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Alright, I've been putting this off a couple days. Time for more Albedo: Structural Integrity Firstly, there's some mechanical stuff I need to cover before I get into vehicles, because the vehicle rules are all about the mechanics, to a degree I've got to say I don't like. They...work, but they're way too complicated and involve enough math that introducing a vehicle is going to slow stuff down and take a lot of getting used to, which is a problem when A: The game is relatively realistic and most infantry is mechanized and B: The game already gives every PC a squad of NPCs to resolve and play actions for. Before we get to vehicles, I need to describe how Albedo does full auto weapons and explosives, because it comes up quite a bit with vehicles. Their solution to full auto is relatively abstract and based on the idea that hitting more than one person (or the same person with multiple rounds) is actually pretty hard to do. In Albedo, Full Auto comes across via Suppressive Fire (You get a chance to hit a bunch of enemies in a cone at short range, or medium range if you have a Gift, while forcing them all to take Awe and possibly Panic, but unless you have a belt-fed weapon you burn your entire clip) and Following Fire (Once you hit a target, you can follow up with additional shots at short range (medium if you have a Gift) or switch fire to nearby targets, but past a certain point to keep shooting you have to spend Drive and you use 3 bullets per attempt). These are pretty solid ways to do automatic fire, especially as the former gives you a very solid reason to have an LMG around despite its enormous bulk and having roughly the same ballistics as a LAKW rifle. Speaking of, all these weapon names, like LAKW, stand for 'Long Arm, Kinetic Weapon' etc. Explosives are modeled by having relatively low damage, but rolling bonus penetration dice and thus having a high chance to inflict a high d20 result, as well as extra iterations of their Pen damage rating, based on how directly they land on target and how little cover is in the way. They also inflict 1 Awe per Pen Die they roll no matter what; even if he survives it, a character who has a close call with a grenade or mortar is going to be reeling. They didn't want to throw the math off entirely with vehicles, so vehicles have a Body and Deflect and Threshold just like PCs. The difference is, if the base damage of your weapon isn't higher than the vehicle's deflection (Say, a LAKW's 10 base+10 Pen vs. an APC's 12 Deflect) you lose 2 Penetration dice. If this would reduce your Pen Dice to 0, you cannot damage the vehicle on that facing with that weapon. A specific sidebar notes they did that threshold of penetration mitigation so someone with a critical hit and sniper gifts could potentially hit something vital with a rifle, and so hand grenades would have a chance to defeat light vehicles. This isn't really the bad part; all this makes sense, a vehicle is relatively impervious to small arms but a heavy anti-vehicle rifle could defeat it, as could a hilariously competent soldier or a grenade tossed in just the right spot and set with a shaped charge. They also introduce new anti-vehicle weapons like a rocket launcher that's designed with a HEAT charge, crew served autocannons, etc, so that's all fine. It's a pretty elegant solution to making vehicles difficult to hurt with small arms without introducing tons of weapons that completely throw off the damage math. The problem comes when they start introducing hit locations and overpenetration rules. Hit location is determined by dividing the total damage from a wounding hit to a vehicle. Yep. It has to be a penetrating hit, but it introduces dice shifts, which lower the size of the vehicle driver/gunner/crew's dice due to the damage to the vehicle (vehicles can also cause dice shifts via their maneuverability rating, to simulate an armored car being easier to turn than a tank, etc). On a divisible by 16 pen hit your vehicle just stops outright, unless you're insanely skilled (5 or higher skill) in which case you can make an emergency landing or keep it rolling long enough to hit cover and bail. It's complicated. Much more complicated than the abstract infantry wounds. It's 'realistic', but I don't know if it's really necessary. I assume the reason for it is that it's insanely hard to Devastate a vehicle and they wanted ways to 'mission kill' them without having to do so or run through all their Body, but the mechanics are going to slow the game down. Then comes Overpenetration. There's a hard cap on the damage a vehicle can take from a single, heavy kinetic penetrator, and it's based on the vehicle's Body and Deflection. A vehicle uses the total rolled damage for special effects, but cannot take more wounds than Body+Deflection+Pen Dice Result from a single non-explosive shot. This is even more confusing because it counts the Pen damage (as well as the d20) as the Penetration result; so if your light aircraft is smacked by something with a massive 69+25 damage, and you only have 30 Body+Deflection, you'd essentially take 30+25+d20 on a penetrating hit and 30+d20 on a glance. This is, again, realistic; this is a real problem for heavy, penetrating rounds and light vehicles. It's also an attempt to ensure that the LH 60-1 Kinetic Penetrater cannon is not the best gun for every situation ever. But it's more math and more complexity in an already complicated system, considering you find the full total to check for hit location and THEN reduce for Blowthrough. One interesting thing about the vehicles is The Bun and the EDF never had a WWI or a WWII. There are MBTs, but they're built almost entirely by colonial militias who aren't expecting orbital/air strike and don't need to move the drat things from planet to planet. Vehicles tend to be light because they need to be air-liftable, and there's much more focus on infantry fighting vehicles and lightweight armored recon tanks than big, heavy gun-carriages. The simple fact is, if the orbital/air situation isn't contested and you clump a bunch of vehicles up in one place, you're going to eat an unmanned hyper-accelerator drone that hits with the force of a tactical nuke. Vehicles in Albedo are designed for dispersion and covering ground quickly, not for huge tank fights, as air and space power has made the latter obsolete before it was even tried. Incidentally, have I mentioned the original author of the comics worked for the air force and the original protagonist was an Aerodyne pilot? I think I did. To be fair, though, this is actually pretty much the direction things are going, with a focus on lighter vehicles that carry infantry as opposed to big MBTs post WWII. Overall, the vehicle rules are doable, and if you can handle the base system you can handle them, but I wish they were a bit faster to resolve and a little more elegant, and didn't introduce so many completely new concepts like Dice Shifts.
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Jan 21, 2015 21:42
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Kurieg posted:So it's like shadowrun except rather than being able to organially grow from "someone who browses the internet" to "Zero Cool" you need both a special rig and special training to do so? Pretty much. You need a deck and the specific skill to really be a Shadowrun-style netrunner. Doresh posted:And this whole situation gotta mess with German public opinion. We don't have much love for our military, though having to deal with daily attacks of demons and cyborgs would probably change that a little. Then Tharkold drops a loving bridge on the city about two years in and just makes everything worse.
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Jan 21, 2015 21:44
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Kai Tave posted:I think a certain degree of poeticism is fine and even better at conveying intent than something dry and utilitarian. Spirit of the Century, one of the first not-completely-obscure Fate games actually discussed this, mentioning that "Strong," for example, is a perfectly functional aspect but does little to inspire the imagination on either end of the GM screen, while "Bull In a China Shop," though more florid, speaks more to the character and how they're strong (reckless, destructive, clumsy) and provides a better springboard for creative invocations and compels.
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Jan 21, 2015 22:41
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Man, that post is proving to be my enduring F&F legacy.
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Jan 21, 2015 23:26
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Doresh posted:(Hint: The secret is hidden in her name ...Cherry Tapping?
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Jan 22, 2015 16:50
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If Thrash is supposed to be modelled on 90s fighting games, I'm thinking it's more about exploiting the hell out of standing Jab.
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Jan 22, 2015 18:54
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Tapperson TAP Turn Around Punch
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Jan 22, 2015 18:58
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The other alternative for nineties fighting games: "Constant squatting low kicks"
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Jan 22, 2015 19:43
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or if it's the MK game for the 64 'throw EVERYONE then get your rear end kicked by Montaro because he can't be tossed' (I was fairly young and not good at fighting games)
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Jan 22, 2015 20:25
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Evil Mastermind posted:Big time. Germany went from reunification to being the #1 defense against the Cyberpapacy. It becomes a significant economic power (since half of Europe is out of the picture) and a staging ground for Storm Knight operations. The economic and staging ground parts are rather accurate predictions, if you replace the cyborgs with terrorists and remove the whole conflict the the Middle East o_O Crasical posted:...Cherry Tapping? Baofu posted:If Thrash is supposed to be modelled on 90s fighting games, I'm thinking it's more about exploiting the hell out of standing Jab. Well, basically both. I salute you  unseenlibrarian posted:The other alternative for nineties fighting games: "Constant squatting low kicks" Sadly not really. Kicks are a bit Action-Points-intensive, though you could do that with the Slide Kick (the fastest kicks that knocks down). Robindaybird posted:or if it's the MK game for the 64 'throw EVERYONE then get your rear end kicked by Montaro because he can't be tossed' (I was fairly young and not good at fighting games) At this still works in modern fighting games. I just beat KoF13's final boss that way yesterday. That's what you get for spamming projectiles like a Budokai Tenkaichi character. Thrash: Anime and Fighting Game Martial Arts RPG  Chapter 5: Maneuvers quote:"You'll have to defeat my Dragon Punch to stand a chance!" This chapter starts of by saying that "maneuvers" encompass anything used to hurt your opponent. Apart from the occasional skill, maneuvers are in fact the only actions you can do in combat. In order to get a maneuver, you have to purchase it with CPs, with the maneuver's cost modified by your styles and other factors, as well as the various modifiers you can slap on it for customization purposes. You can then add in some visual effects to the move and give it a unique name, similar to designing a power in most super hero / universal RPGs. There's also a paragraph on naming your maneuvers, with the most common choices being of course something in English or Japanese, with the latter mentioning how Japanese special moves tend to sound a bit weird in English (Hadoken = Wave Motion Punch). There's also a very handy Japanese-to-English chart with which you can make your own (more or less grammatically correct) Japanese maneuver names! Modifiers These are the various benefits and drawbacks you can add to your maneuver to tinker it as much as you want. They generally modify basic stuff like damage and the Action Points cost. Some positive modifiers are not entirely drawback-free, as some of them do things like increase the AP cost or increase the Chi cost (in most cases adding a Chi cost to an originally normal maneuver). Some modifiers come with Prerequisites, which range from laughably low to pretty hefty. Once you own a maneuver, you can buy others based on the same vanilla maneuver at a reduced price. You just have to pay 2 CP before any modifiers, or 1 CP if that's the maneuver's base cost. You can also create maneuvers based on your basic maneuver, in which case you just pay the price for the modifiers. The list is as follows (CP cost modifier in paranthesis):
Air Charge (+2): The move can be used in mid-air by creating a temporary energy platform (think Dante's double jump from Devil May Cry). Not entirely sure if this feature is worth +4 Chi cost. Chi Charge (+6): Gives your maneuver a chi boost for -3 AP cost, +2 damage and an absurd +4 to your Accuracy. Does however add a +4 Chi cost. Dashing Move (+5): Perform the maneuver while running. -3 AP cost and a Move of 6 (or +3 if that would be higher). Very handy for a noticable reach and speed improvement. Has an odd prerequisite of Agility 5. Why would you ever want less than that? Enraged Use (-2): The maneuver can only be used while your Rage Threshold is reached (but doesn't consume it like a super). If you have lots of levels in the Calm advantage, you can easily create a maneuver you will never be able to use with this. Extended Duration (+2): Can maintain a maneuver through multiple rounds, normally applied to Focus manuvers. Think of a continuous energy beam or something, or some kind of status effect. Not entirely sure if damage-dealing maneuvers need to hit every turn or are considered to always hit after the first. Extended Range (+1): Doubles the range of projectile attacks, which sounds like a very good deal. Extra Force (+1): +2 and causes Knockdown (essentially forcing the opponent to stay defensive for the rest of the turn). Could be pretty cheesy, but the +1 Chi cost at least means you'll eventually run out of uses. Flash Strike (+6): You attack with blinding speed. +1 Accuracy, and the AP cost is halved (which raises unanswered question or whether you apply this before or after adding other AP modifiers). Has the absurd prerequisite of Agility 10 and Focus 8, blocking this modifier from a lot of character concepts. Grabbing Maneuver (+1): You grab your opponent first before attacking, making it a bit harder to defend against. Increased Chi Cost (-1 per +2 Chi cost)[/u]: Exactly what it says. Increased Speed (+3): -3 AP cost. You'll love this one. Lunging Strike (+3): +1 Move, +2 Damage, +3 AP cost. Doesn't really sound too sexy, though it does add Move to maneuvers that originally didn't have any. Multiple Strike (+5/+6): This turns your normal maneuver into a multi-hit maneuver, with each hit costing 1/3 of the original AP. As the damage is always 1d4 per hit regardless of what the original maneuver did, this is only really useful for maneuvers that aren't too slow to begin with, but aren't too fast either (where it would probably be better to just spam the normal move). Move is determined by which version of the modifier you get (either None or 1 per 3 hits), essentially only leaving the maneuver's Accuracy, CP and Chi cost. Weird. Power Boosting (+2): A bit like one of these EX moves that every fighting game seems to have nowadays. With each use of the maneuver, you can decide to increase the damage by spending Chi. Spending lots of Chi however increases the AP cost. Power Strike (+2): Adds an elemental visual effect to your maneuver (hey, I thought that was just descriptive!). +3 Damage, +1 AP, +2 Chi. Preparation Time (-1/-2/-3): You need to spend additional time to turn the maneuver on. The -1 points version is 10 APs, whereas the -3 version forces you to do nothing for 2 turns. So not worth it. Prepared Strike (+1/+2+/3): You basically aim your maneuver, gaining +1 Accuracy and Damage for every turn you waited. I don't think this is very useful. You could've probably already hit the opponent multiple times during that time. Reduced Chi Cost (+2 per -1 Chi cost): Reduces the Chi cost, but can't bring it to 0. Reduced Force (-2): -3 damage. Can probably be used for cheesy purposes if you abuse the "Every hit always deals 1 damage minimum" rule, though there are easier ways. Reduced Speed (-2): +3 AP. Rather hefty for fast maneuvers. Risting Strike (+3): Makes the move an Aerial maneuver, and allows you to counter other Aerial maneuvers (you basically defend by attacking, with the winner hitting). Also +3 Damage. Stunning Strike (+1): +3 Damage, but the whole maneuver only deals stun damage (which is tracked separately and causes a KO if your combined normal and stun damage would surpass your Health). Combo Maneuvers Who doesn't like pulling off combos in fighting games? If you do, here are three ways to represent them in Thrash: Combo Maneuver: A predefined combo you have to buy with CP (the cost being the number of maneuvers -1) that is treated like a single maneuver in its own right, which does allow you to apply modifiers to the combo as a whole, though the book never goes into detail how this affects the individual maneuvers in the combo. Does something like Power Strike affect every single one? Just the first? Or the last?  Anyways, the main reason to buy such a combo is to reduce the AP cost (which is 80% of the total of all maneuver involved) and to make it harder for the opponent to defend. If the first maneuver hits, he suffers a -5 penalty on all attempts to defend against the rest. Has a limit to it in that the maneuvers inside it can't surpass [number of maneuvers x 7] in total AP. Spontaneous Combo: This is a combo you just pull off on the fly, including up to your Agility in maneuvers. You don't get the AP cost reduction of a Combo Maneuver, but you do get the nice -5 defense penalty. The drawback of this whole deal is that you have to declare all the maneuvers in advance, though you can abort if the first strike is a miss (though that costs AP, too). Simultaneous Combo Maneuvers: You pull of 2 to 3 maneuvers at once. You take the highest AP cost and damage, increase the first based on the numbeer of maneuvers and add your usual damage bonuses (aka Strength) from the other maneuvers. You can probably pull of something silly with low AP maneuvers, but this won't be necessary to break the system. Team Attacks Just some rules about how to cross the Chi streams and how you can make a combo consisting of maneuvers from multiple characters. Maneuver Descriptions Now onto the real meat of the chapter! As already seen above, all maneuver cost AP to perform, and may or may not also eat up Chi. They have Accuracy which is added to your combat roll, and deal Damage (usually 1dx + whatever, which is further modified by your Damage Bonus and other modifiers). Maneuvers also have Move, which determines how many hexes you can go while using the maneuver (so I guess you can make hit-and-run tactics?). If your opponent is still out of reach, you can combine the maneuver with a movement-related maneuver like the aptly-named Movemnt. There are however some limitations in place: You can't move farther than your Agility in a turn, and maneuvers that have their Move written out (like "One" or "None") give you just that and nothing more. Basic Maneuvers These are maneuvers that everyone knows from the start. You get your typical setup of Light/Heavy Punch/Kick (used by pretty much everyone except Capcom and whoever's responsible for developing Skullgirl this week). This might just be a good opportunity to showcase the typical maneuver formatting in the book:  Looking at Heavy Punch, you might be wondering why having worse Accuracy, Move and taking more than 3 times as much time compared to Light Punch is worth an average of +1 damage. Let's just say that the book kinda underestimates the usefulness of low AP maneuvers. You can also Grab, which doesn't deal damage on its own, but is rather used to start a combo, as grapples are a bit harder to defend against (we'll get to that in a moment). For movement, you have Dash (aka running around) and Movement, which is less of an independent maneuver and more of a spontaneous modifier (+1 AP per +1 Move). Defending also requires the usage of a maneuver. Everyone starts out with Dodge (avoids an attack entirely) and Parry (reduces the damage by the result of your parry roll, with a minimum of 1 damage). Basic Weapon Maneuvers These are basic maneuvers you can only use with a weapon. You have your typical weapon fighting game setup of Light/Medium/Heavy Strike, with a defensive maneuver called Block. I really think Parry and Block should swap their names. Makes more sense IMO. Strangely, the Strike maneuvers don't have a damage dice, but instead just -3/+0/+2. We'll get to that when weapons are actually covered. Now onto the maneuvers you can actually buy! I'll just give you a highlight reel, seeing how this post is already pretty long without commenting on every variation of "kick stuff". Athletics These all involve jumping around and/or doing crazy acrobatics tricks. They are easily the maneuvers with the highest Move, whichs requires high Agility to really take advantage of.
Block Basically give you different versions of Parry (which really should've been called "Block") with added utility, like being able to Parry projectiles and weapons (which Parry already can do, though the result of the parry roll is halved). Most of these are a bit pointless. If you have high Agility and get some Increased Speed onto your Dodge, you can probably ignore most of these maneuvers altogether. Blocks generally have high Accuracy, but you will always take at least 1 point of damage.
Evasion Only 3 maneuvers here, all about avoiding stuff.
Focus The crazy supernatural stuff. Pretty much anything here costs Chi, so don't rely too much on it.
Grappling Grappling maneuvers are a bit special in that blocks do nothing here. You have to perform a special action that costs 2 APs and has +0 Accuracy (much lower than your typical block). Apart from that, there isn't really anything special here. Just a bunch of maneuvers with high AP and low Move, as well as two defensive maneuvers (one to counter throws, one to get out of a sustained hold). Kick Hurting foes with your legs! Also nothing too notable here. Kicks are generally slower and less accurate than punches. Multi-Kick: Chun-Li's signature move. A bit like the Multiple Strike modifier, but you don't add your Strength to any of the kicks. This makes this maneuver very, very pointless, as you could just make a combo of normal kicks. Punch Now here are some interesting things:
Weapons Unlike the basic weapon maneuvers, these actually have damage dice. It's like you totally suck at using weapons unless you get yourself a maneuver.
Super Attacks The big ones, only usable if you hulk out.
Yeah, apart from Chi Star, Super Attack Combo and especially Rage Burn, this is quite a mixed bag of super moves to be honest. You'd think Mega-Attack would have something to reflect the invincibility frames and large hitboxes you tend to get in fighting games. Sooo, now on to finalizing your example character! Here Comes A New Challenger - Again! When we last left our Scottish heroine, we had 28 CPs left to spend on maneuvers, as well as the 7 CPs we get from the Generic Style, which we'll spend first. I'm not sure if you can spend these 7 CPs only on vanilla maneuvers, but every other style is doing just that. I'll stick with that to be on the safe side. We'll spend the 7 CPs on Head Butt (Scots are tough), Knuckle Fist (just to have a little maneuver variation example) and Uppercut (a Knockdown maneuver for 5 APs sounds nice). We also note down the Iron Fist maneuver we got for free as part of the Discipline of the same name. Before we go into modifying stuff, we'll buy a couple vanilla maneuvers, namely Jump (because everyone has it), as well as Kippup (because ignoring Knockdown sounds awesome) and Circular Parry (as it's nice to have). These thre cost us 7 CP, leaving us with 21 CPs. For Sherry's bread-and-butter move, I have devised the Quickening Knuckle, a running Knuckle Fist to the face. We take the Knuckle Fist manuver we already know (so we pay 2 CP instead of the normal 3 CP for that maneuver) and add the Dashing Move modifier (which costs +5 CP) for a total of 7 CP. This changes the move like this: Quickening Knuckle Accuracy: +2 Action Points: 2 Chi Cost: None Damage: 2d4 Move: 6 Note that Sherry's Area Specialisation (Punch) changes this further to Accuracy +3 and AP 1. This is also true for using the maneuver inside a combo (combos specifically mention that each hit is handled individually, and you can make combos using maneuvers from all kinds of categories). With an Agility of 10, we can create a Spontaneous Combo of 10 Quickening Knuckles, each dealing 2d4 + 6 (our Damage Bonus) + 1 (from Iron Fist), which is very hard to avoid - especially if we pull this off after say using Displacement (for a total of Accuracy +6). Suffice to say this is ridiculously fast, seeing how most maneuvers are at around 5 to 8 AP. Damage ain't to shabby either as even the hardest-hitting maneuvers only have like 1d10 + bonuses. The only maneuver with a noticably higher base damage is the Chi Star with 1d10+12. Speaking of Displacement, that's exactly what we're going to buy next, costing 3 CP. For an additional +3 CP, we add Increased Speed to it, bringing the AP cost down from 4 to 1, allowing us to spam this all day long. We call this creation the Lightning Step. The remaining 8 CP all go into Sherry's only super move: Gaelic Rage. It's the already amazing Rage Burn (4 CP) with 2 levels of the Decreased Chi Cost modifier (+ 4 CP), reducing the Chi cost from 10 to 8. Not terribly useful right now as Sherry has only 13 Chi and nothing else to spend it on (so she can only pull this move off once per fight either way), but it will surely come in handy once we boost her Chi. With this long chapter over, we'll finally learn the actual rules in the next chapter! Then we will find out whether all this dry theory is as gloriously cheesy and broken as planned! (I'll probably pick one of the generic NPCs at the end of the book for a test fight. I could look for a writeup of an actual fighting game character, but those tend to be a bit too experienced, aka they have very high style levels. Maybe I'll do both to see how broken Sherry is). Doresh fucked around with this message at 18:26 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 22, 2015 22:49
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 Vanishing Point is a pretty darn good game and we're glad to have found it. Whether or not it's a total ripoff of Neverwhere is a different discussion. It's insane steampunk weirdos fighting and getting into goofy victorian intrigue on Planet Brain.
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Jan 23, 2015 07:40
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I'm for some reason very tickled by how brain spiders get a strong reaction from you guys. Thanks again for the nifty podcast.
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Jan 23, 2015 10:00
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It's time for some more Existentialist Furry Space NATO After Vehicles comes a hell of a lot of rules that are honestly too complicated to use. Lots of extensive rules for determining if you can spot a target, with what sense, in what direction, how to work out how many NPCs get hit off-screen by an NPC artillery barrage, and some other stuff that is honestly starting to show one of the big weaknesses of Structural Integrity as an add-on. It gets *too* focused on trying to be realistic and model the scale of a large military engagement, which risks losing sight of what the main book stressed, which is that despite the enormous scale things need to stay focused on the PCs. Not only that, but again, this game is already pretty complex! Adding in an extra step of 'I need to spot my target before I can fire' makes hitting or even locating enemies much less likely, and vice-versa, which could bog down combats and slow things down further. There's also rules for homing weapons, which can trade in some of their Explosive Pen Dice for a flat bonus to their highest to-hit die. Next we get the much more welcome Species Design rules. These confirm what a look at the species in the original book would lead one to suspect: There's an actual, specific formula for how many skillpoints, how many stat points, and what gifts Species get. This is why low Body species like Mice tend to have some awesome skill bonuses; it makes up for them being ridiculously easy to kill. Species are rated by size (giving base stats and skill mark numbers), diet (determining how good they are at melee vs. stealth), what sort of environment they prefer, and what other traits (like being pack animals, being ornery, etc). They also include a pretty helpful example of building a batshit crazy wolverine man as demonstration, showing it does, in fact, produce the same sort of results as the listed species from the main book. This is a pretty great thing to put in, both to assure readers the original species were balanced against something, and to allow people to make whatever the hell they want. You want to be a komodo dragon? gently caress it, go with it. You want to have a shell-shocked, tiny least-weasel scampering around breaking bunny necks and soliloquizing about the horrors of war? Go for it. They also finally introduce the biggest limit on using heavy weaponry: Weight. Your gear weighs a lot. Your armor weighs kg equal to your Body stat, and your normal unencumbered weight is 2xBody. A soldier can carry a lot more than that, but it'll slow them down. Taking the Gift of Strong or Very Strong increases the weight cap to Bdx3 or Bdx4, which can lead to a Bear (or rhino, or other particularly big species) being able to lug a crew-served weapon in full body armor because he's a goddamn bear, which is awesome. Carrying more weight slows you down in combat, penalizing the Run skill checks (or Rotes) that you use to move quickly in battle. All the weight also wears you out faster; if you're over encumbered you reduce the number of rounds you can run without needing rest significantly. I normally hate encumbrance rules in RPGs, but one of the big axioms of military operations is that weight is a constant enemy. The weight limit is generous enough that the average soldier can wear their body armor and carry a carbine pretty much no matter what; it just makes it so you need multiple characters to lug a crew served weapon, which isn't as big a deal when you have 4 squaddies with you. Mostly, it serves to limit the use of heavy weapons and enormous anti-vehicle rifles, since it takes a hell of a lot of strength to carry one on your own. Next we come to a ton of fiddly rules about building and repairing stuff. Again, the game's getting sort of overly simulationist here. It's understandable that you'd want some rough rules for 'Can I get the turret working before ILR reinforcements arrive', but it goes into a ton of charts and complex rules and a lot more fluff on the vehicles. They explain how vehicles really don't bother with anti-vehicle-weapon armor because there's no way to physically armor them enough to stop modern anti-tank weapons, and so the focus is on finding a target first and putting a big round in them first. Vehicle armor is designed mostly to protect against explosives and small arms, to provide support to infantry, but most vehicles are vulnerable to GPMGs or HMGs, let alone dedicated anti-tank weaponry. The rules also serve to let you design variant vehicles, but honestly, there are vehicles enough for almost every situation in the vehicle section, and once you have one MG armed APC, you've got them all. All of these are optional rules, mind, but again, this is verging on adding too much complexity to the game. Next up: The guns in the main book were kind of boring. Let's bring in the hypervelocity dart APCR rounds and the flechette grenade MGs!
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Jan 23, 2015 10:04
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theironjef posted:Vanishing Point is a pretty darn good game and we're glad to have found it. Whether or not it's a total ripoff of Neverwhere is a different discussion. It's insane steampunk weirdos fighting and getting into goofy victorian intrigue on Planet Brain. Holy poo poo I thought I was the only one to have a copy of Vanishing Point.
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Jan 23, 2015 11:07
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Plague of Hats posted:I'm for some reason very tickled by how brain spiders get a strong reaction from you guys. Thanks again for the nifty podcast. We're just thrilled to keep doing it! DigitalRaven posted:Holy poo poo I thought I was the only one to have a copy of Vanishing Point. I guess a few more people have been exposed to the twisted imaginings of Ashok Desai. Seriously the cover suggests that this will be the worst book ever.
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Jan 23, 2015 16:34
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theironjef posted:
I!' not even through your rundown of races yet, but I have to ask. Who the gently caress let tumblr write an RPG?!
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Jan 23, 2015 17:18
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ZorajitZorajit posted:I!' not even through your rundown of races yet, but I have to ask. Who the gently caress let tumblr write an RPG?! Heh, the fact that they are all inspired by various mental disorders gave me the deep skeeves when I heard about it. I think it only really becomes a problem with a few of the races. The Faceless are uber-boring and wouldn't be any fun to play, and the Gaunts and Marquis' Children are way too hammy. What is there, it's Loss of Identity, DID, Schizophrenia, Depression, Hyperactivity, Sadism, Masochism, Homicidal Mania, Megalomania, OCD, two kinds of "just visiting" humans, and then whatever the heck robots and spiders are supposed to represent. As we say in there, at least they only mention autism, and even then only in the context of "probably don't use this one." Personally, I'm amazed that the game doesn't have a race of pyromaniacs. It's like inexplicable powers 101 to give someone fire stuff, and the mental disorder has a name and everything.
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Jan 23, 2015 17:46
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theironjef posted:whatever the heck robots and spiders are supposed to represent. Robots are supposed to be sociopaths, aren't they? They're basically lacking in empathy and emotion, being cold and calculating and, well, robotic. The spiders are, I don't know. The only thing I can think of is some disorder that involves poor impulse control, as if someone else were controlling you against your will. But that would mean your character is the meatpuppet and not the spider family. E: I'm missing an NPD race, me. Would make a decent villain, if only because NPD sufferers are almost by definition egocentric and megalomaniacal. E2: Wait, is that what the Victorians are? Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 19:07 on Jan 23, 2015 |
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Jan 23, 2015 19:02
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Doresh posted:
Congratulations, you've made Scottish Yun(minus divekicks)! Man, this system seems to stray further and further from 'balanced and fair' the longer it goes on.
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Jan 23, 2015 19:46
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:Robots are supposed to be sociopaths, aren't they? They're basically lacking in empathy and emotion, being cold and calculating and, well, robotic. The spiders are, I don't know. The only thing I can think of is some disorder that involves poor impulse control, as if someone else were controlling you against your will. But that would mean your character is the meatpuppet and not the spider family. Sociopaths! Exactly, I knew I was forgetting something with the robots. Victorians are supposed to be megalomaniacs, but narcissism seems like it would also fit them just fine. Also it doesn't fit the theme, but I like to think the spiders are Morgellon's Disease, or Delusional Parisitosis, except not delusional and from the POV of the parasite. I think what they're actually supposed to represent is pervasive paranoia? Or maybe spiders are just cool.
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Jan 23, 2015 20:09
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So does Albedo not have any in-game pictures? I was wondering this considering that Night10194's posts are pretty much text-only.
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Jan 23, 2015 20:36
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Libertad! posted:So does Albedo not have any in-game pictures? I was wondering this considering that Night10194's posts are pretty much text-only. It does, but it's an apparently out of print book I can't easily pull the art off. I'll try to find some of the stuff on GiS some time.
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Jan 23, 2015 20:39
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theironjef posted:Sociopaths! Exactly, I knew I was forgetting something with the robots. You could make a cases for spiders just representing phobias/irrational fears in general, considering how many people are batshit terrified of them.
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Jan 23, 2015 22:05
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theironjef posted:
It's an old argument, but steampunk is one of those things I really want to like, because I like a lot of the ideas and poo poo in it, but it sucks complete balls because most of the time it ain't a genre it's a (poo poo) fashion, and it might be steam but it sure as hell ain't punk,. If you have a bunch of people flouncing around as posh london gentlemen you're missing the point, it'd be like playing a cyberpunk game where you are all in charge of OCP and basically run the world, running around having a bunch of circuit-boards and poo poo stuck to your suit.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:05
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Prison Warden posted:it'd be like playing a cyberpunk game where you are all in charge of OCP and basically run the world, running around having a bunch of circuit-boards and poo poo stuck to your suit. I'm imagining the young dissolute son of the old CEO taking over a company and declaring that the new company dress code, so you see all the stodgy old execs wearing these ridiculous outfits and being all  about it.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:18
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Prison Warden posted:It's an old argument, but steampunk is one of those things I really want to like, because I like a lot of the ideas and poo poo in it, but it sucks complete balls because most of the time it ain't a genre it's a (poo poo) fashion, and it might be steam but it sure as hell ain't punk,. If you have a bunch of people flouncing around as posh london gentlemen you're missing the point, it'd be like playing a cyberpunk game where you are all in charge of OCP and basically run the world, running around having a bunch of circuit-boards and poo poo stuck to your suit. The first steampunk stuff was legit punk, like Diamond Age and Difference Engine, because they were both about people rebelling against Victorian-style society via underground technological advances. But these are cosplay people, and it's all so easily supplanted by turning the whole thing into Goth + Brown + Gears. theironjef fucked around with this message at 00:23 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 00:18
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My favorite is White Wolf's "Gothic-Punk" thing that they hung Vampire on. Unless you're playing a Sabbat game or a Brujah, you probably *are* the man that punks are supposed to be rebelling against. And in Werewolf's early editions "Gothic Punk" meant "Like Vampire except you're now an eco terrorist too."
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Jan 24, 2015 00:46
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Kurieg posted:My favorite is White Wolf's "Gothic-Punk" thing that they hung Vampire on. Unless you're playing a Sabbat game or a Brujah, you probably *are* the man that punks are supposed to be rebelling against. White Wolf was weird like that. There's a bit of that popping up across all the old lines. Like its trying hard to be dark and edgy, but the guys writing it have been handed the word "Gothic-Punk" and no one knows what the hell it means.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:52
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It was particularly uncomfortable when I was doing rage across Australia because they used rape as a fallback for "edgy". Like a 2 year old who learned a bad word and keeps saying it because of the hilarious faces mommy and daddy make when they say it in public.
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Jan 24, 2015 00:59
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Kurieg posted:Like a 2 year old who learned a bad word and keeps saying it because of the hilarious faces mommy and daddy make when they say it in public. This describes the entire body of WW's work.
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Jan 24, 2015 01:06
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Night10194 posted:This describes the entire body of WW's work. Well, the old stuff, sure. nWoD, especially in its most recent stuff, is shockingly good. (Mostly.)
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Jan 24, 2015 01:13
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Mors Rattus posted:Well, the old stuff, sure. nWoD is what happened when oWoD writers grew up, had kids, got mortgages, and pulled their heads out of their collective asses. 20th is those people looking back on what they did and feeling the need to fix it.
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Jan 24, 2015 01:50
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Night10194 posted:This describes the entire body of WW's work under Rein*Hagen Mark Rein*Hagen is an entirely style over substance developer. And it shows in their earlier books. Rage Across Australia might as well be called Guilt: The Whitening. and Rage Across Russia turns every single major cultural shift in Russia for the past 150 years into either a werewolf or vampire plot, to the point where the population of Russia is just a backdrop to the country-wide Xanatos plot between the Silver Fangs, Brujah, Ventrue, and Bone Gnawers. MR*H drat near drove the company into the ground before he left, and they lost a few of the good along with the bad when they had the mass firing in 96. Things got much better towards the early 2000s but that's also around the time they realized that they had to reboot the whole thing to shake the lingering bits of poo poo off their boots.
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Jan 24, 2015 02:03
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Kurieg posted:Mark Rein*Hagen is an entirely style over substance developer. Could you go into this guy a bit more? It'd be nice to have a face to hang on exactly what I loathed about WW when I was growing up and getting into RPGs.
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Jan 24, 2015 02:26
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theironjef posted:The first steampunk stuff was legit punk, like Diamond Age and Difference Engine, because they were both about people rebelling against Victorian-style society via underground technological advances. But these are cosplay people, and it's all so easily supplanted by turning the whole thing into Goth + Brown + Gears. Goth + Brown drives me nuts! Look at Victorian Houses, Look at fashion plates! They are not brown. They're colorful, they're gaudy, the Victorians loved and abused color. The only ones gaudier then they were the Rococo-period folks. Also I cry at how many neat old clocks were destroyed to have their gears hot glued onto a cheap-o top hat without rhyme or reason. And there is also a shocking amount of imperialism apologism or just ignorance of how lovely the period was if you weren't an aristocrat. The rigidity of what is proper 'steam punk fashion' and the ignorance pretty much drove me out of the local scene.
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Jan 24, 2015 02:27
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Night10194 posted:Could you go into this guy a bit more? It'd be nice to have a face to hang on exactly what I loathed about WW when I was growing up and getting into RPGs. Seconded. I want to say a lot of old Werewolf was his doing- he was a lapsed Catholic and really wanted to make a world where your god and its blessings were readily apparent.
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Jan 24, 2015 02:29
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As one of my old gaming friends was at St. Olaf's the same time as Mark I have met the guy. Poseur does not begin to describe him ( he put the dot in his name right after he graduated for example)
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Jan 24, 2015 02:46
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Really, you should be able to infer everything from the fact that he changed his name to Rein[large black dot]Hagen.
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Jan 24, 2015 02:48
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Night10194 posted:Could you go into this guy a bit more? It'd be nice to have a face to hang on exactly what I loathed about WW when I was growing up and getting into RPGs. Well. Mors Rattus posted:Really, you should be able to infer everything from the fact that he changed his name to Rein[large black dot]Hagen. If you need something else.     He also gets into slap fights with Rich Thomas from time to time because Rich won't let Vampire die, which takes up most of the market for his I Am Zombie game, which is literally Vampire: The Masquerade except instead of a charater sheet you have a deck of cards. No I don't have any idea how that works.
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Jan 24, 2015 03:11
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That's some pretty mild stuff. I'm phone posting, but from memory I can say he's shitted up his own reddit AMA getting into a dumb fight with an unfailingly polite dude who criticized his years late Kickstarter, he gets really self righteous with his "sure you have X problem, but I've visited or lived in non-American hellholes so shut up", and his triumphant return to RPGs seems to have a constantly shifting target for what the gently caress it's actually supposed to be which seems pretty lovely to do to your KS backers.
That Old Tree fucked around with this message at 03:29 on Jan 24, 2015 |
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Jan 24, 2015 03:21
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