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Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

I just ignored that rule because there was no reason for it and also ignoring it didn't actually change any mechanics or setting stuff at all.

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Cease to Hope
Dec 12, 2011
poo poo, I hosed up that F&F with copy-paste. I'll repost it in a tic

e: okay this should be unfucked



13th Age part 3: Relationship Status: It's Complicated

13th Age's last unique character creation system is its replacement for alignment: Icon Relationships. Relationships represent how likely it is that your relationship with that icon will benefit you. Each PC gets three points to spend, and you can spend them more or less however you want on almost any icon you want, establishing Positive, Ambiguous, or Negative relationships. You can spread out your points or concentrate them in one relationship, whatever you like. Every session, the GM rolls a d6 for each relationship point for each character: every 6 rolled means that relationship benefits that PC somehow, every 5 means that PC benefits but at the cost of some sort of complication. Positive relationships generally mean the icon or their organization helps you out, negative means their enemies help you out, ambiguous could go either way.

Relationships are supposed to represent the likelihood of the relationship mattering, not the depth of your alliance or enmity, but for some reason you can't spend too many points being the ally of an evil icon or the enemy of a heroic one. There's really no reason a hero couldn't be well-connected with the anti-Emperor resistance, or constantly receiving “help” from the Diabolist as part of some scheme only she understands. The justification is that too many positive points with a villain would make you their henchman - but there's no reason such a relationship would necessarily be reciprocal. It's an easy rule to ignore, but the table to explain which relationships have which cap sprawls over an entire page, crammed with of repetitive filler endlessly redefining "positive", "ambiguous", and "negative".

In addition to being a source of story hooks, this is supposed to be a replacement for alignment. However, while alignment does completely suck if you have even a basic understanding of moral philosophy, it's really fast and efficient and easy to communicate, which Icon Relationships are not. "Lawful good" is clear in a way "ambiguous Emperor 2, negative Three 1" is not. Describing this mouthful chews up five pages of rules and charts, jammed ill-fitting into character creation between rolling ability scores and choosing skills. Relationships needed streamlining to make it easier to communicate, both between players and in terms of rules text.

Rolling a One On The Ol’ Craft (Layout) Check

After relationships comes Backgrounds and how to resolve skill checks, which I've already discussed. What I neglected to mention is the lengthy aside about Failing Forward. This is a good guide to using “failure” not as a roadblock but as a reason to introduce further story complications, both to keep the game flowing but also to help avoid d20’s tendency to make everyone fail at routine tasks a significant amount of the time. I can't fault Fail Forward as a principle, but I can fault it for being ANOTHER full page of rules text that does not pertain to character creation before we even learn what a bard does.

Also introduced in passing in the background/skill description is that the game is broken up into Adventurer, Champion, and Epic tiers, and that Champion and Epic environments are a little too hardcore for lower-level heroes. It won't be until the next section that we learn that Champion means levels 5-7, Epic means 8-10, oh and by the way this game only goes up to level 10.

Have I mentioned that I hate 13th Age’s layout? Because man. It sucks a lot.

Elven Centipede

You get one feat per level and there's 10 levels. Get it? Huh? Get it?

Anyway. Feats are broken up into level-based tiers: champion feats come online at level 5, and epic feats at 8. This section only has the most boring feats, like Improved Initiative or Toughness or Rapid Reload, the inexplicable crossbow feat tax that appears in every D20 game despite the fact that literally everyone houserules it because it's not like you're going to powergame with a crossbow and this game doesn't even have iterative attacks ugh it's so useless and

I seem to have lost track there. In any event, the general feats are the usual pile of uninspired, uninteresting junk, except for Ritual Casting which is absolutely huge (assuming you don't have a PC who gets it for free) because 13A rituals are unfucked compared to 4e. The vast, vast majority of feats are actually modifiers or riders on abilities you get from your class or race, so they aren't listed in detail here; rather, they're listed immediately under the power or talent or spell they modify. Despite this, the feat section has eleven useless pages listing every single feat and its summarized effects, in insufficient detail to make any educated decisions about what feats to take or even what feats you're eligible for.

We still don't know what races or classes do yet!

Guess what's next? It's what you're all waiting for…

someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this

It's the gear tables for no apparent reason!

In particular, 13th Age's somewhat-unusual-for-a-D&D-clone handling of weapons and armor. 13A disposes of Gary Gygax's fetishism for differentiating weapon and armor types; everything is collapsed into general categories, and "special weapon qualities" like Reach or Finesse don't exist at all. This extends to the feats and class abilities: there's no Weapon Focus or other options that encourage people to make their character be the Shortsword-Only Guy (except for Rapid Reload, the inexplicable D20 albatross feat). Weapons and armor are mainly an aesthetic choice, rather than a mechanical one.

All of the weapons are collapsed into size (one-handed or two-handed), complexity (small, light/simple, and heavy/martial), and whether or not they are ranged. There isn't any mechanical difference between a longsword, a broadsword, a battleaxe, flail, or morningstar. Weapon damage is on a d4/d6/d8/d10 scale where each step of increasing size and complexity increases damage a step: a (small, one-handed) dagger or club does d4 damage, while a (two-handed, heavy) greataxe or lucern hammer does d10. There are no special weapon qualities any more; the only time the weapon type matters is damage, and the -2 atk penalty for using a weapon that is too large or complex for your class. (The details of weapon damage aren't actually in this section; they appear - and are repeated - in each class writeup.)

Similarly, armor is collapsed into light armor and heavy armor and shields - and, as, light armor includes rugged adventuring clothing, anyone can wear the former with no penalties. Armor is extremely abstract: basically anything that isn't simple clothing is light armor, and anything with a significant amount of solid metal is heavy armor. As mentioned earlier, AC is based on a combination of your class and your current armor: every (core) class has a base AC of 10 or 11 with no armor and base AC ranging from 10-14 in light armor. Some classes can wear heavy armor without a penalty and get up to base AC 14-16; everyone CAN wear heavy armor, but only get an additional +1 AC over their light armor value (which may be as low as 11) and get -2 to atk. Shields are similarly simple: all shields give you +1 AC, with a -2 atk penalty if you don't properly know how to use one.

This could possibly be simplified even further into making damage and AC purely a matter of your class with situational penalties when you're using something grossly inappropriate or undersized as a weapon or fighting in a loincloth, but it's a good enough level of abstraction given 13A's level of tactical complexity.

spend less on candles


There's pages and pages of this. I should be used to it by now, but I'm not.

What isn't abstracted is the traditional list of medieval (and anachronistic) weapons, armor, sundry goods, and services. Discussing coinage (copper, silver, gold, and platinum, 10:1 to trade up) and sprawling tables chew up three more useless pages. Nearly a full page's worth of this is devoted to specific costs for specific sorts of weapons and armor and they don't even do different things any more. A staff - which is just a sturdy, long stick! - is 1 gp, which is enough to eat for a week. Why does a mace cost more than a morningstar?

There are some cute ideas: every table section also has a list of unique or odd things, like a "large tabby cat in Horizon, guaranteed free of fleas and demonic possession", a "fine for unnecessary violence in Santa Cora", or different prices for a "ferry ride across the Grandfather [River]" depending on whether the bridge is out or not. It's a charming way to spice up these tedious and not especially interesting or useful tables of arbitrary prices.

It's nice that they made the effort, but who gives a poo poo. I have no idea why this section is here. Not only do we not yet know how much money a character has to spend, or what sorts of items they might want, or what sorts of items they can even use, but it turns out that characters get their weapons and armor free at character creation and won't even care how much they cost. Very few campaigns are ever put players in a situation where they care about the fact that candles cost 1cp per. It's an absolutely baffling layout decision, especially given that 13th Age is often so abstract that a campaign might never need to consult this table for the specific numeric cost of these mundane items.

We are on page 62 and we still don't know what an elf wizard even is or does.

Next: No, Really, It Is Actually A Metaphor For Race

Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Mar 26, 2017

By popular demand
Jul 17, 2007

IT *BZZT* WASP ME--
IT WASP ME ALL *BZZT* ALONG!


How about your appearance turns gradually inhuman in a way the player decides on? I could really go for cubistic vampire with all face symmetry gone.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Cease to Hope posted:

this is kind of weird and internet diagnosis-y and doesn't match with even a passing reading of his professional work
I'm not sure what you mean; has he ever been the primary author of anything for an established company?

I get that AF and his Tomes are free online stuff, but still. He only writes in a tone that's like, shooting the breeze about house rules on a forum, plus occasional lame jokes.

Cease to Hope
Dec 12, 2011

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm not sure what you mean; has he ever been the primary author of anything for an established company?

I get that AF and his Tomes are free online stuff, but still. He only writes in a tone that's like, shooting the breeze about house rules on a forum, plus occasional lame jokes.

he's got a bunch of SR4e credits that I'm aware of, and there might be other stuff I'm not

megane
Jun 20, 2008



13th Age makes me think of a packrat trying to clean out his garage. You know this box of old oven mitts is junk, you know it, but you just... can't bring yourself to throw it out. What if you need those oven mitts some day?? I'll throw out this broken bicycle pump instead, then I'll have space to keep the oven mitt box.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm not sure what you mean; has he ever been the primary author of anything for an established company?

I get that AF and his Tomes are free online stuff, but still. He only writes in a tone that's like, shooting the breeze about house rules on a forum, plus occasional lame jokes.

I remember that After Midnight or whatever it was called was literally his TGD posts about the whole "WoD heartbreaker" idea, just put together into a single document without editing anything.

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

Quietus (Cruscitus)Level One – Blood Essence: This power allows the Assamite to drain a victim down to one blood point and then rip out their heart for later. It’s a difficult test, a 9 difficulty willpower test, and the victim can fight back if able to. The heart is in a grayish, preserved state but if the vampire bites into it, they can treat it as draining the mortal dry or diablerizing the target if they were a vampire.
Level Two – Scorpion’s Touch: The vampire can convert an amount of blood equal to their generational spending limit to a poison that damages the target’s stamina. If the target is reduced to 0 stamina, mortals die and vampires go into torpor. The poison must be ingested but the vampire can use it as a trap by letting a vampire bite them, can release it by biting or filling their mouth with it, or by coating their weapons with it. It pretty much has to be delivered to the Cainite or mortal’s bloodstream to work. Vampires and ghouls can reflexively purge the poison by succeeding at a test and spending a blood point. Mortals cannot recover from this poison.
Level Three – Dagon’s Call: The vampire delivers a dab of blood to a target, again entering the target’s bloodstream, and after an hour can attack the target vampire from within. The difficulty to activate this power is proportional to the distance from the target and can range up to difficulty 10, which is ridiculously high in a d10, no exploding dice system. After a contested willpower challenge, unsoakable lethal is delivered to the target based on the number of successes. A botch delivers the opposite.
Level Four – Baal’s Caress: This power works the same as Scorpion’s Touch but delivers regular aggravated damage. Coated weapons deal aggravated damage as well so it has a greater utility in combat.
Level Five – Quicken the Mortal’s Blood: The vampire gains double nourishment when feeding from mortals and this translates to each blood point taken being equal to two.

Quietus (Hematus)
“The settling of debts by an offering of blood” is the meaning they give for this name.

Level One – Blood Tempering: The vampire instills their blood into an item, giving it can amount of soak dice based on the character’s stamina. The number of successes determines the length it lasts, 6+ is indefinitely, but the item takes on the Cainite weaknesses to fire and sunlight.
Level Two – Truth of Blood: By filling a container with a target’s blood, the user can determine if the target is lying or not. The number of successes gained on a test against the target’s willpower score determines the level by which the user can determine the truthfulness of their statements.
Level Three – Cleansed in Blood: The user anoints a target in blood and after an hour of concentration with them can cleanse them of any Cainite mind influencing powers. The user has to spend blood equal to the level used and this affects Dominate, Dementation, and Presence uses. This doesn’t protect against future uses by the Assamite mind meld is still pretty useful.
Level Four – Ripples of the Heart: The user imbues the blood of another with an emotion after drinking one point from the target. The targets blood will now be imbued with that emotion, such as fear or hatred, and drinkers of it will be afflicted by a version of that emotion. The severity is based on the number of points they drink. It can be used to lock down the drinker in fear, a blind rage, or to bolster allies by giving them preternatural courage.
Level Five – Blood Sweat: The user, after coming into contact with the target’s blood, can cause them to lose an amount of blood equal to the number of successes the user rolled on a willpower test. This requires three turns of concentration and the target must be in line of sight of the user. The target is also wracked by feelings of guilt or a spiteful compulsion to boast, it’s all based on their Road and morality system.

Huh, cool, these are actually not too bad! The modern-day Quietus suffered heavily under not being a collection of related powers (like Dominate, Presence, etc. are) but were instead just a collection of five powers that made the Assamites good assassins.


RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

They turn unnaturally black though, not to a natural skin tone. It's also something that's only been around since Revised I think, I don't remember it being in older editions. It's unfortunate and I don't really know the mythological origin of it, if any.

I imagine the purpose was that it makes Assamites easy to spot after a point and unable to live among humanity since they can't pass for human. Even if you're pale, you can spend a blood to look human but with their curse, they can't. This would make them more difficult to play and give them more downsides since they have a lot of easily abusable powers.

Maybe someone knows the origin but I don't really know why it exists and what it's supposed to represent other than the above.

The Assamite clan weakness changed a lot. Vitae addiction, Vitae allergy, their skin turning blacker as they grow older and more evil... Successive updates to the setting have done a lot to mellow out the Assamites as more than just the "Arabic assassin and terrorist vampires", but ultimately they're a brainchild of early 90's White Wolf thinking, which means they're laden with racism being core to the concept of the Clan even in the 20th Anniversary editions.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!

Cease to Hope posted:

he's got a bunch of SR4e credits that I'm aware of, and there might be other stuff I'm not
Just two books where he's one of several authors, AFAIK.

I forgot that his solo writing credits read like forum posts because they are forum posts. But considering how much smarter he thinks he is than every working designer, he should maybe clean it up a bit before compiling it. But yeah AFAIK his homebrew is the only stuff out there where he's the primary author, and this is his tone and style:

quote:

Evil Plants
From now on, I’m shooting my salad before I eat it.
The evil plants grow out of the ground in weird pods that make the soundtrack want
to bust out theremin tracks. They grow out of humans and often have mind control and
other weird powers. These things might actually be from Space. But since they don’t have a
civilization or space ships (that we know of), it’s not super important.
Examples Include: Body Snatchers, The Thing, Swamp Thing

Giant Animals
Rar!
The wilderness of horror is a dangerous place with a spectacularly large array of things that
can kill you. Man eating beasts of tremendous size roam the woods, the lakes, the swamps,
and probably the mountains. Being eaten by sharks, crocodiles, tigers, or whatever is a severe
threat. And yes, these super charged zoo rejects have magic powers sometimes.
Examples Include: Jaws, Joe Young, Boa, Python

Ghosts
Boo!
When humans die and they are super pissed about something, they will occasionally linger
on after death and become a ghost. Ghosts don’t interact properly with physical objects and
other people, and in any case are fed only by strong human emotions. So they gradually
lose themselves and go batshit crazy, becoming a force that is more and more destructive.
Examples Include: Slimer, Patrick Swayze, The Mist

Jaws and Joe Young? That's what FMGuru is talking about and it's so drat bizarre

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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



LatwPIAT posted:

The Assamite clan weakness changed a lot. Vitae addiction, Vitae allergy, their skin turning blacker as they grow older and more evil... Successive updates to the setting have done a lot to mellow out the Assamites as more than just the "Arabic assassin and terrorist vampires", but ultimately they're a brainchild of early 90's White Wolf thinking, which means they're laden with racism being core to the concept of the Clan even in the 20th Anniversary editions.
Yeah, this is a general issue with oWoD, isn't it. I think there are some gains from rooting various supernatural splats in times, places, and cultures to some extent, but hoo boy, the Assamites and the Ravnos. And probably most of the werewolf tribes.

wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


The one saving grace of TGD is that it produced scaling fighter feats, which I think really help solve the caster/non-caster problem.

Cease to Hope
Dec 12, 2011

Halloween Jack posted:

Jaws and Joe Young? That's what FMGuru is talking about and it's so drat bizarre

that's not something present even in tomes and ends of the matrix, it's specifically an after sundown thing. AS's whole premise is mashing up all sorts of disparate horror-adjacent genre fiction into a whole that still had coherent magical rules.

FMguru's idea that Trollman or TGD posters can't understand theme or symbolism is baffling even when you just look at after sundown, because the back half is soggy with travelogues interspersed with boring rambling analysis of what horror themes actually mean and how to incorporate them into this game which really doesn't support anything that isn't somewhere between scooby doo and van helsing.

stop being goony psychoanalysts. sometimes a book sucks because the writer isn't very good at conveying their ideas, not because of some deep-seated inability to comprehend ideas which are not properly tackled in a particular work.

Simian_Prime
Nov 6, 2011

When they passed out body parts in the comics today, I got Cathy's nose and Dick Tracy's private parts.

Cease to Hope posted:

that's not something present even in tomes and ends of the matrix, it's specifically an after sundown thing. AS's whole premise is mashing up all sorts of disparate horror-adjacent genre fiction into a whole that still had coherent magical rules.

FMguru's idea that Trollman or TGD posters can't understand theme or symbolism is baffling even when you just look at after sundown, because the back half is soggy with travelogues interspersed with boring rambling analysis of what horror themes actually mean and how to incorporate them into this game which really doesn't support anything that isn't somewhere between scooby doo and van helsing.

stop being goony psychoanalysts. sometimes a book sucks because the writer isn't very good at conveying their ideas, not because of some deep-seated inability to comprehend ideas which are not properly tackled in a particular work.

Is there a special class you had to take to become this much of an insufferable jackoff?

Green Intern
Dec 29, 2008

Loon, Crazy and Laughable

Evil Plants doesn't even include Triffids as an example? Lame.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Green Intern posted:

Evil Plants doesn't even include Triffids as an example? Lame.

I'm pretty certain I remember Triffids being mentioned in there somewhere.

Cease to Hope
Dec 12, 2011

Evil Mastermind posted:

I'm pretty certain I remember Triffids being mentioned in there somewhere.

they're a broken out subtype

I am shutting up about AS now though unless someone does a proper write up of it

LatwPIAT
Jun 6, 2011

Nessus posted:

Yeah, this is a general issue with oWoD, isn't it. I think there are some gains from rooting various supernatural splats in times, places, and cultures to some extent, but hoo boy, the Assamites and the Ravnos. And probably most of the werewolf tribes.

Fundamentally, I don't think there's anything wrong with the concept of "Arabic vampire culture" or "Vampire-clan dominant in the Middle East" as concepts. I even think in my racist moments you might have some fun with the concept, like paralleling the Sunni/Shi'ite split by having creeds of vampires that split over some minor issue a long time ago that have evolved different practices to distinguish themselves from each other. But the Assamites started out as a racial caricature and for whatever reason, White Wolf adopted a process of never really saying "you know, that was horrible and racist, let's just scrap it and start over", which means that the Assamites are still portrayed as scimitar-wielding Levantine assassins in V20.[1] In some parallel universe, more cogent Iranians are posting on SomethingAwful about how silly it is that there's only one European vampire clan that were portrayed as Catholic crusaders with a discipline that makes them better at crusading and Catholicism, and in V20 they're depicted by a blonde, blue-eyed man in full-plate holding a zweihander in one hand and a great helm in the other.

I see it especially in Ascension, where the entire thing is built on a very racist foundation (out of the Nine Mystical Traditions, we have seven variations upon the nuances of European magic, while all of shamanism is lumped into one category) and twenty years and three editions later, there's still seven variations upon the nuances of European magic, while all shamanism is lumped into one category.

[1] Masquerade as a whole I think suffers from trying to force everything into Clans, so you can't just have "the way Arabic vampires tend to do things", you have to have the Clan-of-Arabic-vampires. The Assamites, for example, would probably work better if they were split into a Clan of vampire spooks/assassins[2] and a Sect or three of Middle Eastern vampires who comprise nomadic Gangrel, Ventrue with connections to the oil and shipping industry, Cappadocians who claim to have preserved Egyptian necromancy, Lasombra who immigrated back when Spain was part of the Ummayad empire, that sort of thing.

[2]

quote:

They're a scattered, hunted-by-other-vampires Covenant-clan, spread all over the world. Their curse drives them to feed preferntially on other vampires. They form small coteries, practicing their blood magic which can only be fuelled with blood taken from other vampires, and certain elements of Camarilla society is alleged to have ties to these monsters who eat other Kindred, at least in the US and Europe Most of them are pretty weak-blooded, because they're a broken, scattered clan of hunted monsters. Or at least, they started off weak-blooded, because they're also known to be serial diablerists. In the slums of Washington DC, there's a sizable community of them, ruled over by a paranoid and low Humanity spook from the 50s. They form a secret cabal embedded into elements of the military intelligence community, misusing assets to hunt down Camarilla vampires, wearing black suits and sunglasses even at night (so the blood and the red eyes don't show)

To Protect Flavor
Feb 24, 2016

LatwPIAT posted:

In some parallel universe, more cogent Iranians are posting on SomethingAwful about how silly it is that there's only one European vampire clan that were portrayed as Catholic crusaders with a discipline that makes them better at crusading and Catholicism, and in V20 they're depicted by a blonde, blue-eyed man in full-plate holding a zweihander in one hand and a great helm in the other.

I mean, isn't that just the Salubri?

RocknRollaAyatollah
Nov 26, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

Horrible Lurkbeast posted:

How about your appearance turns gradually inhuman in a way the player decides on? I could really go for cubistic vampire with all face symmetry gone.

Night's Black Agents meets Dreamhounds of Paris.

They already have a clan whose angle is being fugly, several bloodlines as well. It's thankfully ignorable and doesn't really play any greater part in their clan identity. The only one Assamite that I can remember that is mentioned as being inhuman because of age is Ur-Shulgi, who is the second Assamite. They make a big deal about how inhuman he is because he comes back, tells the clan they're all idiots and cowards, and goes all pre-Old Testament on them for not all following the Path of Blood. His childe, Al-Ashard has the opposite thing going on, he has a merit where he looks like a "normal" vampire and is pale. He's "good" and joins the Camarilla which is another aspect of the thing that's pretty sketchy.

LatwPIAT posted:

The Assamite clan weakness changed a lot. Vitae addiction, Vitae allergy, their skin turning blacker as they grow older and more evil... Successive updates to the setting have done a lot to mellow out the Assamites as more than just the "Arabic assassin and terrorist vampires", but ultimately they're a brainchild of early 90's White Wolf thinking, which means they're laden with racism being core to the concept of the Clan even in the 20th Anniversary editions.

Yeah, even though in Revised they went more towards their Mesopotamian roots, it still has a weird Euro-American, Judeo-Christian black equals bad bent. I think they were going for more of an ancient horror from the Middle East angle but there's no mythological or eliptony basis for it. Where they got that and why they thought that was a good idea is beyond me.

RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 01:17 on Mar 27, 2017

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
The 13th Age "Archmage Engine" SRD seems to be better organized and doesn't have nearly as much "cruft" as the corebook

(and I put "cruft" in quotes because in some ways that stuff is still useful to have, we just want to skip right past it because it's not "for us" anymore)

Mors Rattus
Oct 25, 2007

FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Just say Christian, the 'Judeo' part is just there to pretend at inclusion 99% of the time rather than actually refer to anything Jewish. Use Abrahamic instead if you want and are actually referring to something shared by Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

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



LatwPIAT posted:

Fundamentally, I don't think there's anything wrong with the concept of "Arabic vampire culture" or "Vampire-clan dominant in the Middle East" as concepts. I even think in my racist moments you might have some fun with the concept, like paralleling the Sunni/Shi'ite split by having creeds of vampires that split over some minor issue a long time ago that have evolved different practices to distinguish themselves from each other.
Yeah you get this with W:tA too, where like six of the various Garou tribes are rooted in Europe, like one in the MENA area and that extremely marginally, one in Asia, two in the Americas plus an extinct one, one for actual wolves, and a couple from "various Garou factions."

I mean, I liked that all Garou aren't really better than each other, but their heritage spirits make an impact, that was IMO one of the big strengths of Werewolf. You get your giant war stick up front and also you ALL have that giant war stick.

RocknRollaAyatollah
Nov 26, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

Mors Rattus posted:

Just say Christian, the 'Judeo' part is just there to pretend at inclusion 99% of the time rather than actually refer to anything Jewish. Use Abrahamic instead if you want and are actually referring to something shared by Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Jewish scholars in the Middle Ages believed that the sons of Ham fathered the empires of Northern Africa. Islam isn't too big on dwelling on the curses and Biblical lineages from what I've read. It's a hard thing to quantify and I didn't mean it in a Steve Bannon type of sense.

I Am Just a Box
Jul 20, 2011
I belong here. I contain only inanimate objects. Nothing is amiss.

Evil Mastermind posted:

I remember that After Midnight or whatever it was called was literally his TGD posts about the whole "WoD heartbreaker" idea, just put together into a single document without editing anything.

I recall it still has undisguised use of White Wolf-specific neologisms, like just straight up referring to Prometheans who use Transmutation powers, etc. It was really just one step up from being Vampire: Undeath, a sourcebook for the Wastelands of Damnation.

I Am Just a Box fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Mar 27, 2017

Humbug Scoolbus
Apr 25, 2008

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

Halloween Jack posted:

DW at least deserves credit for driving the simulationist crowd to a new level of insanity. The Gaming Den invented the memey phrase "Quantum Bears" because they really couldn't grasp the idea that, since DW embraces fail-forward storytelling, a consequence to the classic problem of "The adventure can't progress because the Rogue can't pick the lock" could be something like getting attacked by monsters. In their minds, that means that in DW you can summon infinite monsters by tapping a lockpick against a door, and therefore DW is insane and incoherent.

Simulationism causes brain damage.

And I still say having an adventure with a fail point like that is a problem with the scenario and has nothing to do with the system used.

slap me and kiss me
Apr 1, 2008

You best protect ya neck

Halloween Jack posted:

...DW you can summon infinite monsters by tapping a lockpick against a door, and therefore DW is insane and incoherent.

But hold on, tapping a lockpick against a door is a completely different action than trying to pick the door's lock. It ought to be impossible to fail the former (because who would require a roll for that sort of thing?)

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
Take away the problematic weakness and you get Assassin's Creed with Vampires, which is an awesome PC concept.

Rigged Death Trap
Feb 13, 2012

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP


Whats this pathetic attempt at faux-arabic calligraphy. I know its not supposed to be recognizable as arabic/persian but still.
At least they could have used a brush for the outside edge script. The bit in the middle is even sloppy.

Oh and I dont think its racist, at least in intent. But it is hella orientalist.

Rigged Death Trap fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Mar 27, 2017

By popular demand
Jul 17, 2007

IT *BZZT* WASP ME--
IT WASP ME ALL *BZZT* ALONG!


Count Chocula posted:

Take away the problematic weakness and you get Assassin's Creed with Vampires, which is an awesome PC concept.

And Assassin's Creed already has a precedent for inhuman faces!

Barudak
May 7, 2007

Rigged Death Trap posted:

Whats this pathetic attempt at faux-arabic calligraphy. I know its not supposed to be recognizable as arabic/persian but still.
At least they could have used a brush for the outside edge script. The bit in the middle is even sloppy.

Oh and I dont think its racist, at least in intent. But it is hella orientalist.

Im trying to read it and then I hit something like 3 vowel marks over an unconnected initial "M" and im confused why they didnt just do something like actual letters but spelling out in English "Drink more Ovaltine"

RocknRollaAyatollah
Nov 26, 2008

Lipstick Apathy

Count Chocula posted:

Take away the problematic weakness and you get Assassin's Creed with Vampires, which is an awesome PC concept.

An all Assamite chronicle or a Black Hand, Cain's survivalist militia version, are pretty much this.

Rigged Death Trap posted:


Whats this pathetic attempt at faux-arabic calligraphy. I know its not supposed to be recognizable as arabic/persian but still.
At least they could have used a brush for the outside edge script. The bit in the middle is even sloppy.

Oh and I dont think its racist, at least in intent. But it is hella orientalist.

I honestly don't even think about this poo poo anymore because Kindred of the East broke my mind before I even got to a conversational level in Mandarin.

I think it's supposed to be some ancient Middle Eastern language. I do think they cheaped out and did squiggles with it being some ancient tongue the Assamites still speak or write in but I'm not going to scour the clan books to verify or justify that. I think the Setites still speak Ancient Egyptian so it's possible.

RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 15:21 on Mar 27, 2017

Dareon
Apr 6, 2009

by vyelkin

Doresh posted:

Coming soon to your local Kickstarter: Death to the Quantum Bear!

Tired of lazy GMs whipping out wandering monsters out of nowhere? Appalled by so-called simulationist games switching between clean and perfect combat turns to vague nothing measured in narrative time? Not anymore!

In Death to the Quantum Bear, the player characters will never leave the combat turn structure, allowing the GM to accurately simulate the world around them. Using our revolutionary "Bucket full of Dice (tm)" mechanic, the GM can easily track the positions, routes, interests, needs and breeding habits of any monster the players might ever run into.

"We rolled three 20s in a row and wound up walking into a dragon orgy."

LuiCypher
Apr 24, 2010

Today I'm... amped up!

This time, on Deathwatch...

Step 4: Derived Attributes: Movement, Wounds, Fate, and Experience Points

These should be pretty brief and easy to cover. Movement is based solely on your Agility bonus plus your Size modifier. Within Deathwatch, you generally have four choices when it comes to movement - Half Move, Full Move, Charge, and Run. We’ll get into Deathwatch’s action economy a bit more in-depth when we get into the Combat chapter, but we can figure out our movement based on some simple equations:

Half Move: Equal to our Ag Bonus
Full Move: Ag Bonus x 2
Charge: Ag Bonus x3
Run: Ag Bonus x6

So for our Librarian with a Agility of 44, his movement looks like this:

Half Move: 4
Full Move: 8
Charge: 12
Run: 24

It also probably helps to mention that movement and distanced are calculated using Meters. For everything in Deathwatch involving speed or distance, meters are the norm. The movement rates also hint at Deathwatch's action economy, which we can go into a little more detail about later.

The quick and dirty way to explain the action economy in Deathwatch is: you can take either two half-actions or one full-action. For movement, Charge and Run count as full actions and carry their own benefits/drawbacks - there are compelling reasons to not just Run all the time versus taking Full Moves.

Wounds are pretty straightforward - you roll 1d5 and add 18, which gives you a pretty slim range of 19 to 23 wounds. Wounds basically represent your ability to take punishment after reducing it by your armor and Toughness. Space Marines tend to have a really high wound total compared to any human, as a result of the superhuman endurance imparted to them by their genetic modifications/implants. To illustrate, the toughest human in Dark Heresy rolls 1d5+9, showing that Space Marines can take about twice as much punishment as the toughest human (Rogue Trader ones can take a bit more, but that’s because they’re special). Wounds typically don’t matter until you hit certain break points, which we’ll cover later. Generally, you will be just as good at fighting at full wounds as you are at zero wounds. When you get down to zero wounds though, you start taking critical damage. Enough critical damage, and you die (but we’ll also get into that later in the Combat section, because the 40k RPGs have a RoleMaster-like Critical Damage table). Critical damage is the ‘bad’ kind of damage, and can generally do unpleasant things to your character that permanently alter them. Typically, this revolves around limb loss.

My favorite example of ‘bad’ critical damage is one that nearly kills you. Basically, your head is set on fire and you suffer such horrific burns that not only do you lose all your hair (depending on who you talk to though, all good Space Marines are already bald) your face is also FUBAR. The game asks you to roll 1d10. Congratulations - this is your new Fellowship score!

This is the game’s way of hard-dicking face characters. No other ‘archetype’ suffers anywhere near as much from critical damage as anyone who’s built around Fellowship. All other archetypes are OK, as they can replace missing arms and legs with bionic replacements that function either as good as or better than the original.

Storm Wardens' other bonus isn’t a characteristic bonus - it’s actually a bonus to wounds! So, rolling for Wounds gives us… 21, because we rolled terribly and added +2 wounds for the Storm Wardens bonus.

Fate is another one of the attributes that we roll for. Fate points represent the Emperor’s favor in your destiny - and as Space Marines, who can claim direct ancestry to the Emperor, you tend to have a lot more of it than most. Fate points are Deathwatch’s (and consequently, most of the 40k line’s) Get Out of Jail Free cards - they allow some player agency in mitigating the impact of bad rolls/results. You can use Fate Points to reroll dice (but you must take that result), add a bonus to your roll (which you declare before you roll the dice), or even recover Wounds and reset Critical Damage (unless it resulted in limb loss). If you need to cheat death (i.e., your character takes enough critical damage to be killed), you can also use a Fate Point for that - but when you do, you permanently burn (lose) a Fate Point. Fate is pretty easy to generate - roll 1d10. Depending on your result, you’ll get a certain number of Fate Points. Space Marines are guaranteed to have a base minimum of 3 Fate points (which of course, is the maximum number of Fate Point a human in Dark Heresy can have). For our Storm Warden, we rolled an 8, giving him a total of 4 Fate Points - the Emperor favors him more than most!

Experience is pretty basic - you start with 1,000 experience to spend on skills, abilities, and talents.

I realized I didn't have any old 40k 1e art to put with any of my text for this update, so here you go:

These are the Squats. There are many like them, but none of them are mine (thankfully).


DID YOU KNOW?! Chaos Space Marines, especially Noise Marines, used to be infinitely more :krad: than they are now. Please note that his weapon is now a guitar. I imagine being killed by him might go something like this.

LuiCypher fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Mar 27, 2017

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

Don't forget Marines move as if they had 1 more point of Agility bonus, since they're a size bigger than humans.

Enemies don't get the normal + to hit them due to size, though, as their special rules let them dodge and move quick enough to negate it.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Night10194 posted:

Enemies don't get the normal + to hit them due to size, though, as their special rules let them dodge and move quick enough to negate it.

Almost. They only slip into the next size category with their power armor on, but the Black Carapace implant every Marine has interfaces with their power armor and cancels out the hit bonus through better mobility.

Also the lifting tables have been copy-pasted from previous books. It's not unheard of to have a starting Space Marine so swole that you can't actually find out how much he can lift, since the table neither goes that high nor seems to follow any kind of clear and easy formula.

Dareon posted:

"We rolled three 20s in a row and wound up walking into a dragon orgy."

Sitting alone on your hoard gets lonely eventually.

Doresh fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Mar 27, 2017

Cease to Hope
Dec 12, 2011

LuiCypher posted:

DID YOU KNOW?! Chaos Space Marines, especially Noise Marines, used to be infinitely more :krad: than they are now. Please note that his weapon is now a guitar. I imagine being killed by him might go something like this.

this is an extremely pro click

MonsieurChoc
Oct 12, 2013

Every species can smell its own extinction.
Listening to old System Mastery episodes, I burst out laughing when talking about shitfarmers in the Fantasy Wargaming review. More specifically, this line:

"THe point of stories is that it's about extraordinary characters! No one wants to read about a farmer who farms and nothing else."

Because this was a major literary genre in Quebec that we all had to study in school due to it's historical significance and we all hated. The reason why the genre existed was to keep the population as uneducated peasant who listened to the Church and didn't want anything better for themselves.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

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

Shitfarmer gaming is great gaming if it's about getting out of the shitfarm and doing something amazing. Though that generally requires a stable group and a long term campaign, and a lot of shitfarmer gaming advocates don't seem to get the whole 'get out and do something incredible' part. And tend to insist ALL gaming should be shitfarmer gaming, which is just patently ridiculous.

But zero to hero is a fun narrative arc.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

MonsieurChoc posted:

Listening to old System Mastery episodes, I burst out laughing when talking about shitfarmers in the Fantasy Wargaming review. More specifically, this line:

"THe point of stories is that it's about extraordinary characters! No one wants to read about a farmer who farms and nothing else."

Speaking of System Mastery episodes, I've recently stumbled upon the same typo they mocked in Cyberworld while reading through the Cosmic Handbook for Mutants & Masterminds:

Hivemind posted:

Hiveminds provide the real threat of a PC being domi-
nated and turned against his allies. This can be tricky to
implement in games and any dominated hero should be
given ample hero points for her troubles, and so they can
be used to throw off her new master’s yolk at a dramatic
moment and help defeat the villain.

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LuiCypher
Apr 24, 2010

Today I'm... amped up!

Night10194 posted:

Shitfarmer gaming is great gaming if it's about getting out of the shitfarm and doing something amazing. Though that generally requires a stable group and a long term campaign, and a lot of shitfarmer gaming advocates don't seem to get the whole 'get out and do something incredible' part. And tend to insist ALL gaming should be shitfarmer gaming, which is just patently ridiculous.

But zero to hero is a fun narrative arc.

Incidentally, few systems do this as well as WHFRP.

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