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A hot-blooded Migou cop on the edge that's swole enough to wrestle tagers, aviator sunglasses mandatory.
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# ¿ Sep 1, 2024 00:54 |
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HitTheTargets posted:I agree. And plus, more fodder for your Miami campaign, Ettin. Stuff's gonna 'splode. Hey, woah now, I don't go asking people to put more Cthulhutech in the games you're in, buddy.
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I love the idea of werewolves who are all "Yeah yeah, nature red in tooth and claw's a sucker's game, kid. You wanna know how to really ruin someone's day? Grab that drain cleaner and I'll show you."
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Gonna throw in a vote for Day After Ragnarok because Ken Hite is good poo poo. Seriously, you guys are gonna love this. It also has some of the best sidebars and "top five" lists in an RPG.
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Yessod posted:Changeling is also basically the most awesome and horrible game ever. Changeling is one of those games whose quality I recognize while simultaneously having no real interest in playing. I participated in a Changeling game once because one of our gaming groups' players was a huge huge enthusiast and he put in a ton of work to set up an awesome game...and the other players dug it, he was a good GM, but I could just never get into it the way they were.
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I think the best bit is how the super-powerful Three Letter Acronym agency with far-reaching discretionary powers couldn't confiscate an unknown power source that was leaking blood. Whoops, sorry Mr. CIAFIBNSA agents, but I think you'll find that your probable cause is no match for our intellectual property laws. Just ignore that crying sound coming from the murder-cube, nothing to see here. In a better written game, i.e. not Cthulhutech, the Chrysalis Corporation would be a blackly-comic object lesson in why you don't let crazy cultists run a multi-gazillion dollar megacorporation when their dead-baby battery and EULA where you sign your eternal soul over to the "Nameless Ones From Beyond The Veil (the party of the third part)" results in everybody involved going to superjail, the Ashcroft Foundation buying out the gutted remnants for pennies on the dollar, and releasing their own better, non-baby-powered magic battery six months later.
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Tasoth posted:Someone asked who CTech was marketed towards. My guess is anime aficionados, internet spergs and those people who read HPL and thought his horror was about gribbly monsters and BAD THINGS. Because that is pretty much all the information in the books boils down to. The baby cubes could have been terrifying if people were cracking them open, realizing what was inside and either shrugging and carrying on (which doesn't seem too far out there from the way the rest of the setting is painted) or they were made to disappear by Chrysalis and put towards a bigger project. Maybe people power cubes. Thinking about how the Ashcroft Foundation is portrayed, in-setting, as one of the most powerful corporations in the world and yet apparently they're afraid to blow the whistle on Chrysalis for selling literal baby-murdering batteries to evil wizards despite A). not really liking Chrysalis, B). being at least AS powerful as them if not moreso and C). on the verge of releasing their own non-baby-murdering magic battery made me think of a (slightly) more interesting take on things where the Ashcroft Foundation is aware of stuff like the Chrysalis Corporation because they discreetly sponsor crazy cult-run corporations like that to basically outsource their mad science. They start up these "competitors" who do all sorts of insane, horrific stuff and Ashcroft keeps tabs on all of it, and then when someone like Chrysalis comes up with a halfway-decent idea Ashcroft steps in, steals it and removes all the heinous bits like dead babies, reworks it into something more palatable for general consumption, then "exposes" the other corporation to the authorities. They get to offload all the insanity-inducing R&D and awful ideas ("You know what we could do? Use babies as a power source!") that occasionally bear useful fruit and they get to reinforce their image as the "good" corporation with humanity's best interests in mind.
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Bieeardo posted:On the other hand, I've always kind of wondered if the EP developers actually read Cthulhutech beyond the elevator pitch. This is actually the best way to read Cthulhutech. Speaking of which, where's my update Ettin? These Nazi rape machines aren't gonna write about themselves.
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"33 A.D. - The Malkavians claim that their greatest practical joke happens during this year, when they perform a bit of graverobbing in Jerusalem." - Vampire: the Dark Ages
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Given the attention that D&D Next, and by extension Mike Mearls, has gotten here and elsewhere lately my vote is for Iron Heroes. Iron Heroes is, by my recollection, a game that definitely does some interesting and even clever things within the 3.X framework but also has a whole bunch of issues. It's one of those things that's genuinely a mixed bag, clever and compelling but also frustratingly in need of a revised edition (supposedly in the works by a third party, estimated due date ???).
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My guess is it's a gem-shaped subcritical mass of plutonium enchanted to go supercritical in the presence of anyone of non-Evil alignment.
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Or it's something incredibly lethal you want to ignore and it's mandatory to progress. That seems about the Tomb of Horrors' speed, really. "The cursed gemstone zaps you for 2d4 points of Strength damage. By the way you need it to unlock the door in order to get into Acererak's Forbidden Ball-Pit of Doom. Have fun with that."
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Amechra posted:You know what I want to see? I want to say that Warlords of the Accordlands (which was both a CCG and a d20-based RPG) actually had D&D-style kung-fu monks who were based more on European monastic orders instead of Shaolin.
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It pays for cigarettes that were once normal people with lives and families who wound up transformed into inanimate objects by sociopathic schoolgirls with magical powers.
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FourmyleCircus posted:They also assume that all characters are self inserts at best. Considering some of the characters in WGA that really doesn't say a whole lot that's flattering about the Channel M folks.
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Yeah, I'm not sure why you'd want to "salvage" Witch Girl Adventures, I've seen nothing to suggest that there are any pearls either mechanically or fluffwise that deserve to be rescued from there. Even Cthulhutech has a handful of interesting and cool ideas buried underneath the hot mess that's 90% of everything else but strip the poo poo out of WGA and you have, what, the concept of a game about magical teenagers going to magic school and dealing with crazy hijinks of a magical nature? Just run Monsters and Other Childish Things, call it a day. (Likewise, all the calls I've seen from gamers over the years who think it'd be a good idea to "revise" RIFTS always baffle me...it's like, take your favorite relatively flexible system and then throw in everything you thought was cool when you were 12, bam, done.)
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The problem is that there isn't a great system for it, on account of the fact that Rifts puts its chief emphases on vehicles and supernatural powers, and finding a game that does both well is a very tall order at the present time. But RIFTS doesn't do that very well either so, y'know, it's still not like you're trading down no matter what you do with. Honestly, if I were going to run RIFTS I'd use a supers game like Mutants & Masterminds or maybe Wild Talents if I wanted to put a more lethal spin on things, games that are designed to handle mixed parties consisting of a guy in power armor, a telekinetic, a wild mage, a fledgeling dragon, and a regular dude who happens to be really good with a gun and lucky as hell.
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Kellsterik posted:I had a mild crisis of faith when I realized that the Comte de Saint-Germain (and for that matter, the Freak) in Unknown Armies are cut from that same 90s design cloth. It's not the same, dammit! The difference is that if the players in Unknown Armies ever do find a way to topple a character like the Freak then I'm pretty sure that neither John Tynes or Greg Stolze would throw a hissy fit and tell you how no, you actually failed because their super-special NPC is better than you, they'd go "Awesome, congratulations...now what?"
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Angrymog posted:Avatar storm cutting off access to the umbra unles syou feel like getting shredded. I only played Mage in a 1st/2nd edition hybrid, because Revised took out too much of what I loved about it. (Mainly the ability to turn vampires into lawnchairs - Life 4, matter 4 and Prime 2 if you wanted it to be permanent iirc.) I am in no way, shape, or form a WoD gamer, I wound up passing that whole milieu by in favor of Feng Shui and Shadowrun, but hang around any tabletop RPG forum long enough and you're bound to accumulate knowledge of the various different Mage flamewar-starters simply by osmosis and this one right here is one of the biggest. From what I'm given to understand the guy in charge of making Revised what it was did what he did precisely because, as you say, people were playing Mage as a game of weird arcane heroics when a few people in charge thought it should be all grim and grounded and bleak. So a number of the changes in Revised, prominently among them the Avatar storm, were put in place specifically to be invisible walls intended to push people into playing Mage "properly."
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citybeatnik posted:And then the Sons of Ether book came out and basically went "gently caress you I'm going to go punch jetpack nazis while being awesome". I'll try and refrain from turning this into a White Wolf chat derail, but White Wolf has a long history of having trouble maintaining consistency (and quality) within its game lines. Freelancers and other writers seem to just do whatever the hell they feel like half the time with minimal oversight and by the time it comes to the line manager's attention it's too late to send it back for serious revisions, just a quick edit or two and it's off to print. They seemed to get a lot better with that after the new World of Darkness came out though you still had exceptions here and there (like Changing Breeds, the book so bad that the people running Werewolf: the Forsaken didn't want it branded as part of that gameline).
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AccidentalHipster posted:and O'Shovah who is a Daemonhost with an unusual knack for melee combat that went rogue not to long ago and I think is the only tau not based off of a canon 40k character. Actually O'Shovah is literally a canon 40K character, also known as Commander Farsight, who is indeed in charge of a rogue Tau enclave with an unusual propensity for melee combat and is strongly suspected of being in possession of a Daemon weapon. D:tD40K7E doesn't "homage" so much as "pillage."
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I can't get over how gobsmackingly dumb some of those "connections" in Numenera are. "Pick one character to passive-aggressively shoot with all your missed attacks, no trust us, this'll be great."
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I get the impression that Monte is trying to create tension and conflict within the party, but "you take 1d6 arrow hurty when I roll a 1 on my to-hit" is a crappy way to do that. A more interesting version would be *World-style questions, like "You took a shot that hurt somebody in the party without hitting them. What was it, and why?" That's exactly what I was thinking when I was reading through that section...connections seem like really lovely versions of *World's bonds/Hx/etc. Also maybe I missed something earlier, but is there a reason why you'd want a Numenera party to have built-in tension and conflict within the party? Is that a big theme of the game or something? Alien Rope Burn posted:Another would be "If you critically miss, you can choose to gain a benny token. If you take the benny token, target the player with the lowest HP. That player takes your normal damage." This would still be pretty crap though, especially in a game like this where your hitpoints are literally your "do stuff" points, but there are plenty of other, better ways to handle something like this. Again, *World does this handily with its 7-9 outcomes which rarely result in things like "one of your fellow PCs takes damage" but has plenty of things like "that shot went somewhere you wish it hadn't" or "you get put in a tight spot."
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oriongates posted:It may be the golden age of humanity, but the Age of Giants was the true golden age when the most powerful magic and artifacts were created. Even the warforged predate the current age. Actually this isn't exactly all that accurate. The thing about all those ancient magics and lost artifacts in Eberron is that by and large they might have been big and flashy but they were often clunky, terribly overwrought, and not very efficient. For example, very early prototype warforged predate the current age, this is true...and when House Cannith got their hands on them they reverse engineered them, and within 50 years had vastly, vastly improved upon the design to the point where they were mass-producing sentient, ensouled warforged far better than anything the Giants had designed. Basically, anything that you find stuck in a ruin or buried in some lost tomb may have value, but that value is less down to "oh man, the ancient civilizations were way better than we are" and more "I can't wait to take this home and figure out how to make more of these without having to sacrifice of a thousand elven slaves during a solar eclipse, I bet we could get by with some candles and 5cc of mouse blood."
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# ¿ Sep 1, 2024 00:54 |
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I have to admit that's a pretty cool centaur picture. Too bad 3.X didn't really handle centaur PCs well (and 4E didn't handle them at all).
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