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JcDent posted:Yeah, it's one of those fantasy curses where the authors forget that the curse should be torturous to the one cursed. Flesh eaters go from a potential of life endless shame for eating fellow man and the indelible horror of seeing loved ones waste away and die to an idealized version of Arthurian mythos. They don't suffer, everyone else does - which doesn't feel like a curse.
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Dec 7, 2020 23:44
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Nessus posted:I noticed that in WFRP and in 40k, most of these curses and evil urges and poo poo are usually portrayed as being terrifying for the people on the other end of them - the horrible thing is that this person is now a super mutant, and perhaps that it is YOUR LOVED ONE or that they were LAYING IN WAIT ANYWHERE. The actual curses and so forth do not seem to actually be that miserable for the bearer after an adjustment period. Compare the entire rolling angst train in Vampire: the Masquerade to Vlad von Carstein. Well Vampirism was never much of a curse in Warhammer. The actual curse part came from Nagash granting Vampires their weakness.
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Dec 8, 2020 00:11
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....this is what happened when AoS's first authors were told "we're getting rid of those gay French knight boys because we can't copyright them, make Bretonnia properly GRIMDARK", isn't it?
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Dec 8, 2020 00:44
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Loxbourne posted:....this is what happened when AoS's first authors were told "we're getting rid of those gay French knight boys because we can't copyright them, make Bretonnia properly GRIMDARK", isn't it?
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Dec 8, 2020 00:53
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Loxbourne posted:....this is what happened when AoS's first authors were told "we're getting rid of those gay French knight boys because we can't copyright them, make Bretonnia properly GRIMDARK", isn't it? Everything done to Bretonnia in the End Times and the like tells me that someone at GW hated Bretonnia about as much as I like them.
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Dec 8, 2020 01:08
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JcDent posted:Yeah, it's one of those fantasy curses where the authors forget that the curse should be torturous to the one cursed. Flesh eaters go from a potential of life endless shame for eating fellow man and the indelible horror of seeing loved ones waste away and die to an idealized version of Arthurian mythos. They don't suffer, everyone else does - which doesn't feel like a curse. Fantasy Coronavirus, not Fantasy Man-Made Plague
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Dec 8, 2020 01:12
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Red Markets: A Game of Economic Horror Part 3: The Crash and the Blight  This is another extremely long section, so we’re splitting it. A lot. We’re splitting the splits, actually, because Gnat/Stokes just will not shut up about a play-by-play of everything that ever happened. For now, let’s talk about the Blight. It’s zombie magic. It’s zombie magic all the way, down. The Blight is Red Markets’ version of the zombie plague. It’s also not a plague, or a virus, or a parasite, or anything. It’s just “black poo poo” that makes more zombies. The setting acknowledges this, but it’s also pretty disappointing for a game that otherwise takes itself fairly seriously (algorithms aside) to just give zero concern whatsoever to suspension of belief. Absolutely nothing about the way zombies work, biologically, makes sense, even compared to other zombie fiction; for some people that's nitpicking, but as a GM, understanding why something in the setting works the way it does is helpful to actually do anything with it or to homebrew things that are still "fitting". What we do know Blight is is a pair of magical substance-organisms that make two different kinds of zombies. Hot strain Blight makes Vectors, your 28 Days Later fast zombies who are still alive. They last hours, tops, because all their muscles run at 100% and they can’t self-maintain, setting aside any combat damage. Dead Vectors’ hot strain turns into cold strain that raises them as “casualties”, regular zombies whose nervous system gets turned into parasitic Blight tissue and get puppeted around. It’s a nice way to get both flavors of zombie in fiction into the mix, depending on what you and your players are into; casualties will always show up eventually, but Vectors give you a different style to work with. Yes, headshots work on both of them. Both types of zombie also happen to be creepy as poo poo. Vectors on account of being alive, turning in minutes and dying in days, and being conscious enough to scream apologies at the people they’re killing; casualties in some ways we’ll come around to later, but in how their actions call back to their old lives, with some fragment of the mind maybe intact. Plus you get all the usual zombie tropes, except your zombies have cords of black poo poo trailing out of them. There are images attached to it but gory body horror isn't something I'm subjecting you to. Okay, so you get bit, saliva gets in the wound, you get infected, you turn into a Vector and poo poo’s over. Right? No, it’s a little more complicated. Immune and Latents are where you get some of the moral bastardry of the setting. There’s an anti-infection drug that turns hot Blight cold, Supressin K-7864. Expensive, but when the alternative is turning into a zombie, it’s helpful. Where does Supressin come from? Well, there’s a handful of people who are naturally immune, with no common traits whatsoever. You just find out through blood testing. You get Supressin from their bone marrow. K-7864 is the number of test subjects it took to figure that out and find a useful donor. Every time it wrapped past "9999", increment a letter - 107,854 victims, for a drug that only halfway works. The more humane scientists and labs tap the marrow periodically to draw safe amounts out; the amoral labs and the criminal element just kill you and crack the whole bone for a payday. Needless to say, Immune PCs should not be spreading that news around. Or, if you really need your own quick payday, you can sell that marrow off - that’s mechanized later in the book. This all gets covered at length when we start talking about CDC kidnapping squads, "medical conscription," and the spreadsheet of doom. Immunity is another magical thing, there’s no “immune system response”, Blight just stops affecting them when it’s injected; "it just quits". So naturally Suppressin should do the same, right? No. Latents are what you get when Supressin works. The Blight turns cold and starts going parasite, but it can’t do anything to a living brain. So you get to walk around in constant agony with a spare nervous system, black veins and sinews all over your body, and a permanently necrotic bite wound. On the plus side, you’re immune! You're one of the only people (alongside your actual Immune buddies up there) who can safely go into melee combat and not have to spend all your bounty on bullets, though brute force can still kill you same as any human. On the down side again, you’re infectious just like a regular zombie (and you still transfer hot strain); no physical contact with anyone but other Latents, separate living quarters from the "normal" folks... Oh, and you get killed? You go zombie in seconds, because your entire body is already blight-threaded. Latents are treated a whole lot like Fallout ghouls; there’s a handful of places that will accept them and bring them into communities, there’s a lot of places that want nothing to do with them whatsoever and reject them, and there’s another handful with shoot-on-sight orders. Including the entire Recession. Latents don’t get the happy ending option. There’s some hints near the end about Aberrants as a third class of zombie, but they’re not really documented on account of all being weird compared to the rest. No details there; that’s a hint for GMs to go look in their section!  There’s a handful of these “posters” scattered through the book to set tones. With all the questions about what the Blight is settled (except, you know, everything about how it works behind the scenes, because zombie magic), you start asking when and why. “When” gets settled pretty quickly - nobody knows. All the old internet hardware was conveniently trashed even in survivor areas, so all the records are gone.  Surely we can study it? Nope. Immune to science. Doesn’t matter what you use. Straight down to electron microscopes, Blight is just “black poo poo”. Seamless and solid, apparently not even really three-dimensional-looking; "a seamless, black smear of pure void". It violates physics, chemistry, and common sense: quote:But when you ask the physicists, they’ll rightly point out that something so tightly bonded as to resist magnification completely is closer to the density of a black hole than any solid we’ve ever encountered. It should be harder than diamonds, so how come bullets can penetrate it? Why aren’t casualties as heavy as mountains? More worryingly, how do the cadavers manage to be lighter than in life? This stuff is sufficiently reality-breaking-bullshit that the people who persevere through and keep studying it go batshit crazy in the religious search for a cure that doesn't exist. The message is unambiguous, even as the various theories (aliens, bioweapons, mutated disease, supernatural cause, even nanomachines) get floated: Red Markets does not care about where the Blight comes from. It does not want you to waste time exploring the finicky details of how exactly it works and what it’s made of. It’s just zombie magic, and despite how much it bothers my suspension of disbelief, it’s really all you need to know to make the game work. Zombies are here; they bite you and you turn; you shoot or stab them and they’ll die, eventually. Players can work with that, those are reasonable rules. It'd be nice to have more to work with on the GM side, but all you really need is that there's zombies that follow the rules, and a few rare ones you can bring in to break 'em. That's all you really need. It’s the other humans we’re really here to deal with, after all. Next time: History of the Crash pt. 3, Emergence Events and the Romero Effect, or: more zombie magic, infection deniers, and essential healthcare and retail workers.
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Dec 8, 2020 01:30
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The main thing I really like about the Red Markets setting is that it's this volatile transitory period between the old status quo and a weird new future and nobody has any real control or plans for how to approach the future. As a result you have things like nobody knowing how the Blight works, the medical slavery and harvesting camps, Latents with kill collars being forced to handle Casualties in DHQS settlements or when visiting/living in Enclaves, all of the various cults yelling at each other and everyone either trying to get rich and get out or get rich and stay safe. 'cuz one day this is going to just be a chapter in a history text book; someone's going to brought up on charges for crimes against humanity for the creation of Suppressin, ethics boards working with medical professionals are going to have concrete answers for healthy Latent lifestyles, people are going to treat Blight like the flu because someone figured something out. But right now it's the wild west and yeah these greater theological/philosophical questions are cool and worth considering but they're poo poo you talk about while manning the fence and popping Cs for ten hours a day because if you don't work you can't pay rent or eat in your little shantytown below a half-destroyed railroad trestle where the elites of your town live on The Tracks themselves. That poo poo is a luxury to figure out later.
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Dec 8, 2020 01:55
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PeterWeller posted:They're using 2D6 here because they're being just as lazy here as they are with the rest of the game, except in this part, they're copying straight from Traveller instead of slightly tweaking 5E D&D.
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Dec 8, 2020 02:09
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 Cyberpunk RED, Part 10: Corrupted by Design The 4th Corporate War may have killed off a bunch of megacorps (including one-time luminaries like International Electric Corporation and Infocomp), but plenty of megacorps have survived, and new ones have joined their ranks in the decades since the war. They're now called neocorps (but the text also calls them megacorps, and interchangably, at that), and while they no longer have armies like they did back in 2020, they're still forces to be recokoned with. They've also gone through a bit of restructuring in how they tend to work, and every neocorp now has what's called a Face; international corporate laws have been rewritten such that the single largest shareholder of any corp is considered responsible and liable for anything that their respective neocorp does, and any punishment or penalty that the neocorp might incur is applied to the Face.  The Faces, from left to right: Olivia Forsythe, Nicolo Loggagia, Michiko Sanderson, Artyom Sokolov, UR, Drs. Lachanan and Jones, Anatoly Novagargov, Jacinda Hidalgo, Angus Youngblood, Samantha Lee, and the head of Netwatch, Magnificent Curtis Arasaka is still around, although it still hasn't really returned to Night City (or the United States at all, for that matter (except it has, despite other parts of this book saying otherwise, and Cyberpunk 2077's background, too)). It's currently split into three factions, each controlled by one of Saburo Arasaka's heirs, and Saburo's eldest daughter, Hanako, is Arasaka's current face (though Saburo himself is still alive.) Her rivals are her younger brother Yorinobu, who just wants to bring down Arasaka, and her younger sister Michiko, who currently acts as the Face of another megacorp and who doesn't really care to take over Arasaka, though a faction has formed behind her nonetheless. Biotechnica is another old megacorp that survived the war. The world's largest biotech firm, responsible for having developed CHOOH2, the biofuel used by almost everything in the world of Cyberpunk RED. They're also heavily involved the engineering of species for reintroduction into the wild, and the resurrection of previously extinct species, too. Their face is Nicolo Loggagia, Biotechnica's founder and one of the few well-meaning corporates in 2045, who mostly just wants to repair the environment and resurrect extinct species, though not without modifying some of those species to have certain "improvements," like koalas with venomous fangs. And he wants to bring back dinosaurs, too, because of course. Continental Brands is one of the newcomers of the corporate world. Formerly a brance of Petrochem, some corporate shenanigans ended with it claiming its independence, and now it stands as the world's largest manufacturer of kibble. Also various other foods and drinks, but mostly kibble. Their Face is Olivia Forsythe, who dreams of nothing more than taking complete control of the world's food supply and does everything she can to make communities ever more dependent on her company's kibble, and establishing Continental brands stores in communities, called Oases: quote:Once an Oasis is established, the community is entered into the Oasis Community Loyalty Program. Pleasing the Kibble Queen by purchasing large quantities of foods or electing local representatives supported by Continental Brands earns points for the whole community. Likewise, displeasing the Kibble Queen by importing food from outside the community, growing your own food, or publicly organizing against Continental Brands results in a point penalty. Danger Girl is...ugh. Danger Girl is a private investigation and security firm founded by Michiko Sanderson (nee Arasaka), who now acts as its Face. They provide security and investigation services to high profile clients, especially celebrities of all kinds, leveraging Michiko main strengths: she's "young, adorably cute, and possessed of a high IQ [and s]he already [has] thousands of devoted young fans all over the world..." Her corp is also just a front for her real, super secret mission: she's being funded by President Kress to undermine the plots and conspiracies of Arasaka.  Someone at R. Talsorian Games really, really likes Danger Girl. Militech is also still around, and has been re-privatized since the war's end. Nothing much to say about them, really. Donald Lundee's retired and now General Samatha Lee is the corp's Face. Network 54 (or Network News 54, the book seriously can't make up its mind) is the largest broadcaster in the US. Their face is Michelle Dreyer, a woman trying to keep her late husband's dream of a lasting media empire alive by battling the onset of aging by any means necessary...and she's since transferred her brain into a Gemini full-body conversion cyborg. Petrochem had already survived the 2nd Corporate War, and had no trouble surviving the 4th. They're still the world's largest supplier of CHOOH2, and are involved in all kinds of other petrochemical and agricultural products and businesses. They're led by Angus Youngblood, who finally succeeded his rival after inheriting the stock share of his late wife, Ellen Trieste. Rocklin Augmentics is a new competitor in the field of cybernetics, founded by a veteran of the Central American Wars. They specialize in cutting edge prosthetics that are obviously artificial and at the same time highly artistic and creative. Some of their more recent designs have come under scrutiny for being entirely too sophisticated, however, as rumors have emerged that they may indicate the use of AIs in ROA's RnD work. ROA is led by Jacinda Hidalgo, adopted daughter of its founder, and she's only too happy to use her body to show off her company's products. SovOil had no more trouble surviving the wars than its arch-rival, Petrochem. They remain the top producer of traditional petrochemicals, and are responsible for most of the world's few remaining oil wells. They've since expended into other industries, too, diversifying into mining, agriculture, synthetics, and more. Their Face is Anatoly Novagarov, who looks every bit the part of a brash, boorish Neo-Soviet oligarch, though rumors exist regarding how different he looks and acts from the Novagarov people remember from years ago, who was a dour, quiet bureaucrat completely unlike the garish, nouveau riche man he apparently is now. Trauma Team has no shortage of clients and work in a world as violent as the world of 2045. They're still providing the same high-power, high-impact paramedical support they always have. They have two Faces, the husband and wife team of Drs. Carrie Lachanan and Bob Jones. Ziggurat is the premier telecommunications company of 2045 North America. They've set up CitiNets all across the US and the Free States, spreading outward from Night City, and have also gotten into the business of creating all kinds of apps and social media services for the Data Pool. Ziggurat's founder and Face is UR (pronounced You Are), a non-binary person of completely unknown background and origin. They have an inordinate fondness for bodysculpting, and are constantly tweaking and adjusting their appearance, undergoing a constant gradual change that manifests in major changes to their appearance over time. Lastly, Zhirafa Technical Manufacturing is a major Neo-Soviet corp that manufactures and designs robots, drones, and construction mechs of all kinds. They got their start with the GRAF3, a cheap, durable construction bot that was used to clean up cities all over the world after the war, and they've only grown since, though word has it they get some support from the Bratva. Their Face is Artyom Sokolov, a former Edgerunner.  The chapter on Night City goes a lot longer than it really needs to, especially since it contains an in-depth description and overview of Night City as it was in 2020 in addition to one of Night City in 2045. I'm going to simplify things by just explaining the broad zones into which Night City's neighbourhoods are divided. The Hot Zone takes up the city's centre; it's still irradiated and mostly just rubble and debris. The Rebuilding Urban Zones mostly make up the core of Night City, and while still damaged and being restored, they're better off than many other parts. The Executive Zone is a small pocket just east of Night City's core that is walled off and populated by the managers and Execs of megacorps, and anyone else sufficiently connected and/or wealthy. The Combat Zones are areas that are run-down, desperate, and full of trigger happy boostergangs, mostly on Night City's south side. Lastly we have the Overpacked Suburbs are former corporate zones that got overrun by the newly-homeless urbanites after corporations abandoned most of Night City following the nuclear destruction of Arasaka Towers. It's crowded and messy, but not completely lawless like the Combat Zones. Night City is currently ruled by a makeshift conglomeration of several factions: the previously mentioned megacorps, the remnants of the city's old government, Edgerunners, and the Nomad families. They more or less manage to function as a junta of sorts, with plenty of politicking and jockeying for position amongst themselves. Despite everything they've managed to carry out Night City's reconstruction, and they've kept some level of public services still running. Data Terms can be found on most street corners, the Data Pool is fully functional, there are two whole hospitals (and a cryobank), and the NCPD is still on the beat, though they're supplemented by both corporate security services and rent-a-cops. Night City even has a working transit system in the form of NCTC, and Orbital Air is working on a shiny new spaceport for Night City, too. As for life in general in 2045, the United States (and the Free States, too) is still following the Uniform Civilian Justice Code, which mandates essentially military penalties for most crimes. Of course, with law enforcement stretched thin, you probably don't have to worry about the cops if you aren't messing around with the wealthy or political/military elites. Punishments for those who do end up being arrested range from personality adjustment to electro-flogging to exile to braindance -- getting stuffed into a cryotube with your brain wired into a VR prison of sorts. And of course there's always the death penalty, too. On the lighter side of things, the average person now carries a personal pseudo-AI assistant of sorts called an Agent, that learns the personality and habits of its owner and adapts to them, learning to anticipate and facilitate its owner's needs. On its most basic level it functions a lot like a smartphone, but it also manages all those functions and requirements (and more) by itself, and can carry out queries and the like on request. It also develops a pseudo-personality of sorts based on its owners preferences (and whatever upgrades the owner chooses to get), and can assume a name, avatar, and voice of its owner's choosing. And if relying on your Agent for keeping up with the news or getting your media fix isn't enough, there's always Data Terms (street corner computer terminals) and Screamsheets (newspapers printed on demand from street corner newsboxes). RED is nice enough to include a little table for generating random screamsheet headlines, too. Where food is concerned, most people have little to no choice in the matter. The majority of people get by on kibble, a synthetic food made from a mix of soy, kelp, and plankton, that generally looks and tastes like its namesake, though a lot of manufacturers offer different flavours that may or may not make a difference. The slightly luckier and wealthier sorts live off prepack, microwavable meals made from soy and various grains and textured and flavoured to resemble "real" food, in addition to having morsels of real food mixed in, with higher-grade prepack having more of it. Only the wealthy can generally afford real food on a regular basis, though urban farming has come in vogue in recent years and might start to make a dent in things. A lot of this material has been lifted straight out of 2020 and is weirdly unchanged despite the passage of time and overall creep of technology. And a lot of the corporate stuff is honestly a complete mess if you've been following Cyberpunk since 2020; Michiko Sanderson's age is completely off by a decade or two in the write-up for her, Danger Girl is a weird outlier, and Arasaka being in Night City in 2045 runs counter to everything else written about them in the book, as well as the background material for Cyberpunk 2077. All of this just makes the game feel even more rushed and confused. Next time: Economics and GM stuff
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Dec 8, 2020 02:49
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Mors Rattus posted:I stand corrected. 
Talas fucked around with this message at 03:33 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 03:25
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Talas posted:This dudes (and dudette) are from the Underworlds games and can be used in AoS: See, none of these say “twisted chivalrous figure” to me, I want tattered tabards, broken swords, heraldic devices scratched onto makeshift shields. These are just ghouls, no chivalric veneer or parody.
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Dec 8, 2020 03:34
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Mors Rattus posted:See, none of these say “twisted chivalrous figure” to me, I want tattered tabards, broken swords, heraldic devices scratched onto makeshift shields. These are just ghouls, no chivalric veneer or parody.
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Dec 8, 2020 03:37
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PurpleXVI posted:I think part of the problem of that angle, though, is that it's hard to get through in roleplay for the PC's sometimes. Like, say you replace your skin with hardened BattleSkin from FightCorp which lets you shrug off a hail of bullets, at the cost of having deadened sensation across your entire body. Like, the person who would make this exchange is probably not in a healthy place, mentally(either they feel they need to make the sacrifice to survive, or more killosity is more important to them than the wide variety of non-murderous sensations they're going to lose), but I feel like it would require an exceptionally good GM and an exceptionally good player to get this across without just boiling it down to a Cybercrazy stat. I wonder if you could make an interesting cyberpunk system if you reversed the causation of 'cyberware causes dehumanization' to some extent. In this read, dehumanization is one of the ways your character can psyche themselves up to get invasive, radical surgical modifications. You don't lose 2d6 humanity because you got a cyberarm, you get a cyberarm because a physical or psychological event results in your character being willing to go under the knife and get one. And that psychological impetus can take many forms - but seeing yourself as an object and commodity, and thus getting augmentation to be a better product, as it were, should always be a legitimate reason to get wired up.
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Dec 8, 2020 03:39
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Tibalt posted:Lol, it's obvious when you point it out, but I just didn't make the connection. I figured they just liked the probability curve on a 2d6. Hehe, it stood out to me right away because I just read the Traveller rules for the first time. Now that I'm thinking about Carbon 2185 just lazily copying stuff, it occurs to me that the attributes might be a half-assed mishmash of D&D's and SWD6's.
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Dec 8, 2020 03:45
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Just browsing through Earthdawn's Horrors(1st ed.) and
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Dec 8, 2020 04:59
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FATAL And Friends 202X: I have encountered Taint on more than one occasion
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Dec 8, 2020 05:16
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Froghammer posted:Agreed. I want rusted, foraged armor proudly waving a long moth-eaten flag. Gimmie that "I think I'm still a knight" energy If you inspire me to convert an entire FEC army in this fashion I will invoice you a significant percentage of the bill. I have no way of enforcing that, of course, I just want you to feel bad.
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Dec 8, 2020 05:48
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By popular demand posted:Just browsing through Earthdawn's Horrors(1st ed.)  That last bit is where you lost me Horrors(1st ed.), that seems to encourage an adversarial game style.
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Dec 8, 2020 06:00
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SkyeAuroline posted:The message is unambiguous, even as the various theories (aliens, bioweapons, mutated disease, supernatural cause, even nanomachines) get floated: Red Markets does not care about where the Blight comes from. It does not want you to waste time exploring the finicky details of how exactly it works and what it’s made of. I was going to pipe up and say that why the zombies work the way they work doesn't matter, but you pointed that out yourself here, so yay. Also, we just had Cyberpunk gently caress itself trying to explain why the internet is lame now, let's not ask RPG devs to go too deep into science 
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Dec 8, 2020 06:14
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JcDent posted:I was going to pipe up and say that why the zombies work the way they work doesn't matter, but you pointed that out yourself here, so yay. Yeah, the realistic science angle is a) not possible with the undead, b) not really necessary for the game or genre. I would still like to have seen some more consistent narrative-side "rules" for them, instead of the page worth of "sometimes it does this until it doesn't" and "you can't understand it and we don't know how it works". I'm oriented towards the more technical side of things as a GM and player. But the actual game rules (which I'll get to eventually, I forgot how much of a slog the setting is and how much Stokes just keeps on talking) lay everything on the table for GMs effectively. Considering the nature of the game that's the only thing I can really ask.
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Dec 8, 2020 06:20
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How much text does it waste on telling you that it doesn't matter though? I'm personally a fan of not explaining the inexplicable just say it confounds scientists ,I don't need a superdense material in my zombie game.
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Dec 8, 2020 06:35
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Just a few pages in the fluff section. The only other time it comes up is: 1. Bait paying you to do dangerous things for weird / pre-crash blight samples. 2. Loss doctor cults paying you do to dangerous things for weird / pre-crash blight samples.
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Dec 8, 2020 06:54
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MJ12 posted:I wonder if you could make an interesting cyberpunk system if you reversed the causation of 'cyberware causes dehumanization' to some extent. I think the issue, then, is that players will likely see psychological damage as a benefit, and have their characters repeatedly expose themselves to trauma/traumatize each other for the purposes of getting a gun implanted in their head. I think a better solution would just be a soft cap and making cybernetics more sidegrades than raw upgrades. Someone with wired reflexes seems twitchy and doesn't move in a quite human way, making everyone around them nervous and giving them a penalty on social interactions. Someone with hardened armourskin is worse at anything requiring tactile senses(physical lockpicking, repairs, engineering). If you've got an implanted gun, you have to be careful about what you do to avoid triggering the muscle sensors that'll fire it when you don't want it(maybe an initiative penalty). Like, it's not hard to give every implant some sort of drawback. Whether it's stealth/senses implants making you less socially viable, social implants making you less combat viable(access to a greater and more sensitive sensorium means you're great at reading people and spotting small details, but huge noisy events like a gun battle become even more overwhelming and distracting), combat implants make you less good at sensitive things, etc. and combine it with a financial soft cap of some sort, so there are suddenly reasons everyone doesn't want to cyber themselves up into a tank. You absolutely can, but once you've reached the apex of some chain of upgrades, the cumulative penalties mean there are some things you just can't do in most practical situations. Of course this also requires a system where every character must at least partially be a jack of all trades, where just one stealthy guy or one talky guy won't carry the day, so Tank Man can't armour up all he wants without compromising the party(maybe some sort of solid mechanics for assisting one another, so while the face is a real good talker, it's assumed that Bob the Stealth Dude and Jill the Shooty Lady will chip in with their social skills to help carry the debate or whatever).
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Dec 8, 2020 13:45
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Way too many settings fall into the trap of desperately trying to explain why their zombies are totally badass and unstoppable, no really. It seems to be a nerd instinct judging by some arguments I've gotten into. (for the record: We've already invented the perfect anti-zombie weapon, it's called the machine gun)
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Dec 8, 2020 14:13
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I love World War Z for its depiction of the need for cooperation and the consideration of peoples' psychological health and the need for hope in a terrible period. I can suspend disbelief about the zombies getting as far as they did because the rest of the story is really good and the zombies absolutely need to be a real threat for that to work as a story. But the Battle of Yonkers would've been a walkover. I don't care that you need a headshot to kill a zombie. That little bastard isn't walking through a fuel-air bomb just because the bomb wasn't aimed at his head.
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Dec 8, 2020 14:19
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By popular demand posted:How much text does it waste on telling you that it doesn't matter though? 153 lines of text about how it can't be understood, if I counted right. Red Markets is formatted in two-column layout with 50 lines per column.
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Dec 8, 2020 14:25
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JcDent posted:Well, the sensation deadening should be freaky by itself, but it should also make it harder to wind down stress via Intimate Contact With Significant Other as well as Just Sex, Really. It may also rise your Hubris score - which measures how likely you are to see regular humans as just weak targets, which ties into social stats, motivations, and Benny regen... Or just go all-in on the murdercrazy and have an app that gives you anorgasm every time you kill someone,
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Dec 8, 2020 15:07
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Night10194 posted:I love World War Z for its depiction of the need for cooperation and the consideration of peoples' psychological health and the need for hope in a terrible period. I can suspend disbelief about the zombies getting as far as they did because the rest of the story is really good and the zombies absolutely need to be a real threat for that to work as a story. Yonkers is really meant to be a cool action scene that sets the tone at just how hosed up things are against this threat, sort of like the opening battle of an alien invasion story. But the moment you start thinking about it, things start coming apart pretty quickly. Brooks clearly wanted to write it to make a point about the second Gulf War, but it follows that idea too hard and becomes ridiculous as a result. There's plenty of other good stories in it but Yonkers is not the best, same goes with the payback battle later on. As much I think zombies are hugely overdone these days I can admit they work much better on a smaller scale than a world ending threat because at one point they will have to become incredibly ridiculous to make things work.
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Dec 8, 2020 15:09
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It's been a while since I read World War Z but I think one of my favorite parts was the person who noted the ingredients in root beer and how much no longer having a global economy sucked. And also the not-quite horror story of WTF happened with North Korea.
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Dec 8, 2020 15:16
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Any zombie story has to make the assumption that the natural process of decay is somehow delayed, because otherwise the solution to a zombie outbreak is "everyone stay inside for about a week until their muscles have rotted enough that they can no longer move."
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Dec 8, 2020 19:31
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Gatto Grigio posted:Any zombie story has to make the assumption that the natural process of decay is somehow delayed, because otherwise the solution to a zombie outbreak is "everyone stay inside for about a week until their muscles have rotted enough that they can no longer move." Look around you in 2020 and tell me if you really think people would stay inside for about a week.
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Dec 8, 2020 19:37
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GimpInBlack posted:Look around you in 2020 and tell me if you really think people would stay inside for about a week. Depends on whether they are forced to go to work by capitalism to avoid being evicted in winter during a pandemic.
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Dec 8, 2020 19:51
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GimpInBlack posted:Look around you in 2020 and tell me if you really think people would stay inside for about a week. Not staying inside would self-select pretty heavily in favor of the people staying inside, I think. After all, Corona doesn't have a 100% fatality rate like your typical zombie bite. Though it sucks that with every dipshit wandering outside, the timer would reset until that dipshit has rotted away, too
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Dec 8, 2020 19:51
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What if we give the zombies shotguns and flamethrowers so it's even when we attack them with shotguns and flamethrowers?
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Dec 8, 2020 19:52
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wiegieman posted:Depends on whether they are forced to go to work by capitalism to avoid being evicted in winter during a pandemic. So, that's coming up in the review...
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Dec 8, 2020 19:56
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SkyeAuroline posted:So, that's coming up in the review... It's quite a topical game.
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Dec 8, 2020 19:58
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Night10194 posted:But the Battle of Yonkers would've been a walkover. I don't care that you need a headshot to kill a zombie. That little bastard isn't walking through a fuel-air bomb just because the bomb wasn't aimed at his head. It's me, I'm the military guy who decided that tanks should use APFSDS rounds against a mass of fleshy targets. Everyone posted:And also the not-quite horror story of WTF happened with North Korea. I don't remember anything about NK, but boy, Russia went places. JcDent fucked around with this message at 20:25 on Dec 8, 2020 |
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Dec 8, 2020 20:23
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The gist of the NK one was that the entire population went underground in massive shelters and no one has any idea if they're still alive in there or not.
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Dec 8, 2020 20:27
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All anyone knows for sure is their SAMs still work.
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Dec 8, 2020 20:32
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