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mcclay posted:I'll agree, its always bugged me how in TTRPGs and video games based off of HPL trying to shoot the things is useless despite like 85% of his stories getting solved by someone either killing the thing, doing magic at it or at the very least confronting the monster. Also how sanity works in those derivatives bug me a lot. In HPL's work you don't go 'oof ow owch im insane and will now hump my couch now' from seeing the giant squid man and his cool theme park-resort island. You freak the gently caress out and have a panic attack or an existential crisis. The long term affects are close to what we would now call PTSD, now early Call of Cthulhu's embarssing list of phobias and philias or something like schizophrenia or bipolar or whatever. And with characters like Randolph Hearst (or whatever his last name is), we see that it is possible to get used and acclimated to the mythos just fine. Elsewise homie wouldn't be doing donuts on nightgaunts and hanging out with moon cats and ghouls. I like how Silent Legions handles the whole insanity thing. You accrue insanity points in a manner pretty similar to the CoC rpg, and at 100, you lose the character. There are temporary effects like panic, catatonia, etc. You can only reduce your insanity in two ways if memory serves: leveling up and taking on quirks. You and the GM sit down and discuss what sort of phobia, tick, delusion, rationalization, conspiracy theory etc. your character has developed to help shield them from the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. Silent Legions also includes tools for making dark magic, strange artifacts, eldritch tomes, building an unique mythos, creating cults and then simulating their activities and rivalries in the background and more. The default mechanics are pretty deadly, but there are also rules for magical gifts or disciplines to even the playing field, and even tweaks to make it into a more heroic splatterpunk thing. There’s also an alternate setting in the back of the book where players are luchadores who bodyslam their way through cosmic horrors like Conan in a mask. By default, the nastier mythos creatures are immune to crits (critical damage is pretty common in the system), but the combat class can bypass that. Dynamite, knives and tommy guns will make short work of chaff like cultists, fish men and rats-what-live-in-walls. Bigger weapons (like boats!) are recommended for harder targets. All of the classes have cool abilities related to their schtick, so a detective can call on his “find every loving clue here,” power, or the socialite can make things happen and gain access easily to restricted areas and the researcher can definitely find the right goddamn book when they need to. The occultist is better at using magic and artifacts, and the muscle, of course, can make things very dead. All of the content generation tools are system neutral, so you’re not locked into one game. Buy Silent Legions Pvt.Scott fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 16:05
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Tylana posted:I don't want to make LPing this awful mess any harder but... would it be possible for in the screenshots to either mouse over the option you are going to take, or none of them? Or is it because the selected option is less readable in screenshots? So one thing I have noticed but not mentioned in the LP is that the game gets blurrier with more lost sanity. As mentioned, the selected option is getting transcribed. Let me know if there's still an issue and we'll figure something out.
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Jul 24, 2020 21:11
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Let's Not Talk About Manifest Destiny So I am by no means an expert in Abenaki culture, but this really doesn't seem like a flattering portrayal? Racism! Ghosts! Manifest destiny! Sad magicians! Women in refrigerators! Pazuzu!
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Jul 25, 2020 07:12
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Eh. Think the conga line of Stygian! is getting to me. Just two things from me this time. Update first, etc. -As the witness list mentioned, there is an option instead of Massacre/Melee Skillcheck. By instead investing in Pyschology, (the little hypnosis pendulum might also be required) it's possible to talk to one of the orphans loitering in town as a witness. Stygian really wants players to have invested in Psychology if that wasn't apparent for the audience by now. Not much is missed in and of itself, save the opportunity to give orphans rations if you feel bad about making Donna remember. -I think I talked about it earlier with the caricaturist, but Stygian really doesn't let players actually use it's skills enough. There are all these skills, but unless players invested in either Melee/Pyschology they either hope there's enough experience left around to hoover up or go do a massacre. We have speechcraft that could let us make our case to have a conversation! We have stealth to sneak our way in to investigate! We have occult to, Iunno perform a seance or use that poorly implemented spell to speak with the dead! all these skills laying around and instead of rewarding players with alternate solutions they punish them for not picking and investing in two specific skills. Euch. On that note, the fact the Stygian! devs aren't going for Stygian! 2! just yet is a bit of a relief. The Non-stygian game has to be better than this, right? Right?
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Jul 25, 2020 07:58
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Every update has me cringing even more, but I can't look away. This game is so bad
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Jul 25, 2020 14:01
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It's Not Nativism! We Swear! I'm really running out of ways to say "the developers did not understand their source material and are also incompetent", but that's the crux of this. I will die of shock if the cat game is actually good. Ghosts! Stabbings! Terrible Old Men! Misreading Lovecraft yet again! Nodens! Suicide attempts!
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Jul 26, 2020 00:42
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Well that was anticlimactic.
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Jul 26, 2020 02:46
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So if you botch talking the Nameless Soldier down from suicide, does he actually kill himself? Does it actually take and leave us down a party member forever?
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Jul 26, 2020 05:39
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So they really have the pirate ghosts demand that you present evidence of their guilt in a dialogue tree when the game has already ensured that you are a witness to the last murder? “I GUESS IT MUST HAVE BEEN SOME OTHER PIRATE GHOSTS AND I HAVE THE WRONG HOUSE?”
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Jul 26, 2020 14:30
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Pule is actually a word! It means 'to cry weakly'. It's not a word that was common in the 1920s, according to Google ngram, but it's absolutely the sort of word these devs would throw into their script, so. Also, I'm becoming mildly concerned that continuing this LP is a form of self-harm. You doing okay? This seems... Just Awful.
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Jul 26, 2020 17:34
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BisbyWorl posted:So if you botch talking the Nameless Soldier down from suicide, does he actually kill himself? Does it actually take and leave us down a party member forever? I can't find any sources either way, there are a few hints on reddit that he dies. If we proc the encounter again I'll savescum it. That said, Sonia is still at Cornuto's so we can still have a full party. I suspect she is still level 3. Narsham posted:So they really have the pirate ghosts demand that you present evidence of their guilt in a dialogue tree when the game has already ensured that you are a witness to the last murder? Yes. It's a whole long interrogation where you have to explain the murder weapon and the motive and blah blah blah from your investigation and reading Fredkin's work. It's again weird to me they made the pirate ghosts the murderers and absolved the TOM of all responsibility, or that the ghosts are immune to everything we can do despite Bertha having the occult power to bind and summon ghosts . For bonus points we get the lead jar that the original TOM used to put pirates in but we of course cannot learn to summon ghosts in combat, pirate or otherwise. NAME REDACTED posted:Also, I'm becoming mildly concerned that continuing this LP is a form of self-harm. You doing okay? This seems... Just Awful. I play these games so you don't have to! Joking aside, I get a lot of cartharsis out of dissecting these games that insist that you play them for the story, subjecting them to the standard they think they hold up to, and laughing as they flop like a fish. We're almost at least halfway done with the game I think. I'm trying to come up with material for a postmortem on the first half but there's so little here and what's here is just...bad. At least Numenera and Ash of Gods pretended to be about things!
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Jul 26, 2020 22:14
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TheGreatEvilKing posted:I play these games so you don't have to! Joking aside, I get a lot of cartharsis out of dissecting these games that insist that you play them for the story, subjecting them to the standard they think they hold up to, and laughing as they flop like a fish. My biggest problem with designing games is starting from the other side. Why even bother writing anything good if you don’t have solid mechanics that are fun? Then I rewrite my ttrpg system for the 9000th time and nod sagely as I glance at the napkin that contains my setting details. Pvt.Scott fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jul 28, 2020 |
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Jul 28, 2020 16:57
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NAME REDACTED posted:Also, I'm becoming mildly concerned that continuing this LP is a form of self-harm. You doing okay? This seems... Just Awful. You could even say it's... Something Awful! 
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Jul 29, 2020 07:50
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To be fair it's perfectly in line with previous direction of this subforum when hate-plays were a lot more common. I, for one, really enjoy a good critical disemboweling and both this and the Numenera LP have (had) that in spades so please keep on rocking!
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Jul 29, 2020 10:49
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The Amount of Sheer loving Incompetence On Display Is Amazing I keep thinking "ok, I've seen the worst this game has to offer" and it keeps getting worse! Cultists! Necronomicon! Inept coding! Dogs! Psychopathy! WoOoOoOoOoO!!!!!
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Jul 31, 2020 06:06
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Dude, if this game doesn't kill your computer it'll be a friggin' miracle.
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Jul 31, 2020 16:48
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I don't recall it being this buggy in my own playthrough, yet somehow I am not surprised. Only one thing comes to mind in this particular trivia corner: Psychology. It's reared it's head a few times in the past, but Stygian really, really wants players to pick it. It enables dialogue options of course, and it also bolsters resistance to the various sources of sanity damage. With, possibly, the exception of sanity damage from casting spells. Haven't confirmed either way on that one. But while those are nice, there is a third benefit: Pyschology when resting/camping can be used to restore the sanity of your companions. Not your own character though. What, you thought you might use the camping skill on your own character in the hopes of coming to terms with all the terrible san-damaging horrors of stygian? Ahhah hah, no, now take your laudanum shot and read a book if you want your points back. While this would be more useful if it worked on yourself, being able to restore your companions sanity without breaking into the item stash is quite nice, particularly for the outsider. ----- Mh. Running low on things to  on.Just about at the point I put the game down and couldn't be bothered to finish. I've heard dire things about blasted street, and even knowing to prepare in advance it just didn't seem worth the bother.
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Jul 31, 2020 18:20
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AltaBrown posted:Dude, if this game doesn't kill your computer it'll be a friggin' miracle. "Kill?" The computer is clearly trying to commit suicide. Also, the game keeps amazing me: the way to portray a haunted protagonist who is slowly going mad is not to provide her with lots of sarcastic wisecracks in her dialogue trees. You are making a mockery of your own game, designers!
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Jul 31, 2020 18:57
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Clap your hands, seals! Look at the Lovecraft references, nerds! Clap! Clap your hands like trained seals! Cthulhu awkwardly shoehorned in! Technicolor Mary Poppins! Cultists! Game crashing bugs!
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Aug 4, 2020 04:37
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...I honestly don't understand how the developers thought this was complete or even professional enough to be sold? I haven't read any Lovecraft, but even then it feels sort of desperate and clingy in the presentation, as though showing off that it can recite references is enough to be exciting or fun? It honestly feels a bit pitiable. I am impressively weirded out by how many people are praising the witing in reviews of this thing 
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Aug 4, 2020 05:35
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As much as we disparage the way the devs here just refer to Lovecraft without understanding, the fan following around Lovecraft writings can get kind of culty at times. Which is oddly appropriate....
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Aug 4, 2020 06:30
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Keldulas posted:As much as we disparage the way the devs here just refer to Lovecraft without understanding, the fan following around Lovecraft writings can get kind of culty at times. Which is oddly appropriate.... I view Lovecraft as a part of his writing circle. Lovecraft wrote about how effete intellectuals would react to eldritch horrors, whereas Robert Howard wrote about how Steven Seagal would react to the same threats. They were technically writing in the same universe. A shoggoth is nothing an enchanted sword and a ship’s cook can’t hew in twain.
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Aug 4, 2020 06:39
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Funny tangential fact, I've read the OP's LP of Ash of Gods recently. I'd initially been holding off because honestly Ash of Gods makes a decent first impression, and I thought it might be something I'd play sometime. Then I saw TheGreatEvilKing's more recent LPs and went 'oh, he LPs dogshit' and ended up reading it. It was nice to read because I actually enjoyed Lo Pheng's sections. I will say that this is probably the worst game you've LPed so far. Torment and Ash of Gods had lovely gameplay and lovely writing yeah, but I'm honestly willing to say that this game actually tops both of those games on that front (especially since Ash of Gods actually had some good writing parts in the Lo Pheng sections, and I barely outright skipped reading the writing). The gameplay looks like it has so much nothing to it, and this game has the highest incidences of me skipping past the writing to the summaries. So similarly awful and insubstantial gaming, with worse writing, and then it adds hideously unstable programming so it's not even a technically-functional game. Is the next game going to be an outright virus or something? There's an uncomfortable quality dip with each successive game...
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Aug 4, 2020 07:37
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Keldulas posted:Is the next game going to be an outright virus or something? There's an uncomfortable quality dip with each successive game... For his magnum opus, GEK does an LP of Lose/Lose.
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Aug 4, 2020 08:05
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DIVING INTO THE BEEHIVE NOT THE BEEEEEEEEEEEES devildragon777 posted:I am impressively weirded out by how many people are praising the witing in reviews of this thing I wonder how many of the Steam reviews came from free review copies.
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Aug 4, 2020 12:52
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We've all lost sanity reading through this crap. My head hurts reading this.
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Aug 4, 2020 15:53
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It's kind of funny to see you topple over and the random mafia sentry blows his brains out but Eduardo and the Soldier just stand there.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:01
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It feels telling that the first time I saw it, I felt the actual mood was in opposition to the presumed intent of "scary, somehow". If anything, I felt it was one of "Ooooh, looky here! It's Cthulhu, get the camera!" as though the event was just another tourist attraction. "Oooh, looky! A surprise 'Mi-Go'! I'll see if I can get us both in the frame..." "Oh it's the old man, maybe I can get an autograph or a replica bottle!" "Ooh, someone died in the street! Wonder if the ghost is up for an interview, eh?" Etc etc etc.
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Aug 4, 2020 19:27
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Keldulas posted:Is the next game going to be an outright virus or something? There's an uncomfortable quality dip with each successive game... Honestly this game is bad enough I don't think I can find something worse that's not some weird disgusting sex game. Not sure what's next - was debating Pathfinder Kingmaker, Tyranny, or that Kingdoms of Amalur remake we are getting for some reason. Alternatively I could do something I really enjoy, but where's the fun in that?
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Aug 5, 2020 00:12
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Do Tyranny, it at least has a lot more joy with the bad than anything else. Kingmaker is just....Pathfinder, and that's bad enough by itself. Amalur I know nothing about, supposedly it was the start for a multi-media-franchise that totally bombed but maybe a good game is beneath it all?
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Aug 5, 2020 08:37
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The problem with Amalur is that it's just incredibly boring to play It's like playing a single player MMO which is such a baffling choice to make for your gameplay some plague rats fucked around with this message at 09:32 on Aug 5, 2020 |
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Aug 5, 2020 09:30
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Mr.Misfit posted:Do Tyranny, it at least has a lot more joy with the bad than anything else. And frankly, the whole "playing the villain" motif would provide some good thread material to discuss.
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Aug 5, 2020 12:47
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MagusofStars posted:Seconding Tyranny. I played it a little and I think there's definitely some interesting material there. I wouldn't call it a good game, per se...but it's not an abject trainwreck either. It is weird because none of the paths in Tyranny are especially appealing except for the rebel path, which is probably the most heroic.
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Aug 5, 2020 18:57
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MinutePirateBug posted:It is weird because none of the paths in Tyranny are especially appealing except for the rebel path, which is probably the most heroic.
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Aug 5, 2020 19:03
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anilEhilated posted:Eh, I had a lot of fun being the ultimate rules-lawyer. Yeah, the most appealing part of Tyranny wasn't that you could play as the villain, it was that you could be the villain of the villains by pitting the various villain sub-factions against each other and openly mocking / berating them with no repercussions (because you are the head honcho's pet)
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Aug 5, 2020 20:21
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The rule-lawyering is definitely the best part of the game, but I think the rebel path highlights it the best, talking Tunon into defecting is a lot more amusing when you are basically an open rebel.
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Aug 5, 2020 20:50
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Tyranny always struck me as a fairly coherent narrative (ie evil is structural, systemic violence can not be stopped from the inside, and so on), I'd also not have thought to find it in GEK's list.
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Aug 5, 2020 21:15
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I think Kingmaker is an alright game today after a bunch of patches/additions fixing game breaking glitches and patching in solutions to borderline unwinnable end game states.
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Aug 6, 2020 00:31
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Endgame is still utter poo poo.
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Aug 6, 2020 01:13
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To be fair, as mentioned TEGK's game LPs have been rolling down the dogshit hill into utter abhorence. Seeing him do simply flawed games that he doesn't personally enjoy will be a change of pace at least. The only one on that list I've played was Kingmaker, and I do admit that while I enjoyed just messing around with it and having the PF1E system to make characters, the gameplay really is flawed both from the inherent system it uses and the new mechanics it put in. I admittedly didn't even finish it since the later gameplay just drags.
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Aug 6, 2020 02:22
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