of doing so.


You gain a Minor Epideromancy Charge?
BOVD isn't set in anything like the real world, so it can't be as disturbing as UA. Is that the book with the prestige class that makes whips out of blood? That was cool.

Shadowrun should capitalize on how the Kids Today like synthwave. Make it a total retro product, lots of neon and bulky cybernetics. Shadowrun: Blood Dragon. Comes with a soundtrack cassette by Kavinsky.

Mr.Misfit
Jan 10, 2013

The time for
SkellyBones
has come!

Count Chocula posted:

[snip]
Shadowrun should capitalize on how the Kids Today like synthwave. Make it a total retro product, lots of neon and bulky cybernetics. Shadowrun: Blood Dragon. Comes with a soundtrack cassette by Kavinsky.

That would require a self-awareness of both their roots and a connection to popular culture, which BTW is also slowly fading already, as the 80s Retro Hype "was so 2016".
It´s just baffling in many ways how the history of Shadowrun goes, but then again, take one look at Anarchy, go shake your head and continue on your way. Because if anything, the people writing for Catalyst haven´t learned a thing.

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!





Funny, I'm in a similar position. Started playing SR4 back in 2015 thanks to meeting a bunch of people via a /tg/ thread.
The reasoning behind going for 4th in our case is very similar, in this case it was also the GM being more experienced with the system.
Funny enough the only book the GM banned was WAR! A book which is the apex of one issue I have with SR4. It has far too many books that are practically useless and are just wishlist shopping catalogues.

quote:

4e dropped some of the cheesy runner slang (Frag, Slot, Drek being mostly replaced with actual cursing, ‘chummer’ becoming the japanese ‘Omae’)
Pretty sure Chummer was still a phrase being used in SR4, same with drek.

quote:

Shadowrun is a weird, clunky, crunchy, rules heavy game. It is, by a lot of standards, a bad game.
Eeyup, can't disagree with this. Parts of it feels clunky for the same of being clunky. Half of the players in the group, including me, took one glance at the Decker rules for 4th and just went "Nope".

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

This map is full of terrible decisions.

A lot of the world design is terrible decisions because the SR writers have this weird boner for things being balkanized and countries just being hacked up into tiny pieces for barely any reasons.

Gobbeldygook posted:

5e is a collection of random changes without any rhyme or reason except they tend to be changes that make grogs happy and settle pet scores of developers. For example, one long-running gun nut complaint about Shadowrun is that it refers to gun magazines as exclusively as 'clips'. In the 5E lexicon, it defines clip as meaning "a box magazine for a firearm" just to shut up gun nuts.

Oh goddamn it. :doh:
That does remind me that I was really weird out during one session with how SR4 deals with weapon ranges when we found an HMG at one point and I looked at its stats to notice it got a dice penalty at the 81-250 meter range bracket. :confused:

Bieeardo posted:

Double-gently caress that GOD wank though. Seriously, that's over-controlling GM garbage.

Which is probably one of the reasons why the SR5 game that our group is planning to do some point later this year is going to be set in Vladivostok which apparently has low GOD presence based on what the GM has written up.

Crasical posted:

My suggestion, if you don't have them already: Use Chummer/Chummergen, and Karmagen character making from Runner's Companion. Karmagen makes more-rounded characters, Chummergen helps with dealing with the clunk of making characters.

If I didn't know about the Chummer program I wouldn't be playing Shadowrun. That's for sure. CH4 has some issues and I wish things from CH5 would be backported into it. But my god is that program a loving godsend.

gourdcaptain posted:

Yep. Technomancers are around and are more mechanically awful and unsupported in suppliments than ever.

From what I remember the latest Rigger book was pretty much a wet fart.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Bieeardo posted:

I don't know about newer editions, but when grenades came out in the 1E Street Samurai Catalog they had a rule where the concussion wave would do damage on the way out based on distance from the explosion. If it hit solid scenery, it would bounce back and do commensurately less damage on the way back in, and so on and so forth, like an old-school lightning bolt that lost energy on each rebound.

Because apparently "Deals X damage to everything within Y meters/feet/whatever" doesn't have enough versimilitude. Did the game also have rules for stray bullets?

rumble in the bunghole posted:

I don't know why you'd go for the nice oubliette when you can just give them a helm of opposite alignment.

A dystopian Lawful Good city where every criminal is punished via Helm of Opposite Alignment sounds like a fun place to have adventures in.

Count Chocula posted:

Has anyone here written a John Wick: The RPG by John Wick movie parody thing? Keanu's a member of a secret society of honorable assasins, he gets screwed over so bad by the GM the rear end in a top hat even kills his dog... somebody who hates Wick more than me could probably make it work. Anything to make the wait for John Wick 2 more tolerable.

The only thing I can come up to show my disgust for Wick is a sort of Anti-L5R: Action resolution is simple and straigthforward, the GM is encouraged to not be a dick, and Ronin are the only class allowed because screw Samurai with their boring etiquette and politics.

Cythereal
Nov 8, 2009

I love the potoo,
and the potoo loves you.
My only exposure to Shadowrun has been the Shadowrun: Dragonfall game on the PC which I enjoyed a lot, so I'm interested to see the rabbit hole behind the game.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

Doresh posted:

The only thing I can come up to show my disgust for Wick is a sort of Anti-L5R: Action resolution is simple and straigthforward, the GM is encouraged to not be a dick, and Ronin are the only class allowed because screw Samurai with their boring etiquette and politics.

Speaking of this, I just saw Yojimbo and goddamn if that isn't the absolute perfect 'Lone PC tricks and fights his way through an insane situation as an outsider ronin' movie.

Watching Akira Kurosawa movies is never a bad idea.

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

I went back and clarified but they brought back cyberdecks. I think it was mostly done for style reasons because I think grogs were upset that it wasn't "cyberpunk" for them.

From my brief experience running 4e, it's because of Hollywood hacking. Anything can be hacked at will, you don't have to hope or wait for a security hole, and only hackers themselves have the money or skills to run decent security software.

This means that anyone who isn't a decker can trivially have their commlink hacked and commlinks are the only computers anyone has. Even if their actual data is on a Nexus (server), their Commlink has permission to access it. Information theft becomes ridiculously easy. Even the sample adventures treated it as an elephant in the room, with most NPCs having no stats for their commlinks because the author didn't want to admit that they were essentially an open book. It felt totally ridiculous.

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!




hyphz posted:

From my brief experience running 4e, it's because of Hollywood hacking. Anything can be hacked at will, you don't have to hope or wait for a security hole, and only hackers themselves have the money or skills to run decent security software.

This means that anyone who isn't a decker can trivially have their commlink hacked and commlinks are the only computers anyone has. Even if their actual data is on a Nexus (server), their Commlink has permission to access it. Information theft becomes ridiculously easy. Even the sample adventures treated it as an elephant in the room, with most NPCs having no stats for their commlinks because the author didn't want to admit that they were essentially an open book. It felt totally ridiculous.

By the same metric a GM can majorly gently caress things up for players by pulling the same trick on them. Especially new players who haven't fully grasped precisely everything about SR being very very gear heavy. So all they do is grab your basic commlink and leave it at that instead of setting up a tripple redundant system or something like that. Then the GM just throws a couple of NPC Deckers at them to get them through their commlinks.
Thankfully I've been spared that through my SR4 experiences.

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Don't the 5e rules make it a much better idea to just start a car theft ring rather than actually being a shadowrunner?

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Night10194 posted:

Speaking of this, I just saw Yojimbo and goddamn if that isn't the absolute perfect 'Lone PC tricks and fights his way through an insane situation as an outsider ronin' movie.

Watching Akira Kurosawa movies is never a bad idea.

The sorta-sequel Sanjuro is downright funny in that regard, what with the seasoned ronin coaching a bunch of newbie samurai so they don't get themselves killed like idiots.

Also Toshiro Mifune is awesome.

Doresh fucked around with this message at 15:34 on Feb 5, 2017

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

Cythereal posted:

My only exposure to Shadowrun has been the Shadowrun: Dragonfall game on the PC which I enjoyed a lot, so I'm interested to see the rabbit hole behind the game.

and honestly, I do fell like the Harebrained Games are the best experience for the setting, so you're not fighting with the rules as I felt I'm doing when I try to play P&P of it.

hyphz
Aug 5, 2003

Number 1 Nerd Tear Farmer 2022.

Keep it up, champ.

Also you're a skeleton warrior now. Kree.
Unlockable Ben

Cooked Auto posted:

By the same metric a GM can majorly gently caress things up for players by pulling the same trick on them. Especially new players who haven't fully grasped precisely everything about SR being very very gear heavy. So all they do is grab your basic commlink and leave it at that instead of setting up a tripple redundant system or something like that. Then the GM just throws a couple of NPC Deckers at them to get them through their commlinks.
Thankfully I've been spared that through my SR4 experiences.

Yea, except the best commlink you can get outside Bogota is Device 5 and costs an absolute bomb; and a specialised hacker can break that without even rolling.

What they seem to want to do is exciting code battles between black and white hat hackers in cyberspace, but wireless just makes it so easy for NPC hackers to gang up or attack while the PCs are distracted that the GM has to treat it as an elephant in the room.

I lost it when our PC Sammy asked if he could go to a museum and get a Filofax to keep his contacts info in because it would be secure. He then used the cheapest commlink just for "talk and text" and if there was any sign of it being hacked, threw it on the floor and shot it, then bought another.

Josef bugman
Nov 17, 2011

Pictured: Poster prepares to celebrate Holy Communion (probablY)

This avatar made possible by a gift from the Religionthread Posters Relief Fund

Robindaybird posted:

and honestly, I do fell like the Harebrained Games are the best experience for the setting, so you're not fighting with the rules as I felt I'm doing when I try to play P&P of it.

I saw this whilst trying to look into the backstory and I kind of realised that HBS was the better model.

Cooked Auto
Aug 4, 2007

If you will not serve in combat, you will serve on the firing line!




hyphz posted:

What they seem to want to do is exciting code battles between black and white hat hackers in cyberspace, but wireless just makes it so easy for NPC hackers to gang up or attack while the PCs are distracted that the GM has to treat it as an elephant in the room.

That whole notion is not helped by the decking rules being what they are. I remember our very first run in the SR4 campaign involved the Decker hacking into a pair of cars to stop a convoy. My memory of the skype discussion between the GM and the guy playing the decker was that sounded like an absolute clusterfuck.
But somehow we managed to hack one of the cars and make it pancake against a truck on the opposite lane so go us I guess.

hyphz posted:

I lost it when our PC Sammy asked if he could go to a museum and get a Filofax to keep his contacts info in because it would be secure. He then used the cheapest commlink just for "talk and text" and if there was any sign of it being hacked, threw it on the floor and shot it, then bought another.

Hah brilliant. I should steal that for a future character.

Robindaybird posted:

and honestly, I do fell like the Harebrained Games are the best experience for the setting, so you're not fighting with the rules as I felt I'm doing when I try to play P&P of it.

The SRR games were my real gateway into the setting. I had listened to a couple of goon run campaign podcasts for it but that was it until I got Dragonfall and played through most of that and Hong Kong.
I'd love to see them approach the 2070's as well but probably not going to happen any time soon.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Doresh posted:

The sorta-sequel Sanjuro is downright funny in that regard, what with the seasoned ronin coaching a bunch of newbie samurai so they don't get themselves killed like idiots.

Also Toshiro Mifune is awesome.

Well, it's more comedic in general. But it does have probably the iconic iaijutsu scene for L5R players:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NNaj5YUxco

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.
Let’s soldier on with another entry on….



Part 10: Them Fightin’ Words

We're picking right up in the rules where we left off. Rules which are almost exclusively relevant to combat!


PEW! PEW!

Actions
Anything a character does in a round is an action. Common actions are: attack, activate a special (non-attacking) ability, move, wait, defend, and do something else.

Action: Attack
Stab someone, throw a fireball, whatever. Roll and compare to a TN. Equal or greater hits. GM can make the roll harder or easier. PCs can lower the difficulty with skills, assets, or Effort. Melee attacks use Might or Speed actions. Most ranged attacks use Speed unless it’s some special ability. An attack that requires you to touch a target is a melee attack. If a power or ability you attack with misses, it isn’t expended and can be used again until you hit, use a different ability, or take a different action that requires the use of your hands. Each attempt is a separate action.

Damage
When an attack hits a PC, subtract points from one of the stat pools. If an attack states it does “damage” that means it does Might damage. Because I guess typing “Might damage” for 98% of the damage sources in this book is a waste of word count. “Intellect damage” and “Speed damage” are always referred to as such. NPCs have a health score equal to their TN instead of stat pools. All damage is dealt directly to the health of an NPC. Objects have health just like NPCs.

Armor
Nothing really new here. Each time a PC takes damage, subtract the Armor value from damage. Intellect damage and Speed damage ignore Armor, unless specified.

Ambient Damage
Sometimes environmental effects cause damage. This can be weather effects, being in a volcano, or maybe an irradiated crater. This normally ignores Armor as well!

Damage From Hazards
You can get damaged by hazards too!



The Effects of Taking Damage
When an NPC reaches 0 health, it’s dead or incapacitated in some way (attacker’s discretion). Objects that reach 0 health are broken/destroyed. For characters, it’s a bit more complicated. First, you deduct the damage from the relevant stat Pool. When the damage reduces the character’s stat Pool to 0, any further damage to that stat (including leftover damage from the attack that reduced the stat Pool to 0) is applied to another stat Pool. Damage is applied in this order:

1. Might (until it hits 0)
2. Speed (until it hits 0)
3. Intellect


Damage applied this way is still treated as its original damage type for the purposes of Armor or any other abilities. As each stat Pool is drained, the character’s status on the damage track changes. There are four levels to the damage track: hale, impaired, debilitated, and dead. When a PC’s stat pool reaches 0, he or she is moved one step down the damage track.

For instance, if a dragon sits on the vector hard enough to reduce his Might Pool to 0, the vector goes from hale to impaired. If the dragon takes the time to roll around on the vector a bit more, all that Might damage reduces his Speed Pool to 0, and he’s debilitated. After having all that fun, the dragon tops it off with a breath of fire, bringing the vector’s Intellect Pool to 0. Now the vector is dead.

Some effects can make a PC move more than one step down the damage track at a time, like poisons or falling off a tall building and hitting the ground hard.


Hey, kids! Buy The Strange-Brand Dice Today! Just $12.99 for a set of four through Monte Cook Games dot com!
Note: I pulled this image straight from this part of the book, watermark and all.


The Damage Track
What’s the point in tracking damage this way if it doesn’t come with certain status conditions?!

Hale is the normal state. A character with at least 1 point in all three stat Pools is hale.

Impaired is the state reached when one stat Pool reaches 0. In this state Effort costs 1 extra point per the level you wish to apply. PCs also ignore major and minor effects on die rolls. Instead, rolls of 17 or higher in combat only deal 1 point of damage.

Debilitated is the state reached when two stat Pools reach 0. Debilitated characters may not take any actions besides moving/crawling around, and for no more than an immediate distance. Unless the character’s Speed pool is at 0 (which it probably is since it’s the second stat Pool in priority). In that case, the PC can’t move at all.

Dead: Did all of your stat Pools reach 0? You died. This is permanent and irreversible outside of Ardeyn and “potentially other recursions.”

Recovering Points in a Pool
The most common way to recover points in a pool is by resting. This prompts a recovery roll. When you rest, you roll 1d6 + your tier to determine how many points you regain. You can distribute the recovered points across the stat Pools as you see fit. You can’t heal over your max in any Pool, and you can only rest up to four times per day, with each rest requiring more down time to recover points.



Restoring the Damage Track
Applying points from a recovery roll to raise a stat Pool from 0 to 1 will automatically move the character one step up the damage track. If a stat Pool is above 0 but some special damage has moved a character down the damage track, the character can use a recovery roll to move up the damage track instead of making a recovery roll.

Special Damage
Some status conditions are represented by effects other than damage to a stat Pool. A few of these have been mentioned before. A character can be Dazed, or worse, Stunned. They can be inflicted with a Poison or Disease that moves them down the damage track. They can also be Paralyzed and unable to move. The game is open to Other Effects, as adjudicated by the GM.

NPCs and Special Damage
The GM can decide what kinds of special damage affects NPCs.

the book posted:

For example, a tiny bit of venom is unlikely to hurt a gigantic dragon, and it won’t affect an android or a planetovore at all.
Haha, great. I hope the players and GM can quickly agree on exactly how much poison you need to dose a dragon with before it actually works.



Special Situations
Who’s ready to learn about attack modifiers and special situations? I'm not! Instead of summarizing the paragraph entries on Cover, Positioning, Surprise, Range, Illumination, Visibility, being in/fighting in Water, and Moving Targets, I want you to imagine any situations where these factors would grant an advantage or disadvantage to one group in an encounter. The advantage/disadvantage modifies the difficulty of the TN by a step or more.

The only super special thing is attacks in total darkness/against an invisible target auto-fail unless the attacker wants to spend 1 XP (for PCs) or if the GM wants to use a GM Intrusion.

Special Situations: NPC vs NPC and PC vs PC
When an NPC attacks an NPC, the GM picks a player to roll for the attacking NPC. The GM can pick based on whatever makes the most sense. Maybe the NPC is the PC’s pet or just the PC's good friend. NPCs can’t apply Effort to anything. When two PCs slug it out, one makes an attack roll and one makes a defense roll. The attacking PC can add a skill, ability, or other effect that would lower the difficulty on an NPC, but since this is versus a defense roll, it wouldn’t decrease the difficulty. Instead, each skill/ability/whatever adds +3 to the roll.

Special Situation: Area Attacks
Sometimes an attack hits a large area covering multiple targets. Each PC in this radius make the appropriate defense roll. One roll is made for any and all NPCs in the attack radius. If the roll is equal to or greater than the TN for an NPC, the attack hits.

Special Situation: Attacking Objects
Objects have levels, which are the TN needed to hit them. The TN also dictates how much health they have. Some objects, like rocks or a tank, will have an Armor score, too.

Action: Activate a Special Ability
You can activate a revision or twist or whatever. If a special ability affects another character in an unwanted way, it’s considered an attack and rolled appropriately.

Action: Move
Again, you can move as part of another action if you only cover an immediate distance (move 10 feet or less). You can move more than 10 but less than 50 feet (a short distance) as a full action. A character that’s 50 to 100 feet from the combat is a long distance away. The character can roll a Speed task versus a TN of 4 to move a long distance as a full action. If a character is further than 100 feet from a fight, they can’t be involved in the encounter without some sort of special ability or weird circumstance.

Long-Term Movement
A group can travel on foot by road about 20 miles per day with a few stops. Characters can travel overland about 12 miles per day with some stops. Mounted characters can move twice as far. Vehicles may move even faster.

Movement Modifiers
If you’re concerned about a short-term fight, Rough Terrain increases the difficulty of a move action by one step. Long-term, it cuts the movement rate in half. Difficult Terrain increases the difficulty of a move action in combat, but it also cuts both short-term and long-term movement in half. Deep water is like rough terrain, but it quarters movement both short-term and long-term.

Special Situation: A Chase
Players can make one Speed action roll to give chase or escape from pursuit. Or the GM can decide to draw it out and make a bunch of rolls on whatever arbitrary metric the GM wants. The game suggests rolling a number of times equal to the NPC runner/pursuer’s level in this case.

Action: Wait
Wait to react until a trigger happens. You can declare what the triggering action is, and when it occurs, you take your action first.

Action: Defend
Only PCs can take the Defend action, and only in response to being attacked. Most Defend actions are against physical attacks, and thus are Speed actions. You can apply skills, assets, Effort, etc. to the roll.

the book posted:

Sometimes an attack provokes two defense actions. For example, a poisonous reptile tries to bite a PC. She tries to dodge the bite with a Speed action. If she fails, she takes damage from the bite, and she must also attempt a Might action to resist the poison’s effects.
Venom! Venom is injected from a bite! :argh:

Oh, and if a PC gets surprise attacked, the PC can still make a defense roll but can’t apply any modifiers to the roll.

Action: Do Something Else
Hooo boy, this is a catch-all category with a massive list of sub actions…

Climbing
Roll to climb against a difficulty set by the GM. Success means you can move per movement rules.



Guarding
A PC can guard a specific spot. In return, the difficulty of all defense tasks are lowered by one step. If an NPC tries to move through the guarded area, the PC can make a Speed action with the difficulty lowered by one step to stop the movement. NPCs can guard, too. A PC that tries to move through an NPC-guarded area must make a Speed action with the difficulty raised by one step.

Healing
You can administer first aid to an injured target. Each target can only be treated this way once per day. Healing restores points to a stat Pool of your choice. You also get to dictate how many points are healed. Roll an Intellect task versus a difficulty equal to the number of points you want to heal. Healing checks can be re-attempted, but each PC can only achieve one success per day.

Jumping
Make a Might roll to jump a distance.



You can run an immediate distance before the jump counts as an asset. Running a short distance also counts as an asset and lets you divide the jump distance by 2, then subtract 4 to determine the jump difficulty. When jumping vertically, the distance you want to clear is equal to the difficulty of the jumping task. You can also run an immediate distance to get an asset on a vertical jump.


I'm not sure why someone asked for art of a marathon runner in this book, but okay!

Understanding, Identifying, or Remembering
When identifying or using a device, the level of the device determines the difficulty. If a character is trying to pick up information of some kind, the GM determines the difficulty of acquiring the knowledge and the PC rolls.



Looking or Listening
The GM will usually describe sights and sounds that aren’t being deliberately concealed. If a character is looking for something hidden, it’s an Intellect roll to detect. If it’s a creature, the difficulty is determined by its level. If it’s something else the GM determines the difficulty.

Interacting with Creatures
If you need to suck up to, bribe, or intimidate a creature, you use the creature’s level to determine the difficulty.

Moving a Heavy Object
You can push or pull something heavy an immediate distance with a Might action. The difficulty of the task is based on how much it weighs, starting at 1 difficulty at 50 lbs and going up 1 every additional 50 lbs. You can move a heavy object up to a short distance if you can reduce the difficulty to 0.

Operating or Disabling a Device, or Picking a Lock
You can roll to operate a complex device, disable it, or pick locks. Again, difficulty is typically based on the level of the object.

Riding or Piloting
Riding a trained animal or piloting a vehicle doesn’t normally need a roll, unless you need to do something challenging which might make it difficult to stay seated on the mount or in the vehicle.



Vehicular Movement
Vehicles have a movement rate just like creatures do. They require a driver and usually require the driver to spend a full-round action controlling the vehicle. Every round a driver spends doing a different action increases the difficulty of operating the vehicle by one step when they return to driving it. Speed actions can be used in vehicle chases, but the difficulty may be based on the level of the driver (modified by the level and movement of the vehicle) or on the level of the vehicle (modified by the level of the driver).

Sneaking
The difficulty of sneaking past a creature is equal to its level. Sneaking requires a Speed roll to do. Other factors can make sneaking easier, like moving at half speed or wearing camouflage.

Swimming
Swimming follows the movement rules for being in deep water. If something makes swimming difficult, it would be a Might roll to struggle against it.

Special: Crafting, Building, and Repairing
Crafting mechanics are the same no matter if you’re building a chair or repairing your robot waifu. The difficulty is set by the item’s level and the difficulty sets the amount of time it takes to craft/repair it. The player can then modify the difficulty and roll. If you’re attempting to make an item that is unique to a recursion you’re not native to, you should add 5 to the item’s level when determining the difficulty for crafting or repairing it. The GM can add to the difficulty and time if he or she feels that the quality of the item you’re trying to make would require it. Some items have a level of 0 because you can find them anywhere, like sling stones and firewood. I already shared this crafting table once, but here it is again as a refresher:



Materials
A device you’re crafting will usually require materials equal to its level and all material levels below it. A level 5 item will need access to level 5, level 4, level 3, level 2, level 1, and level 0 items. The book basically says the GM can make it as annoying or easy to get the materials as seems appropriate at the time.

Time
The GM ultimately decides how long it takes to make or repair a thing. The time listed on the table provided is just a good starting point. Repairing an item takes between half and the full time required to make it (also GM discretion). The GM can also permit a rush job in exchange for giving the item some awful flaw that makes it inconvenient to use!

the book posted:

Let’s say that a character needs to create a tool that will cut through solid steel with a powerful laser (a level 7 item), but she has to do it in one day. The GM might allow it, but the device might be extremely volatile, inflicting damage on the user, or it might work only once.
Skills
The level of training in a skill will reduce the difficulty of crafting an object, but does not reduce the time or change the materials required. If the GM approves, the character could reduce the time or materials required instead of reducing the difficulty with a skill.

Failure
Failing a roll means the device is unfinished. A new roll can only be completed when more materials are gathered. The required crafting time must also be repeated.

Nonstandard Items
If you want to create a super special item like a magic wand, you’ll also need to spend XP. Repairing uses the same rules as above.

Cooperative Actions
Help your friends! None of these options can be used at the same time by the same characters.

Helping
If you’re trained or specialized in a skill, you can spend an action to help someone else with the task. If the other person is not trained or specialized, they can decrease the difficulty of a task by one step. If the person you’re helping is trained or specialized, you add +1 to the roll instead.

Complementary Actions
Thanks to natural language the wording of this one is vague....

the book posted:

If a character attempts an action, and a second character skilled in that type of action attempts a complementary action, both actions gain a +2 bonus to the roll. For example, if Scott tries to convince a ship captain to allow him on board, and Sarah is trained in persuasion, she can use a complementary—but different—action in the situation to gain the +2 bonus.
Um… “skilled” and “trained” mean different things in your own rules, Monte and/or Bruce! I’ll assume since the example states the complementary character is only “trained” then that’s all that’s needed. Complementary actions can work in combat, too. For example, if two people are using pierce attacks, both of them would get a +2 to their attack rolls. Make sure the GM approves!



Distraction
A character can use a turn to distract a foe. When this happens, the difficulty of the foe’s attacks are modified by one step to its detriment. There’s no roll for this, so there’s no reason not to have at least one character constantly distracting a foe everyone is targeting in a fight. (If they’ve got nothing better to do.) This bonus isn’t cumulative, though, so you shouldn’t bother having more than one person doing it.

Draw the Attack
When an NPC attacks a character, another character can draw the attention of the attacker instead. Most of the time this doesn’t need a roll, unless the NPC has a particular reason to attack its original target. In that case, the character trying to draw the attack has to succeed at an Intellect task. I sure hope the party’s vector has a few extra Intellect points around for that situation!!! Oh, and fair warning: two characters trying to draw the same attack cancel each other out.

Take the Attack
A character can use an action to stop an attack meant for someone else. The attack automatically hits the character taking it, and it deals 1 extra point of damage. You can only dive like this once per round.

The Old One-Two-Three
If three or more characters dogpile a target, everyone attacking the target gets +1 to attack.

High and Low
If one character attacks a target at melee range and another character attacks at a distance, they can both declare that they’re coordinating the attack. If both attacks hit, the difficulty of the foe’s next task is modified by one step to its detriment.

Suppressing Covering Fire
A character can use a ranged attack to fire near a target, but intentionally miss by a hair. If the attack is successful, the target’s next attack is modified by one step to its detriment.


"MARCO?!"

Experience Points
There’s nothing new to say about XP. You gain it from GM Intrusions (not the ones from rolling natural 1s, the ones GMs are supposed to throw out whenever), discovering things, and accomplishing a side quest the GM/a player set up.

Spending Experience Points
Use them! If player is hoarding more than 10 XP, the GM can order the player to spend some of it.

Immediate Benefits
Reroll any roll in the game for 1 XP and choose the better result. You can spend as much XP as you want to keep rerolling. You can also spend 1 XP to refuse a GM Intrusion.

Protip: This does mean you can spend 1 XP to refuse a GM intrusion on a natural 1, but it makes more sense to spend 1 XP rerolling the d20 and hoping for a better result. Unless you only have 1 XP, and don't want to chance it or whatever.

Short and Medium-Term Benefits
Spend 2 XP to gain a skill that provides a short-term benefit. Maybe you know the trick to opening all the doors in this science facility, or you’ve studied the ancient runes covering the wall of an old temple. You can also spend 2 XP to gain a skill that would help you in the Medium-term like expertise with flora and fauna in a particular jungle region or familiarity climbing a specific mountain range. With GM permission, a character might gain a completely new ability for a short period.

Long-Term Benefits
A player can spend 3 XP to buy something beneficial in game:
Familiarity: The character gains a +1 bonus to rolls involving one kind of task.
Contact: The character gains a long-term NPC contact who can hook the PC up with information, equipment, or some sort of physical aid.
Home: The character gains a full-time residence.
Title or Job: The character is granted a position of importance or authority.
Wealth: The character gains considerable amounts of wealth. The PC doesn’t need to worry about the cost of simple equipment, lodging, food, etc.
Artifact: The character creates an artifact that has a power of the player’s choosing.

Character Advancement
Spend 4 XP to buy one of the stages of benefits offered at your Tier of power. When all stages are bought, you automatically advance to the next Tier and begin buying those stages.
Increasing Capabilities: You gain 4 points to add to any Stat Pool.
Moving Toward Perfection: Add 1 to your Might, Speed, or Intellect Edge.
Extra Effort: Increase your Effort score by 1.
Skills: Become trained in one skill, or become skilled in a skill you’re already trained in.
Other Options: Instead of buying one of the above-listed stages, you can spend 4 XP and select another option. This option counts as one of the four stages towards advancement. These other options are: reduce the Might cost and the Speed reduction for wearing armor by 1, or add 2 to your recovery rolls.

And that's all!



Next: Oh, hey, I bet you want to know how to actually do some world-hopping in this multiversal adventure game?

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!
"Planetovore". :geno:

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

"Planetovore". :geno:

They roam around eating realities Galactus-style. One of the main conflicts of the game is stopping them from eating Earth and all the recursions around it. I haven't brought them up in the review yet because at this point all the book has done is a quick in-setting fluff description early on, and then nothing besides the occasional namedrop until we get to the actual recursion descriptions.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Well, it's more comedic in general. But it does have probably the iconic iaijutsu scene for L5R players:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NNaj5YUxco
The best thing about that scene is that the gushing blood was an fx error.

quote:

the notorious "blood explosion" at the film's end was done in one take. At the moment that the compressor hose attached to actor Tatsuya Nakadai was activated it blew a coupling causing a much larger gush of fluid than planned. In fact it was so strong that it nearly lifted him off the ground and it took all his might to finish the scene.

Nuns with Guns posted:

Let’s soldier on with another entry on….


I meant to bring this up after the last Strange post, but I was focused on getting the Unity review done and forgot.

The equipment list in The Strange drives me nuts because they list like a dozen weapons that all have effectively the same stats. There's a bunch of hand weapons listed, but since they all do the same damage the only difference is in the price, so why list them all separately? Related question: why are we worrying about the prices? Who cares how much stuff costs? This isn't a gear porn game.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

"Planetovore". :geno:
While I agree that the name is dull, beings that are capable of eating whole planets or realities are perfectly viable threats in a multiversal setting.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Kurieg posted:

Doesn't 5e still have the people with brains that are basically wifi nodes that are also for some reason completely incompatable with being a magician because GAME BALANCE but are also mechanically terrible in every single conceivable way?

I love how Tenra Bansho Zero is way more into crazy magic-cyberware stuff than Shadowrun. None of the cybernetics in that game interfere with spellcasting. A lot of them are magic themselves. There are even cybernetics specifically made to enhance spellcasting, and one of the example NPCs is a spellcaster that stuffed his soul into a multi-armed robot body. Just so he has an easier time summoning demonic Pokemon.

But it's all fine and dandy for non-spellcasters because normal people can turn into Kenshiro if they train hard enough.

Evil Mastermind posted:

The equipment list in The Strange drives me nuts because they list like a dozen weapons that all have effectively the same stats. There's a bunch of hand weapons listed, but since they all do the same damage the only difference is in the price, so why list them all separately? Related question: why are we worrying about the prices? Who cares how much stuff costs? This isn't a gear porn game.

Old habits die hard.

Doresh fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Feb 5, 2017

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

Evil Mastermind posted:

The equipment list in The Strange drives me nuts because they list like a dozen weapons that all have effectively the same stats. There's a bunch of hand weapons listed, but since they all do the same damage the only difference is in the price, so why list them all separately? Related question: why are we worrying about the prices? Who cares how much stuff costs? This isn't a gear porn game.

It's not like this is uncommon. Look at D&D. There are dozens of weapons, most of which no-one will bother with because they're mechanically suboptimal, but even more of them are interchangeable.

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

Evil Mastermind posted:

I meant to bring this up after the last Strange post, but I was focused on getting the Unity review done and forgot.

The equipment list in The Strange drives me nuts because they list like a dozen weapons that all have effectively the same stats. There's a bunch of hand weapons listed, but since they all do the same damage the only difference is in the price, so why list them all separately? Related question: why are we worrying about the prices? Who cares how much stuff costs? This isn't a gear porn game.

It seems like half of it is some kind of expectation-flotsam carried over from the formatting of 3e D&D books, where they had to have equipment tables to track prices, ranges, damage types, damage dice for both small and medium-sized versions, and weight since all of those factors were technically relevant to each weapon in D&D. The design team of this book and Monte Cook Games in general is heavily-loaded with D&D devs.

The rest is a mixture of giving people an idea of what sort of gear is available in each world, which will be relevant when they need to pick out a new weapon given by their chosen focus in a recursion, and I guess allowing them to buy some odds and ends with the starting cash given by their focus. But then the book turns around and says you can ignore all of the frippery around mundane gear if you want, so yeah it's all excessive. :v:

Ratoslov
Feb 15, 2012

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

Nuns with Guns posted:


Hey, kids! Buy The Strange-Brand Dice Today! Just $12.99 for a set of four through Monte Cook Games dot com!
Note: I pulled this image straight from this part of the book, watermark and all.


Just look at these fuckers. Unreadable and hideous. Amazing.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Ratoslov posted:

Just look at these fuckers. Unreadable and hideous. Amazing.

Q-Workshop dice in a nutshell. They're decent quality dice, but they're always so over-designed it's amazing they have space for the numbers.



Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.
weirdly, only the d20 is notably hard to read irl. It's the one you'd roll the most, of course



It's still a really bad image to advertise the dice with

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Nuns with Guns posted:

weirdly, only the d20 is notably hard to read irl. It's the one you'd roll the most, of course



It's still a really bad image to advertise the dice with

I'm surprised they didn't switch to Roman or Chinese numerals. Those are more artsy.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer
Rifts World Book 8: Japan Part 7: Are you a pure enough dude to be a samurai?



Now we get to the first set of OCCs, the ‘Traditionals’. These are all fairly original to this book, even stuff like the “Mystic Ninja” which could have leapt straight from the pages of Ninjas & Superspies. They’re also...questionably accurate as one might expect. The “True Samurai” in particular is going to get a lot of tiresome dry-humping but we’ll do the best we can.

The True Samurai opens the section, and does so with a quote from a passable history book from the 80s.

”Stephen R Turnbull, Book of the Samurai: The Warrior Class of Japan” posted:

Few countries have a warrior tradition as long and as exciting as that of Japan. It is a tradition found particularly in the person of the romantic, loyal, and self-sacrificing knight of old Japan, the samurai. He is the valiant lone swordsman, the ultimate individual warrior. He is the esthete, appreciating in the beauty of cherry blossom, and seeing its brief career his own short and glorious life. He is the commander of a host on the battlefield, the assassin in the night, the keeper of peace, the aristocratic administrator and the avenger of his master.

At various times in Japanese history the samurai fulfilled all these roles.

This is kinda shoddy history writing but it’s thirty years old from a guy who at least earned a PhD in the area. Of course, Asian Studies people turn a very jaundiced eye to their orientalist forebears. But either way, this quote does contain some of the many ways the samurai is romanticized and portrayed. The varying realities of poverty and brutality will probably go unaddressed.

Since a large section of Japan’s survivors ditched modern technology and democracy in favor of ‘nothing’ and ‘Tokugawa cosplay’, there is a samurai caste again. Samurai family and clans “can trace their lineage over 200 years,” with some going back before the coming of the rifts. :rolleyes: Seriously, they didn’t even bother addressing this in England and here it’s just dumb. Samurai caste people are landowners, scientists and engineers (in this anti-tech society) as well as the traditional military governor/defender jobs. They’re legally allowed to carry weapons, which other citizen castes are not. Non-citizen travelers are allowed to keep weapons but advised to keep them covered.

As with so many western portrayals of samurai, this class is very fixated on the swords over the bow, but it does acknowledge that they use archery as well. We haven’t gotten to the part yet where they explain how mundane arrows hurt MDC Oni. They’ve also brought back the topknot hairstyles of the past to signify status.

No section on an honorable warrior stereotype in a Palladium book would be complete without an extended code of honor section. Yep, we get a long list of bushido code rules. I’m not going to analyze these because they are tedious as hell and the modern conception of bushido is entirely made-up bullshit from the 19th century. The full history of the concept is much more complicated than that and somebody else (I know you fuckers know this) can do an effortpost about it if they want. Let’s just say that Kev-chan’s Simplified List of Rules is inaccurate and the text also treats this very exacting code as something most if not all True Samurai actually adhere to versus “something that was presented as a good idea but wasn’t really followed that much” like actual chivalric codes. Now, Siembieda did this same thing with the knights in England and at least one of the knightly orders in Wormwood and probably someplace else I’m forgetting where that stupid chivalry list was reprinted, but it remains dumb. L5R has shown us a more nuanced (a little bit anyway) examination of a strict honor-based society and it has huge extensive rules for fighting about honor and dealing with all the little rules involved and also explores the many, many ways that these codes are interpreted or broken by members of that society. This text does none of these things.

After the bushido stuff we get some real talk about the specialness of “true” samurai swords, which apparently all “true” samurai have--I don’t know why this section starts putting the “true” in quotes, maybe Carella slipped some sarcasm through KS’s serious-screen. The swords themselves are “minor rune weapons” (those are my quotes) which has the problems mentioned previously with every other source in Rifts cosmology presenting rune-anything as vanishingly rare and hard to create.

These swords are made with the famous “folding” method that worked the blade 400 times. These special swords are folded 1000 times! ...Which as I understand it actually would spoil the metal, the 400-range was actually specific and not the smith going ‘welp’. “True” swords though, after all that folding, must be tested by chopping off all limbs and the head from a live person, generally a criminal. :stonk: Oh, it’s okay though, because 80% are “volunteers.”

These swords, once fed the blood of a criminal, are slightly intelligent and linked to their master, nearly indestructible (and regenerate), and inflict a heaping 6D6/4D6 MDC for katana and wakizashi respectively, against supernatural beings. SDC against mortals. Does that include mortals in power armor? Because I’d consider that a downside. They don’t even do extra damage against vampires, and even twigs from a Millennium Tree do extra damage on vampires. You do get a +1 bonus to all saving throws though. :rolleyes::fh: Also, if the samurai is of incompatible alignment to the swords, they do half damage. Most of these swords are some variety of Palladium-good despite harboring the soul of a criminal. Oh, there’s a note that 1 in 4 of the samurai and the swords themselves are anarchist or evil--that must be an awkward matching process. “I’ll take the set that’s weeping blood and growling please.”

The samurai is also gifted with a suit of magical samurai-lookin’ armor that can be crafted in special magic ceremonies (for which we do not receive rules for once), gifted by the gods (what), captured from oni, or occasionally granted by monks who make them out of Millennium Tree bark. They typically have 100 MDC but up to 180 MDC is possible but ‘uncommon’, and they are not environmentally sealed so all those nasty chemical weapons Coalition grunts can ignore will totally take out these elite warriors.

Samurai also receive multiple skill-based abilities like a 54% chance (+4% per level!) to ride a horse and shoot an arrow at the same time. The very next entry is “bowmanship” which allows a samurai to ride and shoot “without penalty.” As far as I can recall there isn’t anywhere that gives penalties for riding and shooting. Samurai are at a ‘mere’ -2 to dodge arrows and -4 for energy blasts, and can fire 3 arrows a round at level one, +2 at level three, and +1 more at 4, 6, 9 and 12. That is a fair number of arrows, which might be useful if they’re magic or something.

Swordsmanship gets its own section and declares that true samurai are master swordsmen and study Zen. They get +1 on init, +3 to pull their strikes and one additional attack when using the paired swords. They also get a “Chi M.D. Death Blow” which is just such a delightfully awkward phrasing. This attack is used by samurai and some other folks to inflict mega-damage with a melee or hand-to-hand attack and you kick a monster so hard it can’t heal the damage for 1D4 hours. It cannot be used in anger (bah) and must be used without regret for one’s action of using it. :wtc: Takes two attacks, won’t work on techfoes, just supernaturals, samurai cannot expend their immense rate of bow fire with it, and never states how much damage it actually does or how much PPE it costs. Instead we learn that samurai also carry an iron fan around with them for use with their teeth I guess since their hands are full of swords and can be used for parrying. “It also functions as a fan.”


pretty sure i saw this in a museum somewhere

We still haven’t reached the actual normal statblock area for the true samurai class. Instead we’re going to have some more special training in the form of “zanji shinjinken-ryu” which is something that Siembieda heard somewhere as the name of samurai sword training. I don’t care enough to even look this up. Anyway, it’s a sword methodology that survived the time of rifts and is designed to kill! emphasis theirs. I guess this is a long and complicated form of WP: samurai swords, it grants miscellaneous bonuses including +2 to PP still more bonii to using the paired swords in addition to the ones already given. Each level includes a new special bonus but not all the explanations are reprinted from Ninjas & Superspies, like the bonus for level 9 which is “Death Blow!”, end of entry.

Alien Rope Burn: ”Zanji Shinjinken-Ryu” is from Erick Wujcik’s Palladium game Ninjas & Superspies and is almost certainly a fictional concoction, given the only references I can find to it link back to Palladium sites (or bullshido sites that literally stole from N&S’ martial arts listings :v: ). To be fair, a number of the martial arts in that game are intentionally fictional - like Dog Style Kung Fu (fight on all fours) or Taido (battle twirling) - but “Zanji Shinjinken-Ryu” is a mess of broken Japanese. It’s probably meant to be something like “Lightning Divine Sword Dragon” but “Slightly Delayed Newbie Coupon Dragon” would be a far more accurate translation.

After this we get a “Samurai family background” table. Rolling 1-10 gets you one of the coveted pre-rifts daisho sets because your family traces its line back that far. All of them grant three skill choices in various areas, some of which are “choose anything from physical or wilderness” which experienced Palladium players will recognize as “choose Acrobatics and Gymnastics and Boxing” while others are “choose anything from medical or science in this agrarian anti-tech community” so clearly not all outcomes are equal, even aside from social status.

Finally we get the stats. 33% principled, 16% scrupulous, 33% aberrant, 8% anarchist and 10% “other.” They get skill selections more or less in line with what one would expect, their special magic swords and armor, “samurai silks”, several changes of kimono (specifically mentioned), sandals, a utility belt (bat-samurai) and other basic gear including a good horse. They also get a bow with 20 normal arrows, 6 silver-tipped arrows, and 6 magic arrows of unspecified type, plus two extra weapons of choice as long as they aren’t magical. 3D4x1000 credits in valuables + 1D4x1000 in a monthly stipend, this being one of the rare occasions when PCs with a steady job are told how much they are paid. Also 20% of all booty gained goes to the daimyo, 20% to the Empire and 20% to the family, but hey, free meals.


praise the rising sun

As ever with any class that’s even vaguely mystical, they refuse cybernetics, though as normal humans they wouldn’t experience penalties for using them and most of their powers don’t need PPE.

Lastly there’s a small note that female samurai are taught kendo instead of zanji-whatever and get PPE x3 instead of x2 and notes that most female fighting samurai arise out of vengeance but some are just born warriors. Kendo is detailed in the back in a separate martial arts section.

That’s it for the true samurai class, and that was a whole lot of :circlefap: It’s not like it’s a surprise, weeaboo sentiments didn’t just originate recently, but I forgot how much the book gushed on this topic.


Next time: The samurai’s dark other, the Ronin! Will they get dicked around as much as in L5R?!

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Nuns with Guns posted:

weirdly, only the d20 is notably hard to read irl. It's the one you'd roll the most, of course



It's still a really bad image to advertise the dice with

That d6 is pretty annoying too.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015
Now I just have to use "Slightly Delayed Newbie Coupon Dragon" somewhere. Maybe I can turn it into mangled German and use it for a giant robot.

"Leicht Verzug Neuling Gutschein Drache"

Perfect. Sounds like something the Bount from that one Bleach arc would chant.

Doresh fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Feb 5, 2017

Siivola
Dec 23, 2012

occamsnailfile posted:


pretty sure i saw this in a museum somewhere
Smashing!

occamsnailfile posted:

Alien Rope Burn: ”Zanji Shinjinken-Ryu” is from Erick Wujcik’s Palladium game Ninjas & Superspies and is almost certainly a fictional concoction, given the only references I can find to it link back to Palladium sites (or bullshido sites that literally stole from N&S’ martial arts listings :v: ). To be fair, a number of the martial arts in that game are intentionally fictional - like Dog Style Kung Fu (fight on all fours) or Taido (battle twirling) - but “Zanji Shinjinken-Ryu” is a mess of broken Japanese. It’s probably meant to be something like “Lightning Divine Sword Dragon” but “Slightly Delayed Newbie Coupon Dragon” would be a far more accurate translation.
Taido is, believe it or not, an actual thing. "Battle twirling" describes it quite well.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth

Young Freud posted:

Which goddamn blew all the progression that previous editions had worked on. 4e Hackers felt like a natural evolution on Deckers and Riggers, considering that they had been building up that merger in the Rigger books. I remember reading in Rigger 2, I think, where they say site security system managers acted a lot like riggers, except immobile, that a rigger could pull all sorts of tricks with building security if they had something to break ICE with. It was an inevitability that those classes would be merged together.

Also, after last year, where we had people using botnets made of internet-connected refrigerators, DVRs, and security cameras to launch DDOS attacks that shut down the internet a few days before a big election, 4e's hacking was oddly prescient.

it really can't be overstated how hilarious it is that almost right after they did their big 'no see REAL hackers work like this, and riggers are just kinda morons with RC cars' revert to old bad things we had actual RL hacker/rigger types loving up multiple things one after another.

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Evil Mastermind posted:

While I agree that the name is dull, beings that are capable of eating whole planets or realities are perfectly viable threats in a multiversal setting.

Well, yeah, it just fails the "sounds good when an NPC shouts and points" rule of monster naming. "It's a planetovooooore!" just sounds silly. I guess it is technically Latin-ish, though. Dammit. It could me made to sound more Latin-ey. "It's an orbisovoooore!" A little better? Hm.

Siivola posted:

Taido is, believe it or not, an actual thing. "Battle twirling" describes it quite well.

Ooops. My mistake. I don't know where I got the idea it was fictional but I never bothered to double-check.

Errata: Replace "taido (battle twirling)" with "lee kwan choo ("nonviolent" kung fu)".

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


I'm getting the impression that Shadowrun has a similar problem to Twilight 2000 that history has outrun it but they haven't rewritten the setting to account for this yet. Is that correct?

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Well, yeah, it just fails the "sounds good when an NPC shouts and points" rule of monster naming. "It's a planetovooooore!" just sounds silly. I guess it is technically Latin-ish, though. Dammit. It could me made to sound more Latin-ey. "It's an orbisovoooore!" A little better? Hm.
Really, I think it's better if your realityovores are more unique. Not just a generic race but a small number of named entities that're all doing it for different reasons.

Basically I want pre-Ultimates Galactus and 52-era Mister Mind coexisting and doing their things separately.

Really I just want a "Multiversity: the RPG" that doesn't suck. :(

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

Midjack posted:

That d6 is pretty annoying too.

All of the promotional material for the d6 shows the 1-side which has that obnoxiously busy stylized "S" on it, so that doesn't help. Either way, all the little freckles of color around the numbers on a die face is a terrible design choice.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Well, yeah, it just fails the "sounds good when an NPC shouts and points" rule of monster naming. "It's a planetovooooore!" just sounds silly. I guess it is technically Latin-ish, though. Dammit. It could me made to sound more Latin-ey. "It's an orbisovoooore!" A little better? Hm.

Why not just "World Eater"? Probably used in other media, but it's simple and ominous.

Kavak posted:

I'm getting the impression that Shadowrun has a similar problem to Twilight 2000 that history has outrun it but they haven't rewritten the setting to account for this yet. Is that correct?

Though I can at least understand why they would hesitate, at least to a point. A more accurate hacker/decker/whatever wouldn't even have to be on the same continent as the rest of the party. He'd probably just interact with them through a rad drone.
Wait, that actually sounds kinda cool.

Lol, that just reminds me of a monster class from the JRPG parody tabletop game Super Console. You can evolve your Automaton into a mainframe computer. The thing following the rest of the party and doing all the work is just a robot you control from afar. If it gets smashed in combat, you just send in another one.

Doresh fucked around with this message at 20:27 on Feb 5, 2017

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

Doresh posted:

Why not just "World Eater"? Probably used in other media, but it's simple and ominous.

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a new tabletop RPG setting must implement new nouns for every tired concept.

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Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Doresh posted:

Why not just "World Eater"? Probably used in other media, but it's simple and ominous.

Yeah, that came to mind. Of course, yeah, as Mastermind mentioned, you may as well make them individuals unless you're somehow using them in mooks in a really high-powered game.

Nuns with Guns posted:

All of the promotional material for the d6 shows the 1-side which has that obnoxiously busy stylized "S" on it, so that doesn't help. Either way, all the little freckles of color around the numbers on a die face is a terrible design choice.

This is why I generally just buy yellow or white dice with black numbers. Boring, but very readable.

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