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Night10194 posted:The other thing is a lot of the attempts to 'gameify' mental illness are dealing with things that have no real world analogue, so why should they inflict mental traumas and things that happen to map to whatever copy of the DSM the game's author is using? We have no idea what 'losing 90% of humanity within the last 10 years' would actually do psychologically. Nor 'encountered a giant alien dragon squid/evil AI gangster computer god'. If you need to have shock and surprise and moments of despair slow a character down, fine, but it doesn't need to manifest in 'you have GAD now' or other mental illness terms. This is why I kind of like the nWolf take on it. Luna, spirit of the moon, is also spirit of "madness" but madness is not actually any real mental illness. It and Lunacy (the mental breakdown associated with seeing werewolves in their true form) are a kind of horror movie insanity that explicitly doesn't and should not be taken to map to real mental illness. It's Moon Crazy.
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Aug 12, 2019 19:40
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Jerik posted:And according to the illustration, it also makes a snazzy necklace... I will note that along with Mjolnir and Stormbringer, Ma Yuan's omni-weapon gadget was one of the most sought-after bits of loot from this book back in the day. At least among Monty Haul campaigns where god-killing was a popular recreation.
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Aug 12, 2019 19:56
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I think it is valuable to provide (respectful, genre-appropriate) avenues to help players portray characters with mental illness, in games where one can similarly model physical illness or disability. That being said, most cases are done terribly and even the very basic level of 'this provides a mechanical hook to attach it to the game at large' is mostly because I find that kind of thing helps players feel more ok about having things on their character sheet that can be a problem for them and the group (even when the group is expressly interested in that kind of story). But I also can really understand why one might want to just avoid the entire issue in gaming.
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Aug 12, 2019 20:24
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Tibalt posted:So this may have changed from 1st to 2nd version and I may be remembering wrong, but in the aftermath of the TITANS and Earth getting wiped out, somebody decided they needed a generation of brilliant leaders NOW. They stuck a bunch of baby brains in a simulated environment, cracked up the speed so that the children inside the simulation would experience time 6x faster (and therefore grow up in just 3 years), and let that simulation go without so much as a "Hello" to any bioethics board. A: an integral reproduction cycle to Flats (non-chipped regular humans) or B: an absolute luxury due to birth control augs being the norm in morphs and needing money to raise kids any which way. Exowombs exist for growing new kids but you have to have some kind of capital to access them. Regular-rear end pregnancy takes time and resources which you may be lacking as a wage slave on Luna or a rep-scumming anarchist who keeps the toilets unclogged. Many, many societies in Eclipse Phase are not conducive to healthily raising children and ironically the Jovian Republic kinda has this on lock as a result of the majority being Flats. There's universities but not a lot of schools. There's scum swarms and exhuman habitats and floating cylinders full of robot morphs and whales on the sun. Everyone is working 24/7, even if you're too rich in rep or money to work. It's a world for adults. And the Lost (this name was post-hoc, obviously) Project was, in universe, a deeply deniable corporate project to answer this question. 'cuz fundamentally if you want to have a kid all you have to do is fork yourself and edit the memories heavily. Bam. New person. But they wanted something more traditional with some acceleration: absolutely new minds incubated in a safe place and allowed to mature and grow. 99% of humanity is dead. Can we really just repopulate with forks of ourselves? (yes) Is this project a viable way to raise new life in this solar system now? Which is a really great mission statement until you start giving corporate carte blanche and really really powerful computer servers to unsupervised scientists and don't include as many social scientists as you should.
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Aug 13, 2019 01:19
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That, and the omnipresent, casual opportunities for mass mind rape, are part of what the make large chunks of the setting too toxic to want to play in, hence my preference for exoplanet focused stuff. At a certain point, the answer to "wHaT mAkEs YoU a PeRsOn?!?!?" is "gently caress it, I'm tired and everything is so nasty and lovely and mean that I don't care anymore."
Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 01:49 on Aug 13, 2019 |
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Aug 13, 2019 01:41
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Personally I feel like I'd gladly run or play in EP if I wanted to play that kind of high-weirdness uplift and upload SFF, I'd just pretty liberally modify the setting to fit my game and group. A lot of kitchen sink settings more or less need to be approached that way, honestly.
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Aug 13, 2019 02:35
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Yeah, there's always a gulf between game-as-discussed and game-as-played, and some games have a bigger distance than more (Hello Shadowrun)
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Aug 13, 2019 02:47
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I keep thinking I'd want to play EP and then I realize I'd make it through chargen + asking the GM "how long will it take for me to fork an arbitrarily large army of flats of myself, 3d print up basic weapons, and systematically dismantle a megacorp with as much violence as is available?" And then that becoming an NPC in the game that goes on without me while I do something else with my evenings.
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Aug 13, 2019 02:56
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Ronwayne posted:That, and the omnipresent, casual opportunities for mass mind rape, are part of what the make large chunks of the setting too toxic to want to play in, hence my preference for exoplanet focused stuff. At a certain point, the answer to "wHaT mAkEs YoU a PeRsOn?!?!?" is "gently caress it, I'm tired and everything is so nasty and lovely and mean that I don't care anymore." Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:I keep thinking I'd want to play EP and then I realize I'd make it through chargen + asking the GM "how long will it take for me to fork an arbitrarily large army of flats of myself, 3d print up basic weapons, and systematically dismantle a megacorp with as much violence as is available?" And then that becoming an NPC in the game that goes on without me while I do something else with my evenings.
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Aug 13, 2019 03:01
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Joe Slowboat posted:I think it is valuable to provide (respectful, genre-appropriate) avenues to help players portray characters with mental illness, in games where one can similarly model physical illness or disability. That being said, most cases are done terribly and even the very basic level of 'this provides a mechanical hook to attach it to the game at large' is mostly because I find that kind of thing helps players feel more ok about having things on their character sheet that can be a problem for them and the group (even when the group is expressly interested in that kind of story). Yeah, this is part of why the Accessibility Toolkit exists, because having no representation sucks but having bad representation where you're the butt of the joke is even worse. I recommend reading the free preview to see how it covers the topics. It's here if anyone wants to peep it.
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Aug 13, 2019 03:03
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The more I hear, the more EP sounds more like a dystopian hellscape that is horrific in ways the writers don't understand. Psychosurgery, forking/resleeving, ten years after an apocalypse that everyone just kinda seems to ignore somehow, where every single adult in the setting has lived through it, and it doesn't sound like children are actually born or raised at all. It's like... it's like the setting is the actual MMO experience. No growth or change in society, reloading saved characters when you die horribly, wandering monster that do so for pointless programmed reasons, your NPCs are mass produced, traumatized lobotomy patients, and everyone is dropped into arbitrary political factions with facile ideologies. You exist to do quests and to make your numbers go up, dying regularly and a new being that thinks he was the previous you is installed in another disposable body. You don't love, you don't have families, and the millions of people who 'fled' the Earth are stuck in limbo. Despite them being a vast potential help to everyone, especially since they also lived through it and being from Earth likely have a wealth of pre-apocalypse knowledge and education. But no, they're used to calculate pi for megacorps for reasons. Megacorps that don't actually have a market that merits their existence. It's just so confused, unthinking, and horrifying in that way of someone writing a utopia is creating a hell and has no idea that they are doing so.
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Aug 13, 2019 04:06
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Jerik posted:Terrible things. Hi I'm an academic focusing on medieval Chinese things and this hurt my brain so much that first I grabbed whiskey and then I just stopped reading and did something I never do which is jump ahead to post. This is a loving garbage fire. I appreciate that you definitely tried your best with the Chinese, I know that's hard, (PS if you want the other characters, PM me), but loving ow. Ow. Ow. I'm lily god drat white and just this much flagrant disregard for Chinese culture hurt me. Ow. I already had a drink so I'm not gonna make an effort-post now, but I'll try to do one tomorrow cause jesus loving christ that is dire and for once I have something to contribute. (Not knocking your efforts, I just literally am getting a degree in this.) Also loving bullshit Wade-Giles was not standard then. Pinyin came out in the 50's and only idiots kept using it cause it's loving garbage. That point you're just straight up wrong about. Every even half-decent Sinologist adopted pinyin by the early 60's cause it's just way better. Also stop capitalizing it, it just means "spelling". Good write up of a bad book but I'm too angry to give constructive stuff. I'll try to do Xiahou Dun Knows Way Too Much About Old Chinese Things Theater tomorrow when I'm less angry and more sober. gently caress how do you gently caress up Guandi that bad! And somehow forget he's the "god" of tofu. And that translating gods from Chinese culture is bullshit at the beginning. gently caress! I need to take a walk.
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Aug 13, 2019 04:19
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Yeah, "Disposable" is a lot of the impression I get out of everything in EP. Even characters themselves are disposable, given how forks exist and there is literally nothing stopping you from pulling an AD&D style "Oh, Andy died? I'm his identical brother Randy. There's also the sisters Mandy, Sandy and Candy, so you better hope nothing happens to m-URK. There's interesting things you can do with analyzing the sanctity of life as a self-perpetuating algorithm, but I don't think EP is much interested in that so much as "okay but is it bestiality if we're information constructs merely inhabiting the bodies of a gorilla and an octopus at the time. Deep moral dilemmas here." I mean, by all accounts EP should be a place where Monsieur Mallah & The Brain can exist with po-faced seriousness. But it seems a tad too fixated on Freak The Norms like some kind of bad WW knockoff. ...gently caress, now I can articulate why I dislike EP: It kinda feels like if Phil 'Satyros' Brucato finished his copy of Accelerando and had Ideas. Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 04:23 on Aug 13, 2019 |
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Aug 13, 2019 04:21
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I imagine there was probably also a political cast; wasn't pinyin developed or otherwise associated with the CCP?
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Aug 13, 2019 04:21
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YOU ARE A GENDERLESS SELF-REPLICATING NANOVIRUS CALLED DAVIS, YOU LIVE IN A COMMUNIST HABITAT AROUND URANUS. THE LAST HUMAN PART OF YOU IS THAT YOU STILL GIGGLE WHEN THAT'S MENTIONED.
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Aug 13, 2019 04:29
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Ronwayne posted:YOU ARE A GENDERLESS SELF-REPLICATING NANOVIRUS CALLED DAVIS, YOU LIVE IN A COMMUNIST HABITAT AROUND URANUS. THE LAST HUMAN PART OF YOU IS THAT YOU STILL GIGGLE WHEN THAT'S MENTIONED.
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Aug 13, 2019 04:39
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the comparison of EP to some kind of prequel to warframe is eerily accurate. especially the part of warframe where you find out the ruling cast of the previous society really, REALLY deserved to be murdered wholesale by their abused clone workers. the best thing that could happen to most of the factions in eclipse phase is the TITANs finishing the job.
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Aug 13, 2019 04:39
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Maybe in 3rd edition, Eclipse Phase will reveal all the inconsistencies in timeline and weirdness in politics are that it's all been part of a simulation running to keep everyone's brains relatively sane and stable in a planetary-core-sized server farm while the solar system burns out the the Exsurgency infection with a cosmic deep-clean over the next few hundred years, and 3rd edition is picking up the pieces in a universe where the wolves have been pushed back from the door, all that's really out there is what people put out there, and there hasn't really been a You in centuries, so all that exists is what you make, all that matters is what you do, and who you are is who you choose to be. Probably not though.
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Aug 13, 2019 04:40
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Now THAT is how you take "Previous season was all a dream" to its final conclusion.
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Aug 13, 2019 04:42
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Ronwayne posted:Yeah, "Disposable" is a lot of the impression I get out of everything in EP. Even characters themselves are disposable, given how forks exist and there is literally nothing stopping you from pulling an AD&D style "Oh, Andy died? I'm his identical brother Randy. There's also the sisters Mandy, Sandy and Candy, so you better hope nothing happens to m-URK. Arguably, the most interesting thing you could do with EP is to lean into the crash and play it like Extremely Serious Paranoia With Infinite Clones. Everyone is dying of terminal PTSD and future shock and nobody wants to discuss it at all, everyone and everything is disposable, the exurgants are basically the only thing that's solid and meaningful in this society of ghosts and they are utterly incapable of coping with it, so your group of murder-junkies and serial-suicides need to deal with it. Or at least that's what you all claim is motivating you when someone else asks. That's what a motivation is, right?
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Aug 13, 2019 04:56
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Nessus posted:I imagine there was probably also a political cast; wasn't pinyin developed or otherwise associated with the CCP? It was kind of sort of started by the ROC but they abandoned it during the war and then the PRC picked it up. They kind of half assed came into the room and read their notes after they'd left, so to speak. Then also kind of dropped it cause it was too not-commie. But yeah the ROC/Taiwan doesn't use pinyin (or even Wade Giles) which can be super annoying. In my experience they use something vaguely inspired by the Yale system but I think they might have been drunk. It's really more Bepemefe/Zhuyinfuhao half-assed applied to Roman letters. With no tone marks. Taiwan is a mess. Also he's called GuandDI instead of Guanyu because he's a god and "di" means "god". Or well, close enough. That whole update just made me really angry. Not at the summarization, but at the content. It's so loving wrong it hurts. I'm on my second bourbon just thinking about it. Uggggghhhhhhhhh. I'm going to post an angry rebuttal but I'm tired and no-one wants me to ramble. Also, using 簡體字. Come on. 最近在做什麼?
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Aug 13, 2019 05:19
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I mean, the way EP has always been sold to me is precisely as a horror setting where the giant AI monsters are basically just setting dressing and the real horror is the absolute alienation between human experience before and after the fall? That's sort of the point of the setting, that Earth died screaming and as a result you live as an algorithm in lawless space habitats. It just doesn't go the route of loudly declaring everything to be awful because a large part of the setting is that life goes on, as I understand it - people are still (weird, posthuman) people, and post-Fall society seems a lot like it's a thin tissue of people pretending things can be stable and Earthlike again despite that being a ludicrous fantasy. I mean, the Lost Generation is an obvious example of horror, and I don't know why it's not being treated as such on here? Both the idea that the ideal citizen the project produced (a weird, selfish, traumatized teen who's good at hacking) might be the actual best adapted to what the world has become, and the idea of being one of the Lost Generation. It's the horror of 'trying to succeed in the capitalist education and employment arena' taken to the posthuman superscience degree, where the deeply emotionally damaged young marketing executives are now human-based engrams literally raised in a vat. E: which is also why Ultimates and Jovian fit in as varieties of authoritarian or fascist response to cyber hell capitalism. A few nice anarcho-socialist habs on the fringes can have their poo poo together and be decent places to live, I'd personally prefer that so it's clear how unnecessary and cruel the various dystopian places are.
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Aug 13, 2019 05:33
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But after a certain point it all becomes so unrelentingly nasty it kinda kills the enthusiasm you need to get through chargen. (Speaking first hand, making a PC right now, you need a bit of enthusiasm to get through the core.) Actually now that I think about it, would doing a post by post on making this PC be in the spirit of this thread? The old EP thread autoarchived.
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Aug 13, 2019 07:29
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Xiahou Dun posted:I already had a drink so I'm not gonna make an effort-post now, but I'll try to do one tomorrow cause jesus loving christ that is dire and for once I have something to contribute. (Not knocking your efforts, I just literally am getting a degree in this.) I'd definitely be interested in your comments on the chapter. I mean, don't feel obligated if you don't feel up for it, but if you do want to post about the matter I'd certainly be interested in reading it. I did try to do my own research about the gods in the chapter (which is largely why this post took so long and why so much time passed between the post on the Central American Mythos chapter and this one), but like I said in the post I'm absolutely not in any way an expert on Chinese culture and mythology, and I'd like to hear from someone who is. I'm sure there are plenty of things I've missed or gotten wrong. Xiahou Dun posted:Also loving bullshit Wade-Giles was not standard then. Pinyin came out in the 50's and only idiots kept using it cause it's loving garbage. That point you're just straight up wrong about. Every even half-decent Sinologist adopted pinyin by the early 60's cause it's just way better. Also stop capitalizing it, it just means "spelling". ...Like that, for instance. Oops. Okay, yeah, my bad; I knew Wade-Giles was an older romanization system no longer in use, but I didn't know exactly how old, and I guess I just assumed that it was still standard when Deities & Demigods was written. I should have checked instead of assuming. I'll edit the post to correct that bit. Actually, I think probably the real reason Deities & Demigods used Wade-Giles is because their principal source for this chapter was published in 1922 and used Wade-Giles: E. M. Werner's Myths and Legends of China. (I mentioned that book near the end of the post, but it'll come up again in the next post as it becomes increasingly clear that that book was Kuntz and Ward's main, if not only, source for Chinese mythology.) Unfortunately, if the content of this post enraged you, I don't think you'll like the next post any better... among other things, as far as I can tell Kuntz and Ward managed to mistake a book for a god and presented a goddess noted for her kindness and virtue as a chaotic evil monster.
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Aug 13, 2019 08:06
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tv tropes calls that 'darkness-induced audience apathy', and while i don't like tv tropes it is a pretty good term. I think the horror elements of EP don't come off as being the main focus because of a few factors: - the writers seem super horned up for the scum barges and there are some clear favourites and designated 'good guys' - all the art is guys doing karate kicks in front of explosions, not sobbing people selling their flesh body so they can pay for a new robot body for their infugee child who was murdered on earth - the horror is undercut by the fact stuff doesn't make any sense, which makes the horror seem like obvious artifice rather than believable. 10 years after 95% of the population is murdered in the most horrific ways imaginable and the entire earth is lost there are somehow functional nation-states and functioning hypercapitalist markets? even warhammer 40k has a more realistic backdrop for the misery of its setting, and that game has demons in it.
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Aug 13, 2019 08:12
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Fundamentally, as I told someone earlier, EP just lacks focus. It has a lot of elements that are, on their own, interesting: TITANS, the Fall, sleeving/resleeving, forking, psychosurgery, the Factors, the Pandora Gates, exsurgents, a solar system split along "ideological" lines rather than straight-up nationalist ones. But they all have different focuses so they all draw the game in different directions, and some of them clearly only get namedropped because there was no time/space left for them, like the Factors. Hell, at some point even the TITANs and Exsurgents that feature so heavily in the background fluff start to feel like the authors forgot about them since they mostly exist in appendices full of save-or-die opportunities. I mean, the TITANs are, per description, so far behind human comprehension and power that humans can't actually sensibly engage with them, only with the crazy exsurgents they poop out seemingly at random. They have less of a guiding logic than the Great Old Ones/Elder Gods in the Lovecraft Mythos and only exist to be background dressing. Even the loving Lady of Pain has more opportunities to engage with her and actually use her in a game except as a "you chose... poorly. The TITAN reaps your souls." If EP wanted to be a psychological horror setting, it should just have focused on a far-future ideological solar system with psychosurgery and forking. If EP wanted to be Space Delta Green it should just have focused on the TITANs and exsurgents and let WHO ARE YOU REALLY?! stuff stay in the background. If EP wanted to be Space Shadowrun, tone back the whole TITAN aspect and heck maybe even just make Earth uninhabitable due to compounding climate crises. Boom. Solved. Fall happens, TITANs do not. If EP wanted to be a soft space opera, focus on the Factors and the Pandora Gates, fade out what's actually going on back in Sol except as it colours the various Pandora Gate owners and missions they fund. Joe Slowboat posted:E: which is also why Ultimates and Jovian fit in as varieties of authoritarian or fascist response to cyber hell capitalism. A few nice anarcho-socialist habs on the fringes can have their poo poo together and be decent places to live, I'd personally prefer that so it's clear how unnecessary and cruel the various dystopian places are. Part of the problem is that as presented, if you think about it for even five seconds, the "nice anarcho-socialist habs" are their own flavour of horrifyingly dystopian. In the inner-system habs you're useless to society if you're not commodifiable and don't fit into the machine, in the outer-system habs you get ostracized and rendered into rep-poverty if you don't like wacky random dance parties and everyone doing drugs and having public sex parties for ~art~. Choose your own flavour of choking on poo poo if you're even marginally introvert. juggalo baby coffin posted:the comparison of EP to some kind of prequel to warframe is eerily accurate. I have at various points been extremely tempted to homebrew a Warframe PnP RPG just because it's got so much cool setting and background stuff that's kind of wasted/rarely engaged with because of the format.  Or at least a passable knockoff of the Warframe setting.
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Aug 13, 2019 09:26
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PurpleXVI posted:Part of the problem is that as presented, if you think about it for even five seconds, the "nice anarcho-socialist habs" are their own flavour of horrifyingly dystopian. In the inner-system habs you're useless to society if you're not commodifiable and don't fit into the machine, in the outer-system habs you get ostracized and rendered into rep-poverty if you don't like wacky random dance parties and everyone doing drugs and having public sex parties for ~art~. Choose your own flavour of choking on poo poo if you're even marginally introvert. I'd say the analogy to Cthulhu makes sense, except that Sandy Petersen wasn't writing for an audience that was in significant portion warmly anticipating the rise of Great Cthulhu.
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Aug 13, 2019 10:37
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The 'nice anarcho-socialist habs' aren't the scum barges, those are medium-bad at best, I don't think the authors were ever particularly enthused about '4chan but it's a pseudo-nation-state.' I was thinking about Titan, and the implied habs that have their poo poo together but aren't really the narrative focus precisely for that reason?
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Aug 13, 2019 15:27
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PurpleXVI posted:I have at various points been extremely tempted to homebrew a Warframe PnP RPG just because it's got so much cool setting and background stuff that's kind of wasted/rarely engaged with because of the format. Getting off topic for the thread, but are there any good summaries of the Warframe setting? I haven't played in forever, and I mostly remember all fan sources just being numbers crunching and drop rates
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Aug 13, 2019 15:34
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PoontifexMacksimus posted:Getting off topic for the thread, but are there any good summaries of the Warframe setting? I haven't played in forever, and I mostly remember all fan sources just being numbers crunching and drop rates Ancient empire ruled by transhuman demigods kept making terrible decisions on the basis of 'this can't actually affect me personally, so I don't care how horrible it is' until eventually it affected them personally, in the face, via space ninjas.
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Aug 13, 2019 15:45
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If we take these traumatised god-children and train them to be super soldiers to fight our wars for us, there can only be good outcomes!
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Aug 13, 2019 15:51
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Xiahou Dun posted:Hi I'm an academic focusing on medieval Chinese things and this hurt my brain so much that first I grabbed whiskey and then I just stopped reading and did something I never do which is jump ahead to post. There's a reason I've just stopped commenting on how badly they've been loving up mythology in general.
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Aug 13, 2019 15:52
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Mors Rattus posted:There's a reason I've just stopped commenting on how badly they've been loving up mythology in general. Imagine what you'd get if you ran Christianity through the Deities & Demigods filter 
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Aug 13, 2019 16:03
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SirPhoebos posted:Imagine what you'd get if you ran Christianity through the Deities & Demigods filter Something somethings saints something.
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Aug 13, 2019 16:14
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wiegieman posted:If we take these traumatised god-children and train them to be super soldiers to fight our wars for us, there can only be good outcomes! Look, we've been assured that the self-replicating AIs that we are absolutely not permitted to build under any circumstances will just die if they use FTL, so there's no way they can ever actually come back to Sol and gently caress us, too. They'll surely just quietly do everything we want and then die quietly in the void later. Okay that went badly. Start arming the slave-clones, there's no way those will turn on us. Also infect everything with a, like...metal-eating plague that can infect machines, that will probably work. 4000 years later everything is on fire.
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Aug 13, 2019 16:16
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Night10194 posted:Look, we've been assured that the self-replicating AIs that we are absolutely not permitted to build under any circumstances will just die if they use FTL, so there's no way they can ever actually come back to Sol and gently caress us, too. They'll surely just quietly do everything we want and then die quietly in the void later.
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Aug 13, 2019 16:20
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SirPhoebos posted:Imagine what you'd get if you ran Christianity through the Deities & Demigods filter This is how you end up with the Earth Defense Force trying to arrest God on the charges of starting poo poo, then hitting him with an airstrike. And/or any other JRPG with God but the EDF example is simply the best one because EDF rules.
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Aug 13, 2019 16:23
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SirPhoebos posted:Imagine what you'd get if you ran Christianity through the Deities & Demigods filter Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Aug 13, 2019 |
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Aug 13, 2019 16:23
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Night10194 posted:This is how you end up with the Earth Defense Force trying to arrest God on the charges of starting poo poo, then hitting him with an airstrike.
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Aug 13, 2019 17:03
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 Inquisitor Abilities, Psychic Powers, and Endless Lists of Stuff Haha, this may have been marked abandoned, but like all good overly-fiddly and archaic narrative wargames, there’s always a revival waiting to happen. For those who have forgotten, Inquisitor is the 54mm-scale narrative wargame produced by Games Workshop’s Specialist Games division, intended to explore the darker corners of their Warhammer 40k universe through the lens of an Inquisitorial Team. I won’t lie, the next two chapters are part of why I stalled out at first - big lists of stuff aren’t particularly interesting, and a lot of these sections are basically giant lists of stuff, along with some mechanics that can be kinda interesting but are otherwise a bit buried in other stuff. So, rather than going through absolutely everything, you’ll get the high-level stuff here, along with my own understanding of how this can be used to create flavorful and interesting characters. Talents Talents are just what they sound like - innate or practiced skills that a model has that lets them do things better or take some different types of actions during a game. A few highlights are:
Otherwise, most of these talents are stuff like “You can ignore various penalties while shooting” and “Better at X action”, which is a nice way to make individual models feel more granular despite having similar/close numbers. I like the idea behind it, but as has come up quite often in these kinds of reviews, a bunch of small, fiddly bonuses can really slow things down. The issue I mentioned above (namely, that these feel like they’re either letting you ignore mechanics or are hyper-specific) seem somewhat at odds with the narrative focus of the game - it’s still clutching onto the idea that if you’re not keywording a bunch of options, anarchy will reign and no one will play. Still, on the other hand, in a game where your characters are meant to be a motley crew, they can add variety to what is otherwise a block of numbers and a model - an otherwise-incompetent adept who somehow manages to land on their feet is an interesting idea and puts them in a position where you may try unexpected tactics during a game. Psychic Powers The big “science fantasy” element of 40k, psychic powers are the sole domain of psykers, whose connection to the Immaterium allows them to do stuff like make things explode with their brains or act like a radio station in order to relay communications/whatever the 40k equivalent of annoying earworms are. Psychic powers are basically like using a weapon, except the character’s brain is the weapon. Concentrate for your standard dime bonus of +10%, modified by range to the target, line-of-sight, and the difficulty of the power itself. The rules text explicitly mentions that powers that don’t require LOS get a bonus for having LOS to the target, while those that require it get no bonus for having it. Failure can lead to brain damage for the psyker - for every full 10% the psyker fails a psychic power test by, they lose d10 willpower. So, from 0-9% nothing, 10-19% is 1d10, 20-29% is 2d10, etc. No chance of horrifying warp portals due to a critical failure unless that’s part of the scenario dreamed up by the GM. Powers can also be nullified - if a psyker is affected by another psyker’s ability, they can attempt to nullify it by passing a Willpower test, with a penalty equal to the degree by which the original psyker passed the test to activate their power. This is a free action, so might as well do it as soon as the original psyker’s power activates. After going over these mechanics, we get a bit list of assorted powers for psykers, divided into disciplines.
GMs are cautioned to limit what psychic abilities are available in a scenario, as well as to tailor what both sides have access to so as to keep things interesting. Overall, I think Pyromancy is the most boring of the disciplines, with Daemonology and Telepathy managing to be remarkably interesting and flavorful thanks to the conceits of the setting. Miscellaneous Abilities Finally, there’s a list of random grab-bag abilities that can be used to build up options for the players, including stuff like regeneration, vampirism, spitting acid, natural psychic abilities that always work, and various daemonic abilities. Most interesting, however, is the advice on how to use these abilities and talents; the GM is encouraged to set caveats and combinations on abilities so as to create a more interesting character. For example, they recommend combining vampirism with regeneration, with the regeneration only working on a turn where they successfully make a vampirism attack. Weapons and Equipment The next big chapter is gear porn. It’s a giant block of numbers for the most part, so I’m just going to talk about the more interesting options here. Weapons are pretty obvious - we get stats for various types of las-weapons (including the venerable Necromunda-pattern semi-auto las rifle), solid projectile weapons (everything from single-shot muskets to assault cannons), bolters in every configuration you could imagine, melta, plasma, and flame weapons, along with all sorts of throwable sharp objects. Then we get to the fun stuff. Because Inquisitors have access to weird stuff, you get stuff like needle rifles, gravity guns, web shooters, neural shredders, and the hilariously deadly psycannon. There’s also the option to take reclaimed Xenos weaponry and utilize it in whatever dark missions are required in the Imperium of Man - everything from Kroot rifles to Necron gauss flayers are available, most of which is hilarious overkill. We also get stats for the Hrud fusil, from back when they were hinting that the Hrud were space-Skaven. Close-combat weapons follow a similar pattern - stats for more stuff than you’ll ever need in the form of axes, staffs, knives, chain knives, Eviscerator-pattern chainblades, and armored gauntlets, followed by power weapons and force weapons. Then, we get the classic Daemon weapons where the wielder is fighting possession every turn but also gains access to various powers, with the first set of rules being for how the GM should try to create a unique weapon if any ever appears. There’s a whole grab-bag of powers for them, and they are appropriately powerful to make up for the insane risk of touching a daemonic weapon. We also get exotic melee weapons, which is mostly stuff that seems to have been made for the Dark Eldar, and optional attachments like bayonets and chain-bayonets. After weapons, we get grenades and explosives. As expected, they’re heavy, come in a wide variety of hyper-specific options (anti-plant grenades are an essential part of an Inquisitor’s equipment), and even have rules for blowing up structures, setting timers, and generally doing sneaky Inquisitorial stuff. Explosions are, as one might expect, ridiculously damaging, with the peak probably being attaching Meltabombs to things, which do d3 x 20 damage to a single location. Although the rules specifically state that you can’t attach them to non-inanimate objects, there’s nothing to say that the GM can’t let players improvise. Armor is . . . armor. We went over the mechanics earlier, there’s a bunch of types and fields, including ones that are more useful against daemons, psykers, darkness, melee, and ranged weaponry, as well as the classic “teleport you in a random location upon activating” type fields. Power armor remains the best, which means that you’re supposed to maybe have one person wearing something like it. Now, onto the weird miscellaneous equipment! We’ve got bionics, which replace missing bits with either crude prosthesis or advanced technology - there’s a bunch of penalties/bonuses available depending on the quality, and it is possible to mostly ditch your meat-form by getting bionic arms, legs, a head, a brain, lungs, heart, and various other items, including the ever-classic Mechanicus Mechandrite tentacles, implanted weaponry, the necessary hookups to pilot a Titan, and psychic booster circuitry. Combat drugs are next on the block - they do a wide variety of stuff, and it’s actually a cool part of Inquisitor that you expect your guys to use them to get an edge in the dark dealings of the world. Models can huff their stimms, inject them, use an auto-injector, or just get implanted with a gland that constantly floods them with violence-drugs, all of which have nasty side-effects and which will likely lead to a dead member of your retinue before too long. Viruses and toxins are handled similarly, except there are no good effects and a cool table of hallucinations. Finally, the last bits of equipment are miscellaneous stuff like weapon sights for small bonuses, servo-skulls in several varieties, psyber-eagles to let your Inquisitor do psychic powers through a two-headed bird, cyber-mastiffs for having Good Dogges to attack dudes, and various things like motion trackers, psychic hoods, and solvent for web guns. Okay, my long nightmare of equipment is over! Next time, on Inquisitor: character creation recommendations!
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Aug 13, 2019 17:12
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