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Crasical posted:This is purely personal opinion but that doesn't actually make it better? Just because your local pho restaurant is a front for the cartels doesn't make characters more sympathetic if they gun down half a dozen people enjoying subpar noodles to get at the actual badguys. I think someone playing Deviant like they're trying to impress me with their purity score is going about having fun the wrong way. While I wouldn't like it if my local pho restaurant was shot up by someone, I'm not a nurse whose family was killed by that cartel, was turned into a mutant by that cartel, or who was a guinea pig for the cartel's experiments. Given the Chronicles game system, which isn't about superheroing it or playing a good alignment by default, I don't see why people should be expected to play noblebright. There's plenty of other games for that, some already made by Onyx Path.
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Mar 1, 2019 04:46
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Crasical posted:I have no idea if this is still (or ever was) the case but I thought that one of the two 'morality bars' for Deviants was specifically how well you were managing maintaining your personal codes of honor and integrity, my assumption being that you could temper your need for revenge with a code of conduct and achieve something closer to justice than pure vengeance. No, Deviant's twin Integrity bars are "people you're loyal to" and "people on your poo poo list", so the game can precisely track how many friends your rip-roaring rampage of revenge costs you, and you can flip friends who betray you (or who you think have betrayed you) into Enemies. It is not an optimistic supers game. It's about wallowing in justified anger until it poisons you. (I may have been in a dark place when I broke ground on a lot of Deviant's stuff. It is pretty much "Dave just cut everyone who voted Leave out of his life and oh, look, WW just hired ZakS: the rpg") You can achieve a state of temporary Golconda-like respite from your Scars by getting Loyalty higher than Conviction, but it produces a state of "I will defend this neighbourhood/group of people/insert obsession here to the death whether they like it or not". A bit more supers-ish, but on the Matt Murdock end of supers. Dave Brookshaw fucked around with this message at 11:24 on Mar 1, 2019 |
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Mar 1, 2019 11:17
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nofather posted:I think someone playing Deviant like they're trying to impress me with their purity score is going about having fun the wrong way. There's a reason they say "Revenge is a dish best served cold", and it's because what feels correct is "Revenge is a dish best served with a rock in your hand as you run screaming directly at your problem and break it's loving head into a million jagged pieces". Try that though and I don't think there's a particularly optimistic chance of your life continuing on much further. Which I suppose is fine if your problem is a single person you can actually get to with that rock, and you are good enough with that rock to deal with them. If you aren't, you are probably going to need something a bit more complicated to deal with the problem. So you need to actually work out who has wronged you, how you need to deal with them, and then execute. And those are all things that can be really, really hard when you are consumed with the injustice done to you and the atrocity that is the continued existence of your enemy. If you let it, something like that will destroy you. And you'd probably be fine with that, but are you fine with that and them getting away with it? If not, you have to try to keep that thing focused, you have to try to mitigate your need [Because if it's just something you want, you know these are some bad guys and it'd be a good thing if they weren't being bad anymore, it's not revenge. Revenge isn't a want.] to lash out. Because it's not like it gets easier as time goes on and they are still out there getting away with it. If you let it it ends in basically the same place, toxic hatred for the entire world that allowed your crime to happen. Nobody is innocent, nobody is uninvolved. Which again, is a fine place to take a game talking about revenge....it's just not one that's going to go particularly long.
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Mar 1, 2019 12:00
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXZ2bTigdGY
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Mar 1, 2019 16:06
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I mean, in the context of the one shot described, it wasn't like the PCs opted to murder the ship. They attempted to bluff the Russian sub to prevent it from torpedoing the ship, and when that failed opted to just escape with their prisoner rather than somehow save the ship or its people. Not particularly heroic to be sure, but certainly in line with some of the more callous anti-hero revenge archetypes, I think.
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Mar 1, 2019 17:37
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In my Changeling: The Lost 1e playtest game, the party caused a fatal carbon monoxide leak in a mental hospital rather than let a True Fae that had infected the patients' minds use them to open a door to Arcadua. Compared to that, this seems almost tame.
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Mar 1, 2019 18:40
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I mean, the poo poo my Requiem group get up to regularly. There’s a reason my character yo-yos between Humanity 3 and 4. We’re awful monsters. But that’s okay. The problem comes when people expecting Ascension try to play Awakening and don’t get the “mages are shitbirds” memo. Or, worse, when the game downplays it like Beast did. Deviant is very clear that the Remade are broken monsters who don’t have appropriate responses to stress any more.
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Mar 1, 2019 20:11
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Mulva posted:If you let it it ends in basically the same place, toxic hatred for the entire world that allowed your crime to happen. Nobody is innocent, nobody is uninvolved. Which again, is a fine place to take a game talking about revenge....it's just not one that's going to go particularly long. Absolutely. I know with the threat of character sheet loss, there was an implied incentive to avoid super low Humanity/Morality/whatever in 1e, but even then trying to keep 10 or even 7 was a personal decision for yourself and your character, not something all players need to do. Which is why I said more flippant terrorist activities seem common in convention play or one offs, where you aren't going to have to face repercussions for your actions the next week. IIRC, during one of the memorable attempts to force their way through the Tomb of Horrors, players started buying herds of cattle to just shove them through the grinder, setting off the first traps so the PCs could get through later. Obviously abominable deeds but you're not going to be haunted by the ghosts of a thousand head of cattle next weekend. The game has room for breaking your promise cutthroats just as it does keeping your promise mercifuls, but neither should be insisted upon by the setting, or ST. Even Changeling where, I think, you can lose Clarity for lying or have pacts against dishonesty still have it as an option.
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Mar 1, 2019 22:27
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Well poo poo, man. I brought it up because nasty horrible monster bastards like Dave's Requiem character is not usually how I (or my table) roll. I passed the playtest around to my group and the response to it was 'wow that was a lot of dramatic failures' and also a general lukewarm "Uh..." towards the player's actions. A sampling from the group chat: "Oh jeez that ending, huh." "Just, uh." "I'm really picky about giving my word, even in RP, if I say something I'll do my level best to deliver on it, and the other thing is just no. I'm also psychologically incapable of playing an out and out villian, for whatever its worth." "It would have been fair if they dumped him on shore somewhere, which would have been bad enough for the dude considering he was wanted enough to have to spend his life at sea in international waters." "that's not edgy enough" Just to clarify, this is not, like, virtue signalling or not trying to be pass-agg or trying to impress anyone with our purity scores, that's just how we roll. It's a group of folks who all chose to play High-Karma characters in New Vegas. Maybe we're playing the game wrong, or maybe Deviant isn't the book for us. I asked if other people who currently have games currently get into that sort of morally-ambigious collateral-damage behavior often because I wanted to know if we were in the minority. If GimpInBlack and Dave are any indicaton, that does seem to be the case.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:28
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That kind of going back on your word rubs me the wrong way in games as well. I think it's the most limp wristed and uninteresting betrayal on top of leaving a bad taste.
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Mar 1, 2019 23:46
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Bit off topic, but as I slowly pick through KotE content (the last major unfinished area of the Project. Spirits is next but doesn't require a reread, which KotE does because I stupidly decided to continue my Wraith 'cause of death' addition into KotE) and books that didn't get added to the Timeline, we have an actual date for the Third Age in the oWoD now - c. 175MYA. The Wan Xian, apparently, were kickin' it with the Lizard Kings, which is stupid and awesome at the same time. It's also yet another piece of evidence that until the solidification of the Gauntlet c. 72KYA history is very weird in the oWoD. Though there's also the alternative reading which would place the Third Age beginning at c. 14KYA, in which case it wouldn't be until around 7.5KYA that the KJ consider their uncorrupted wyrm analogue, the Dragon of Balance and Harmony, to have fallen - which would roughly coincide with either the Dogger flood and its Banestorm or the end of the Impergium.
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Mar 2, 2019 00:00
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Counterpoint: kill everyone, ignore collateral damage, suplex a helicopter, revenge like crazy and implode into a terrible conflagration of rage and virtue and catharsis and healing and blood. These motherfuckers gotta remember the laws of thermodynamics they abused to make you, and you are the equal and opposite reaction reminding them of consequences as you nail them to a loving wall. You don't have to be a hero, but a protagonist? That's something you can do.
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Mar 2, 2019 01:18
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Im pretty sure I’ve burned a hospital down in Demon. I won’t insult the world of darkness by comparing it to a Zack Snyder movie but it is a horror setting. Not for nothing that senseless suffering is literally a physical function of the universe in at least two game lines. The starting line is theodicy.
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Mar 2, 2019 02:07
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Hostile V posted:Counterpoint: kill everyone, ignore collateral damage, suplex a helicopter, revenge like crazy and implode into a terrible conflagration of rage and virtue and catharsis and healing and blood. These motherfuckers gotta remember the laws of thermodynamics they abused to make you, and you are the equal and opposite reaction reminding them of consequences as you nail them to a loving wall. You don't have to be a hero, but a protagonist? That's something you can do. I lean pretty far into staying on the side of whatever passes for good in WoD, but I also agree with this statement.
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Mar 2, 2019 02:12
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I mean if you’d rather be going with X-Files or Buffy as referent than Hellraiser that’s fine and good but the inability of the heroes to prevent disaster and even their weakness / complicity in it are concerns in those too. Despair is a legitimate outcome. If you take the games at face value it is probably the preferred outcome. More to the point, bad poo poo happens in all horror but it’s important to recognize that actual nihilism is surprisingly uncommon. It’s a moralistic genre. Beast is bad because it’s the one splat line that doesn’t recognize the toxicity in its storytelling Basic Chunnel fucked around with this message at 02:17 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 02:15
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nofather posted:Absolutely. I know with the threat of character sheet loss, there was an implied incentive to avoid super low Humanity/Morality/whatever in 1e, but even then trying to keep 10 or even 7 was a personal decision for yourself and your character, not something all players need to do. Humanity 7 or you ping on Sense Wyrm, always a real problem in a mixed Vampire / Werewolf game.
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Mar 2, 2019 02:29
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Dave Brookshaw posted:The problem comes when people expecting Ascension try to play Awakening and don’t get the “mages are shitbirds” memo. I mean, you're playing a member of a terrorist cult in either case. The main difference is that Awakening has a better magic system and therefore does a much better job of letting you become a lich or eat souls or whatever.
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Mar 2, 2019 02:53
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So uh, Mage and Shifting Sands - is there a cap on Reach or are players meant to be able to just go back to the start of the day even as a starting character if they're willing to eat the Paradox? Especially so if you cast it in a demesne in which case you get to go back in time... as far as you want? I'm surprised that it's Acceleration that has the 'always one mana' cost and not Shifting Sands. e: though I did forget about the having to have a long enough duration to make the changes stick, that's still enough to repeatedly Groundhog Day a four-hourish stretch of time as a newbie as long as you eat the paradox. bewilderment fucked around with this message at 08:13 on Mar 2, 2019 |
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Mar 2, 2019 06:31
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Crasical posted:It's a group of folks who all chose to play High-Karma characters in New Vegas. Maybe we're playing the game wrong, or maybe Deviant isn't the book for us. I asked if other people who currently have games currently get into that sort of morally-ambigious collateral-damage behavior often because I wanted to know if we were in the minority. If GimpInBlack and Dave are any indicaton, that does seem to be the case. I'm pretty sure the high end of the morality scales exist to empower and give mechanical hooks to moral play just as much as the low end exists to empower and give mechanical hooks to amoral play. You can run a game of Vampire as a tragic struggle against the parasitic condition inflicted on you or as a downward spiral of decadence and self-justification, both modes of play are poignant and valid. It seems weirdly premature to assume that Deviant will only support one kind of playstyle. It definitely seems to be pointed at the kind of self-destructive climax that is common to the stories in its source material, but how your group actually gets there ought to be up to them, I see no reason why it couldn't be noble self-sacrifice to make sure nothing as awful as what happened to them ever happens again or whatever. Or a story about trying to perpetually stave off that seemingly inevitable climax. There's a lot of fertile ground.
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Mar 2, 2019 11:51
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As someone who has played a lot of Hunter the Reckoning, it is hard to imagine not having every character do incredibly destructive things (both to themselves and others) to achieve to achieve their goals. Deviant sounds perfect for this in a way that Hunter the Vigil isn't.
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Mar 2, 2019 17:03
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I had a Promethean GM who pushed back really hard against me doing a "downward spiral into Centimanus" character arc. Not necessarily the game's fault, though. Generally speaking though I dislike every "morality" stat that actually attempts to model morality. Give me Harmony / Synergy / Clarity over that poo poo any day and Cover twice on Sundays.
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Mar 2, 2019 17:16
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Loomer posted:Bit off topic, but as I slowly pick through KotE content (the last major unfinished area of the Project. Spirits is next but doesn't require a reread, which KotE does because I stupidly decided to continue my Wraith 'cause of death' addition into KotE) and books that didn't get added to the Timeline, we have an actual date for the Third Age in the oWoD now - c. 175MYA. The Wan Xian, apparently, were kickin' it with the Lizard Kings, which is stupid and awesome at the same time. It's also yet another piece of evidence that until the solidification of the Gauntlet c. 72KYA history is very weird in the oWoD. Though there's also the alternative reading which would place the Third Age beginning at c. 14KYA, in which case it wouldn't be until around 7.5KYA that the KJ consider their uncorrupted wyrm analogue, the Dragon of Balance and Harmony, to have fallen - which would roughly coincide with either the Dogger flood and its Banestorm or the end of the Impergium. So uh, have you actually IRL awoken yet? Also, I think this is on my players (and thus might be me metagaming a bit) but my parties tend to give their word very freely and follow through on their word only when extremely convenient for them. I tend to have my savvier NPCs either demand something upfront or have a well considered exit plan in case the party fucks them over as soon as possible. But not ALL of the NPCs, obviously, if my players wanna gently caress people over I'm happy to usually let them. Plus, every once in a great while, they'll let someone go with a light maiming as warning and actually otherwise keep their end of the deal, and those times become satisfying and memorable when the rest of the time they're such dishonorable bastards.
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Mar 2, 2019 17:34
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No, I'm pretty sure I'm dead and this is some kind of ironic punishment for a life spent in Vampire related sin. Am I Stoker's ghost? Is that what's happening? Continuing the vein of 'poo poo that makes you go what', apparently circa 1999 oWoD Thailand had 50%+ of the population infected with HIV. That's, uh. Something.
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Mar 2, 2019 21:53
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I'm glad they managed to work that out.
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Mar 2, 2019 22:33
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I fully expect Loomer to finish the census, mail it to the Tal'mahe'Ra that dominated him, and then forget the whole thing ever happened.
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Mar 2, 2019 23:08
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Loomer posted:Continuing the vein of 'poo poo that makes you go what', apparently circa 1999 oWoD Thailand had 50%+ of the population infected with HIV. That's, uh. Something.
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Mar 3, 2019 00:45
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Zereth posted:... what? How did that work? Unclear. It's a one line mention in The 1000 Hells of Thailand being the favourite nation of Rangda, the Yama Queen of Pestilence, because of it. No explanation given other than that Rangda deliberately sabotages (implicitly sexual) health education and programs regulating prostitution because they could limit the spread of STDs, which makes it veer uncomfortably towards a whole 'Thailand as a nation of sex workers' stereotype arena. I don't think it was ever mentioned elsewhere. For those wondering why it's such a bugfuck crazy line, Thailand was sitting at about 2% c. 1999 so this is 25 times higher than the real figure (so if we want, we can add it to the list of evidence for the oWoD being quite definitively hosed in ways our world mercifully isn't, as no country in the world exceeds ~25% infection rate (all those that are above 10% are Subsaharan African nations, unfortunately)) and adding a mere 51% of the Thai population would have effectively doubled the global figure of people living with HIV for 1999.
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Mar 3, 2019 01:03
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Did it say "50%" or did ti give a very large number, which turned out to be 50% of the population at the time?
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Mar 3, 2019 02:36
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Zereth posted:Did it say "50%" or did ti give a very large number, which turned out to be 50% of the population at the time? Specifically 'over half', so it could be anywhere from 51 - 100%.
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Mar 3, 2019 03:07
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i'm colorblind and illiterate, but wouldn't 50%+ of the population infected with HIV just...destroy a country? Straight up?
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Mar 3, 2019 03:08
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Crasical posted:i'm colorblind and illiterate, but wouldn't 50%+ of the population infected with HIV just...destroy a country? Straight up? EDIT: And that's assuming you can actually treat everybody to the full extent, which wouldn't be true
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Mar 3, 2019 03:48
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Not necessarily, and not quickly, but it'd be an enormous public health challenge even today. In theory, with the antiretrovirals now available (and which Thailand has been producing en masse since 2007 after going 'gently caress your patents' in response to the cost difficulties of supplying them to the people living with HIV in Thailand, which is the highest concentration of said people in SEA. They're actually now becoming a significant exporter, too - the Thais have been taking this poo poo really seriously since 2006) alongside PrEP it's possible to reduce the risk of transmission to virtually nil even for unprotected sex and quite low even for fetal transmission and needle users, and the life expectancy for people on good ART is nearly as good as that of those without HIV although the long term health effects still suck, especially since ART is no walk in the park and causes organ damage when used for an extensive period like most medications. The bigger issue is going to be keeping the ART flowing on that scale without serious fiscal difficulty as well as the very high comorbidity of drug-resistant tuberculosis. You'd have a nation in a lot of trouble, but people wouldn't be dropping like flies so long as the government could keep the ART available. Overall morbidity would increase thanks to the generalized vulnerability of the population to opportunistic infections and cancers, but to what extent I'm not sure since I'm neither a statistician nor a doctor. For Thailand the bigger issue by far would be the total collapse of their tourist industry, which would put serious strain on the economy. It's nearly 20% of their total GDP so if it collapses - and let's face it, not many people are going to Swaziland (which has the current highest infection rate at 25%) and are hesitant about tourism in Subsaharan Africa generally in part because of the extremely high prevalence of HIV there. When we consider as well that up to a third of all Thai tourism in one way or another involves the sex trade, we could expect an even bigger impact on its industry than we see in other significantly affected areas like the Bahamas and Jamaica. So that'd be the major challenge - it takes a lot of money to provide ART and PrEP to a population even at the substantial subsidy the Thai government produces it with, and a major source of that money would be wiped out at the same time.
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Mar 3, 2019 03:54
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I'm interested in Deviant because I think it really hits the itch that Beast probably should have scratched (really variable monsters) but didn't because, uh, weird things happened on that line. Also, a bit off topic, but since this is the best thread to talk about Onyx Path Publishing, I'm confused on how quickly Cavaliers of Mars dropped off the face of Earth. It's been out since October but I've basically heard nothing about it and there's not a review of the system I can find at all.
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Mar 3, 2019 04:39
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i assume people arent interested in going to swaziland primarily because its a super hosed up dictatorship propped up by coca cola
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Mar 3, 2019 07:23
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make mockery posted:i assume people arent interested in going to swaziland primarily because its a super hosed up dictatorship propped up by coca cola Well, there's that too along with the general poverty of large swathes of Subsaharan Africa as an impediment to tourism, but the HIV epidemic is definitely part of the equation in terms of tourism interest.
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Mar 3, 2019 07:32
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make mockery posted:i assume people arent interested in going to swaziland primarily because its a super hosed up dictatorship propped up by coca cola If I couldn't travel to countries with dodgy governments, I wouldn't be able to travel at all!
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Mar 3, 2019 08:15
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SunAndSpring posted:Also, a bit off topic, but since this is the best thread to talk about Onyx Path Publishing, I'm confused on how quickly Cavaliers of Mars dropped off the face of Earth. It's been out since October but I've basically heard nothing about it and there's not a review of the system I can find at all. I think it's biggest hurdle is that there is no reason to care about it. The system seems fine, but I already like Scion and the Trinity universe.
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Mar 4, 2019 02:56
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Lord_Hambrose posted:I think it's biggest hurdle is that there is no reason to care about it. The system seems fine, but I already like Scion and the Trinity universe. That’s kind of my problem. I’d probably love it, but I already have settings I’m invested in so it’s hard to get me to put in the time.
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Mar 4, 2019 04:26
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I definitely love Cavaliers, but there's like, just no hype around it and I think part of that's on OP but like...there are more things coming for it in the pipeline but I'm not sure OP actually is all that great at hyping the settings they do that aren't already established or connected to their established properties. Like...where's the scarred lands hype? Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau like, get the cute pet contingent but that's pretty much all I know about the setting, too. I don't even know what they're not doing that they should be. Paizo built hype about loving Starfinder somehow. But there's just kinda this big ol' gap somehow.
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Mar 4, 2019 04:57
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MollyMetroid posted:I definitely love Cavaliers, but there's like, just no hype around it and I think part of that's on OP but like...there are more things coming for it in the pipeline but I'm not sure OP actually is all that great at hyping the settings they do that aren't already established or connected to their established properties. Like...where's the scarred lands hype? Pugmire and Monarchies of Mau like, get the cute pet contingent but that's pretty much all I know about the setting, too. A small streaming group I follow is doing a 5E Scarred Lands game, but you wouldn't really know it from OPP's end. I only bring it up because apparently they're being sponsored by OPP.
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Mar 4, 2019 12:37
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