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Terrible Opinions
Oct 18, 2013



Put me down for Living Land.

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Small Strange Bird
Sep 22, 2006

Merci, chaton!

Halloween Jack posted:

Whereas from what I've heard about Paranoia 5, it's too complicated and just painfully unfunny.
The art alone put me off Paranoia 5 even before reading it. Third-rate student union newsletter cartoons - that's the style you're going for? Really?

Lightning Lord
Feb 21, 2013

$200 a day, plus expenses

Halloween Jack posted:

MiB is at least playable, about 1% as complicated as Torg, and not awful, but the humour is all wrong. Which is to be expected. You can't really adapt the buddy-cop dynamic from the movie to a group of experienced PCs. Whereas from what I've heard about Paranoia 5, it's too complicated and just painfully unfunny.

Isn't that the edition that had a really bad comic adaption that was a straightforward post-apocalyptic, humorless sci-fi story?

Libertad!
Oct 30, 2013

You can have the last word, but I'll have the last laugh!

Littlefinger posted:

Um, yes?
I picked it not because I think it's awesome but because it is a literal street ~samurai~ that is so hilariously 80s-90s and a single-picture representation of the whole postmodern orientalism of the time.

My question wasn't an indictment towards you, but whoever thought up that cover.

8one6
May 20, 2012

When in doubt, err on the side of Awesome!

My vote is for the Cyberpapacy

ascendance
Feb 19, 2013
I also vote Cyberpapacy.

Kavak
Aug 23, 2009


I'm voting for Orrosh, because why the hell not?

Count Chocula
Dec 25, 2011

WE HAVE TO CONTROL OUR ENVIRONMENT
IF YOU SEE ME POSTING OUTSIDE OF THE AUSPOL THREAD PLEASE TELL ME THAT I'M MISSED AND TO START POSTING AGAIN

Kavak posted:

I'm voting for Orrosh, because why the hell not?

This, and because I remember the Cyberpapacy from the last time around.

sexpig by night
Sep 8, 2011

by Azathoth
I stand for Cyberpapacy

The Sin of Onan
Oct 11, 2012

And below,
watched by eyes of steel
we dreamt
Living Land, just so we can get it out of the way.

LornMarkus
Nov 8, 2011

Cyberpapacy here.

Edit: You know what, it was several pages ago but HSD really does just have me annoyed enough that I have to throw in my own point. Just like everything else Libertarian related they labor under a very simple delusion: they believe that the greatest economic good is also the greatest societal good. Not only is that not true in the macro (corporations will always make better and more reliable money off a populace teetering on the edge of poverty than one that is well-paid), but it fails spectacularly on an individual basis. Stable, long-term gains will always lose out to the quick buck that can be made by burning everything to the ground and running away with everything you can carry because as long as every other person doesn't die in the process someone will rebuild it again. It carries down through to even the oldest levels: the individual or small gang who murder the hunter for his stores of winter forage rather than bothering to do it themselves. There'll always be someone else to murder and pillage and even if there ultimately isn't . . . the phrase, "gently caress it, got mine now," comes to mind.

LornMarkus fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Jan 14, 2015

Carados
Jan 28, 2009

We're a couple, when our bodies double.
Would doing it in the order of release make more sense?

Midjack
Dec 24, 2007



Living Land, let's crescendo.

kvx687
Dec 29, 2009

Soiled Meat
I'll vote for Aysle, because I enjoy suffering. (Is it Asyle or Asyle? You spell it differently every single time it comes up.)

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

kvx687 posted:

I'll vote for Aysle, because I enjoy suffering. (Is it Asyle or Asyle? You spell it differently every single time it comes up.)

It's Aysle. Torg is chock full of strangely spelled words (especially in the Living Land and Orrorsh) and it's hard to keep them straight sometimes.

Young Freud
Nov 26, 2006

Evil Mastermind posted:

It's Aysle. Torg is chock full of strangely spelled words (especially in the Living Land and Orrorsh) and it's hard to keep them straight sometimes.

My vote's going to be Cyberpapacy, but if you do Orrorsh at some point, are you going to include the Creatures Of Orrorsh in with it, if just for the possessed lawnmower created by the demon who also created the pre-Ringu possessed VCR?

I do find it peculiar that WEG never made a Creatures of Living Land or Land Above, when they made on for Orrorsh, Aysle, and even one for Tharkold (which doesn't really give you the territory to actually unleash them).

Erebro
Apr 28, 2013
I am on the :bandwagon: for Cyberpapacy

DicktheCat
Feb 15, 2011

Erebro posted:

I am on the :bandwagon: for Cyberpapacy

Me, too. I enjoyed it first time around, and would like to read it again.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Young Freud posted:

My vote's going to be Cyberpapacy, but if you do Orrorsh at some point, are you going to include the Creatures Of Orrorsh in with it, if just for the possessed lawnmower created by the demon who also created the pre-Ringu possessed VCR?

Oh yes. Watching the writers come up with weird-rear end monsters is almost as entertaining as all the "how to run horror games" advice.

mllaneza
Apr 28, 2007

Veteran, Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force, 1993-1952




I'm voting for Asyle. Let's get the horrors of the create-a-spell rules out of the way.

Mr. Maltose
Feb 16, 2011

The Guffless Girlverine
Create-A-Spell really should be the finale of the worldbooks, because there is nothing more TORG than that system.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

It's time for more Existentialist Furry Space NATO Albedo: Platinum Catalyst!

Alright, I've described the setting some, and PC and squad creation, and now it's time to see why you have an entire squad. The reason is infantry tactics and combat math. Combat in Albedo is the main point of mechanical complexity; your PCs are soldiers, your job is going to warzones and carrying out peacekeeping, counter terror, and military actions. There's plenty of non-combat stuff to do, but the bulk of mechanical rigor is in combat because the game wants to try to make combat tense and relatively grim.

First, we'll go over how injury works. If you get Injured in a stat, you reduce your pool of that stat by 1 and reduce your max pool of that stat by 1 per point of injury until you can recover (Psych counseling, time and distance and good service to rebuild a reputation, or medical care). This is important because one of the keys of combat is that being shot is terrible, and you never want to be shot. When it comes to taking actual damage, you have damage thresholds, determined by your starting Body stat (these do not reduce as you spend Body or take injuries) of Wounded, Crippled, Incapacitate, and Devastated. If you take a hit that does damage in excess of a Threshold, you take some points of Injury to your Body AND gain a condition based on the threshold passed, making it easier for subsequent hits to hurt you even worse. If you're Crippled, you have to spend Body (or Morale, for supporting characters) just to act in combat. If you take Injury equal to your Body or take a really heavy hit, you're Incapacitated, which means you're down and probably out of the fight, though an exceptionally heroic character might be able to spend Body to stay conscious and crawl for safety, or even fire back. Incap is generally the point where a character can be considered down and out; they also have a 5% chance of actually dying each round until a medic gets to them. Devastated takes a truly insane amount of damage (for an average 7 Body character, they'd need to take a solid hit from a .50 anti-tank rifle or a heavy, direct grenade hit), but if it happens you loving die. Not only do you die, but seeing someone get their head blown clean off or turned into red mist causes combat fatigue. All onlookers take Awe, which reduces their Morale or Drive (It isn't actual Drive injury unless you've run out of Drive to spend, in which case it becomes Trauma and thus Drive Injury) by 2 if they were on the dead guy's side (instantly panicking rookie squaddies) or 1 if they were on the attacker's side. That's right, blowing a guy's head off or turning a guy into soup with a shotgun or grenade will cause combat trauma to your characters, too. The math on being wounded is harsh, though it's very hard to die instantly and much easier to get incapacitated and wounded. All weapon damage is measured in two numbers. Say a LAKW, your Space M16, does 10+10 damage. This means it will inflict 10+d20 to a target it hits. That d20 is rolled against their Deflection (usually 10-11 for combat armored troops) and if it beats Deflection, they add the second number to damage because it Penetrated the target's armor. If you're Wounded or Crippled, foes get extra Penetration dice against you (since you're already hurt and more fragile). Explosives and close-range shotgun fire also roll extra damage. Considering average Body is 7, and Wounded Threshold is Bodyx2 (Subsequent levels are +10, +20, and +40 to the initial) and an extra +5 to all of them if you're in combat armor, this means even a shot that doesn't penetrate could wound the average bunny or fox (a 9 or 10 on the d20 Pen dice will still result in 19 or 20 damage, which will Wound them) through their armor by blunt trauma alone. As you can see, being shot loving sucks.

Which gets us to Awe, one of the key parts of combat. Awe comes from being hit (regardless of injury), being Injured, fighting in close combat, watching someone die horribly, taking suppressive fire, or being hit with explosives (regardless of if they do damage). Awe instantly reduces Morale or Drive, and if you run out of Morale or Drive and take excess Awe, not only will a PC take Trauma from the combat fatigue, but you Panic. Panicked characters can still act, but they have to move towards and hide behind cover, and if they attack, they can no longer claim Rote (and since they're out of Drive/Morale, can't Push or Risk either), which makes their performance extremely erratic because they're scared out of their mind. Close Combat always inflicts 1 point of Awe on the attacker and the attacked, as it's much harder to bring yourself to wrestle a guy to the ground and knife him in the throat than to shoot him at 100m. A set of Gifts (and one Dubious Gift) let you resist some Awe each round if you have them, making it much easier to keep your mind in the fight. You'll also need to be using Lead to keep your squadmates from panicking, since by default they can only handle 2 points of Awe before panicking and going wild. I feel like Awe is one of the better systems in the game; it's fiddly, but it does an excellent job of getting across that a firefight is insanely unpleasant and stressful, and that badass bravado doesn't really survive the realities of war unless you're so hardened you start to scare people. It also means doing morale damage to enemies and panicking them into retreating or cowering is a legitimate strategy and that firefights often end with some enemies wounded or dead and the rest retreating or surrendering, instead of fighting to the death.

So how do you avoid getting shot, which we've established is super bad, and why is it so important that you have 5 guys to control? You don't have any active Dodge skills, etc, though a character with extensive melee training will get to claim extra defense in melee due to their skills. Instead, you have Range, Cover, and Concealment. If you're shooting at a guy at medium range (50 or so meters) in solid cover at you're attacking vs. 2d8. You don't add the 2d8, you just take the highest showing die, but remember your average infantryman will rote to a 5 and he loses ties unless he has Semiauto Expert and spends extra bullets to convert a tie to a hit. So he's got roughly 25% odds of making that shot, and that's an average shot in an average situation in urban combat. Further, each character only gets 1 action every turn, which can be used to run, move through cover slowly to avoid detection, overwatch fire, and improve their cover/concealment protection, fire, treat an injured ally, reload, etc. You have 5 guys so that 'I suppress him' and 'I move up to start moving to flank' don't feel like 'wasted' turns. A couple of your squad can try to pin the enemy while others move through cover or dash to new cover or provide overwatch or get into an elevated position to aim or grenade the targets while a couple others suppress or try low-odds frontal shots to keep the enemy's attention. Thus, you have 5 guys to encourage using actual infantry tactics like suppressing and flanking and so that if you're taking multiple low-odds actions in one round, you have a better shot at one of them succeeding and keeping you from feeling like you wasted your turn. Also, let's take our theoretical 8 skill rifleman hero from character creation: You'll note he can Rote to a 9 and WILL NOT miss in the standard 2d8 situation. That's intentional; that's designed to simulate, say, an expert sniper or marksman that the enemy will need to hunker down or take their lumps from, letting you use that PC to keep their heads down while others maneuver. In the combats I've played, the game feels a lot like a grittier version of Jagged Alliance or X-COM, and while combat is challenging to run and basically requires a tactical map, it's actually a lot of fun and tense as hell. This is the other reason you have 5 guys; if you're knocked out or taken down, you're intended to be able to take over playing as your squaddies until your PC gets back on their feet. This does make running with large groups insane, though; I recommend a small group of up to 3 people for Albedo, in general, which is one of the flaws of a lot of Sanguine's games.

Let me know if people need more detail on stuff! I can go into more detail if you like.

Hypocrisy
Oct 4, 2006
Lord of Sarcasm

Evil Mastermind posted:

I did it the first time around, but I faded after doing the Nile Empire and only getting about 3/4 of the way through Cyberpapacy. This redo is my attempt to redeem myself.

Ah, well, I thought your first time around with the Cyberpapacy was great so I'll vote for Orrosh. Or anything besides the Cyberpapacy. I wanna see new stuff!

Drakyn
Dec 26, 2012

Hypocrisy posted:

I wanna see new stuff!
Which is why I'm voting for Living Land. If it's boring a lot of it'll get skimmed anyways and we can quickly move on to other things.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Well, I'm awake.

quote:

Cyberpapacy: ..............
Nile Empire: ......
Living Land: .......
Nippon Tech: .
Orrorsh: ....
Asyle ..

Looks like we're going to revisit and actually finish the Cyberpapacy first.

(On the plus side, since I'm reworking old posts, I should be able to chew through it pretty quickly.)

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012

Night10194 posted:

It's time for more Existentialist Furry Space NATO Albedo: Platinum Catalyst!


Let me know if people need more detail on stuff! I can go into more detail if you like.

I really feel like this would be the basis for a great videogame. Even if it's just XCOM with an added mechanic

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Hc Svnt Dracones
Would you believe there's still more fluff/setting bullshit to crunch through?



Setting

This section starts out with a glossary of Space Future Terms, which are basically a bunch of tiny fluff snippets to tell us more about living in the SPACE FUTURE, most of them are dumb and pointless, but a few of them are dumb and hilarious, and I'll paste from those.

Did you know that in the Furry Space Future, stores are outdated? Instead of buying physical goods, you just buy limited-use licences to 3D print stuff... which actually seems like an alright idea for a setting where 3D-printing/nanotech forges replace most traditional construction. Though it's partnered with the bizarre idea that you can only buy said blueprints in certain areas, called "BuySpots." That seems weirdly anachronistic. If you've done away with physical stores, why still tie purchases to a location?

Space suits are now called "Suck Suits," which sounds more like something related to some really bizarre fetish.

quote:

A physical surface that contains digital components capable of processing information and displaying it. Almost every piece of glass, metallic or reflective surface in a Vector community is a smart surface.

It seems weird that HSD's society is so much more "civilized" than EP's, everyone's on board with the hypercapitalist thing(so far, anyway, there's an antagonist chapter later on which I guess might include filthy unionist scum and others who want to share wealth), because it appears to be a perfect playground for anarchist/anti-establishment pranksters. Make an infinite-use 3D blueprint for dildos and go swamp some corporation's "BuySpot" with dongs, hack an entire city to display nothing but your taint on every loving surface. But no, everyone seems to have just mindlessly gone along with the whole idea.

quote:

When they were first developed, smart surfaces blared advertisements and followed Vectors around with digital salesmen to the point that the community as a whole demanded a stop to it.

Also, as much as EP is hostile to hypercapitalism, I think it displays it more realistically than HSD, because in EP, corporations largely have power over their employees, yet still have to avoid massive scandals, since they're not invincible. In HSD, on the other hand, corporations instantly bow to the wishes of the public and their employees and seem to either have no actual power to throw around, or to be innocent of any real desire to ever abuse people, committing misdeeds largely out of ignorance rather than selfishness. Not to mention, did the corporations not need the advertisements or anything? Could they just cut them with no harm to their revenue streams? Nope, must've just been on a whim that they advertised for stuff, since they could just cut it out at the drop of a hat.

quote:

Ledger: An autonomous investment system that works on behalf of each individual to make them a functioning part of the flow of commerce. Its profit offsets the cost of living in a society with chronic nickel-and-diming, and ensures a partial income. Ledger systems are not distributed after birth, cannot be bought, and cannot be traded. Their encryption relies on certain codes and programs only possessed by a handful of people in the universe, and the system itself operates on a constant basis. It is not updated, tampered with, changed or modified, which makes it easy to notice if someone is meddling with it. By and large, Ledgers cannot be hacked. They do what they do based on centuries-old equations that grow naturally with the inclusion of certain variables, and anomalies are very easy to spot. The systems themselves are contained within the sealed archives of the corptowns in which people are born, and might be accessible by one in every 10 million people.

I just want to repeat the whole "Ledger" thing because it's so loving stupid. I love how it's "not updated" and "based on centuries-old equations," and clearly in the centuries since the start of the setting, computing power has grown massively if we've now literally made every loving reflective surface a computer, and Transcendent Technologies surely has holistic crystal power quantum computers or something, yet despite this program never being updated, and being based on ancient equations, apparently no one has ever thought to use this massive flood of computing technology to either exploit bugs in the system's equations or crack the encryption?

quote:

Also known as the Human Aural Resonance Effect, this phenomenon is the largest piece of unaccounted-for evidence known to Vector-kind that perhaps their understanding of their own history might not be all they thought it was. The human voice, specifically human singing, resonates in the Vector mind in an almost hypnotizing fashion. While Vectors can still function more or less adeptly in the presence of human singing, they become somewhat placid and susceptible to suggestion, and can even be calmed or manipulated if the right person is exerting the right pressures.

...

Very few uncompressed original human pieces have survived 700 years past the death of their world

...

When combined with the other curious discrepancy in the early days of Mars: the last of humanity choosing to die off or transform rather than push onward, this paints a disturbing potential alternate to the end days of mankind, in which they attempted to gain control of the Vector population, failed, and were subsequently killed off by the early Vectors themselves. It would mean an awful lot of early history was entirely manufactured, but it wouldn’t be the first time.

I want to point out that I have not read ahead at all, so if the book is setting us up for some sort of surprisingly rad twist where it turns out that everything we've read so far has been blatant propaganda bullshit, I'd be pleased, but I doubt it. If anything this seems more like "the humans were evil all along, only the furries have true moral purity, that's why hypercapitalism works for them."

quote:

The Shadow President is a single, faceless, nameless civilian that exists above the CEO. Each megacorp has one. Their job is as profound as it is simplistic: watch. Be the stopgap. Hold the corporate machine in check when it needs to be reined in, allow it to roam free when it doesn’t. Be silent and uninvolved while the business flourishes, but when it oversteps its boundaries, when it pushes too hard, bring the hammer down on it. It is suspected by those in the know that nearly every megacorp CEO assassination was only possible because the Shadow President determined that the CEO had to be stopped, and arranged it.

...

The nature of the order of succession is as mysterious as the people themselves, but it is suspected that the titles have been passed down from person to person for generations, carefully selecting brilliant individuals who can accomplish the weighty goals held before them. They’re geniuses, whose job is not just to keep the system from snowballing, but to use its assets in ways that will profoundly influence the universe while the greater machine worries about what this year’s spring fashion line will be. They walk the streets as normal people, see the effects of their titanic corporations, monitor their books and research, and silently weigh in their hands when it’s necessary. A slip of paper containing even one of their names would be worth billions. So far, no such document has been found.

In short, all those checks and balances, those distributions of responsibility and decisionmaking, such as shareholder councils and the like, don't actually work. What's necessary for corporations to act correctly and morally is a single, powerful CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY with ultimate power over them. At least they just decided to go, "UH, IT'S A MYSTERY" rather than trying to bullshit up a way in which none of these SHADOW PRESIDENTS would ever be corrupt assholes or fuckups. I also want to point out that the book describes one of the reasons to need the SHADOW PRESIDENT as being because the other entities controlling the company are too far-removed from the public, and can too easily seek safety in bunkers or in orbit if their decisions ever really piss someone off... so I want to ask you, what protection is better than PERFECT ANONYMITY? At least people know who to loving blame with the rest of them.

Next, we're on to locations! Which starts out by describing that "skirmishes" ranging from "a couple of employees" to "a few hundred thousand" in size, happen with some regularity and often little warning. This is described as "worrying" to us, that is, us, the reader, and perhaps unsettling to us. But apparently to the people of THE SPACE FUTURE, this is just how business is done and nothing to whine about, highly implying that it's just a matter of culture and not, objectively, a bad thing. I'm absolutely boggled by whatever thinking came up with this... and then it turns out that the "locations" section has a dire dearth of actual locations, instead just describing types of locations like "urban city" and "a big cave" with a single, sparsely-detailed example of some of them.

About the only interesting parts are a couple of incredibly wanky space-stations briefly mentioned, one for idiot furries with mythical-esque forms, who live on a big space station where they permanently LARP themselves into a delusion that they actually ARE mythical creatures, like dragons, sphinxes, etc. They're somehow described as "noble" and "self-sacrificing," even though I remember most mythical monsters as being selfish and concerned largely with wealth and/or stealing attractive human women. The other's for idiot furries who idolize being ~wonderfully one with nature~ and all live as feral predators on a single space station... with no mention of what they hunt there, are there other furries there who worship the glory of being prey that gets messily murdered as food for the predators? Do they hunt targets? Do the predators hunt each other? Of course, despite ~abandoning all technology to live beautifully one with nature~, they're somehow still a match for the hunters with plasma rifles and railguns who regularly visit to hunt them for sport.

quote:

Being feral does not make you stupid, and smart animals hunt in creative ways.

Gotta make room for everyone's fursona, after all.

Blightspots are one of the few ideas in this book I actually like. Basically, growing bioships, like Transcendent Technologies does, is a tricky business. And sometimes, rather than forming correctly, they become a tumor, complete with the original ship's defenses and self-repair abilities, but now just sort of... spread across their construction facility(whether in space or planet-side), and aggressively resisting attempts to destroy them. But then again, I've got a soft spot for body horror type stuff.

After that is the bit that's about actual, defined, locations, the various planets.


Mars

Mars is incredibly dull, it's just Earth with taller trees, literally. About the most interesting part is the detail that Deimos was just casually demolished by automated debris-clearance machines in orbit, at which point I have to ask what challenges can really remain for players or anyone in this setting if a loving moonlet can just be recycled for trash without anyone apparently noticing until it's too late.

The bit on Venus and its terraforming just makes me laugh, though, apparently it was a casual operation to increase the planet's rate of spin and give it an artificial magnetic field to shield it from solar radiation, and so I repeat: What loving challenges are left? What technology even needs to be discovered? Faster-than-light travel seems to be about the only thing missing at this point. There's already a substance to make you immortal and planetary-scale engineering seems like a wave of the hand away.

quote:

During the course of the Venus terraform, the planet’s rotational speed would accelerate from one turn every 238 Earth days to an almost perfect 24 hour spin, in the opposite direction. Its core would be liquefied, its magnetic field restored, and its atmosphere stabilized.

When they terraformed the place, they were also loving idiots, I'd note, deciding that what an awesome, habitable world totally needed was herds of giant sea monsters and dragons. Why yes, I would love to go settle on a nice, Earth-like planet where a giant, flying loving goose with scales might incinerate me.

Europa's somewhat interesting, since someone's actually bothered writing up a bit of local culture beyond "this is where all the corporations live" or "they like taking trips to Mars."(for Venus) With the Europans described as superstitious and, in fact, particularly in dread of Jupiter, the entire surface colony effectively going into blackout when Jupiter's in the sky, and leaving it ambiguous whether being farther out-system, more isolated, and dominated by a single, odd, corporate culture(Transcendent Technologies) is what's making them weird, or whether it's because the heart of their planet is full of ineffable alien artifacts.

Lastly, there's Ganymede, which is dull. It's just a generic space-frontier, a moon basically covered in jungle, and Earth, which is also dull, because it's got even less of a purpose in the setting than Earth does in Eclipse Phase. Earth in EP at least has a canonical reason to be scavenged-on, and a canonical number of scavenger inhabitants. Earth in HSD has half its surface literally covered in Whispers, the red gooey crystal shell covers half of Earth and extends almost all the way to the moon(and the entire moon is also covered), and apparently it's made of Whispers that can just wake up and murder people. So like, good luck visiting Earth, everyone who ever has, in canon, has loving died.

But on the bright side, that taps out setting and lets us see how badly done chargen is, which I'll do next post.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Xelkelvos posted:

I really feel like this would be the basis for a great videogame. Even if it's just XCOM with an added mechanic

I agree, but it's actually pretty fun to play as an RPG, too. Going Rote and everyone only having a single action lets you cycle individual actions pretty quickly in combat, but I feel like Awe is probably the single most important part of the combat system because Awe gets across the tone very effectively. Albedo is less anti-war than it's anti glorification of war; it wants to get across that even if the ILR or whatever has to be fought, the battle is going to be bloody, inglorious, and painful in both mind and body. Having characters freaking out and losing their cool is both an effective mechanic for simulating trying to break an enemy squad and defeat it by taking its position rather than killing every trooper, and a good way to get across that this is incredibly hard on you and your troops, even if you don't get maimed or murdered.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
I'm still surprised that there isn't more military sci-fi RPG stuff, especially in the wake of stuff like Halo and XCom.

Edit: Has anybody covered Dream Pod 9 stuff?

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Jan 14, 2015

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012
Are there rules variants for players controlling fewer squad mates so more people can act or each player controlling a squad member

John Liver
May 4, 2009


definitely_not_midgar.png

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Xelkelvos posted:

Are there rules variants for players controlling fewer squad mates so more people can act or each player controlling a squad member

I don't think so, though I know there are rules for abstracting out PCs becoming platoon level and company level officers as their careers advance in the expansion, and for turning specific surviving squaddies into 'aides', who are basically starting PCs that you can take over for smaller or field grade adventures. I'd imagine if you wanted to have each player control a squaddy you definitely could, particularly if you brought in the aide system from the expansion (which I'll try to cover later, it adds vehicles as well as plenty of information on ILR and EDF standard Order of Battle, units of organization, etc) to play a sort of small special forces team or something. But the focus is definitely on 'You are a couple squads of dudes and you play as the squad leaders, work together to overcome problems both political and military.'

hectorgrey
Oct 14, 2011

Night10194 posted:

I don't think so, though I know there are rules for abstracting out PCs becoming platoon level and company level officers as their careers advance in the expansion, and for turning specific surviving squaddies into 'aides', who are basically starting PCs that you can take over for smaller or field grade adventures. I'd imagine if you wanted to have each player control a squaddy you definitely could, particularly if you brought in the aide system from the expansion (which I'll try to cover later, it adds vehicles as well as plenty of information on ILR and EDF standard Order of Battle, units of organization, etc) to play a sort of small special forces team or something. But the focus is definitely on 'You are a couple squads of dudes and you play as the squad leaders, work together to overcome problems both political and military.'

Huh. With a little jiggery pokery, this could make for an excellent game for just about any military style setting you choose to pick.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Only the wolf looks like it has any effort put into it. That gun is terribly designed Nevermind all of the gun/lasers are terribly designed. And that feral cat has body armor with pouches.

It doesn't have thumbs!

Why do these artists keep giving things that would require thumbs to things that do not have thumbs?

Zereth
Jul 9, 2003



Kurieg posted:

Only the wolf looks like it has any effort put into it. That gun is terribly designed Nevermind all of the gun/lasers are terribly designed. And that feral cat has body armor with pouches.

It doesn't have thumbs!

Why do these artists keep giving things that would require thumbs to things that do not have thumbs?




And that does look weird. I feel like it was composited out of some other stuff that wasn't intended to be used together like this.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Lightning Lord posted:

Isn't that the edition that had a really bad comic adaption that was a straightforward post-apocalyptic, humorless sci-fi story?
Are you talking about that comics miniseries where the protagonist was named King-R-THR? And his friend was Lance-R-LOT?

Kurieg posted:

Only the wolf looks like it has any effort put into it. That gun is terribly designed Nevermind all of the gun/lasers are terribly designed. And that feral cat has body armor with pouches.

It doesn't have thumbs!

Why do these artists keep giving things that would require thumbs to things that do not have thumbs?
Is a fur not entitled to the use of his tools? No! Says Kurieg. It belongs to the primates.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

Zereth posted:

And that does look weird. I feel like it was composited out of some other stuff that wasn't intended to be used together like this.

My favorite is the Sniper using the stock on her rifle as a shoulder mount.

Halloween Jack posted:

Is a fur not entitled to the use of his tools? No! Says Kurieg. It belongs to the primates.

I chose a different path. I chose, MARS!

Speaking of obtuse furry bullshit. I'll be done with the first book of Warcraft d20 very soon (there's only enough non-lore material left for about one and a half updates) so I'm planning for the next book to review and I just realized that theres a very important book that Daeren never finished.

So what should I do next
A bunch of races and mass combat rules?
A new caster class designed around punching things and rules for even more mechanized bullshit.


or


We rehired a guy that we fired 6 years ago for being a creep who thinks he's a literal satyr to write a book on anthropomorphic animals, how were we to know it would be full of animistic bullshit and furries?

Xelkelvos
Dec 19, 2012
Keep rolling with WoW

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

hectorgrey posted:

Huh. With a little jiggery pokery, this could make for an excellent game for just about any military style setting you choose to pick.

You could say the same for Ironclaw and low fantasy. It's one of the reasons I like Sanguine; they choose properties or write backgrounds where the furry stuff is more a stylistic choice than anything (In Ironclaw, it's kind of a welcome change from Elf Dorf Gnome whatever) and that have a lot more to both system and setting than just furry wankbait. I will probably try to do 1st Edition Ironclaw (the one I've actually run) after I finish Albedo because for its faults (Dice mechanics are too complex, which is something Sanguine noticed and cut down on in Albedo and Ironclaw 2e) it's a very solid low fantasy setting and system. The one problem is the art. Oh jesus christ is the art in 1e Ironclaw embarrassing. Like, it was so bad we taped white paper over much of it because it was basically random furry art that I assumed the authors had gotten for free and was terrified to find out they paid for on commission. The art style improved vastly in IC2e, and Albedo's art is pretty much the comic's art. I should really post the cover for reference.



There's nothing really offensive about that. It's just animal people in combat armor and reasonably sane looking tanks.

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Doresh
Jan 7, 2015
Dunno how interesting Warcraft Mass Combat is. Dind't they just copy the rules of Cry Havoc? And HSD seems to more than fill the furry bullshit quota, so onwards with mechanized bullshit and punching casters.

And boy oh boy, there's a lot of stupid in the last stretch of HSD fluff...

"Suck Suits"? There are writers who love coming up with cryptic, pretentious terms for nearly everything, and then there's this. Whatever it is.

In a world where the big corporations are the government, there are no advertisments anywhere?

I think we can add IT to the things the writers of HSD have no clue about. Building your entire economy on ancient hard- and software that is never updated is just asking for trouble. And what happens if you do end up breaking/losing your Ledger, or if your Ledger just goes bad? Are you banished or something?

So human songs have an effect on the furries? Are they now ripping off Macross?

Does anyone else finds it disturbing that the perfect capitalistic furry paradise future views large-scale manslaughter as "just another whacky monday evening"?

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm still surprised that there isn't more military sci-fi RPG stuff, especially in the wake of stuff like Halo and XCom.

Edit: Has anybody covered Dream Pod 9 stuff?

Colon V started (but never finished) doing 2nd edition Heavy Gear a couple years ago. That's about all I know so far.

I might tackle some DP9 myself as I've gotten myself the main books of the whole SilCORE era, though I'm leaning towards CORE Command, as I'm a poor sod who doesn't own too many actually bad RPGs.

Doresh fucked around with this message at 21:14 on Jan 14, 2015

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