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BryanChavez posted:I remember Wick waging a one-man war on rpg.net to prove that Diplomacy was the actual first RPG, because of how much he personally disliked Dungeons & Dragons. When I saw this section in Houses of the Blooded for the first time, I couldn't help but completely lose it. Funny that he went on to write a "Wicked Fantasy" book for Pathfinder. Maybe a 3rd Edition variant doesn't count or something.
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Nov 3, 2013 07:37
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Libertad! posted:Funny that he went on to write a "Wicked Fantasy" book for Pathfinder. Maybe a 3rd Edition variant doesn't count or something. As for writing a PF book, well, a brother's gotta eat.
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Nov 3, 2013 07:50
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FMguru posted:I dunno if Wick hated D&D so much as he hated 3E John Wick posted:Well, friends and neighbors, I have seen D&D3, and I can tell you this: Didn't he also hilariously fail to follow through on this?
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Nov 3, 2013 08:22
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Comrade Koba posted:Didn't he also hilariously fail to follow through on this?  Someone really should write it up for F&F (not me, I don't own a copy).
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Nov 3, 2013 08:28
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Smells pretty awful, whatever it is.
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Nov 3, 2013 08:34
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Mr. Maltose posted:Can we please, this one last time I will ask, stop calling John Wick a bad person because he is a bad game designer. I get it. He makes bad unfun games and likes poison and is therefore scum. You can stop constantly stating that he's a huge manchild and if he was dying in the desert it'd be a favor to let him dry out. I feel like I egged some of this on with my Way of the Scorpion preview, but if one thing it demonstrated is that Wick puts a lot of himself into his work, like having stand-ins for himself and people he knows in that book. The problem is that it gets very hard to divide Wick's design work from his personal life because he lets the two blur and puts a lot of himself into his work. He strikes me as an author badly in need of an editor, and never willing to put up with one, so... what we get is what we get. Sometimes he can be really innovative and cool, and sometimes he can be really regressive and pompous. Unfortunately, the latter tends to stand out more in reviews like these. Also, I've gotten to see the man have a huge shouting tantrum in front of me. I don't wish ill on him, and that doesn't necessarily make him a huge manchild or a bad person, but he has done some questionable stuff that's on the public record and people are free to draw their own conclusions. Libertad! posted:Funny that he went on to write a "Wicked Fantasy" book for Pathfinder. Maybe a 3rd Edition variant doesn't count or something. About a decade ago, he announced he was going to write a d20 adventure to "steal Ryan's customers." He was going to write something so good that it would blow the industry's socks off and cause WotC to be publicly shamed by how good it was. (Edit: beaten to it, but the link is handy if you want the full, unedited screed.) The adventure went entirely under the radar and socks remained on their feet. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 08:55 on Nov 3, 2013 |
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Nov 3, 2013 08:45
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I can't wait for John Wick telling us about how to be like him. I thought his master 3E adventure was 'The Last Paladin', and I don't know how you could get any blander and easy to miss than that.
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Nov 3, 2013 14:20
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FMguru posted:He published one tepidly-received D20 adventure titled "What's That Smell?" which somehow failed to shatter the granite pillars that D&D3E was erected upon and send it crashing to the ground, and then he dropped it and moved on. It's terribly-written, betrays a complete lack of understanding of even the most basic aspects of 3e*, and is chock-full of character-punishing bullshit**. Also, if I remember right, it justifies being absurdly deadly for no reward with "hey, it's not like you have to keep playing; you can just flee the area like the spineless coward I know you are.  "*Like most poorly-written early d20 products, it's a mix of badly-designed 3e and badly-designed 2e, with many assumed (but never explained) houserules. **IIRC the only treasure is hidden well out of the way any PC would reasonably go, behind multiple double-bluff false doors and the like, and is trapped to the extent that it is 99% likely kill any PC who tries to take it at the recommended level. And after all that, it's still way under value for the adventure, and belongs to an NPC that will want it back.
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Nov 3, 2013 15:56
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I feel like I egged some of this on with my Way of the Scorpion preview, but if one thing it demonstrated is that Wick puts a lot of himself into his work, like having stand-ins for himself and people he knows in that book. The problem is that it gets very hard to divide Wick's design work from his personal life because he lets the two blur and puts a lot of himself into his work. He strikes me as an author badly in need of an editor, and never willing to put up with one, so... what we get is what we get. Sometimes he can be really innovative and cool, and sometimes he can be really regressive and pompous. Unfortunately, the latter tends to stand out more in reviews like these. EDIT: And you're right too a lot of his ideas aren't bad but you have to strip the smug assholish nature from them before you can even begin to use them. MadScientistWorking fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Nov 3, 2013 |
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Nov 3, 2013 16:36
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Despite my open hatred of The Wick, I actually used to hold him with a measure of awe. I loved the Scorpion clan so much, I heard so much good about Ven, and Blood & Honor was so fresh and well put together to me that I actually thought that his only flaw was his tone of writing. Then I bought Eldritch High and I saw the game fall apart at the seams before I even got through character creation. After that, I started wondering how things could have gone so wrong. I started reading his more controversial work and his essays on game design and very quickly those  i spent on Eldritch High felt more and more galling. At this point, I think John-boy might be his own worst enemy.
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Nov 4, 2013 00:56
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Have you always felt your combat-heavy RPGs lacked in the realm of narrative mechanics? Are you a swine who enjoys storygames, but think they lack that little something in terms of combat? Have you ever wanted to earn XP as a Game Master? Are you secretly still 13 inside (we all are) and crave nothing more than pretending to be a high-schooler who spends the day being awkward around girls and the nights beating up giant monsters with lasers? Or do you really want to play a sentient idea who can throw cars around? Boy, have I got a game for you.  Wait, what?  ...oh! What is this? Double Cross (from now on, DX) is a Japanese RPG that has been described as a "character-based conspiracy superhero RPG". That's a mouthful, so let's break it down. Superhero: in DX, you play someone who has been infected by a virus that gives you superhuman abilities. These include skills that range from shooting lasers to creating autonomous servants out of your blood to turning every car you enter into an instant transformer. The central conflict here is that the more you use your powers, the more they use you. Abuse your monstrous skills, and you become a monster yourself. Conspiracy: You work for the good guys, who want the best for the world. You fight the bad guys, who want to ruin society and mankind. Everyone is exactly who they seem to be. The problem is that none of these sentences are true! Character-based: Your character has relationships with the other characters and with NPCs. Your relationships dictate your position in the web of factions, people, and their conflicting interests. Your relationships are where you turn to when you find yourself slowly becoming more like the monsters you face in battle. Your relationships are always changing, and as they change, so do you. What can I expect from this game? Fluff-wise, you'll get a setting that has got high-schoolers and adults with super abilities, secret organisations that fight for the good of the world, mysterious otherworldly foes, betrayals and uneasy alliances. The powers employed by the characters are X-Men-like mutant abilities, only on average they're more... gross. Remember the Prototype videogame series? Like that. Imagine what would Persona 3 be like if it was not inspired by Jung but by Darwin, and you've got a decent picture of DX. Mechanics-wise, think Tenra Bansho Zero meets 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons. From the former, you get mechanically enforced narrative flow of quick-paced play with strategic scene framing and rapid character change. From the latter, you get a "class system" and a granular "powers system" that drive combat. There's plenty of mechanics and ideas that are innovative on their own as well, at least compared to Western games. The aforementioned GM earning XP points is one of them, for instance. The book also offers a default setting: Japan and the personalities associated with it, as well as City N, a generic Japanese city where the action of the included sample adventures take place. Yep, in a refreshing change of pace, you get three entire sample adventures in the core book. The first is intended as the regular introduction to the game for new players, while the following two are direct sequels to the same story. Tell me more about the book itself. DX is a game by F.E.A.R., noted Japanese RPG designers. The translated version is currently sold through Amazon, and it is unfortunately only available as a physical copy. Apparently, the game is very beloved in Japan. About the translation: it is solid. There is, however, not much localisation. The sentences are also written in a not very natural way. In other words, it is very much a translated work. The setting and adventures chapters make no effort to ease the player and GM into a Japanese mindset: they just assume you're playing in Japan and that's it. The factions and NPCs presented are Japanese. This is an issue only because a certain step of character creation has you forming relationships to established NPCs. Thus, creating characters exactly as written means you play in Japan. This is a very, very minor inconvenience if you want to set your game someplace else: just re-fit the existing NPCs or make up your own. Very few classic Japanese tropes pop up in the setting. The most obvious of which is half the sample NPCs being underaged geniuses. None of the Japan-ness of the work detracts from it. Personally, I think it adds to its charm. As for content itself, the book contains quite a few errors, especially in the powers descriptions. Missing values, properties that make no sense or repeated descriptions for different powers. The most absurd error is in the sample characters, which are essential to one character creation method. The first character has the powers of the second, and every single one of them has the stats of the first. It's ugly. There is, however, a comprehensive errata booklet that comes with the book. The booklet corrects every error that I know of in the main book. So everything's alright, and I can only think the marathon of mistakes was due to a tight printing deadline or something. DX has something like a thousand supplements over in Japan. The translated version of DX uses the same model as Tenra Bansho Zero: the "core rulebook" we got is actually made up from the original core rulebook and various supplements, including rules updates. So Japan has many supplements but we've got, as far as I know, a lot of the content packaged into our book. We also got right away the 3rd edition of DX: it is apparently a simplification and consolidation of the hugely popular second edition that got bloated with power creep and an excess of choices. I believe this is it for an introduction. Next time, we'll dive straight in. The first chapter is a summary of the basics of the setting. It tells you all you need to know to fill the gaps with your imagination. So please, join me next time as we start the read-through of Double-Cross: The Roleplaying Game! The thing about the sentient idea, by the way? Not kidding about that. Cyphoderus fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Nov 4, 2013 |
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Nov 4, 2013 01:58
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Houses Of The Blooded The end run, and some thoughts The final part of this book is the Narrator chapter, about as long as the crunch-heavy Seasons section. Wick opens by warning players to stay away: quote:And trust me, learning how a trick works is a lot less sexy than watching the trick as a sucker sitting in the audience. The GM's job is to make players believe that the ven existed, so he (the Narrator is always a he in this book) is kind of a magician. The ven actually had a name for this, altrua, pathos. Which, for some reason, is the same name as that ectoplasm-like substance that cocoons Suaven. Coincidence? Oblique reference? Lack of an editor? You be the judge! So yeah, don't read this chapter if you're a player, but read it if you're the GM. It has all sorts of tricks, including one for that one player that will read through this section anyway.  First Wick opens with some basic advice, basic in the sense that you could apply it to any game. The "Big Secret" is that players will make up the plot if you let them, and part of the design of HOTB was precisely to let them do that. So pay attention to the group, ask them what you think is going on, and so on. Communication! Let the players use Wisdom risks and define Shanri: this is why the game has no map of it. Even though gamers love maps. He also plugs his original Play Dirty column from SJG's Pyramid magazine. quote:Play Dirty was, all at once, one of the most popular and least popular columns in the mag. People hated it and loved it. I figured that meant I was doing my job. He insists on the idea of letting the players run the game for you, and shows off his Three True Things technique: Wick tells the player three true things about an NPC/location/whatever, then lets the player fill up the details so that Wick can run along with it. He knows the concept of blurring the line between Player and Narrator is alien to most gamers, but nuke it all the same! And remember that now you have to adapt and not be stiff with the plot. He talks about mood and atmosphere, which should be old hat to anyone familiar with the original L5R corebook: show, don't tell, use props, move around, act out the actions of NPCs, and so on. Then he talks about the one time players completely blindsided him. The players were at the capital between Senate sessions when one "remembers" that there are catacombs under the Temple of Talia and wants to check them out. Wick is nice and lets the player have a Wisdom risk. He does it, comes up with a few details, and before Wick can react the party is armed, bearing torches and kicking down a secret entrance. So Wick does what everyone does, panics, and goes into the bathroom to figure out what to do. quote:The blowhard who wanted to come down here was the Serpent. He wanted to find lost scrolls, rituals, knowledge. He used that drat charisma of his to convince the other players this was a great idea. Okay. This is his fault. I’ll punish him. But I’ll also give him what he wants. So what does he do? Obviously he turns into The Wick and springs the Tomb of Horrors on the players, right? Or he has Serpent ninjas waiting to kill the entire party, or Shara Yvarai shows up at the end and cuts off all their pinkies, right? Well, actually, he doesn't. He considers the character's strengths and weaknesses and sets up encounters that engage them all. The comedy relief guy with the Courage weakness ends up with a literal silver eye as he's split from the party while fleeing the catacomb orks. The two characters with an one-sided love between them end up with a chance to save each other from harm. The two fighty guys get a puzzle fight holding off orks at a bridge LOTR-style while some of their fellows try to pepper them with arrows. The Serpent spots an ork executing a blood ritual (!). Everyone has fun, not bad for a five minute bathroom break. Wick then talks about Style. He brings up 7th Sea Drama Dice and, yes, in his games he gave them out like candy, a dozen or so per session. Style should also be given out like candy, at least ten points per session if not more. Let the players talk, let them make up the world, let them get themselves into trouble. Give them Style! quote:This game was designed with the noble class in mind. Playing a kind of character you really can’t play in that other fantasy roleplaying game that shall remain nameless but who’s initials are “D” and “D.” I don't know what Wick's beef with Drakar och Demoner is but anyway, he mentions some suggestions if you want to play a non-noble HOTB game. The Midnight Game is essentially Rosencrantz and Guildensten Are Dead: The RPG, with players taking on the role of their own maids and valets. It's meant as a fun distraction between noble ssessions, with the maids and valets getting into all sorts of backstage shenanigans. If players are particularly good, let them elevate their vassals to NPC status. And then there's the Roadman game, which is all about playing kickass ven knights, solving troubles and stabbing orks. A variant of this is the Ytavia game: ytavia are "the lady's roadmen", and this type of game is all about being the guardian of your lord's wife and all the ~*drama*~ that comes with it. There is some advice on what to do with the Style given to players to NPCs they like/hate/like to hate, which was already covered in the Players chapter. And then there is the sample adventure, Roses & Thorns. The signature character of the game, Shara Yvarai, is the centerpiece of the action. But don't worry: again, she's no Kachiko coming here to steal away the spotlight and get away with it willy nilly. This is the adventure Wick uses for demoing HOTB at conventions. Anyway, Shara is basically a hothead Fox, beautiful and deadly with a sword, but a little too ready to hurt people and lacking the Wisdom to fully realize the consequences of her actions. The PC's Count/Countess wants her to sign a Contract of servitude, and they get the mission to go to one of Shara's parties at her puzzle house to convince her. The thing is, other than Shara's sheet, descriptions of the other NPCs they may find, a very rough story outline and the Puzzle House's stats, that's the entire adventure. The real trick is that all players, before starting, roll a Wisdom risk. Then, they use their wagers to define the circumstances of the story about to play out. Wick says that he's ended up with wildly different scenarios out of this: one group decided that their Countess was blind and that Shara was the one to blind her, so they couldn't decide on whether they should win her favor or kill her in revenge. Another group defined their Countess as a sorceress of terrible reputation that wanted Shara under her yoke or dead. And yet another group had their Count in a very complicated family tree involving Shara and the PCs, and he was in love with the young baroness and wanted to marry her. On one hand, this is seriously loving cool: the same basic idea, very different outcomes, and the players are invested from the get go. But tying it to the risk mechanic means that one player will inevitably get to define more of the adventure than the others, and woe betide anyone with Wisdom as a weakness (Wick suggests giving those players a free wager if he's feeling merciful, but mercy is for the weak )So on to the various doomed highborn manchildren at this party! There is Shara, of course, armed with a new sword at her hip, very bold and flirts with everyone, but she's really careful about it. Her main goal at the party is making Contacts so that she can protect her father's lands. The appearance of Valin Burghe disturbs her. Also.
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Nov 4, 2013 05:04
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posted:
Ork is fat, can be tagged when the ork's size proves a disadvantage and compelled to prevent the ork from running/climbing/etc.
Roll the ork's rank + ten loving dice of Fire against the ven's Strength and whatever dice they can come up with to shelter themselves from the fire. Ork must spend one Style for each additional character it wants to affect.
. Cultists can summon orks with as many Traits as Devotion they have. They can summon a number of orks per day equal to their Devotion, spending one Style for each ork.
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Someone should do Cat, I think. It is certainly a surprising read for people who've pegged Wick as the smug liar who thirsts for the death of PCs.
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Nov 4, 2013 05:15
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Mr. Maltose posted:Someone should do Cat, I think. It is certainly a surprising read for people who've pegged Wick as the smug liar who thirsts for the death of PCs. I was actually thinking about Cat, I have both the original and the new PWYW version, which I haven't read yet. Though I'm not staking my claim on either.
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Nov 4, 2013 11:37
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 Introduction: The Settling of In the world of Northern Crown, the eponymous continent has become a key part of the rush of colonialism, with all sorts of That's right, we're knee-deep in the territory of alternate history with funky naming schemes that are not universally applied one way or the other. It's a D&D title published by Atlas Games and written by Douglas Anderson, who as far as I know never wrote for any other settings and is definitely someone we can call... Douglas Anderson posted:Guns should be slow and cumbersome to use -- this is a game of derring-do and heroic action, not gun-fu. ...a man with a specific opinion and vision for his setting. Northern Crown also happens to share something in common with the last alt-history RPG I did, Broncosaurus Rex, in that it was an ambitious project that never had many of its corners truly explored. The author had plans for a Boston sourcebook, the mysterious and mostly undiscovered western Northern Crown, a guide to Uropa, and an Aztec empire still standing thanks to the magic of its gods, but all that ever surfaced other than the two core campaign books were two minor supplementals and a three-page article on So, to start out early on a celebration of the month of Thanksgiving, we'll be delving into both Northern Crown: New World Adventures and Northern Crown: the Gazetteer. Prepare for magic, mad science, weird names, and questionable timeframes. Fossilized Rappy fucked around with this message at 15:51 on Nov 4, 2013 |
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Nov 4, 2013 15:46
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Fossilized Rappy posted:
I'm suprised that no-one ever uses Gaul as their name for not France. Worried about Asterix and Obelix jokes? Pre-empt it, make your sample characters be Asterix and Obelix.
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Nov 4, 2013 16:16
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Thanks for doing Shatterzone, by the way. Years ago, I was into WEG's Masterbook stuff, and I always wanted to check it out but never had the time or a group that wanted to do sci-fi.
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Nov 4, 2013 16:25
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Cyphoderus posted:DX has something like a thousand supplements over in Japan. Actually, only eleven of the books offered on the site are supplements. There's also three volumes of the official novel, and the other 28 are official replay books -- transcribed campaign sessions. Paying money to read about a bunch of strangers playing make-believe is a Very Big Thing in the JTRPG world for some drat reason.  (Oh, and  )
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Nov 4, 2013 17:58
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 DOUBLE CROSS Part I - Introduction DX starts out with the classical introductory chapter: we get to know what RPGs are, what you need to play, and the role of the players and GM. No specific mechanics are mentioned, but we learn that the game uses pools of d10s for its rolls. Also, there's something called Roll or Choose: you have a random table that you can either roll on or just pick whatever option you want. Or you can roll and ignore your result and just pick an option anyway. There are some options, like a result of 101 on a 1d100 table, that you can't roll. You either pick them voluntarily or they don't come into play. I'm told RoC is a common thing in Japanese games. I like it, even though it's a formalisation of something we've all been doing for years anyway. When common sense things are explicitly spelled out, "that guy" has fewer things to complain about. DX treats the GM in a way that's not exactly adversarial, but... traditional. The "golden rules", as the game puts them, consist of the following: the GM always has the final word; the GM can do anything without needing to roll; if the GM makes a mistake in a ruling, the mistake must be corrected immediately, but if there's already been an effect because of it the game doesn't reset and what's been done stays that way. Like all RPGs with an introductory chapter to RPGs, DX makes it clear that there are no winners or losers in a game. However, it does define "victory": it's when, at the end of the session, the players accumulated a lot of experience points. When there's a lot of XP, it means the game has been played in the intended way, the way that is designed to be the most fun for everyone involved. This seems obvious but it really isn't, as there are lots of games in which XP gain doesn't directly imply the fun way to play the game. All the ones that treat "action points" and XP as one single resource, for instance. DX doesn't do that. The best part about experience in DX is that it's rewarded to the players, not the characters. Including the GM. Think about it: all the problems you've ever had with rotating GMs and changing characters each session? Gone. We'll get to how that works later, I'm just mentioning it now to tease you guys. At this point we get to talk fluff.  The Setting of the Game First, picture a virus. Real-world viruses have derpy names, like human papilloma virus or foamy virus. This one has a cool name. It's the Renegade virus. It works, honestly, a lot like herpes. First, most of the human population carries the thing; about 80% of everyone you know. Second, in most people the virus is dormant. It sits there quietly without showing itself and without you even knowing you're infected. Third, if you go through a particular stress, the virus can awaken. Something drastic happens in your life, and you start seeing the symptoms of the infection. However, while herpes leaves you with a slightly embarassing oral outburst, the Renegade does one of two things: it either kills you outright, which is the boring option, or it rewrites your DNA and gives you superpowers and superhuman abilities. The people carrying an awakened Renegade and who show such powers are called Overeds. Overeds exhibit a variety of powers. Some can stretch or compress their bodies, some can plug their brains into surveillance systems, some can turn into a vizzerdrix, some can talk to trees. Scholars categorize the superhuman skills granted by the Renegade in twelve broad groups, which they call Syndromes. An Overed tends to express one or two syndromes, and recently there has been a wave of Overeds who can express three. Not everything is flowers for the Overeds. Power comes at a cost. The more you abuse the virus, the more the virus abuses you. The Renegade seems to have a mind of its own and encroaches slowly on yours. You use your skills and powers too much, and gradually you become less yourself and more... something else. Until the point where you snap. You surrender yourself completely to the virus and become what is known as a Gjaum. The Renegade takes complete control and your body gets warped into a monstrous form as your mind crumbles under the pressure of the virus. Worst yet are the cases where you don't become a monster. Superficially, everything is fine – but inside your mind has been shattered in little pieces, or it's been taken over by something else, whatever a virus can have that passes for consciousness. Or you become wrong version of yourself. The fear of becoming a Gjaum is what keeps Overeds in line. Now here's the problem: you can't just tell people about this stuff. The Renegade appeared around 20 years ago, and its existence is still a highly confidential secret. Imagine if it became known that 80% of mankind has in themselves something that either kills or creates superpowered monsters. The chaos that would ensue! There are people who know, of course. The Overeds themselves, for once. And someone has to do research on the Renegade. Someone has to provide help and comfort for Overeds who awakened recently and have no idea what's going on. Most important of all, someone has to make sure the information about the Renegade is managed correctly and doesn't become public until the time is right. Enter the Universal Guardian Network, or the UGN for short. It is a global organisation, extremely wealthy and extremely well-connected. Now there's people who don't think the Renegade should be kept a secret at all. There's people who think Overeds are better than humans, and should take control. There are even those who think becoming a Gjaum isn't that bad after all. There are Gjaums who want the freedom to follow their impulses and desires without anyone getting in the drat way. Enter the False Hearts. Classified as a "terrorist organisation" by the UGN, the False Hearts have no central leadership. It consists of many independent cells, each working to further its own objectives. The UGN has teams of field agents: Overeds who are out there, thwarting the plans of the False Hearts, and usually having to directly confront the terrorists' powers with their own. The only way to stop an Overed is another Overed. When you play Double Cross, you'll probably play an Overed employed by the UGN, fighting against False Hearts agents. There's way more to the setting, including what I consider the best parts. They aren't introduced in this first chapter, however, so we shall not do so as well. Next time we'll delve straight into character creation. Next time: Are you better at riding a bike or breathing fire?
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Nov 4, 2013 20:20
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Cyphoderus posted:
drat I'm loving the sound of this so far. It's really catching hold of my imagination. I look forward to hearing more about this system.
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Nov 4, 2013 20:28
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So Prototype steals its whole setup from a Japanese RPG? Cute.
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Nov 4, 2013 20:30
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Double Cross is laid out incredibly poorly for a first read, yeah. It could have used a better editing pass in general, but I will give them mad props for working hard on that index, referencing the 500-odd powers would be impossible otherwise. It looks like a pretty cool game, but I haven't gotten around to running it yet because I burned out halfway through transcribing all the errataed powers and stuff to make a cheat sheet for my group. I did actually finish a fairly lengthy intro to the Syndromes if you want me to pinch-hit when you get to the powers section.
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Nov 4, 2013 20:37
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Cyphoderus posted:Think about it: all the problems you've ever had with rotating GMs and changing characters each session? Gone. We'll get to how that works later, I'm just mentioning it now to tease you guys.
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Nov 4, 2013 20:38
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I want to play or run Double Cross so bad. It's hard to tell how well the rules hold up just on a read-through, so playtesting would be essential. The main issue with it is that it's not in digital, and you essentially have to have a copy of it as a player. Imagine trying to play Exalted or Dungeons & Dragons 4e without digital support and you get the idea. It's a game badly in need of Power Cards or the like to track all the myriad powers players can pick up.
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Nov 4, 2013 20:42
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Fossilized Rappy posted:Introduction: The Settling of
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Nov 4, 2013 21:27
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I just ordered a copy of DX just on the concept/intro post you did. I will be using your posts to decipher the errata and concepts.
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Nov 4, 2013 22:51
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Lemon Curdistan posted:So Prototype steals its whole setup from a Japanese RPG? Cute. I'm also seeing a bit of Parasite Eve in DX.
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Nov 5, 2013 02:16
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It mostly reminds me of Persona and Witch Hunter Robin. Maybe a bit of Type Moon.
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Nov 5, 2013 02:41
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If I had to throw in my two cents, I'd say it reminds me a little bit of s-CRY-ed with the way some of the powers and organizations that Cyphoderus mentioned worked.
AccidentalHipster fucked around with this message at 03:43 on Nov 5, 2013 |
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Nov 5, 2013 03:40
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Digging this DX thing, but here's the big question: do you have to play stupid high school kids? It was mentioned in the intro post, but is it a requirement? Like, can you make adult PCs? The whole preoccupation with highschool/that age group is what drives me running from a lot of Japanese media in general, and not just anime.
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Nov 5, 2013 03:53
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DicktheCat posted:Digging this DX thing, but here's the big question: do you have to play stupid high school kids? It was mentioned in the intro post, but is it a requirement? Like, can you make adult PCs? Yeah, I have a friend who owns DX, and I'm at least 90% sure that you don't have to play high school kids. It just crops up a whole lot.
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Nov 5, 2013 04:33
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DX sounds like Cybergeneration done right. Fact that the virus gives you superpowers at a price (shades of WoD blood and rage pools) makes it a step above that game in my opinion.
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Nov 5, 2013 04:37
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The game veers towards most of the examples and scenarios being teens and young adults but it's not necessary, really. There's plenty of rules for adult occupations and I don't recall anything about the manifestation of Overeds leaning towards any particular age category.
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Nov 5, 2013 04:48
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DX sounds really interesting and I am looking forward to more. Some of the stuff that gets done up in here really sounds interesting and makes me wish more people would run PbPs of these obscure games.
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Nov 5, 2013 05:43
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It's time for more  It's time for the most  nation of Heluso and Milonda, the TRUILS. Truils are cannibal, mammoth riding, drug-crazed, werewolf barbarians. Well, technically they are three tribes. One is a tribe of mammoth riding barbarians (The Mountain Riders), one is a tribe of werewolf barbarians, (The Night Hunters) and one are folks who use a lot of a special drug called Kratig (The Bluefaces. So it's only a slight misrepresentation! They -are- all cannibals, however, in two acceptable and one unacceptable circumstance. The two acceptable circumstances are funerary (where a truil in good standing is served as the main course of a feast in his honor) and on the battlefield, by biting a live enemy and ripping a chunk off- given that just about every Truil in the Night Hunters probably knows a spell or two even if they aren't full blown dedicated sorcerer-priests, and that Truilish magic is about being a werewolf who worships the moon as a goddess, this may just be practical. It's also a good scare tactic against their most common enemy, the Ulds. (Because well, who's not gonna be freaked out by that?) The mostly unacceptable version is about eating the uncooked flesh of a dead enemy; Truilish belief is that this curses the enemy's ghost to unending torment until the one responsible is himself dead and his body goes uneaten. (If the killer gets a Truilish funeral, well, the torment isn't going to end.) The Truils aren't really a nation, exactly , despite being in a chapter called "The Second Nation" they're a collection of not actually unified tribes who are slowly being pushed off their land by the Ulds. They aren't entirely sure why the Ulds want it, really, given that their own myths say that they were tricked out of the good lands where there is actual sunlight by the ancestor goddess of the Ulds. The tribes are nomadic, and 'agriculture' for them consists mostly of tending to plants in an area and trying to plant and grow more than they take from a given spot before they move on. They're an oral culture, for the most part, and possibly the most actually egalitarian society on Heluso and Milonda, but this is largely because the gap between "Chief" and "Average member of the tribe" is just not that wide. The truilish military is basically exactly the opposite of the Ulds; Ulds tend to field big waves of average troops, backed up with terrifying military sorcerers who dance to make people explode or spit lightning. Truils do small sneaky commando units, supplemented by werewolf terror attacks or mammoth shock and awe raids. As a side note: The Truil chapter is the first one to mention skin color; Truils (And a group that don't get a full writeup until another book) are the only white people in the setting. (This is another bit that drives some people crazy about the game, though not as crazy as 'Men ride side-saddle'. These people probably deserve to be driven crazy.) Next time: COMPANY RULES. Possibly even this month! unseenlibrarian fucked around with this message at 11:54 on Nov 5, 2013 |
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Nov 5, 2013 11:20
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I'm so glad people are getting interested in DX! It's pretty cool. It's also very, very succinct. More often than not a term or idea will be explained in one sentence in the entire book. It works because it really fuels the imagination, and doesn't fall in the oh-so-common pitfall of over-describing a setting that Western designers love to do so much.DicktheCat posted:Digging this DX thing, but here's the big question: do you have to play stupid high school kids? It was mentioned in the intro post, but is it a requirement? Like, can you make adult PCs? What DX doesn't do is shy away from genre cliches. On the contrary, it embraces them fully. That's why so many examples and illustrations follow the high-schooler norm. Alien Rope Burn posted:It's a game badly in need of Power Cards or the like to track all the myriad powers players can pick up. unseenlibrarian posted:It's time for more Still love this game.
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Nov 5, 2013 11:36
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unseenlibrarian posted:Truils are cannibal, mammoth riding, drug-crazed, werewolf barbarians. 
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Nov 5, 2013 13:44
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unseenlibrarian posted:As a side note: The Truil chapter is the first one to mention skin color; Truils (And a group that don't get a full writeup until another book) are the only white people in the setting. (This is another bit that drives some people crazy about the game, though not as crazy as 'Men ride side-saddle'. These people probably deserve to be driven crazy.) I believe that there's one other group of mostly-white people, the Ob-lobs...who are related to the Truils.
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Nov 5, 2013 13:50
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Mors Rattus posted:I believe that there's one other group of mostly-white people, the Ob-lobs...who are related to the Truils. Yeah, that'd be the group I mentioned that don't get a full writeup until another book- Ob-lobs get namechecked, but don't really get explained until one of the bits that'd later become "The First Year of Our Reign". Actually because of that, they may actually have more written about them specifically than anyone else, just because there's a good chunk on their language written up as well.
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Nov 5, 2013 13:57
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unseenlibrarian posted:It's time for more Fun fact about the Truils, the Kratig drug the Bluefaces use is so special because it makes pain feel pleasurable. Naturally this works wonders in combat, since you can mechanically shrug off anything short of overflowing killing damage to limbs which would be them physically breaking your arm or something like that. But it's also mentioned that Kratig is used as an epidural! As one of my friends just went through four straight days of contractions before finally giving birth I appreciate that they thought about that.
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Nov 5, 2013 14:04
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