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I propose we activate the "Nazi Bar" Rule in regards to this Everyone guy.
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Aug 28, 2020 14:37
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The what
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Aug 28, 2020 14:58
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Ego Trip posted:The what "If you let in the well-behaved nazis, sooner or later they'll bring in their buddies the poorly-behaved nazis, and then your bar is a nazi bar and now there are too many to evict. So don't let even the well-behaved nazis get away with their poo poo for even a moment."
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Aug 28, 2020 15:05
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Fivemarks posted:I propose we activate the "Nazi Bar" Rule in regards to this Everyone guy. Is there any evidence he's actually a Nazi or something equivalent that would warrant such a response?
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Aug 28, 2020 15:17
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I don’t think they’re a Nazi they just constantly sound like your uncle after two too many Scotches.
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Aug 28, 2020 15:21
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Everyone posted:It is what it is. I'm sorry if You know, I was a little nervous about that post. I didn't think it would get under anyone's skin, but as a scholar working with something controversial they aren't an expert on, it's easy to accidentally say something provably incorrect that throws your whole conclusion into question. While an inevitable risk, it can be nerve-wracking to deal with. But then you stepped in and drew the attention away from me. I rest easier knowing you can be relied on to say something way more debatable than I ever could and draw any fire. I really appreciate it! 
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Aug 28, 2020 15:39
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Falconier111 posted:You know, I was a little nervous about that post. I didn't think it would get under anyone's skin, but as a scholar working with something controversial they aren't an expert on, it's easy to accidentally say something provably incorrect that throws your whole conclusion into question. While an inevitable risk, it can be nerve-wracking to deal with. But then you stepped in and drew the attention away from me. I rest easier knowing you can be relied on to say something way more debatable than I ever could and draw any fire. I really appreciate it! You're welcome? The thing is that this nation was "built" by White Males. And when I say "built" I mean that the rules and customs were set by them. And not just White Males but pretty specifically White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Males. Since they "built" the country they built it in ways that advantaged them and tended to disadvantage everyone else. Because what was good for them was good for the country in their minds. We're still dealing with the effects of that and will be for a long time to come. And we're never going to be able to truly restructure our nation to be a fairer, more equitable place unless we're willing to look certain truths in the eye and call them what they are. So, yeah, if my take is a cold, glaciers are coming one, that's because it kind of needs to be one. Anything less than allows our unjust, unequal system to continue as is. No problem ever gets solved unless people admit that it exists.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:10
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Everyone, the reason you keep getting "Dogpiled" on is you keep looking at moments when people express discomfort whether it comes to rules that mandate characters sexually assault or issues of class and race, you butt in with a "Well aCKUALLY" as if this was a debate team and you're trying to argue that people's feelings are invalid, or start lecturing. The poo poo you get dogpiled on for aren't merely thought exercises to tilt at but actual issues many people have to deal with every loving day. And then when told you're being rude or this isn't the place for playing debate, you double down and insult people instead of stepping away. That is why you're getting yelled at.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:19
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PurpleXVI posted:"If you let in the well-behaved nazis, sooner or later they'll bring in their buddies the poorly-behaved nazis, and then your bar is a nazi bar and now there are too many to evict. So don't let even the well-behaved nazis get away with their poo poo for even a moment." Ah, never heard it called that. Thanks.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:21
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Libertad! inspired me to pick up The Nightmares Underneath, and holy poo poo is this game rad.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:23
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It’s amazing that Everyone thinks the problem is that people are just Not Ready To Talk About Race and not the way they stumbled in with the most basic take like it was something new and complex. Some real living in 1919 poo poo.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:25
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Ego Trip posted:Ah, never heard it called that. Thanks. https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/1280891537451343873 This is the original tweet that started it, OP's replies to his own tweet continues it.
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Aug 28, 2020 16:33
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I don't normally read this thread, but apparently reports have come in so now I need to.Everyone posted:I don't think they intersect so much as they feed on each other (which is probably just another way of saying the thing that you just said). Because of racism, minorities found it much, much harder to gain wealth and opportunity, which tended to keep them poor and powerless, which "justified" racist claims that they were inferior and so loving on. A self-reinforcing feedback loop of evil. SA user "Everyone," the problem you are having here is you think people are disagreeing with your elementary-school take on race and class. They're not: they're mocking you for thinking you're providing a helpful discourse, in a teacherly tone even, and then posting this: Everyone posted:It is what it is. I'm sorry if when someone tells you that hey man, maybe stop trying to teach grandma to suck eggs here, especially given your egg-sucking technique is super-basic. Like OK you ate some of the egg in the end, but you got it all over your face, too. There's egg on your face. Grandma is not impressed. This is a metaphor. I am explaining it carefully to try to make sure you understand. So now I'm gonna just lay down a law. SA user "Everyone", you may not post in this thread about real-world class or race any more. Other posters are welcome to do so in the context of analyzing RPG products, per the topic of the thread, if you can do so in a respectful manner without creating a big ugly derail. But not user "Everyone", who is free to go get savagely owned in C-SPAM or D&D or wherever it'd be more appropriate. Your posts on these topics are instant-derails and annoying to the thread and I will probate you for doing more of them. If you want to debate the severity of this restriction, feel free to PM me or a moderator. Fivemarks posted:I propose we activate the "Nazi Bar" Rule in regards to this Everyone guy. Fivemarks, please do not accuse or even obliquely suggest that other SA users are Nazis or have Nazi sympathies without solid hard evidence. The rest of you, please don't pile on, either. I'd prefer it if the thread continued on its merry way with more FATAL & Friends related game chat. Thank you.
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Aug 28, 2020 18:46
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CroatianAlzheimers posted:Libertad! inspired me to pick up The Nightmares Underneath, and holy poo poo is this game rad. It's generally dope as hell, which makes things like the random unacceptable lust curse really irritate, like sand in the socks. I'd still run or play it in a heartbeat, though.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:00
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Everyone posted:This seems like something that could easily be problematic. That said, I appreciate that the game allows you to keep it relatively vague and open to what the GM and player are okay with instead of something like "You become a pedophile" or "You think rape is fun." Yeah, I edited the post to reflect that I don't necessarily approve. LeSquide posted:It's generally dope as hell, which makes things like the random unacceptable lust curse really irritate, like sand in the socks. CroatianAlzheimers posted:Libertad! inspired me to pick up The Nightmares Underneath, and holy poo poo is this game rad. It's really one of the rare gems among D&D clones. I'm also reading the magic sourcebook, the Nameless Grimoire. I have some other products I plan to review first, but the overall creativity and quality holds up in the rest of the line.
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Aug 28, 2020 19:32
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Age of Sigmar Lore Chat: Gloomspite Gitz The National Bird Of Canada No one is sure where Skragrott the Loonking came from, largely because he has made sure to kill or disappear any grot that knew him before he seized control of the Ayadah region. Everything before is wholly the story he has put forth. On the night he led the Gloomspite-driven hordes to take the surface, the Bad Moon spoke to him, alerting him that it was coming. When he awakened, he claims, he was totally covered in crawling bugs and slime. His head ached horribly, a crown of fungus grew from his scalp, its roots running though his brain. In his hands he held a skull-tipped wand and a staff topped by a rare and precious Badloon Bossfungus. That mushroom alone was proof of his blessing, and it helped him unite the local Moonclans. The few that would not follow he beat into submission.  The Loonking's Crown, as Skragrott has named his fungal headdress, has made him even more intelligent and cunning than he was before, and he led the grots to triumph over the many armies in Ayadah, making his home in the immense rubbish heap mountain of Skrappa Spill. This alone would be enough to cement him as one of the most successful grots in history - but his ambitions reach higher. To prove his mastery of the Bad Moon, he has decided he must be able to consistently predict it, and that's why he set up the Loonatic Asylum we discussed earlier. It hasn't necessarily been great for his sanity, but he has successfully predicted the Bad Moon four times so far, and each time, he won the battle he started in its honor. Most other Moonclan groups are led by a Loonboss, a rank that requires a clever mind, a little luck and a ruthless willingness to kill off rivals. Unlike an orruk leader, a Loonboss can't rely just on shows of strength to keep their position - what grots really respect is cunning, and shadowy murders tend to accomplish more than brutal beatdowns. Despite this, the Loonbosses still tend to be the largest, most violent grots around. (Relatively speaking - they're still weedy little things by human standards.) This helps them retain the best gear, shiny things and riding squigs, even if their control is more often cemented by their devious minds. Many Loonbosses favor heavy armor, shaped by slaves from other species (who tend to be better at smithing than grots) and bathed in the spores of lucky fungi by their skrap's shamans. They wear crescent-moon-shaped loonhelms often, to ensure they properly resemble the Bad Moon as a proper loon should. Most Moonclan grots are conditioned to obey people that look like that at this point. They wield moon-cutta blades in battle, designed for swiftness of attack, or moon-slicer polearms that carve armor easily. They may lack the strength and resilience of other species, but they are masters of feigned injury, trickery and distraction, allowing them to survive things they have no right to. Their use of hidden blades, falling rocks and blinding scaldyscratch spores also make them very deadly in melee - a grot never fights fair. Famous Loonbosses include Wyngle of the Boomsplatta tribe, who likes to catapult exploding fungi and pots full of vicious squigglebees at foes before attacking. Snark Gitbaiter is infamous for using inane songs and shouted insults to irritate enemies, drawing them out of secure positions into his deadly ambushes. Blork of Chunderpeak, on the other hand, favors literally drowning people in trogg vomit. The maddest and most dangerous Loonbosses, however, ride Mangler Squigs. They are most often found at the head of a Squigalanche, and they're often braver and crazier than other grots, though no less cunning. Their immense, terrifying steeds bounce across the battlefield, distracting the enemy from the horde of grots that follows after and eating huge amounts of enemy troops. We'll get into what Mangler Squigs are in a bit.  Most Loonbosses maintain at least one Gobbapalooza, a collection of wise (or at least clever) grot shamans and loonpriests. They advise their leader on what the skrap should be doing - whether or not the Loonboss wants to hear it. The Gobbapaloozas, when under Gloomspite influence, go into euphoric, manic activity. They dance and shriek about, spreading chaos through the other grots. Their ecstatic trances are infectious, and can lead to strange fungal transformations among the rest of the clan, speaking in tongues or even bizarre and random vanishings. Despite all this, the Loonbosses tend to value them very highly for their skills in battle. Their frequent use of hallucinogens inures them to pain (and, often, the ability to hear orders) and each member has unique magical powers to wield. While the nature of the Gobbapalooza's members varies wildly, certain archetypes are more common. Scaremongers dress up with sun masks to resemble Glareface Frazzlegit and ride into battle on top of a squig skull carried by other grots. The skull represents the godbeast Boingob, father of all squigs, and between the mask and the skull, they radiate mystic waves of fear, speeding the feet of the grots around them and causing foes to stumble. Brewgits, on the other hand, are alchemists and drugmakers, and they bring their potions and tools into battle with them. These potions grant immense strength, but they don't last long and are extremely addictive. Spikers, the third main archetype, just carry around a lot of poisons and mushroom extracts, which they use to coat the weapons of other grots. They also carry highly venomous scorpisquig stingers, in case enemies get close. Boggleyes are hypnotist demi-shamans, bizarre grots who love to leave anyone - friend or foe - in a drooling trance and prone to bizarre acts. Last are the Shroomancers, who can magically animate fungi as part of their psychedelic visions. They rode bloatstools into battle, which burp out fungal spores that sprout into small armies of bouncing, bubbling mushrooms. Besides these collectives, Madcap Shamans channel the Gloomspite into magical spells, wielding their power to assert authority over other grots. Their loonstaves hurl energy blasts and conjure squirmling swarms, shroud grots in shadowy armor and even conjure huge fields of darkness to hide troop movements. They take their title from the madcap mushrooms they carry, which they devour when they need to use more potent magic than normal. Madcap fungi cause wild and maddened visions as well as charging the body with raw magical power. This causes sparks to fly from their eyes and their spells grow to even greater heights, allowing them access to arcane abilities such as Mork's Mighty Mushroom or Scrapskuttle's Arachnacauldron...assuming they get a madcap mushroom, not a madcap toadstool. Madcap toadstools are nearly indistinguishable from madcap mushrooms, but when eaten, they cause the shaman to vomit up corrosive spore clouds, dissolving them from the inside and, in extreme cases, causing them to melt entirely. Fungoid Cave-Shamans are the prophets of the grots, claiming to channel visions direct from Mork, who yells into their minds to tell them where the best battles are to be fought. Their influence among the Moonclans is immense, and even other greenskins will gather when a Cave-Shaman begins to give prophecy, for even the orruks, ogors, troggs and gargants acknowledge their Mork-guided babbling. This means they tend to have much longer lives than most grots, as an orruk will fear to strike them, an ogor won't generally eat them and a gargant will check before stepping on that. They are the closest the grots have to master strategists and planners, using their cunning and visions to plot out campaigns across entire realms. Their main method for coming up with these plans is eating large amounts of poisonous mushrooms, then hollering at anyone nearby. Because a Fungoid Cave-Shaman is part-fungus, they can survive mushroom toxins that would kill most humans or drive them mad. Thus, they happily withstand the maddened shrieks of Mork in their minds, go on extremely heady trips and come down having shouted out a brilliant grand strategy. Their hallucinations are so powerful that the shamans can manifest them into reality, summoning forth deadly spore clouds that transform into leering Bad Moon miniatures or biting squigs. They also carry rare and deadly deffcap mushrooms, which when consumed grow fungi inside the shaman's own brain - sometimes large enough to burst out of their skulls in strange growths, which somehow doesn't kill them, but instead grants them a certain communion with death. (Or so they claim, at least.) Their bodies are always lousy with tiny squig and insect familiars, drawn to the spores that spill out of their ears. Segmapedes crawl on their staves and bite at foes, spore-squigs scurry around them and burst into spores when stepped on, that kind of thing. Next time: SQUIG
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Aug 28, 2020 19:34
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Leperflesh posted:So now I'm gonna just lay down a law. SA user "Everyone", you may not post in this thread about real-world class or race any more. Other posters are welcome to do so in the context of analyzing RPG products, per the topic of the thread, if you can do so in a respectful manner without creating a big ugly derail. But not user "Everyone", who is free to go get savagely owned in C-SPAM or D&D or wherever it'd be more appropriate. Your posts on these topics are instant-derails and annoying to the thread and I will probate you for doing more of them. If you want to debate the severity of this restriction, feel free to PM me or a moderator. That's probably for the best. I'll take it further and just not talk about any real world topic in this thread full stop save for this last bit. Real world context, I'm a 52 year old white guy living in a deep Red state in the South. If I'm lecturing others it's because that's what I do to myself to avoid falling into the patterns and beliefs with which I am surrounded. So with that, I'll step back and just talk about crazy-rear end goblins and their Bad Moon.
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Aug 28, 2020 20:22
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Mimics often take the shape of The Deck of Encounters Set Two Part 51: The Deck of Caricatures and Mimics 254: Mad Scientist, Part 1 of 2 There’s a little wizard’s tower near a small village with no powerful clerics. The necromancer Togreif lives there, and he decides he desperately needs the body of some passing adventurer for his experiments. He tries to kidnap one of the PCs, after which the villagers will tell them about the spooky tower that nobody ever comes back from. Here’s how the card writer wants this kidnapping to happen. Mad Scientist, Part 1 posted:He casts strength and invisibility, then teleports right behind one of the PCs. He strikes him with a sap of paralyzation (bonus of +1; victim must save vs. paralyzation at -1; each strike takes one charge; 12 charges left). The spell effects and situation give him a +8 to hit (invisibility, strength, behind victim, sap). AAAAGH this is so AD&D it hurts. That urge to make sure everything is JUST SO mechanically so that the story can go the way the DM wants. Nothing can be made up; it must all be existent in the rules. The author has missed the forest for the trees here, though. In practice, this is what happens: Togreif gets his surprise round. Let’s say he hits the PC (even if he misses, the DM will fudge the roll), and that they fail their save. Then Togreif’s surprise round is over and both sides roll initiative. The remaining PCs are just as likely to get initiative as Togreif. Even if you’re using weapon speed/casting time, there may be a party thief with a dagger (weapon speed 2, same as teleport casting time), or a wizard with equally-fast spells. A single hit disrupts Togreif’s teleport spell. The odds are really not bad that the PCs waste Togreif where he stands and take his stuff. If you’re rolling individual instead of group initiative, the odds are even better. Just give Togreif some spooky necromancer way of trying to kidnap someone that doesn’t put himself at personal risk. Overbearing skeletons with a walking bone cage. Ghosts lifting up people in the night. Whatever. And instead of assuming that Togreif succeeds when planning this scenario, assume that the PCs are heroic and that he fails! They’ll still have reason to go investigate the tower. (Namely, spite.) 255: Mad Scientist, Part 2 of 2 So Togreif totally kidnapped a PC, and their player is now engrossed in a match-four game on their phone. Meanwhile, the adventure continues. The card suggests that the DM pull out a good wizard’s tower dungeon that they already have. Otherwise there’s a brief, uninteresting outline: a fire trap, a couple small groups of zombie ogres. If they quietly approach the laboratory, they’ll see Togreif about to put a helmet with wires coming off it onto the captured PC’s head. “Togreif fights for only a few rounds before teleporting to safety.” He has 28 hp. A few rounds will be plenty to kill him, thank you. The tower has some spells, a very thorough set of necromancy spellbooks (levels 1-6), some coinage, and a crystal ball. Togreif had the sap and bracers of defense AC 4 So… what was Togreif trying to do with the PC? Not important? OK. There’s the seed of a fine encounter here, but the execution is... pretty uninspiring. Keep card 1, and just have a random necromancer terrorizing the area. The emergent gameplay should be fun. (EDIT: Thread poster Everyone reminded me that expanding on this encounter would take a lot of work, and I personally hate work, so actually pass.) 256: Fizzt! Zop! A magic item that the PCs recently picked up is faulty. The card has some suggestions on how they might be messed up - the title of the card comes from one of the Wand suggestions, “One-in-six chance the wand makes only a Fzzt! Zop! Sound.” I appreciate making magical items a little bit less like super-tech, but I don’t think a random encounter card is exactly the right place for this idea to be executed? Pass? 257: I Can See It! Weird card. There’s a, just gonna lay this out here, “gypsy” woman. WIth “all the trappings.” And a fake magic crystal ball and stuff, and she reads the future. For everyone. With very specific dooms - that one of them will die by the spear of a gelugon, for instance, or that one “meets a man with fangs, and her torment lasts for centuries.” It’s all lies. But the card instructs the DM to portray it as a “trite, heavy-handed, plot device,” like they fully intends to work all this stuff into the game in the future, even though they don’t. It’s a card to trick the players themselves. I guess the fortune-teller has no motive here besides her 1 sp fee? I’m not going to use this, for obvious reasons. Namely, “I don’t want to use a specific real-world racist caricature, thank you” and “I’m not actively trying to be a jerk to my players.” Pass. 258: Gold!!! Old temple, ruined altar. Lying by the base of the altar is a mimic pretending to be a golden statue. The altar was magical, the mimic’s been living there for years, and “the remaining dregs of magic have given the mimic a tolerance for sunlight and the ability to change its mass by 90%.” So when you pick it up, it turns back and grows huge, pinning the person’s hand underneath its mass, and attacks. Huh. On the one hand, if you’re playing full-on semi-adversarial trope-filled D&D, changing one of the fundamental premises of a common “gotcha” monster is kind of bullshit. On the other hand, if you’re playing the cool kind of D&D where memorizing the Monster Manual is not a requirement, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with a suspicious statue turning into an unexpected protoplasmic horror. It was their choice to pick up the statue, after all! The treasure is nicely-done, also - the mimic was copying a real golden statue of a deity, which is stashed around here too. It’s worth 100 gp for the gold, 1000 gp to a collector, or a lot of good will to an appropriate temple. Keep, on the whole. 259: This Blasted Door There’s a door to a treasure room (or that the PCs think leads to a treasure room. It’s actually a mimic that has learned to speak Common, because as I always forget, mimics are sapient and can talk. It pretends to be “Grumph”, an “expert treasure finder” stuck on the other side of the door who offers them the treasure if they can get him out. He says he got in with a girdle of fire giant strength (which he’ll offer as a reward if he needs to sweeten the pot), but they should be able to get it open if three or four of them push on it. Also someone should be ready to wedge the door, since it shut fast when he entered. Obviously the mimic will glue the pushers’ hands to the door, and lash out at the person kneeling to wedge it. Geeze. If the party was the right size and actually fell for this, it could even be a TPK. I mean, you need a Bend Bars/Lift Grates roll to break free of mimic glue, and if you don’t have exceptional strength, your chances are very bad. I guess I’ll keep, since it could lead to some very enjoyable freak-outs if there’s one remaining PC trying to figure out quickly how to save the others. It’s a fine balance, though. Dallbun fucked around with this message at 22:15 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 20:45
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Arkham Horror: the Living Card Game 3 - Let's Actually Talk about Cards Now So to try and get the thread off of talking about unpleasant topics let's talk about some more Cthulhu! Surely nothing unpleasant could be tied into the DNA of this particular franchise! Wait, poo poo. First an addendum to the previous installment, after you pull a Chaos Token from the Chaos Bag and finish resolving your skill check you put it back in the bag. This may have been self-evident, but it's still a rule that's worth making explicit. But before going any further let's actually talk about Actions you can take on your turn. Each turn each player may activate in any order and is allowed to make three actions. Once each player has taken their actions monsters activate, doom progresses, and each player is forced to draw an encounter card before the players can act again. At its heart Arkham Horror is a game about action efficiency. Because Doom accumulates every turn no matter what and you have a hard time limit the name of the game is to do as much as possible as fast as you safely can. Time is not on your side. What can those actions be? Well… The Rules of Arkham Horror posted:Investigate your location. Many these are self-explanatory, no? There's more to it than that, again Fantasy Flight Games, but on a certain level this is what you've got. Now quick note about cards and resources: each player begins the game with a starting hand of five cards and a starting resource pool of five resources. Also of note is that every turn after all players have gone they each draw a card and gain a resource passively. Your starting allotment and passive gains are rarely enough to sustain yourself hence why the game gives you the option to spend precious time for more cards and resources. I'll go more into all of these some more as time goes on, but for now the things to keep in mind are the number of actions (3) you get per turn. So let's finally talk about Player Cards! Generally speaking Player Cards come in three varieties. Asset cards represents items, objects, tools, allies, and sometimes even skills or temperaments that help your character get ahead and fight the mythos. They stay in play and can be used repeatedly. Event cards, meanwhile, are generally one-off meaning after you play them they go to the discard. Event cards might represent a lucky break, modifying your gear, following up on a lead, a one-shot counterspell, a gambit, or even something totally mundane like finding a shortcut. Finally, Skill cards represent extra effort of some kind that can be applied to a skill check to improve your odds and give you a leg up. Like event cards, skill cards are one-shot but are more limited in scope, yet quite powerful within that scope. They can only be committed to a skill check and cannot be played by a Play action or suchlike. More on that in a little.  A quick refresher on our main lady First let's start with assets! Since I'm still using Zoey Samaras as our example character (here she is as a refresher) let's use the sort of asset that you would put in a Zoey Samaras deck.  This is pretty simple as it goes, but there are still a lot of moving parts in here. The number in the circle in the top left (4) is the card's resource cost. Pay 4 resources to play the gun, so it's pretty pricy. Beneath that number is a row of five stars, none of which are filled in. This tells you that this is a level 0 card, more on that at a later date. Beneath that is what you can commit the card for, the foot icon is identical to the agility stat so for agility, more on that when we get to skills. The symbol in the upper right is the symbol for the Guardian class to remind you, along with the blue background, that this is a Guardian card. The words in italics in the middle (item. weapon. firearm.) are the cards traits akin to creature types in MTG and matter sometimes for certain cards. Finally the actual text of the card: "uses 4 ammo" tells you the gun comes with four bullets and the action ability below that (the arrow means it costs action to do what follows it) tells you what the card actually does. And what the card actually does is shoot things! Use an Activate action on the gun and spend a bullet to Fight an enemy with the stat boosts listed. The +1 to combat is nice, but the real winner is the +1 to damage. Remember the last example that regular barehanded punches dealt only one damage so it took two of our three actions to kill a ghoul minion. The .45 requires one action to play in advance, but if you're fighting ghoul minions they go down in one (successful) shot, theoretically saving you four total actions for a net action economy advantage of three. Remember kids, if you're fighting horrible monsters from beyond the stars bring a weapon. The symbol in the bottom right tells you what slot this card fills. One hand means that it fills one hand slot, of the two characters have by default. By default each character has Two Hand slots, two Arcane slots (represented by pentagram, it's where you keep your wizardry), one Body slot, one Accessory slot, one Ally slot, and one Tarot Card slot. If you fill up on slots and play another card that would use one of your filled slot you have to discard a card already in play. This isn't always bad, if you run out of bullets in your .45 you can play another weapon to replace your empty gun. One thing to note is that dual wielding is not really a thing in this game. Since the .45 Automatic gives its bonus when you use it through an Activate action, other weapons will (in general) not stack effects. If you have two .45 Automatics you can't "double up" on firing actions, you can only spend one action at a time to shoot for +1 combat and +1 damage. Also note that some assets don't take up a slot. If you go back and look at Liquid Courage you'll notice it has nothing in the bottom right corner. There is no limit on how many slotless assets you can have so go wild. Let's look at some more assets!  As the name explains this is Zoey's cross. Zoey's cross is a card unique to Zoey Samaras, it must always go on her deck and nobody else can have it. Every character has at least one unique positive card to their name, frequently an asset though sometimes an event or skill. The white border beneath the cards cost tells you that this card has no level (which is different from being level 0), but other than that it follows all the other normal rules for assets. The star before the name means that this item is unique, only one card called "Zoey's cross" can be on the table at the time (but since Zoey herself is unique that's not really a big deal). The pendant symbol in the bottom right means that this is a Accessory item and thus fills an Accessory slot. This card is also really good. The circular arrow icon means that Zoey's cross has a Reaction Ability, meaning that when the triggering condition listed is met, even if it is not your turn, you can choose to activate this cards effect. Saving actions by increasing the amount of damage you can deal? That's good. What's even better is being able to deal damage without even spending an action, because reaction abilities don't cost you an action. Moreover you can stack these, remember how Zoey gains a resource when she engages in enemy? You can gain a resource and then spend a resource to more or less make activating her cross for free to immediately compell some power of Christ into any enemy you run into. One final note on reaction abilities, they are optional. If you don't want to fire off Zoey's Cross you don't have to, say if you want to save that resource or if you intend on using the cross on a more meaty enemy.  Here's another asset, this time an Ally. As this is fiction, Beat Cop here is cool and good. Having him on your side passively gives you a +1 to combat which is great because stat boosts are good. Unlike the bonuses from weapon actions, passive boosts like the one here do stack and will be applied to all weapon attacks. You can also discard him to deal damage, and note the little symbol beside that ability. That squiggle means that it is a Fast Action to activate that effect, and as the name "fast action" implies it doesn't actually cost you an action to play that ability and you can actually use it even when it's not your turn (during certain timing windows, more on that later.) Finally at the bottom you can see that Beat Cop has his own little health and sanity track, that means you can voluntarily put damage and horror on your Beat Cop to soak hits for you. When you take damage or horror you can distribute it however you like among any card that has damage or horror (which includes your investigator card). Naturally when you fill up a card with either damage or horror it gets discarded. All allies have some amounts of health or sanity to soak hits meaning that the Ally slot is a highly valuable one simply because having allies extends your own durability. Add to that that allies often have stat boosts or really strong and useful effects and you'll definitely start to realize it's nice to have NPC friends. Cards being able to have health or sanity is also how things like armor work incidentally, armor in general has a couple of points of stamina on it so you can put damage on it before you put it on yourself. And that was a lot of words about assets. Now for events.  Another card you're probably going to consider playing if you're using Zoey, Prepared for the Worst is another simple self-explanatory and highly useful card. Weapons are good, having weapons on hand is good, so a card that has a good chance of getting you a weapon is also good Prepared for the Worst has no special wrinkles to it, you spend a resource and an action, do the effect, and put the card to discard.  Slightly more complicated is Dodge. "Fast" in the text there is a keyword, fast in general means that you could play it at the same time and with the same speed as a Squiggle/Free Action i.e. not taking up one of your three actions per turn and being usable even outside your turn. Dodge has a specific restriction on when you can play it though, but again the effect is fairly straightforward. When a monster attacks you or a friend to your location you can spend a resource and play Dodge to counter that attack so they don't take damage. Now if you're looking for really complicated events try this!  Telescopic Sight is a fancy, wordy, not actually very good card that has lots and lots of words for a fairly digestible effect: you put a sniper scope on a big gun and then you snipe with it. You will note that it is an event but it is also an item that has to be attached to another card with a specific trait and restriction, it adds a drawback to the weapon you're using, and it has extremely granular rules text about what kind of monsters you can shoot at with its effect and how it interacts with special monster trait keywords. I bring up Telescopic Sight only as an example of how far down the rabbit hole events can go in terms of complexity. There are some weird and wild cards and effects in the Arkham Horror card game, and some of them are even good. Finally, let's look at Skill Cards  The first thing you should notice with Overpower here is that it has no cost. That's because you do not Play a skill card, you Commit a skill card. So to go back to skill checks you may remember that you perform them by adding up your bonuses, pulling a token from the Chaos Bag, applying that tokens modifier, and then comparing your final result to the difficulty of the check. There's actually one more optional step you can do before you pull a token, you can commit cards from your hand to try and boost your odds. It's a rather straightforward thing to do as well. You simply announce which cards you are using and discard them and add the matching icons to your skill before pulling a token. These are what the little symbols beneath a cards cost are for, if you look at all the cards I've shown so far you'll see that they match one of the four basic stats you can see on an investigator card. Thus you can discard a .45 Automatic from your hand for one Agility icon to boost your agility by one for the length of the test. Skill cards are cards explicitly designed for committing. It is literally all they can be used for, and appropriately they are good at being committed. Skill cards like Overpower usually have a special effect when they're being committed, as you can see Overpower draws you a card if you succeed in overpowering whatever you're trying to overpower. Even besides that effect (and that's not nothing) If you are looking to make a difficult combat check Overpower stands head and shoulders above any other card I featured in this update so far except Zoey's cross, and that's a card you'd much rather play than commit. Some quick commit rules to keep in mind: Number one is that you can only commit cards from your hand, not from play. Number two you can only commit cards if they have a matching skill icon. Thus you can't discard .45 automatic for anything but an agility check because it only has agility symbols on it. Thirdly you may have noticed that Zoey's cross has a "?" symbol among its commit icons, that's a wildcard which stands for any other icon and therefore matches any skill test. Fourthly you can actually commit cards for other players. If someone is in the same location as you and they're making a combat check, you absolutely can toss down an overpower to give them an edge. Fifth and finally you can only commit one card to another player (and vice versa) but you can commit any number of cards for yourself. If you want to run out your entire hand to give yourself the best possible odds go wild, just remember the Tentacle token is always waiting… Naturally, what assets, events, and skills you choose will vary a lot by character and by class. Some characters are all about assets and building up a board state that can deal with anything. Others go all in on events either getting bonuses to use events, or having additional ways to play events, or even having a separate deck of events they can pull from every turn. And of course still others are all in on skills either for themselves or others. It's possible, even viable depending on your character to have almost no assets and rely entirely on the power of events and skills to do your work and contrariwise you can build a deck to have many many assets and take kind of toolbox approach. It all depends on your investigator. In the case of Zoey she generally prefers a balance. Zoey deck has some leeway in what assets you choose for reasons we'll get into only talk about how you actually make a deck in this game, but if you're playing her you're probably going to want to have weapons to hit things with, events to support and protect yourself with, and skills to further your strengths and shore up weaknesses. As an example of what deck building looks like though, if you are making a Zoey deck you may want to think twice about how many accessories you want, as her unique cross is by design an immensely powerful card that you almost always want to have in play. All of this is just food for thought, there's more than one way to build nearly every character in the game so I say again that there is almost certainly a play style in the Arkham Horror card game that will fit your fancy. Phew that was a lot, huh? Hope you've been keeping notes, because it will be on the test. Next time! The structure of a turn of Arkham Horror! Also entirely too much about monsters. Omnicrom fucked around with this message at 05:16 on Mar 19, 2021 |
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Aug 28, 2020 20:56
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Dallbun posted:259: This Blasted Door I never forget that mimics are sapient and talkative. My players' last encounter with a mimic was that once one character was stuck to it, it extorted the party for a share of their rations in exchange for letting their party member go with all his HP still attached. Then it slithered off before the PC's attracted some other monsters to come see what all the fuss was about.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:02
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The two mimic encounters can be okay if you use them correctly, but mimic encounters in general tend to be adversarial DMing in a particularly irritating way. I think the mimic door works better if you make it a much larger mimic and the PCs are prying open its mouth to get into its stomach.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:04
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Dallbun posted:Mimics often take the shape of There's a few things you can do with this, but most of them require more prep than "drop the card and let it roll." Dallbun posted:256: Fizzt! Zop! I'd say Pass unless you have some other hook like the thing is cursed and they can't get rid or it or it's sentient or something. Dallbun posted:257: I Can See It! Yeah, for sure drop the caricature and maybe replace it with one of Sybil Trelawny - Emma Thompson's character from the Harry Potter series. Then have her predictions sort of come true. Like some guy named Gelugon (or something close) will throw a spear near the party which will hit some container and cause the unfortunate party member to become covered with purple dye. A female PC will find her time monopolized by some really boring dude with very pronounced bangs. Dallbun posted:258: Gold!!! Agreed mimics exist in AD&D to exploit the greedy and foolish and let GMs enact medieval themed versions of The Thing. Dallbun posted:259: This Blasted Door Plus, there might also be a way for the PCs to negotiate their way out of this (some good quality meat cuts?) since they are dealing with an intelligent being.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:25
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I have to say, I like the idea of a card that's just 'here are some things that can go wrong'. Whether it has a place in a deck of encounters like this is a bit more debatable.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:28
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When we played Arkham Horror (the board game) the first three times we did 'draw a random investigator' and I got Jenny Barnes all three times. I confess to being really curious if she's good in the LCG. I'm slightly attached at this point.
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Aug 28, 2020 21:33
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The Deck of Random Encounters writers seem to have had a tendency to zone out and forget that they're supposed to be writing "random encounters," not just "things that could happen in D&D."
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Aug 28, 2020 21:37
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I suspect they have a quota to fill instead of actually brainstorming how many feasible random encounters they could actually make and then just bundling the results, resulting in a lot questionable 'encounters' to fill out the deck.
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Aug 28, 2020 22:00
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Robindaybird posted:I suspect they have a quota to fill instead of actually brainstorming how many feasible random encounters they could actually make and then just bundling the results, resulting in a lot questionable 'encounters' to fill out the deck. You have figure that once the cards get into the triple digits, creativity will be on the wane. "Uh, uh, ah, gently caress it, 1 in 6 chance your new wand just goes phluugh and does nothing. Next card."
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Aug 28, 2020 22:06
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Chicago-in-a-Box: Episode IV
 That square I skipped over tells you to go to the traffic jam space. Fantastic.
So that’s the board. As I said before, two piles of cards: Contingency, which are boring, and Big Fun!, which have something to do with Chicago. So let’s look at them.   Yeah, you can tell I took this picture before I started writing this review. Why would I include the two on the left?
 Once again, I’m not sure what I was thinking. I already covered half this poo poo earlier. Whatever, let’s keep moving.
Funny thing is? I actually skipped over maybe the most important card in the Big Fun! pile (  ): the card about stockyards. After the Civil War, as urban populations exploded, railroads linked America’s cities, and heavy industry grew more and more common, entrepreneurs began to invest in meatpacking facilities that processed cows and pigs into meat products. While they built facilities across the country, Chicago received the bulk of their investment; near the demographic center of the country, accessible both by large ships sailing in through Lake Michigan and smaller ships going up the Mississippi, situated at the heart of the nascent railway system, conveniently located for cattle drives from the Midwest, and boasting an established population with room to expand, the city seemed perfect for the task. To staff their factories they brought in a substantial portion of the wave of European migration into the US in the late 19th century, especially Germans, Irishmen, Poles, and Italians – those four major ethnic groups I mentioned earlier. Soon enough the immigrants substantially outnumbered the original inhabitants of the city, suffering under the worst kinds of 19th century capitalism. Like, have you heard of company towns? Multiple Chicago districts started out that way. The horrors they went through catalyzed the growth of unions among these workers, while their general Catholicism and foreign origins drove them towards the Democratic Party. I’m skipping over God knows how much labor and political history at this point – again, it’s not my specialty – but the meatpacking industry defined early Chicago and its legacy defines modern Chicago, too. This is one of those things I suggest you look up if you have any interest in the topic.And… I think that’s it. I mean, we are missing both the rules and the dice, so I can’t comment on those, and the hotels and such are boring. I mean even the money is –  Wait a second…   CINCINNATI!  Anyway, that’s my review of this awful, simplistic board game and the end of this really shaky city tour. I’ve really only touched the surface despite writing like 8000 words on it; you can look into labor, political, economic, cultural, ethnic, and cultural history in depth and find whole fields of history I had neither the time nor the context cover here. I mean, even one of the cards mentioned the Bud Billikin Parade which I recommend looking into. But, well, I told you just about everything I can. I hope you enjoyed it. I mean, it’s not like I have any other Chicago games in my collection I can follow this up with – Wait. Oh.  Oh no. Falconier111 fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Aug 28, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 22:17
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Arkham Horror: The Living Card Game makes me really happy to read about, because it makes me think about what it would be like to go back in time and have played the games of Arkham Horror: The Undying, Impenetrable Board Game with much more coherent rules.
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Aug 28, 2020 22:21
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Falconier111 posted:
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Aug 28, 2020 22:27
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Chicago by Night is a gateway drug to Dark Alliance: Vancouver, or god forbid, Rage Across the Amazon Tread carefully my friend
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Aug 28, 2020 22:28
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Falconier111 posted:FIELD MUSEUM: hell yeah, best museum in the city and the country as far as I’m concerned. I will admit I am heavily biased, having volunteered there, but my opinion on this is still objectively correct. Has exhibits on everything from ancient Egypt to Native American peoples to local wildlife to the Precambrian era, plus a famous T-rex with a twitter account (pronouns are they/them, and that is not a joke). I did most of my docenting in The Greeks: Agamemnon to Alexander the Great, a traveling exhibit on loan from Greece including, among other things, the famous Mask of Agamemnon. I had all sorts of stories I broke out – Asklepios’s transition from inventor of the health regimen to god of medicine, Persephone’s mystery cult, why bathing with olive oil instead of water is a lot better for you than you think – but my favorite part of the exhibit was the curled up skeleton of a man ritually executed around when the Trojan War was supposed to be happening. Whenever I spotted a group of schoolchildren in the room before it, I’d ask them, “you wanna to see a dead body?” The answer was always yes. I also realized it’s a popular date spot for people in their 20s and 30s, which rekindled my faith in humanity a bit. I actually went on several dates to the Field Museum with my current girlfriend. I personally prefer the Museum of Science and Industry, but the Field is a very close second
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Aug 28, 2020 23:08
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Falconier111 posted:Chicago-in-a-Box: Episode IV 
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Aug 28, 2020 23:10
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Hey now, Cincinnati is a lovely place.  I'm really appreciating these reviews, Falconier! Keep 'em up.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:23
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I'm really enjoying seeing how Arkham actually plays!
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Aug 28, 2020 23:23
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Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Arkham Horror: The Living Card Game makes me really happy to read about, because it makes me think about what it would be like to go back in time and have played the games of Arkham Horror: The Undying, Impenetrable Board Game with much more coherent rules. If you're at all interested consider checking out the third edition of Arkham Horror they released in 2018. Credit where it is due, Fantasy Flight Games actually did work on innovating their design in the 15 years and half a dozen games between second and third edition. You can actually play Arkham Horror with Much More Coherent Rules! Dawgstar posted:When we played Arkham Horror (the board game) the first three times we did 'draw a random investigator' and I got Jenny Barnes all three times. I confess to being really curious if she's good in the LCG. I'm slightly attached at this point. Time for Unofficial Arkham Horror LCG FnF writeup 3.5 that's mostly just pictures of cards - Is Jenny Barnes good? (this does not need to be put into the Inkless Pen Archives, it's just an off the cuff thing) Oh yes, Jenny Barnes is good. A couple of years back she was the single most popular investigator on ArkhamDB, one of the game's deck list and card search hubs.  Jenny here has average stats down the line, relying primarily on the fact that she gets twice as much money passively is anyone else. It turns out you can indeed just buy success! The most obvious way is with a number of "cash sink" Assets.  If you have ways to turn your money into power then having average stats as a starting point might actually be a strength rather than weakness. Jenny is also a rogue and rogues have lots of ways to bend the rules, take extra actions, make lots of money, and give the finger to probability.  What does it matter if your stats are only average if you turn penalties into bonuses? As I pointed out the majority of tokens in the Chaos Bag are negative, so having a sure gamble on hand can turn a lot of draws into success. The punchline is that the worst thing to draw when you have a sure gamble is actually probably a 0 because you can't turn it into a bonus. And sometimes you just completely ignore your stats entirely.  The bottom line is that Jenny is extremely versatile. Her ability is simple, her stats are average, but she is in exactly the right color to be an effective jack of all trades and she can do nearly anything depending on how you build her deck. You want to fight monsters? You can do that. You want to investigate and solve the mystery? You can do that. You want to run interference and laugh at the concept of luck? You can do that as well. In fact arguably the worst thing about Jenny is her unique asset:  Don't get me wrong, Jenny's guns aren't BAD, but compared to everything else you could do by dumping her excess funds? I said that you almost never wanted to commit Zoey's Cross for its icons because of how good it was, but honestly I always found the best use for Jenny's .45s to be dumping them for +3 on an agility check. If you want Jenny to be a monster fighter there are way better weapons to consider, especially for a two-handed gun.  And besides, if you didn't want to see a rich dilettante gunning down Shoggoths with a Tommygun I have no idea why you would want to play Arkham Horror in the first place Edit: Night10194 posted:I'm really enjoying seeing how Arkham actually plays! Glad to hear! I'm actually probably going to try and provide a semi-full play report of the initial scenario to cap off the review, just to give a sense of how all the pieces come together. Omnicrom fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Aug 29, 2020 |
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Aug 28, 2020 23:31
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If you're doing side things, please please please talk about Barkham Horror.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:35
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Omnicrom posted:If you have ways to turn your money into power than having average stats as a starting point might actually be a strength rather than weakness. Jenny is also a rogue and rogues have lots of ways to bend the rules, take extra actions, make lots of money, and give the finger to probability. Given the fact that in most CoC scenario the probability is that your character will either go mad or get eaten or both at once, you kind of want to be able to give the entire hand to probability not just the finger. So, yeah, Jenny all the way.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:51
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Leraika posted:If you're doing side things, please please please talk about Barkham Horror. It's not out until next month, and I'm not honestly a dog lover (I have literally never had a positive experience with a dog in my entire life. Ever), but when it does come out sure I'll give it a talking about. And no, this is not a joke.  No matter how much it looks like one.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:51
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Oh, I thought it'd been out for a bit now; I remember when they announced it in... december.... oh.
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Aug 28, 2020 23:56
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