FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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Ronwayne: Nov 20, 2007; That warm and fuzzy feeling.

I've seen rpgs try to do a lot of dumb internet memes, but emulating Loss.jpg is a new one.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 04:30

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# ? Jan 17, 2025 11:05

megane: Jun 20, 2008

Nessus posted:

Sometimes gaining Acumen is harder on the wizard.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 04:52

Angrymog: Jan 29, 2012; Really Madcats

This is pretty bad, but I'm surprised that you're all looking at the Birth arc as if the PC is the father.

Anyway, it's not that every pregnancy goes wrong, just ones where it's an arc.

Another issue with this system is that they're not balanced against each other timewise. Building things, having a baby, or raising a child are usually going to take longer than bringing someone to justice or having/starting a romance.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 04:54

juggalo baby coffin: Dec 2, 2007; How would the dog wear goggles and even more than that, who makes the goggles?

Angrymog posted:

This is pretty bad, but I'm surprised that you're all looking at the Birth arc as if the PC is the father.

Anyway, it's not that every pregnancy goes wrong, just ones where it's an arc.

Another issue with this system is that they're not balanced against each other timewise. Building things, having a baby, or raising a child are usually going to take longer than bringing someone to justice or having/starting a romance.

hey my joke was about the PC being the mother and taking up bad habits while pregnant cause she needs a despair point to level up

# ? Aug 6, 2019 05:19

JcDent: May 13, 2013; Give me a rifle, one round, and point me at Berlin!

Flail Snail posted:

Coming soon to a thread near you.

How long can a stroke a last? :stare:

# ? Aug 6, 2019 08:21

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

REIGNING YOSPOS COSTCO KING

Flail Snail posted:

Coming soon to a thread near you.

Cool, someone made a follow-up to HYBRID.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 12:53

By popular demand: Jul 17, 2007; IT *BZZT* WASP ME--
IT WASP ME ALL *BZZT* ALONG!

Is that the pen-and-paper equivalent of a novelty programming language such as Mindfuck?

# ? Aug 6, 2019 13:14

Mors Rattus: Oct 25, 2007; FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

If you mean HYBRID, no, because Mindfuck is intentional and HYBRID has always appeared to be the sad result of someone's mental illness interacting with an obsessive hobby.

If you mean the thing linked, quite possibly?

# ? Aug 6, 2019 13:36

Flail Snail: Jul 30, 2019; Collector of the Obscure

Nah, the thing linked is also the sad result of someone's mental illness interacting with an obsessive hobby. He was in his local news and everything.

But I'm not going to be making fun of the author or his mental illness. That's not a cool thing to do. I've just wanted to acquire and read one of these books since noticing them on a late night trawl through Lulu's RPG section. Maybe it'll be good for some entertainment. Maybe I'll end up with a shiny new blank book.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 13:56

Rand Brittain: Mar 24, 2013; "Go on until you're stopped."

Joe Slowboat posted:

Someone better with epubs than I am should copy a Chuubo's arc into this thread for comparison, because I'm just poleaxed by Monte Cooke's ability to miss the point.

Well, since you clearly have a person in mind...

Bindings Arcs posted:

Bindings Arcs focus on sealed, bound powers: you develop a facility with containment and targeted use of wicked, forbidden, or dangerous things. They look something like this:

Quest 1 establishes you as the kind of person who does this.

Quest 2 lets you help someone or do something important.

Quest 3 lets you enact a big, decisive plan.
Then, if you haven�t got enough XP to finish out the Arc, or just plain want to do more, you can go on to do:

Quest 4 where you remake the world into something more like you think it ought to be.

Quest 5 where you explore the effects that that had.
This Arc uses a really loose definition of �wicked, forbidden, or dangerous.� I mean, we�re not just talking about someone who calls up the powers of Hell, here; this is the Arc to use if you have a pet wolf, command a division of not-100%-clean cops, or act as the government handler for a reckless kid and their marvelous wish-granting engine�

If you�re someone whose genre is �the person who controls dangerous forces,� I mean.

If you�re the innocent playing with forces that would kill anyone else; or the pragmatist in control of a ruthless power; or the selfish jerk riding the tiger; or the person who deals with edge and liminal forces because there�s nobody else who can:

That�s what this Arc is about.

Bindings 1 posted:

You have to work with, partner with, or tie your fate to something wrong or in disfavor: a beast; Bleak power; cruel or disliked person; taboo or ill-favored entity; or maybe a ghost, vampire, or witch�

Reward: you�ve hammered out a working relationship with them.

Bindings 2 posted:

There�s someone who needs your help, or something you must do, because you work with the kinds of things you work with.

�Unfortunately, you have no idea what you�re doing. This is big. This is complicated. Maybe leap in feet-first and hope to figure it out as you go?

Reward: you�re oriented now. You have a plan.

Bindings 3 posted:

You risk yourself on a complicated and difficult plan. Usually you know what you�re doing, and you�re doing it right, but you�re doing something so hard and complicated that you might lose midway through anyway.

Result: you win! �unless you already lost. If you already lost, finishing this quest results in the ongoing catastrophe staggering to its natural halt.

Bindings 4 posted:

You�re making a proactive choice or gamble. You�ve decided to fix things, change things, or reveal the truth of how they already are.

Reward: you made an impact. You changed things. Was it right to do so? Time will tell.

Bindings 5 posted:

You explore the consequences of a big decision you made for somebody else.

Result: it�s time to turn your attention to something new.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 13:59

EthanSteele: Nov 18, 2007; I can hear you

juggalo baby coffin posted:

Numenera stuff

A big thing for me is like the slimes that zap you when they mash together. That's absolutely 100% a dungeon crawl encounter/trap that only works if you're in a confined space so they can slorp you up. For a thing that just exists in the world as you like walk through some weird crystal forest or something? Garbage. So many of these are obviously made up to fit the picture like you say or just unused D&D encounters and the game keeps trying to tell you its not that, but so much just kills you if you ask it too many questions.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 14:14

Zereth: Jul 8, 2003

Seatox posted:

Does a panel van count as a site for the Building Arc? Because you could farm Acumen by re-detailing it over and over with panel art of your trashy wizard deeds.

Airbrush art of you airbrushing the last thing on it if you're short on ideas.

Sage Genesis posted:

Uh... why is the pregnancy complication not optional? Does every single pregnancy in Invisible Sun always go wrong in some way? Shouldn't the step after Complication not be "Go To The Esoteric Hospital" instead of continuing to paint the baby room while your wife is shrieking bloody murder?

Oh and thanks for giving my explicit rules for the game mechanics of stillbirth. Because that's what this loving hobby needed. Jesus Christ what the hell, why would you even include rules about any of this? Getting xp for knocking up your girl and having the child not survive the birth what the gently caress?

I was about to say that that'd be part of the "Complication" step, but no, it does not require you do anything to alleviate the problem. Just that it happens.

In fact you might be better off long-term if the baby dies, the Joy vs Despair thing aside, because then you don't need to deal with the baby after it's born. Maybe get the Joy you need somewhere else.

Angrymog posted:

This is pretty bad, but I'm surprised that you're all looking at the Birth arc as if the PC is the father.

Anyway, it's not that every pregnancy goes wrong, just ones where it's an arc.

Another issue with this system is that they're not balanced against each other timewise. Building things, having a baby, or raising a child are usually going to take longer than bringing someone to justice or having/starting a romance.

... Can... can you have more than one Arc going at a time? Could you just be the Deadbeat-est Dad fathering kids left and right so you can farm Acumen and Joy/Despair and then just gently caress off? Because that would mean it's mechanically better to be the father for this one. Although presumably you could do Magic Bullshit to "father" a child while not equipped with the right parts, we've seen people with poo poo like "my head is a literal book" in the art.

Mors Rattus posted:

If you mean HYBRID, no, because Mindfuck is intentional and HYBRID has always appeared to be the sad result of someone's mental illness interacting with an obsessive hobby.

If you mean the thing linked, quite possibly?

I looked at HYBRID once and it didn't seem to actually have, like, a resolution mechanic, or anything trying but failing to be one. There's no actual game there.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 15:18

Mors Rattus: Oct 25, 2007; FATAL & Friends
Walls of Text
#1 Builder
2014-2018

Correct, HYBRID is not actually a game. It is in fact someone's mental illness interacting with obsession over games in such a way as to produce a very sad document.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 15:29

Sage Genesis: Aug 14, 2014; OG Murderhobo

Zereth posted:

I was about to say that that'd be part of the "Complication" step, but no, it does not require you do anything to alleviate the problem. Just that it happens.

In fact you might be better off long-term if the baby dies, the Joy vs Despair thing aside, because then you don't need to deal with the baby after it's born. Maybe get the Joy you need somewhere else.

Yeah. And that's why I'm legit mad about this. I know people who've had this happen to them. In fact, one former colleague of mine had a pregnant girlfriend and from a complication she got a blood infection about six months in and died. This stuff is horrible and not the kind of thing you should gamify. You need Despair to level up, right? That means that getting a baby and letting it die during the pregnancy/childbirth is a valid level-up approach and whoever puts that into their game is a huge piece of poo poo.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 16:04

megane: Jun 20, 2008

Don't forget that it's an equally valid level-up strategy to attempt to build a doghouse in your backyard and screw it up.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 16:34

KirbyKhan: Mar 20, 2009; I purchased and 100%'d Huniecam so quickly that I still get friends shaming me over it. And I deserve to be shamed. But I did not praise the game. I called it fucked up. That's how fucked up it is: it's up there with Princess Maker as far as poster body counts.; Soiled Meat

megane posted:

Don't forget that it's an equally valid level-up strategy to attempt to build a doghouse in your backyard and screw it up.

I enchanted my dog house to levitate with Gale speed. My Snoopy always dreamed of being the Red Baron, but he didn't read far enough into the history book to learn that the Germans lost the war.

+2 Dispair

# ? Aug 6, 2019 16:58

EthanSteele: Nov 18, 2007; I can hear you

megane posted:

Don't forget that it's an equally valid level-up strategy to attempt to build a doghouse in your backyard and screw it up.

The concept is not bad, encouraging players to accept their characters loving up and even desire to gently caress up in the interest of good stories is what Burning Wheel and Chuubo's are good at. It's the execution and that tying having a miscarriage and your wife dying in childbirth directly to your advancement is real bad news. A narrative where that happens? Not for me, but nothing inherently wrong with that as a story. Making it so you do that directly for xp so you can learn Fireball is real nasty trash.

If the game even took it to a meta level and made it so your stupid idiot wizards were intentionally sabotaging their own quests because that's the cheat code to unlock ultimate power because as we all know wizards have no sense of right or wrong that might be almost interesting. Still BIG NO to the pregnancy one, but a wizard building a house and doing it wrong on purpose to gain power while completely disregarding the needs of the person who wanted it in the first place sounds like a game I might think about playing.

KirbyKhan posted:

I enchanted my dog house to levitate with Gale speed. My Snoopy always dreamed of being the Red Baron, but he didn't read far enough into the history book to learn that the Germans lost the war.

+2 Dispair

Absolutely this, if this was the game it might approach good.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 17:00

Evil Mastermind: Apr 28, 2008

Ultimately the problem is that Monte is trying to procedural-ize something that shouldn't (and really, can't) have a hard procedure. Character arcs are great, but if you want to make them mechanics then you have to keep those mechanics loose and vague so people can make their own arcs and choices.

Those aren't arcs, they're checklists. They're how people who've been poisoned by TVTropes think creating fiction works: you take a bunch of concepts, put them together like "story LEGOs" and bam, fiction achieved.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 17:01

DalaranJ: Apr 15, 2008; Yosuke will now die for you.

KirbyKhan posted:

I enchanted my dog house to levitate with Gale speed. My Snoopy always dreamed of being the Red Baron, but he didn't read far enough into the history book to learn that the Germans lost the war.

+2 Dispair

Now you�re thinking with Chuubos.

DalaranJ fucked around with this message at 17:10 on Aug 6, 2019

# ? Aug 6, 2019 17:03

Angrymog: Jan 29, 2012; Really Madcats

Zereth posted:

... Can... can you have more than one Arc going at a time? Could you just be the Deadbeat-est Dad fathering kids left and right so you can farm Acumen and Joy/Despair and then just gently caress off? Because that would mean it's mechanically better to be the father for this one. Although presumably you could do Magic Bullshit to "father" a child while not equipped with the right parts, we've seen people with poo poo like "my head is a literal book" in the art.

I think it costs more XP to start the arc than you get from the impregnation stage?

Angrymog fucked around with this message at 20:03 on Aug 6, 2019

# ? Aug 6, 2019 17:06

Big Mad Drongo: Nov 10, 2006

EthanSteele posted:

The concept is not bad, encouraging players to accept their characters loving up and even desire to gently caress up in the interest of good stories is what Burning Wheel and Chuubo's are good at. It's the execution and that tying having a miscarriage and your wife dying in childbirth directly to your advancement is real bad news. A narrative where that happens? Not for me, but nothing inherently wrong with that as a story. Making it so you do that directly for xp so you can learn Fireball is real nasty trash.

If the game even took it to a meta level and made it so your stupid idiot wizards were intentionally sabotaging their own quests because that's the cheat code to unlock ultimate power because as we all know wizards have no sense of right or wrong that might be almost interesting. Still BIG NO to the pregnancy one, but a wizard building a house and doing it wrong on purpose to gain power while completely disregarding the needs of the person who wanted it in the first place sounds like a game I might think about playing.

Absolutely this, if this was the game it might approach good.

This totally sounds like it could be an Unknown Armies thing. Call them Bunglemancers, colloquially known as Screw-Ups or Failsons.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 17:16

Zereth: Jul 8, 2003

Angrymog posted:

I think it costs more XP to start the arc than you get from the impregnation stage?

That... doesn't have anything to do with what you quoted?

# ? Aug 6, 2019 17:17

EthanSteele: Nov 18, 2007; I can hear you

Big Mad Drongo posted:

This totally sounds like it could be an Unknown Armies thing. Call them Bunglemancers, colloquially known as Screw-Ups or Failsons.

You're right, you're totally right pissss

# ? Aug 6, 2019 17:18

Big Mad Drongo: Nov 10, 2006

The most feared Bunglemancers, of course, were a trio of Dukes known only as The Stooges: they terrorized well-meaning countesses and other society ladies well into the middle of the 20th century.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 17:54

Angrymog: Jan 29, 2012; Really Madcats

Zereth posted:

That... doesn't have anything to do with what you quoted?

Doesn't it? I'm phone posting, sorry. Stupid things happen.

Someone was talking about a male character just spamming step one of the Birth arc with different women.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 18:21

Zereth: Jul 8, 2003

Angrymog posted:

Doesn't it? I'm phone posting, sorry. Stupid things happen.

Someone was talking about a male character just spamming step one of the Birth arc with different women.

No, I was talking about running lots of it in paralell and then loving off the instant it resolves.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 18:23

Angrymog: Jan 29, 2012; Really Madcats

Zereth posted:

No, I was talking about running lots of it in paralell and then loving off the instant it resolves.

Right, but I think you'd need to initiate a new copy of the arc for each parallel process. I don't think you can fork an already running arc.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 18:27

inklesspen: Oct 17, 2007; Here I am coming, with the good news of me, and you hate it. You can think only of the bell and how much I have it, and you are never the goose. I will run around with my bell as much as I want and you will make despair.; Buglord

PurpleXVI posted:

Love the retrospective, Jerik. But as a recommendation, you may want to start each post with a consistent bolded title, it helps the nice guy who maintains the F&F archive when he's hunting the thread for posts that need to be hauled over there.

Thanks for suggesting that. However...

Not a guy.

(And yeah, I'm currently indexing page 1097. It's fun!)

# ? Aug 6, 2019 18:51

Zereth: Jul 8, 2003

Angrymog posted:

Right, but I think you'd need to initiate a new copy of the arc for each parallel process. I don't think you can fork an already running arc.

... Yeah?

# ? Aug 6, 2019 18:58

PoontifexMacksimus: Feb 14, 2012

KirbyKhan posted:

You hear about Wizard Rick? He had his 8th kid and leaned Disintegrating Beam. Gonna go to his next baby shower to ask which dope spell he's gonna name his 9th after.

Actually raising the child is highly XP inefficient though, which, certainly brings some implications.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 19:00

KirbyKhan: Mar 20, 2009; I purchased and 100%'d Huniecam so quickly that I still get friends shaming me over it. And I deserve to be shamed. But I did not praise the game. I called it fucked up. That's how fucked up it is: it's up there with Princess Maker as far as poster body counts.; Soiled Meat

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

Actually raising the child is highly XP inefficient though, which, certainly brings some implications.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 19:02

Zereth: Jul 8, 2003

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

Actually raising the child is highly XP inefficient though, which, certainly brings some implications.

hence why it's more efficient to have them not survive, since you need both despair AND joy

get your Joy from, like, building a bunch of doghouses or something

# ? Aug 6, 2019 19:20

Kaza42: Oct 3, 2013; Blood and Souls and all that

Messing up a painting and suffering a miscarriage: both equally traumatic and likely to change your life

# ? Aug 6, 2019 19:46

DalaranJ: Apr 15, 2008; Yosuke will now die for you.

Kaza42 posted:

Messing up a painting and suffering a miscarriage: both equally traumatic and likely to change your life

My paintings are like my children. (Mechanically)

# ? Aug 6, 2019 20:03

Angrymog: Jan 29, 2012; Really Madcats

Zereth posted:

... Yeah?

Firstly, I did quote the wrong part of your sentence, so I've edited that to be the bit I intended to quote (as I said, I was phone posting, and sometimes it goes wrong.)

My point is that it costs two acumen to kick off a Birth arc, but you only get one back for Impregnation, therefore you need to stay involved at least to the point that there's a complication to make your Accumen back on it.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 20:06

Zereth: Jul 8, 2003

I'm pretty sure the real prize is the Joy/Despair anyway.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 20:07

PurpleXVI: Oct 30, 2011; Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

I'll be honest and say I haven't been reading the details on Invisible Sun because holy poo poo it sounds like, somehow, a generic mess. Which is weird because there are so many individually out-there elements, but just tossing them all in at once is the RPG design equivalent of using all the bright colours at once together and just getting a brownish mess.

But, since you earn Acumen from these EXCITING NARRATIVE ARCS, but also need to spend Acumen to start them. Does that mean it's possible to paint yourself into a corner where you don't have the Acumen to earn more Acumen?

# ? Aug 6, 2019 20:10

Bieeanshee: Aug 21, 2000; Not keen on keening.; Grimey Drawer

Big Mad Drongo posted:

This totally sounds like it could be an Unknown Armies thing. Call them Bunglemancers, colloquially known as Screw-Ups or Failsons.

In flat earther circles, they're known as Johnsons.

# ? Aug 6, 2019 22:00

StratGoatCom: Aug 6, 2019; Our security is guaranteed by being able to melt the eyeballs of any other forum's denizens at 15 minutes notice

Young Freud posted:

Yeah, it would be real easy to just push EP2 ten years forward of the first edition and the Autonomist League is in collapse because their techno-anarchist utopia got co-opted by factions that gamed their own system. The Hypercorps are putting infogees into Freeman biomorphs for easy labor and disposing them when they have become unprofitable. The Ultimates have become just another group of ExHumans, who are tearing across the habitats converting, torturing, or slaughtering what's left of transhumanity, because cruelty is now the point of their evolution. The only really safe place where you won't be transhumanly exploited in the solar system is the Jovian Republic, which is because they use the old-fashioned, bioconservative-sanctioned methods of oppression to ensure societal compliance.

Add in that the only reason why both sides aren't fighting one another is that (A) half of Mars is literally ungovernable due to open revolt, (B) the Morningstar lot are this close to throwing in with the AA to get rid of the PC, (C) both sides are fighting tooth and nail to stop the Ultimates sizing their interstellar holdings and both the Martian and Iapetan TQZ have gone active and mean that all the concerned parties are squashing an exsurgency a week when it's quiet...

Flavivirus posted:

Jesus, I was a big fan of EP 1e but that section on trans issues is loving yikes. Even just the assertion that the non-trans population is totally a-ok with different gendered bodies is completely tone deaf. Not to mention the old faithful of immediately conflating trans issues and drag

EP seems to have this special ability to be remarkably yikes about minorities yet goes mostly undetected. Lessee, we got Devotees, which is an entire stereotype racist voudou adventure with every trope from mind control to capering evil native medicine providers (literally grinding up cortical stacks) with the old racist urban legend about minority gangs killing folks as an initiation added on top :yikes:

, we have literally giving a religious minority persecuted as devil worshippers exsurgent powers so they can play magic arab, as well as most likely pulling a chakotay with their myths, as I've done some searching and I've yet to see any mention of Ny�knikiin outside of EP :catstare:

; doesn't even look like any anglicized Kurdish I ever seen, although I am willing to admit I'm wrong here. I don't think I ever saw a asian origin hab that didn't have some degree of mob infiltration of the government either?

Also, they used pansexuality for folks willing to gently caress uplifts.

Ithle01 posted:

EP has always been like a Silicon Valley nerd's techno-futurist ideal world and is about as well thought as most Silicon Valley bullshit..

Mixed with their idea of the apocalypse and their specific complex about superscience fueled :byoscience:

; that core mix, and how badly it causes themes to :zaurg:

is one of the core issues that plagues the design of the universe and game.

Is it just me, or do I get the feel that things went badly sideways during the EP 2.0 dev cycle? We know that there was some kind of significant breach of trust that had come out between Jack Graham and Rob Boyle around, estimating, a bit past the half-way mark. IIRC, he was a major setting guru and his departure took some material with him - IIRC, there was an early version of the sample character list that had Carter, a character of his that notably is missing him at release. I'm wondering if his departure was a major inflection point in the game's dev and caused some kind of major thrashing for a while.

# ? Aug 7, 2019 00:55

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# ? Jan 17, 2025 11:05

The Skeep: Sep 15, 2007; That Chicken sure loves to drum...sticks

Thats one fine looking Barbecue Pit...

# ? Aug 7, 2019 03:53

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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