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theironjef posted:Yeah, and our first huge 4+ hour recording session this Saturday, now that we have our absolutely ridiculous characters. I think we're basically going to be playing with a high risk of death to encourage more crazy characters.
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Jun 21, 2017 16:08
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Strange Matter posted:When was this game published? The Insanity System is clearly borrowed from Unknown Armies, buts its implementation feels kind of like UA 3rd Edition which just came out.
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Jun 21, 2017 17:01
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Halloween Jack posted:So, having listened to the review: I have never seen a game where the true nature of the setting was hidden not only from the players but the GM, that managed to carry it off well. SLA Industries, Insylum, Noumenon, Lacuna, a|state, all of them are just half-baked as a result. This is a self evident result. The GM has a responsibility to accurately portray the rp setting. The rp setting is partially obscured. Therefore, the GM will fail at one of their primary roles.
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Jun 21, 2017 17:14
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Halloween Jack posted:So, having listened to the review: I have never seen a game where the true nature of the setting was hidden not only from the players but the GM, that managed to carry it off well. SLA Industries, Insylum, Noumenon, Lacuna, a|state, all of them are just half-baked as a result. The hidden backstory of SLA Industries will never not be amazing. The entire setting is just a drug-fueled fantasy dreamed up by a schizophrenic Scottish goon locked up in a mental institution. 
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Jun 21, 2017 17:23
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What I'll never get tired of with these 'There is a shocking twist!' settings is how little the twist actually matters. Like, the one for SLA; okay, cool, does that actually change my character's situation any? The number of these SHOCK TRUTHS that will have a direct effect on the game (especially as the game is probably being written by a GM who probably doesn't know the twist since it's obscured from them) are just tiny.
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Jun 21, 2017 17:28
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It also says a lot that these "shocking twists" are usually miserable as gently caress and almost always serve to downplay or undo any accomplishments the PCs have made. The key to ask is "if the truth was revealed from the outset, would people still play your game?" If the answer is anywhere near "no", you might want to rethink it.
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Jun 21, 2017 17:39
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If your setting is all a dream, that should mean something for the players like a) they can break normal rules like conservation of matter and or b) they should be able to travel to other dreams. Gotchas are completely stupid unless the player can interact with them, and if they can interact with them they shouldnt be hidden.
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Jun 21, 2017 17:54
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Regarding Exquisite Replicas, I kept thinking that maybe these reality surgeons or whatever they were called are really good natured but ignorant; they just want to make our world better, so they copy us into super bodies and get rid of the stuff that doesn't matter because who cares about broke trash when you've got the new you living life! You get scanned and replaced, but you have all the memories of the previous person, you're just better at being them than they are and presumably are healthier and happier too! So it's like, what if I offered you a service that took away all your pains and age related ailments and let you go on with your life, but unbeknownst to you a copy with all your flaws just gets dumped into a horror closet until he or she dies? What if it works like a Star Trek teleporter where you are ostensibly "killed" at the moment you're beamed and reassembled from data, only without the disintegration implied at the start (I think there was a New Generation episode with that hook)? Or like the Prestige--are you the copy who lives or the guy drowning in a tank? It also seems like you could have an interesting game if you played someone who was recently replaced, and you had to find a way back. Of course you'd have to deviate from the rules as written to probably try. Same with realizing that you are one of the replicas; how does that affect how you see the world and yourself? And at least if you were rebel replicas fighting monsters like the Jigsaw men you'd be on more equal footing. Maybe the end game should be about making the reality surgeons do their work on the small scale of people, replacing hearts and malfunctioning organs, rather than wholesale copy and replace. Can't stop them, because the game clearly won't let you, so maybe just alter their course?
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Jun 21, 2017 18:35
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Comrade Koba posted:The hidden backstory of SLA Industries will never not be amazing. Barudak posted:If your setting is all a dream, that should mean something for the players like a) they can break normal rules like conservation of matter and or b) they should be able to travel to other dreams. Gotchas are completely stupid unless the player can interact with them, and if they can interact with them they shouldnt be hidden. Night10194 posted:What I'll never get tired of with these 'There is a shocking twist!' settings is how little the twist actually matters. Like, the one for SLA; okay, cool, does that actually change my character's situation any? The number of these SHOCK TRUTHS that will have a direct effect on the game (especially as the game is probably being written by a GM who probably doesn't know the twist since it's obscured from them) are just tiny. I think the idea with SLA was that there would eventually be a sourcebook where your PCs learn the Truth, get infused with a soul from our world, and become the gang from The Matrix. This would be like the epic level campaign for the game. Unfortunately, companies that promise to reveal their secret lore in a sourcebook have a way of going bankrupt without leaving behind so much as an outline.
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Jun 21, 2017 18:44
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Alien Rope Burn posted:It also says a lot that these "shocking twists" are usually miserable as gently caress and almost always serve to downplay or undo any accomplishments the PCs have made. This is the big key to why they fall flat. I will never totally be down on 'The Big Reveal' as a DMing trick because one of the best campaigns I ever played in relied on it; an old Spycraft 1e game where the twist was we were playing a prologue to X-COM without ever being told that until we pieced it together in game. The key to that was, none of that invalidated our accomplishments or made our characters useless; one of my PCs (everyone had a Combat/Field and Support PC) was a badass Marine supply officer recruited for security and her ability to wield a 23mm anti-vehicular shotgun turned out really goddamn useful when we had to kill a Muton with human weapons in the finale, etc. It also never betrayed the pitch; we were still an NSA black ops team that happened to piece together, then save the fledgingly X-COM project from thin-men, sectoids, and a couple Mutons sent in to strangle it in the crib at the climax. Us being a bunch of hyper-competent g-men and action heroes was still the core of the game and why that big surprise was exciting and fun instead of being a huge letdown.
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Jun 21, 2017 18:45
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Night10194 posted:Utopian, simplistic fiction often comes off really, really dystopian if you think about it. After all, "Everyone gets along and thinks exactly the same." is the core of a lot of dystopian fiction. I can see the musings of the 'the elders are right' being a not uncommon thing where kids grow up, have kids of their own and realize why their parents did things a certain way, but combined with the implied social rigidity, and again apparently the dragons have no hand in rearing their young during their most formative/vulnerable stage is brow raising. And as someone else pointed out, there's nothing really dragon-ish about the setting - you can swap dragons with humans, elves, or Redwall-esque sapient animals and nothing really changes.
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Jun 21, 2017 19:18
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Robindaybird posted:I can see the musings of the 'the elders are right' being a not uncommon thing where kids grow up, have kids of their own and realize why their parents did things a certain way, but combined with the implied social rigidity, and again apparently the dragons have no hand in rearing their young during their most formative/vulnerable stage is brow raising. So the Trolls from Homestuck.
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Jun 21, 2017 19:40
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marshmallow creep posted:What if it works like a Star Trek teleporter where you are ostensibly "killed" at the moment you're beamed and reassembled from data, only without the disintegration implied at the start (I think there was a New Generation episode with that hook)? Or like the Prestige--are you the copy who lives or the guy drowning in a tank?  it - there's actually a TNG episode that explicitly demonstrates that you aren't dying or being killed and recreated or whatever-the-gently caress because the crux of the plot is that a guy had a much longer subjective experience of 'being in the transporter beam' than was usually the case -- but they straight up show you "getting beamed" from a character's perspective, and it is consistent and steady. I think the thing that makes all these things appear super dystopian is the Internet cottage game of reading everything as a dystopia.  As for Call of Cthulhu, I don't know if there's a fixed opinion there but it seems to me like the setting has always made it clear that while in the grand and cosmic sense you can't beat Cthulhu or slay all the Elder Gods or what-have-you, you can understand things and protect the world. So it's bleak but you know it up front that you're in a horror game. Sort of like the "Dark Fate" flaw in WOD! Nessus fucked around with this message at 20:23 on Jun 21, 2017 |
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Jun 21, 2017 20:20
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Nessus posted:Gonna A lot of stupid things like "the teleporters actually killing you" can be blamed on internet posters taking a television show way way way too seriously. Likely the same people who claim the force isn't Magic or that the Empire actually brought order to the Galaxy. Yes I know that Star Wars, not Star Trek.
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Jun 21, 2017 20:28
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Covok posted:A lot of stupid things like "the teleporters actually killing you" can be blamed on internet posters taking a television show way way way too seriously. Likely the same people who claim the force isn't Magic or that the Empire actually brought order to the Galaxy. Yes I know that Star Wars, not Star Trek. There was a canadian cartoon where a guy invented a teleporter that works exactly like that and slightly explore the moral implications of it
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Jun 21, 2017 20:31
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Covok posted:A lot of stupid things like "the teleporters actually killing you" can be blamed on internet posters taking a television show way way way too seriously. Likely the same people who claim the force isn't Magic or that the Empire actually brought order to the Galaxy. Yes I know that Star Wars, not Star Trek.
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Jun 21, 2017 20:33
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Nessus posted:Gonna That was also a weird edge case because they had to do it super especially slowly due to the Problem Of The Week. Also in an episode of DS9 they explained that they've somehow got these absolutely massive ram-banks that they use to store people as data but they're ludicrously volatile and the error checking algorithms break down after less than a minute if they aren't used.
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Jun 21, 2017 20:33
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Nessus posted:As for Call of Cthulhu, I don't know if there's a fixed opinion there but it seems to me like the setting has always made it clear that while in the grand and cosmic sense you can't beat Cthulhu or slay all the Elder Gods or what-have-you, you can understand things and protect the world. So it's bleak but you know it up front that you're in a horror game. Sort of like the "Dark Fate" flaw in WOD! This take is also especially important if you're writing a GAME rather than a novel. Games that end in absolute, abject failure regardless of the players' actions had better have a really, really good reason and players who were on board with that being a thing from the word go or you're really going to annoy your players.
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Jun 21, 2017 20:34
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Robindaybird posted:There was a canadian cartoon where a guy invented a teleporter that works exactly like that and slightly explore the moral implications of it I assume you mean "To Be". The problem is that it's an incredibly dumb exploration that ignores every argument against and flaw with what it's trying to say in favor of a flimsy strawman. It tries to explain continuity of existence without at all understanding the concepts of continuity of memory or continuity of consciousness.
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Jun 21, 2017 20:38
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My DM a while back pulled a huge twist on us a long while back when our party was exploring this suspiciously familiar castle that also had statues of our PCs from two games previous(notably,one he was not running) only to find his PC from that game hooked up to some gigantic machine. Turns out he had figured out how to create sentient machines, but doing so stole souls from someplace, and tended to be powered by still-living magical beings bound into the armor. The resident gods at the time found out and were pissed so he elevated himself to godhood and set up a wall around reality that kept magic to a minimum and kept the other gods out, using our former PCs and some of their children as living keystones in said wall. Then set up a church designed to enforce single and devoted worship to him and kill any and all "Magical Deviants" so that people wouldn't start believing in magic and weakening the wall. Well the wall got weakened, magic started coming back, and said god asked us to go back and help the church with their genocide campaign and enforce a single monodominant worship of the only god keeping us alive. My Good before Lawful paladin then promptly decapitated god with his vorpal fullblade and went back home to reform the church at knifepoint, before organizing the free nations of the world in battle against the re-awakened beings of magic who were understandably incredibly pissed.
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Jun 21, 2017 20:45
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Nessus posted:Gonna Fair enough, I haven't watched TNG since I was a kid, but I was apparently thinking of the episode Second Chances where Riker was in a teleporter mishap and discovers much later that he has a "twin;" one version of him made it to the ship, the other was dropped back on the planet they had been trying to leave.
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Jun 21, 2017 21:06
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you definitely, definitely do die when you use the transporter but it's not like that's stopping you so it's not a big deal
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Jun 21, 2017 21:15
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marshmallow creep posted:Fair enough, I haven't watched TNG since I was a kid, but I was apparently thinking of the episode Second Chances where Riker was in a teleporter mishap and discovers much later that he has a "twin;" one version of him made it to the ship, the other was dropped back on the planet they had been trying to leave. Wasn't the point of that episode that they bypassed like, a quadrillion safties and beamed him up using two transporters at once, hoping that one would get through the interference, One did, and the other got reflected back to the planet and materialized there. So theoretically quantum cloning is a thing that you could do in Star Trek and whoever came up with the transporter realized this and went "Holy gently caress no." I mean Replicators are basically tiny transporters that turn stored energy into matter using coded patterns.
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Jun 21, 2017 21:26
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In general there is a tendency amongst nerds to either try and overexplain setting or genre conventions instead of saying "it's just a show, I should really just relax". I watched the Today I Found Out on the functions of Darth Vader's chest console and that's mostly had me gaping in mild horror at the amount of overwritten garbage that tries desperately to explain what all the buttons do when the real answer is "it looked like cool space suit stuff is why".Night10194 posted:This is the big key to why they fall flat. I will never totally be down on 'The Big Reveal' as a DMing trick because one of the best campaigns I ever played in relied on it; an old Spycraft 1e game where the twist was we were playing a prologue to X-COM without ever being told that until we pieced it together in game. The key to that was, none of that invalidated our accomplishments or made our characters useless; one of my PCs (everyone had a Combat/Field and Support PC) was a badass Marine supply officer recruited for security and her ability to wield a 23mm anti-vehicular shotgun turned out really goddamn useful when we had to kill a Muton with human weapons in the finale, etc. It also never betrayed the pitch; we were still an NSA black ops team that happened to piece together, then save the fledgingly X-COM project from thin-men, sectoids, and a couple Mutons sent in to strangle it in the crib at the climax. Us being a bunch of hyper-competent g-men and action heroes was still the core of the game and why that big surprise was exciting and fun instead of being a huge letdown. It makes me think of the big reveals in Spycraft's Shadowforce Archer setting mostly because they are reveals, if you had told me part of the setting was spies having to deal with Russian psychic ghosts trying to Final Destination them from beyond the grave I would be like "Oh, that's cool." instead of "Oh, this isn't what I thought I was buying at all and I'm a little annoyed at it."
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Jun 21, 2017 21:42
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I always thought Vader was wearing one of those hardcover-sized Seventies tape decks.
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Jun 21, 2017 21:55
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I am phone posting so pretend I posted the Nerd Crew episode where they ask where Han Solo got his boots.
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Jun 21, 2017 21:57
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Alien Rope Burn posted:In general there is a tendency amongst nerds to either try and overexplain setting or genre conventions instead of saying "it's just a show, I should really just relax".
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Jun 21, 2017 22:23
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Making up a bunch of poo poo about Vader's suit is boring, but sometimes there can be interesting factoids from production, like how the cylinder at the back of a stormtrooper belt is supposedly a holster for the lightsabers they were originally supposed to have.
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Jun 21, 2017 22:24
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It's what makes his voice James Earl Jones. Source: the movie they straight copied it from.
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Jun 21, 2017 22:29
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Jun 21, 2017 22:32
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FMguru posted:Nerds have loved that poo poo since way back. Early comics were full of cutaways showing the precise inventory of all the gear on Batman's utility belt, or what everything is in the Batcave, or how the Fantastic Four's portion of the Baxter Building was laid out. Eventually that stuff got codified in things like the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, which I always imagine is the ur-source for nerds being unwilling to accept "because it looks cool" as an explanation. See also: the Star Fleet Technical Manual and the appendices for Lord of the Rings, which also came out (or got noticed) in the same late-60s/early-70s timeframe. Well, a lot of that was basically what I see as the rise of the "fan writers" during the late-70s / early-80s at Marvel - writers like Jim Shooter, Mark Gruenwald, and Peter David who had grown up on comics and wanted to answer all their burning questions or at least give them a more adult sensibility. (Hell, Mark Gruenwald got his start writing fanzines trying to make sense of DC continuity - a fool's errand at the time, but he did it.) It's easy to forget that Mavel comics didn't have much strict continuity as a universe at that point and it was Shooter laying the law down and saying if Thor was busy being a frog he couldn't show up in Avengers at the same time being a not-frog that really changed that. Granted, I conversely love the OHOTMU mainly because it was massively informative not in terms of how much Colossus could bench, but in just laying out who characters were and what their histories were. So when they referenced Phoenix or Whiplash I had some idea why the gently caress that was a big deal. Okay, Whiplash was never a big deal... I think that kind of thing worked better with Marvel anyway, since it was always a crazy quilt of concepts. Star Wars, on the other hand, ends up focusing on like ten characters so much I wouldn't be surprised if we knew what Boba Fett's favorite breakfast cereal was. (It's Han Sol-Os, I'm sure.) If you want pure nerd madness, there was - I think it was the early Marvel Index - that have a synopses of each issue plus what characters appeared in them, and where those characters appeared next.. but they also has synopses of every vehicle and device, so if you see, like Wyatt Wingfoot's plane in one issue and were burning for the desire to know what issue that plane showed up in next, it would tell you. Thankfully whoever did that found whatever help they needed and newer versions of the Marvel Index are very much to the point. theironjef posted:Making up a bunch of poo poo about Vader's suit is boring, but sometimes there can be interesting factoids from production, like how the cylinder at the back of a stormtrooper belt is supposedly a holster for the lightsabers they were originally supposed to have. Oh, yeah, a lot of trivia about the production itself is great, especially given that it was so chaotic and so much of it is just the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, or actors revolting against the script - I love that stuff.
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Jun 21, 2017 22:47
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, a lot of that was basically what I see as the rise of the "fan writers" during the late-70s / early-80s at Marvel - writers like Jim Shooter, Mark Gruenwald, and Peter David who had grown up on comics and wanted to answer all their burning questions or at least give them a more adult sensibility. e: Here's a 1943 version of the Bat-Cave  ...and one from the early 1960s  FMguru fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jun 21, 2017 |
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Jun 21, 2017 23:05
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Commisioner Gordon: "That's strange. I don't remember there being a tiny snow capped mountain just next to the Wayne estate. Oh, well."
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Jun 21, 2017 23:40
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marshmallow creep posted:Fair enough, I haven't watched TNG since I was a kid, but I was apparently thinking of the episode Second Chances where Riker was in a teleporter mishap and discovers much later that he has a "twin;" one version of him made it to the ship, the other was dropped back on the planet they had been trying to leave.
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Jun 22, 2017 01:22
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Epyllion: The Dragon is perceptive, his eyes alert as his mind. Only he discerns a difference in a mirror. So, chargen. You pick your playbook, and we'll get to those. Then name, description (you can look like whatever kind of dragon you want) and your color. Your color is very important and while you can have other patterns mixed in, one color is the color of your friendship gems, which you put in a pile in front of you. Then you pick one of two Houses to belong to, determined by your playbook. This gives you a house obligation, and in any session where you fulfill that obligation, you can erase a Shadow from your Shadow track. Your stats are Charm, Courage and Cunning. You get to give +1 to one of them from your base values determined by playbook. You also get a Virtue, chosen from two listed for your playbook. This is the virtue you like to see others demonstrate, and whenever another player shows that virtue, you can give them a Friendship Gem, regardless of if your character is present or not. Friendship gems are primarily spent and returned to their giver to activate moon magic, and you can't do magic with your own gems - just those given to you by others. You get one move from your playbook in addition to its signature move. Then you go through your Fellowship, which determines what friendship gems you and the others have to start and how you get along with the clutch. So, what moves are there for our three stats? Quite a few, actually. And, like in Dungeon World, you mark XP whenever you fail a roll. Some moves will ask you to roll +Friendship Gems, you roll and add the total number of gems you have from the clutchmate in question, but do not return them. When you roll +Friendship Gems Returned, you pick a number of gems to return to the player that gave them to you and roll, adding that number. You don't get the gems back even if you fail. You also may have to mark Shadows for various reasons - getting hurt, triggering effects that cause it, etc. You fill in a box on your Shadow track for that, as you are temporarily corrupted. Whenever you mark a Shadow you pick a Shadow condition associated with that Shadow box, and you must choose to immediately take an action reflecting one of the following:
So, moves! Let's see what they actually are. When you act despite danger, roll +Courage. On a 10+, you succeed despite the odds. On a 7-9, you fumble, stumble, or embarrass yourself. The DM will offer you a worse outcome, hard bargain, or ugly choice. When you stand up to an older dragon (NPC), roll +Courage. On a hit, they acknowledge your worth and address your concerns. Pick one:
When you convince a dragon, roll +Charm. For NPCs: On a hit, they will do it if you offer them a favor, gift, or useful information. On a 7-9, they don't get it quite right or they don't tell you everything you need to know. For Clutchmates: On a 10+, both. On a 7-9, pick one:
When you try to mislead or trick another dragon, roll +Cunning. On a hit, they are fooled for a moment; you learn a valuable secret or create an opportunity. On a 10+, you either get both benefits or you confuse them for some time. When you study another dragon, roll +Charm. On a 10+, ask 2. On a 7-9, ask 1.
When you spend a moment to survey an ancient or arcane area, roll +Cunnin. On a 10+, ask 2. On a 7-9, ask 1.
When you call on the magic of the moons, roll +Friendship Gems Returned. On a 10+, both. On a 7-9, pick 1:
When you give in to the Darkness, mark a Shadow and roll +Shadows Marked. On a 10+, you harness the Darkness, casting powerful shadow magic. On a 7-9, you harness that same magic, but it's powerful - almost too powerful. On a miss, the Darkness chooses how the magic manifests, without your guidance. When you help or hinder a clutchmate after they have rolled, roll +Friendship Gems (max +3). On a hit, add +1 or -2 to the roll. On a 7-9, you expose yourself to cost, complication, or harm. You cannot help or hinder your clutchmates while they are calling upon the moons. Also, when you end a session, you ask the following questions as well as removing a Shadow if you met your Obligation:
Next time: Age brackets and playbooks.
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Jun 22, 2017 01:30
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Nessus posted:Sure, it's not that it makes, like, sense - it just doesn't kill you, unless it is possible to be killed and recreated while having completely consistent experiences and form memory of those experiences during the process. But that just makes it a "Prestige" style teleporter, just one that failed to kill the original in that instance.
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Jun 22, 2017 01:37
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The key to doing a big twist is simply that it can't invalidate the initial premise (Look at 7th Sea going 'IT'S COSMIC HORROR, NOT COOL SWASHBUCKLING! WOOOOOO!' and how much that sucked) and it can't invalidate the players (EVERYTHING WAS A MAN DREAMING HE WAS A BUTTERFLY). It's fine to be a spy who suddenly stumbles on russian spy ghosts or aliens, you're already playing a superspy game. That stuff is in genre, even if it might be a surprise for the campaign. And critically, you still use the same toolkit of being an action hero to solve it. Like, if 7th Sea revealed its cosmic horrors and the goal was to swing from a chandelier and banter with The Unspoken One and banish it back to hell with a flourish of your rapier and a prayer to the prophets, it might not suck so much.
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Jun 22, 2017 01:38
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Servetus posted:But that just makes it a "Prestige" style teleporter, just one that failed to kill the original in that instance.
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Jun 22, 2017 01:45
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Nessus posted:I thought that teleporter didn't kill you automatically, the whole fancy magic trick just killed the original as part of the magic trick. Exactly. it duplicated you, and then another mechanism dropped the original into the water-filled case to drown. Or in that episode's case, it duplicated Riker but then failed to kill the original through disintegration. Except it doesn't work like that in other episodes, just like characters will have different backgrounds depending on the needs of the story. Star Trek has never really been about an internally consistent universe, but about exploring ideas around technology.
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Jun 22, 2017 01:53
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So I'm still not seeing where this thing isn't just My Little Pony with scales. Friendship gems seems like a really fiddly mechanic.
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Jun 22, 2017 01:54
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