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juggalo baby coffin posted:They get matched up into groups as babies by their 'dam' (it does not say what a dam is) 'Mother'.
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Aug 5, 2019 13:23
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I don't see why a player couldn't be a telekinetic friendly grub person. I had a sentient flock of rockhopper penguins that networked their brains together for mighty psychic powers once. Grub man shouldn't be an issue after that.
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Aug 5, 2019 13:23
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Night10194 posted:I don't see why a player couldn't be a telekinetic friendly grub person. I had a sentient flock of rockhopper penguins that networked their brains together for mighty psychic powers once. Grub man shouldn't be an issue after that. Numenera is weird in that 'race' is replaced by 'descriptor', which were initially stuff like 'charming', 'mechanical' or 'stealthy'. Which made it seem like ok, your characters physical biology is just up to you. But then they added in descriptors that were races, which hosed the whole thing up. So now all the descriptors are just descriptors for humans, and to be the other races you need the racial descriptor. it's the classic 'air breathing mermaid' issue. i feel like for 90% of the intelligent races in the game you could just model them using the already existing descriptors and character focuses, so I don't know why they added racial descriptors.
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Aug 5, 2019 13:30
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I'm perfectly fine with "You are an Adjective Noun who Verbs; as for your race, just tell me whether you're a human or a nonhuman."
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Aug 5, 2019 14:16
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Nessus posted:Reading all of this also makes you wonder, how do people in the setting know for sure that they're not in some simulated reality? By playing the Anders Sandberg scenario "Think Before Asking": The Church-Turing Device posted:Impossible to understand, possibly dangerous, yet everybody will want to study it. Its real function is to use closed time-like curves to perform hyperturing computation impossible in any finite computer to check whether this is base reality or not. It doesn’t do anything useful other than check the limits of the Church-Turing thesis. Unfortunately it is absurdly fragile and probably self-destructed once it did its job.
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Aug 5, 2019 14:52
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So what's this cube the thread title's about?
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Aug 5, 2019 15:02
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super sweet best pal posted:So what's this cube the thread title's about? It be this: https://projects.inklesspen.com/fatal-and-friends/wapole-languray/monte-cooks-invisible-sun/ Specifically, the box the game came in. Also a reference to Se7en, I guess.
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Aug 5, 2019 15:08
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Wow, that looks needlessly complicated.
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Aug 5, 2019 15:47
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JcDent posted:It be this: That is a Hellraiser rear end cube. One day I'll play in a cypher style Monte Cook game so I could play my homebrew dictionary Dope Wizard who is Entombed On an Airbrushed Van or Samurai Jack who Has a Working Cellphone.
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Aug 5, 2019 16:25
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KirbyKhan posted:One day I'll play in a cypher style Monte Cook game so I could play my homebrew dictionary Dope Wizard who is Entombed On an Airbrushed Van or Samurai Jack who Has a Working Cellphone. I say go for it; Cypher System's flawed but I still love it.
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Aug 5, 2019 17:50
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A lot of these Numenera monsters seem pretty good to be honest. I can definitely see looting some of these for any games I'd run. Aside from the usual Monte Cook-ness which can get aggravating, but isn't damning and with some minor tweeking there's a lot of usable material.
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Aug 5, 2019 18:02
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LatwPIAT posted:(EP 1e psychosurgery rules also didn't really support the idea that you could just fix things easily. The most you could do was to give someone a ±30 bonus/penalty towards wanting to perform some action - which was pretty meaningless in game terms since there weren't really any rules for wanting/not wanting to do things - but clearly indicated that you couldn't just change 'disloyal=1' to 'disloyal=0'. You were limited to changing 'disobedienceFactor=0.45' to 'disobedienceFactor=0.15'.) Yeah and its not described as being easy, it's said to takes hours and hours for a very skilled professional to do it to the level being talked about, anyone can go in and hack a brain up and make it lovely and useless or capable of literally only one task and who cares if you gently caress up your workers (read: slaves) because if they need to by New and Improved Brain Fix by Atlas Industries to deal with the mess you made of their head then that's even better for you as the sole producer of New and Improved Brain Fix by Atlas Industries. juggalo baby coffin posted:Whales who live on the surface and only go underwater once every 10 years for mating season. For some reason this makes people think it's a good idea to build their cities on the back of them. Well, I guess 10 years IS enough time to build the entire Eclipse Phase status quo ooooooooooohhhhhhh. Legit laughed hard EthanSteele fucked around with this message at 18:32 on Aug 5, 2019 |
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Aug 5, 2019 18:20
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Eclipse Phase: Second Edition Thirteen Clans of Space Vamp- I Mean, Space Capitalists  So this is the FACTIONS!!!!! chapter and honestly for someone new to the game, it might be interesting, but to the rest of us, it's kind of old hat. Still, for anyone here baffled by all the terms we keep going over, here's a rundown. We start with the Inner System factions: LLA(Lunar-Lagrange Alliance): Luna and near-Earth environs. They're capitalists and, for some reason, primarily Indian in culture. They have a lot of reclaimers, that's their entire faction theming. Tend to not be blamed for as many crimes as the PC. The Morningstar Constellation: Venus and Venus-nearby areas. They're capitalism with a human face, i.e. you won't have to pay for your oxygen and some amount of open-source fabber stuff is available. Split from the PC over a disagreement about Venusian terraforming, the MC wanted to terraform at a slower scale that would leave the surface mostly as it was and just make it more easily settled with aerostats and with a novel aerial ecosystem, PC wanted to just wham it with the heavy terraforming gear until it was as Earthlike as possible. The Planetary Consortium: They're on Mars and they're more or less the generic political villains of the game because the Jovians never get to do anything. They're also host to both Project Ozma, the generic supervillain badguy faction and Oversight, the Lawful Neutral faction that UPHOLDS THE LAW!!!!! whether that means arresting an executive for loving a space whale without consent or breaking up a union strike. Tharsis League: I don't know if these guys ever existed in the original, I don't recall them and honestly they don't really have a reason to exist. They're Mars' theoretical-but-toothless non-corporate government. Theoretically they might be roused into something approaching an actual Martian state, but the writing makes this feel extremely unlikely. And then the Outer System Factions: Anarchists: The author argues that if being selfish would rock the boat and get everyone drowned, no one would rock the boat, and that's why Anarchism always works and never goes wrong and collectivism is perfect. The Autonomist Alliance: Not sure why this wasn't just folded in with the Anarchists, since the AA is literally just an organized way of going: "Hello, other Anarchists, I would like some help not getting violated by these capitalists/Jovians/aliens/ultimates. Halp." Extropians: Extropians are great, because they're literally capitalism with all the brakes off. You dock at an Extropian station? Better be ready to pay a life support subscription before disembarking. You actually disembark? Better sign up for some law, order and policing, otherwise someone can brain you and steal your poo poo with no repercussions. The only law is contract law. It's great because it's the sort of place where EP approaches Planescape in having philosophical guilds rather than governments, a bunch of maniacs willing to take their philosophy to its utmost limit and live every aspect of their lives by it. While in practice living in an Extropian locale would probably be awful, mostly it comes across as the Planetary Consortium but with just enough of a dose of black humour that you can work with it as a GM rather than it just being a monolith that squelches most options for fun. The Jovian Republic: EP always feels like it's vague on how well-settled the system was before the Fall, but apparently it was well-settled enough for Russia, China, the US and Chile(?) to have space fleets, and the strength of them were all near Jupiter when the Fall happened. The Chileans and Americans pounced on the other two, destroyed them, and seized all of the embryonic Jovian colonies to create the Jovian Republic. They also, somehow, have the strongest military in the system. This remains weird because their habs are all described as being universally lovely and overcrowded, so strength of numbers would be difficult compared to, say, Titan or Mars, which can colonize most of an entire world if they want to, for healthy growth. They reject a lot of tech the other factions can use, so it's not a tech advantage. Maybe they've still got the remnants of the original space fleets and no one else has managed to build up enough of an actual fleet to challenge their space dominance? Could be, but it sure feels like the other factions weren't lacking the infrastructure for a bunch of other huge projects. Scum: Space Fishmalk Mafia. Titanian Commonwealth: Scandinavian Democratic Socialists in Space. They're so perfect that it's a bit offensive. Like they literally have no flaws. Everyone has everything they need, they've got super high tech, they've got no regressive social policies, they're living on one of the better pieces of real estate in our Solar system and they've even got a powerful military. Titan is, as a result, probably the most meaningless location in the game as no one would ever need to go there for any reason except a relaxing holiday. There are also Social Movements without any specific bases of operation: The Argonauts: Open-source all knowledge and science. They share all knowledge and require all projects they collaborate on to be open-sourced, but somehow manage to leverage this into having everything from their own habs to their own heavy security force and a massive research budget. I guess Space Patreon pays sweet buckazoids. Barsoomians: Free Mars agitators. Bioconservatives: Jovians and Anprims. Brinkers: They like to be alone. Exhumans: Gonna turn myself into a big blob of brain OR something out of Alien so some protagonists can come running by and shoot me while I espouse my manifesto that's 90%  Mercurials: Uplifts and AGI's who try to make their own cultures that aren't just copies of human culture. This would make more sense if the game's writing ever gave a sense that neo-octopi, neo-avians, neo-primates, neo-pigs, AGI's, etc. actually thought or experienced in any way markedly different from humans. Instead it just makes them come across as either Uplift-supremacists or borderline-Exhumans. Reclaimers: Gibe back Earth plz. Sapients: Not sure, again, why this is even listed as a faction, since it's just "these people think Uplifts deserve equal rights." The Ultimates: quote:Ultimate communities are highly stratified and built around personal achievement. They take literally the Confucian belief of strength from the bottom up: strong individuals make strong communities, and strong communities make strong states. As before, if you actually read their core philosophy rather than decrying them as fascists out of hand, they're not fundamentally bad, but any sort of ideology like that will tend to attract people who regards themselves as fundamentally strong and therefore others as weak. So it's easy to see why they're an even mix of people in there for personal improvement and giving their best to the world, and people in there so they can get back at the genetrash who bullied them in an MMO last week. They also get to have this sidebar which is... quote:In AF 4, a high-ranking Ultimate known as Yasuke, disillusioned with the Ultimates’ drift towards fascism and disdain for the rest of transhumanity, broke from the faction and embarked on musha shugyō, the samurai warrior’s pilgrimage. He wandered the Solar System for the next three years, fighting duels, working mercenary contracts, creating art, and formalizing his neo-bushido philosophy. In time, he attracted followers, in part due to his willingness to train uplifts and AGIs at his isolated dojo in the caldera of Olympus Mons on Mars. Although a tiny faction, the shugyōsha have a formidable reputation as warriors and protectors of working-class Martians — and the undying enmity of the Ultimates, who consider Yasuke a traitor. ...I mean it's definitely some absolute weeb's PC.  After this great art of a guy doing something while a ghost dolphin watches, there's a list of hypercorps which exists almost primarily so you have some names to drop. None of them, Zrbny Group excepted(their thing is that post-Fall they suddenly fired every single employee and now continue to operate in total radio silence. Entirely operated by AI that never communicates out-company but offer very good deals on materials. Spooky.), generate any plot hooks. This leads into the Religion chapter. quote:Certainly, younger generations took the mask off of religion, seeing that underneath it is just another ideology, and one that did not always adapt quickly to the world's changing values. Religion was one of the most successful early memeplexes in human society, but it did not hold up well in an ecosystem of memeplexes. "God was a good meme for his time, but he just couldn't hold a candle to planking." According to the author, the TITANs destroyed the rest of humanity's faith because when you're truly in danger and everything is hosed, that's when you become an atheist on the spot. Catholics: Mostly all evil conservatives. But what about in EP? I kid, but this is seriously how the game presents them since their major stronghold is among the Jovians. Hindus: Enlightened and thriving. Untouchables are often forced to sleeve into lovely Case morphs, though. Islam: For some reason, Mars is the primary home of Islam now. They've moved with the times in ways that the setting's Catholics have apparently been unable to. Judaism: Of course their main goal is to reclaim Israel on Earth. Mormons: Still preaching. Pagans: The Jovians apparently have a lot of Wiccans and of course the loving Asatru are popular on Titan, goddamn. The New Boys on the Block: Neo-Buddhism(cybernetics are enlightenment), Technocreationism(no mentions of what they believe in except that the Fall was divine punishment), TITAN worship(they become as gods, so maybe they are gods, makes u think...........) and Xenodeism(what if Jesus was actually an alien grey?).   Afterwards there's a System Gazeteer and... seriously the factions already tell you mostly what you need to know. It's the same goddamn planets and space rocks. The only things of note are that Iapetus, a large chunk of Mars and a chunk of Luna are all still considered hazardous areas full of TITAN activity. Oh and some TITAN on Mercury tried to create a literal human centipede for whatever reason and then crashed when it tried to add itself to the party. Mostly the useful info there is in describing some exoplanets in case you want to run a Gatecrashing campaign. One of the ones it includes is Giza which was also in the Gatecrashing supplement for EP1. It was always one of the oddest additions considering it was one that you literally could not use. See, it was basically a planet full of Alien Omegle Devices, which humans had used plentifully to swap dick pics(I wish I was kidding) with aliens and occasionally get traded blueprints that would explode in their faces when fabbed. Firewall then promptly smuggled a nuke through to blow up the Giza end of the connection so no one could use it, it canonically remains nuked. So there's no connection to the world. You can't visit it. It feels like one guy on the team thought it'd be funny and then everyone else went "NO, THIS CANNOT BE ALLOWED TO REMAIN IN OUR VERY SERIOUS SETTING." so they had it blown up.  cyberbarian vs scorpimancer COMBAT? We then get abruptly dumped into the combat section. I'll note that we still haven't reached several sections necessary for chargen(gear, async abilities) but they decided combat was where we needed to go next. It starts out by telling us to declare our actions in order of initiative... without telling us how to determine initiative. I wonder if I've just missed it somehow, go to the index, and learn that when we're now on page 202, combat, the place where initiative actually matters, our actual init rules are way the gently caress back on page 33 in the middle of chargen, basically. WHY. Anyway, EP2 is one of those games that loves its loving rolls. No static defenses for us, every single attack is at minimum an attack roll and a defense roll. Can't have the players not exercising their wrists regularly. Then you roll to see how hard to bonk someone, subtract armor and then hurt 'em real bad if you roll high enough on your damage. For simplicity's sake, all the weapons and armor are also statted and have their costs listed in this section of the book, rather than the Gear section which is a literal hundred pages further into the book. The costs aren't even replicated there so you can do all your shopping/gearing checkups in one easy part of the book. And no, the 100 pages in between the two have nothing to do with either combat or gear. This is also where the book's typos first throw me for a loop. Now, so far I haven't commented on how shoddy the editing has been in terms of spelling/typos, but there are an embarrassing amount of dropped letters and misspellings compared to most books, even stuff like Kromore I felt had better editing in that regard. But this time it actually interferes, see:  Note the formatting. Every piece of gear has something like Min/R/1 listed for it. The first is the acquisition difficulty if gotten via Rep, the last is the cost if bought with Resources or Gear Points, and the R is if it's something that the locals might ask questions if you try to fab/buy/bring, like a nuclear warhead or a bag of anthrax. The Rep difficulty and Gear point cost is in lockstep. Min/1, Mod/2, Maj/3 and then all of a sudden just Rare in the middle of it. Which is weird, because there IS a cost listed for Rare stuff... 100 pages later, 5+, but here it's hard to tell if it's intended as a "you can't just buy this" or is a loving typo, because there are plenty of them as it is. Also, gently caress the EP2 devs. Anyone who's played EP1 will surely remember that a laser sight or smartlink targeting would help you aim a weapon, +10 to hit. Here, they flipped it around, there's a default -10 to hit if you don't have that. Thank you for the rear end-backwards extra poo poo to remember, assholes. Some of the damage values are also... so a club does 1d10 damage. A thrown baseball? 1d6+1. Hitting someone with a small robot? 1d6. I'm just glad that at least there are actually damage values for using synthmorphs and biomorphs as improvised bludgeoning weapons. Any time you're firing a single-shot weapon, you can use a quick action to aim and a complex to fire. You can always do a quick and a complex action together. With these weapons you have no other good use for your quick action 99% of the time, why not just give those weapons or single-shot attacks a default +10 to hit rather than gating that behind the player remembering to call out an aim? This also invalidates half of Burst Fire, where you can choose to get either +10 to hit or to do +1d10 damage with three shots. There's never any reason to do a +10 to hit burst shot when you can just do a +10 to hit aimed single shot and waste less ammo. Spray weapons fire in a Cone(they're the only kind that does), at 10 meters or less, Cone weapons(by which they mean Spray weapons but don't write so) do +1d10 damage. Almost all Spray weapons barely have range greater than ten meters, meaning that in almost all situations they'll be getting the bonus. Why not just increase their default damage and make them do less at their extreme range to cut down the number of multipliers players will generally have to keep in mind? In this chapter's defense, in between the remarkably lovely editing, they do manage to give us weapons to use a slightly larger variety of weapons. Missiles and plasma rifles are now actually competitive with Railgun Machineguns for total damage output. Melee has inexplicably been stripped of it's SOM bonus to damage and isn't really too great a thing to focus on outside of the inherent stealth involved in not having any loud gunfire, since you'll have a hard time chewing through the armor and DUR pools of a lot of morphs in time to make it a stealthy takedown in any case. Still, there's a lot more reason to branch into weapons other than SHOOT BULIT now. But it feels like there are also more moving parts to remember since fiddly poo poo like reach and size categories impacting melee feels more present than it was in EP1's combat(or maybe I'm just not remembering all the gritty details of that too clearly). In Conclusion: I hate the combat less, but the editor more. Next time: Space magic?????
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Aug 5, 2019 22:56
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 I’m back babies! Now I took a hiatus because everyone was all a tizzy about other projects, and I don’t like sharing that limelight y’know? But I’m here still because we got so much bad to get through. Namely, this time it’s something truly awful: Character Arcs (Ver) Yes. See Monte Cook apparently saw another game for 5 seconds out of the corner of his eye one day and decided to copy it without understanding a drat thing about how it works. That game was Jenna Moran’s Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. Yes, that very difficult to understand super narrative revolutionary weird nontraditional RPG was ripped off by Monte “3rd Edition is Best Edition” Cook. It is bad. See Cook… never really figured out what a “narrative” RPG is. Like, I don’t think he’s ever read one, just… heard about them vaguely through hearsay. He doesn’t seem to comprehend the point of narrative mechanics. Narrative Mechanics are big though. They’re The Thing, so Monte wants them in his game, so he works out his big massive brain and figures out exactly how to do it, and it’s the stupidest way possible. I’m going to show you one, and break down just why this is loving stupid. You start with one Character Arc. Like, you start the game having one started and on your sheet. “Wait, how do you write down a character arc? Is this like… a character goal? Planned arc for your character worked out with your GM?” Nope, that’s sane and reasonable. This is a character arc:  I’ll let you take that in before we start the breakdown. Really read over that and internalize how loving bad an idea this is. So, character arcs are the main way to earn Acumen, one of the types of XP in this needlessly complicated game. The first character arc you get is free. Every arc after that? You must pay Acumen to start. What this means is that there is an XP tax for Swearing to bring the Villain to Justice. Sorry Mezzamalch the Crimson Swervish you can’t try to catch the Shropshire Slasher, you don’t have enough Acumen to afford starting a new Character Arc. You see how each step is… very specific, but also unhelpfully vague. Also some are optional. First off, no they aren’t optional, they’re goddamn XP rewards. You will always do the Optional steps because XP. So the steps. They’re… specific. Really specific about what happens, but super vague about details, both are unhelpful. They’re too vague to give a GM a guideline about exactly what to do, but too specific to let you freely improv. These feel like writing exercise prompts in elementary school, testing you to fill in the blanks for Teacher. Now, if these were JUST guidelines to rough processes to do these sorts of story arcs I wouldn’t mind, but they aren’t. These are checklists you go down in order to earn XP, which is the goal of the game because Invisible Sun has D&D style constant power growth. You HAVE to play out these exact arcs as written, as Monte loving Cook decided, to actually advance mechanically in this game where the only solid motivation you have as a player is to make your numbers Go Up. Here, have some of my personal favorites:    And finally some advice from Monte Cook:  All I can say is: Bullshit. This advice works just fine for non-mechanical character development like any other RPG, but you put checklists with fixed XP rewards at each step for your game. So no, people are rewarded, incentivized to min-max their character development for XP Gains. Acumen is how you learn Skills, Spells, Class Abilities, and Secrets, most of the actual mechanical bits of your character. Of note, I went through every character arc, and turns out? They aren’t balanced against each other at all. Mathematically speaking you want to only do the character arcs Assist an Organization, Birth, Build, Creation, Defeat a Foe, Growth, Instruction, and Master a Skill. These all give you at minimum 7 Acumen for doing them. Of note that if you’re doing one of those arcs to benefit someone you have a Bond with, you can get even more Acumen, as that adds a flat +1 Acumen per step, most of these having at minimum 6 steps. Every other option? Gives you less than 7 Acumen for doing them. Of special note is , Finish a Great Work, Raise a Child, Repay a Debt, Restoration, Revenge, Romance, and Train a Creature, all of which give you only 4-5 Acumen minimum. Next Time: Character Creation is DONE! Learn about Orphan Depression Fiat Currency!
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Aug 5, 2019 23:39
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Uh. So, you level up in Invisible Sun by grinding repeatable quests. Like an MMORPG. And yet they gave 4th edition so much poo poo for it's mechanics.
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Aug 5, 2019 23:55
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You hear about Wizard Rick? He had his 8th kid and leaned Disintegrating Beam. Gonna go to his next baby shower to ask which dope spell he's gonna name his 9th after.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:06
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Did... did he just assign EXP rewards for impregnating someone..?
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Aug 6, 2019 00:09
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kommy5 posted:Did... did he just assign EXP rewards for impregnating someone..? 1 Acumen. They don't even have to be a romantic partner or spouse!  That's for the romance arc! 
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Aug 6, 2019 00:14
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Seatox posted:1 Acumen. They don't even have to be a romantic partner or spouse! But... You get bonus for doing Complication Idea: the person you have a mechanical bond with is your dude friend. You and him have to fight it out on Wizard Maurey to find out WHO IS THE WIZARD DADDY. Your spouce retreats to the ho couch back stage, it grants wishes in exchange for tears.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:25
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Someday, someone will make a game of trashy idiot wizards and their vans and do it on purpose.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:25
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Yup, those are Chuubo arcs but really mega mondo bad.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:32
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Does a panel van count as a site for the Building Arc? Because you could farm Acumen by re-detailing it over and over with panel art of your trashy wizard deeds.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:33
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KirbyKhan posted:Complication Idea: the person you have a mechanical bond with is your dude friend. You and him have to fight it out on Wizard Maurey to find out WHO IS THE WIZARD DADDY. Impregnate each other. 
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Aug 6, 2019 00:33
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Coming soon to a thread near you.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:37
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Ratoslov posted:Impregnate each other.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:38
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Seatox posted:Does a panel van count as a site for the Building Arc? Because you could farm Acumen by re-detailing it over and over with panel art of your trashy wizard deeds. As wizard GM I declare it against the spirit of the rules to paint over your Legendary Panel Van. You must journey back to the Yard of Junk and Build a NEW GRANDER WIZARD VAN. Also you can't do unless you Aid A Friend for Wizard Larry. He told me in advance about his Fall From Grace Magickal Meth Addiction.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:38
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I read the description and I felt like I was getting activated.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:42
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KirbyKhan posted:As wizard GM I declare it against the spirit of the rules to paint over your Legendary Panel Van. You must journey back to the Yard of Junk and Build a NEW GRANDER WIZARD VAN. Also you can't do unless you Aid A Friend for Wizard Larry. He told me in advance about his Fall From Grace Magickal Meth Addiction. Behold, we have also
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Aug 6, 2019 00:48
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Seatox posted:Does a panel van count as a site for the Building Arc? Because you could farm Acumen by re-detailing it over and over with panel art of your trashy wizard deeds.
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Aug 6, 2019 00:58
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PurpleXVI posted:LLA(Lunar-Lagrange Alliance): Luna and near-Earth environs. They're capitalists and, for some reason, primarily Indian in culture. PurpleXVI posted:Islam: For some reason, Mars is the primary home of Islam now. They've moved with the times in ways that the setting's Catholics have apparently been unable to. PurpleXVI posted:Tharsis League: I don't know if these guys ever existed in the original, I don't recall them and honestly they don't really have a reason to exist. They're Mars' theoretical-but-toothless non-corporate government. Theoretically they might be roused into something approaching an actual Martian state, but the writing makes this feel extremely unlikely. PurpleXVI posted:Titanian Commonwealth: Scandinavian Democratic Socialists in Space. They're so perfect that it's a bit offensive. Like they literally have no flaws. Everyone has everything they need, they've got super high tech, they've got no regressive social policies, they're living on one of the better pieces of real estate in our Solar system and they've even got a powerful military. Titan is, as a result, probably the most meaningless location in the game as no one would ever need to go there for any reason except a relaxing holiday. The TC are the creation of one of the authors' PCs - the one who's a smug rear end in a top hat, founder of the TC, majority shareholder in a major TC state corporation, professor of post-capitalist economics at the most prestigious university in the Solar System, expert hacker, and Firewall proxy.
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Aug 6, 2019 01:24
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EthanSteele posted:Yup, those are Chuubo arcs but really mega mondo bad. Yes, the first thing I thought when I read the arcs is "This is like nightmare world Chuubo."
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Aug 6, 2019 02:14
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Someone better with epubs than I am should copy a Chuubo's arc into this thread for comparison, because I'm just poleaxed by Monte Cooke's ability to miss the point.
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Aug 6, 2019 02:38
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Ithle01 posted:A lot of these Numenera monsters seem pretty good to be honest. I can definitely see looting some of these for any games I'd run. Aside from the usual Monte Cook-ness which can get aggravating, but isn't damning and with some minor tweeking there's a lot of usable material. I think a lot of them are cool but either don't fit the theme of the game too well (ie are just there to fight in a game that says it isn't about fighting (it is lying)), or are made annoying by the way the entries in the book aren't really standardized. like its fair to make fun of d&d 3.5 for listing every minor skill a grunt monster has, but at least it was consistent. in this book 'Interactions' could tell you which languages they speak, or tell you that they're friendly, or tell you their level of intelligence. the problem is that all three of them are important pieces of information to have, and most of the time you'll be missing at least one. sometimes you'll be missing all three when it just says 'they aren't interested in talking', which is like, ok? can they not talk? can they not talk our language? are they just dicks? there's a lot of other missing information, all you get for stats is health, armor, movement, and their attacks. so you don't know how smart things are, what type of creature they are (if the text doesn't bother to tell you), how big they are, what they look like if the picture isn't full body. like the lava creatures from a couple of posts back, I have no idea what those are or what they look like. a lot of them seem to be existing art they bought and then made up a story to fit the art, which is I guess an ok way to do things if you don't have a massive budget, but a lot of the time the story they make up is really incomplete. Like the lil virus dudes. From their own entry it makes them seem like cute, curious things who have risen above their own viral lifestyle to get their own bodies. But then in a sidebar later of the evil hexagons, it tells you that the virus dudes are interested in domination. i don't even know if the hexagons and the virus guys were even written by the same person, it could just be the hexagon guy's headcanon that the virus guys are evil. The book is a mixture of cool ideas and frustrating implementation and formatting, which seems to be the Monte Cook Directorial Trademark (tm).
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Aug 6, 2019 02:39
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LatwPIAT posted:The TC are the creation of one of the authors' PCs - the one who's a smug rear end in a top hat, founder of the TC, majority shareholder in a major TC state corporation, professor of post-capitalist economics at the most prestigious university in the Solar System, expert hacker, and Firewall proxy. Does said PC also have an awesome sex life?
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Aug 6, 2019 02:41
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Uh... why is the pregnancy complication not optional? Does every single pregnancy in Invisible Sun always go wrong in some way? Shouldn't the step after Complication not be "Go To The Esoteric Hospital" instead of continuing to paint the baby room while your wife is shrieking bloody murder? Oh and thanks for giving my explicit rules for the game mechanics of stillbirth. Because that's what this loving hobby needed. Jesus Christ what the hell, why would you even include rules about any of this? Getting xp for knocking up your girl and having the child not survive the birth what the gently caress?
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Aug 6, 2019 02:47
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uuuh my pregnant character takes up smoking and drinking heavily because they need 1 despair to level up, because you need joy AND despair to level
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Aug 6, 2019 02:51
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Sage Genesis posted:Uh... why is the pregnancy complication not optional? Does every single pregnancy in Invisible Sun always go wrong in some way? Shouldn't the step after Complication not be "Go To The Esoteric Hospital" instead of continuing to paint the baby room while your wife is shrieking bloody murder? It has to go wrong or the characters won't learn and grow from it, you see! That's where you get the EXP from. I'm absolutely certain that's the thinking involved and it's dumb as hell.
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Aug 6, 2019 02:55
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juggalo baby coffin posted:I think a lot of them are cool but either don't fit the theme of the game too well (ie are just there to fight in a game that says it isn't about fighting (it is lying)), or are made annoying by the way the entries in the book aren't really standardized. That's basically what I thought it was. Bad stat blocks are aggravating, but manageable for me. The part about everything being there for fighting is where I would do my tweaks, but it's also just the way most people play rpgs in my experience. I wish it weren't that way and Numenera had better exploration bias and encounters, but like, it's a book written by dnd grognards so I'm not expecting otherwise and I'm not about to run out and buy Numenera. I'm just happy to see someone reviewing it because when Numenera first came out my ears perked up, but then when I read more about it the more I realized it wasn't actually going to be what I was hoping for and this review basically confirms that.
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Aug 6, 2019 03:36
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Sage Genesis posted:Uh... why is the pregnancy complication not optional? Does every single pregnancy in Invisible Sun always go wrong in some way? Shouldn't the step after Complication not be "Go To The Esoteric Hospital" instead of continuing to paint the baby room while your wife is shrieking bloody murder?
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Aug 6, 2019 03:59
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Night10194 posted:It has to go wrong or the characters won't learn and grow from it, you see! That's where you get the EXP from. It's like Monte read Burning Wheel while hosed up on Everclear and gas station spice and wrote what he remembered of it.
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Aug 6, 2019 04:29
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