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OvermanXAN posted:I think Deadlands is possibly the most aggressively in-your-face metaplot I've seen. Maaaaybe TORG's is about equal, but even it doesn't go as far as "Yes just kill the PCs for having the temerity of existing adjacent to our story." More egregiously, while other settings are guilty of metaplot bullshit, Deadlands seems unwilling to back off from it even recently or even give a "Feel free to take things in your own direction" Seeming to not comprehend that that's possible. Down to pitching situations that are difficult to impossible to actually pull off (see that starter adventure in the core book, IIRC), and then mostly staring blankly at you when you bring up the possibility of, you know, the PCs failing. Or not understanding what they're supposed to do. (Yes, technically the starter adventure did have something to do for if your PCs failed, but it completely derailed the setting and made every other book almost completely useless, and this was by far the more likely scenario.)
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Jan 17, 2019 13:05
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
The Silver Snail and Avro Arrow references made me smile.
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Jan 17, 2019 13:36
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Every aspiring game designer should at least read Uncle Figgy's Guide to Good Game Mastering: http://ryucope.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/UFGGM.pdfquote:Planning narrow, where you might create a
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Jan 17, 2019 13:42
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Just Dan Again posted:It seems particularly silly to me now, in 2019, to cling to the sourcebooks as if there is some one True Licensed Game World that your group's stories mustn't betray. The idea that anybody ever bought that line for the big metaplot games is pretty wild to me. I wonder if it ties into the tradition of gatekeeping in the hobby- "REAL fans know exactly what happened during the Avatar Storm and how it affected the Kiasyd's kinfolk Fianna allies, and if you're not a REAL fan then you can't play rock-paper-scissors with us at Denny's on Friday night."
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Jan 17, 2019 16:07
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Halloween Jack posted:Bear in mind, this is all happening in the context of the CCG craze, and in wargames and CCGs you really do need to keep up with new supplements. It's great if you can get that racket going with RPGs, and for awhile, some companies did. But eventually people move on, because you can't really create a disincentive to just continuing to play with the materials you already have. hence TSR in the 80s launching a cartoon show, countless tie-in fiction novels, licensed apparel, back packs and lunch boxes, basically slapping the D&D brand on anything they could find. it'd be an interesting "what if" how things could have turned out if gary had found some competent business people to manage that side of TSR instead of letting his family and friends mismanage it into the ground
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Jan 17, 2019 16:54
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Freaking Crumbum posted:basically slapping the D&D brand on anything they could find 
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Jan 17, 2019 16:59
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The D&D branding and merchandising was a very good strategy that should've been done years sooner. Unfortunately, they were indeed far too profligate and careless in how they went about it.
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Jan 17, 2019 17:03
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Myriad Song Myriad Rules The 'Spot Rules' section is so full of detail that there's no way I could describe it all in full. These are all the various 'well what if I want rules for-' sorts of things. Rules for property damage (if it's super important to know if you can cut through that bulkhead in time), rules for environmental exposure, rules for starvation, rules for how close you can get to someone without being spotted, anything you might decide you need rules for is in here. They're potentially very useful, but these are all of the 'non-core' rules that don't directly relate to the core system of conflict resolution and combat, and you won't necessarily use all or any of them during a campaign. A few are particularly important, though, and should be described in detail. One is the actual procedure for Rondo jumps, because this gets at why you benefit from having a Conductor aboard your ship outside of their direct space magic and ability to sense weird phenomena. Anyone can program a ship for a Rondo jump. It doesn't take a Conductor at all, and Gifts like Mathematics and Navigation will help you with it even if you don't have a Conductor. It's perfectly possible for groups like the Concord and Solar Creed who don't like Syndic technology to make safe FTL jumps just by being very good at math and science and stellar navigation, which is an important bit of implicit fluff. Rondo has to be done well outside a planetary gravity well because folding space and transiting between the points can do some weird stuff when you do it with an object the size of a spaceship. The fluff on this section is also where we get the title drop: The harmony and mixture of FTL navigation signals from the Campanile towers is often called the Myriad Song. After you're out of the gravity well, you need an hour or two to charge the capacitors onboard. Rondo bridges take a huge amount of energy, and ships have to use huge capacitors to hold it all, capacitors that often burst during the jump. There's a 1-10 chance a good commercial capacitor breaks, a 100% chance a cheap and intentionally disposable one does, and a 1% chance a Cavalcade's capacitors burst. If they do, you'll need to fix or replace them before you can jump again, adding to the time between jumps. Next, you have to navigate. A Conductor can hear the Myriad Song without special equipment, and they can hear it better than others. Others use a device called a Carillon, which lets them receive and read the FTL signals from the Campanile navigation towers. If you have a Conductor, they get to include their Psyche dice in the eventual Navigation check, and since Psyche is also a Career skill for them, there's a good chance this means the Conductor is a good 1-2 dice up on a normal navigator. You also use Mind and Academics, plus Astronomy, Mathematics, and Navigation is you have them as Gifts. Number of successes (and the number of successes you can Rote) really, really matter for this, so every extra die is a big help, especially as it's a standard vs. 3 check. You need at least 3 successes to get anywhere. 0 Successes breaks your device and you need to fix it, a Botch sends you wildly off course and onto a totally different adventure, 1 success means you need another hour to plot the course and try again, 2 successes means you only need 5 minutes. 3 Successes means you can lock on and jump to a Strong signal. These are for worlds with working Campanile towers that are fairly nearby; this means that to Rote a jump on a normal commercial route you need 6 dice. 4 Successes picks up weak signals, from worlds with damaged towers or worlds that are really far away; jumping to far spaces is hard because of the distortion and fading of the signal, not because you can't break space like that. You're already breaking all physical laws to go FTL. 5 Successes will help you find lost worlds that don't have a functioning signal. To even go to such a place, you have to have researched why it might be there, or otherwise have some reason to believe it's there. Such worlds are rumored to be full of treasures and mysteries the Syndics wanted to keep from others, but also terrible dangers and mysteries. Two people can work together to program a Rondo device, so an ally can help you out and make this easier even if they aren't a Conductor. For a working example: Lady Ryllin Solan is a midshipwoman of the House of Solan and a Conductor in training, tasked with plotting a jump to test her skills. She is a Conductor with a d6 Career die, a d8 Mind, a d8 Skill in Psyche, and the Navigation Gift from being a Conductor. She didn't put any Marks in Academics, trusting to her Career and Mind dice for that skill, but she's also wearing her Mezzo-forte Outfit, which provides d8 to Psyche; she includes that with her check. Thus, with 6 dice, she could easily Rote a standard jump and ensure it goes off with no trouble. If she needed help, her friend Kenna is a Laborer and has the Gift of Team Player, d4 in Academics, and a Mind die, and thus could Rote assisting her and grant her an extra d12. To try to plot a longer jump, Lady Solan would need to roll and get 4 successes on her dice. To plot a jump to an unknown world to pursue a grand mystery (because c'mon, you're space adventurers, that's got a good chance of coming up) she'd need to succeed on 5 dice; better get Kenna's help for that. Once you've plotted and opened the Bridge, you Segue through it (I love that hyperjumps are called Segues) with a piloting test. This is where misjumps can happen; if you don't maintain a very clear course when you just folded space and time like a soft shell taco you can end up light-years from your plotted exit point. The pilot rolls Mind+Transport vs. 3 and if they get 0 successes, you fail the jump entirely and something bad happens. If they get 1, you make the jump but something goes wrong. If you get 2 or more, you make the jump fine. The Mishaps are things like misjumps, a command console exploding like we're original series star trek and wounding an officer, shipboard fires, a chance of a crash due to slight off-course jumping, etc. They should introduce a complication to the adventure rather than derail it entirely. So why is all this in the Spot Rules section? Because chances are you aren't going to roll all this every time you make a hyperjump. It's there for when the jump is being done under pressure, trying to get out and on target before a Solar Creed patrol cutter on intercept burn catches up to and boards you, etc. It's also there for cases like long jumps or jumps to hidden worlds, where you really want a Conductor among your explorers. One nice thing is that Conductors are useful in general, not just for stellar navigation; nothing stops them having skills beyond Conducting, their magic is a handy and unique powerset, Psyche is useful on its own for all kinds of mystical events, and Academics is used for a lot of useful checks anyway. Even if you don't end up using the detailed spot rules for jumps, your Conductor PC is still going to be a useful part of the team, unlike the Rogue Trader Navigator. The jump rules are also more about 'only someone really skilled could do this important step in solving this huge mystery' rather than 'and then you randomly get turbofucked and that's the main purpose of these rules'. The other rule that absolutely needs description in detail is Size, because while Size is technically a spot rule, it comes up a LOT in the (fairly extensive) bestiary. Things have a Size rating relative to a normal person-sized sapient PC. Note that the Gift of Giant does not make you a size category bigger; you're only big compared to a normal person of your species. Giant is for being an 8 foot tall hyper-space tyrant/hero, not being the size of a tank. Something with a Size rating gets a point of Invulnerability per point of Size (giant enemies like space T-Rexes are Size 2, for comparison), moves faster, does +1 damage per Size, and is easier to hit with a gun based on its size. They also can't take cover behind smaller combatants and terrain; a chest high wall is not going to protect Godzilla. Larger weapons also increase their Threat, Sweep, Splash, and Strike distances by 1 band per size larger they are. So a Ship sized Machine Gun (Size +2) would go from Long range to Extreme Range and from Damage +4 to Damage +6. Fighting giant space monsters can be tough; hits that would splatter a normal combatant will only injure them slightly and make them very mad. In general, the spot rules are pretty well done and reasonable, but if you try to use all of them at all times you will go mad. That's why they're spot rules; they're there for if you want to add mechanical weight to a situation that's going to be central to an adventure, not to keep on at all times. You're not, generally, going to be checking if the players have food and water during their standard space adventure, but you might when they're marooned on a desert world and trying to survive. If you want to see if you can just stand tall and use sheer presence to stop a bunch of mooks from even going for their guns every now and then, the spot rules are there for you. If your players really insist on getting into a fight in a tank and don't want to have it be a normal extension of the normal combat system, the vehicle spot rules have your back. If you want to have cover getting blasted away and forcing people to move in a gunfight, that's here too, along with rules for your villain grabbing a hostage for a sapient shield. Next Time: Space Monsters!
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Jan 17, 2019 17:23
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Is that the weirdest or was there even more improbable stuff?
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Jan 17, 2019 17:43
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If some capacitors are expected to burn out in every jump isn't it better to just abstract the process to a flat credit cost you pay per attempt? Who wants to keep tally on a stock of ship components?
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Jan 17, 2019 17:45
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I think it's in case you're trying to make multiple jumps in a row and checking to see if your ship's capacitor needs a pit-stop on a planet or not, in case that's important. I generally don't track capacitors.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:10
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Deptfordx posted:Is that the weirdest or was there even more improbable stuff?  I've read that during Lorraine Williams' administration, she was interested in selling D&D quilts, so TSR just acquired a quilt company. I don't know if they produced any product. But most of the collectible products from her era seem to be more of the "sad nerd" variety, like collectible plates and calendars with chainmail bikini babes.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:12
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OvermanXAN posted:I think there are actually ways of framing metaplot so that it works. You could say "We're going to provide you with how we see events going, feel free to use or ignore any parts of it you want to use in your currently running games if you are already playing." Give the events in narrative form and then go "If you would like your party to sub in for any of the characters here, here's some relevant stats for (important combats) to serve as a good idea of what kind of encounter we see this as being, feel free to tune them up or down as needed" There's also the route Progenitor took, which was to lay out the timeline and present it as "this is the way things will go if your players don't do anything" along with a very clear admonishment of "if they aren't doing anything to chuck this timeline in the garbage you're playing the game wrong". Then again I'm not sure if Progenitor counts as metaplot since it was a one-and-done line.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:13
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They should have made a D&D line of Barbies.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:15
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By popular demand posted:Who wants to keep tally on a stock of ship components? Night10194 posted:I generally don't track capacitors.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:21
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No matter what happened with d&d, Loren Coleman has them all beat.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:22
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Myriad Song Space Monsters So, what do enemies look like in this system? You've got a bunch of choices and basic templates for foes. The most common enemy is a Typical NPC, who has d6s in all their stats, maybe has a Career based around shooting or fighting for a 3d6 or 2d6 combat array, and only has their basic Career and Legacy Gifts. When your players are mowing down AMG rent-a-cops or fist-fighting with common street thugs, this is what they'll be up against. They need to outnumber the PCs, by a lot, to really have a good chance. If you don't put any armor on your Typicals, they'll have a 1-6 chance of botching their Soak rolls and not only reducing damage by 0, but taking +1 damage, which often means head explosions and panicking allies. Elites are tougher, but not by much. They have a d8 in all their stats, plus the Gift of Improved Armor on top of their Legacy and Career Gifts. They're meant to be more of a challenge for PCs; these are Remanence Janissaries or basic Apparat Killbots and stuff like that. The d8 makes them much more of a match for a starting PC who didn't specialize in combat, though with their other skills, advantages, and gear a PC should beat them most of the time. Enforcers are minibosses, and you might've noticed a pattern: They go up to d10 in everything, plus an extra Improved Armor and the Gift of Toughness, which lets them declare one attack Weak during the combat to try to shrug it off. These are generic enemy officers or the toughest guy in the gang, etc. They look a bit scary, but you can definitely still take them, especially if the PCs work together. They're very hard to kill, but remember that even if they're soaking damage, they're still losing actions to getting sent Reeling by being shot. Hitstun and action economy will beat them, and a well-built starting combat PC will kick their rear end in a duel as it is (The example Mercenary gunslinger character among the sample characters rolls an average of 2d12+2d8+2d6 with his dual magnums, because Dexterity lets him set up his own flank with them and he has a d12 Career dice, with his Career giving him both Shooting and Tactics, so he'd crush one of these guys most likely). They're most dangerous when they've got buddies; you usually need your best fighter or a couple other characters ganging up on one of these, and that keeps them busy and unable to deal with the Typicals/Elites backing up the miniboss. Supernauts follow the same pattern and are meant to be goddamn terrifying, having d12 in everything, d12 armor dice, and 2 ranks of Toughness. Personally, I never use direct Supernauts because if I want someone who is going to take the entire party to beat, I'm usually making that person the main villain of the adventure and I'm going to plot them out fully rather than using a simplified character plan for them. You also get a bunch of upgrade packages you can add to these templates, plus suggestions for what that could represent in fluff. Hordes get the 'don't get panicked by Overkills' Gift and a Gift to help them make outnumbering people count more, etc. There's even a specific 'make this guy into a boss who doesn't need allies' package, the Solo. The whole thing is a nice way to do simple sapient enemies and customize them on the fly when you just want to shoot some space pirates. I'm partial to making the actual major named characters myself and trying to give them more mechanical gimmicks, because it's a fun way to get to play around with character building and make memorable personalities for the players to have duels with. Big enemies are also a great place to play with those 'specific faction gifts' from the back of the book; the elite super-rhagia gene-troopers jumping your players at a dramatic moment aren't just Elite Typicals, they're PORTIAS, with the full Portia Dual Attack special move and two shotguns blazing! That kind of thing. There's also a huge pile of Monster Gifts that you can use to build scary space monsters. These can be really nasty, and generally aren't available to players. You can put them on your Leitmotif magic pet if you're a powerful Conductor, and if you choose to be a Mutant (which is its own big mechanical/RP mess. I really don't like the implementation of Mutants: You get a nasty +1 damage to all attacks that hit you but +d8 to Soak rolls per mutation and it's just weird) you might have access to these. They're generally quite powerful! These are everything from various energy ray attacks, to psychic powers, to regeneration, to breathing in space. Using these, you can build almost any of the space monsters in the actual Bestiary, who exist primarily to give you little bits of fluff and some examples of how to use these Gift rules. That's right, every single monster in the bestiary is built out of the components that they give you. You could build them all yourself out of the templates, Gifts, etc provided in this section. The decision to give bad guys all the same die type is done to make them easier to run. Instead of trying to remember which dice to roll for each random nameless enemy, you just go 'Oh, they're Typical, and they have X things giving them a bonus die here, so they roll Xd6 dice'. It also means that outside of the biggest possible enemies, any player character who can claim a d12 has a chance of beating any enemy outside of major campaign villains on any individual test. In practice I'm usually comfortable with major foes having variable dice instead, but this definitely works better for when you just need 8 space pirates or rent-a-cops or a squad of killbots. In all places in the Bestiary/monster building rules, the book urges you not to make enemies so complex that they're difficult to run. It's okay for the PCs to be complicated, they're the stars, but space cop #78 shouldn't send you scrambling through 8 special rules, nor should Space Bear. Not unless Space Bear is really important, and even then, you should be certain Space Bear's complexity doesn't get in the way of focusing on the PCs. Next Time: Fluff! Example planets! A chance to talk about the fluff-crunch balance and what it means for design!
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Jan 17, 2019 18:44
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By popular demand posted:They should have made a D&D line of Barbies. Not going to lie, little girl me would've been all over this - knight princesses are better than plain ol' princesses. But yeah a lot of the licensing decisions were odd.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:52
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Bieeanshee posted:The Silver Snail and Avro Arrow references made me smile. Ramon Perez is Canadian and it shows. I did a bit of a search trying to find if there were other licensed woodburning sets and if this really was all that unusual for the time - like, were there a lot of woodburning kits based on various properties? The only one I could find was a G.I. Joe woodburning kit, though, and D&D kept popping up- so I guess it really was unusual.
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Jan 17, 2019 19:16
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Consoles didn't explode in TOS except for once or twice when the ship had actually been severely damaged. TNG is when consoles started to blow all the time. (Technically it was Wrath of Khan that started the trend, but it was still severe structural damage and direct hits to the bridge in that battle)
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Jan 17, 2019 19:41
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Did D&D even have any “famous fantasy figures” at this point?
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Jan 17, 2019 19:45
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Deptfordx posted:Is that the weirdest or was there even more improbable stuff? I had a D&D Shrinky Dinks kit, and the local Toys R Us sold Nerds-sized boxes of D&D branded candy, with assorted critter stats printed on the back.
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Jan 17, 2019 20:27
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DalaranJ posted:Did D&D even have any “famous fantasy figures” at this point? Not sure how you could forget stone-cold classics like DREX™ Evil Barbarian and his new Battle-Matic™ Action.   e: The woodburning kit doesn't have any characters labeled, but obviously you can recognize the iconic characters on sight, such as the old wizard with a beard and the old wizard with a beard. 
Tulul fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Jan 17, 2019 |
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Jan 17, 2019 20:47
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Found it! TSR actually bought a needlepoint company at the behest of Kevin Blume's wife. Lorraine Williams is the Vince Russo of D&D. She gets blamed for all kinds of poo poo that didn't happen or happened before she got there. 
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Jan 17, 2019 20:48
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Myriad Song A Thousand Worlds The example worlds are explicitly examples, nothing more. They're good, and most of them would be fun to set an adventure on, but they're there as an example of how to build worlds and a few plot hooks, not a definitive setting. They do bring some more interesting implicit fluff for the factions, though. For instance, the Concord protects most of its actual worlds/megastations with enormous arrays of nuclear weapons, which is kind of amusing for people who are the Space Union of Concerned Space Scientists most of the time. There's also some good basic advice on structuring plot hooks, in addition to the planetary plot hooks. "Start with a mystery or problem, entice the players with a reward or interesting personality, and then have some extra complications and questions for the adventure to bring up." I could go into a lot of detail about the planets, but again, they're there as examples and starters to help you come up with your own planets. Instead, I'd like to take this time to talk about the fluff-crunch balance of Myriad Song and why I find it interesting, but also why I'd say it's one of the bigger challenges for Hosting the game. Myriad Song is the first book in a new IP, set in a colorful and older genre of science fantasy. Normally, you'd expect such a book to be brimming with fluff as the authors try to capture something I heard of at a con once called the 'textbook effect', where players and readers and authors are often interested in writing a huge quantity of made up history. When done well (and specifically in a way that suggests plot hooks), that kind of thing can be really fun, but we all know how often that results in 40-50 pages of the thousand year reign of the Azurians and how they fought the Xardaxians for the fate of Mundus and no-one goddamn cares because it's a parade of made up nonsense worlds and dry psuedo-history. Or where every goddamn setting problem already has a helpful heroic NPC with a big backstory already handling it. You could say Myriad Song averts that because it has so goddamn many rules to get through that it doesn't have space for fluff, but I don't think that's the case at all. After All, Ironclaw had a lot of interesting history and fluff about the 4 Great Houses And Also The Celtic Wolf Guys. Instead, I think Myriad Song's light fluff is completely intentional. Take the Solar Creed. What do we know about the Solar Creed? We know how they reacted to the Syndics leaving, the big event that drives a lot of the setting's factions. We know roughly that they're authoritarian, but ambiguous; they really do keep their promises to provide for everyone if you do what you're told and they generally try to spread their Creed by disaster relief and missionary work rather than forcing people to join them via threat of orbital bombardment. We know they like rocket-fuel flamers, and that they have an elite warrior class called Heliotropes. We get a Career for Heliotropes later, in the optional/NPC Careers, and they're interesting: They're fighters, yes, and they have Shooting. But they also have Presence and Questioning, and are defined by the Gifts of their Legal Authority and their Heliotrope Loadout. Their armor specifically provides decent (2 dice) combat armor and a bonus to scaring people and doing police work. They're as focused on being charismatic and standing out as they are on actually fighting people. You can draw your own inferences about their organization from those mechanics, but the book isn't going to tell you if they're crazy 'BURN THE HERETIC AND THE DEVIANT INDIVIDUALIST!' jackboots or if they're meant to be the vanguard space paladins of the Creed, leading by example and showing people what the new future should be. That's up to your game. This is generally true of all the aesthetics and details of Myriad Song. The setting is designed as a big writing prompt, without a clear setting villain or hero. This is because the setting villain is whoever you've made it in your campaign, and the setting hero is your PC party. It's interesting to see the book's definition of Space Opera: It doesn't define it by genre signifiers like giant space fleets and epic scale, it defines it by the way your story will be driven by the personal interactions and goals of larger than life characters. Your group is going to have to do a lot of the legwork when designing your campaign and the planets and places you're going to adventure across. This can be a significant challenge and takes a fair amount of work and investment, make no mistake, and it's something anyone buying the book ought to be aware of. The setting material is evocative and interesting, but it's there to get you started and you're going to end up putting in some time to design your game. The reason I think this is a good thing here, where I kind of panned it in 40kRP, is because of two things. One, this is a new IP that doesn't have to deal with the kludge of 30 years of dozens of authors writing about how the big blue guy with the shoulder pads hates the big red guy with the shoulder pads but they're too evenly matched to ever successfully punch one another, so there's a lot more room to fill things in. Two, what's there works with you instead of against you. I've been comparing this game to 40kRP a lot in my head as I've been writing this, because they're in a similar place. Weird space opera with a lot of crunch and gear rules, plus a setting where you're going to have to do most of the work of filling in the details yourself. The difference is there's nothing as omnipresent or oppressive (Oppressive in the sense of every story written in that setting tends to be about them, not as in they're crazed space nazis) as the Goddamn Imperium of Man. Also the rules actually work. But what I mean when I say it works with you is, the writing prompts are explicitly written as prompts. Why did the Syndics leave? Don't know, up to you. You know how people reacted to it, and that forms enough of a basis to have factions to work with, but they're also loose enough to be interpreted in ways that a more 'filled in' setting wouldn't be. There's also no 'main' faction in Myriad Song, and no main species. You don't have to delete wide swaths of what's there or 'work around it' to change things. You even get the full rules guidelines on how the authors designed Careers and Legacies, with suggestions for how to make your own; there are way more than the base playable species living in the Myriad Worlds. By keeping things implied and open, you have a lot more freedom to get where you want to go without having to toss out or change a lot of what's there. There's much more room to invent rather than needing to alter, and things were written that way on purpose. You start with an opening hook (The Gods who oppressed and ruled the galaxy are gone) and then some basics of how people reacted to that hook. I also adore that the setting isn't stagnant like many space opera settings; there are active plot hooks about people eagerly trying to design non-Xenharmonic FTL, or working on the first digital computers, or studying all the thousand and one things the Syndics forbid them to study. Your PCs can be a part of inventing wholly new things that the old Gods never allowed anyone, rather than spending the whole game rummaging about the ruins of a 'golden age'. It is not a setting about maintaining an eternal status quo. You're going to have to do a lot of work in writing for this game, but the work is rewarding to do, the hooks are interesting and creative, and what's there already is a solid and colorful guideline. The sheer variety of mechanically viable character concepts also helps. You can be a slave laborer from an AMG colony who discovers they're the last scion to a lost Syndicate Dynasty and their genes will unlock fantastic secrets. You can be a cheerfully mercenary Troodon, because sometimes playing to type is actually fun. You can be an Apparat Kill-Bot designed to learn Xenharmonics who had his mind expanded by contact with a gentle guru of metal, and who now seeks to free the whole galaxy through music. You can be a shape-shifting sapient space bush on the run from the drug smugglers who built you by mistake, trying to run a small transport company on a backwater ocean planet and occasionally having shootouts with the mafia. By allowing a wide variety of PCs that are mechanically effective, and a wide variety of interpretations of an interesting set of setting hooks, the setting does what it can to prompt you filling in all those blanks it left you. Next Time: GM Advice and Variant Rules Night10194 fucked around with this message at 20:54 on Jan 17, 2019 |
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Jan 17, 2019 20:48
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DalaranJ posted:Did D&D even have any “famous fantasy figures” at this point?
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Jan 17, 2019 20:53
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 Rifts World Book 20: Canada, Part 3 - "In the most extreme cases the victim may actually lose extremities (typically amputated to prevent gangrenous infection): toes (reduce speed by 30%, -20 to all skills requiring balance), fingers (-10% to skill performance and takes 50% longer to perform properly), nose (reduce P.B. by 50%), or ears (reduce P.B. by 10%), sometimes even a hand, arm or leg." Climates in Canada Five pages of maps detailing weather statistics for different regions of Canada. No way am I covering this sort of thing: Rifts World Book 20: Canada posted:Annual Snowfall: 48-112 inches (120-280 cm; roughly 4-9 feet/1.2 to 2.7 m), with an average maximum depth of 20-30 inches (50-75 cm). 30-50% more in the northeast. Snow covers the ground for about 100-120 days in the southern half, and 200-250 in the north. Wiki if you gotta.  It's time for some random stinkeye. Dangers of the Cold By Eric Thompson & Kevin Siembieda So, now we get detailed rules for surviving in the cold. Russia was safe from the scourge of detailed frostbite rulings, but not here! We get discussions of exhaustion and hypothermia, and about two full pages of rules for hypothermia. Weirdly, it doesn't give any times for how long you might survive in the cold, so despite having detailed penalties for six temperature thresholds, it's up to the GM to figure out how to apply it. Double weirdly, it does have very specific times for how long it takes to suffer from it when immersed in cold water or otherwise soaked. PCs get about twice as long as NPCs, with a shockingly generous average of 40 minutes. We also get a long, long set of details on first aid for hypothermia, but there's not much in the way of game details other than the fact getting dunked in cold water requires a "save vs Insanity or Horror Factor" to keep from panicking... which, uh, make up your mind there, because that can really affect the odds for some characters. "Save vs coma/death may be required." So there's a lot of handwaving involved. Magic or psionics can be used to help combat hypothermia, but other than the fact it quarters the recovery time, details are sparse. Similarly, we get a half-page of frostbite with no details as to how quickly it occurs, just the penalties involved and treatment. Snow blindness gets about another half-page, but at least gives details that it takes "2d6 hours after exposure". Once again, we get some penalities and recovery, and it can be avoided with eye protection. Then we get some exciting new saving throws! They're doubly exciting because no preexisting material has been written with them in mind, meaning most characters won't get much in the way of bonuses against them (save attribute bonuses if mentioned).
  How to fill space, the Siembieda way: take illustration, cut a part out of it, then paste that little part in several pages later. Traveling in Snow & Ice Rules for avalanches are more straightforward, but for some reason it inflicts damage directly to H.P. That means most characters below 5th level or so are likely to auto-die unless armored or in a vehicle (in which case it's "only" 2d6 H.P.). Also snow inflicts mega-damage. Yep, a tank can be crushed to a literal pancake by snow. No saving throws or rolls to avoid an avalanche, you're just hosed. Snow pits follow, getting stuck in deep snow, blah blah blah, litany of penalities for traveling through snow or active winter weather, vehicles, getting vehicles stuck, traveling on ice, details on riding animals, etc. Environmental armor can help a lot, but- Rifts World Book 20: Canada posted:Wearing traditional chain mail or plate armor is impossible (it's too heavy, cold and uncomfortable), and even wearing modern non-environmental armor only adds to the bulk and weight of the garments one must wear to stay warm. I do not think that word means what you think it means.  This looks pretty cool and... it's not in this book. Dammit, Palladium! Fury beetles are becoming more common as riding animals but aren't great in the deep North due to their size and aversion to severe cold weather. Similarly, riding dinosaurs aren't really suited for Canada at all, so why are they coming up? Well, I guess they're cool enough to include just because. Rules for hoverbikes seizing up follow, and... then, weirdly, a long diatribe on all the drawbacks of flying. I can only guess this is there the same reason the Yucatan (of Rifts World Book 1: Vampire Kingdoms) has a weird dimensional flooey that prevents flight- the authors want hard-bitten survival adventures and your ability to jump on your pegasus or SAMAS ruins that. Finally, we have something actually weird and fantastic in the form of demon storms that appear around ley lines, where it rains things like stones or frogs, and a few demons or (ugh) deevils show up. In the arctic these can be Russian demons because I guess they like the pole and get lost. After that, we get more weather; thunderstorms, the fact flash floods inflict mega-damage (you're really stretching, authors), mud slides, lightning storms, tornadoes, etc. Lastly, we finish with: Winter Sports Skills Okay, Ice Skating and Snow Skiing skills, I guess that's fair. It'd be more useful for a game with definitive movement or maneuvering to detail, but. Figure Skating, though? Pro Hockey Skating? You serious? Cross-Country Skiing? Downhill Speed Skiing/Slalom? Mother loving Snowboarding and Jump Skiing? What is this, Erin Tarn and Karl Prosek at the 2300 Olympics? ... also we get some vehicle skills reprinted. I mean, yeah, it's rad to shoot your particle beam cannon from a snowboard, but we have no real idea what snowboards might do, game-wise. Next: Nowheresville.
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Jan 18, 2019 05:33
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My O.C.C. gives me 13% in Curling.
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Jan 18, 2019 05:38
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God if I had anything even remotely resembling spare time I would do a Deluxe Recon F&F so hard. It'd be epic. I have opinions about that game.
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Jan 18, 2019 07:53
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Recon is a fascinating game considering when it came out, it always felt to me to at least have some interesting design for its time, though it's still a sloppy mess in a lot of places (as is typical of most games of its era). I've never gotten to see the original version, so I don't know how much of that is owed to the game originally or was introduced by Palladium. The lineage between it and Palladium's skill system seems pretty clear to me, but at least Recon had some degree of focus and purpose to its long skill list. As for the actual setting and "accuracy", you'd be worlds ahead of me on evaluating that. Certainly, I haven't looked too closely at that in ages, But having multiple pages of in-setting fiction of a man being instructed on how to build a foxhole was certainly a thing.
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Jan 18, 2019 08:09
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Honestly, it's not about accuracy mostly. There's some Deeply Dumb Rule Stuff, but mostly its the game's Extremely Political Apoliticalness which would be the target of most of my ire.
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Jan 18, 2019 08:10
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That's definitely fair, I always felt that it's attempts to be a Vietnam Game That Is Totally Not Related To Real History about as disingenuous as "our Gypsies aren't based off any real-world minority!"
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Jan 18, 2019 08:13
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.... thanks for the nervous reminder that i need to get back on my hunt for Roma sensitivity readers for Flying Circus...
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Jan 18, 2019 08:17
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Who is Loren Coleman? I did a quick google and it appears to be a crypto-zoologist?
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Jan 18, 2019 14:36
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What? No rules for brewing beer? I cannot be the post-apocalyptic Bob or Doug McKenzie? Kevin, I am shattered.
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Jan 18, 2019 15:04
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 Emerald Empire is the first released supplement for FFG's line of Legend of the Five Rings books. I covered the beta way back when it came out, and...well, the mechanics are all pretty similar to what they were then. Some tweaks, dueling got redone some, some stuff got renamed (strife explosions are now called something else and are technically optional, but if you don't have one when you're full up you get huge penalties). But now we get to see in detail their take on the setting, and it is...honestly, pretty impressive. For example, this book is the first time Legend of the Five Rings has ever actually detailed a lot of the stuff that goes into playable day-to-day of the Empire, such as how shrines are actually treated or what castles are really like. The book is divided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 is about castles and palaces, both as forts and as political centers, and also discusses diplomacy and war. Chapter 2 is about cities and towns and their role in trade, as well as harbors, ports, crime and law. Chapter 3 covers villages and farms, roads, rivers and the interaction of the Empire's classes of peasant and samurai. Chapter 4 is about Rokugani religion, shrines and magic. Chapter 5 covers the teachings of Shinsei, the lives of monks and priests, and the role of temples and monasteries. Chapter 6 is about the wild lands, the mines and logging villages and other rural areas. Chapter 7 is new mechanics - the Imperial Family's schools, playable kitsune shapeshifters, playable Kolat agents and new titles, mainly. But first, let's talk about the history. It is presented as a text written by Imperial Scribe and historian Miya Chinatsu, and it is explicitly the official Imperial History, which is written expressly from a Rokugani perspective and almost certainly does not line up with the histories kept by, say, the Yobanjin, foreigners or even secret groups within the Empire itself. But hey, let's see what the timeline is now. In the beginning, there was Nothing. Nothing is not even Void, because the Void does not change and cannot change. The Nothing, however, eventually realized it was alone, and in realizing it, the Nothing became afraid, which made one third of the world. Then, it longed for companionship, and in so doing, it made the second third. At last, it realized what it had done, regretting its fear and longing, and so created the final third. When this was done, the Nothing was no more, because the world had taken its place. Of course, in that time it had neither form nor solidity, being like a dark fluid swirling in chaos. Eventually, the lighter parts separated out, becoming hte Heavens, while the heavier parts became the earth. From this came the Three Nameless Gods, who saw that while Heaven and earth formed, all within was as yet wild and unshaped. They discussed, and they made two gods, sent forth to give shape to the world. These gods thought of how this could be done, and they bowed, kissed the earth and named it. From this came life - new gods, new beasts. Suijin, lord of the oceans. Kaze-no-Kami, the god of wind. The Four Cardinal Winds, the Elemental Dragons. More. The two gods also gained names - the man Onnotangu, who was the moon, and the woman Amaterasu, who was the sun. They were attended by the shizoku, the tribe of gods, and below them the mazoku, the underworld demons, toiled to oversee what few dead souls existed. At this time, no humans existed. Instead, there were the Five Ancient Races - the tengu, the kitsu, the ningyo, the trolls and the zokujin. Little is known of such ancient times, of course. While the last of the Kitsu married into the Lion Clan, if he gave them any histories of his people the Lion have not shared them. What is known is primarily stories recorded by the granddaughter of Tsumaru, the ningyo wife of the Kami Shiba. The Unicorns claim that after the Five Ancient Races came another race, snakelike, which dwelled in the lands that would become Rokugan, based on the existence of statues within the Shinomen Forest that resemble snakes with human features. However, nothing is known of the truth of this. As time passed, Onnotangu and Amaterasu had nine children, the Kami. As they grew, Onnotangu saw their strength, empowered by both his own blood and that of Amaterasu, and began to fear that they would one day usurp him. He became envious and fearful, and decided he would prevent this by devouring his own children. Amaterasu wept over this, her tears falling to the earth to form salty pools. However, she would not fight her husband directly, so she found a different solution. Each time Onnotangu swallowed a child, she would give him a cup of sake containing a single drop of poison. By the time he reached the youngest child, Hantei, he was so addled by the poison that Amaterasu was able to swap the child for a stone. At last, Onnotangu was satisfied and went to sleep. Amaterasu smuggled Hantei out, hiding him and teaching him of honor and war and strength. When he had learned all he could, she gave him a sword of starlight and sent him to rescue his brothers and sisters. Onnotangu was barely awakening when Hantei arrived, and the two began to fight. The duel was long, and Hantei was able to avoid his father's blows while striking his own heavily. Onnotangu's blood fell to the earth, landing in the pools of tears Amaterasu had wept. From each pool emerged two humans, and humanity is born of the Sun's tears and the Moon's blood. At last, Hantei found a chance, carving open Onnotangu's stomach and freeing his siblings. The last of them, Fu Leng, was caught by his father as he fell, but Hantei cut off his father's own hand, causing Fu Leng to fall to earth as had all the others. Fu Leng grabbed Hantei in a panic as he fell, and so all the Kami tumbled from the Heavens. However, Fu Leng landed far from the others - Hantei, Akodo, Doji, Hida, Togashi, Shinjo and the twins Shiba and Bayushi. None knew where he fell. Having landed on earth, the Kami were shocked to find that they had become mortal, able to die. But even more, they were amazed by humanity, which was pitiable and weak despite the nature of its birth. In this dawning age, humans lived in scattered tribes, like the Yobanjin do, and worshipped the Fortunes, who are the gods of human labor. They lived in tiny villages and small towns, making crude pots and bronze weapons. They were barely able to farm wild grains or beans, and wore uncured hide and woven grass. However, they had no letters, no art, no dye. They relied on word of mouth and wild drums. Raiding was common, without strategy or honor. The Kami decided that each of them would travel the land and judge it. Because all eight of the Kami were beautiful and wise and strong, they always gained attention where they went, and soon each had many followers seeking to learn from them. The Kami taught the arts of writing, calligraphy, smithing, making instruments and more. They taught honor and loyalty. (Some say a tenth Kami existed, called Ryoshun, but he died in the stomach of Onnotangu, and many claim he fell to the Underworld, where he serves or helps the Fortune of Death. Others say this is blasphemy, worthy of death.) In the year recorded as 5 Imperial Calendar, the Kami returned to the place they had fallen, deciding that humans had great worth, and so must be organized and governed, to bring wisdom. Thus, they would hold a tournament to see who would lead. Of the Kami, Togashi refused to participate, for it is said that with his immense wisdom, he saw that Hantei would inevitably win, and saw no point. (Hantei did, indeed, win.) Naming Hantei Emperor, the Kami then set about to forge an empire. All of them but Hantei formed clans made of their followers, and Hantei granted land to each, where the Kami settled and taught the ways of Bushido, teaching many warriors to make the land safe, and to fight those foolish humans who did not understand the blessings of the Kami and resisted their rule. Others learned the arts and craftwork, especially those that served Doji, and made many things of beauty. Towns grew to cities, roads were made, and the Emperor chose as his home the very hill upon which the Kami had fallen, which is now the site of the capital, Otosan Uchi. Next time: Fu Leng returns.
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Jan 18, 2019 16:22
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Myriad Song Coda So, Hosting a Game is a section of general advice for running Myriad Song. I always find GMing advice chapters interesting, because they tell you some of what the designers thought they needed to convey to someone writing for their setting/game. They start with the Theme: Myriad Song is a game about rebirth, reconstruction, and renewal. You are living in the aftermath of a bloody and terrible Empire ruled by impossible space Gods, but its fall is 100 years away from where you are now. The worst of the collapse is over, but it still left behind space tyrants and new governments fighting over what happens next. There are many mysteries left behind by their departure, and you are the kind of people who either solve those mysteries, or help new worlds and new orders come to life from the ashes of the Syndicate. In general, MS is built on the assumption the players will eventually overcome their challenges and find their way to a happier ending. It's an optimistic sci-fi setting where people are still inventing things, people are still building things, people are trying to overcome the limitations imposed by the Old Empire, etc. There's plenty of evil out there, and weird space monsters and terrifying plots, but you're playing a Space Opera: You're the kind of people who overcome these things and shift the status quo for the better. It's actually really nice to see a game that has a default assumption that you'll change the status quo, rather than just defend the one that exists. I also really appreciate the general sense that the people of the Myriad aren't just stuck clinging to an 'ancient Golden Age', because A: The age wasn't really golden, it was a space tyranny and B: The 'Golden Age' was in living memory for some people of the setting. The idea to set it 100 years after the Syndics disappeared rather than 10,000 or whatever like you normally get in these settings was inspired; you still have time for whole societies to form and collapse in the wake of the Syndics vanishing, but there's still plenty of memory of what they were like and what the old Empire was. One of the biggest pieces of advice in the book is KEEP THINGS PERSONAL. This is a Space Opera. You might be involved in a clash of enormous battleships or something, but it is in-genre and appropriate for the heroes to fight their way through to the bridge of the enemy ship and personally duel the enemy admiral and their command team. It is also in-genre for that admiral to get away, shaking his fist and swearing revenge, and come back later with more cybernetics. This is why everyone important has Combat Save: It's so you can have direct, personal, even violent confrontations between the protagonists and villains without the risk that your major campaign villain gets blown away in one lucky magnum hit. This is a truce of genre conventions between the players and the Host; the players are afforded the same courtesy, and so should expect their villains to get away to fight again another day from time to time the same way PCs do. This is about the clash of personalities, goals, and hopes for the post-Syndic world. You shouldn't have to keep villains and heroes separated from one another for fear of every situation turning lethal between them. Another nice bit of advice is to know yourself and your audience: If you're excited about the story you're writing as the Host, you'll have a much easier time putting in the work. But it won't matter if your audience doesn't like it. Pick up on their cues. Use the debriefing. Communicate honestly. Set the tone and some of the conventions to something you can both agree on. If they love puzzles and exploration, and you prefer lots of diving through windows firing two guns at once, work together to create a story where both things happen and compliment one another. Write motivations for your villains. Use things like your players' Mottos to know what their characters want to do and why. When you write motivations, remember that one of them should usually be 'survive'. Most people don't want to die, and this system is practically designed to help you portray that better. Remember to make things happen because people make choices to make them happen. Even if that Remanence villain gives a big speech about how he 'has' to do what he's doing for the sake of Order, remember that he made a lot of choices (and probably has a lot of stakes and benefits in it for himself) to get to that point. Their assumption for the average plot is that the antagonists would succeed if not for the player characters. This sets up situations where the players are pro-active; they choose to get involved. Focusing things on the players' choice to get involved is the book's idea of what's good for gaming plots, specifically; the whole advantage of a role-playing game relative to something like a cRPG or a novel is you get to make choices about what happens. I actually really enjoy this section's focus on the specifics of what makes for good interactive storytelling; tropes and ideas that work in novels don't necessarily work in RPG plotting, after all. Once people have decided their goals are in conflict and they've committed to opposing one another, your plot can flow more naturally from there. I also appreciate the general way the book is written as if it's someone's first RPG, or first GMing advice section. You can't assume your audience has seen lots of RPGs in the past, and these books are teaching tools and instructional manuals as much as they are setting books. I appreciate an involved approach to pedagogy in the way the book is written. There's also the same section on dealing with players who potentially cause issues that's been in pretty much every Sanguine game. The Author who wants to take over the story, who needs to be gently encouraged to let the others have time in the spotlight even as you try to encourage them to keep contributing. The Professional who wants to be the best at their schtick. They're best solved by letting them do so, but making sure it's only a part of the story rather than writing the entire story around them. If you've got a master Conductor who wants to be the best navigator in the galaxy, let them find amazing things and the others explore them together. If you have a master martial artist who loves facing strong enemies, add in colorful enemies to duel occasionally to draw attention while the others sneak into the mansion. Etc. Don't let the Professional become a Decker Problem, but let them do the thing they're excited about sometimes and show off just how good they are. They want to. If you have someone who knows the rules really well and takes great pride in it, be a little more careful changing the rules. Let them help you with rules questions. The actual Rules Lawyer is the most hated of all players for the writers, I think. There's going to be a lot on them and on 'power gaming' (as opposed to the Professional) in these sections and it stood out to me. I suspect this is partly because the system is set up to make it so characters who would be 'suboptimal' in a lot of other games are viable, since players are (by genre convention) meant to be broadly competent, but someone who really focuses in on one thing can be insanely good at it, too. I suspect part of the reason for the experiment in making Gifts very goal driven was to prevent 'I take 3 ranks of Improved Armor, Veteran, Toughness, Die-Hard, and Resolve. COME AT ME.' because it's really clear the game isn't intended to be about just being incredibly good at killing people. They want to enable storylines like 'discover you're a Conductor all along and your hard-bitten mercenary learns about the song of the universe' and other things that make you branch out based on life experience. The Professional can be fine because a story about a great pilot or martial artist or whatever is in genre and still a story. The thing the writers seem to have a vendetta against is the player who takes abilities because they're seen as a 'required build', I think. Someone who thinks every PC should have X not because they're excited to use X but because they think X is the most powerful ability. Anyway, the way they define a Rules Lawyer is someone who knows the rules really well, but instead of trying to help make sure things go 'correctly' like the first example, they want to use them to make sure they win. The issue with the Rules Lawyer isn't so much that they cheat, but that they see the game as adversarial rather than cooperative, which pushes things away from the Host and players collaborating to tell a fun story. I actually think this is a fairly insightful view of what makes that player a problem player, and as noted elsewhere in the thread, their solution to minimize rules lawyering is to make the game more about remembering your bonuses than 'forgetting' your penalties. The Butcher, who measures success in game via kill count, is also potentially a problem given the game's focus on not slaughtering goddamn everyone you fight. More importantly, such players are often bored outside of combat and can build PCs who don't do anything but combat, locking themselves into a Decker Problem of their own making. The advice is the same as always: Try to talk it over with them and find things they'd be excited or interested to do outside fighting. The Monomaniac likes your game too much. You need to gently encourage them not to be quite so excited and not to take over the game. Finally, if you have a player who is often absent, find out why. If they're just busy, write around their PC being absent often. If they're just not interested, talk over what would get them interested, or possibly suggest they drop. All in all, the focus on communication and finding ways to involve people and compromise between tastes is good. As is the encouragement to have regular communication about how the game is going and what people would be excited to do, and the general advice on making this a collaborative affair. It's good to encourage GMs not to see the position as being lord and master of the gaming table, but also to emphasize that they're often going to have to be arbitrator. There's also a lot of decent advice about how to narrate multiple successes, when to roll and when not to, how to use the Rote rules to speed up NPC actions and move scenes along, and a refrain of 'Let the players think of how to use their abilities here.' Let them propose what they'll attempt and what dice it will use. Players should be rewarded for coming up with ways to apply their strengths to problems. Especially when giving one another assistance. Let one player make a Will+Presence test to have their pop idol get a security guard to beg for their autograph while the party thief counts that as an assist on their Evasion+Speed to sneak past. Let them try unusual skill and trait combinations for tasks. Encourage them to find ways to use their resources and get involved in situations. If they're using multiple skills on one roll, raise the stakes by letting the enemy do so, too; if someone is using Deceit+Negotiate+Mind to lie and trick their way through a talk, let the enemy include Questioning as well as Negotiate (And suffer for it if they don't have Questioning). Combat gets its own advice section that has one bit that really stands out: An acknowledgement that getting players to run away or surrender is really loving hard. Mechanics like Panic, or Combat Save, are designed to give players time or impetus to run from time to time. The problem is players tend to think losing a fight is a failure, or assume that surrendering will get them killed. The whole party becoming Panicked means a fight will almost certainly end in favor of their enemies, the same way it would have if they'd Panicked all surviving foes. The book advises warning players when they're running out of extra saves; they don't have their narrative shield anymore and are suddenly very mortal, and might consider backing off. I think they would have been well served to advise you give players an out, too. Give them an escape route they could take. Or condition the expectation that if they're captured, it will lead to an escape sequence instead of an execution. They want fights to have sensible reasons to start, and stop, and they want them to stop without everyone dying on both sides. I appreciate the goal of making it possible to lose fights without dying as the PCs, though getting players to give up is still really goddamn hard. You can change the game and its rules, obviously. You shouldn't need to (and honestly, you don't. The rules are well put together and outside of my objections with a possibly overweening focus on Goals in advancement, they work well in play), but you can. Just be careful you do it with the consent of the players, and that you work together towards rules you'll find enjoyable and that benefit your story. That leads me to the bad part of the appendices. The Variant Rules. The stuff on creating Legacies and Careers is good; explaining the design logic of the 'canon' ones is a good idea, as is working to enable players doing that kind of thing themselves. The variant rule for point-buying characters is a little meh, because by their own admission it can be used to create crazily min-maxed characters, but I'd be more worried about it creating less useful ones. There's a lot of moving parts in this system and the relative guidance of normal character creation does a good job ensuring you make someone who is Good At Things and who can participate in plots. The Variant Power Levels rule is solid, giving a wide variety of starting levels of stats and Gifts and Skill Marks in case you want to play higher or lower power PCs, along with the effective EXP boost each represents. I'm not at all fond of the Variant Rule for Flaws. You make up a Flaw. If your Flaw causes you trouble (which it does at Host discretion), you get +1 EXP for the session. You can have up to 6 Flaws, and you can remove Flaws easily. This means the player who takes up more narrative space (and sets back the party more often) gets personal benefits for it, if they survive. I know this is a throwaway one or two paragraph rules variant, but this is not a good implementation of this kind of subsystem, especially with the relatively low rate of free-EXP gain as written. There are also rules for Individual Initiative, which is fine, but might make the complex combat system much harsher on you. I do like the rule for speeding up combat and movement when you're at very long range, as combats beyond 30m if you don't have people with Rondo can be kind of awkward in the base system; you let people move further and take more actions until they've closed with one another. The variant rules that annoy me by existing are the Something Always Happens rule (Any damage result will inflict a new damage result on someone) because it suddenly interferes with some of the subsystems, renders some Gifts useless, and is generally not thought out how it will interact with the system as it exists, and the Reality Modeling set of variants. Look, I know. There'll be demand to cut out the space wizards from any sci-fi RPG. I know this is a throwaway 'variant rule' set for people who want to play Traveler in Cardinal or something, or to placate the group that talks about 'verisimilitude'. But 'rip out all Xenharmonics from the setting' feels like a weird suggestion when it's the core of the setting's FTL system. Especially as, well, this is sci-fi; we're pretending we can travel faster than light and making all kinds of assumptions just to have easy space travel and stellar colonization as it is. There's also a suggestion to disallow 'dodging bullets' that literally just makes it easier to shoot people because they can't active Dodge against guns. A 'realistic' rule that makes it vastly easier to shoot someone with small arms in a chaotic gunfight isn't realistic at all. Where's my 'realistic' rule for pinning people down with automatic fire and then calling in artillery or grenading them (it's in Sanguine's version of Albedo, that's where it is). All 'no-one dodges bullets' would accomplish is making people play gun characters instead of melee fighters, all the time. Similar for 'drop all the Plot gifts and Save Gifts'. The damage system is specifically built on the idea that important characters take multiple deathblows to prevent anticlimax and provide room for a fight to develop a narrative. I know, these are throwaway variant rules, but it's just kind of sad to see a short section of 'just throw out most of the underlying design of the game, without considering what this will do to balance'. The main game works great, at least. I should also mention, I've been unsure where to put this, but one of the weaknesses of this book in general is the art just isn't very good. This has long been a problem with Sanguine's games; it doesn't bother me that much, outside of really egregious examples like IC1e, but there's just no real sense of tone to the art. Most of it is blandly cartoony, and there isn't a huge amount of it anyway, but it's just not a major strength of the book. And so that's Myriad Song. I'm actually quite glad to hear it wasn't a commercial failure like I feared; it's a fascinating game that has a really unique and fun sci-fantasy setup, a good attitude towards players and GMing, and a lot of good writing prompts. It's well written and clear, even though it's complicated as hell, and the actual rules are well designed and mostly well balanced. There's a wide variety of mechanically viable character types, there's lot of mechanical variety in equipment, there are even some real innovations like the Outfit system replacing the dozens of lovely tools no-one ever pays attention to in RPG equipment sections. If you want to have colorful space opera adventures and you're willing to do some mechanical and narrative legwork, Myriad Song is a good option for the 'good' kind of crunchy game, where the mechanics help you tell the story and give you meaningful decisions to make. Next Time: The first Cardinal Game
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Jan 18, 2019 16:49
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Night10194 posted:I should also mention, I've been unsure where to put this, but one of the weaknesses of this book in general is the art just isn't very good. This has long been a problem with Sanguine's games; it doesn't bother me that much, outside of really egregious examples like IC1e, but there's just no real sense of tone to the art. Most of it is blandly cartoony, and there isn't a huge amount of it anyway, but it's just not a major strength of the book.  This is a deep cut. We invested enormous effort and funds in to the art direction for Myriad Song, and hired a long list of pretty storied artists, so hearing that it fell flat completely is taking me aback. Can you elaborate on this criticism a bit?
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Jan 18, 2019 17:28
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RiotGearEpsilon posted:
I'm not a very visual person in general and I'm terrible at art criticism, it's more that it doesn't seem to hang together. Like, take the intro comic. The intro comic has a very, very different look to most of the art in the book. All of the art feels very different to itself, so to speak. There's no sense of cohesion to it and it doesn't do much for setting the tone of the setting. In one picture, Towsers (and Rhagia) are generic furries. In another, the Towser are tiny terrier men and the Rhagia are huge spiders towering over everyone. I know that's also part of how Rhagia are supposed to be, but it's still just the jarring and there's a constant shifting in the art-style. I know the setting's aesthetics are meant to be pretty open, but there's just nothing that really stands out or gets you a good sense of 'how things look'. None of the art caused any of my players to go 'I want to play that'. To be frank, the art in Sanguine's games has mostly always been bad for the same reason; a lack of cohesion. Albedo's is fine because it's mostly drawing on the comic itself. The art in IC1e was so terrible that my players were embarrassed by it and actively taped a white sheet over the infamous corebook cover when we were playing in High School. There have been standouts; the Species Art in IC2e is fantastic and sets the setting's tone wonderfully. But then you're back to Anime Foxboy and Cruella de Vixe and a mishmash of reprinted art from the first book. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 17:39 on Jan 18, 2019 |
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Jan 18, 2019 17:36
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| # ? Apr 16, 2024 15:58 |
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So its 'first print run of magic the gathering' art?
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Jan 18, 2019 17:39
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