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Young Freud posted:That looks a lot like Photoshop stock photos, especially that corporate conference room with an Eurotiger pasted into the background. Comanche.  But yes, that helicopter is hilarious out of place with the rest. Pretty sure the head on the guy in the middle is photoshopped as well with how it stands out from everything. Might post another update later today where we dive headlong into character creation. But don't want to go through my backlog too fast at the same time.
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Apr 1, 2019 17:40
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Cooked Auto posted:Hopefully that makes it more understandable. Not going to lie but even I struggled at wrapping my head around how the system worked in the beginning. By this point I know how the basic resolution mechanic works at least.
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Apr 1, 2019 17:48
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Dungeons: The Dragoning: 7.5 Edition In which Night cheats So, yeah. I could continue DtD for several weeks, carefully going through everything in the book to talk about why most of it is non-functional at an actual gaming table. I could talk about how putting the 40k miscast tables (especially without the later safety-rail mechanics) into the magical system sucked. I could tell you all about how the Sword Schools (and Gunkatas) are all about building one really good move you'll do constantly because each move costs EXP and so you want to build as few as possible. I could talk about how armor is useless just like in 40kRP for the most part, or about how guns sucked compared to melee weapons before the Gunkatas were put in and even kind of sucked after. I could tell you about how Sword Schools are the most powerful overall character option. We could be talking about no poo poo Social Combat rules. I could go into the embarrassing 20 page Example of Play that is just a verbatim log of an AdEva session where the group plays DtD with Rei. But there's no actual mechanical or narrative meat to talk about. There's no reason these mechanics are put together how they are; they're there to be silly references and nothing more. There's no real thought put to a coherent design philosophy, not even in keeping with the game's original premise of a shitload of companies being forced to make one hyper-40k abomination game. There's simply nothing to DtD beyond the original eye-grabbing premise. The premise is worth a little bit of a chuckle, and would genuinely work for the original concept for the game. If I was going to have my PCs doing Pyramus and Thisbe style 'this is a loving mess' stuff for their Game Within A Game, playing Mornington Crescent/Calvinball and making up poo poo as we went along for a session to make fun of RPG design, DtD's premise would be fine. It's when it gets written for 400 pages that it just doesn't loving work. Not just 400 pages, but expansion books. It was the alignment rules in the expansion book that broke it for me. See, I went into the expansion curious, because I was thinking 'Hey, there are some hints of okay ideas in some of the aspects of the rules in book 1. Maybe the author will tighten things up a bit now that this is no longer just a joke project they spent too much time on' and I got a face-full of White Wolf Morality Systems. So no, there is no more thought put into the expansion book. It's literally just the lovely morality/humanity sins rules from WW's stuff, but applied to make the game's alignment system more annoying. Combined with Gunkatas, which are just a mechanical copy of Swordsman Schools but for guns, new spells, a few new races, and two more eh Exaltations. Yes, there's a little chuckle in the Dragonblooded Exalted actually being Dragon People. But not enough to be worth writing up a bunch of boring mechanics in detail when there's nothing to analyze. Part of what brings DtD down, aside from Roll and Keep, is that there's no writing goal beyond making references. There's no connective tissue. There's no story. There's no commentary on RPG design or writing, there isn't even a desire to make a fun gonzo setting. It's just 'I gotta get Mass Effect in there to go with 40k and Exalted and WoD and D&D and some Planescape because that's cool I guess and also the humans come from Theah and and-' with no other objective. The same is done with the mechanics; they exist to let you make a Pirate Robot Monkey Ninja who is just so zany without actually asking if any of them are any fun to interact with. There are so many ways this game could have been done better, narratively or mechanically. But almost all of them would've required tightening it up and focusing a little. When you throw every single thing you can think of into the game, you don't even end up with something mechanically gonzo; you just end up with a bland mess. There's no actual flavor to the game's mechanics, and almost everything comes down to stupid dice tricks for a dice system that doesn't work. Narratively, it's just 'Oh that's that but it's also that.' Like the Modrons. They're the Planescape Modrons, the silly funny little box robots from the Plane of Law, except they've been made into killer grimdark Necron robots from 40k. Isn't that funny? Because they're usually cute and silly, but now they're still cute and silly looking but they're murderous killers! I get those references! You could, from a writing standpoint, make some real hay out of paralleling John Wick's older 7th Sea 1e Villanova/L5R Scorpion/Play Dirty style 'WELCOME TO THE REAL WORLD, MAAAAAAN!' stuff with 40k's losing the satire and White Wolf's standard issue edgelording. There's actual resonance there, and a lot of it comes from similar periods in RPG/gaming writing. But that wouldn't leave as much time for completely rehashing scenes from a bunch of movies and anime but look it's so funny because Abbadon the Despoiler is filling in for Azrael in Dogma or 'look we put a scantily clad werewolf-demon woman Space Marine in the Star Wars Cantina'. Alternately, you know, gently caress it, writing a version of 40k that has some of the spirit of lighter hearted settings to take the edge off its Catholic Space Nazi bullshit and remind it to have fun could be perfectly fun without needing to do any meta-text stuff. But instead it's just a dull list of references, like a story written to excite TVTropes because there are just so many things to list and they're so wacky. I've talked a lot about how this game isn't actually funny, despite being a comedy game. The reason should be pretty loving clear: It's got one joke. The joke is 'I get that reference'. Also, well, the game's free and easily available on line. If this was an obscure game that came out in the early 00s or 90s, I'd write it all up just to show it off. But with nothing to actually analyze, and with it readily available for you to read yourself, there's really no cause for me to go deep into the mechanics like I normally would. Page after page of 'This exists solely because it's in This Game and works like it did in That Game, but worse and using Roll and Keep' doesn't do anyone any good. End of the day, there's nothing really objectionable about DtD. The worst it gets is the occasional 'Isn't it funny how the giant werewolf lady has huge tits' stupid anime poo poo, rather than the 'Man you know what's awesome, making your players uncomfortable' poo poo from AdEva. There's no 'you're going to need a certain degree of sexual imagery'. There's no 'Whatever you do, make sure you don't let the players bully you out of your brilliant story'. It's crime is being a boring comedy that got a little out of hand in how much its author worked on it, and mediocrity is hardly a crime. And some people certainly do find it funny and fun, so I can hardly say they completely wasted their time. It's not professional work, it's costing you any money, so it being kind of mediocre and dull isn't the end of the world. But there is one really damning thing I can say about it: Reading it didn't make me excited to use anything in it. Even in a bad game, like AdEva, I usually come away with at least one idea or concept I want to explore or use elsewhere. For instance, AdEva told me a competently done Giant Robot X-COM would loving rule. Here? There's just nothing. None of the mechanics, concepts, or fluff looks like something worth repurposing, or using, or playing in its own context, either. Probably because anything worth getting excited about was already in the dozen or so other games this game shoved together without thinking about why any of them were fun or what shoving them together would look like. And that's it for DtD. It's just not interesting enough to go in depth on, and if you've read this thread, you've already read it, really. Every game mechanic in this game is somewhere in this thread already. Every fluff concept is, too. It takes a wild premise and just does absolutely nothing with it. Next Time: Who Knows?
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Apr 1, 2019 18:09
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DtD claims another soul, lmao. What RPG on Inklesspen's archive has the most abandoned attempts at an F&F?
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Apr 1, 2019 18:47
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It's just sort of pointless to write about. There's nothing there, so why keep wasting time? E: It's the first thing I've ever tried to write up where each time I'd sit down to write I'd be like 'You know I could be doing anything else right now'.
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Apr 1, 2019 18:50
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Xelkelvos posted:DtD claims another soul, lmao.
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Apr 1, 2019 18:53
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I originally did IC2e specifically because it had been abandoned many times (and also because I think it's a good game, though I think Myriad Song is a better version of Cardinal), and went into DtD for the same reason, but DtD was making me hate doing F&Fs so it's time to move on.
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Apr 1, 2019 18:55
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Night is, in fact, the 4th person to come to grips with DtD and been stultified by the sheer pointless density of it. Three people have tried and failed to get through Princess: the Hopeful.
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Apr 1, 2019 18:56
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Night10194 posted:I'm also not entirely sure that a game with Exalted's reputation coming from 2e really wants to mess around with 'Here's how to run a targeted harassment campaign where you cut someone off from everything and then they kill themselves'. That said being able to diss someone so hard as to cause actual physical injury does seem like an important, if obviously slightly-beyond-the-core, mechanic for Exalted. Halloween Jack posted:Night is, in fact, the 4th person to come to grips with DtD and been stultified by the sheer pointless density of it. Like the "joke" of something upbeat and cheerful owning the World of Darkness has been tried many times at this point
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Apr 1, 2019 19:01
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Night10194 posted:It's just sort of pointless to write about. There's nothing there, so why keep wasting time? I wont disagree with the points you've made, but I still see it as a sort of amusing curiosity that was spawned that has enough connective tissue to sort of limply hop about, but obviously not have enough for the proper get up and go as a system generated from the ground up. If the tying of all of the poo poo together, at least in the fluff was tighter, it'd probably be a bit more interesting. There is a fluff chapter that tries to tie everything together and give everything a place, but it's not tied as tight as it could be. It's one of those projects that probably could've used a kick in the pants by some editing and criticism passes by the /tg/ board but the system is definitely far more ambitious and complex than any other system spawned from the board at the time. Strange Matter posted:Reign's been attempted twice without getting anywhere near completion. Night's attempt is #4 for this game. Mine was #3 and I didn't even start from the beginning of the book.
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Apr 1, 2019 19:05
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 Part 4: Weapons The Weapons section of Chromebook 1 has the worst art in the book. As sloppy as the vehicles were, they at least had an earnestness to them that I found charming. By comparison, most of the drawings here are of plain looking guns in flat (sometimes 3/4) profile. Most look like they’re traces right out of a Guns & Ammo magazine, and the weapons that aren’t are from movies or look like toys. The statblocks for the weapons in Chromebook 1 are missing the range. This is huge because base difficulty to hit is based on range. For standard weapons it can be assumed it has the normal range of weapons in its class, but there are enough specialized weapons where it’s harder to make a comparison. Some weapons do have ranges given in the descriptions, which can greatly change how effective it is. There are 34 weapons in this section. My first question while reading this is if there were any that Jamie, my sample character from the core review, would purchase. Specifically, would there be something she would buy at character creation? At first I didn’t think I would find anything, but after a final reread before typing this update out, I found a new gun for Jamie:  The Heckler & Kosh G-6 Advanced Squad Automatic has a similar stat block as the Sternmeyer CG-13. 5d6 damage and +1 Accuracy is the same. 100 Rounds and 30 ROF is honestly more manageable than the 90/48 of the CG-13. There’s one big difference in the (incomplete) statblock, and that is that the G-6 is a Light Machine Gun. So the Heavy Weapons Skill would be used for attacks, which isn’t a career skill for the Solo. Jamie would have to spend pick-up skill points to max out Heavy Weapons, but that frees up the career skill points she used for Rifle on stuff like Notice and Stealth. And Heavy Weapons opens the door to a lot of weapon, so having an effective anti-personnel weapon on top of the big hitters is huge. The description text makes the G-6 even better. The range is 900 meters, more than double that of rifles. It comes with smart gun interface included. And SP from armor is halved, but the damage that gets through does the normal amount. The H&K G-6 costs 2,050 eb, a little less than a smart-linked CG-13. And I thought I’d have to wait until Chromebook 2 to break the damage curve further.  Another weapon that Jamie would pick up is the Militech Mini-Grenade Launcher. This is one of the weapons where it’s not clear what the range should be, but the closest equivalent is the normal grenade launcher in the core book (225 m). The mini-grenade launcher comes in two versions. One is a stand-alone weapon that carries 16 grenades (pictured). The other is an under-barrel addon that holds 4 grenades. Jamie will be getting the under-barrel version (255 eb). Grenade launchers use the Heavy Weapon Skill. The benefit of the mini-grenade launcher is the flexibility of munition types. HEP grenades do 5d6 (1/2 real damage, 1/2 stun, armor has no effect and is damaged two levels). Fragmentation grenades do 2d6+1 in a 5m diameter. Flechette grenades hit with 2d6 shards, each doing 1d6 damage. It can also shoot smoke or tear gas.  The last weapon on Jamie’s shopping list is the Malorian Arms 3516. It’s also called the Silverhand Special because it was a custom order from the setting’s favorite office-trashing Rockerboy. The 3516 straight up breaks the damage scale for handguns. The hardest-hitting handguns in the corebook do 4d6+1 damage. The Malorian 3516 does 6d6. It requires a Cyberarm to use, but later books would say that this requirement can be ignored by characters with a BOD of 12. The Malorian 3516 costs 4,525 eb and comes with a smartgun link. While it’s not something Jamie will start with, she’s going to get one after completing a few missions.  There’s one other weapon in Chromebook worth talking about, and that’s just because CP2020 left a genre staple out of the core book. Y’see, because there are no rules for modifying weapons, there’s no sawed-off shotgun in the core book. The Militech Crusher SSG lets a character just purchase one. It’s a little weak compared to the shotguns in the core, but it's a shotgun you can conceal it in your jacket. The 30 other weapons are bad in varying degrees. There are a couple of weapons that’ll be really good once, and afterwards everyone is going to have the counter to it. The EMP grenade will have everyone buying the electric hardening options for everything (and make the Referee come up with prices for things that don’t). The Biotech-Askari Motion Restraint is a bomb that explodes into a polymer net that seemed like a good option for non-lethal takedown, until I realized that the Release Tube can be bought seperately. At least it has the benefit of being really inexpensive. There are a few weapons that suffer from the incomplete rules. The Rostovic Wrist Racete has no range, and you have to go digging through the cybernetics section of the core book to find something that’s comparable. That’s not as bad as the Rifle Grenade. There’s an anti-tank variant, but your guess is as good as mine as to how much damage it does! There are three guns that fire flechette rounds. Two of the guns have extremely different rules on how flechette bullets work. The third simply doesn’t list any damage.  Then there’s the Militech M-31a1. It’s literally the rifle from Aliens. It’s actually halfway decent. It has +2 accuracy, carries 150 rounds and comes with the mini-grenade launcher. But it does low damage for an assault rifle (4d6). It’s also really expensive for a rifle that doesn’t include a smartgun link (1,695 eb). When compared to other rifles, my impression is that all you’re paying for is just a really big ammo clip. My award for worst addition is split between 11 different weapons in this section that are effectively identical to the guns found in the core book. There are slight differences in ammo capacity, accuracy and/or cost, but they bring absolutely nothing new to the table. The core book already has two SMGs that do 2d6+1 damage, this supplement didn’t have to waste a half a page to tell me about another one! Next Time: Dressing Down EDIT: Shout out to Young Freud for pointing out the misogynistic joke tucked into the half-page long description of the Setsuko-Arasaka Police-Military-Security SMG. Or "PMS". "Early models of this weapon gained the reputation about being fussy about ammo and rumors that the weapon interface caused peripheral vision hallucination." Hardy-loving har-har. SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 04:27 on Apr 2, 2019 |
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Apr 1, 2019 19:08
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Nessus posted:Wasn't Princess basically "We saw Madoka and Utena and decided that yes this deeply needs to be a World of Darkness splat"? It was originally trying to emulate Sailor Moon and maybe Utena, iirc. Then Madoka came out and there were massive rewrites to try and incorporate that and at this point is just a mess of fluff disjointment. I also tried to tackle Princess and failed. 
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Apr 1, 2019 19:12
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Nessus posted:Wasn't Princess basically "We saw Madoka and Utena and decided that yes this deeply needs to be a World of Darkness splat"? I remember some other poster pointing out huge gaps and glaring omissions in the listed set of inspirations for Princess, which is also common. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Apr 1, 2019 |
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Apr 1, 2019 19:13
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm not the best person to ask, but I can say that all those Storyteller homebrews tend toward the same mistake: statting up a vast catalogue of very specific things they liked in a genre, which never coheres into a clear theme. I remember some other poster pointing out huge gaps and glaring omissions in the listed set of inspirations for Princess, which is also common. They also all make the mistake of using Storyteller.
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Apr 1, 2019 19:14
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Halloween Jack posted:I'm not the best person to ask, but I can say that all those Storyteller homebrews tend toward the same mistake: statting up a vast catalogue of very specific things they liked in a genre, which never coheres into a clear theme. I remember some other poster pointing out huge gaps and glaring omissions in the listed set of inspirations for Princess, which is also common. I'd say that there's one homebrew, at least based on the F&F that actually has a clear theme if only to not be quite as fleshed out as it could be. Leviathan: the Tempest or somthing. I don't recall the other issues it had, but it was the best one between it and the others that were being F&F'd. The themes of family, destiny, dying glory was pretty clearly illustrated compared to Genius which was basically Mage and Princess which was initially being a point of hope and Light to contrast the rest of the setting (which then got usurped by Geist as actually being properly optimistic in the face of death) and then transitioned into sacrifice and raging against they dying light and despair or something. idk.
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Apr 1, 2019 19:21
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Leviathan has the opposite problem. The authors should have asked themselves questions like "Maybe White Wolf never made a Creature from the Black Lagoon game because there's not enough to work with here." That's not Leviathan's only problem, though. It's fundamental problem is that the authors are illiterate. The Creature from the Black Lagoon isn't about puberty or heritage, it's about race and imperialism. Because they're illiterate, they thought they should round it out by drawing on "The Shadow Over Innsmouth," not because of how the latter story treats race and miscegenation, but because it also has fish-monsters in it. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Apr 1, 2019 |
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Apr 1, 2019 19:31
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Leviathan had the advantage of being in the same thematic space as Beast, a space in which my droppings would be the more favorable tabletop game
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Apr 1, 2019 19:31
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In order for Leviathan to make sense, it would also have to draw on, for example, Cat People. But then you have the problem that Werewolf and Changing Breeds already exist.
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Apr 1, 2019 19:41
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I feel like Leviathan, from what I've seen of it, would be a more interesting game if written in a post-Shape of Water world.
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Apr 1, 2019 19:42
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Homebrews made by people who are really excited about a movie they saw yesterday are also bad.
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Apr 1, 2019 19:56
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Halloween Jack posted:Homebrews made by people who are really excited about a movie they saw yesterday are also bad. I'll note I never said 'better' just 'more interesting.'
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Apr 1, 2019 20:01
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SirPhoebos posted:Out of curiosity, were you aware of the changes between editions when you submitted your vehicles? I'm going to go with "no". On reflection, the helicopter gunship should have been something like a jet powered Osprey. Otherwise, I'm still pretty happy with the fluff on everything.
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Apr 1, 2019 20:02
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mllaneza posted:I'm going to go with "no". I know the Dragon got a change in Maximum Metal, where it became a giant-sized Hind.
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Apr 1, 2019 20:06
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Halloween Jack posted:In order for Leviathan to make sense, it would also have to draw on, for example, Cat People. But then you have the problem that Werewolf and Changing Breeds already exist. Change it from fish people to Lizard people and draw upon the sort of conspiracy theory stuff about Lizardpeople hiding among humanity and it might be there. Unfortunately, like any conspiracy theory stuff with powerful people in disguise, it starts treading on stiff like the Bilderberg group or stuff from the Protocols and it can go south fast.
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Apr 1, 2019 20:08
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Genius, as the person who F&F'd it, was a game idea that honestly did put its finger on a good kernel of pathos and tragedy: it's a game about disappointment, failing to live up to expectations (your own most of all), and the downward spiral into madness simply looking for validation. That, in my opinion, is fine. That's a compelling story, you're the most brilliant person in the world and it means nothing because your ideas never quite work properly no matter how much you work and sacrifice for them, and no one will ever recognize or appreciate what you do, simply calling you insane. The problem with Genius, I think comes from everything the writers built up after that idea. The oMage cargo culting, the "We wannabe steampunk wizards!" air, all the material pushing you towards forgetting the tragedy and limitations of Geniuses and instead being magical eccentric adventures with Star Trek and superheroes. Mechanically, item crafting classes have always been a thorny issue in tabletop games, and Genius is a whole game built around everyone playing as one. The game tells you to severely restrict the time and resources available to players, which is fine per the original core notion of disappointment and disillusionment - one of the main allures of the evil organization, besides the emotional pathos of people who believe in you and think your ideas are valid and good, is their supply network. But then a huge chunk of the book is filled with crafting rules and gizmos and adventure hooks that you can't interact with without some serious gizmos. Genius is a schizophrenic game, in the end. There's a good idea to be had, but the game built around goes off in its own, different direction.
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Apr 1, 2019 20:21
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Xelkelvos posted:Change it from fish people to Lizard people and draw upon the sort of conspiracy theory stuff about Lizardpeople hiding among humanity and it might be there. Unfortunately, like any conspiracy theory stuff with powerful people in disguise, it starts treading on stiff like the Bilderberg group or stuff from the Protocols and it can go south fast. you, uh, you know David Icke is pretty explicitly conflating those guys with jews from the start, right
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Apr 1, 2019 20:26
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Cythereal posted:Genius is a schizophrenic game, in the end. There's a good idea to be had, but the game built around goes off in its own, different direction.
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Apr 1, 2019 20:28
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Mors Rattus posted:you, uh, you know David Icke is pretty explicitly conflating those guys with jews from the start, right Did that stuff start with Icke? I wasn't aware.
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Apr 1, 2019 20:32
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Cooked Auto posted:Where things get dicey Spoiler alert: it does not make a pretty graph.  If you're curious, paste the following into AnyDice. You can change the maximum depth up to 8 or 9 before it starts throwing an error, but that mostly just bloats up the charts. code:
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Apr 1, 2019 20:54
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Ahahahaha, I suspected the results would be swingy but nothing like that.
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Apr 1, 2019 21:06
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Xelkelvos posted:Did that stuff start with Icke? I wasn't aware. There are novel things and weird things but the core DNA of the Pernicious Other who Seeks to Do The Harm is pretty deeply engrained in the West.
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Apr 1, 2019 21:10
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Part 5: Fashion, Services & Housing I am admittedly of two minds about this section. On the one hand, the rules for clothing, if players want to spend money on it, are pretty drat simple from the core book: Pick the item of clothing then give it a multiplier depending on how fashionable it is. So having individual clothing lines with separate prices for every article of clothing is pretty pointless. But I can appreciate the extra effort to give some variety to how people in Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. dress. In the core book we’ve seen a lot of leather jackets, tank tops, trench coats, or suits that would be hard to tell was “future fashion” if not for the bits of cyberware also present. So it’s nice to get some alternative looks for what someone might wear.    I have very little to say about this section...except that even here they manage to break the item scaling. See, the max SP you could get without taking EV penalties (outside of the head) was 14. But in Chromebook 1 we get armor that provides 16 or 18 SP with no EV. It’s not huge, but 4 points of extra SP can mean the difference between some attacks getting through or not.    Since that was a short chapter, I’ll cover the next section of Chromebook 1: Services. There are a few interesting ones. Character can rent an AV-4 for 500 eb an hour and only need to put down a 500 eb deposit. That seems like a surefire way for the service provider to go bankrupt, but whatever. There’s a Bug Sweeper service so characters don’t have to go through the hassle of checking their apartments every goddamn time. The laundry service also doubles as armor repair if you are using the degradation rule. There’s a detective agency if the group is really not into doing investigation. Finally, there’s an executive decorum service that could probably be used to somewhat short-circuit the bad skill progression rules, but it still takes six months to give +2 to Social Skill, so it’s probably only worth it if your Social is at 8. Other than that these services can serve as inspiration for one-shot adventure hook (get hired to retrieve a Corporate’s pet howler monkey, for example). Well this is still a short update, so let’s move on to the last section of miscellaneous stuff: housing. There are five examples of housing in this section, and each is laid out in the same fashion: an in-setting advertisement, base price, Referee information, and a floor plan. The preface at the beginning at least makes it clear that PCs aren’t so much meant to spend money on this, but these would be locations for different scenarios. The first entry is an Arasaka Sleep Facility. It’s a capsule hotel for the inner cities, and it’s as disgusting and dangerous as you would imagine. Characters might come here to meet a Fixer or a fly-by-night Ripperdoc. What’s not mentioned at all is that it’s strange or suspicious that a security Megacorp known for black-ops shenanigans is running a chain of roach motels. Today I can think of a bunch of plot hooks that would tie into these places, but a reader less immersed in in the Cyberpunk genre probably won’t see this potential. Costs 40eb/night + a whole bunch of side charges of varying degrees of usefulness.  Security Services, Inc. Professional Apartments are single bedroom apartments for junior to mid-level Corporates or other high-value employees. They cost 2,500 eb a month, but an executive will probably have free housing as part of their lifetime contract. Chromebook expects PCs will be breaking into these apartments, so most of the details are focused on security. In particular the security system for the apartment is offline, so it can’t be compromised by a Netrunner. Dick move, Chromebook! I’ve ragged a lot on how Netrunning sucks, but if a group is going to have a Netrunner, then let them do their thing. Cockblocking an entire role does nothing to fix its core issues. And for what? This is some mid-level yuppie the players are going after, not someone important. Speaking of which, the next living quarter is The Masterpiece, a Harris & Company Luxury Penthouse on the top of a high-rise in downtown San Francisco. Two floors with outdoor patio and AV-Pad. Private elevator. Sophisticated security systems inside and sentry turrets on the outdoor areas (though no blanket immunity to hacking, amusingly.) The penthouse or one like it is an appropriate spot to have as the climax of a campaign, or perhaps something the group can get for themselves after a really big score. The opening bid for this penthouse is 800,000 eb. Umm, I’ve never had the money to buy a permanent residence, but that feels really low for what the buyer gets and where it’s located. Sure it’s a bid, but the architects faces a real risk of the bidders getting together to low-ball them.  Silverhand Studios are a collection of warehouses across the country that have been converted into communal lofts. Costs 600 eb a month, and there’s side benefits for being part of an artist commune. Other residents can help characters find work or lay low when the heat is too hot. Just living in the studios for a year will boost an artistic skill by +1 (up to +3). Finally there’s the Drifter RV. It costs 24,995 eb, but the seller, New American Motors, offers “the lowest finance rates (22.5%).” Please don’t make the Referee calculate financing rates, Chromebook, just give a per month price and move on! The Drifter keeps up the trend from the vehicle section of leaving out important stats. In this case, we don’t the vehicle’s top speed. Lovely. Next Time: Chips and Dipshits SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 22:49 on Apr 1, 2019 |
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Apr 1, 2019 21:41
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Neotech 2 Part 3: My god, it’s full of tables.  So we are without further ado dropped straight into the character generation chapter. This book is not big on any large chapter headers or anything. Chapters will just generally run after one another without much ado. Hell, that pictures was accompanied by another table and the beginning of the character creation checklist. Yes, I said the beginning because the entire process of making an N2 character is a total of 40 steps from start to finish. There is basic introductory talk about that you can either roll your own character or the GM will have premades done for you. Making specific mention that if the GM trusts the player the can make their characters by their own ahead of time. Which almost seems preferably with the amount of things you need to do in this case. It also makes mention that the character generation rules is not meant to make average citizens in the setting but player characters that are suitable for adventuring. Also, just to cover all its bases, it finally mentions character sheets. They certainly are something. So somewhat strangely enough the first step is to determine what gender your character is. Here is where the writing gets a bit cringey. For while it starts explaining that the player character’s gender does not need to coincide with the players gender. It goes on to say that it’s easier to roleplay a character of the same gender as themselves. It then goes on to mention that there are no real obstacles for the player pick differently. Perhaps the real eyebrow raiser in this case is the mention that playing the opposite gender might be considered a challenge if you’re an experienced roleplayer. When I first read that I admit I groaned slightly. It comes off as an really old fashioned way of doing things, almost theatrical in a way. What is perhaps even stranger is that while the player picks what gender they want to play, ultimately it’s the GM who has the final say on the matter. One might argue it makes sense since the GM might have a campaign where playing man, or a woman, respectively might not fit in. But at the same time, it comes off as an old fashioned of doing things. After that you pick your characters nationality, while it says that this is important for the characters background it has no actual mechanical benefits other than language selections. All you really do is, together with the GM for some reason, looking at a map and decide where you a from. Then it goes on to point out doesn’t have to matter anyway if you want to due to immigrants and minority populations. So why are these the absolutely first two steps you do? I have no idea myself. It feels like this, and some other things later on, could’ve been relegated to the end where you usually start hashing our your characters personality and motivations if you haven’t decided on that already. But once that is we move onto step three is where the dice, and the tables, come out. In this case we need to roll in what kind of environment the character grew up in. Which is done with a D100 roll in this case, or you can pick whatever you if you are so inclined. The book goes on to mention that the descriptions they’re using are rather broad generalizations and there’s always exceptions to the norm. Our environment options are: Wilderness - The outback, the places that are hard to reach or you’re simply a nomad or refugee who wander through abandoned environmental disaster or warzones. Lots of physical work and being suspicious towards strangers and technology. Countryside - The places outside the giant cities. Hit hard by the urbanisation over the years and are therefore more or less abandoned. But nature is close by on the other hand unlike in the city. Life is easy and calm and you’re usually left to your own devices. Outside of the random raids on small towns conducted by criminals and homeless people. Because the countryside entry lacks any general area description I can’t help but to imagine that Mad Max scenarios going on outside the cities and suburbs wherever you go. Suburbs - Your average metropolis suburb. It’s quiet, there might have some private police on patrol. Any strangers are vetted thoroughly. City Slums - The hard life in the projects, or ghettos. Life is cold and hard on average. Violent crime, drugs, gang wars and social misery is part of daily life. But the close proximity of the city also has its benefits; the nightlife, valuable contacts and the opportunity for quick deals. Or an all too early death. I feel they’re hammering in the clichés a bit too hard in this case. Even if they’re meant to be generalizations. But it’s worth mentioning this is the first time we actually get some pointers as how characters from this background might think or act, something that was only briefly mentioned previously. Or should is more accurate I think, as the phrasing is very much that the violence has made any character from there desensitized, cynical and disillusioned. So going by Rules as Written in this case it feels like they’re trying to enforce a stereotype. Corporate district - The Saraiman and so on. Life as part of the workforce of a megacorporation. You grew on their grounds and in their housing. Not very enriched perhaps but it’s safe and orderly. Except for the slow brainwashing done by the corporations that own you. Space - The final frontier. You grew up on either one of the major space stations in orbit around the earth or one of the colonies on Mars or the Moon. Life feels lacking and rather sterile, and you can’t really go outside without protective gear. So yeah, colonies on the moon and mars. Didn’t expect that did you- For those curious the stations mentioned are InterOrbit, Freeport or Space Station. While the colonies on the moon and on mars respectively are Armstrong Down, Luna City, Tycho 2, Marstown, Red Sands and Eldorado. Not the most original names perhaps. Either way, get ready to roll again! This time we need to roll for what social status the character has. You do this by rolling on the table relevant to what environment we got previously. Even if you are allowed to pick it in some cases. They range from Homeless to Social Elite, so I won’t really elaborate much on those. But the dice result will differ from each sub section. For example a roll between 1 to 40 on the wilderness section would give you homeless while you’d have to roll a straight 1 on the space table to be homeless. On the opposite side of the spectrum you have Social elite which has the smallest range overall. Going from either 96-100, 99-100 or 100. Looking at the ranges overall, the average result would be either Lower Class or Middle class depending on which environment is used. It’s at this point we suddenly get to pick our characters name. You are instructed to pick a name that is logical within the boundaries of nationality, gender, and social status. So I guess something like Moon Bloodgood or Bear Blaze are reserved for only the social elite then. I wonder what their stance on Cash Money would be. They do mention that one should pick names that feel realistic, or else the tone and feeling of the game might get lost. Which is true, but after having seen some of their example names I can’t help but to think they forgot that rule themselves a bit. For example the name of the character used most frequently in examples is named Jace Ryker. Other example names that pop in quotes and elsewhere are Sinclair MacNeal and Jason Carn. I mean it might just be me, but those name feel more at home in an B-grade 80’s action movie done by Italians wanting you to think it’s set in the US. Moving onto step six we now have to see what our characters basic attributes are. There are seven primary attributes in N2. They are: Strength (STY), Toughness (TÅL), Mobility (RÖR), Personality (PER), Psyche (PSY), Will (VIL) and Education (BIL). Swedish abbreviations in parenthesis as I’ll be using those from here on. After that we also have two sensory attributes, namely Sight (SYN) and Hearing (HÖR). Attribute generation is 3D6 down the line, nine times. No unlimited dice in this case and they mention the average value will be 10,5. Which goes to show just how intense they are about the maths for this game. For those who doesn’t want to roll they offer three different alternatives for rolling attributes as an optional rule. Optional rules is something which the game is very big on I should mention as they will crop up a lot. Especially later on. Custom method: Roll 3D6 nine times and then distribute them as you want. Points: You get 94 points to spend on the various attributes at 1 to 1 cost per rank. No value can go below 3 and above 18. Higher attributes: Roll 2D6+6 in order. Used when you want some more heroic characters. After that follows a rundown of the various attributes. The most interesting ones in this case are Psyche and Education. The others being the usual Strength, Agility, Constitution, Charisma and Will under different names. Everyone knows what they do respectively. Psyche, or memory for that part since it deals with how well the character can remember things. Also how creative and intelligent they are. It’s also good if one wants to draw logical conclusions between things and not suffer from mental illnesses. Oh no. Education meanwhile is just how well educated the character is. Higher values meaning a possible university education. Or that they’ve gained their knowledge through experience or countless hours on the internet. Oh you wound me so game. This is also the only attribute that can be affected by your environment or social status results, but the stat can not go below zero at this point. Sight and Hearing is simply perception split into two different attributes. And they’re only really for passive perception as there are also a surveillance skill for when you need to look for things. If you have five or lower in those it means that your senses are impaired. But you can use aids, like glasses or hearing aids, or cybernetic implants to boost it. Interestingly enough they mention all of them, including the cybernetic implants, can only temporarily increase them. Splitting up passive perception into two different things, then making them necessary attributes as well. Then on top of that actively penalising you if they’re below a certain value feels like such pointless minutia and awful game design at the same time. But at the same time I get the feeling we’ll be seeing a lot of that as we progress through the rules. We get a sidebar mentioning that if any attribute, with the exception of SYN and HÖR, ever drops to zero it means that the character has died. Although I wonder how that is possible if you manage to get BIL down to zero. Are you suddenly too dumb to live? If there’s actually something that can affect that attribute we’ll have to see but I find it slightly unlikely. If SYN and HÖR reaches zero the character none too surprisingly becomes blind or deaf. On top of that there is a degeneration table that you need to roll as you sustain attribute damage. Which you also need to roll on as you age. But more on that later on because it’s listed on a much, much later page under a different chapter. If you were lucky enough to become part of the social elite during the social status roll you get to roll on another table for the chance that you might have been genetically manipulated before you were born. But that does not come without its side effects! So you need to roll both on the type of gene manipulation and on the side effect table. The first and second results are either a dud or you get to reroll all attributes under a value of 10, but obviously the second roll must be kept. The rest are simply bonuses to some attributes. Meanwhile, the side effects range from you either getting nothing or -1D6 in one attribute. No attribute can go lower than 1. The 97-100 roll is that the character is sterile. Okay? Feels like they ran out of ideas right at the end. Or they’re implying it’s a really awful thing for PC’s to have. Then we move onto a hearing and visual aids for some reason. Most important in this case is that you can never have SYN or HÖR over a rating of 10 when you use these. Rather dickishly it mentions that if you wear glasses that are too strong, pushing the SYN value over 10 in this case, then your value is lowered in as many steps as it would go over. That just feels really petty in a way. Beyond that it mentions that any derived attributes and basic chances for skills are counted on the basic SYN or HÖR value. Then what is the real point of using these aids outside of simply boosting your passive perception? This just reinforces the notion that this design choice was a really bad idea. While it’s nice to see this here and this early. it feels this part would’ve been better to have in the gear section where it might be more relevant. No prices or anything are listed so you’re going to have to flip forward later on anyway if you need to get them. There’s a brief mention about that cybertech exists and it can affect attributes but that’s about it really. There’s not even a step in the character creation process that pertains to them so the mention feels completely superfluous. Next time: There’s more to this. Cooked Auto fucked around with this message at 21:44 on Apr 1, 2019 |
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Apr 1, 2019 21:42
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You know, I've been thinking of this all day, and I think if I was rewriting DtD to make the rules system itself no longer a joke, I'd write the rules as a 'meta rules system'. I'd keep the joke that the actual game rules are a confusing mess of every bad idea in 90s/early 00s RPGs, but have that just be the fluff; the actual resolution mechanic would represent players rolling to remember all their bonuses, or to have been lucky enough to have a character concept that landed them the unplaytested, super awesome ability combo, etc. That way you could have simple rules but maintain the fluff of a labyrinthine mess.
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Apr 1, 2019 23:11
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SirPhoebos, why is one of the pictures in your Cyberpunk review clearly Kyle MacLachlan with a robot hand?
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Apr 2, 2019 00:21
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For DtD I was thinking a talmudic sh approach; have the entire games ruleset be a commentary between unkown authors who are wrangling the rules in front of them and resolve contradictions. If you want optional rules then have two or more sidebar writers disagree on how to read the rules.
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Apr 2, 2019 00:27
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Y'know, I can see an RPG where having exploding dice as a negative for the roller is effective. I just wouldn't use it for anything cyberpunk themed.
SirPhoebos fucked around with this message at 01:01 on Apr 2, 2019 |
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Apr 2, 2019 00:46
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So far I'm even dubious if Neotech is much of a cyberpunk RPG at all. It certainly doesn't have the flavour of one so far but that might change once I actually reach the setting chapters.
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Apr 2, 2019 00:56
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wdarkk posted:Roll under with exploding dice sounds like a recipe for feel-bad.
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Apr 2, 2019 01:04
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DtD just makes me think that you can have a lot of fun with RPG mashups, and that's it's appeal until you get past the novelty and stare at the earnest numbers. Granted, that's kind of what games like Rifts, Torg, or Dream Park were about to an extent, and there was a small boom in the early '90s for that which just kind of died down. But just take your two favorite RPGs and mash the things you like about them, or take a system you like and then pick and choose stuff from other games to cram in. It's inevitably silly, but gently caress it, what's the worst that'll happen? Synnibarr already came out.
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Apr 2, 2019 01:14
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