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I think it's a fair assumption that a lot of people who popularized tabletop RPGs and studded leather really liked Judas Priest.
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Nov 30, 2016 17:47
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Bieeardo posted:I remember a friend explaining the 'Gainax Girl', and how Rei and Asuka subverted whatever it was supposed to be. I can't remember anything else, because I think I was stoned at the time. I may have thought it was overthought twaddle too, like the people who swore up and down that including crucifixion and Quabbalistic imagery meant it was deep and meaningful. Chu Chu died for your sins.
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Nov 30, 2016 17:53
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Night10194 posted:Say hello to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e. Right. Then back to my other weird projects. (Does "Mahjiqua" sound like a sufficiently-pretentious name for "magic"?) wiegieman posted:"Studded Leather" is such a peculiar thing. It's persisted even though everyone knows it's actually the result of someone not understanding what a brigandine was when they saw it and thought "oh, that's just some leather with a little metal, it must be better." But we need a kind of leather armor for warriors to wear. They'd feel like total dandies otherwise!
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Nov 30, 2016 17:57
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Green Intern posted:Man, what a bunch of studs. That looks like Walter Velez, who did a lot of paperback covers in the 80s. Dude loved drawing armor with lots of buckles and studs and straps and detail. The Thieves' World boxed set was pretty awesome, though. Besides stats for the various characters and things in the books, it included a huge map of Sanctuary, tables of random city business and encounter generators, building floor plans, and for some reason a copy of Poul Anderson's essay "On Thud and Blunder' which, as it happens, goes nicely with the current discussion on realism in fantasy. There was also the Thieves' Guild series, which was all about giving thieves more options. ("The Duke's Dress Ball" in Thieves' Guild 3 is pretty interesting because it's one of the first published adventures I can remember that emphasized socializing, sneaking, and clue-gathering rather than dungeon crawling.)
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Nov 30, 2016 18:16
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My dad had a big binder with the City of Haven (No relation to Haven: City of Violence) stuff for Thieves guild which I mostly remember featuring a pair of halfling entertainers called Bing and Bob who were literally just 3 foot tall Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. The adventure hook they were featured in was the plot of one of the Road movies.
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Nov 30, 2016 18:31
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Selachian posted:The Thieves' World boxed set was pretty awesome, though. Besides stats for the various characters and things in the books, it included a huge map of Sanctuary, tables of random city business and encounter generators, building floor plans, and for some reason a copy of Poul Anderson's essay "On Thud and Blunder' which, as it happens, goes nicely with the current discussion on realism in fantasy. Started reading this, but had to stop because I got to the part where Anderson calls katanas "marvels of metallurgy" over the "cruder blades of Europe."
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Nov 30, 2016 20:09
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ZeroCount posted:So what I'm hearing is that Middenarde is terrible at being the shitfarmer game it pretends it is but it is actually quite serviceable for playing Exalted. I'm quoting this for the express purpose of getting it into the F&F archive, because it made me cackle like a madman when I read it. Middenarde  4 - KNACKS We're still on Knacks, about halfway through, let's see if there's anything else interesting in there. Miraculous Savior posted:Requirements: Heal VI Confounding the Grim Reaper posted:Requirements: Heal VI, Miraculous Savior Low. Fantasy. Adventures. With. High. Mortality. You know, unless Doctor loving Frankenstein is in your goddamn party! Good thing you don't have to wait for a thunderstorm, either, because the guy with Anachronism can build a simple battery and the wizard can cast Lightning Bolt on the machinery. Meanwhile, over on the Influence side of the Knacks, we're continuing with the "why do I need a loving feat for this poo poo?"-trend from the combat knacks, as you need special knacks to piss people off, intimidate them or distract them. How would you ever do any of this without special training. Also, seeming harmless so you'll be ignored in combat requires healing skill as a prerequisite, rather than any sort of acting talent. Suggestion posted:Requirements: Influence VI, Skilled Manipulator Also hey there, mind control! Obviously still limited by the limits on the Influence skill I noted in, I think, the very first post, that is that it really can't twist people's intentions THAT far, but anyone who doesn't hate you will magically do anything that they could be technically bribed into doing, now, for free. Skilled Manipulator, the prereq that it states may be useful, has the effect of people not knowing that you just manipulated them. Now, I have to point out, that most people, if they know you're loving with them to get them riled up, or angry, or sad, or to make them ignore you or go along with what you're saying, won't do it. Much of that poo poo only works because people are unaware of the manipulation. So what happens without Skilled Manipulator for all those other skills? Do people go along with it for a minute, realize you were a fuckface, then keep all the gold you bribed them with and not do what you said after all? For that matter, Influence is affected by bribing people, and it's still an influence check when you are, for instance, trying to incite them to violence and get them angry. Is that fluffed as throwing your wallet at their face over and over? Flicking gold coins at their nose until they get really pissed? It's the same for intimidate. The Investigation skills, again, start in on the whole "why do I need a feat for this?"-thing. quote:You can tell what left that mark. By succeeding on an Investigation check at the GM’s discretion, you can determine through the properties of a mark or blemish, exactly what caused it. The scuff of a boot versus a shoe, what type of knife blade nicked it, and what profession would have wielded such a blade, how heavy or strong the person or thing marking it may have been, et cetera. Then again, other times you get to literally REWIND TIME. quote:Seeing into the past can sometimes be more useful than the future. With this knack, you can systematically rewind a room by rearranging it, so that you can get a clear image of how it looked at some point in the past. The DC is how many hours in the past you wish to reconstruct it, minus how many hours it has been since it was last disturbed (or days, if the room is rarely touched). This can give you an idea of who did what in it, even re-staging events. There's a knack that's required to hear stuff that you haven't specifically declared that you're trying to listen in on, a set of knacks that build up to literal echolocation. Seven skillpoints into lockpicking, you finally get to even attempt to disarm traps. Actually knowing what stuff is worth is also a knack roughly that distance up the Mercantilism tree. And the apex-level Mercantilism ability is literal mind control, if they fail the initial roll and you sell them something "for a favor," they have to complete that favor. They can be annoyed at you and unwilling to go along with future bargains, but as per how its written, they're "bound" to complete the task for you. Psychology lets you just steal your opponent's combat abilities, even if you've never seen them displayed, just BAM, now you know them as well as he does and can use them against him... or anyone, in fact, it doesn't actually list an expiry point for these "mimicked" knacks. The only requirement is that they're learned from your "opponent." So I guess the "optimal" strategy is to have one combat monster character, and everyone else just focuses on psychology so they can copy whatever he learns by sparring with him, because someone you're sparring with is technically an opponent. Then afterwards you call his mom a whore and he keels over for 12 hours, crying to himself while you walk away. Crippling Word posted:Requirements: Psychology VI, Disrupt Concentration, Mimic Also since all they can do is "defend themselves from attack," that would imply that they can't, for instance, swim. So if you use this on someone trying to swim a river, they'll sink weeping to the bottom and drown. Just A Rat posted:Requirements: Stealth IV, Shadow-Walker It's a shame so many of these knacks are attached to a bad system that loudly declares it wants to do the opposite of delivering this kind of absurd fun. Because some of these aren't actually BAD. Mimic could, with some limits, be interesting. This seems like an amazing stealth apex power. Crippling Word is a great way to give a social character, a somewhat overpowered, way to join in combat. In any case, the remaining knacks are just boring +x bonuses, so I'm gonna skip those.  5 - EQUIPMENT This isn't gonna be a very interesting chapter, though I want to note that there are eight kinds of polearms, but only one type of bow(no difference between longbows and shortbows). Also everything you're wielding will inevitably fall apart, armor and weapons both, just from natural use. Because truly, the most compelling part of any game is to track your loving equipment's HP with every swing you make. This chapter also encourages the GM to track how much PC's are eating and drinking, and whether or not they should suffer penalties from dehydration or malnutrition. At least the different kinds of food and drink don't have different hydration values and nutrition values. Herbs posted:All herbs weigh ¼ unit and cost 8d, and take 2 MH to craft. They can be used to treat wounds by making a Heal check with a DC equal to the number of VP the patient has lost to determine which humours are imbalanced. The physician then applies a poultice of the correct herbs, made using a mortar and pestle (½ MH), and the patient gains 1 bonus VP while resting for each different herb applied. If no mortar and pestle is available, the herbs can be applied raw at one third effectiveness. We also clearly needed stats for nine different breeds of dog and three different breeds of cat. As a happy note, cats can't kill you in a single attack, it'll take at least five, or three if they're hitting your head. It took me a while to figure this out, since your maximum and starting Vitality Points are listed nowhere in the .PDF, instead being hidden away on the pre-made character sheet. If that character sheet ever gets taken down or removed, the players are poo poo outta luck. In the course of trying to find this out, I also noted that actually attacking someone, is the 28th sub-heading in the Combat chapter, rather than, say, the first or second. Also, a bite from a dog will do more damage than getting stabbed with a shortsword or getting impaled by a javelin. In fact, dogs are loving dangerous in this game, you'd rather be beaten by a mace or eat an arrow from a bow than getting bitten by a dog. This is also the chapter that has the spells, and they are literally D&D spells. Fireball, Owl's Wisdom, Lightning Bolt, Flying, Invisibility, Hold Person, Haste, Blink... thoroughly unimaginative. When I pointed this out to the creator, he told me that this game was actually a hobby that he'd been working on for the last 7 years, and that none of the friends who'd played it had EVER complained about this, so clearly I was wrong.  6 - PLAYING THE GAME This chapter starts off with some of the dullest details on carrying and lifting capacity I've ever read. Do some people actually enjoy this sort of petty bookkeeping bullshit in their PnP RPG's? Oh and also there are luck points, which we get a finite amount of, one for each level-up, non-recoverable unless GM arbitration says we get some. They can be used for rerolls and for healing less HP than a day of rest, so they don't really do THAT much to tip the balance considering how sparse they are. KNOWN AS LEVELING UP posted:A character’s skill progression is modeled through the gaining of levels. A level is gained when a character receives enough XP to pass a threshold known as XPTNL, and they receive eight hours of sleep. The character’s XP is then reset to zero, and they receive a new XPTNL equal to 9 plus the square of the character’s level. This is explained in more detail in section 2.2. I've literally never read a more spergy description of gaining XP and leveling up. Jesus Christ. Malnutrition posted:You can’t survive off of hardtack or travel rations forever. Characters need to eat real food or they will suffer adverse effects from a limited diet. Every time a character eats a meal, they should make a 3d6 nutrition check with the DC listed for that food. If they succeed, they suffer no adverse effects. Otherwise, they must make a note of how many checks they have failed, in total, since the last time they had a filling meal, and suffer all of the appropriate penalties: Oh and the malnutrition penalties are permanent. Generally this chapter is nothing but petty ways for a GM to hunt you for not being omniscient. "Ah, but you only bought NORMAL pants at chargen! Now there's a blizzard and you don't have fur pants! Roll to save vs hypothermia!" "Roll to save vs dysentery!" "Roll to save vs malnutrition!" Dysentery posted:Dysentery can be contracted from tainted foods or water. At the GM’s discretion, he or she may secretly roll a 3d6 when a player consumes food or water and determine whether they suffer dysentery Also on average, any food you don't cook yourself seems to have roughly a 50% chance of giving you dysentery, which has a very real chance of killing your character. The section on how the GM can kill you with dysentery, malaria, smallpox and syphilis is bookended by the rules for throwing objects at stationary targets(or willing catchers) at one end, and the rules for attacking a stationary target at the far end. Combat rules coming up in the next post. Let's see how HIGH MORTALITY this game gets.
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Nov 30, 2016 20:35
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Green Intern posted:Started reading this, but had to stop because I got to the part where Anderson calls katanas "marvels of metallurgy" over the "cruder blades of Europe." The worth of any heartbreaker can be measured in how much cheese it adds to the allmighty tank-cleavers from glorious Nippon. PurpleXVI posted:A character’s skill progression is modeled through the gaining of levels. A level is gained when a character receives enough XP to pass a threshold known as XPTNL, and they receive eight hours of sleep. The character’s XP is then reset to zero, and they receive a new XPTNL equal to 9 plus the square of the character’s level. This is explained in more detail in section 2.2. XPTNL is a great term to use in your name. I may borrow this for the name of a Great Old One. Doresh fucked around with this message at 20:59 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 20:57
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Where the heck does the "you can only level up after a full night's sleep" thing come from? Is there something completely game-breaking about having people level up in the daytime or what? I feel like most of the weird rules that D&D has came from just like, this one argument Gary Gygax had with one player this one time, and Gary was like "no gently caress you you have to sleep to level up" and now it's an Incontrovertible Law of the Universe that every heartbreaker includes out of "realism."
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Nov 30, 2016 21:14
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Doresh posted:
It's probably just short for XP To Next Level. But if it weren't written in all caps... yeah that's sufficiently Old One.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:16
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megane posted:Where the heck does the "you can only level up after a full night's sleep" thing come from? Is there something completely game-breaking about having people level up in the daytime or what? Morrowind did it?
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Nov 30, 2016 21:20
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AweStriker posted:It's probably just short for XP To Next Level. But if it weren't written in all caps... yeah that's sufficiently Old One. Just needs an additional apostrophe or two for that extra bit of Lovecraft.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:21
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Just wanna say that it's a shame that Middenarde is such a shitshow because man, the art is absolutely gorgeous and impressionistic. It's obvious where that $5k of the Kickstarter money was spent. Too bad the rest of it is hilariously bad.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:25
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So basically what I'm seeing is that the PCs can build towards the long-term goal of getting stupid rich by inventing the battery and then using it to reanimate the recently dead, making their day-to-day business being starting the industrial revolution four centuries early by using serf labor to push cranks to turn batteries while their major source of grants is reanimating princes for gold when they accidentally die from hemophilia. ...actually, poo poo, that's just thinking small. I'd immediately sink everything into medicine and stealing ideas from the future to revolutionize healthcare and medicine and then start a college in addition to the Revolution.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:30
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megane posted:Where the heck does the "you can only level up after a full night's sleep" thing come from? Is there something completely game-breaking about having people level up in the daytime or what? Probably since, for most of the classes in D&D, leveling up in the daytime actually doesn't do anything. Spells only refresh after a night's sleep, same with class features. The only thing you'd get out of levelling up mid-day is HP, a feat(maybe), and some skill points.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:31
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Night10194 posted:Morrowind did it? I think it's an old D&D trope. I swear I remember running into it in the SSI games.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:31
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PurpleXVI posted:When I pointed this out to the creator, he told me that this game was actually a hobby that he'd been working on for the last 7 years, and that none of the friends who'd played it had EVER complained about this, so clearly I was wrong. I want to frame this sentence.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:40
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Young Freud posted:I think it's an old D&D trope. I swear I remember running into it in the SSI games. In Pools of Radiance you had to go back to town and pay to train at the relevant guild to level up
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Nov 30, 2016 21:41
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Evil Mastermind posted:I want to frame this sentence. It's quite along the line with Paizo who like to boast that Pathfinder is built upon 10+ of experience with the system and an army of 50,000 playtesters. We all now how that turned out.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:48
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Evil Mastermind posted:I want to frame this sentence. It explains so much.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:52
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If I had to hazard a guess sleeping to level feels natural in so far as sleeping is the moment in most of these games where your energy is restored so it makes sense. It also, in a more classical game where you're constantly earning fractional bits of a level, a more elegant way to ensure players only need to dick around with their character sheet and stats during downtime rather than in the middle of a dungeon or a gods forbid a fight. Needing to sleep to level is also, funnily enough in the most recent Final Fantasy game and the hero is literally powered by his constant adventuring naps.
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Nov 30, 2016 21:56
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Doresh posted:It's quite along the line with Paizo who like to boast that Pathfinder is built upon 10+ of experience with the system and an army of 50,000 playtesters. We all now how that turned out. A horrible pay to play MMO that cratered from orbit like everyone with a functional brain said it would?
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Nov 30, 2016 21:57
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It keeps your players from pestering you for XP on a kobold-by-kobold basis, because they can't suddenly level up in the middle of combat, for one thing. There's always the matter of surviving their eight hours' rest, too...
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Nov 30, 2016 22:18
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RE: Gritty, semi-realistic low fantasy games, I'd love to see a high mortality game designed around one-shots, with the setting conceit being yeah, most adventurers die young and horribly, but grab the treasure from a dungeon or two and you are set for life. You're now a mid-tier celebrity, possibly minor nobility if you went on your mission for a proper royal, you never have to work another drat day, and you're drowning in attractive members of your preferred sex. In my head the game would be in two halves, the first revolving around a horribly deadly adventure, and the players who bit it would use the downtime stat up some local leaders/come up with some social norms for the second half, where everyone roleplays how the surviving heroes settle in their new lives/spectacularly fail to settle in their new lives/use their crazy loot to challenge the status quo through politics/violence. Big Mad Drongo fucked around with this message at 22:20 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 22:18
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Hostile V posted:So basically what I'm seeing is that the PCs can build towards the long-term goal of getting stupid rich by inventing the battery and then using it to reanimate the recently dead, making their day-to-day business being starting the industrial revolution four centuries early by using serf labor to push cranks to turn batteries while their major source of grants is reanimating princes for gold when they accidentally die from hemophilia. What you want to do with your batteries is make bleach.
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Nov 30, 2016 22:35
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Nessus posted:Jethro Tull (the farm man, not the prog rock band) invented his seed drill in 1700, and there were similar designs in China before then. This plus a few innovations in how to do crop cover and the like and you'd drastically increase agricultural production in a rather sustainable way. In the near term, wealth and free time for you and your serfs; in the mid and long term, population growth. If you don't mind primitive seed drills and only use European dates, they were in Bologna by 1602, making it even easier to reach (though Tull's was better, especially when combined with the horse hoe, which he also designed). Using non-European dates, they already existed then, since the Sumerians had a single-tube version and - as you note - China was using iron seed drills some time before the birth of Christ. edit: Originally I had the Venetian patent date mentioned from the 1500s, but apparently no details of the actual mechanism survive, while a description does for Cavalina's design in 1602. Either way, you can shave a good century off, saving you some valuable skill points! Prism fucked around with this message at 22:48 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 22:41
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Nessus posted:Jethro Tull (the farm man, not the prog rock band) invented his seed drill in 1700, and there were similar designs in China before then. This plus a few innovations in how to do crop cover and the like and you'd drastically increase agricultural production in a rather sustainable way. In the near term, wealth and free time for you and your serfs; in the mid and long term, population growth. So basically I think in any scenario where a game bills itself as "grimdark danger and high mortality and gritty realism" yet still includes weird shenanigans, the best thing to do is either: Short term play: see how much poo poo you can gently caress up before you die. Long term play: see how much you can raise the quality of life nationally to make things suck less for everyone and help save the world that way. Hopefully your DM doesn't turn the tables on the latter in a petulant way by being like "good job idiots, you derailed history and ruined the future" and make a big stink over it.
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Nov 30, 2016 22:48
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Hostile V posted:Hmm, good point. If the latter, ask them where all the spellcasting went.
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Nov 30, 2016 22:52
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Hostile V posted:Hmm, good point.
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Nov 30, 2016 23:05
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Apparently you have to spend feat slots to know which end of the spear to hold, just like in real historical warfare!
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Nov 30, 2016 23:35
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SirPhoebos posted:Chu Chu died for your sins. I think the fact that Chu Chu was Gear sized made it extra ridiculous.
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Dec 1, 2016 02:53
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Middenarde might have the worst gap between theme and mechanics that I've ever seen. Theme: It is a harsh and gritty world. Life is short. You will not prosper. Mechanics: Revive the dead with batteries. Erase yourself from the memories of others. Kill a man by calling him fat.
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Dec 1, 2016 04:14
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ZeroCount posted:Middenarde might have the worst gap between theme and mechanics that I've ever seen. Admittedly those mechanics look kinda sweet (in concept, not execution). As a concept, a game where you play historical people who have to choose a couple inventions from 200 years in the future to come up with in a flash of insight and then change the world from there would be awesome.
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Dec 1, 2016 04:16
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Why not just have character death lead to some kind of progression? Your peasent-cum-soldier bites it after an adventure, but the next man or woman you roll up gets to start off where they left level wise. Dungeonmans this poo poo.
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Dec 1, 2016 04:37
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Also a Watt is a measurement of energy over time - a joule/second. If you're Frankensteining it up that is usually portrayed as a delivered in a single instant in which case you'd need less than 20 joules to raise the dead, which you could probably get just by sliding the body down a hill since the rule doesn't say the power has to be in the form of electricity. If it has to be over time then you'd need a big rear end battery even if you were using lightning, because a bolt's peak of 1TW for an instant will blow anything else. Don't get scientific terms in your fiction, guys.
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Dec 1, 2016 06:59
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hyphz posted:Also a Watt is a measurement of energy over time - a joule/second. If you're Frankensteining it up that is usually portrayed as a delivered in a single instant in which case you'd need less than 20 joules to raise the dead, which you could probably get just by sliding the body down a hill since the rule doesn't say the power has to be in the form of electricity.
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Dec 1, 2016 07:01
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hyphz posted:Also a Watt is a measurement of energy over time - a joule/second. If you're Frankensteining it up that is usually portrayed as a delivered in a single instant in which case you'd need less than 20 joules to raise the dead, which you could probably get just by sliding the body down a hill since the rule doesn't say the power has to be in the form of electricity. "Excuse me while I chuck this stitched-up corpse out of a window..." *flop* *splat* *groan* "IT'S ALIII... wait, poo poo."
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Dec 1, 2016 07:02
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You can also easily impart 20 Joules of energy by gently slapping the corpse in the face. In Middenarde it's not significantly harder to wake the dead than it is to wake somebody who's asleep.
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Dec 1, 2016 07:19
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Ah, so this is where the high-mortality concept comes in- it's no harder to wake the dead than those asleep, so everyone is effectively identical to "dead" for around 6-8 hours a night.
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Dec 1, 2016 07:21
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I feel like the whole frankenstein deal is distracting us from the fact that this grim n gritty ultra-mortality shitfarmer game lets you reattach severed limbs by slapping a poultice on it.
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Dec 1, 2016 07:35
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