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PurpleXVI posted:Thank you for suffering for our sins, Kurieg. You've done God's work. Doresh posted:Wat Ever heard of Prima Nocte? Basically he has the right to gently caress any girl he wants and their husbands can't do anything about it.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:16
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Mors Rattus posted:Copperhead there is literally the only interesting character in the book. Bluesman snake guy! Sure. Why not. I played an oMage character with that concept (I hadn't seen Changing Breeds). He used Life (and his guitar) to lead an army of snakes and ended the campaign by turning into a giant snake and simultaneously biting and being bitten by his PC rival, who turned into an evil octopus or something. The last group of PCs sound like a Tom Robbins novel... I wouldn't mind the book of it was more weird one-offs like them, Drunk Sewer Gator, bug swarm, and possum thing. You could have the Tom Robbins Crew encountering them, maybe fighting/getting seduced by a satyr cult. Rape-Revenge Movie Faun could possibly be cool if she wasn't creepy. Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 21:24 on Jan 3, 2016 |
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Jan 3, 2016 21:19
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Kurieg posted:Ever heard of Prima Nocte? Basically he has the right to gently caress any girl he wants and their husbands can't do anything about it. I know, but in modern day? With a dude who can turn into a horse? The only way to keep this a secret is if this is some isolated hillbilly community where everyone's cool about this one bloke shanking every lady 
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Jan 3, 2016 21:22
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Doresh posted:I know, but in modern day? With a dude who can turn into a horse? Well, see, he's Spanish, Spain still has peasant villages and is basically medieval, right? ...right? ...right?
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Jan 3, 2016 21:24
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Again this is the kind of delusional world that the writers think they have constructed.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:25
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Rand Brittain posted:He did write the majority of Mage 20, though. And it flavoured it with that particular Brucato flavour. So prepare for pages of some guy ranting at you about Abrahamic religions and appropriating trans-people so he can gush about magical hermaphrodites. And don't you dare eat pizza at the RPG table. That's the blackest sin there is to Brucato.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:29
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I'm looking forward to Brucato turning Changeling from 'SCAdians vs Big Pharma' into the 'Wicker Man'.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:32
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I could forgive the ranting with a sad shake of the head, I guess. What really bugs me about M20 is that it's a celebration of my least favorite flavor of Mage—all navel-gazing and none of the philosophical respectability. It also gives the Traditions a thorough greywashing when they really needed a whitewashing, to the point that the Crafts all get together and make their own Traditions with blackjack and hookers because the existing one was so full of itself. I mean, lots of people seem to like it? But it's just not for me.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:37
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Doresh posted:I know, but in modern day? With a dude who can turn into a horse? The only way to keep this a secret is if this is some isolated hillbilly community where everyone's cool about this one bloke shanking every lady Didn't Brucato have some kind of meltdown over a fear that Mage 20th will lead to people accidentally invoking Choronzon or some poo poo? I'm so glad that Wraith 20th appears to just be cursed by ghosts.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:38
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But yeah, I just checked—the C20 Kickstarter lists all the authors, or at least a lot of them, and it doesn't list Brucato.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:38
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Nessus posted:Didn't Brucato have some kind of meltdown over a fear that Mage 20th will lead to people accidentally invoking Choronzon or some poo poo? I'm so glad that Wraith 20th appears to just be cursed by ghosts. Supposedly, and I have not been able to track down actual documentation of this, Brucato refused to give any paradigm details in any of his Mage books because he was afraid players would "call up something they couldn't put down." (I'd be interested to see this confirmed or denied.) I don't know of him saying anything like that recently, though.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:40
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There's a sidebar about playing Nephandi in Mage 20 that implies that, or at least that he thinks the game can work actual magic.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:44
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Kavak posted:There's a sidebar about playing Nephandi in Mage 20 that implies that, or at least that he thinks the game can work actual magic. Did he ever tell that story about this game he ran where this stupid thief Black Leaf got herself killed?
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Jan 3, 2016 21:56
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Kavak posted:There's a sidebar about playing Nephandi in Mage 20 that implies that, or at least that he thinks the game can work actual magic. He legit thinks magic is real. I know at least some of the line devs were happy when he left white-wolf because of the dig they made at his expense in Pentex.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:58
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Kavak posted:There's a sidebar about playing Nephandi in Mage 20 that implies that, or at least that he thinks the game can work actual magic. It would seem that the hazards of playing Mage are "becoming a person who posts about Mage a lot" or, potentially, "becoming John Wick." While these are dire fates, it is clear that either can happen for wholly non-magickal reasons.
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Jan 3, 2016 21:59
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The sad part about those premade characters (aside from Copperhead taking mad snake tokes on his saxophone bong) is that Fawn actually kind of has a Native American analogue. Admittedly, this is in the sense of "I read a Wikipedia article about the Ojibwe Deer Woman and man wouldn't it be hot and empowering for a naked woman covered in dirt to kill people and shapeshift?".
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Jan 3, 2016 22:22
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Kavak posted:There's a sidebar about playing Nephandi in Mage 20 that implies that, or at least that he thinks the game can work actual magic. He doesn't especially worry about the GM, however. The GM can run Nephandi as much as they like.
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Jan 3, 2016 22:53
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Kurieg posted:He legit thinks magic is real. I know at least some of the line devs were happy when he left white-wolf because of the dig they made at his expense in Pentex. I dunno if that's a dealbreaker, since both Grant Morrison and Alan Moore think that and they write awesome stuff. Is he talking about Chaos Magick/PopMagick? 'Cause that's all over oMage - did it come out before or after Invisibles? They're very similar. I love oMage, though. How's the Mystic Hermaphrodite archetype handled in Mage 20? It's something I've found interesting in Doom Patrol and Books of Magic, but I understand how it can be problematic.
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Jan 3, 2016 23:02
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Count Chocula posted:Phil Brucato, Grant Morrison, Alan Moore One of these things is very much not like the others.
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Jan 3, 2016 23:20
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Everything Counts posted:One of these things is very much not like the others. I get SUCH a 90s Vertigo vibe from this writing, though he's terrible at it. Did he ever bring in Plant Elementals to oWoD?
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Jan 4, 2016 01:32
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I'm not sure if there are plant changelings, but the closest thing in Werewolf are some of the stuff from Book of the Wyld and he had less than no part in that.
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Jan 4, 2016 01:41
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Whenever Inklesspen catches up to archiving this thread would be a good cue to start anew. I can archive multiple threads simultaneously. Now that Kurieg has finished Changing Breeds, I say we close this thread for quarantine. (I'm also almost completely caught up.)
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Jan 4, 2016 01:59
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Kurieg posted:I'm not sure if there are plant changelings, but the closest thing in Werewolf are some of the stuff from Book of the Wyld and he had less than no part in that. There's a group of Inanimae, elemental and inanimate object Changelings, called the Kuberas who are usually anchored to a tree. They're kind of dryads but they're not really addressed beyond the book they appear in, like everything else in Changeling. Changeling has a ridiculous amount of ridiculous character types. It's like 3.5 or a Star Wars RPG when it comes to the number of character racial types there have. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 02:34 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 02:09
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I've mentioned it before but there is an entire demarcation of changelings that only exist on the islands of Hawaii.
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Jan 4, 2016 02:34
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Just to give an idea of how deep this rabbit hole goes if the write up for Changeling the Dreaming ever gets this far. http://wod.ottershome.net/types/chankith.php The ones with book page listings are official ones. The Hsien though aren't really changelings or fae even, they're weird Japanese spirit creatures that gain their power units from people praying at shrines.They had no connection to the dreaming and had no idea what a changeling was. I would have liked to been a fly on the wall for that meeting where the Changeling person had to pitch something for Year of the Lotus and had nothing. Most the other game lines were essentially ravaged by globalization but Changeling just about had a special regional kith, fae, or whatever they could slap a Changeling the Dreaming logo on to get some rabid fan to buy.
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Jan 4, 2016 04:43
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 Even computer-ghost Jedis are assholes Last time, we unboxed the beginner game and looked at the "Read This First" flyer. It had a one-paragraph "What is Roleplaying" section, an example of play, and a nice opening scroll for the players to look at. The Adventure Book opens with the same "What is Roleplaying" section, along with the obligatory "pick one schmuck to be the GM"; all non-GMs are abjured not to read past that section, while the GM is instructed to just dive in; the Adventure Book is designed to teach everyone the rules. As a consequence, it is railroady as all get out. The next page shows everything in the box (except the catalog of fine FFG merchandise) and also demonstrates three sidebar styles. Red sidebars contain text to be read aloud to the players; beige sidebars contain summaries of the mechanic being taught, and brown sidebars contain lore, stat blocks, and rules reminders. These sidebars will make up nearly half the book.  quote:The available dice should be placed somewhere within easy reach of all players. The map can also be placed in between all players (with the Valley side showing), so everyone can easily see where the action is taking place. Each hero player should find the appropriate character token from among the available cardboard character tokens and keep it nearby. The hero players might wish to use these to represent their characters on the game map later during fight scenes! It would also be helpful for each player to have a pencil or pen and some scratch paper to take notes. One thing I do like about the adventure book is the way it explicitly spells out some things that seem obvious to you or me, but which a group playing their first game might not think about.  Then the GM is instructed to play the Star Wars opening theme and read aloud the crawl text (provided in a red sidebar) while the players look at the crawl text on the back of the "Read This First" flyer. I like a bit of ceremony as much as the next person, but this seems like it would get old pretty fast. The scenario is set during the Rebellion era; a handful of people have learned about the Force from a scholar named Romund, who has now been captured by a Dark Side user named  Malefax. The PCs have all gotten to this planet to rescue their friend, but somehow climbed up a mountain instead of taking a shuttle ride or something. As a result, they take 2 strain. Strain is the non-lethal damage type; every character has a strain threshold, above which they pass out. Players are instructed to mark down the strain on their character sheets; sure hope they have pencils, or these are going to become hard to read very soon.Encounter 1 begins! Guess what, the climbing isn't over. This provides the game an opportunity to teach us how to perform skill checks, which means I should probably show you a character sheet. The game comes with four pregenerated characters. Each one has a bit of backstory provided.
The website provides two additional character booklets for download.
Tarast's backstory also says he's spent 15 years on the run from the Empire, which is the closest thing we get to an actual date for this scenario; if we assume he went on the run right after Order 66, this puts us four years before the Battle of Yavin. (An alternative reading of his backstory gives 18 years, which pushes the scenario closer to Yavin, but eh.)  The character booklet puts the sheet in the center of a two-page spread, with each section numbered to correspond to explanatory text on the left and right. Where something is too wordy to put there (like skill definitions), it refers you to the reference pages at the back of either the Rulebook or Adventure Book. We also have a handy reference guide to the dice types and the symbols on them (more about this later) and the kinds of actions you can take on your turn. Ok, back to the adventure. quote:You stand at the bottom of a steep stone rise clad in snow and ice. It's not especially tall, but you will need to brave the elements and exert yourself to reach the top. The path continues upward in a tight switchback exposed to the howling winds. To your left, several tall evergreen trees brush against the cliff face, where smaller trees cling to cracks in the rock. A more direct route would be to scramble straight up the rocks and ice to the valley above. In any event, you have to go up if you're going to rescue Romund. What do you do? Going back to town and borrowing a light aircraft is not, unfortunately, one of the options. Whatever the PCs do, they'll need to make a skill check. Heading up the path is a Resilience check. Climbing straight up is Athletics, while "leaping from tree to tree" is a Coordination check. You can also "search for another path to the top" (Survival) or rig makeshift climbing gear (Mechanics). No matter which skill the PCs choose to use, the difficulty is Easy. Now it's time to build a dicepool.  Let's say we're playing as Sarenda, since I already showed you her sheet above. If she climbs the cliff, she'll need to roll Athletics, which means three green Ability dice. However, if she somehow rigs climbing gear out of fallen branches and vines, she'll roll Mechanics, which is two Ability dice and one yellow Proficiency die. The dicepools are already calculated here for us, but if they hadn't been, they're fairly straightforward to figure out. You look at the character's stat (Intellect is the stat for Mechanics), which is 3, and the skill rating, which is 1. You start out with the larger number's worth of green Ability dice, then upgrade the smaller number's worth of them to yellow Proficiency dice. If her skill rating was 2, she would have ended up with one Ability die and two Proficiency dice. Then you add in one purple Difficulty die, roll them, and count up the symbols. There's six possible symbols, three good and three bad. Each one can cancel out one of the other kind. If you don't happen to have FFG's special dice on hand and you don't want to pay $5 for their smartphone app, the full game provides a table to convert regular polyhedral dice into FFG symbols; this table isn't included in the beginner game.  The green Ability dice will generate Success and Advantage symbols; hereinafter Ⓢ and Ⓐ because gently caress if I'm going to embed their silly symbols all over the place. Ⓐ symbols are positive side-effects, and you can get and use them even if you don't have any successes. The yellow Proficiency die can also generate a Triumph Ⓣ, which is basically a critical hit. The purple Difficulty die generates Failure ⓕ and Threat ⓣ symbols, which counter Ⓢ and Ⓐ, while the red Challenge die is the negative equivalent of Proficiency and can generate a Despair ⓓ symbol. Luckily we won't be seeing any of those right now. I just rolled Sarenda's Mechanics check; she got 2 Ⓢ, 3 Ⓐ, and 1 ⓣ. The ⓣ cancels out one of the Ⓐ, leaving her with 2 Ⓐ. Since she got a success, she managed to climb the mountain using her makeshift gear. The Ⓐ symbols can be cashed in for various benefits, but the text only explains one of them right now; every non-canceled Ⓐ can be used to heal 1 strain, while every non-canceled ⓣ makes the character suffer 1 additional strain. Even if we fail our skill checks, we still make it to the top, because this is a railroad, but we're in poorer condition and we'll take a penalty going into the next check, so the GM is instructed to note down who succeeded and who failed. Encounter 2 teaches opposed checks. A Jedi holocron (which is explained in a sidebar) reveals itself to the characters and will either welcome them to the ancient temple (if at least half the players succeeded on their climb check) or be an rear end in a top hat. quote:"The climb seems to have nearly killed you, and the valley may finish the job. You are of no use; turn back. What possessed you to attempt the climb in the first place?" Anyway, now the PCs get to interrogate the Gatekeeper for a bit and then try to convince him to help. This allows the players to learn opposed checks. The basic mechanic is you figure out what the defending character's dicepool would be, flip the dice to their opposites (good dice becoming bad and vice versa), then add them to the active character's dicepool. The Gatekeeper has only a few skills: Cool, Discipline, and Knowledge. The book lists several arguments the PCs might try to convince the Gatekeeper to help them out; they're allowed to try each of them once, unless they roll a ⓓ which would represent running out of time. Each strategy lists the Gatekeeper's dicepool in the "bad dice" format. The players must also add a blue boost die if they succeeded on their climb check, or a black setback die if they failed; these dice have two blank sides and a mixture of Ⓢ and Ⓐ (or ⓕ and ⓣ) on the other four sides. They add these dice only on the first checks they make. For each strategy, only one player can make the roll.
Depending on the tactics the PCs choose, they'll have to add at least one Difficulty die and at least one Challenge die to their pools. They may need to make a couple of tries. If the PCs roll a ⓓ, this means a group of hostile NPCs have approached. Otherwise, if they succeed at one of these rolls, they secure the Gatekeeper's help for the future. Next time: combat rules! inklesspen fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 04:55
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Those loving special dice rules make my head spin, I can't imagine it's any easier for someone who's completely new to RPG's.
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Jan 4, 2016 06:21
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PurpleXVI posted:Those loving special dice rules make my head spin, I can't imagine it's any easier for someone who's completely new to RPG's. Having run Star Wars quite a bit, for a mix of total RPG noobs and veterans, the noobs are much better at devising uses for advantage/triumphs/opposing threats, but veterans are much easier at what is essentially reducing fractions on the table to announce a result.
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Jan 4, 2016 06:28
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Rand Brittain posted:I could forgive the ranting with a sad shake of the head, I guess. What really bugs me about M20 is that it's a celebration of my least favorite flavor of Mage—all navel-gazing and none of the philosophical respectability. It also gives the Traditions a thorough greywashing when they really needed a whitewashing, to the point that the Crafts all get together and make their own Traditions with blackjack and hookers because the existing one was so full of itself. The game and a lot of its adherents claim it's 2e/Revised-agnostic in the sense that it's 2e-centric with notes on how to implement changes from Revised edition, but it really just pays lip service to Revised edition while being entirely 2e in tone. I'm not planning to start a 2e/Revised flamewar here, but I think it's reasonable to claim that when a game has such a divided fanbase, claiming to be impartial while at the same time neglecting Revised is a pretty bad attitude. Among the greater faults Brucato makes in M20 is to completely steamroll the concept of a Paradigm. Several examples will involve characters using magick that is out-of-paradigm to them; the one that most readily comes to mind in the Virtual Adept casting spells with Kung Fu and dropping acid when the entire point of Virtual Adepts is that they believe the universe is a computer they can reprogram. There's also the occasionally hilarious "Focus" each splat is given, which is related to how the cast magick, and for the Virtual Adepts include "androgynous clothing" and "manga-inspired hairstyles". Count Chocula posted:I dunno if that's a dealbreaker, since both Grant Morrison and Alan Moore think that and they write awesome stuff. Is he talking about Chaos Magick/PopMagick? 'Cause that's all over oMage - did it come out before or after Invisibles? They're very similar. I love oMage, though. I re-read the passage I was referring to and it's not actually about the Mystic Hermaphrodite archetype as much as it is about Brucato betraying his biases about trans people. He steps in the salad when talking about Verbena hierarchies: M20 posted:Two leaders (taking priest and priestess roles although both might be male, female, or transgender) govern the larger covens And later he drops this line: M20 posted:And between the old associations of mystic power and the new freedom to transcend gender roles without getting burnt at the stake for it, the idea of gender identity is more fluid – and more magickal – than ever before. Especially in queer, polyamorous, transhumanist, neotribal, and psychedelic cultures, it’s often more unusual to be conventionally “straight” than it is to hold, embrace, and enjoy the hell out of an identity outside the traditional polarities. Quite a lot of trans people - me included - take umbrage at any claim or implication that we're not male-or-female-(circle-one), and several other trans people I've talked with, like me, are offended by the appropriation of trans identities as something "magickal" rather than something mundane and normal. That he writes this betrays an ignorance and/or lack of regard for the disenfranchised minority he tries to score brownie points with by including in his book. (Also the claim that transhumanist circles are more trans than not. :V ) I'd be tempted to write a review of M20 here - and there are some hillarious gems in it, like how picking up 6 Paradox permanently turns you into a ticking timebomb - but it would be a mean-spirited hate-reading, so I'm not sure whether it would be fair to do so...
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Jan 4, 2016 10:30
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Bieeardo posted:I'm looking forward to Brucato turning Changeling from 'SCAdians vs Big Pharma' into the 'Wicker Man'. From what I've heard the new Changeling book is a bit of a doozy but that's based on how some of my friends on Skype were going  over some of the new design choices in it.Although I can say that having DiTerlizzi art is neat and all but I'm not too sure it really fits the tone because to me it just looks like Planescape art instead of something closer to Changeling.
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Jan 4, 2016 12:11
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Letting a Virtual Adept channel Neo from The Matrix makes perfect sense, especially in a game that shared DNA with The Invisibles and other inspirations for that movie. Does Brucato take a Chaos Magick 'whatever works' view? Even without that acid still fits the paradigm, since tons and tons of computer guys like Steve Jobs and the EFF founder took it. VA Acid Trip: http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4utHn-iUvoI quote:Among the greater faults Brucato makes in M20 is to completely steamroll the concept of a Paradigm. Several examples will involve characters using magick that is out-of-paradigm to them; the one that most readily comes to mind in the Virtual Adept casting spells with Kung Fu and dropping acid when the entire point of Virtual Adepts is that they believe the universe is a computer they can reprogram. There's also the occasionally hilarious "Focus" each splat is given, which is related to how the cast magick, and for the Virtual Adepts include "androgynous clothing" and "manga-inspired hairstyles". Count Chocula fucked around with this message at 12:48 on Jan 4, 2016 |
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Jan 4, 2016 12:45
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Count Chocula posted:Letting a Virtual Adept channel Neo from The Matrix makes perfect sense, especially in a game that shared DNA with The Invisibles and other inspirations for that movie. Does Brucato take a Chaos Magick 'whatever works' view? Even without that acid still fits the paradigm, since tons and tons of computer guys like Steve Jobs and the EFF founder took it. My objections are less about people doing magick through Kung Fu and dropping acid than it is "these people who believe that all magick is computer programming do magick through Kung Fu and dropping a acid." Especially when the primary distinguishing feature between the character splats is how they do magick. On the topic of anything goes, anything goes except non-conventional religious belief. Nothing is true, everything is permitted... except genuine religious belief in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
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Jan 4, 2016 13:16
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As someone who thinks RoleMaster is really quite the elegant system (once I wrapped my head around it), I got a real kick out of your Phoenix Command write-up. I had some questions: You mentioned using PCCS for its hyper-realistic depiction of firearms combat, but to not use the character generation rules. How would you do this? I know that RoleMaster, like Sword's Path Glory, was one of those add-on rules supplement things where you were supposed to "convert" your D&D character's stats into its own numerical scale and work from there, but I get the impression that even if you did the same direct assignment of stats to characters (Richard Marcinko should be ~this~ strong and fast), you're still going to run into the issue of your derived stats shifting around with every move you make. You mentioned things like pistols being insufficiently covered by Table 3B, and the M16 not actually being represented on any table despite being a critical weapon. Did you or someone else ever come up with a rectification for this?
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Jan 4, 2016 13:54
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Cooked Auto posted:From what I've heard the new Changeling book is a bit of a doozy but that's based on how some of my friends on Skype were going DiTerlizzi did a fair lot of stuff for the softcover run of Changeling, so I'm not surprised that they'd dig the old colour plates out or hire him on for new stuff. He's done a lot of traditional fairy and fantasy stuff, but the ones with little diagrams and exploded figures in sepia definitely speak more of a naturalist's notebook than changelings pausing for a magickal snapshot.
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Jan 4, 2016 14:26
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LatwPIAT posted:The game and a lot of its adherents claim it's 2e/Revised-agnostic in the sense that it's 2e-centric with notes on how to implement changes from Revised edition, but it really just pays lip service to Revised edition while being entirely 2e in tone. I'm not planning to start a 2e/Revised flamewar here, but I think it's reasonable to claim that when a game has such a divided fanbase, claiming to be impartial while at the same time neglecting Revised is a pretty bad attitude. See, I totally disagree. M20 rolls the metaplot back to Second Edition, but it honesty keeps a lot of the infuriating tone and philosophy that burned people out on Revised. Revised announced that the Ascension War was over, and that coming to violence over your beliefs was dumb anyway--you should seek global Ascension instead! M20 doubles down on this and says that global Ascension is also bad--who are you to tell other people what to believe, even if you aren't using coercion? Seek personal Ascension instead. M20 tells you that it's a mage's job to change the world but it doesn't really approve of any specific way you might change it other than seeking union with your own navel.
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Jan 4, 2016 16:26
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PurpleXVI posted:Those loving special dice rules make my head spin, I can't imagine it's any easier for someone who's completely new to RPG's. The special dice are actually surprisingly simple in practice. There are three matched sets of Stuff is Happening dice. You roll the good ones. The DM rolls the bad ones. I'm Really Good At This/This Is Really Hard I Can Do This/This Is Challenging Circumstantial Advantage/Circumstantial Disadvantage. There are three different symbols on the dice. The bigger ones have more and better poo poo on them. Triumph/Despair: Hot drat/Oh gently caress. Counts as a success/failure, and also, something great/terrible will happen. Success/Failure: Add these up. You now know whether what you tried to do succeeded or failed. Advantage/Disadvantage: Add these up. You now know whether, regardless of whether you succeeded or failed, something neat/bad happened as well. Basically if you can grasp "bigger dice=more powerful" and can remember what six symbols mean you're on your way.
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Jan 4, 2016 16:35
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Minor nitpick. You roll all the die, not only the good ones
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Jan 4, 2016 17:14
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PurpleXVI posted:Those loving special dice rules make my head spin, I can't imagine it's any easier for someone who's completely new to RPG's. I'm convinced there's no smooth way to explain them but I can assure you in an actual game the system is actually smooth enough to click really fast. I've run the game for total newbies before and after a bit of awkward 'ok so an advantage isn't a win but it's something nice right' reminders it works really well. The dice are literally color/shape coded and all the mechanics use symbols for the dice. It's really one of those things where you gotta just suck it up and pay for the weird dice because it's much smoother than using the table and all. The group usually always gets it within the first game. I've found it works best when you use actual examples to describe them. Like 'you have advantages and triumphs, or threats and despairs as well as pass/fail. Like how in Jedi when the older security code works, but Vader basically just happened to pass by and be all 'hey who's that rear end in a top hat' and drew his attention. That's a Threat on a successful check.' Something like that to give them some kinda example. I've found that the biggest roadblock new players (and old players, really) have for this stuff isn't a lack of understanding, but constant second guessing if they're 'allowed' to use their things the way they think of. I've had so many times when a player goes 'oh no I had some ideas but I wasn't sure if they were ok' when I say 'you kinda didn't use your advantages and stuff as much as I thought you would'. A lot of players get stuck on the mindset of the gm must make the choices like that and their job is to react to them I think. Give them kinda a big and iconic example to go off and then they can maybe start thinking 'oh so this is more than just 'he takes a penalty dice to his next attack'.
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Jan 4, 2016 17:16
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I think part of my failure of understanding is why you need, as far as I parse it, one set of symbols for normal successes and one for awesome successes(or failures). Why not just have an excess of normal successes/failures lead to that? The "but!"-dice, as in "but something neat/bad happened as well!" aren't a bad idea, but, eh. Maybe it betrays my OLD GROGNARD ROOTS, but that's something I'd usually just leave up to GM discretion, having the system demand that a good/bad thing suddenly be shoehorned in, just feels wonky to me. Personally I see more headaches than adventures from making it work, but it's probably a whole lot down to your player, your GM and the group's playing style. As far as I understand the system right now, I'm getting more Donjon flashbacks than anything.
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Jan 4, 2016 17:29
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Tatum Girlparts posted:I'm convinced there's no smooth way to explain them but I can assure you in an actual game the system is actually smooth enough to click really fast. I've run the game for total newbies before and after a bit of awkward 'ok so an advantage isn't a win but it's something nice right' reminders it works really well. The dice are literally color/shape coded and all the mechanics use symbols for the dice. It's really one of those things where you gotta just suck it up and pay for the weird dice because it's much smoother than using the table and all. The group usually always gets it within the first game. I have some reservations against gimmick dice, but then again I fondly remember the days of me playing the HeroQuest board game. Oh well, guess I can work it out. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Just to give an idea of how deep this rabbit hole goes if the write up for Changeling the Dreaming ever gets this far. http://wod.ottershome.net/types/chankith.php The ones with book page listings are official ones. The hell? There is an official splat of Japanese Not-Really-Changelings called the Nyan? Not Bakeneko, not Nekomata. Just Nyan, as in the sound made by Japanese cats and fanservice-y anime girls with cat ears that may or may not be fake and a doki doki kawaii-desu verbal tick? This is like calling werewolves Yiffs (o__O) *Goes to write up a Changeling character that is a catgirl ninja maid in case he ever finds a Changeling campaign to derail*
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Jan 4, 2016 17:34
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