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SirPhoebos posted:I mean, from what I learned hanging on in the Christianity A&T thread, the Nicean Council is where St. Nicholas earned his Saint 'cred, and it was by punching out someone on the other side. He punched Arius, who was one of the sources of what they decided was a major heresy (That the Father was more divine than the Son) during debate at the council, yes. Early Christianity rules. Like St. Martin the ex Roman soldier running around burning down pagan shrines, but then the pagans say 'Hey man, you can't burn down our sacred tree' and he goes 'I have an idea. We shall let your god slay me for my transgressions if he has power. You guys, chop down the tree and I'll stand under it.' and they go 'Yes! YES!' and chop down the tree and obviously it miraculously falls the wrong way like a warner brother's cartoon and flattens the rest of the shrine while Martin laughs.
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Dec 3, 2017 15:28
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Humanoid arms, giant arms coming down from the sky... Dude, if you're going to crib from Monty Python, just loving own it already.
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Dec 3, 2017 15:42
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The gently caress is perceptronium?
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Dec 3, 2017 15:50
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Mors Rattus posted:The gently caress is perceptronium? I'm thinking it's a form of bullshitinite.
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Dec 3, 2017 15:54
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I think you're supposed to make The Doors out of it.
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Dec 3, 2017 15:54
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TSR published a series of successful fantasy novels based on The Deck of Encounters Set One Part 46: The Deck of Slugs and Spectres 273: Slugfest The PCs are heading down a corridor that dead-ends. When they realize this, though, presumably by shining some light against that back wall, it opens its mouth and starts to move. It’s actually a giant slug that exactly fills the corridor and is “over 40 feet long.” (!) It’ll pursue them relentlessly, smashing through barriers and spitting acid as it goes (with weird extra rules about how likely it is to hit with that spit). I enjoy the occasional weird setpiece combat, and the idea of the PCs fleeing through a dungeon while a huge slug crashes through behind them makes me smile, no matter how little sense the ecology makes. Keep. 274: Heads Up There’s a spectre in an old castle or dungeon. Its bones are buried in the floor. It attacks the PCs with hit-and-run tactics, diving through cracks in the wall to escape, the result being that they can only attack it if they beat it at initiative on a round that it strikes. It’s just an unavoidable combat. The mechanics that help the spectre threaten the PCs are decently done, but I don’t think they’d be particularly interesting in actual play. Pass. 275: Kiss of Death In a ruined keep or castle, the PCs find a room with lots of rotted old clothes and jewelry, guarded by the spectre of the mistress of the keep. If they beat it there are some nice thematic treasures like gems, a philter of love, and a, uh, +2 dagger, longtooth. (Was this lady a gnome, or a halfling?) There are also some worthless jewelry and a doll which are the only things the spectre apparently actually cares about. If she’s just turned or whatever but not destroyed, she’ll pursue whoever has the jewelry and doll and try to reclaim them. Fairly nice flavor. Keep, maybe dropping the dagger, depending on the campaign and where it’s at. 276: Ghost of Honor A crazy spectre has declared the sewers underneath a city to be its kingdom. It’s interested in creating more spectres to serve as its court, but won’t leave the sewers for any reason. It’s got some treasure tucked away - 1150 gp worth of gold and gems, a potion of healing, and a potion of shadow control. The card says that the PCs either are poking around the sewers for their own reasons (unlikely but not out of the question), or they’re walking around an old area of the city and the street collapses and dumps them down there.  I’m cool with a spectre ruling the sewers. Not so big on dumping the PCs down there for no good reason. Keep the setup, but I might just plant rumors about odd happenings in the sewers and see if the PCs bite, rather than force the issue. Dallbun fucked around with this message at 16:24 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 15:58
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My thought with 276 is that a ghost-prince trying to build a kingdom is a great way to uncover all kinds of covered-up dynastic shenanigans. Bit awkward if the Princes In The Tower show up as ghosts and start asking passersby to come and play horsies with them. A noble might pay serious money to have some adventurers go and shut an embarrassingly royal ghost up, and it's a setup where Baron Johnson betraying the party isn't a total asspull either (no witnesses).
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Dec 3, 2017 16:11
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Mors Rattus posted:The gently caress is perceptronium? That really depends on how you look at it.
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Dec 3, 2017 16:11
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JcDent posted:How do standard physics allow you to live on a snowflake made of acid or bugs? Like potatocubed said, they wouldn't and you'd probably die. But by the point your recursion can be weird enough to be composed of bugs or acid, it's probably spawned a physical law that allows you to live on it normally. I hope. Unless you really just wanted to make a big body-disposal dimension for all your killing antics. In this game that would like to emphasize adventure and discovery over fighting, but also made one of the three base classes "fighter" again. Mors Rattus posted:The gently caress is perceptronium? That table is the only place in the book that mentions it, so your guess is as good as mine Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 16:35
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FMguru posted:It is a literal blood ocean. Yeesh. Imagine the smell.
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Dec 3, 2017 19:44
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Mors Rattus posted:The gently caress is perceptronium? According to wiktionary, it's "A hypothetical state of matter capable of giving rise to self-awareness and subjectivity." So it's the most useless answer to the Hard Problem of Cognition ever devised, in prepackaged form. It's a physicist's attempt to answer 'why do we have subjectivity, how does it arise' with 'there's subjective stuff in our brains, it's a state of matter.' So presumably they mean a universe where everything has a subjectivity of some kind. Still ridiculous but I can see sticking that in a table if the table were weird, optional, and in a much looser, more PBTA-ish game where you're intended to make poo poo up off of general setting implication.
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Dec 3, 2017 19:50
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...you'd think that'd be easy to disprove by, like, dissecting a brain.
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Dec 3, 2017 20:17
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It has every appearance of being a physicist being as reductionist as physically possible, so they probably mean some kind of subatomic free will particle that neatly solves all the problems of both philosophy of mind and cognitive biology. I don't like reductionism even a little. And I suspect the 'perceptronium' hypothesis is pretty equivocal about what perceptronium should look like when you crack a skull open because it dodges the question 'ok, so we have this material form of subjectivity... what are its properties then?'
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Dec 3, 2017 20:29
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Joe Slowboat posted:Still ridiculous but I can see sticking that in a table if the table were weird, optional, and in a much looser, more PBTA-ish game where you're intended to make poo poo up off of general setting implication. Cypher System games like The Strange occupy this weird trench between open games that feed on player input like PbtA and FATE, and the firmly-defined dimensions of d20. The game loves to talk about PCs giving things flavor and background dressing. Then it abridges every suggestion with "at the GM's discretion" because it doesn't provide the kind of clear limits or guidelines for what is appropriate the way PC moves in a PbtA game do. The GM Intrusion is the clearest example of "not getting it" when you compare it to the way Invoking and Compelling work with Aspects in FATE. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 20:44
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So the thing about perceptronium is its one of those bleeding edge physics things that's almost certainly wrong, but the pop-sci summary of it is also fundamentally misleading. Perceptronium ultimately builds out of the idea that matter can be understood as a form of information. So it's not that thinking is literally something you can put in a pile on a table or scoop out of someone's brain. It's more that you can define consciousness as an informational state the same way that what we generally know as matter can be defined as an informational state. It's more than a metaphor but less than a literal statement. It's not supposed to be a tangible physical thing, it's a mathematical definition. This grows out of some of the weirder potential interpretations of quantum mechanics, the ones that lead to the more scholarly and less stupidly alarmist ideas about the universe being a simulation (another one of those "probably wrong but misinterpreted into an obviously wrong version by pop-science" ideas). You can see it in science fiction in certain transhumanist/singularity stories (e.g. Accelerando, where an ancient civilization built a giant machine to hack the Planck substrate). Again, it's probably not a correct interpretation of what's going on, but the math works so it's internally consistent and consistent with current observations, which is perfect fertilizer for fiction. To connect to something less seemingly absurd, what Max Tegmark (who came up with the idea) is talking about has a lot more to do with say the Black Hole information paradox than it does with neuroscience. It's still probably wrong and overly reductionist. Mainly because it, like some of the other universe-as-information ideas, misses what could be called the virtual machine issue. That is to say, even if matter really is just a special case of information state, that doesn't mean consciousness is at the same hierarchical level, similar to how you can virtualize mainframe hardware architecture on a desktop computer. In any case, Monte Cooke is almost certainly using perceptronium as a synonym for computronium, because he's making the same pop-sci misunderstanding. Computronium is a physical thing - specifically, it's programmable matter or matter that is inherently capable of computational processes - literally that if you had a glob of it and connected some I/O devices and power to it, you'd have a computer. It's another one of those futurist ideas that is mostly a thought experiment, particularly to force scientists and experimenters to think really hard about their assumptions. It's also a great science fantasy macguffin.
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Dec 3, 2017 21:13
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Has anyone covered the Stargate SG-1 Tabletop RPG? I found a real copy of World of Darkness Gypsies in the wild, but it seems like someone already did that, and the archive page on the first page isn't up to date for this thread I don't think. fishception fucked around with this message at 21:26 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 21:13
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Here's the current archives provided by inklesspen, I'll have to fix that later.
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Dec 3, 2017 23:32
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Dark Matter: Xenoforms A Confusing Mishmash of Cultures in Asia: With “Asia” as our prompt, I hope it won’t be a surprise that three entries leaves, um, a lot on the table. That said, they’re actually some kinda cool and good things so let’s do this thing. Ikuya:  The Ikuya is an enormous fuckoff polar bear three times the size of a grizzly. It is apparently something from Inuit mythology that is also known in Russia, which is why this is in the Asia section. It’s potentially a singular supernatural creature of some kind, or even a god of some kind. It also either only appears during harsh storms or literally creates them, nobody’s sure because it’s a nightmare from the depths of hell and surviving an encounter with it enough to study it is laughable. So this thing is crazy durable (and Good Toughness like the Mapinguari from last time) and gets some scary bonuses with respect to knocking you to the ground and annihilating you. It’s also very intelligent for an animal, and capable of recognizing the threat humans can pose when armed. It’s best not to be in a situation where you’re fighting this thing unless you’ve got like a tank or something. The adventure hook starts with whatever organization the PCs work for asking them to fly into a remote Alaskan research station to pick up some Russians they rescued from the wilderness. When they arrive, the station is already destroyed and a storm descends on the area. The only survivor is one of the Russians, who it turned out had attempted to capture the Ikuya and were pursued by the thing in a grim death march. How things go further is up to the GM. Verdict: This thing works really well as a threat the PCs aren’t actually intended to be fighting straight up, and as long as it’s used that way it’s probably pretty reasonable. Naga:  Naga are huge intelligent cobras capable of making their hoods look vaguely like a human face. They’re not super friendly to humans for the most part, considering us savages and just general assholes. Their venom when properly prepared is capable of granting a human the ESP broad skill and one psionic specialty skill for a few hours, but they’re not really inclined to give it out because again they aren’t the biggest fans of humans they haven’t known for decades. They’re incredibly old, and are a good potential source of information if you can track one down and convince it to tell you something. In combat they use a variety of psionic and FX-Shamanism skills in combination with intimate knowledge of their lairs to their advantage. Their venom is also pretty dangerous if it’s not properly prepared, though they prefer not to bite with venom. They’re very fragile, though, since they are just very large snakes in the end. The adventure hook has the PCs seeking an audience from a supposedly 10,000 year old monk named Ananta (this should be a big the gently caress clue if they are at all familiar with mythology). When they arrive, they learn Ananta’s been kidnapped by some evil fuckers in a flying machine. It turns out a Pakistani industrialist is seeking nine temples that are reputed to contain naga, attempting to steal the secret of their venom. Again what the heroes what to do about this and how it might turn out is left as an exercise to the reader and party. Verdict: I kinda like the Naga, after a bunch of maybe supernatural things that manifest as just giant badass animals that might in fact be totally prosaic it’s good to have one that is legit a magic giant intelligent snake. And who doesn’t want to run a douche-y giant snake and talk down to the PCs for being uncivilized? Reiko:  Reiko are a form of kitsune apparently. Their things are illusions and loving with men who they consider greedy (their definitions of greed are not necessarily congruent with ours though, and just in general they like loving with people). They also eat people sometimes, because apparently we taste good to them. While they love ruining jerks they dislike, it’s not some kind of supernatural purpose and they can defer doing it when it would be dangerous. Reiko have a bunch of illusion magic (it’s detailed in full in the FX supplement but they kindly provide descriptions of they spells they actually put on her profile and how Illusions in general work in this system). They prefer to use illusions to avoid combat, but if really pressed they have the ability to shoot fire and bite. It’s generally better to try and just talk to her though, they’re intelligent and amenable to reasonable arguments that their victim has suffered enough or even that they’re just kinda being dicks. We don’t get an adventure hook this time (since they already needed to take up nearly two pages with the Illusion FX rules). But come on, it’s a mystical fox lady who uses illusions to mess with people she dislikes. It’s not hard to come up with ways to use such a character. Verdict: Properly used I think you could get a lot out of this entry as a minor recurring character who could with positive interactions be a useful source of information for the PCs while also demonstrating how much supernatural poo poo is really happening just beneath the surface of what normal people notice. Next time is Australia, with some fun stuff.
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Dec 4, 2017 02:31
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MonsieurChoc posted:Now do the fun ones like the Nosferatu Luchador. Challenge accepted. Big Game Hunter (Assamite) Vigilante Cop (Brujah) Vanilla Ice (Brujah) Guy Who Sells Pseudo-Egyptian Novelties (Setite) Stuntman (Gangrel) Another Big Game Hunter (Gangrel) Lesbian Indiana Jones (Gangrel) Antifa Supersoldier (Gangrel) Pirate (Lasombra) Spanish Anarchist (Lasombra) Italian "Years of Lead" Marxist Terrorist (Lasombra) Death Metal Shock Rocker (Nosferatu) Luchador (Nosferatu) Gay Rights Vigilante (Nosferatu) Masked Pulp Vigilante (Nosferatu) Dave Mustaine (Toreador) Rob Liefeld (Toreador) Aleister Crowley (Tremere)
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Dec 4, 2017 06:44
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Halloween Jack posted:Challenge accepted.
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Dec 4, 2017 06:53
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Comrade Gorbash posted:So the thing about perceptronium is its one of those bleeding edge physics things that's almost certainly wrong, but the pop-sci summary of it is also fundamentally misleading. Just wanted to say that this is really interesting (and a lot more interesting than most of the stuff in The Strange). One of the things that I've always been really fascinated by in this thread has been, for want of a better term, wasted potential. That is, places where there's something really cool, flavorful, or mechanically interesting... and the authors veer away like two magnets set north-to-north.
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Dec 4, 2017 06:58
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 Contracts, Injury, Drugs, and Rehab: or, Let's Be Careful Out There Contracts! Unless the promotion is set up so that everyone is under contract, wrestlers can’t start with them unless they’re Experienced Wrestlers or Managers. Everyone else has to wait until after their first PPV. They’re desirable because they mean reliable money, but at the same time they’re an opportunity to bargain for various points. Contracts come in three forms- Guaranteed, Incentive-Based, and Per Appearance. A Guaranteed contract gets the wrestler a base pay per show based on their stats at signing. Wrestlers, valets and managers use their Heat at signing times a dollar amount (for wrestlers it’s x $10, for the rest $5), other personalities use a stat times a dollar amount- for Refs it’s Work Rate, for all other on-air personalities it’s Mic Skills. Basically this is good for established Wrestlers, not so much for newbies. Incentive-based Contracts divvy up your pay between a base rate and a per-show bonus. The base pay per Series is determined by your Heat at signing- wrestlers get that x $50, valets and managers x $25. (Other personalities can only use Guaranteed Contracts.) At the end of the show you get a bonus based on your current Heat- x $5 for wrestlers, x $3 for others. Meanwhile Per Appearance just works the same as Guaranteed Contracts, but for a limited number of appearances. This is the first we’ve seen of money in terms of dollars-and-cents in this game, which raises a problem- what, precisely, are the characters spending it on? There’s no real system for personal expenses, which is generally good because who wants to track that bullshit, but while there are a couple of Flaws that talk about money trouble it’s fairly abstract. There’s no real reason to angle for money other than running up your score. Still I can see that in itself being an interesting story element- a little while back someone released info on WCW’s payrolls around 1999, and it was interesting to see the absurd sums everyone was pulling down in Ted Turner’s soon-to-collapse wrestling fantasyland. (Also they had a habit of buying plane tickets for everyone on the roster, for every show, whether they were on it or not.) Contract negotiations also involve Contract Points- a point-based Merit/Flaw system that helps you add all sorts of clauses beyond money. A wrestler begins negotiations with Contract Points equal to 1/10th of their Heat (rounding down), but can gain more through a successful Clout roll or through accepting clauses. Some are as simple as the contract lasting longer than usual or being required to make personal appearances (which will be played out in the Locker Room portion.) Punishment clauses let the promotion dock your pay for bad behavior or for being below a certain Heat level, Morality clauses can get you in hot water for bad public behavior, while an Old School Clause means the promotion is requiring you to keep kayfabe at all times- no carpooling with your arch rival or letting slip that it’s all a work in interviews. A promotion can only do this if it’s for all contracts. There are also some guidelines for coming up with your own clauses, based on how strictly they’re enforced and how harsh the punishment is. You can spend Contract Points on things like having a manager or valet, getting medical coverage which helps remove Injury points, getting a cut of the merchandise or a PPV bonus, being able to get out of the contract early, and of course Creative Control, which costs 5 CP and means you get an additional point of Clout as far as anything that happens to your on-air persona. (It’s not a huge bonus but the kind of control that, say, Hulk Hogan had at the height of his power would break the game in many ways.) The Manager/Valet stuff is a little complex, the cost is based on the minimum stat requirements you set for said character- 1 for every 2 points of Wrestling or Mic Skills, or for every 10 Heat (valets only). There are also minor perks like having your own dressing room, getting plane tickets, catering, etc.- mechanically meaningless but more ego boosting. Much like actual contract negotiations! Overall my complaints about money not doing anything aside, the contract negotiations seem like a fun element- the game notes that you don’t have to do this during a game session, meaning “blue booking” is encouraged here. It’s nice when games acknowledge this is a thing (and don’t pretend they invented the process, Monte.) Steroid Use gets its own section, because yeah. While you can’t do much to enhance performance in a noncompetitive sport, there is a specific “look” promotions tend to favor. Ever since McMahon, really, US wrestling in particular has been about the musclemen- chiseled Adonises, bigger than life, and yeah, almost certainly on the juice. The effects of steroids in-game depend on how long your character takes them. At two weeks you gain the “Steroid User” flaw and “The Look” (Muscular) asset, at four you gain the “Strong” asset, and this cycle repeats (all of these assets and flaws are ones that can be taken multiple times.) Taking megadoses or “pyramiding” (gradually increasing how much you take over time) doubles the rate at which this happens, and worsens the negatives. (This part’s a little vague- it “doubles” the negatives but it’s not clear how this works in each instance.) And those negatives? First, every two weeks you have to make a roll to see if you become addicted. For each instance of the “Steroid User” flaw you have at this point, you roll 1 die. If more than one of them show a 1, you gain the “Steroid Addict” flaw. There are various physical side effects which can kinda backfire on your attempt to craft the perfect look, and it can also make your joints less flexible. The Booker has fiat to apply the flaws Bad Look and Slow “when applicable”- it’s a gradual process and there isn’t much detail on how best to describe all this. There’s the potential for “Roid Rage” which can make a wrestler shoot (i.e. fight for real) when they feel they’re being provoked (getting stiffed, a wrestler not cooperating in a match, etc.) There are various mental side effects that can be roleplayed as well, and finally characters may suffer from problems with blood pressure, heart attacks, etc. (These normally take years to develop so it’s recommended to limit this to wrestlers with the Old flaw or ones who have been megadosing.) A character who isn’t an Addict may quit using Steroids at any time, at loses the flaws and benefits at a rate of 1 per month. (It’s suggested that a character who makes a point to work out and eat healthy may keep the benefits, but wouldn’t that be a default for wrestlers anyway?) Addicts have to take time off for rehab. There are a number of psychological symptoms related to steroid withdrawal that should be roleplayed out. We get to injuries- well, we don’t get to HOW they’re picked up because that’s in The Show (again this organization really works against the game at times), but we get how they’re handled after. Injuries are rated on a point scale, with a 2 point injury being a minor cut or bloody nose and a 30 point injury being potentially fatal or losing you a limb. Every 5 points of Injury you have in total means you must reduce your Wrestling trait by 1, and if it’s at 0 you can’t wrestle. You lose 2 injury points after each show you don’t wrestle. There are specific flaws the Booker may impose based on the kind of injury you’ve taken. If you’ve taken 10 or more points of damage to the head, you get the Brain Damage flaw, which reduces your Mic Skills or Work Rate by 1, and this can happen multiple times. 15 points of injury to the back or neck can mean a Career Ending Injury- even if it heals, at any time afterwards if you take more than 5 points of injury at once, you become paralyzed or otherwise incapacitated. (This is very much along the line of what would cause Adam “Edge” Copeland to retire- while a lot of retired wrestlers might have one more match left in them, he’d risk permanent damage or even death if he took one more bump.) And if you take 15 or more points of injury at one time, you can be assigned a Nagging Injury- 5 points of that damage just will not heal normally- or a Serious Injury, which means 10 points remain despite rest. Painkillers are an option, of course- they let you temporarily ignore the penalties to your stats from Injury, though the Injury itself remains. A reputable doctor will only prescribe enough pain killers to ignore 5 points of injury for 3 weeks. Addiction here is also kinda tricky- at the end of each show, a wrestler using pain killers must roll one d6 for each 5 points of Injury ignored. If more than one of those dice is a 1, you gain the Drug/Alcohol Problem Flaw. (And you have to roll an additional die if you already have a Drug Problem.) Finally, if you try to dull the effects of more than 20 points of Injury, you roll a d6 plus one for every 5 points of Injury over 20 you’re ignoring. Any of them rolls a 1, you end up in a coma. More than one 1 and you need to be rushed to the hospital or risk dying. You also risk this if you mix the painkillers with alcohol. So, yeah. Watch the gently caress out. This is pretty drat accurate, sadly. Painkiller abuse is probably still THE problem for wrestlers, even more than steroids. This poo poo hurts, nobody wants to feel pain, and of course opioid abuse in general is a major problem in America nowadays. And that “reputable doctor” thing- yeah, promotions can have ways around that. Eddie Guerrero is the most notable casualty of painkiller addiction in the business, though that was after this was published. There are a couple of ways out of all of this. Injury Flaws- whether assigned during play or taken earlier- can be addressed with surgery. Serious and Nagging Injuries are simple enough- you roll a six sider, to get rid of a Nagging Injury you need a 2 or better, a Serious Injury you need a 3 or better. Repairing Brain Damage and Career Ending Injuries is riskier- in both cases, you roll a die and need a 4 or better, and if you roll a 1 the character either (Booker’s Choice) dies in surgery or becomes a vegetable or paralyzed, based on the respective injury. Succeed or fail, you have to take time off for a surgery. A Nagging Injury requires 5 + 1d6 weeks, Serious 10 + 1d6, Brain Damage 15 + 2d6, and Career Ending requires 20 + 2d6. And while exact costs for all this are delved into, the Booker may assign the Debt Problem flaw after surgery if you don’t have an insurance clause in your contract and/or aren’t making very much money. Drug and alcohol problems can also be treated by entering Rehab. Steroid rehab lets you lose the Flaws from Steroid use as if you didn’t have the Addiction flaw, which also goes away once you’ve lost all the associated Flaws. Alcohol and Drug Rehab let you lose the Drug/Alcohol Problem Flaw after 3 weeks + 1 week per level of the Flaw. Leave early and you get nothing. After you’ve gone through Rehab, you replace the Drug/Alcohol Problem Flaw with an equal number of levels of the Recovering Addict Flaw. And if you ever gain Drug/Alcohol Problem again, you regain all the levels you lost. Just as a side note, if you’ve been wondering how the game handles things like pot, cocaine, alcohol, etc., way back in Character Creation the Drug/Alcohol Problem Flaw explains all this- before each show you roll a d6, if the number comes up equal to or below the number of times you took the Flaw, the character is under the influence. Cue Jeff Hardy stumbling to the ring in the main event of Victory Road 2011. No real rules for cigarette use- you’re not really “under the influence” of the drat things, but I would figure it’s a bad idea for athletes who depend on cardio to do any damage to their lungs. Prolonged absences give you Ring Rust- the only real way to be prepared for wrestling is to wrestle, after all. After more than 2 months off you get the equivalent of the Nagging Injury Flaw, though this needs an asterix- it goes away after a full Series back on active wrestling duty. For every six months off you receive a level of the Poor Timing Flaw, and this is lost at the rate of one level per Series of active wrestling. In general this is a risky business, and this chapter, while abstracting it and still leaving a lot to the GM, really does a nice job conveying the risk. In truth the whole of the Locker Room chapter- being everything the wrestlers do outside of the Show- could use a bit more mechanical fleshing out, to really get people into the drama of life on the road and trying to put on a good show and getting involved in all the weirdness that happens in this carny business. But it’s a start. Next time, enough of all this, it’s time to start The Show.
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Dec 4, 2017 08:58
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Halloween Jack posted:Challenge accepted. Aww yes. Gotta play one of them, one of these days. Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Don't forget "legally distinct from Tom Cruise" from Tzimisce (though this could go in either list) Just quietly put it in both lists.
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Dec 4, 2017 09:54
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I want to be the anti-fa super soldier or vampire marxist, yes!
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Dec 4, 2017 12:25
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 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness Revised Edition, Part Four: "However, we recommend random determination." So, with the basic rules out of the way, we can move on to character creation. First off - even though it doesn't mention this until Step 4, some or all of the players can choose to roll themselves up as a team. That means they all roll and share the same background and animal type, and have to all spend their BIO-E the same way. However, they'll get big bonuses as detailed below. Step 1: The Eight Attributes Roll 3d6 down the line. If an attribute rolls a 16 or higher, add an extra 1d6 to it. If you're doing team characters, whenever somebody rolls that extra 1d6, all the other team characters get that added to the same attribute. If multiple people roll that bonus 1d6 on the same attribute, they take the highest bonus rolled rather than adding them together. Attributes that are 16 or higher get a bonus. Hit Points are your Physical Endurance + 1d6 at first level, and an extra 1d6 every level after that. Step 2: Animal Type You roll randomly on a set of percentage tables to determine your animal type. However, the gamemaster can restrict certain tables or allow players to choose animal types... but it really recommends going random. The tables aren't heavily weighted - you're more likely to roll a "urban" (pests, pets) animal or a "wild animal" (wilderness) than a "rural animal" (mostly farm animals, but with bat on there for some reason). "Zoo animals" are the hardest to roll up. Some animals are slightly more likely due to appearing on multiple tables (mouse, pigeon, sparrow, duck, bat) but it's very slight. For the record, your chance of rolling up a turtle is roughly 1%.  Horny toads actually don't show up for several expansions. Sorry! Step 3: Cause of Mutation You roll randomly to figure you your character's mutation cause and resulting background. 14% are "Random Mutations", which means your character is literally just a natural mutation, as ridiculous as that may be. 46% are "Accidental Encounters", which are animals just exposed to radiation or chemical spills or the like. And lastly, 40% are "Deliberate Experimentation", which generally means genetic experiments of some sort. If you roll "Random Mutation" or "Accidental Encounter" you roll on the "Wild Animal Education Table", of which the highest chance is being adopted by a mentor (literally a 50% chance, so 30% of total characters written up will end up as ninja, appropriately). There's a 20% chance of being a feral wild creature, a 20% chance of being a homeless mutant animal, and a 10% chance of - very curiously - going public and being taken in by a university as a student! "Deliberate Experimentation" characters roll on the a much longer table, with about a 30% chance of having been raised as a pet with varying reactions and acceptance, 30% chance of being adopted and raised by the organization as a specialist or as if they were human, 20% chance of being raised cruelly as an experiment, 10% chance of escaping with a researcher that raises one, and a 10% chance of being deliberately raised as a soldier. We get a roll or the type of organization, of which only 25% are actual biological research firms and 30% chance of being part of some secret organization. Once you have the cause of mutation, you'll also know the skills you have to select and the amount of money you get for equipment. Step 4: BIO-E Points This is where you "build" your mutation, which I"ll cover in the next part.  Step 5: Equipment and Money Here you turn to the equipment list and go shopping. Despite the above rules for scavenged equipment, we're told "the reliability of character built equipment is equal to the character's skill level", which presumably refers to electronics or mechanical skills for it... but it's hard to say. Rounding Out One's Character You choose an alignment; these are the same good, selfish, and neutral alignments found in every Palladium book and have no mechanical effect outside of the See Aura power. There's an additional diatribe talking about how some characters may be anti-heroes or vigilantes and be largely selfish or good respectively, though it notes some more extreme ones may be downright evil. We get the "no neutral alignments" section as always: "Sorry, no neutrals; this is one of the very few definitive, unbending rules of this game." We get rules for XP, but because it just starts at 0, we can move on. Oddly, at the end we get skills. Depending on your cause of mutation, you may have individual skills to pick from specific categories or "skill programs" which are usually fixed sets of skills representing a collegiate-equivalent education. You may also have "secondary skills", which are chosen from a small subset of the larger skill list and usually don't include "professional" skills. I won't get deep into these save to say there are three types:
Mind, the actual Ninja Turtle statblocks will defy these character creation rules, which is curious given that they're treated as playable characters... but we'll get to that when we get to them. Next: Origin of the species. 
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Dec 4, 2017 12:28
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JcDent posted:I want to be the anti-fa super soldier or vampire marxist, yes! Roll up an anarch campaign then. They're a blast. Full on 90's punk.
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Dec 4, 2017 12:29
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So it's possibly to roll up a team of mutant college students? Roll on the chart for Animal House jokes.
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Dec 4, 2017 13:15
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What non-secret, non biotech organizations make mutant animals? Can I be a mutant skunk trained by the union of bus drivers to spray down any strike breakers? FEMA rescue super monkey? PBS tax collector bear?
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Dec 4, 2017 13:42
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DMV tower cheetah DOJ Gorilla baliff Police.....rabbit? This is juat zootopia isnt it
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Dec 4, 2017 14:42
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Inescapable Duck posted:So it's possibly to roll up a team of mutant college students? Roll on the chart for Animal House jokes. If you decide to roll up as a team you have about a 4% chance to do so, yeah. Collegiate Mutant Undergraduate Turkeys doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never really did, either! JcDent posted:What non-secret, non biotech organizations make mutant animals? Can I be a mutant skunk trained by the union of bus drivers to spray down any strike breakers? FEMA rescue super monkey? PBS tax collector bear? We have: 25% chance of a "biological research facility", a 20% chance of "private industry", and a 25% chance of "military organization", so... close? FEMA or PBS doesn't exactly fit the above because there aren't any non-military, non-secret governmental agencies listed, though. (Later on we'll have a mutant hamster trained to dig for oil. Sure, makes sense.) There's also a 5% chance each of: "secret medical experiment organization", "secret criminal organization", "secret crime fighting organization", "secret military organization", "secret espionage organization", and... "secret medical research organization". What's the difference between a "secret medical experiment organization" and a "secret medical research organization"? Well, cue my most used emoji when it comes to Palladium books... 
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Dec 4, 2017 14:48
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Rigged Death Trap posted:This is just zootopia isnt it Judy could have avoided a lot of flak by buying herself up a few more size categories. I mean, did she really need functional hands?
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Dec 4, 2017 14:50
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Female goons receive a -1 penalty to Strength, male goons receive a -1 penalty to Charisma, and non-binary goons receive The Deck of Encounters Set One Part 47: The Deck of Spiders, Storage Devices, Tanar’ri, and Tasloi 277: Welcome to My Parlor Not to be confused with #86: Step Into My Parlor. This is a different parlor. A phase spider has spun a web near a path through the forest, and she attacks. She tries to kill a party member, after which she'll drag them back to her web. It won't pursue more than a mile. The card boosts the word count significantly by repeating the rules for how a phase spider's attacks work, and repeating that it'll flee to the Ethereal if threatened. I'm not sure if that's convenient, or just padding. I'm leaning towards the latter. Once again, this is just a "Phase Spider - 1d4" encounter from a wandering monster table. Pass. 278: The Wizard's Bag The PCs find a painting of a wizard standing nonchalantly, holding a bag open towards the viewer. It’s a beautiful and lifelike painting probably worth 2,000 gp by itself. It’s also magic, though, because the bag in the painting functions as a bag of holding (currently empty). Bad for travel, good for decking out your stronghold. This card is useless for my purposes - I want a deck of short encounters I can throw in to break up gameplay or offer little side-adventures. This is a piece of treasure on a card. There’s a reason I never used the AD&D Trading Cards (although I owned those too). Pass. 279: Magical Safe In a wizard’s tower, noble’s keep, or whatever, there’s a painting of a woodland scene. It’s up against a wall that’s obviously a hallway or something on the other side, so people would think “No sirree, there certainly isn’t any room for a secret safe to be hidden behind that painting!” But there’s space for a portable hole! (It’s behind a little hidden door, so it’s not 100% immediately obvious if someone looks behind the painting.) Not really an encounter. Not really interested. Pass. 280: Road Warrior A rutterkin got some brownie points with a nalfeshnee, who gave it leave to go to the Prime and kill 100 humanoids. But why should the PCs care about that? A rutterkin is standing in the middle of the road, laughs and shambles towards them, will never give up pursuit, and now they have to fight it to the death for no apparent reason. Pass. 281: Antic Ambush Hmm. In the jungle, a group of 21 tasloi ambush the PCs to capture for food. The card spends some time trying to add detail, including a named leader (Hoogot), but most of it is just reworded mechanics from their Monstrous Manual entry (including the same weird omission where it’s not clear how the PCs actually get hit with a net. Do they make a save, or what?). Also, look. D&D is full of racism, a lot of which reflects horrible real-life cultural attitudes towards “non-civilized” peoples, simply off-loaded onto people with purple skin or dog-faces or whatever. I accept this, for the most part, as part of the genre. But I’m certainly not going to go out of my way to run an encounter where small spear-wielding jungle-dwelling humanoids who can talk to monkeys and apes “swarm” the PCs to try and cook and eat them for dinner, when I could just pass. 282: The Natives' Drums Way to reassure me with that title, card. It’s another tasloi ambush, this one at least following their Monstrous Manual description of how they like to operate. They set up a trip wire in an obvious “game trail” leading away from a monster lair, so when the PCs flee or emerge weakened from their fight with the monster, logs drop on ‘em. Then some tasloi drop on them from the trees, and the wasp-riders come in, and actually it’s potentially kind of brutal, depending on how beaten-up the PCs are to begin with. It holds more interest than the previous encounter, but after re-reading the tasloi monster entry, I think I’m fine just… not using them. Pass, or maybe keep and just turn them into some other humanoid race so it’s a little bit less pygmyriffic. P.S. To break free from the tasloi nets in the previous encounter, you needed a Bend Bars/Lift Gates roll. To free yourself from the logs in this one, you need to make a STR-4 check. Because AD&D. 
Dallbun fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Dec 4, 2017 |
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Dec 4, 2017 14:59
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It's a group of kobolds who got shipwrecked in the area after trying to circumnavigate the globe.
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Dec 4, 2017 15:07
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Dallbun posted:Judy could have avoided a lot of flak by buying herself up a few more size categories. I mean, did she really need functional hands? Or Bio-Manipulation: Pain, if you wanted a really different movie.
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Dec 4, 2017 15:09
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JcDent posted:I want to be the anti-fa super soldier or vampire marxist, yes! The Russian Revolution was orchestrated by the Brujah and they controlled the USSR until Baba Yaga, a Nosferatu elder, took over and erected her evil, magical, shadow
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Dec 4, 2017 15:39
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Don't forget "legally distinct from Tom Cruise" from Tzimisce (though this could go in either list) MonsieurChoc posted:Just quietly put it in both lists.
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Dec 4, 2017 15:45
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What level tanar'ri is gopnikshee?  The talsomethings look like goblins, why are they not just jungle gobbos?
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Dec 4, 2017 15:47
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Mors Rattus posted:It's a group of kobolds who got shipwrecked in the area after trying to circumnavigate the globe. Stealing this for my Encounters.
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Dec 4, 2017 15:53
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Alien Rope Burn posted:If you decide to roll up as a team you have about a 4% chance to do so, yeah. Collegiate Mutant Undergraduate Turkeys doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, but Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles never really did, either! "Collegiate Mutant Undergrad Turkeys" scans just fine. Some people use concrete boots to cover their crimes, I have trochaic tetrameter. If it was good enough for the Kalevala...
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Dec 4, 2017 16:25
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DigitalRaven posted:"Collegiate Mutant Undergrad Turkeys" scans just fine. Go Hokies! ...sorry. Couldn’t resist.
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Dec 4, 2017 16:30
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