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I've been very sold on Warhammer Fantasy for a while now, but holy poo poo, I need to be in a game where I can start as Honest Ivan of Honest Ivan's Experienced Horses and end a Hero of Mankind.
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Nov 8, 2017 20:23
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MightyMatilda posted:I just did a Google image search of Nechronica. Some of the illustrations were a bit grosser than I could manage, but for the most part it looked pretty cool. Disturbing, but not in a way that would keep me awake at night. It might be that I have a high tolerance for this sort of thing. Or maybe it's more disturbing when you actually read the text. I didn't image search it first, but the first hit I got from the search was for it's Tv Tropes page. And that really tells me everything I need to know.
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Nov 8, 2017 20:28
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theironjef posted:Just make every encounter a gnome, see if it fixes it. Should be a litmus test.
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Nov 8, 2017 20:38
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Angrymog posted:Talking Frog. Talking gnome except the gimmick is the gnome just talks like a normal person instead of having hilarious catchphrases
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Nov 8, 2017 20:39
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Can someone explain to me how careers in WHFRPG 2e work? I remember reading about them in the book and it seem kinda stupid by itself and in fluff.
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Nov 8, 2017 20:41
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JcDent posted:Can someone explain to me how careers in WHFRPG 2e work? I remember reading about them in the book and it seem kinda stupid by itself and in fluff. They work slightly differently depending on if they're your first or not. Your first career, you get a set of talents and skills and some free gear, and a set of stat increases you can spend XP to buy. Once all your stat increases are bought, you can shift to a new career that your career exits into. After the first career, you have to get the equipment that your career has before you can go into it (RAW), and have to spend XP on buying the skills and talents of your career as well as your stat increases. Stat increases overwrite each other if better - so if one career gives +5% Str and another gives +15, if you go from the first to the second, your new Str cap is +15%, and you have to reach that cap (and the cap for all your other stats) before you can change careers. Basically, a Career is an XP-spending scheme that defines what you can and cannot buy with XP right now. Like many things in WFRP, it works quite well for fantasy and falls into tiny, flaming bits when 40k breathes on it.
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Nov 8, 2017 20:45
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JcDent posted:Can someone explain to me how careers in WHFRPG 2e work? I remember reading about them in the book and it seem kinda stupid by itself and in fluff. They're an advance scheme. Your first Career is what you used to do before becoming an adventurer, so you start out with all its trappings (gear and possessions) in addition to the Hand Weapon, Dagger, clothes and 2d10 Gold each PC gets. You also start with all its skills and talents, except where a skill or talent has, say 'Charm OR Consume Alcohol', in which case you choose which one you start with. You can stay in the career longer to buy any of those optional advances you didn't get at the start. You also get an advance scheme for your stats, and you must buy all those advances (with stat advances in increments of 5%, Wounds, Magic, and Attacks in increments of 1 per purchase) before you finish the career. Once you have all the advances from a Career, you move on to a new one as listed in your Career's exits, promoting into a new class and getting the ability to buy its skills, talents, and stat advances. Note that if you, say, went through Soldier and into Veteran, while Soldier has +10 BS and WS and Veteran has +20, that just means you can buy up to the new cap of +20 from your base, not that you buy another 4 advances on top of what you had in career 1. You can also spend 200 EXP (2 advances worth) at any time to exit your current career early and pick any Basic (potentially starting) career to enter immediately, without any other requirements. You can also sometimes buy advances outside your career, usually for 200 EXP, if you can get someone to teach you them or find a good plot reason why you'd learn. In the rulebook, you also need the Trappings of your new career before you can enter it (so, say, a Squire becoming a Knight would need to find full plate armor and a proper warhorse, since Knight has those). I've never really used that rule except as a treasure guideline at times. For instance, say you start as a Peasant. You used to do that before adventuring. In adventuring, you become a Winged Lancer, learning to be a badass soldier and gaining the ability to buy fighting skills through that class. After finishing Lancer, you can now go into things like Captain, representing that you're gaining status as well as new skills and abilities. It's a mixture of abstract (A soldier becoming a Veteran is really more a matter of EXP than someone giving you a job title) and fluff (Explaining how Peasant to Politician to Noble Lord happens seems like it would make a really good campaign and I want to run it some day). E: The real problem for 40kRP was that it introduced way more variable costs and diminishing returns, and heavily limited the actual stat advances. To get an average PC to a 50 in a stat they were supposed to be good at cost 1350 EXP. This is over 1/10th of the EXP you'd spend to get to Rank 8, the maximum rank in the first 40kRP game. This is to get the average PC, again, to 50-50 odds of succeeding at a stat check. Take the Horse Coper from Kislev. An average Fel roll will get that guy 50 or so Fel by the end of Career 1. Also, every one of your advances costs 100 EXP, so you're not giving up tons by investing in stats you're not 'good' at, you just don't have as much ability to invest in them. When you start charging players 5 times as much for some advances, the simple thing is to not buy those advances and start hyper-specializing their PCs further. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 21:00 on Nov 8, 2017 |
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Nov 8, 2017 20:53
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I'm in two 40K campaigns now and we have some characters rolling under 100 in some skills, so the stat system is still broke. I think trappings make sense - how can peasant just decide to be a winger
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Nov 8, 2017 22:14
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You need to pick up Specialist Weapon Group talents for that - lances have one, as do guns. Riding a horse is a skill. The trick is that you only get access to learning those once you become a Winged Hussar or whatever. But yeah, the ease of advancing stats combined with the capping of them by career means WFRP characters actually rarely end up rolling in the hundreds, because they also can't just freely stack skill bonuses, and all a skill lets you do is do the thing, with each additional purchase giving +10%, but you can only purchase so many bonuses. And 'hit somebody' is not covered by any skill, so you can't minmax being good at combat in any way besides 'pump the hell out of WS and other attributes'.
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Nov 8, 2017 22:56
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In general, an unskilled character can use a hand weapon, spear, dagger, shield, fists, a simple shortbow or crossbow, or javelins. Even without any Special Weapon Groups you have plenty of options for equipment. Gaining Specialist Weapons is one of the reasons to go into a class. The other thing to remember is, say, the peasant who 'just decides' to go into Winged Lancer has already become an adventurer, left home, and had about 1000 or more EXP worth of adventures; an average of 6-10 game sessions depending on how you're doing bonus EXP. That person has had ample time to start really learning to fight and deciding that maybe they ought to consider becoming a professional warrior because they'll have already had adventures at that point, it's why stuff like Knight of the Realm, Winged Lancer, etc are 'advanced' careers instead of ones you can just roll as a starting class. When they enter the career they won't yet know how to do those things, but entering the career will let them learn it. E: PCs in Fantasy are generally less incompetent faster than the early 40kRP PCs, but have less options for extensive minmaxing that will give them 100+ skills unlike later 40kRP PCs. A highly skilled PC will probably be able to get their average success chance in non-combat stuff into the 90s. In combat, most characters will top out in the 70-80% range if they're focused on fighting. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Nov 8, 2017 |
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Nov 8, 2017 23:29
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Note, mind, that by Knight of the Realm you get to be, say, 50% or so on fight rolls and are going to tear low-skill enemies apart simply because you hit half the time, and if you get hit you parry half the time, and your armor eats it the other half. Knights are loving beastly.
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Nov 9, 2017 00:04
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Mors Rattus posted:Note, mind, that by Knight of the Realm you get to be, say, 50% or so on fight rolls and are going to tear low-skill enemies apart simply because you hit half the time, and if you get hit you parry half the time, and your armor eats it the other half. Knights are loving beastly. Also armor and durability are actually viable. Which is not at all true against absolutely any serious foe in WH40KRP. Full Plate is specifically designed so that if your Toughness and the Damage you're eating are equivalent you will fully deflect the blow on your armor 50% of the time because that is what Full Plate does on the tabletop game. E: Also, fight characters are intentionally fairly good because the game only really assumes you're likely to have 1-2 dedicated fighters in a party. Everyone else can pitch in and help some in a fight, and the fight guys usually have some out of combat skills to help out with, but if you're making it so, say, the guy who rolled Thug on his elf (as my current party has) is the only real trained warrior in a party of nerd dwarf and 2 wizards, he's gotta be pretty good so that he can keep trouble off the others. Also, yes, they're a dwarven grad student (Runesmith), a dumb muscle elf who tells everyone he was an elite elven warrior and they believe him (Thug), and two apprentices struggling with crippling student loan debt. It's a weird party. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 00:10 on Nov 9, 2017 |
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Nov 9, 2017 00:06
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Night10194 posted:Also, yes, they're a dwarven grad student (Runesmith), a dumb muscle elf who tells everyone he was an elite elven warrior and they believe him (Thug), and two apprentices struggling with crippling student loan debt. It's a weird party. That actually sounds pretty normal for WHRPG.
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Nov 9, 2017 00:17
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Nah, doesn't have the random guy who used to pick up sticks, burn them and sell the results.
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Nov 9, 2017 00:18
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Ratoslov posted:That actually sounds pretty normal for WHRPG. It's more the part where 3 of them are highly educated and know about magic that's unusual. I mean, Vinnethiel ('Vinny' to his friends) actually stands out for *not* knowing how to read.
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Nov 9, 2017 00:18
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Mors Rattus posted:Nah, doesn't have the random guy who used to pick up sticks, burn them and sell the results. I'll have you know that charcoal burning was important profession involving skilled labor and extensive woodland management techniques.
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Nov 9, 2017 00:50
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Has anyone taken a look at ZWEIHÄNDER? I picked up a copy when it was free over Halloween and haven't really had a chance to look at it, but from skimming it looks like a streamlining or retooling of WFRP2.
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Nov 9, 2017 01:04
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Rhandhali posted:Has anyone taken a look at ZWEIHÄNDER? I picked up a copy when it was free over Halloween and haven't really had a chance to look at it, but from skimming it looks like a streamlining or retooling of WFRP2. I took a look at what the guy writing it says it is and the snippets of how his dice system works and 'streamlining' is not how I'd describe it. Not with all the added on 'chaos dice' and wound systems and stuff. I remember skimming some of the preview stuff and being really unimpressed. It seems like it's basically a WHFRP2e heartbreaker, which is not a genre I thought existed.
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Nov 9, 2017 01:07
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Unless the author updated it, I believe Zweihander is actually a 1e heartbreaker.wiegieman posted:I'll have you know that charcoal burning was important profession involving skilled labor and extensive woodland management techniques. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4uyYakrPXRU&t=210s Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Nov 9, 2017 |
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Nov 9, 2017 01:37
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Hey everyone, someone gave us a copy of Dark Continent, so here's a review of it. It's the game of exporing and profiting from Africa in the 1880s. It really walks right up to that racist line.
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Nov 9, 2017 02:45
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if you liked it then you should've put a The introduction leads off by noting exactly which Niven books this game draws from, and a general note that this is an RPG, so don't expect it to be canon-perfect, especially in your own games. The core premise is also brought up: That you are all people on an exploration mission to the Ringworld, hailing from Known Space, who have hied yourself off to seek the people's ovation and fame forever by doing... something. Even if you are literally there to rob the place blind, you will, by necessity, be functioning as explorers. There is also the introduction to the concept of a roleplaying game, which is remarkably concise and advanced for the time - or indeed, for today.  After a brief introduction to the concept of how to use dice - including instructions on how to doctor a D20 to serve as a D10, because the box set included the former instead of the latter - we go on to EXPLORER CREATION. ('Explorer' is the books' synonym for 'PC' and I will probably slop between them.) After a summary of the setting and a note that the GM has the right to veto non-human explorers, the outlines are brought up. The reason for the possibility of playing a 400-year-old is that in Known Space, a more or less perfect human anagathic was developed a bit under 400 years ago. The option of random rolling is provided, but it is also suggested that you might jot down the skills you want and use these figures to work backwards. ("In using this method, refrain from granting any skill higher than 100%.") Character creation goes like this. Pick gender, consider if you came from "a community in which men (or women) dominate," no statistical difference. Pick home world, which has an impact on some stats, and is culturally important. You can also be from some backwater or a bubble world or whatever. This is meant to reflect where your character grew up, not just their cultural identity.  If your homeworld is light gravity, -3 to STR and MAS, +3 to DEX. If it's heavy gravity, you Jinxian son of a bitch, +3 to STR and MAS, -3 to CON. Defects! Do you have one? Most of them have been handled already due to advanced medical science and widespread organ transplants. (About which more later.)  if you're curious about any of these, ask! Chronological age! And also Physiological Age! These are distinct because your character may be hopped up on boosterspice. If you had boosterspice allergy, sucks to be you - physioage must match chronological age. Characteristics! Or as some might call them, "scores" reflecting one's "abilities." There are eight, and it's pretty much the Call of Cthulhu spread. All are determined by 2D6+6 except EDU, about which more in a minute. These are: * Strength: Swole factor. Affects melee damage and deadlift. * Mass: SIZ by any other name: it represents the total volume of your character's body, which informs weight and damage modifier. * Constitution: How fit are you? (The fictional reason for a CON hit to heavy gravity is cardiological strain.) * Intelligence: Intelligence. * Power...  Slander! Base slander and calumny. * Dexterity: Flexibility, adroitness, and ability to act more than the other guy and win fights. * Appearance: Largely Charisma, but not explicitly. * Education: How much schoolin' you've gotten, with each point approximately representing one year. You start with 10, roll a D6 and add that, and if you roll 5 or 6, add that and keep on rolling. Since this is BRP, we have some derived stats. Damage modifier affects your melee damage and is derived from STR+MAS; general hit points are CON+MAS; the health roll, which represents not getting dysentery and gangrene so easy, is CONx3; reasoning roll, INTx3; Luck roll, POWx3; Dodge roll, DEXx3. There's also hit locations, unfortunately, as well as an "action ranking" (high dex = go faster), a basic land speed of 3 meters, and the allure of a "Psionics" section, left undefined. Next up is tossing points into skills through PURSUITS. The concept here is that your character, who may be an old woman or whatever, has learned things through training, often a lot of things. You can spend some points from your EDU to buy more academic skills, but then you consider pursuits, which can give you money but also help flesh out a character's life story. This is largely inspired by the viewpoint character Louis Wu, who is a 200-odd year old human who has gone through a range of different professions.  UN secgen elections tainted by fake news from gummidgian troll farms. sad Oh, it also affects how rich you are. Most of these boil down to "If you were a researcher, buy up sciences; if you were an artist, buy up expression". You should also note number of years your character did things in if you want to roll up for your Wealth, but after this and some beginning items (mostly tchotchkes), it is supposed to be probably-meaningless, as the game is intended to let you adventure on the Ringworld, where your funny money from "We Made It" is useless anyway. However, these rules would also be entirely usable for scenarios in Known Space, and the rules do expect that the characters will probably go back and forth for reasons other than "the campaign ended and we didn't die." Then we get to how skills work. Basically: percentile dice; roll low. A "special success" comes from rolling under 20% of your skill - if you have Frombotzing 60%, you get a special success on a 12 or lower. A "special failure" is poorly explained, but seems to be "one-twentieth of your skill" - so our Frombotzer would "special failure" on a 96-100. A roll of 96 or higher always fails, except at very high skill levels: at 601% you only fail on 97 or up, at 701% at 98 or up, and at 1000% only a 00 fails. A 00 is considered to always be a special failure, no matter what. There's a bunch of skills, most of them boring. There are a few setting limits to represent imprecise cultural knowledge of aliens, and some notes in the skills that some of them should not be taken without a clear reason - for instance, Louis Wu, the 200 year old man, didn't clearly know what an axe was. He'd never encountered one, or at least, not in a context where he associated it with reality. Finally, experience. You can train from teaching, studying, or various futuristic forms of brain-stuffing which are available in the setting. To get a skill past 100%, you have to actually go learn in the field, or at least do something, Jesus. Get off your rear end, flatlander. NEXT TIME ON RINGWORLD: An exciting precursor of Chuubo-style storypaths in the form of planning research projects, and also: Violence.  your correspondent, shown unflatteringly
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Nov 9, 2017 02:58
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No Kzin rules? Also, current addiction should be fairly crippling, shouldn't it?
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Nov 9, 2017 03:04
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Mors Rattus posted:No Kzin rules? Current addiction is, in this section, not quantified in rules beyond "when you're on the wire, you're uselessly orgasming; you are pretty cranky when you're not on the wire, and someone offering you wire time can probably control you." It can also be substituted for a comparable life-defining addiction if you like.
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Nov 9, 2017 03:15
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What's hyperspace blindspot phobia? I'd guess that while in hyperspace you can't see directly ahead of you because of the speed of light thing (because by the time you see it, it's already here) and it's being phobic about that, but I don't actually know; I've never read anything Ringworld. (It's one of those things I kept meaning to but never found a copy of, like the Culture.)
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Nov 9, 2017 03:49
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Prism posted:What's hyperspace blindspot phobia? I'd guess that while in hyperspace you can't see directly ahead of you because of the speed of light thing (because by the time you see it, it's already here) and it's being phobic about that, but I don't actually know; I've never read anything Ringworld. (It's one of those things I kept meaning to but never found a copy of, like the Culture.) Hyperspace in the Known Space setting is literally impossible for the 3-dimensional mind to perceive. Look out a window into hyperspace and you'll see the edges of the window stretching inwards until they're touching each other, not a black window. Look up when you're out on a hull during a hyperspace jump (a rare occurrence usually arising from extreme stupidity) and you will forget the concept of sight until your neck hurts and you look down at the hull, at which point the sight of the hull will remind you that you have eyes. Some people react a lot worse to the Blind Spot, and they can't fly a ship.
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Nov 9, 2017 03:58
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wiegieman posted:Hyperspace in the Known Space setting is literally impossible for the 3-dimensional mind to perceive. Look out a window into hyperspace and you'll see the edges of the window stretching inwards until they're touching each other, not a black window. Look up when you're out on a hull during a hyperspace jump (a rare occurrence usually arising from extreme stupidity) and you will forget the concept of sight until your neck hurts and you look down at the hull, at which point the sight of the hull will remind you that you have eyes. It surprises me that they have windows in that situation and don't just fly in an enclosed cockpit, reducing the problem. That's pretty cool, though.
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Nov 9, 2017 04:04
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wiegieman posted:Hyperspace in the Known Space setting is literally impossible for the 3-dimensional mind to perceive. Look out a window into hyperspace and you'll see the edges of the window stretching inwards until they're touching each other, not a black window. Look up when you're out on a hull during a hyperspace jump (a rare occurrence usually arising from extreme stupidity) and you will forget the concept of sight until your neck hurts and you look down at the hull, at which point the sight of the hull will remind you that you have eyes. Hyperdrive was not invented by humanity in this setting. A human colony (We Made It, in fact) bought the drive on credit from the Outsiders, weirdo helium ice beings who skate between stars and are the most reasonable "information brokers" I can think of. It goes at a fixed "velocity" - I forget what it is. The Puppeteers have access to a much faster model.
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Nov 9, 2017 04:05
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Note how the defects range randomly from minor cosmetological annoyance (albinism) to horribly crippling (boosterspice allergy). I'm pretty sure the only reason albinism is on the defect list is because Beowulf Shaeffer, the protagonist of some of the Known Space stories, is an albino. Also, it's probably worth discussing age in Ringworld. Your age is determined randomly by rolling d10 to see what range you fall in (d4 if you have boosterspice allergy), which can be anything from 17+1d6 to 259+2d100. And thanks to boosterspice, there is absolutely no advantage to being young. Even if you're cut off entirely from boosterspice, you just start aging normally -- you don't dry up and explode into dust like Mother Gothel at the end of Tangled. The number of pursuits and skill points you get are primarily determined by your chronological age. A 25-year-old explorer will probably have a few hundred skill points and one pursuit to work with, but a 400-year-old explorer will have several thousand skill points and a dozen or more pursuits. And since pursuits are determined randomly, it's entirely possible the 400-year-old will get the same pursuit the 25-year-old has, and be better at it. It's not quite Stormbringer where one player can roll up a Melnibonean noble sorcerer with half a dozen bound demons and the next player can roll up a sickly beggar with a stick, but that single d10 roll makes a massive difference in how effective your character turns out.
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Nov 9, 2017 04:20
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Prism posted:It surprises me that they have windows in that situation and don't just fly in an enclosed cockpit, reducing the problem. The thing to remember is that when they're in Hyperspace, they don't have windows. They have window rims with no windows inside them. For Humans, Hyperspace is actually navigated using a device called a mass pointer, which looks something like a radar screen and allows the pilot to steer around stars.
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Nov 9, 2017 04:21
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wiegieman posted:The thing to remember is that when they're in Hyperspace, they don't have windows. They have window rims with no windows inside them. For Humans, Hyperspace is actually navigated using a device called a mass pointer, which looks something like a radar screen and allows the pilot to steer around stars. Well, I meant why physically put them in at all instead of just flying by sensor? Like, being phobic about the inability to look outside is not a problem if there is no way to attempt to look outside. You might not even know it hits you that way. Edit: This is less a problem with the RPG though and more a minor point of issue with the source material, which I'm not familiar with. Prism fucked around with this message at 04:26 on Nov 9, 2017 |
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Nov 9, 2017 04:23
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theironjef posted:Hey everyone, someone gave us a copy of Dark Continent, so here's a review of it. It's the game of exporing and profiting from Africa in the 1880s. It really walks right up to that racist line. With the weekly schedule, does this mean that Expounded Universe is on Tuesdays, System Mastery on Wednesdays, and Movie Mastery on Fridays?
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Nov 9, 2017 04:27
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Selachian posted:Note how the defects range randomly from minor cosmetological annoyance (albinism) to horribly crippling (boosterspice allergy). I'm pretty sure the only reason albinism is on the defect list is because Beowulf Shaeffer, the protagonist of some of the Known Space stories, is an albino.
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Nov 9, 2017 04:39
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So what's the deal with We Made It that makes it special for this stuff?
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Nov 9, 2017 05:18
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Cythereal posted:So what's the deal with We Made It that makes it special for this stuff? e: They had tons of albinos due to a founder effect from their original colonists. Prior to the hyperdrive, the colony planets had essentially no immigration, for obvious reasons. Nessus fucked around with this message at 05:45 on Nov 9, 2017 |
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Nov 9, 2017 05:41
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Most of the settlement on We Made It is underground because of the extreme weather -- the survey probe arrived in one of the rare good weather periods. People from We Made It are called "Crashlanders" in the same way that people from earth are called "Flatlanders", and are famous for producing lots of pilots. Beowulf Schaeffer, the hero of a number of the fiction stories, is an albino Crashlander, ace pilot, and general troublemaker. Since We Made It has low gravity, Beowulf is quite tall and limber enough to smoke with his toes instead of his fingers. When he fights a bad guy, he can back up faster than they can charge him and continuously punches them in the face as fast as he can, which is quite fast. That, or he shoots them from ambush. It is a running theme in Known Space stories that space travel is dangerous and you should always be practical.
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Nov 9, 2017 05:53
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 Last Exodus the Interactive Story Arc of the Third and Last Dance is a roleplaying game from Synister Creative Systems published in 2001 and designed Sean and Joshua Jaffe. It’s a metaplot heavy, playing card deck using, religious themed urban grunge game. Unless I am otherwise notified it appears to be completely out of print with no digital versions available. Should this be incorrect I will update to include where it can be bought to give the original developers income. Part 14: Not One But Two Lists of Influences on This Game We come now to the end of this game, which isn’t so much a graceful endcap to what has come before as the game finally letting go and plunging into the chasm below. The entire end section is badly organized and unfocused which isn’t as bad as it should be because this section contains almost no useful information. Well, unless you are a registered crazy person like me and want to credit the artists you’ve been including in a review nearly two decades after this game first came out. So in terms of pacing, this immediately follows the complete disaster that are the rules of the game which end with how to grant XP. Naturally, what that smoothly segues into are suggestions on how to run this as a live action role play aka LARP. I’ve never seen a book try to hype a LARP element before, much less hype a LARP element in a game where the characters they’re playing as would be less physically and mentally capable than the people playing them. TLE pitches itself to the LARP aficionado by saying its resolution system makes it uniquely suited to LARP because it uses cards instead of cumbersome dice, but since I still don’t know when to shuffle the deck in their game I disagree pretty strongly. The suggestions for how to run this as a LARP start with advice that is flat out better than how TLE suggested to run the game when it was sitting at a table. The Director is encouraged to be a referee and simply help players guide the sort of story they want to tell and to use a strong hand to make sure nobody gets uncomfortable or upset. TLE helpfully suggests the Director can maintain order by never allowing players to hit each other, maybe not having everybody LARPing all get high at the same time, and reminding all the players to wear a condom when they have sex. No, I didn’t make any of that advice up, and yes, that advice is longer than the entire section on vehicle rules. With that good advice out of the way the game encourages you to have two separate directors and two distinct rooms functioning as Eden and Earth for people to play with that all need separate ambience and props. Don’t wear KKK outfits when cosplaying it interjects, which is good, before promptly diving back into suggesting having two Directors for its two room setup and have them talk on walkie-talkies to each other, which is really bad. TLE is noticeably really, really insistent on music when discussing the setup for LARP be it ambient music, theme music, contextual music, your favorite music, whatever you must have music. TLE unashamedly recommends you, “[...]spend a few hours before each session grabbing appropriate tunes.”  There’s compensating and then there’s this Art By: Frank B. Fallon So after buying walkie talkies, pot, and spending three hours on Kazaa searching for just the perfect song to roleplay a robot alien and bone down to, you might vaguely remember how we still don’t know exactly what you’re supposed to do in a game. Heck, you think, as you start picking out the perfect skull decorations for tonight’s session, the setting constantly undermines itself in all sorts of interesting new ways, how can that possibly work as a coherent game? Well never fear, TLE includes some helpful plot hooks but with a sliiiiight catch: all of the plot hooks are alternate universe “What If” scenarios and explicitly are intended to be unlike how the game proper should be played. TLETISAOTTALD Actually, I TLETISAOTTALD’d too early. One of the playable stories is one where the player characters get to replace the settings Apostles and play as their own very important(™) leaders of the Millenium religions and all around super cool people which sounds like it might actually be fun and have a discernable goal. Except, surprise surprise, this plot hook ends with the note that the PC versions of the Apostles will live their lives, quote, “knowing that they have to begin the war but are powerless to finish it”. TLETISAOTTALD The next twelve pages of the book are a mixture of items, NPCs, flying Eden cars, and locations like “McDonalds, but in Eden” which isn’t a joke it is literally called the Church of St. McDonald. The NPC stats in this section are built so incorrectly according to the game’s rules that every single part of the NPC’s stat block breaks the rules in some way. It’s not like they were designed for an earlier version and never updated so much as they were designed for an alternate dimensions finished product. The description of locales get in on the fun with the heaven sushi joint basically calling all non-Japanese asian food and culture trash out of completely nowhere and the Coke analog existing solely to make a “The Gods Must Be Crazy” reference. I’d write more about this, but in a book that features an unambiguous savage heart of darkness to represent Africa, who even cares anymore. Following the hodgepodge of random things is a glossary and the index which I’m not going to go over in any detail since it is mostly a rehash and also forgets some terms, forgets pages terms appear, and includes references to terms by the wrong name. To one up this editing incompetence, the glossary manages to undermine elements of the game’s setting with regularity as well. Ahura Mazda is noted as capable of incarnating into a Soul, thus eliminating any reason for any player character to exist. For reference by the way, the glossary alone is four pages long, making a supposed reprinting of material from earlier in the book is 2/3rds the length of the games rules. If you thought the game would end with the index, WRONG! The game next plops a final page of in-universe genre fluff at us by the brother of the Van Zandt that wrote the fluff at the beginning. I’m not copying any of this terrible story, as it is absolutely terrible. The funniest part is it tries very hard to be serious and emotionally affecting about how the author is grieving over their brother’s death before undermining it completely by pointing out the other brother is now in Eden in their words “flying dogfights, swinging on ropes, and fighting the good fight” and can presumably you know travel back to Earth at any time since he’s a PC and all.  Pictured: The only reference to Star Wars I can find in this game Art By: Clayton Graham With the game’s fluff finally behind us, it’s time for the lead designers, the siblings Jaffe, to talk to us about why they made this game and what the influences are. These are basically long, blog-post style pages with almost no formating except to remember to include a bold “influences” header when they finally start focusing on that. Let’s dive in. The first of the two, Sean Benjamin Jaffe refers to themselves as “Reverend Mother” which, whoa there bucko that title is for people who can manage to not undermine their own setting every twenty pages. Their section indicates that, pretty rightfully, they’re upset that as a society people pay more attention to celebrity gossip than actual tragedies. Unfortunately, the tack they take with this outrage is to encourage us, the reader, to play this game and it reads like Sean genuinely thought playing this game would somehow encourage real-world activism even though the game has absolutely none of that in it. Sean’s influence list carefully includes examples from all kinds of media and almost none of them have any cohesive relationship to each other, except, helpfully, the ones that Sean spends any time talking about beyond just name dropping. These discussed influences are Blood Music by Greg Bear, the band My Life With The Thrill Kill Cult, the comic Preacher, Kevin Smith’s oeuvre and specifically Dogma!, and then it teases a broadway play which they don’t name because it’s supposed to be so obvious what it is just by reading this game*. The other sibling, Joshua Brain Jaffe who goes by “Pidge”, takes a very different approach to the personal thoughts section prefacing the list of influences. I’m not going to discuss the preface in depth or make any fun of it; it is a heartfelt outpouring of raw emotions for Joshua and Sean’s recently deceased mother. The influences list that follows, though, shows a very different focus from Sean, consisting of nearly an entire column of text consisting solely of uninterrupted musicians and bands. If you name an artists who released music but wasn’t mainstream pop in the 90s they’re probably on this list because it is exhaustive; who even remembers Dred Scott? The rest of Joshua’s list is a movie or two, Voltron, children’s cartoons and the one book author not even a specific book. Taken separately, it’s hard to really see where the game came from other than a good portion of the music choices that pepper this book. Between the two of them, they don’t have a lot of overlapping media and even within those media their interests diverge. What helps though, is looking at what few things overlap. The only things on both their lists of influences are Star Wars, the Matrix, Kevin Smith Movies, My Life With the Thrill Kill Kult, and Wu-Tang Clan, which seems to succinctly explain everything wrong with this game in a lot less words than I took. The rest of the book is shoutouts to their play testers, friends and family as well as a pizza parlor, and people and things from the online world they appreciate like rpg.net and a person named Michael Gentry who the game helpfully says, “if you don’t like anything about the book, it’s his fault”. Then it’s time for art credits, the “Upcming Products” section, promotion for a totally unrelated monthly pulp magazine called “Thrilling Tales” and the character sheet. With the book finally done and closed out, I wish you warmest regards as I now begin the onerous task of emailing this analysis of TLE to every single human being named Michael Gentry. *Seriously, I have no idea what it is. Any guesses?
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Nov 9, 2017 06:18
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Barudak posted:*Seriously, I have no idea what it is. Any guesses?
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Nov 9, 2017 06:37
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Barudak posted:*Seriously, I have no idea what it is. Any guesses? I would have to guess that it's Cats, which closed just around the time of publication.
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Nov 9, 2017 06:41
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bound - with love's desire. i stepped into a The research system is presented, a little confusingly, in the skill development section. See, it's possible to learn from experience as well as tutoring and various forms of future brain training, but formally researching a topic can unveil a secret of the Ringworld. This is presented as a collaborative process, where the player approaches the GM and says, "I want to have my guy figure out what the Ringworld's foundation material, scrith, is made out of." (This is an example. You don't have to learn what scrith is if you don't want to.) The GM assesses his own plans and schemes, what the player has on their sheet, so on and so forth, and then builds out a few steps towards a particular goal, a lot of which requires things like "spend 200 hours doing a literature review," and others of which involve "capture a live Muck Ogre, and then observe it in captivity for a while, then dissect it." These involve a range of skill rolls and sometimes a specific play session - for instance, having to play Monster Hunter to get a Muck Ogre. The system as presented is very fiddly, with a lot of things like "you need THIS many hours of off-screen busywork," but for 1984 I think this is pretty forward-looking. It really does remind me of nothing more than the systems in Chuubo. There's also a side note about adjusting your EDU: go to school APP: Get glam (significant financial costs) for APP+1 or +2, which may fade if you can't get new supplies of makeup or similar. STR, CON, MAS: Any of these can be increased up to matching the highest value of them. I.e. if you have MAS 13, STR 10, CON 9, you can in principle work hard and beef up to STR 13 and CON 13. During chargen, you can also either buy more MAS at the cost of 1 CON per added MAS and 1 STR for every third point of more MAS, which is meant to represent being a lardass. (You can, presumably, game the system this way. I assume that's how Fat Buu got so strong.) You can also lower MAS to match your STR; if your STR is higher than MAS, tough titty, you're already swole. INT, POW, DEX: Cannot be permanently increased save by becoming a Protector. There's also a Resistance Table, because of course there is. We touch on time intervals. Trivia fact: The UN standard day is 24 hours long (presumably leap time is considered a minor quirk of Earth's), while the Ringworld day is 30 hours long (21 daylight, 7.5 night, balance dawn/dusk). The rules recommend treating the two as interchangeable for purposes of schemes and things that count "days." Now we have the Action Sequence, which involves IMPULSES. Basically, the idea is that you track events by these specific one-second "Impulses," which are a kind of discrete unit to cover the time in which all things happen. A live healthy human can move 3 meters in one impulse, or 6 meters if they're sprinting. Minor actions, such as firing a ranged weapon, take one impulse; major actions, such as melee attacks, take a number of impulses determined by your DEX.  If I understand this correctly, let's compare two hypothetical people. Julian Forward has 10 DEX, vs. Beowulf Schaefer, who has the theoretical starting max DEX of 21. (That's 18 for the roll, +3 for being from We Made It.) In the time it takes Julian to throw one punch, Beowulf can throw a counterstrike (if he wants) and move backwards three impulses, or 9 meters. Julian would, rules as written, keep up pace in a footrace, but in any kind of a conflict situation, Beowulf has a massive advantage, especially as you can combine moving 3 meters with a minor action. Combat is pretty standard; roll your weapon skills with various modifiers. There are hit location tables. Dodging takes an impulse, and you can't do anything else unless your skill in "anything else" is over 100%. There is a note that you shouldn't overcomplicate your actions, but this was 1984 so I assume this is more to deal with wargamers trying to make complex nested conditionals, when the idea is you say "I run to Julian and shoot at the Kzin" or "I aim at the whatever the gently caress that is" and then move on, rather than narrating a Platinum Games cutscenes. Damage sucks. Don't get hit. It's similar to Call of Cthulhu, balanced mostly by the Godlike power of the autodocs, which can sew you back together if you arrive with conventional trauma injuries. Natural hazards suck. Don't fall into radioactive waste or stick your reproductive organs in a hard vacuum. Don't inject poison into your eyeballs. That's about it. Next up, step up for the grand tour (grand tour) (grand tour) - this one was kind of lovely other than the weird impulses system, but coming up next is the history of Earth and other worlds between c.1980 e.v. to the 29th century, when the Ringworld is found! I will probably get right on that.
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Nov 9, 2017 06:53
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Kayfabe: The Other Other Wrestling RPG One thing about wrestling fans is, by and large, we pay a lot of attention to the business side of things. Pretty much every fan these days is a “smart mark” or smark, someone who knows the outcomes are predetermined but likes to lose themselves in the drama. Even in decades past, when wrestlers worked hard outside the ring to maintain “Kayfabe”- the Masquerade-like illusion that this is all real- newspaper surveys indicate that an overwhelming majority of people knew what was up. Because we know it’s scripted, we’re interested in what the people behind the scenes are doing, why they’re pushing one wrestler over another, and also, how they’re doing. In the absence of sports statistics, we talk about ratings, live attendance, and PPV buyrates. We want the promotions we follow to do well, for wrestling to be popular- but at the same time we want to be able to get caught up in it. And of course, we like to think we can do better. Fantasy booking is a common thing, coming up with plotlines and matches we’d like to see, and actually trying to organize whole promotions- “e-Feds”, we call them- using real or made up talent. It’s at the root of a lot of backyard wrestling (well, that and your average teenager’s total lack of self preservation instincts), and there’s even a long running computer game series, Total Extreme Wrestling, that’s all about managing a wrestling promotion. This is why I was interested in Kayfabe, the game, which bills itself as “The Inside Wrestling RPG.” It’s a perspective other tabletop wrestling games on the market really don’t take. WWE Know Your Role, and its spiritual successor Wild World Wrestling, have the wrestlers in a given match actually trying to win, as well as gain popularity- the victor is determined by the roll of the dice. World Wide Wrestling has match outcomes predetermined by the GM, and is more purely about trying to get your character over, but every move you make in it is supposed to be something that happens “on camera”. Kayfabe, which actually predates these games (it has a copyright of 2003), is more about the business.  “Introduction” posted:Kayfabe draws you into the wrestling industry The basics: Kayfabe is by Matthew Gwinn at Errant Knight Games- some additional material came from Cynthia Celeste Miller (of Cartoon Action Hour), Eddy Webb (of Pugmire), David Creighton, Janet Johnson, and Ron Edwards. It’s available from https://www.errantknightgames.biz as a PDF, with a caveat- when I first paid for the game via Paypal, for a day or so nothing happened. I shot an e-mail to the site, and Gwinn apologized, said Paypal isn't being consistent on notifying them of these things, and gave me a download link. It would be nice if this were on, say, Drive Thru, but whatever. So if you like it and want to buy it, do be prepared to give ‘em a nudge. Is it good? Let’s see! (Honestly I’ve only looked some at this book. Seems okay so far.) The game is designed for at least 3 players, one of whom will be the Booker. It works on a “troupe” model of play, similar to Ars Magica, with each player having multiple characters, those being wrestlers, managers, and other talent. They also will each be playing a member of the promotion’s booking committee- the Booker may make the final decisions, but you try to influence them. The “Starting A Campaign” chapter talks about Shows and Series; a one-shot game of this might revolve around booking a single wrestling show, where a campaign might involve multiple shows. Running a Show is broken down to three parts. In the Booking Committee, the players are the writers, deciding what will happen in the show, from matches to promos to backstage segments and the like. The Booker uses this to create a Booking Sheet for the show. The Locker Room Session is “where the majority of the roleplaying of Kayfabe takes place.” This represents the time between the posting of the booking sheet and the actual running of the show. Wrestlers and talent react to the plans, resolve other off-screen issues, and can try to influence the final booking of the show in their favor. “The Death of WCW” posted:The Steiners were scheduled to take the [tag team] belts, but in the end, it didn’t happen. [Scott] Hall and [Kevin] Nash went up to Bischoff backstage at the PPV and said the frequent title changes were hurting the drawing power of the belts. Therefore, they argued, they should retain against the Steiners. Bischoff assented. The irony of all this was that [Lex] Luger, who had just won the WCW title six days earlier at Nitro, didn’t get to retain, and dropped the belt instead to Hall and Nash’s good buddy Hogan [I don't have to say who this is]. The next night on Nitro, Luger was hardly mentioned at all. This upset more than a few of the boys in the back. And finally there is The Show, where the Matches, Interviews, etc. all actually play out in front of an audience. The paragraph describing this in this chapter gets cut off, but the rules will come later; in summary it’s all about trying to gain Heat on every segment, and the total Heat will determined the ratings and overall reception. The chapter closes talking a bit about the Series, the default structure of which is eight Shows building up to a Pay-Per-View. The way wrestling has worked ever since the introduction of TV is, promotions will use the TV show, which viewers basically get for free, to convince people to spend money on an upcoming supercard where titles may change hands, big stories get settled, etc. In the days of regional promotions the supercard would be a live event playing somewhere in the area, which you could only see by attending in person; in the 80s this gave way to closed-circuit broadcasts of the likes of Wrestlemania and Starrcade, and then the Pay-Per-View market took over as cable became widespread. Nowadays, the WWE mostly tries to get you to see these events on their streaming service, the WWE Network, while indies may focus on iPPVs or live shows. Basically what I’m saying is that despite the “PPV” term, this structure can be adapted to various eras of wrestling. Next up will be Character Creation, and I’ll try to explain the system some.
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Nov 9, 2017 07:31
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