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Hc Svnt Dracones The home stretch  So what's left? About 50 or so pages of Adventuring, Character Sheets, Advancement, Adversaries and ships, and I'm pretty sure there's going to be more retarded to find in there, or at least more lovely art. So let's chew through the rest of this pile of trash... and of course they gently caress up right from the get go, with something as simple as suggested quest rewards. > 300-500 for jobs with substantial personal risk. Basically, a couple of sessions that we drag out with extended shopping trips or some sort of intercharacter drama can, unless we have rock bottom Ledger stats, basically land us as much money as a highly dangerous adventure. In fact, unless a given adventure only lasts one or two sessions, we're in fact almost guaranteed to earn more during it than we will at the end of it. Did anyone playtest ANY of this? Mind, they're allowed to "negotiate" for better payment, but it's not something they can mechanically roll, the book informs us, they have to have a legitimate argument for it. How about the argument that "hey, chief, I can earn more than this sitting at home and scratching my nads for a week, get hosed."? quote:Vectors don’t need to worry about muscular atrophy due to low or no gravity; they were specifically designed to adapt to such conditions. And of course the everlasting parade of SPECIAL FURRY ABILITIES because ~superior genetics~ just loving keeps on going, and going, and loving going. quote:Fall damage is standardized across the game system regardless of what planet you’re on. It also applies in zero gravity situations where your character collides with objects. So, apparently velocity doesn't matter for this mechanic, which means that if you gently drift a hundred feet in zero-G at a snail's pace and then "collide" with an object, you'll gorily explode, going by the rules as written. Remember how Eclipse Phase had transmitting a copy of your brain to another location, as a way of travelling, but with the cost of needing to use a local body and perhaps the complications that entailed? HSD just has magical technology that builds you a perfect body-copy on-site in a span of hours. Despite the fact that a "round trip" costs 1000 credits, which then includes the cost of manufacturing first one new body, and then a second, the game suggests that PC's can sell their organs to cover some of the costs. But why? Growing an entire new body is apparently loving effortless, the work of hours, growing a box of new livers should take five minutes. Also, wait, why does a "Body Replacement" surgery, which just involves one new body, which doesn't need to be a carbon-copy replica of the original, cost 2500 credits, when this costs 1000? Can't a PC just ask for a new body to be transmitted to on arrival, rather than a copy of their old one?  There's a section on loans, which caps you at loaning 500 credits(your max is equal to your Econ:Strength*100, so in practice the cap is more like 300, but let's be generous), which we've already established you can just earn in a couple of game sessions with plain ledger rolls as long as you don't put them all at 1 dot or something. quote:A note to Guides: You do not always need to make loans available to players. Using just the rules mechanics it is possible for a team of players to borrow a substantial amount of money right off the bat. This is intentional, as it gives them a means to purchase things like ships without having to play a long campaign first. However, it can also be used to outfit them with high-tier weaponry much sooner than makes narrative sense. Players should keep in mind the sort of character they’re playing. It isn’t always particularly believable for the first action of say, a scientist or sports star, to take out two loans, go to the nearest store, and buy a high powered rifle and fully enclosed suit of active armor just on a whim. I don't know, if I was a loving PC in a sci-fi game sorta-styled as "horror," with monstrous space-creatures and loving Libertarians all over the place, I know I'd invest in a sniper rifle and decking myself out like a Space Marine as fast as possible. So this seems like an entirely reasonable route of action, especially after the first encounter with something scary.  Why the gently caress does the evil red bloodbad space creature of starterror have tits. loving Christ, HSD.  At any rate, the Adversaries chapter is mostly dull statblocks for a bunch of generic furry enemies, the only ones that get anything resembling fluff are Vitae Demons, Pale Men and Whispers. The red-titted wonder up there is a Whisper, while the Edgy Fursona above is a "Vitae Demon." Apparently if you can't feel pain, for instance if you're using Vitae, which also removes all need for nutrition or other things that generally keep a body and mind alive, it makes you go insane. Like, the whole description reeks of them having invented Vitae as a WONDER DRUG but then needing a reason why everyone wasn't just juicing up on it while letting the farms go fallow instead of having to eat, why they didn't just replace oxygen storage aboard spaceships and in spacesuits with it, etc., and they arbitrarily decided that while it keeps your brain alive without oxygen, and thinking without oxygen, and capable of controlling your body without oxygen, it just so also happens to make you go insane if your brain lacks oxygen. For some vaguely defined reason. So Vitae Demons are the completely crazy Vitae junkies that despite each vitae hit lasting only an hour, and despite their clearly not being able to function without it, somehow still exist. How are they paying for it? Is someone still hiring them when they're described as amoral sadists who know only violence? Do their Ledgers just keep piling on money for them anyway and corporate vending machines keep pouring out Vitae to sustain them? A Vitae Charge costs 150 credits, the book lists a Vitae Charge being consumed as lasting for "one hour" or "until the end of battle," whichever comes first. So a Vitae Demon, to survive, must apparently need... 3600 credits per day. This is enough to buy multiple Instant Death Cannons and suits of powered armor. So long story short, someone did not think about how the rules and fluff lined up, here.  Transcendent Manifestations are space ghosts. That's basically it, they're space monsterghosts that show up, do things because the plot requires them to and then... disappear? The game doesn't even really have any rules for why they show up, what they do when they do, or what makes them leave again. They don't even get any stats of their own, they just use some of the REAL TOUGH GENERIC GUY templates with some random superpowers slapped on. Also despite being Transcendent Manifestations, they don't actually get any of the space wizardry from Transcendent implants, despite the two being linked by fluff in very vague ways.  We don't learn anything about Whispers that we don't already know, they're bad and spooky and they kill dudes, and when they kill dudes, sometimes those dudes explode into more Whispers. They're also literally made from blood, when they die, they turn from "crystalline blood" back into plain normal blood. Also if you just hide for ten minutes, they'll turn themselves into crystal art installations. Seriously. If they can't find anyone to kill for ten minutes, they just shrug, merge with the nearest Whispers into a big crystal. If you attack the crystal, they all come back out again, but according to the fluff, blowing the whole thing up in one go will negate that. So just call in the Scrooge McDuck Battallion to nuke the loving thing with their death rays. Also if they try to infect someone who's got a Transcendent Implant, there's a 12.5% chance that the Whisper trying it, and all Whispers in the area, spontaneously explode. However, if the person with the implant ever tries to use their implant again, they explode, into more Whispers, without a save or any response possible, and if they don't have the requisite combination of stats and/or corporate allegiance to have information about this, the PC will just unknowingly be able to suicide at any moment by deciding to use their superpowers. Fun gameplay!  We also finally get art of the Pale Men... and they look a lot less Slendermanny than I had expected. Despite being TERRIBLE THINGS THAT CAN MURDER EVERYONE, they basically just have high stats and use guns, there's nothing really that unusual about them. The fluff doesn't particularly give them any motives or establish any behavior for them, and since they're all on Earth, which is a shithole no one wants to deal with... I can't really see why they would ever really feature into the game at all. There's a section on ships which is largely space gun wankery, but does contain a section that's kind of weird. In normal combat, high-charisma characters can issue "commands," that basically buff comrades or allow them to switch places in the turn order, handy things like that, one of the few things I liked about the combat system, but it wasn't unique enough to merit my pointing out. In space combat, stuff like telling the ship to run quiet or telling people to "launch drones," is the counterpart, requires a specific level of charisma and command skill. Even if the "commander" is the one doing the thing themselves, instead of using a Mind stat and some sort of technical skill to know what to do, they still use Body:Presence(physical beauty) and the Command skill. The most complicated SPACE COMMAND is apparently ramming enemy ships, because "ALL POWER TO ENGINES" is clearly a complicated concept that only the most brilliant strategist can understand. Other things that require a command check: Hitting the brakes and scanning an area.  So, the advancement section! Interestingly enough, the game doesn't run on XP or anything similar, but instead simply suggests giving a certain number of stat-ups/skill-ups/focus options per time played(either in number of hours or number of sessions), of course while this is somewhat novel, there's also no such thing as diminishing returns(more XP needed to be paid for the same amount of boost, for instance) or other things to limit hyper-specialization. It's also worth noting that you can't use these stat-ups to boost Economy and Community stats, and Mind and Body stats can only be raised to 3 this way. How do you get Mind and Body Stats up to 4 and 5? Why that's simple. Surgery! Surgery that you pay for... with ledger stats! It's at least somewhat expensive, being 1500 for a stat-up, either from 3 to 4, or 4 to 5, but it's not that bad if you really focused on your ledger stats. Also for some reason you can boost Body:Acuity by +1 just for 200 credits with an "Augmentation" operation that jams more eyes into your head. I also somehow missed this, but for just 500 credits, you can get a Celerity implant that "levels up" one of your dice groups(d8's become d10, d10's become d12, etc.). Now, it can only be taken twice, and it has another 600-credit thing as a prereq, but one of our groups is already "maxed" out with d12's, so we only have three that need boosting, and that means we can just stat-dump something like Community and run around with three d12 groups instead pretty fast. There does in fact not seem to be any surgery for improving your mind, now that I look around for it. There's Muscular Enhancement, and the Advancement section references a "Mind Enhancement" surgery, but it's not in the book as far as I can tell. Not sure if its an editing error or if mental stats really are capped at 3 for PC's. You also can't increase Community stats at level-up time, only the GM can say when the party as a whole deserves to have them levelled up. But what about Ledger stats? Well. That's kind of funny. quote:Economy Traits grow as the player achieves certain conditions. Since your Economy Stat represents your footprint in the cash flow of the universe, it increases on its own as you achieve certain landmarks of wealth and importance. So, let me get this straight. If I start out by buffing my Ledger stats sky high, quickly earn 1000 credits, buy a death ray, then I get a boost to my Ledger stats, which will allow me to buy more death rays, or other stupidly expensive items(I guess it could be taken as meaning a different item each time, but I only need one Annihilate-status weapon, anyway). So it's like some sort of self-sustaining reaction where the richer I am, the faster I'll get richer. Then I'll use my normal level-ups to bump my body stats to 3 as fast as possible, so I can pay money to boost them even quicker... actually, surgery counts as an item, right? So hey, I'll get a ledger bonus for increasing my body stats under the scalpel, too! This system is loving stupid. Also if you want the body/mind stat boosts you have to make a case to your GM that your character did something that made you deserve said stat boost. Hope your GM isn't a cockhead. But what about proficiencies? Simple, you buy a trivial item that teaches you while you sleep. Seriously. As long as you get enough sleep for 14 days while wearing your stupid sleep-learning eye implant, you gain a proficiency point with no costs, penalties or checks, though it caps any given skill at 3(or 2, if you already have too many skills at 3). Considering that the item is of trivial cost, I'm kind of wondering why not everyone in the loving universe has a baseline of 2 in every skill. There are 30 skills, you can get up to at least 2 in all of them, 16 days per skill point(14 days of learning plus a two-day downtime period afterwards), meaning it'd take... 960 weeks, or 18 years, for it. So by the time everyone is out of their teenage years, they'll pretty much know everything, or early 20's if they don't make "Neuroplex" implants for toddlers. Going above rank 3 requires "a special quest themed around the skill." I look forward to my exciting and inspiring Finance-themed quest my amazing quest themed around the "Swim" skill. Advancing above rank 3 also frees up another skill to rise to rank 3... players have the same max on rank 4 skills as on rank 3 skills. Rather than, perhaps, some sort of shared cap for "advanced" skills(anything beyond tier 2), indicating the difficulty of mastering everything. It's. Augh. It hurts my brain and it's loving retarded. And then the book just... ends. No metaplot suggestions, no premade adventures, nothing. Except for the list of fuckwits who supported the thing, accompanied by two last pieces of art crammed in alongside all the names. 
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Feb 5, 2015 08:04
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Kai Tave posted:Does it explain why Vitae Daemons apparently look like some sort of college art student's splatterpunk mannequin sculpture made from random wooden scraps and power tools? Or is it just "lol they crazy." "lol they crazy." Because apparently when you go insaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaane what you do is randomly graft new stuff to yourself, because, apparently, being a deranged sociopath also gives you the money to pay expensive surgery bills alongside your staggering Vitae budget.
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Feb 5, 2015 09:12
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Communist Zombie posted:I actually consider this somewhat logical for a fully unregulated capitalist system, the more money you have the easier it is to exploit various loopholes and such in the economy (which includes bribes, lawsuits, just buying out competitionm etc). There is a reason why wealth concentrates into a smaller and smaller fraction of the population. But it's not the money itself that makes you richer, it's using the money. If you go out and spend 1000 credits on a fancy sports car, you somehow get more money on your next paycheck. That's not how capitalism works, a sports car or a death ray aren't investments. I mean, unless you're engaging in some particularly brutal protection rackets which... completely unregulated capitalist system... yeah, fair enough, I guess the death ray might make sense for increasing your earning potential.
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Feb 5, 2015 09:52
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It's sad that a reasonably fun concept that could be entertaining with just enough crunch to give you some tactical options, gets ruined by being literally so vapid and empty of content. gently caress the Forge and all its spawn.
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Feb 5, 2015 18:40
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Kai Tave posted:The hate some people have for The Forge and the things that came out of it has always baffled me, even back when the Forge was a thing which it isn't anymore despite the way some people still rant about it like it is. It's like, of all the poo poo in this hobby to detest and there's plenty out there to detest, you're (the general you) mad about a bunch of people whose biggest crime was having longwinded discussions about RPGs and maybe publishing some games you don't want to play, both of which you could just as easily use to describe SA Tradgames. The Forge was what gave us Bliss Stage and the inverse of Rule Zero(i.e. you're playing games wrong if you change the rules to have more fun) I think that justifies pretty much all the hate for the Forge, and Acacia's not far off on the whole GNS thing, it was basically a meaningless set of categories(they're either for CASUAL GAMERS, they're for GROGNARDY REALISM FREAKS or they're for HIPPIE STORY NERDS) to shove games into so you could point fingers at them for being the wrong thing. I mean, obviously not every thing out of the Forge was Child Molestation: Now With Gundams, but the ones that aren't just greasy from the very conceptual stage tend to be things like Polaris which, to me, are less games for people to have fun with, and more little badges of honour for people to smugly rub their beards about having played, because it makes them more intellectual than those who haven't. I don't have any real animosity for the people who were part of the Forge, but their products were pretty much the poo poo this thread was made to mock.
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Feb 5, 2015 21:17
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Halloween Jack posted:If you're going to engage in pearl-clutching over Forgey games, Poison'd is the popular choice. Wiktionary posted:Etymology[edit] Alright, so let me just be entirely sure here. You are saying that my reaction to Bliss Stage as a creepy, greasy pile of poo poo, is exaggeratedly sanctimonious and me being easily offended? Like, have you actually read the drat thing?
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Feb 5, 2015 21:28
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One of the problems with an FF RPG is that the settings are kind of like Dragonlance, each setting, and its components(possibly excepting the FF:Tactics setting), are pretty much made for one story and rarely have the content needed to weave another story out of. The mechanics are, mathematically, a pain in the rear end to replicate with dice and paper, and when they're not a pain in the rear end(and sometimes when they are), they require huge suspensions of disbelief and really treating the thing like a game(see: phoenix down mechanics, abilities that only work in combat, etc.). Frankly I always found it kind of a weird thing for anyone to make an RPG based on, most FF stuff isn't a deep vault of inspiration that begs for more stories to be told with it.
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Feb 7, 2015 01:08
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I think the issue when dealing with psychology and trauma isn't having it as part of a world or setting, but when systems start assigning them stats and point values, trivializing them by simply making them something you roll for to avoid doing something crazy/wacky or whatever. I think it's really impossible to convey a lot of the terror and hopelessness of mental illness that way. Hence why it's simply easier, better and more respectful to just say "it exists" and then let people roleplay the loving stuff.
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Feb 8, 2015 20:49
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So, looking at the F&F Wiki, we DO have an Eoris review, but it's listed as "abandoned" despite getting a decent distance into the text. I'm thinking of giving it a try, because what we DID get sounded crazy as hell.
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Feb 20, 2015 00:05
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hyphz posted:That's me. Basically, I realized I'd screwed up the rhythm by covering most of the rules during chargen so there wasn't a great deal left except for the initiative rules - which I couldn't make any sense of - and Primordial Clay, which lets you make new species. Also I had gotten to the point where opening the books was guaranteed to bring on a headache, since you have to basically scan and memorize the whole thing to know that you're not missing something elsewhere at any given moment. By all means pick it up though. Well, was there enough missing that there's actually anything new I could cover? Or would I basically just be repeating your words with more swearing and crying?
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Feb 20, 2015 01:57
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hyphz posted:There was certainly some new stuff to cover. You could actually try to play it instead of just making a character, for one thing.. Oh, hell, I'll give it a shot. I need something to pass the time until Desborough releases his loving Gor RPG, anyway.
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Feb 20, 2015 22:17
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Bacon In A Wok posted:Hey Purple, any interest in the near future in going back to look at the Night[noun] adventures for the Hollow World setting? If you're not interested anymore, I may give them a once-over, because WOW are they early 90s adventure design. I remember the Hollow World stuff didn't really catch me much when I read it, so go right ahead.
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Feb 21, 2015 17:40
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I think the Eoris review is going to be put on hold, because I found something new to look at instead. From their Drive-Thru RPG page... KROMORE quote:Play in Fantasy, Steampunk, Medieval, Sci-fi, or Modern eras. Practice the ways of the Sci-magi with realm magic. Hunt down demons from the outer realms. Encounter aliens & demigods as you explore the universe. Customize unique characters, weapons, vehicles & armor. Explore a massive setting over Kromore's 10,000 year timeline. So firstly, we've got something massively ambitious, likely full of terribly loving written fiction since it needs to span 10,000 years, and secondly they think steampunk isn't a terrible idea. Already off to a great start for an F&F review. quote:Use armor and gear based on your character training and not based on a pre determined class. [b]Use armor and gear based on your character training and not based on a pre determined class. They think that apparently a classless system is breaking new ground. quote:With the custom Kromore three action combat system players and story tellers can quickly add dimension and story to combat all while strategically planning the next move. Players can drive home lethal blows to targets using devastating attacks or pick apart enemy armor with a flurry of attacks. With literally thousands of different build scenarios players will never run out of new ways to defeat their enemies. And they're using a custom system which promises to be completely different from everything else, ever. quote:The system brings extensive choice to players in its uniquely strategic three action combat system blending new ideas with old for easy to play strategic adventures. A massive setting filled with wonder and excitement at every corner. An easy to use game system that gives choice to players. Hundreds of abilities & dozens of character professions. A diverse range of races, weapons, and armor to fit your characters game. You have everything you need to run your epic adventures in one beautiful book. I mean, if it's not all just callous marketing hype, and they really tried to do this, they almost certainly hosed it up hilariously... especially since all this novel content only takes up 352 pages, which is only 50 more than, say, Hc Svnt Dracones, which only focuses on one time period of one setting, has its own(even if kind of bad) system... it's going to be a box of gently caress, and I look forward to it.
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Feb 22, 2015 16:18
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Kurieg posted:
Has there ever been a good execution of the "arcane caster in melee"-concept? Because it always seems to be hosed in some way, usually because they incredibly lazily just copypaste other arcane casting, rather than acknowledging that a lot of it's useless in the middle of a scrum.
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Feb 25, 2015 00:11
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Ratpick posted:The traditional problem with Fighter/Mage hybrids is that if you just stack the two together you end up with a character who spends alternating turns either fighting or casting spells instead of combining them somehow. The 4e Swordmage overcomes this by making most of its spells melee attacks with the weapon tag (meaning that a part of the casting of the spell is actually hitting someone with your sword), while the Pathfinder Magus does it by having spell combat, which works sort of like two-weapon fighting in that you get to make two attacks as part of a full-round action, but for the Magus the other attack is always a standard action spell, and by giving them the ability to cast touch spells through a melee attack (so that when you cast a touch spell you don't make a touch attack, you make a melee attack and if it connects you deal your melee damage on top of whatever effects the spell might have had). I can absolutely agree with this. Either give the characters some special rules for using spells differently(all your spells are touch-attack, yes, that includes the ones with an area of effect, and you cast them just by whanging someone real hard with your sword. FIREBALL BLADE, MOTHERFUCKER.), or give them their entire own spellbook/ability set. The Magus sounds kind of hard to balance, though, if they get to BOTH attack AND hurl a spell around every turn, and assuming they get the same spellbook as ordinary wizards/sorcs or whatever, aren't they objectively better than both fighters AND wizards?
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Feb 25, 2015 23:07
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So, end of the month, which means time to spend money on potentially terrible RPG's to look at. As usual, I'm going in blind and really only ranging ahead if I encounter any really interesting terms like "Phallus Space," so you'll get to experience this as I do. This game first came to my attention when someone popped into an IRC server I frequent to ask if someone could hook him up with some HOT WAREZ of Kromore, which got me curious about what this HIP NEW RPG could possibly be. Turns out to be, as mentioned, basically a one-man effort to crank out 350+ pages of fluff and rules for the RPG that appears able to cover pretty much anything. At least according to the sales blurb. Kromore Roleplaying Game!  I crack open the book and it looks reasonably organized compared to a lot. Glancing at the index, for instance, the fluff is in the back, for once, rather than forcing us to read an ill-advised novel before letting us play the game. Basics, chargen, rules and then fluff. I suppose this means we'll be frontloading all the dry stuff and saving the real laughs until the end.  Or does it? DARK BLADE, that's a profession name right out of someone's lovely fanfic. The Adventure No, really, that's the title of the very first chapter. It gives us the basics of what a roleplaying game, as per usual, elaborating in detail on the role of the storyteller, how to tell a good story and... some... weird phrasings, and some suggestions that seem a bit on the line of encouraging railroading and DMPC's to keep the PC's on track and on mission. But seriously, weird phrasings, the next one is a particularly odd one that seems kind of strange given that the developer doesn't seem to have English as a second language. is this even English? posted:Sometimes if players choose not to get involved in a situation a great story element to develop a mistaken identity theme can occur. Use all story that occurs around players to drive back to the larger story. Every choice including inactive choice is part of a story. The third line is mostly just there because the phrasing, again, seems awkward as gently caress. But in general this entire chapter seems to heavily imply that you shouldn't actually let your players affect the story, or go off on their own adventures. Keep driving them back to the "larger story" and give them the "belief" that they can change the story, which may again just be lovely phrasing, but seems to imply that they should only BELIEVE they have the power, not actually have it. Then after that, the book dropkicks us into EXAMPLE COMBAT before we've even had a look at the rules basics. quote:“Kromore is on the verge of total civil-war between Steam Rebels and those who favor tech advancement. This real issue lingers at the back of your head as you ride the bumpy, uncomfortable, and yet highly familiar upper D train across the exposed open track over Mavens Sky District. The sound of steel reverberate a steady cha-chunking as the train car whistles against the steam filled airy exterior. An old Mavish woman clutches her purse next to a red skinned Gyxan who has been eyeballing a gold watch hanging from the lapel of a short and whiskery Laerish. The Laerish seems to check the watch impatiently every few seconds. He is finely dressed with a small bowler hat atop his head. Also in the car are three passengers. The first passenger of our players is Steve's character, Steve please describe your character." The example of play rolls on with, well, excessive rolling. EVERYTHING gets a roll, even for NPC's. quote:Player Jane: "Ut oh. I quickly yell for everyone to duck." "Ut oh?" Have I mentioned that this thing blatantly needs the loving care of an editor? Anyway, the players are on board a train, the train gets attacked by a driveby shooting from a hovercar, lots of dice are rolled that we don't really know a drat thing about because the example of play is well before the example of rules, a guy steals a watch and runs off, and then the example ends, continuing into some advice that's mostly praising itself about how awesome the example was and how great an example it was, specifically, of all the previous advice. quote:As the Story Teller you can always change the outside hovering vehicle to a civil police ship that is arresting the Laerish for stealing a top secret watch, A top secret watch. But really, there's some good advice here, like what to do when the players ignore your carefully crafted railroad to engage in something they find more interesting. quote:Some ways of getting stories back on the right path are by reminding the players of story goals through a third party, friendly messenger, newspaper article, television program, or deadly assassin. For instance, have the world and NPC's nag them about the main plot until you lose your temper and try to have them killed. And don't forget that Deus Ex Machina should only be used for quote:When dealing with Story Telling never take the power away from a player. Don’t tell a player how their character feels, instead present them with a scenario and ask them how their character feels. This motivates role playing and a bond between player and character. It’s also a lot more fun. Don't take away power from the players by telling them their character's emotions, allow them to properly roleplay the anguish of being trapped in an unfeeling, railroaded world where evil assassins and blizzards stop their every attempt to deviate. I mean, this isn't bad advice, it just seems kind of hilarious when it's right after all that other poo poo. Then the book harps on a bit about how there are rules for literally everything you could ever want to do in or outside of combat, which seems to me less of a promise, and more of a threat that no matter what we try to do, we're going to be loving rolling for it. quote:Sometimes the best stories start with the simplest of concepts. Here are a few of our favorite plot hook ideas: Rescue a missing person from some villains. Explore a cave or ancient tomb. Survive a natural disaster and travel back in time to stop it from occurring. Defeat a power hungry leader who is exploiting their citizens. Track down a stolen item and the one who stole it. Outside of Bill & Ted, I don't think I can recall many stories with time travel that I'd define as "simple." Time paradoxes and becoming your own grandpa aren't exactly GM's First Adventure. quote:Players will find the system easily adapts to any game setting world. Challenge loving accepted, this claim requires testing. Start considering what worlds you're convinced Kromore won't work for, and we'll see how it turns out. My guess is that it's going to be basically "all of them." But who knows? It sort of flows into the "basic rules" chapter which tells us literally everything except the basic loving resolution mechanic. We get told what the stats mean, how we calculate HP, how we calculate how much we can throw, what languages we know, and so on, all sorts of stupid minutiae. The closest we get to actually getting a basic mechanic before launching us headfirst into chargen is, as far as I can parse the bad phrasing, the mechanic for skill checks, where our skill level is a static modifier, and the associated stat is the number of D4's we roll... but no one tells us what the "average" DC should be, so there's no real way of judging whether it takes 1d4 or 10d4 to make us competent at something. I mean, it even tells us what the difficulty "categories" are("basic, easy, medium, hard, epic, legendary, unimaginable, uncanny, and in some cases ungodly."), but neglects to point out what a given "difficulty" translates to in DC. Off to a great loving start, here. I'm expecting some loving gems once we get into the actual chargen, and even more once we hit the fluff.
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Feb 26, 2015 21:55
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Those are all excellent suggestions and I'm going to go ahead and expect that exactly zero of them can be implemented in the game. Also, Tasoth, you're a loving monster. KROMORE  Character Creation So in Kromore's defense, at least the character sheet doesn't look Eoris-levels of bad, but much in keeping with the rest of the writing so far, the author just cheerfully launches into everything with what I can best describe as bad pacing. The very first page of chargen is just a huge smear of mechanics and how to calculate derived attributes. Also apparently how much you can carry, drag and push is derived only from your character weight, not your Muscle stat, just the first of what I'm going to assume will be many puzzling design decisions. Chargen seems to start off with a "lifepath" sort of thing, where we follow a flowchart through four decisions that give us some starting bonuses, as well as helping determine our starting money. Most of it seems relatively setting-agnostic, meaning that Kromore might at least slightly deliver on being able to function through any of its five supposed settings, though quite a few lifepath options get "piloting" and "tech," which I'm not sure how relevant would be in the "fantasy" or "medieval" settings. Also, while we've had the basic stats explained, and know what they would benefit us for, we've had no skills explained so far, so, for instance, "Operate"? What does that help us do? And of course, almost all of the lifepath bonuses are skill bonuses. Also some puzzling choices, most of the bonuses to skills are static +X bonuses, and we've been told that skill ranks are static +X's to things we do, while stats define how many D4 we roll. But there's a "+1d4" to skills in places, does that mean that I get a RANDOM bonus for choosing this lifepath option? Or that I get another 1d4 to roll whenever I use that specific skill? This isn't explained anywhere. In general, though, the lifepath doesn't seem too badly constructed, and is followed up by assigning points to our basic stats. It's a pointbuy system and, as a first for any pointbuy system I've seen, actually lines up some suggested stat arrays for new players, as well as doing some of the basic math for the player(how many free points a given array leaves them with for the next stage of chargen. Though the terrible organization of the writing and the occasionally "I ran this through Google Translate"-tier phrasing made me confused on the actual calculations and made me think the book got some of them wrong at first.). As clumsy a first impression as Kromore gives, this is actually a nice touch, as pointbuy is something that can occasionally trip up new players. quote:Players should remember they will automatically receive an equal number of free abilities to their attribute score totals. A number of free abilities EQUAL TO their attribute score totals, as it turns out. But anyway, small slip-ups aside it's time for the EXCITING RACES OF KROMORE and oh my God what's wrong with your FACE.  Hahahah, what the gently caress? Is she a smurf or something? Uh, I guess we've got four colours of human, the weird loving things from Avatar with huge noses instead of huge eyes, and dwarves. quote:If players decide to choose a Human race they must select which nation the Human is from. Each Human race holds grudges politically and socially against one another. I look forward to a list of all the human nations that have existed throughout KROMORE's 10,000-year DETAILED HISTORY, cross-referenced by which ones existed simultaneously, and with each one having a detailed rundown of who they hate and who they get along with. I'm pretty sure, though, that we're just going to get, like, five nations, and two of them will have a sidenote of "Only exists during STEAMPUNK ERA" or "Blown up during SCI-FI ERA, replaced with LASER COUNTRY." And, of course, only humans avoid being a monoculture. quote:All races start with the bonus language of Trade. Trade is a language comprised of 100 different words, phrases, and sign language symbols used for basic means of communication. Wait, so, there's 100 words, 100 phrases and 100 sign language symbols? Or there's 100 if you tally up all the words, phrases and sign language symbols? Because the latter's not going to let you do much communicating beyond asking where the loving toilet is or ordering a beer. quote:Natural Defense applies to a characters dodge and is always constant even when the character is caught prone or disabled. Which makes me imagine a team of commandos trying to assault a sleeping Metal Man and falling all over each other because even though he's asleep, his Natural Defense is somehow still applying to his Dodge. I don't know if +2 is a lot, but I hope so, because that would be loving ridiculous and a little bit hilarious. Like, I could see if it was applied to armor of some sort, but dodge? Why dodge? quote:Natural defense for some races is higher due to the races small stature or the races thicker than normal skin. Oh, I guess because the designer is a lazy sack of poo poo and went with D&D-style "armor"/defense as being a rolled-together lump of all your defensive attributes, both dodging and armor. quote:Due to social relations, size, and origin several races have negatives applied to them. These are not bad qualities of the race, but represent their social and physical standings in the ever changing political world of Kromore. I like how it represents their standing in an EVER-CHANGING WORLD, but apparently over 10,000 years, the world doesn't change enough for these things to be different during different periods. Jesus loving Christ. This is even more offensive when the game, a paragraph later, acknowledges some degree of change in that some races only exist during some periods... and of course those are all shunted off to the appendices, but include, we're told, H.I.V.E. Vampires and "realm races." Ferrians quote:“Bendai khu beiz’nehet y’ Razz-I” Why loving bother to translate it if you leave out translating a word that's core to the loving meaning of the statement?  So the Ferrians were transported to Kromore in "the 70th century BSC" by the "Tesck" that have so far gone completely unmentioned anywhere. They live on a continent referred to as "the jungle paradise of war"(???), and they used to live on another continent, but something hosed it up so that it's now "vastly uninhabitable for sustained life." As opposed to very temporary life, I guess? loving hell. quote:The Great Metal War during the era of Steam and Steel left it destroyed after the humanoid Innate wielder inhabitants formed an alliance with the allied nations against the Kalin Parliamentary Order. Metal Men arrived and destroyed the small island continent, a destruction the land never recovered from. Hmmm, yes, these sure are a lot of terms. Not that I give a poo poo what they mean. But the whole thing is basically meaningless without knowing who the gently caress these people or things are, what "humanoid Innate wielders" are. quote:Though the Ferrian have cat like appearances in the eyes and face, they are far more human than cat despite their tails and ears which are both docked at birth. ???????????????????????????????????? Nothing about them is loving catlike, at all. Has this person ever seen a cat? quote:Exiled Ferrian in their native tongue are called “Razz-I.” So "death without battle honor is exiled Ferrian"? Aaaaaargh. Whatever, these guys are basically Cat Orcs/Klingons. BATTLE HONOR, tattoos, live in noble savagery, can wear their SUPER HAIR as armor, don't do much with technology unless it's for war, and when they're in other cultures they're mostly mercenaries or criminal muscle. quote:Many Ferrian do not seek honor battling amongst the stars unless something proposes a threat to their home. The author of this is supposedly from New York, born and raised. You wouldn't have loving guessed it from this writing, would you? I would've guessed, like, Poland, myself. Maybe Dutch. If I quoted every single loving awkward or downright WRONG term or phrasing, I'd be quoting the entire loving book so far. Did you know it's possible to "miss-use" magic? I just learned that, from this book. Metal Men  quote:Their existence was declared a mistake after many rebelled slavery in the Order’s military. Thousands of Metal Men were dishonorably discharged into space before their existence was revealed, but thousands more managed to escape. Hard to tell if he's making a joke or actually thinks that a "dishonorable discharge" involves throwing someone away into the ocean or space or something. But anyway, they were a magical experiment into making SUPER SOLDIERS that accidentally developed free will, like basically every super soldier project in any piece of fiction, ever. At this point it would be a surprise to have an android that actually stayed true to the spirit of its programming or an artificially created species/creature that didn't eventually eat its creator. quote:In addition to their immortality the Metal Men all begin life at the age of twenty seven and never age beyond it. Their previous human memories are gone, Except I guess they used to be humans, yet no matter what, they're always 27 years of age? What if you turn a child into a metal man? Does he become huge and buff? Do old people turned into metal men become young and strong? Can you even do that? Can they reproduce in any sort of way, resulting in a horrific sudden aging of metal man babies? Apparently they're engineered not to procreate, but some "metal women" mutate to "reveal" offspring(what? WORDS MEAN THINGS). So I if all metal men are instantly 27 years of age, that's gotta result in some weird stuff when giving birth, or possibly an Alien-like explosion during procreation. Gross. But aside from that, if new-born metal men are a rarity, and they're all functionally immortal, does that mean that the player is most likely centuries, if not millennia old, and hyper-experienced compared to every other member of the party? I guess this is just completely ignored. And mind you, if metal men don't care about aging, what about other biological necessities? Do they need food and water? Do they breathe? Maybe this would be relevant to address, considering that their description makes them sound like loving robots(metal skin, no aging, no natural procreation, outside of mutants, have trouble with "complex emotions.") I'd also like to point out that while the Ferrians got an entire page to themselves, all the other species basically get a single half-page column. Also for some reason only half the races(Ferrian, Metal Man, Laerish) get a quote, while the other three(Gyx, Human, Zatilok) go without. The Gyx  The Gyx get literally no biological or sociological details shared about them. Nothing. They're just some red dudes that the "Tesck" dropped off on Kromore a couple of times over the eras and who were generally enslaved or murdered by roaming packs of xenophobes, but now they're free. quote:The Gyx are known deadly with a small blade due to thousands of years in servitude. Apparently a history of being enslaved means everyone assumes you know your way around a shiv. Or that you DO know your way around a shiv. I can't tell. Zatilok  GAH, it doesn't get any less horrifying the second time So, the Zatilok are apparently the only true natives of KROMORE, a bunch of NOBLE SAVAGES, not to be confused with the NOBLE SAVAGERY of the Ferrians. quote:Though they are the oldest, the Zatilok are the least technologically advanced of all Kromorian races. They are referred to as space monkeys by Kromorians, because they are no more apt at flying than a monkey is in space. A term used negatively against Zatilok. This also makes no sense to me. Firstly, they're pretty clearly feline-inspired. Secondly, why would monkeys have trouble in space? I mean, if anything, a semi-prehensile tail, and feet that can be used for grabbing and clinging far better than human feet might actually be an advantage in a zero-G habitat. Hell, I'm pretty sure a lot of apes and monkeys would transition to zero-G/micro-G pretty fast, faster than some humans, in fact, once they got the hang of it. But anyway, yeah, they're cats, JUST LIKE THE FERRIANS, GUYS, NOTICE HOW CATLIKE THE FERRIANS ARE, but more catlike than the Ferrians because of their "furry complexions." Laerish  quote:“There was a wee man named Harboro Sam, He took up some drinkin’ with main sail in hand,With nothing but hot air to sail him to land, He shored up to sailors, befriending with man,He threw down his skivvies and threw up his hands SHOVE OFF UNLESS YE DRINKIN!” Everything in this book has an "unknown meaning." quote:During the time prior to the Three Kingdoms and over the era of Three Kingdoms, Laerish lived in barbaric clan houses and sailed long ships. The Laerish of this time focused on pillage and wealth along with technological advancement. So the Laerish are basically honourable Irish(or Scottish? Can't tell) drunk techno-vikings. Or something. Also they've got almost no women(for some reason?). Also everyone likes the Laerish despite the fact that the Laerish used to raid everyone and now, apparently, maintain a stranglehold on high-tech trade because they're just so good at it. Wow, Christ, this is off to a great start. I'm going to handle the humans in a separate post, because it turns out there's actually a few pages' worth of nations/human variants. Not that I expect them to be particularly inspiring, but dealing with this writing is a bit of a challenge.
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Feb 28, 2015 17:49
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:You know... between the orcs being described as having feline features which are clearly not there in the art and having the more feline name, and the actual cats being described as "monkeys" while having a name more fit for the orc race... that makes me wonder, were these switched at some point in development? Given how poorly edited this thing seems to be, there could be a treasure trove of material referring to the wrong race in this thing! Nah, it specifically points out that the Zatilok are also feline, and that some people think the Zatilok and Ferrians are related, but they're not. Still doesn't explain that loving hideous Zatilok nose, though.
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Feb 28, 2015 21:06
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KROMORE Humans of Kromore So, I was mildly wrong, there are 17 human nations, six of which are restricted by era, and the remaining 11 of which have existed, apparently, for the entirety of humanity's existence on Kromore. Obviously humans are not from Kromore since only the Zatilok are natives. quote:The disparity of Kromorian Humans are as vast and as their Earth ancestors. Though they share a historical bond, Human’s of Kromore distinguish themselves by the Kromorian nation they hail from. Hmmm, yes, I'm sure that it's entirely reasonable to simply list an "immortal" race alongside the human races. Certainly immortality would result in exactly the same culture and statistics! It actually does, and Daeadrin don't even have the highest skill bonus total or anything. I guess they spend a lot of their immortal lives doing nothing productive that they can learn from. In general the human nations are described haphazardly, sometimes we learn what wiped them out, sometimes we don't, sometimes their government style is mentioned, sometimes it's not, the only constants are average weights and heights, and what their diet largely consists of. Not sure why the latter's so important unless the book contains a detailed section on gluten and nut allergies later on. This section also reveals that when Earth was threatened by an alien species wanting to suck it dry of resources, humanity just relocated en masse to the rest of the galaxy. Considering that humanity had the ability to just do this, apparently before this insurmountable alien foe destroyed them or enslaved them, you have to wonder why humanity hadn't spread to the rest of the galaxy before then. Earth refugee humans are also for some reason far less restrained by their culture than the other nations, just getting a pool of free skill points to assign however they want, rather than having four to six culturally pre-assigned skill points.  Also note how every single non-human species live in exactly one location, with one culture, while humans have spread everywhere. Lazy loving writing. Also note how there's an "Outlander Human" nation, even though they're specifically described as the "humans without nations or borders." I also skipped over dozens of terrible wordings because you guys have the gist of the bad writing by now. Professions Note that even though the game prides itself, in its sales pitch, on not having "pre-determined classes," instead it has pre-determined professions, which are basically treated like 3.x/5e classes, you gain a new "level" every time you level up, and you can use that to continue a profession you already have, or straight up just grab a tier of a new one. The text in the book here even admits that professions "resemble the concept of 'classes'."  I do legitimately like some of the art, though. This is really well done. Military Professions Soldier posted:The one in the heavy armor carrying a two handed weapon in one hand while killing you with the other. That's a Soldier. Soldier: Continuing in the proud tradition of lovely fantasy RPG's everywhere, by and large all the soldier gets is increasing numerical bonuses to shooting/stabbing things, or using things that shoot things. It turns out that "Operate," at least by the description here(yes, we still have no skill descriptions, so while making our character we have to guess at what half these things actually benefit), is about "operating" vehicles, meaning that's yet another huge part of the lifepath chargen that only really works with post-fantasy/post-medieval stuff and... hey, wait a minute, that also kind of means Soldiers don't fit into that stuff for poo poo either. So much for being setting-agnostic. About the only hilarious ability Soldiers get is "Weapon Redirect." Any time an enemy within reach of the soldier fails any action, including some attacks(specifically grapples and charges), the soldier just gets to pick them up and throw them away. It doesn't even have to target the soldier, and seems to completely ignore the target's weight and size. In fact, it specifically just says "attacker," so potentially a charging tank attempting to run someone over would count, or a giant robot just trying to move past and failing some check. In general, though, even 3.x Fighters get more options than these poor goons(well, after a couple of feats, anyway).  SOME of the art, I don't like all of it. Medic posted:When everything begins to spin and the room grows dark a Medic is hopefully closing in. Lofting the wounded onto their shoulders and carrying them to safety, the Medic will slap a bandage on wounds before the target can realize they are pushing them back into the fray of combat. After all, who else are they going to hide behind as the bullets come flying past. Medic: gently caress all not-wizards, I guess. In the same way Soldiers just get +attack, all Medics get is +heal and the special ability to carry allies a very, very short distance. So unless your friend collapsed just on the other side of some handy cover, this is loving useless. Pilot posted:As the rush of air blows hair wildly into the open sky and a smile breaks across their face, it's evident the Pilot is having that dream where they are flying again. Pilot: The pilot is yet another one-trick monkey, in this case "fly better, fly better, fly better." Their few abilities that breaks the monotony is that above a certain level, they basically get a Red Baron-ish renown and get to intimidate enemy pilots just by telling them that they're in the air and loving poo poo up, and that they get to "Cloud Fall." I.e., if they pass their skill checks they can drop from 100' with little to no damage, of course, if they gently caress up their skill checks they probably die instantly, so you can't even really rely on it. And how often are you 100' off the ground in an RPG without your friends being so as well? I guess this might save YOU, but the rest of the party is still hosed. Good luck playing a Pilot unless the entire party does or it's a solo game. quote:Instinctive Foresight: Shady characters are found on refueling pads, in space stations, and within and environment vehicles are brought for repairs and construction. When the pilot is first to act in a fights initiative against enemies they gain a bonus 1d4 to their first attack in their rounds turn. Any time the pilot has a better initiative than their target they gain this bonus. I also don't know why associating with shady characters somehow gives you an attack bonus?  Banned from DeviantArt for being too poo poo Officer posted:The Officer excels at controlling a large force of men and women on the battlefield. Their leadership abilities are unmatched by any other profession. Negotiating or blasting their way through conflict, the Officer is always prepared for any battle. An Officer is available through the background origin or by Story Teller approval. Officer: I hope you like sitting at the back of the battle with a megaphone and giving everyone boosts in combat, because that's literally all this class gets to do Knight Agent: Finally there's the option to be a "Knight Agent," if you have high enough stats, totally not a prestige class, honest, which basically means you're a member of the Kromorian CIA. Interestingly enough, unlike the four preceding classes, they acknowledge that Knight Agents will function differently in different eras... which they accomplish by changing the gear, and not the skills. They have the ability to interrogate enemies... except they don't use it to interrogate, apparently they use it to yell at enemies in combat and scare them into lowering their defenses? Why is this ability called "interrogate" at all? They also get the ability to PASS JUDGMENT which... again has nothing to do with passing judgment in a legal sense, instead it just means that the agent now gets a huge bonus to fighting them. With this level of fighter oppression, I can't wait to see what options wizards get. Civilian Professions Aristocrat: Interestingly, even though we have to beg storyteller permission to become an officer if we don't get it during lifepath chargen, nothing stops us from just declaring at level-up that Bob the Officer is now in fact Bob von Schnauzer, Officer and also heir to the Schnauzer mercantile empire. Despite being described as negotiators, diplomats and fast-talkers, almost every Aristocrat skill is somehow using their charisma to better beat up people in combat by distracting them. In fact, almost EVERY loving ability so far, for all the classes, have been for combat. I think the only exception being that Officers get a military agent network that gives them a bonus on knowledge checks. Oh and I guess Aristocrats also get a monthly allowance depending on how charismatic they are. Dark Blade: Half these guys' skills are prefaced with the word "Dark." Dark Sneak, Dark Survival, Dark Blade Veil, etc. which is no surprise to anyone. It also takes seven levels before this EPIC ASSASSIN CLASS actually gets any special ability making them better at sneaking. All their other abilities up till that point are just combat tricks. Did I mention that this game is REALLY FOCUSING ON THE COMBAT yet?  HELLO I AM A SUBTLE ASSASSIN, PAY ME NO MIND Shadow: The first class to get almost as many non-combat boosts/skills as combat boosts/skills, generally related to stealth and traps, and avoiding being blown up by traps. A momentous day! They also have the ability to "trick" enemies in an undefined way to remove their actions in combat, at higher levels. They can steal "two actions" from an enemy, and as I understand it, PC's and NPC's only have three actions per round. Judging by the lovely wording, they can do this once per enemy adjacent to them... but nothing seems to require them to target different enemies, and it only costs them one action... so two Shadows working together could basically stunlock up to three enemies completely, as long as they're in relatively close quarters. Resisting being "tricked" is possible, but takes a "legendary" resistance check. Inventor: Holy poo poo, this class only has one ability directly focused on combat. And it only took us nine classes to get there! Their one ability focused on combat is dealing double damage to artificial enemies, an ability that is, puzzlingly, named "Bad Breath." It's also, again, one of the few classes that acknowledge different eras. For instance, apparently even in eras without electrical devices, they're able to make short-distance, radio-wave remote controls that can set off, as per the book's example, trebuchets. quote:In tech level settings that do not allow for electronically machinery the device works as a short wave frequency radio or trigger device that can operate a trebuchet or device to be set off. Christ, there's another 13 classes to go, including the "Combat" class category. Yes, Combat and Military classes are, inexplicably, separate from each other. At least the final category will be the various wizard professions, Sci-Magi, Adept, Sci-Priest and Demon Hunter. They, at least, have to be able to do some poo poo that not everyone loving else can do. In fact, I think it's almost entirely guaranteed, by this point, that having access to magic will mean that they get a huge swathe of things they can do while fighters and thieves can eat poo poo.
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Mar 1, 2015 17:03
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Christ, for once I'm reading ahead for an update and this stupid poo poo. There's a class that, if it successfully "Negotiates" with enemies in combat, can basically take any of their stuff without checks as long as they're within reach. Literally says ANYTHING, and up to three items per round(you get three actions per round, a given thing only takes more than one action to do if it specifically says so). So armor, weapon, pants, or their left shoe or something. There's also a skill that massively magnifies your ability to Negotiate as long as you've fed someone food you've made, and it doesn't say they have to eat it WILLINGLY, so you can just jam it in their mouth. You can dual-wield cakes into combat in Kromore and steal people's weapons right out of their hands. This loving game. I also leave you a teaser of ~art~ for the next update. 
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Mar 2, 2015 20:56
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KROMORE More "Outland Professions" are basically described as adventurers, characters who travel the globe getting into fights and stealing stuff. They consist of the Privateer, Mercenary, Duelist, Grifter and "Ferrian Vanquisher." Most of them are relatively unremarkable, aside from the Grifter and the usual bizarre wording and logic that pops up in some of the abilities. quote:Outland Trickster: The privateer is often stuck off grid from the rest of society. The privateer learns to combat the forces of mad men, wild beast, and thieves with the power of quick thinking. As 1 action and a hardsurvival skill check they can render a target prone until their next turn. The privateer uses their survival skill to find a weakness in terrain, environment, or enemy gear. Because yes, I absolutely translate "often out in the wilderness" to "knows how to trip people up." Also note that despite this being related to fighting the forces of "mad men, wild beasts and thieves," nothing prevents you from knocking over a robot or a cop with this. It also simply specifies "target," so unless something is specifically unable to be knocked prone, you can flip over tanks, giant mecha and just about anything else with it. There's also no specified range, and the fluff on how it works is delightfully vague, so potentially you can do it from across a room as long as you can come up with an excuse? Or from even farther away? I mean, the fact that you can use a "weakness in the terrain or enemy gear" that, presumably, the player gets to invent himself opens it up to just about anyone, anywhere, in any situation, as long as you know they're there. The real star, as mentioned, is the Grifter. quote:Grifter Charm: A grifter makes a negotiate check in combat as 1 action and gains up to 1 point of their charm attribute as a bonus to attack that chosen target until it flees or is defeated. So yes, we can literally steal ANYTHING from an enemy as long as we're within reaching distance and manage to "grifter charm" someone. If you wanted to be very technical, you could presumably steal someone's eyeballs or, if you rule that "distance" only considers how far you can theoretically reach, and not what's in the way, also internal organs. Also again, even without wording it to instakills, remember that we have three actions in a given round, and unless specified otherwise, anything we do seems to default to requiring one action. So even if we need to use one action to close up to stealing range, we can still steal a dude's weapon and armor. By the level where we get THE GRIFT, our Grifter Charm has also been upgraded to apply to three targets at once. So we can literally disarm an entire squad of dudes in one round if we can get into melee range. The CAKE BATTLE ability is a bit later on, in another chapter, where any class is allowed to spend points to get a "Civilian Vocation." The first rank of the Chef vocation provides: quote:Cooking Persuasion: A chef gains the ability to cook amazing meals that can persuade targets by allowing the Chef to make a negotiate check against their target after feeding them a meal. The negotiate gains them x2 their normal bonus to negotiation against that target. Also note that there's no limit on how long after eating a meal that they'll be easily persuaded by you. At the most aggressive you could rule that "feeding" means you have to at least serve it to them, so you can't be the owner of a candy shop or kebab booth that eventually makes an entire city vulnerable to his Negotiate attempts. So if you use your presumably sky high, if you're going for this, Negotiate abilities to charm your way into taking over an army's field kitchen or something, moments after dinner time you can declare you're starting combat and start liberating everyone of their gear. It also notice that it just says a meal, not even necessarily a meal that the cook himself made. The RAW for Kromore is hilariously dire. Weirdly enough this also seems to make the Grifter a far more potent thief in combat than out of combat and in any stealth situation, and looking up the rules for Negotiation, it's basically ROLL FOR MIND CONTROL. If you get 16 or more than the target number(determined by their Charisma), you can literally convince them of anything, and there appears to be no upper limit on how high skill bonuses can go. Duellists and Mercenaries are both dull, except that mercenaries get the weird ability to make makeshift bombs out of "a simple fuel and a hard object. (Ex. Rocks, Tin can, Battery, etc.)," and can, at higher levels, and with a decent intelligence score, guarantee that they can make makeshift bombs so fast that they can make and throw them in the same round, and still have an action to spare. A quick glance ahead in the book reveals that these bombs made out of tin cans and batteries do more damage than "plasma sniper rifles," at least by just looking at the value on the tables and without involving any skills or other modifiers. By the point he gets to do this, the Mercenary also has three NPC companions, so he could just spend all three of his turns making bombs, passing them to his companions, and having them throw them. This seems to add up to way more damage than he could ever do by actually giving them or himself weapons, and cheaper, too. Ferrian Vanquishers are only notable for the fact that their weapon is their hair, and telling us that apparently it requires "diamond blades" to cut Ferrian hair. Why no one captures Ferrians to shave them bald and weave an impenetrable set of clothes/armor out of their hair, I don't know. Next up are the "combat professions," listing the Battler, Warrior, Combat Artist and Brawler. Including them, we now have the: Soldier, Duellist, Mercenary, Battler, Warrior, Combat Artist and Brawler, to list the ones that are just a fighter by any other name, and that's being very generous and leaving out some. In any loving sane RPG they'd just be the same base class/profession but with different fluff and specializations chosen by the player after first level. And there's literally no interesting fluff or detail to any of them, they're all just a tiresome blur of combat modifiers. The Battler can go berserk and the Brawler is a 3rd ed D&D Monk, that's about it. The art does seem to try to outdo itself by being loving awful in new and exciting ways, though!  And now it's time for wizard supremacy. Sci-Magi, who are chalk wizards. Adepts, who are sorcerers. Sci-Priests, who are "soulful combat fighters." And Demon Hunters, who are dark, brooding characters that no one trusts. Sci-Magi In addition to getting skill boosts and abilities of their own, some of them quite rad and even, dare I say it, kinda cool, Sci-Magi also have an additional column in their level up spreadsheet that no other class does, that grants them free abilities. Any class can buy into magic abilities, but these guys, in addition to getting as much poo poo as everyone else, gets them for free. quote:Chalk: A Sci-Magi can procure 1 piece of chalk every action without the use of an action to draw the chalk, but the chalk is required carried. Chalk? Well, sure. CHALK, but what can a wizard do with CHALK? Well, for starters, a Sci-Magi can crush a piece of chalk, specifically, nothing else, to have it function as a flashbang that he's immune to. Chalk is also the item needed for most sci-magi abilities, drawing sigils, etc. and since he can just make more out of thin air, he can never really be disarmed of those abilities unless he's tied up. He can also find anything non-living(easily circumvented, just tell it to find the guy's shirt instead), without needing a check, as long as he has a "crystal" to imbue with a desire to find it, then he has a magical compass for finding it. Chalk posted:Doorway: A Sci-Magi can use chalk to draw doorways to the other side of a wall or structure. An "epic awareness check" requiring that someone get over 24 as a result of d4's+skill modifiers. And no, it doesn't require any check to turn invisible, just chalk, chalk that you have an infinite loving supply of. Without chalk, the sci-magi still has telekinesis and the ability to turn any reflective surface into a portal gateway. The text specifically calls out "the surface of the ocean on a still day," and specifies that it counts as one continuous surface, which happily negates the limits on how far two surfaces can be from each other. So, you know, have fun teleporting from one continent to another as long as the weather permits. And this isn't even getting into the fact that anyone with Realm Magic can make an infinite army of ghosts. Yes, you heard me right, we'll get to that in the Abilities chapter. Adept Adepts don't get as much overpowered poo poo as sci-magi, presumably because they're not proper wizards and hence don't deserve proper supremacy. Instead they get to make inferior lesser classes like rogues feel irrelevant. quote:The adept can produce basic elemental items. The items are not completely stable and deteriorate into air after a number of mins equaling the adepts SOUL attribute. Often times the adept will create a key or something they are searching for without realizing it, but then the object vanishes again in a few hours. The items created are elemental in nature and fit into the hand of the adept as a solid item with no moving parts. Example: chalk, flint, wood, soft rock, metal, coal. Suck it, lockpickers. Also if you want to break the game, point out that there's clearly permission for organic chemistry since coal is mentioned, and that there are plenty of toxic and corrosive substances that could do notable damage even if you didn't produce more than the weight/volume of a key, and they certainly have no moving parts. This stuff also takes up only one action and with an "easy focus" check to pull off, we can do it pretty much at will. quote:Homeopathic Touch: The adept can identify the status of a persons thirst, hunger, core temperature, sleep, salt hunger, and LP by touching skin to skin. Though what the gently caress is a salt hunger? Like is that a term in another language that means something, but has no meaning when translated literally to English? Please. Help. But aside from making rogues irrelevant and checking if someone's cold or hungry, basically they can throw fireballs and heal themselves, that's it. Sci-Priest quote:The Priest is a soulful combat fighter The jazziest of professions, but it's hard to judge whether they suck poo poo or completely break the game until we get to the crafting rules, because that's literally all these guys get a bonus to: Crafting and being able to melt non-living matter with their hands. Of course since this is expressed in hit points' worth of damage to stuff rather than in some sort of narrative term or a volume of decayed matter, it's impossible to tell how much it actually matters. I tried searching the entire book and nowhere does it seem to actually list what, say, an average door has in terms of hit points, making this ability entirely pointless. Demon Hunter Despite being in the wizard section, this one is actually a trap choice for fools who think fighters are relevant! That is to say, literally half their abilities don't work unless the storyteller is merciful and let them fight demons on a regular basis, as said abilities require demon blood, souls, etc. to craft items from. And of course their only actual cool ability, being able to trap demon souls in equipment for bonuses, is sequestered at the very top of their levels. Tune in next time when we check out magic and abilities and how they let us become an evil overlord as long as we've got time to waste. And of course as long as we're a wizard, we don't get to break the game if we're not a wizard. Pop quiz: Which of these three is it possible to do with/to a zombie: Negotiation? Intimidation? Or logical debate? PurpleXVI fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Mar 3, 2015 |
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Mar 3, 2015 00:49
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Kavak posted:Salt hunger is a real thing, but I have absolutely no idea why it's being brought up here. How much was this kickstarted for again? About 25k. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/raexgames/kromore
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Mar 3, 2015 05:59
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RE: Polaris, I'm of the opinion that Polaris is a bad game and also, in fact, a non-game, because of the extremely limited interactivity. I'd definitely be very loath to actually call it an RPG, and if I had to, I'd call it a bad one, because it allows you to roleplay exactly one story and then you've effectively mined it for all content. Also if you decide to review it, it's not all that long, but keep in mind that the creator's the same guy who made Bliss Stage, another short(and objectively terrible, Polaris has some wiggle room, Bliss Stage does not) RPG so you could make it a double serving. KROMORE Because fighters don't deserve nice feats  I suspect this is not the same guy who drew all the loving terrible character art So, the Abilities chapter is up next after the professions. Abilities are pretty much analogous to 3E/5E Feats, except that you get a shitload more of them, right down to being broken in the same stupid ways. For instance, I can pay an ability point for a permanent +1 to Fitness rolls. Fitness is basically Athletics from most other games. Jumping, climbing, swimming and squeezing into narrow spaces. However, if I'm not retarded, that same ability point will also buy me "Cooking Persuasion," also known as "Cakes = Mind Control," which basically doubles my pre-existing bonus to Negotiation(almost guaranteed to be more than 1) towards anyone already friendly enough to accept a piece of candy from me or unaware enough to not react before I shove something in their mouth. But that's just if they're not a wizard. The same one skill point is also all it costs for Innate Magic abilities(one each, but still) that let me conjure up weapons and armor for free and effectively without needing to bother with any checks(unless I decided to make the world's only wizard with Down's). Or I can learn necromancy, which lets me raise undead minions. Raising a minion takes a Hard(DC 19) focus check, but there's no penalty for screwing it up, and the time consumed in the casting is less than five seconds(two actions, a round has three actions and lasts five seconds). Of course, you only control the undead servant for 1d4 hours, after which it just shambles off to eat flesh. quote:NEGOTIATION: Negotiation tricks auto succeed on the Zombie, Intimidations and logic negotiations always fail. It'd be great, though, if you had an undead minion without that problem, and one that couldn't be tricked. Skeletons have the same "tries to kill everything after a few hours"-issue, plus they take a whole round to summon. Time is money, can't just waste it on something as frivolous as bony guardians. That's why you use your 1 ability point to learn how to summon ghosts instead. Ghosts never break free of control, are moderately intangible- quote:IMMUNITIES**: The spirit is immune to steel weapons and wooden weapons, stuns, KO, and poisons. -and have an AoE stun attack that stacks. Meaning you just need enough ghosts and you can zero out anyone's combat stats, after which you just need to raise a single skeleton to go around cutting throats. Assuming we make an ULTRA WIZARD who can do NOTHING but cast magic well, back-of-the-envelope, simple min-maxing allows us to roll 6d4+6 to attempt to summon a ghost, vs a DC of 19. That's a 50+% chance of making our DC, since our ghosts need no materials to summon(aside from a "grave or burial ground," but how hard can finding a graveyard be? We just take a few minutes' walk through the nearest graveyard and we've got our ghosts for the day), and we're not working off any sort of stat pool or resource, that means we can spend all our waking hours summoning. Our only real limit to how many ghosts we can make is that we can only summon a number of ghosts equal to our SOUL stat per day, meaning we'll cap out at 6(and there's literally no way for us to not get that many per day). Hence, as soon as you've made a necromancer, time is literally the only thing standing in the way of him conquering the world at the cost of only twice as many skill points as it costs a fighter to get +1 to jumping(twice because we also need to shell out the massive price of one skill point to unlock magic in the first place). And since two PC races, one of which is available in most time periods(metal men) and the other of which is available in all time periods(Daeadrin humans, which also get a bonus to the Focus skill used for all spellcasting) are literally immortal and unaging... time is not that big an issue. Now, in the game's defense, it does gate "Rule The World With Magic Ghosts: The Ability" behind requiring the caster to be level 10... however the storyteller section recommends roughly a level-up per session, which is also about what you'll get if you use their manual XP-handout rules, so it's not really a huge barrier. You can spend the intervening levels pumping up your Focus skill to make sure you succeed on all your ghost summons and also learning combat magic that does more damage than any weapon short of artillery, has an AoE effect, has no hit roll(even if enemies pass their save, they still take damage and get hit with status effects) and doesn't require any ammunition, unlike all the really nice fighter weapons. It also still only costs one skill point to learn. Ultimately all the abilities fall into this. You can either get a +1 if you're a fighter or you can expend an ability point to replicate a non-wizard's abilities(and if you DO decide to pick the abilities that give you a + to the Focus skill for spellcasting... you get +1d4 or +2 instead of +1 like you'd get if you chose better Fitness rolls). Jealous of the medic? Learn healing magic. Jealous of the sneaky thief? Learn to turn yourself into a table from level 1. Remember how Sci-Priests had a "melt stuff with their bare hands"-class ability? Well get hosed, that's a spell, too. Practically every magic tree has some sort of attack spell that rapidly levels up to outclass weapons. If we're impatient for ghost supremacy, at level 6, we can summon tornadoes. Anyone who touches a tornado has to succeed at an epic(DC 24) fitness check or get sucked in, flung away and hammered for shitloads of damage. And keep in mind that anyone not as min-maxed as our wizard will be hard pressed to roll 24 on a check. As a sci-magi we also specifically get the ability to double the effect of all spells from second level onwards, in exchange for an absolutely trivial focus check. Of course, min/maxing our caster makes us awfully fragile. So it's a good thing we can use a first-level spell to turn ourselves into solid rock so we're difficult to injure(or even a rock so no one will ever even realize we're a mage). Shame that some spells require vocal and somatic components... which we can ignore with another first-level ability, permanently. Now we just need another party member to carry us, or to learn the first-level wind spell that lets us slowly shove ourselves along. We basically only need to ever stop being an inanimate object on occasion to eat. I could really go on. But the point is: This is some wizard supremacy on a level I've rarely seen in any loving game. Skills In the game's defense, there's really nothing wrong with the basic mechanics, I like how it leaves in some degree of randomness while still providing a very sharp bell curve and a generous static modifier, so players can generally rely on their skills and attacks landing in a given region of results, but with just a bit of randomness to provide some tension. There are also a lot of helpful rules for what you can do to make sure your skills succeed, "taking 20" from 3E expanded up to pretty much any span of time you could imagine... though it seems a bit excessive that the table also includes "1 year" and "1 lifetime," and that "1 lifetime" only provides 1d4 more than a year. Though I suppose it does encourage not wasting too much time. Unlike a lot of RPG's, there's also a useful table for GM's advising them on what DC of check is usually appropriate to what level of character... and the suggestions actually aren't bad. There are of course, some oddities that crop up. For instance, the Charm(CHA) stat is used not just to negotiate, but also for medicine and grappling. Flying a plane or riding a horse both work off of pure Agility(and the same skill...). There are a few wonky things in there, though not exactly something unforgivable, though it doesn't really salvage the fuckups in the previous chapters.  This chapter really helps hammer home that either the author or his editor did not have English as a first language, though. quote:Hard: Identifying a face in a crowded market street, hearing a whisper from two closed doors away, or seeing a hidden item that took a great deal of time to hide. Doing a scan of an area to find hidden people or objects without the pretense of a Story Teller asking for the check is always a Hard or higher. This form of an awareness check is often at the level of a trained investigator or a detectives observation abilities. Also the return to Railroad City! If you try to do something without the Storyteller specifically asking you to, it automatically becomes more difficult! Choo choo! I also find it amusing that the hacking mechanics that it took Eclipse Phase, like, ten pages to make totally confusing, even an RPG as generally confused and ineffable as Kromore manages to make more natural and more easier to work with in the span of two pages. One check to breach a network, then successive checks to increase your "security level," and a given security level gives you certain privileges, for instance, at security level 4 you can copy data off the device rather than just read it, at 5 you can delete it, at 8 you can scour a network to alter or remove someone's identity and at level 9 you can make computers explode like a Hollywood hacker. Then a few quick rules for HACKER DUELS and what happens if you gently caress up your hack checks. What I realize at this point is that if you just cut out all the non-wizard(sorry, Grifter) classes out of Kromore, I'm actually not too opposed to the system itself so far. Most of the spells are actually... reasonably fun and useful-sounding(breaking the game with ghosts aside), the only thing that kind of poisons the game is that NOT being a wizard is 18 out of 22 class options, only one of those 18 options getting any fun abilities(Grifter), and of the remaining 4, Realm magic(Sci-Magi, Sci-Priest) is vastly superior to Innate Magic(Adept, Demon Hunter), at the same cost, and Sci-Magi by far get the more fun abilities compared to the Sci-Priest, so the game really only leaves you with two options to play. The basic mechanics are relatively easy to use and the developer did a lot of work to give you benchmarks for your numbers. Of course, there's still combat and the EXCITING SETTING DETAILS left to poo poo on things, but if the combat isn't somehow a total shitpile(I'm guessing it might actually not be, though I doubt it'll make physical classes worth playing)... I could actually see myself scrapping the setting, telling three or four players to roll up some Sci-Magi and letting them loose to do some damage with fireballs. I'm also largely going to skip over the Armory section except for poking at the art, since they made the ~brilliant~ decision not to explain the equipment stats in the chapter that the equipment is in. There's probably some really broken rules, but I can't tell yet, all I can identify is when something stupid in the writing or art jumps out at me, like the fact that "Disrupter" weapons are illegal but nothing explains WHY they're illegal, for instance what they DO that's illegal when other guns are not. There's also LITERALLY no sensible organization to the order that weapons are presented in. It goes like this: Melee, thrown, bows, shotguns, pistols, steamguns, "disrupter" guns, advanced melee, rocket launchers, the "dual clip" pistol(see below), lightning guns, flintlocks(just in case you thought it was by escalating technological advancement), powder wheel, plasma, cannons, mounted guns.  On the one hand, poor art and ugly as sin, on the OTHER hand, it's steampunk without any loving meaningless gears and goggles.  I legitimately cannot tell what this is.  Breaking new ground in retarded weapon designs!  Also, if anyone's interested, this is the DA of the guy who did all the actually awesome Kromore art: http://balaskas.deviantart.com/
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Mar 4, 2015 06:19
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Xelkelvos posted:Would it be appropriate to do an F&F of a game that's A: Mostly fan translated and not 100% complete, B: Compiled into .txts and spreadsheets and C: Based off of an anime? As long as it's hilariously bad or good in some sort of interesting and novel way, I think it's fine F&F-fodder. It's not a problem that it's mostly in .txt's and spreadsheets unless you just copypaste everything in here, a game doesn't need to be jam-packed full of atrocious art to be terrible or awesome.
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Mar 4, 2015 06:37
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Nothing about Forge-produced games deserves to be judged or considered by any standards but the ones we use for every other RPG. The only thing that sets them apart is that they were produced by one insular group and their preferences, but they released them to the world at large, so they get to be judged by the world at large.
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Mar 4, 2015 18:35
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Doresh posted:Combat Drone Why are the drone's lower torso and upper legs made out of mashed potatoes?
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Mar 6, 2015 22:38
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PoptartsNinja posted:This was from a page back, but is that any hard object? Does it specify size? Any hard object, going by RAW, it only has that little parenthesis section to give examples. And yes, this is the entertainment I see in Kromore, abusing the giant gaping holes in the rules to create hilarious scenarios.
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Mar 7, 2015 21:32
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KROMORE THE RULES 202 pages into Kromore and we actually get to the rules in any sort of concise format. We had a "RULES BASICS" at the start that only told us how many dice to roll, and nothing else. We had some scattered stuff in the Skills section on how skill checks worked and what a given difficulty of a check was. But it's not until 202 pages in that we hit the majority of the ruleset. Just to recap what we've already been told, though, because the game doesn't do that for us even though we were introduced to them a couple hundred pages back... the basic check is a roll of STATd4+SKILLRANKS with no weirdnesses or complications, no critical successes or failures, you either beat a static number(for most checks) or an enemy's roll. The first thing the chapter tells us is that we're gonna need a board or battlemat(informing us in the process that hex grids are vastly superior to square grids), this makes sense when we check the index and find that literally the entire rules chapter is combat, leaving the full extent of non-combat stuff as what we can do with skill checks and the few spells that aren't about throwing some variety of painful elemental energy at enemies(or summoning things to cut their faces wide open). Then we're told how to roll initiative, what a round consists of(five seconds of real time, split into three actions that we can assign as we see fit, unless we do a single thing that consumes more than one action, like some spells... and about half the list of default actions, like attacking with a two-handed weapon or just about any skill check. Some things, like putting on heavy armor, require up to nine actions, meaning that they consume a total of three full rounds). All these actions are just actions I'll note. No major, minor, free, bonus or whatever separation, removing the need to keep track of any such goofery. In the game's defense, it's all pretty neatly organized. There's one table that contains all the default actions, you can quickly check if something provokes free attacks if done at melee range and how many actions it takes... attacking and defending is also relatively simple. Rather than having separate dodge and damage resistance, like most modern games, or having one huge dodge pool like D&D, there's just one big soak/damage resistance pool. First dodge subtracts from incoming damage, then your shield, then your armor and finally it impacts your life points. Shields and armor also have their own pools of hit points, which, when drained, mean they're coming apart and can no longer soak up anything, as well as a damage resistance stat indicating how much they can soak per round. It's a bit abstract, definitely not for anyone obsessed with verisimilitude, but it seems like it'd make combat flow pretty quickly since you're just rolling once to attack(weapon damage + Muscle or Agility + your combat bonuses), versus a static number(Dodge+Shield+Armor). quote:FINISHING A TARGET Despite my moderate praise, though, the writing is still loving awful. What does it even mean to have DIRECT CONTACT TO LIFE POINTS OF THAT TARGET? This is nothing compared to the next section which uses CRITICAL CALLED ATTACK so many times it's lost what little meaning it has, including all its permutations like "critical called area attack" and "critical call called attack." For some reason the mechanic for making target attacks isn't just called attacks, it's critical called attacks. It's making me dizzy just trying to read these pages. quote:Any attack can deal critical damage. The amount of LP dealt in an attack to a region represents a critical hit to that region. A critical hit is a one time attack and the amount of LP taken at one time from an attack represents the devastating blow. Sure, any attack can deal critical damage, but "critical damage" is something that only happens when you hit a specific region of someone, and you can only hit specific regions when making critical called attacks, not when just attacking normally(unless we're supposed to assume that normal attacks are critical called attacks to the torso/"body"? ...which it tells us several pages later, almost at the end of the actual combat rules). These sure are some words but gently caress if they don't lose all meaning in this idiot writer's hands. The rules for critical damage are surprisingly detailed and brutal, and reward having some sort of medic or healer in the party. Basically any attack will cause at least a temporary effect(in the case of limbs and body, most likely just a "scar" for low damage), but if you go more than 24 hours without medical treatment, a lot of them advance into becoming permanent effects(or if someone completely fucks up trying to heal a temporary effect). The name is a bit of a misnomer, though, as "permanent" effects can still be cured by medicine(and for that matter, "temporary" effects aren't temporary either, they don't seem to go away with time? I can't tell). It... doesn't say whether permanent effects replace the temporary effects, or simply stack on top, but I have to assume that they stack on top, otherwise broken bones would magically heal themselves after 24 hours. Though either way it leads to some weirdnesses, like severed heads not causing death until 24 hours later, severed limbs not bleeding until 24 hours later, gushing arteries(which you'd be lucky to survive for a couple of minutes, 1 LP lost per round, 5 seconds, between 10 and 15 LP's in most cases, critical damage causing the bleeding likely already removing the majority of your LP's... a tourniquet can solve the problem temporarily, I suppose) turning into internal bleeding. A severed arm will, 24 hours later, cause the much slower internal bleeding(1LP per hour), while a severed hand instantly causes a gushing instadeath artery(likewise losing any "appendage," defined as an eye, finger, toe, ear or "other." That's right, losing an ear will make you bleed out faster than someone lopping off your loving arm), yet broken arms and legs also cause instant bleeding... okay there's something loving goofy here. Moving on to the section about movement and facing, which is largely just common-sense stuff about when someone is considered to be facing, flanking, etc. I also have to give Kromore props for illustrating everything with diagrams. Most of it is, as said, pretty common sense, but it ensures that there's literally no doubt and everyone can follow along, even if they're relatively unused to RPG's and boardgames. It also starts to become obvious that Kromore is really envisioned as a combat-heavy boardgame, more than an actual RPG, in most cases, especially in light of all the character abilities being, in 95% of all cases, aimed towards combat uses only. Also we don't have falling damage in Kromore. We've got SASFAFF. quote:Surface & Stun From A Fitness Failure(S.A.S.F.A.F.F.) I could literally not make this up. They invented an entire custom acronym for something that fills a grand total of half a page and consists of checking how far they fell(which requires paging back to the skills chapter, and seeing what height a given difficulty of skill check for climbing fits with), then referring to the matching row for what kind of damage they take(stun or lethal), how much damage and how many rounds they'll spend stunned. Considering that life points are largely static after chargen, falling is actually surprisingly lethal in Kromore. Considering that most people will only have 10 to 15 Life Points, and that a fall of 26 to 35 feet will do 3d4 damage(3d4+3 if it's on to a hard surface), that'll make most unarmoured people splatter on impact. Mind, the scale isn't open-ended, damage caps out at 6d4(+5, for a hard or jagged surface), meaning an average of 20 damage from just about any distance(unless there are rules for orbital re-entry). With armor and shields being included in soaking falling damage... just a thick suit of platemail and a tower shield could let us survive a fall from near the edge of the atmosphere. There are also a few weirdnesses here and there in the tables, being medium or large gives you a +1 to dodge, being one step up, huge, is a +2, then down to a +1 again for gigantic, 0 for enormous and -1 for colossal. Why that arbitrary bump for Huge? More nice attention to detail in the combat rules, though, as we're told what side effects elemental damage has(rules for ice spells locking up enemy armor by freezing it, electrical spells breaking sensitive electronics, how long fires will continue to burn, and a handy table for converting ice magic damage to how much you can freeze solid, in case you want to use ice bolts to cross a river or something). Also standard damage values for various environmental objects exploding, like fireworks, gas tanks, etc.(according to the rules, the average person in Kromore is almost guaranteed to survive a "grill propane tank" exploding right next to him unless it rolls absolutely maximum damage. Most of my understanding of exploding propane is from videogames, but shouldn't that be relatively fatal? Of course, Kromore isn't too realistic. Cars in Kromore apparently explode like in Hollywood action movies, according to the table). quote:When something is frozen it requires time to thaw before it is useable again. The table includes damage values for freezing warm-blooded creatures, but doesn't specify whether PC's survive cryogenic suspension or whether it kills them outright. The end of the chapter is half a page of rules for time travel, which summarizes as follows: First we have to leave reality, then we have to use a captured soul of a Lovecrafty "Realm" creature as a guide to drag us back in time. We cannot go forwards in time beyond where we've actually been "naturally." However, any time traveller can bring along hitchhikers, and they CAN be brought further forward than they themselves have been. Unfortunately, all "technological" items crumble in the world outside the physical universe, so we can't smuggle plasma guns into the past and set ourselves up as a techno warlord. I've no idea what they define as "technology," though. quote:A character who alters a previous time will cause a ripple effect that generates a new time line. Coincidentally, the chapter titled "The Kromore Universe" begins on the next page, so I guess we'll shortly find out just what the canonical Kromore is like. Right now, though, I'm kind of disappointed that Kromore wasn't more of an amusing clusterfuck in the rules section, so I'm taking a break.
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Mar 10, 2015 03:26
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Man, I grabbed the Dragon Dice videogame back when it was new and... I'm not sure if it was just me being a dumb kid, or terrible UI design/manual design, but it felt loving incomprehensible. I'm pretty sure it was only supposed to make sense to anyone who'd played the actual dice game. I also seem to recall it had like ten kinds of elves, which is also usually a pretty dire warning.
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Mar 13, 2015 17:49
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Rangpur posted:I'm not sure if you're making that part up or not, but I adore the notion of the metagame developing its own mythos over time. Not merely a gold farming bot, but one of the 13 Legendary Gold Farming Bots collectively known as 'The Blood of the Zodiac Wheel' or whatever nom de group they have (if any). Winning their favor is not easily done, but if you manage to pull it off they will farm the poo poo out of your gold. I would ABSOLUTELY play a sentient gold-farming bot, seems more fun than playing someone who got stuck in the game.
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Mar 16, 2015 06:44
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Oh man, this sounds like it could lead to something wonderfully lovely. How about just taking it in the order it appears in the book? Sometimes the bad planning and formatting is part of the ~experience~.
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Mar 17, 2015 02:47
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theironjef posted:I think I would have to be thinking fetish while reading it for that to kick in. Otherwise yeah, all the "hah hah you're a frog" stuff just reads like adolescent empowerment. But you're not the first person inside of twelve hours to tell us it's apparently a fetish book. If I remember the original review right, it comes into sharper relief if you know the author and some of his other works, I could swear I remember someone pointing out that some of his other transformation-related stuff is very fetishy.
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Mar 17, 2015 15:25
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theironjef posted:Bleah, I missed that. Grossest thing we found was her turning some guy into a bug and some guy into a frog and then the frog eats the bug. Even then, I was in benefit of the doubt mode (we've had recent complaints about being too negative) and figured it was just cartoon violence. Dude, don't be afraid of being too negative. The entertainment value is in ripping into this poo poo.
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Mar 17, 2015 17:20
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KROMORE So I get back to Kromore for the final stretch, the fluff chapters, after two weeks of being too sick to write worth a drat, and I immediately wish I was sick for a third week: The fluff chapters are loving awful. And not just the entertaining, Fieldsy kind of awful where every second page is about cocks, but also the sort of terrible editing that makes me wonder if Gene Ray wrote this. Sections will jump from a paragraph about alien invasions to paragraphs about how much of a random planet's surface is covered from water with no warning. Let me quote an example section, just so you can tell I'm not joking: quote:Fear of attacking unknown aliens from the worm hole located in the Alpha-1 nebula are often discussed as priority scenarios amongst high ranking galactic commanders in later era time lines. Much like the rest of the book, terms are thrown about haphazardly and only explained twenty pages down the road, if at all, and often the description completely fails to answer most of the questions you have. I'll try to put some sort of sense to the book's ramblings but it's not easy, so this will probably get a bit incoherent, too. How the gently caress you pronounce "Жo-Rin." So anyway, the core of the setting is that the "Жo-Rin" are moustache-twirling evil aliens from an evil galaxy with an evil lich king, and the Tesck(the entirety of their description is "blind and matriarchal," they're blind because they're from a part of space without any light. Really.) are decently-nice Ancient Aliens who, in the face of the Жo-Rin conquering everything they see, evacuate species from their homeworlds and transplant them to others so they can survive. Unfortunately, despite having the capacity for inter-galactic travel(Earth is in this setting and is in a separate galaxy from the planet of Kromore, the Жo-Rin eventually conquer Earth and strip-mine it), they seemingly dump just about every species they rescue on Kromore, which is, in galactic terms, right on the Жo-Rin's doorstep. quote:It is believed the Tesck have gathered most of the life forms from the surrounding galaxies to the refugee planet Kromore in hopes of protecting them against the Жo-Rin and their vastly growing control on galactic space. (The Tescians also apparently suck balls at this "rescuing species"-gig since Kromore has about a half dozen intelligent species, yet there's supposedly a couple hundred other sentient species that the Tescians never bothered to rescue or otherwise work with.) The Tesck generally gently caress around being useless albeit well-intentioned, then there's the Alliance(largely Kromore) who gently caress around being "good guys" and mostly spend their time getting their rear end kicked, the Prime(Earthling refugees with some other refugee species, none of which we're ever actually told a loving thing about despite their supposedly being huge parts of one of the major factions in the setting) who can actually belt the Жo-Rin but then turn out to be dictatorially-minded and the Жo-Rin themselves who do evil things entirely because they're evil. Once you've read this, you largely understand the "metaplot" of the setting. It's in the specifics that things get really stupid, for instance, the Жo-Rin are a species of galactic conquerors... but a group of Kromorians in the loving middle ages manage to defeat a Жo-Rin settlement attempt and drive them off. This, coincidentally, also creates vampires when some idiots decide to eat Жo-Rin corpses, these vampires are just generally vampiric(about as generic as imaginable) and get recruited by the Prime as their secret police/special forces when they briefly occupy Kromore. This is a nice arrangement that lasts until the Vampires discover that the Primes, not being total loving idiots, had made special vampire-killing gear in case their cannibalistic allies ever completely lost their poo poo and had to be put down. quote:The council discovers the Prime has hidden information about new weaponry equipment specifically designed to kill Vampires. The clash between Vampire and Prime is violent and leads to the fall out between Vampire and Prime overnight. A civil war within Kromore between Vampire and Prime leaves nearly all Vampire extinct in the year 4300 ASC. The small war opens the door for further corruption scandals to unfold within the Prime governments on Kromore. Inexplicably, killing vampires somehow leaves the Primes open to more corruption than having a secret bunch of bloodsuckers with mind control powers as part of their oganization.  A vampire And since we're talking about vampires, let's also talk about the H.I.V.E.. Because they're the second secret underground species haunting everyone, basically they're little bugs that mind control people by crawling inside their spine and pretending to be the host for the two to four years until the host curls up and dies, leaving the larvae looking for another host. A brief side trip into H.I.V.E. fluff is one of the first side trips the setting of Kromore does, in the middle of explaining the galaxy's geography, revealing to us that the H.I.V.E. larvae both die rapidly without a host and are capable of just chilling out on an asteroid for years while waiting to crash on a planet where they can infect someone. quote:The planet spawns H.I.V.E. regularly, but without host bodies nearly all of the young hive lings die shortly after birth. (We're also told we can play a H.I.V.E. infectee, which comes with no downsides besides requiring "intense roleplay," and just gives us a grab-bag of expensive abilities for free. We only need to switch bodies every few years.) Also keep in mind that for every paragraph I'm writing here, the fluff section of Kromore has ten paragraphs about, say, Kromore's moons(one is blue and icy, the other is red and volcano-y), after which we get told that wormholes are dangerous and full of bad aliens, and that Kromore is 40% water and that now the book is going to tell us why the Steampunk poo poo is totally justified and really works! quote:Steam transfer technology developed out of the end of the Age of Nations movement when fossil fuels and combustion engines were placed on the side line for a cleaner steam transfer technology. Except no, we're not told anything. It winds up for explaining all the steampunk poo poo but then instead just tells us that steampunk stuff requires a cylinder made from special super alloy metal compounds, and that it has a safety valve. Also on Kromore, batteries that are literally just containers full of highly pressurized steam which are, in this setting, more efficient than actual batteries holding an electrical charge. Then, in the usual whiplash fashion, it's a leap into a paragraph about living conditions in modern Kromore, about how they were super cramped, and also about Kromorian identification papers when Kromore was occupied by the Prime. Apparently the Primes, if I'm reading this poo poo right, and I'm not sure anyone can read this right, would blow up Kromorian villages if the "galactic allies"(by which I assume off-world aliens?) of Kromore did not apply for Kromorian citizenship. ...and then we reach the actual Timeline for everything, way after all these loving incidental facts. Timeline The timeline is just so dull, it's literally an incredibly dispassionate recital of everyone who was ever at war with anyone, and when they were at war with them, and the occasional anomalous event thrown in. Like, a giant comet hits Kromore's moon and plunges the world into a hundred years of darkness, but that just sort of passes and the only real upset is that people get very angry at wizards afterwards for no real loving reason, when they never had any problems with wizards before and wizards were completely unconnected to causing this. After the darkness passes, the Kromorians spend 450 years murdering the Жo-Rin who'd tried to settle their planet. This apparently happens well before the invention of the printing press, so I can only assume that these DANGEROUS GALACTIC CONQUERORS were literally defeated by swords, bows and maybe some primitive gunpowder weapons, especially since magic is still basically banned and no one's using it. Like, this is roughly some 6000 years of history and the only noteworthy thing is the comet, the Tesck dropping off more loser species on Kromore and a bunch of savages with sticks beating up an alien species with plasma guns. Everything else is really just some permutation on "and then these guys invaded those guys and some other dudes were angry." It doesn't help that half this poo poo is never explained, like the STEAM METAL MEN destroy a nation by using nerve gas and the S-BOMB. What's the loving S-Bomb? It's never been mentioned before, it's not in the armory section, it's nowhere else in the loving document. Is it the STEAM BOMB? Did they parboil an entire loving nation? What? Explain yourself to me, Kromore, you piece of poo poo. Also now the Tesck show up and just hand over technology to people, but apparently don't seem to give a poo poo about all the warring and killing, and they're kind of absentee-parents considering they weren't around to give a loving hand with clearing out the Жo-Rin or helping anyone when the planet had a hundred years without light. Somehow, floating cities are constructed before computers, not like you'd want anything to help you with all the calculations necessary to keep a loving city afloat by whatever means you intend. Also for some reason the planet has an organized rebellion terrified of nuclear steam power(same as normal steam power, but now the STEAM BATTERIES are "charged" by nuclear reactors) and computers, also exploring space is now apparently commonplace without any mentions of space programs being initiated and the METAL MEN decide to all throw themselves into a black hole. A mysterious black hole. It's almost a footnote that the Жo-Rin just wade in and conquer Kromore, the core location of the setting. It gets literally as much text as some minor trade treaty does earlier. Then in as much of a footnote, the Prime are introduced, showing up and saving Kromore from the Жo-Rin. They're described as "tyrannical," but this is rarely explained, except that they hate wizards and force everyone to carry an ID card. There are no great racial purges or abusive laws passed that the book ever tells us about, I guess we're just supposed to insert our own villainy for them. The metal men show up again, blow up the Tesck homeworld, turn out to have an evil virus corrupting their brains, fight everyone, get cured and then a paragraph later they jump into the black hole once more. 800 years pass without anything happening, one of the moons of Kromore turns into a pure dark void, swallowing anything that touches it, is designated a no-fly zone by the Prime, and then in the next paragraph we're told that mining on the moon(which was just a paragraph ago an all-destroying forbidden area) has unearthed a new horrific menace called the Leech. Also the book keeps using "empirical" instead of "imperial" and it's annoying me way more than it should. Two paragraphs ago, the Leech are described as "devouring" Жo-Rin ships alongside everyone else's, but now we're told that they're encountering the Жo-Rin for the first time and the two just casually form a symbiotic bond to become an entirely new species. The metal men return after 1600 years of being in a black hole and, despite being literally over a millennium and a half out of date, technologically, are totally helpful to the good guys by blowing up some Жo-Rin. At this point the fighting with the Жo-Rin is over 2500 years old and literally the only noteworthy thing they've done is to occupy Kromore for half a decade before the Prime booted them. Congratulations, you're now caught up on all the notable points of Kromorian history. I.e. literally loving nothing except that magic is now banned and we have space travel, compared to the start of the setting. What remains of the book is mostly trivia, first there are the stats for Жo-Rin, Ancients(which can apparently just casually eat suns, why even stat something that powerful?), enemy Ferrians, enemy Gyx, enemy Zatilok(hidden deep inside a bunch of fluff rather than being with the other enemy stats), enemy vampires(the only enemies to get more than one type of stats, to account for different tiers of stats, apparently every enemy Ferrian is level 10) and enemy shadow demons(but no stats for Tesck, who only get a description, Metal Men, or so many other things we've been told exist). Next up, there's a bunch of forgettable data that largely amounts to telling us what sort of exports the various nations have during various time periods, practically nothing of any real consequence unless you really need to know that the Kingdom of Kelmoria was big on exporting hammers. There are the major religions, all of which have existed unchanged from the start point of the setting's history and then 10,000 years onwards... and that's the loving book, really. It doesn't make for an entertaining review despite being a frustrating read, because so many of the stupid, frustrating things are in the editing, and it's hard to really convey just how much it overreaches itself in trying to have TEN THOUSAND YEARS OF HISTORY and then devoting maybe five lines to loving two thousand years of said history. And a major event like an entire species, the Metal Men, having their brains corrupted, and whatever it takes to uncorrupt them, taking up a grand total of half a page. The quest to cure an entire loving species of a corrupting infection takes up less space than what was spent at the start of the book to tell us how to effectively railroad our players. gently caress this book. But great news, someone else got me a new piece of poo poo to review. Whee.
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Mar 24, 2015 20:30
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Fight against the civilized man's tyranny of hygiene. Clearly roleplaying games have reached their apex in terms of concept, we can just pack up the hobby now, it's over.
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Mar 28, 2015 14:25
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Kurieg posted:Yes. If I'm reading this correctly, farming was the tipping point. Leafcutter ants, motherfucker. gently caress you, Brucatto, gently caress you.
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Mar 28, 2015 15:17
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Even though we've seen the highlights of Changing Breeds before, I still can't get over how loving poo poo it is. Brucatto is pretty much Fields with a budget and an admitted love of dogfucking.
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Mar 29, 2015 15:15
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FMguru posted:Kult's weapon rules were just so weird and out of place. Like, someone saw Jacob's Ladder and thought that the only way that movie could have been better was if there had been a five minute scene where someone set up claymore trip mines with overlapping fields of effect. The most out-of-place thing about Kult's combat was the whole "HEY, YOU WANNA MAKE KEN AND RYU WITH THESE RULES? YOU CAN!"-bit, where being a MARTIAL ARTIST capable of kicking people apart from across the room without actually touching them was roughly as effective as an assault rifle. Gritty, hyper-detailed combat would have been less strange than that.
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Apr 7, 2015 00:54
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Goddammit Brucatto. What's the longest page gap between references to making GBS threads/pissing/spraying musk on something? I get the feeling it's like half a page, tops.
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Apr 7, 2015 12:39
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Plague of Hats posted:Not an F&F, but it came up a week or two ago and then I was cleaning out my mom's basement and… Oh hey, is that some Dragon Dice stuff? We really could use a review of that at some point, because I wanna know if there was something good there.
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Apr 9, 2015 06:09
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