|
Behemoth almost certainly represents a hippo. Everyone in that region was goddamn terrified of hippos, with extremely good reason. Imagine all you had was bronze age tech and try to fight one of those things.
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2014 02:54
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 11:34 |
|
|
Kavak posted:Oh my God did they seriously add in "Your LARPing rival" as an actual, statted antagonist? Goddammit White Wolf why do you have to suck so much sometimes? Gee, the originators of the 90s Metaplot Craze wherein the writer's super cool characters do everything while your PCs watch are kind of lame and pathetic? Color me surprised.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2014 07:59
|
|
|
Every single time they try to make a Hunter type character a villain in White Wolf games, they almost always seem to come off as the hero. That police officer is the actual protagonist, these loving faeries need to get brained.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 14, 2014 23:03
|
|
|
RocknRollaAyatollah posted:That was pretty much how the Hunter the Reckoning writers went about it and it worked. I don't even remember there being a story that presented them as something other than monsters. I hate a lot of the mechanics but I will always loving love Hunter for existing and being about 'Actually, all these self-absorbed shitheads deserve a shotgun to the face.' It helps that when I played it, our GM accidentally gave us the stat spreads for a starting Vampire, so our group of juvenile delinquent runaways had the stats of actual action heroes and got to do stuff like killing a neonate with a shovel, setting a vampire hitman sent to drag us back to the feeding camp on fire by flicking a cigarette into a puddle of gasoline, and eventually talking local werewolves into accompanying us and a firetruck full of holy water back to the camp to save the other kids and become known as the Four Horsemen of Baltimore. In the spirit of the setting? No. But it was one of the best campaigns I ever played in.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2014 07:14
|
|
|
Payndz posted:Hunter: The Reckoning sounds like the only WoD game I would actually want to play. No metaplot? No complex networks of paranormal society to negotiate? Shooting vampires and werewolves in the goddamn face? Seems good to me! The entire game is designed around you failing and dying, mechanically, if played normally. Creatures will regularly get 4-5 turns to your one, soak damage way better than you do, arbitrarily ignore their own weaknesses, etc.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2014 18:46
|
|
|
Also, if I remember, the crazy Messengers giving you the powers were loving Exalted.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2014 19:16
|
|
|
It may come as a surprise from WHITE WOLF, but Hunter: The Reckoning is another case of rad concept, lovely execution. I swear, I hate White Wolf. A lot. But I've rewritten more of their base games to use for something of my own than any other company I've encountered. More than anyone else, all their games are full of ideas that could be so goddamn cool, ruined by their execution, that I can't help trying to salvage.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2014 19:24
|
|
|
It would've been a good chance to actually put their money where their mouth was about the whole 'Oh, every supernatural has to hide because this is really the humans' world!' bullshit they kept trying to push, even after it was incredibly clear that wasn't how any of their games had ever played. Watching normal people stand up to the self-absorbed bullies and shitheads who served as protagonist in every other WW game would've been very cathartic.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 15, 2014 19:33
|
|
|
There are two ways to play Black Crusade: Ridiculous power metal melodrama and Shenanigans. One involves quests across blasted hellscapes to accomplish insanely ambitious goals, similar to Rogue Trader. The other involves landing a shuttle on a pirate king and stealing Khorne's lawn chair. Played right, Black Crusade is awesome.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2014 17:39
|
|
|
Admittedly 'I sell everyone to the Inquisition for wealth, fame, and prestige' would also be a hell of an ending to a BC campaign.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2014 18:54
|
|
|
theironjef posted:I've always avoided it because every description of play I've ever heard is basically concentrated monkey cheese. I assume it's way more fun to play than to hear about. I've never enjoyed Rogue Trader. I've never had a good campaign of Rogue Trader. The kind of characters it creates are the kind of people I'd generally prefer to see get kicked in the dick rather than write for or play as. But that's more a matter of taste between myself and my regular players versus any indictment of the game.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 22, 2014 23:09
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:Well that was kind of dumb of them because unlike DH1.0 where one thing got promised and another delivered, Rogue Trader was never, to the best of my recollection, ever billed as being a game about low-rent space truckers at all. I think half the reason I liked DH1.0 as much as I did was because I've never read Eisenhorn and I kinda liked the idea of being a bunch of bumbling human-intel agents who get thrown at problems until you start to succeed and eventually become indispensable. I like having that option around alongside the various flavors of 'be elite badasses', which is fun too.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2014 07:26
|
|
|
theironjef posted:I may have posted on the wrong quote. I have little beef with Rogue Trader, all the random monkey cheese stories I hear tend to come from the one where people play Chaos Marines. Lots of "Then I mailed vomit to his children and took a poo poo in his ear" stuff. Chaos Marines are, as a rule of thumb, even worse characters than normal Marines. Like normal Marines, they can be interesting or fun, but it's kinda the exception. Though we did have a Chaos Marine in one of my BC campaigns get Illusion of Normalcy (People cannot see your mutations, or tell you're a Marine, without being a psyker) and go off and pretend to be a rogue trader while questing to make the most absurd shotgun in the galaxy. That was pretty funny.
|
|
#
¿
Nov 23, 2014 18:55
|
|
|
Hippo how can you LET ME DOWN so hard? After how much I talked you up!?
|
|
#
¿
Nov 27, 2014 06:13
|
|
|
Golden Bee posted:It's hard to be charismatic when you talk about besting other people. Even more so when they're people you sat down to have fun with. Don't forget that, as the GM, you have absolute control over what happens. GMs bragging about 'winning' are missing the entire point.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 01:45
|
|
|
I'm sure at the end of all his stories, everyone in the gaming club stands up and claps, too. Honestly, a lot of it just sounds like poo poo that didn't happen.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 03:28
|
|
|
Bieeardo posted:I can't really agree with this. If you're playing in an established setting, chances are that your players want to play in that setting as described, and make their own mark on it, not suddenly discover that the Jedi council is a bunch of evil asshats and has been playing them for patsies, or Elminster uses timestop as a magical roofie. If you're going to subvert things, make sure your players are in on it. Remember, 7th Sea is about cthulhu and never getting on a boat, and gently caress your players if they want to be pirates and swashbuckle. It's the same drat trick over and over and over. It's his only trick. Similar with the Scorpion being the 'true' Samurai and going gently caress HONOR when the L5R setting is all HONOOOOORRRRR to a ridiculous degree.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 05:12
|
|
|
Like, 'Hey, players, how would you like to play a game where the secret conspiracy is the Jedi are actually terrible and you have to unmask them before they take over the New Republic and complete the master plan they started with Luke' is the sane, rational way to check interest in that kind of game.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 05:21
|
|
|
Bait and Switch can, however, work in one specific circumstance: When you're playing with people you know well and you know the thing you're doing is something they really like. But it's something that requires a long term relationship with a play group, and a lot of foreshadowing. And as was said above, always leave your options open to bail on the concept if they're really enjoying the original assumptions or don't bite on the foreshadowing. Like, if you're setting up some Weird War II poo poo, and you notice your players are actually mostly just really excited to play the 101st airborne or someone spots a hint and groans 'gently caress, dark wizard nazis, that's where this is going' you should leave it open to back out.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 05:42
|
|
|
Ah, there's the whole 'WELL GO TO REALISM UNLESS YOU'RE SCARED' thing. Realism can be fun. I still need to go back and do a review of Albedo like I was planning, but that's a game where the attempts to make things somewhat 'realistic' is an actual part of the tone, which is intended to drive home that even for a professional soldier, fighting is exhausting, stressful, dangerous, and all around lovely. But realism is a matter of tone, as are all mechanics. Mechanics are designed to reinforce the general feeling you're going for with your game; realism should only be your goal in mechanics if it's part of the goal in tone. Also hahaha at the whole 'Cornering a guy in his home and taking him on 6 on 1? YOU FOOLS!' bit. That picture looks exactly like I always imagined Wick did, too.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 08:02
|
|
|
MonsieurChoc posted:John Wick is Bizarro Greg Stolze. My God, this is completely accurate. Stolze wants you to have a good time and do cool things, and his writing exists to enable the PCs and players to do these things, while Wick is trying to 'win' at something he already controls, like a little kid being proud of winning an FPS with godmode on.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 09:24
|
|
|
Eide posted:Right now all I have in my head is an image of a jaded, unpopular but prideful nerdy kid in the throes of puberty discovering that the universe is apathetic and nobody is special. And like every teenager, he needs to share this discovery with all the poor shmucks who don't get it(which is everyone else, of course). And doing it in the most oblique manner possible, because if you were smart like him, you'd get it, otherwise, you're stupid and deserve to suffer. John Wick is the Monsterhearts Witch.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 18:22
|
|
|
Kai Tave posted:To be fair, plenty of people writing official Star Wars-y stuff, including George Lucas himself, have gone out of their way to portray the Jedi as a bunch of incompetent fuckups and/or trying to spin the Sith as bad but misunderstood or something, it's not just RPG geeks that do that stuff. The Sith are assholes by design, the Jedi are assholes because George Lucas is a bad writer.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 4, 2014 04:27
|
|
|
Feng Shui's time periods are literally just set up as a series of variant locations connected by chinese hell. Time travel works roughly like Chrono Trigger (stuff changes if dramatically appropriate and part of the plot). That's all it needs to do and I really appreciate it for that.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2014 02:16
|
|
|
Yeah, but it's funnier to call it X Hell depending on which culture your PC thinks it is, even if the actual Underworld is located somewhere beneath the no poo poo Chinese D&D Dungeon the crazy wizards built over the hellmouth. I love me them crazy wizards.
|
|
#
¿
Dec 18, 2014 10:26
|
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:I'm going through a few of the Torg newsletters; I'd forgotten there's one near the end of the line where they flat-out tell the GM that they're being given an uber-powerful NPC with the express purpose of railroading PCs to where you want them to go. And despite the fact that she's basically cosmically powered and unbeatable, they still gave her a stat block. Huh, I thought it was Deadlands that did that, not Torg. Oh, the Metaplot, bane of RPG design.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2015 18:09
|
|
|
Robindaybird posted:A lot of games did it, it's notable the designers of Planescape knew what happened when you stat something: Players will wanna kill it. They left the Lady Statless for this very reason - also to help keep her origins a mystery. Weirdly, I find if something is statless my players' desire to discover its stats and kill it increases monumentally, because it marks something the setting doesn't think you're 'supposed' to murder.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2015 18:49
|
|
|
Isn't the way you fight the Lady (if you decide to do that because you're a madman) via changing Sigil? Alter the beliefs and general goals and culture of the place and perhaps risk undoing the Cage and you'll really piss her off/maybe defeat her, rather than stabbing her in the face?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 2, 2015 20:37
|
|
|
How did anyone ever actually play Torg?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2015 20:01
|
|
|
The more I see of the rest of the stuff that came out of the same period, the more I forgive Feng Shui's flaws.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2015 20:22
|
|
|
Alien Rope Burn posted:I never really got into Torg, and this is mostly reminding me why. It's just... too complicated for its own good both in terms of setting and in terms of rules. Having different settings operate by different fundamental rules sounds like it makes sense, but it was a pain in the rear end in Planescape as well. Generally that kind of thing works better when it's low-impact, like "you have +X to hit with melee weapons here because it's a primitive land" or "inventing checks take half the time because it's a pulp setting" and have three or so traits. Having to spend possibilities just to play with your character's actual concept was about as unfun as mechanics get. Better the carrot than the stick with most games, unless you're really trying to emphasize the innate hostility of a strange land (which might be better for a pure horror or post-apocalypse game, for example). Plus, half the fun of dimension hopping is being, say, a Vietnam War soldier stuck on a galleon in the Spanish Main having no idea that swordfighting relies on insults and wordplay as much as footwork, or finding your primitive warrior stuck in a weird hyperfuture where violence is alien and the world has become a hive mind.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2015 23:18
|
|
|
Cythereal posted:Not familiar with Demon: The Fallen. Fall-From-Grace is a succubus in Planescape: Torment who's entirely chaste and specializes in slaking intellectual lusts - she and her peers at their brothel provide stimulating intellectual conversation, play chess and other games of strategy, and the like. The Brothel of Slaking Intellectual Lusts is one of the (many) things that makes Torment so goddamn great.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 6, 2015 19:00
|
|
|
Young Freud posted:Oh god, I just convinced a friend to buy this. He's been on an awful RPG kick right now and he does have the collected works of Chris Fields, so he's biting the bullet and buying this. How many of those can there possibly be? Was Chris Fields prolific?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 7, 2015 00:29
|
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:Ultimately it comes off as a lack of trust of the players. They seem to feel that OF COURSE everyone's going to make cybermagical T-Rexes if they can because the whole point of an RPG is to win, right? Gotta reign in those PCs or they might get too powerful! Also note: Cybermagical T-Rexes sound rad and if your game has the reasonable possibility to make them, maybe your game would be better served by having cybermagical T-Rexes. Like, that's what kills me. Genre blending and being a fish out of water with weird abilities is like goddamn point of dimension hopping!
|
|
#
¿
Jan 8, 2015 20:32
|
|
|
Is this actual Metzen art? Is he really as bad at drawing as he is at writing?
|
|
#
¿
Jan 10, 2015 16:20
|
|
|
What no-one mentions, of course, is that from a human perspective the corporations were a loving disaster, considering they're all dead from war/nukes/smug bitcoiners/slenderman. Which also means all the 'very clever very wealthy men in tall towers smiling slyly' were dead within 20-30 years of their bullshit.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2015 16:35
|
|
|
Evil Mastermind posted:Casting spells in Torg is a loving mess. As opposed to the simple, tight mechanics for everything else, obviously. Torg in general seems to be a terrible mess of boring and dumb.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2015 18:26
|
|
|
Torg is the very epitome of 90s game from what I've seen so far. Salvageable concept, but not in the current form. That's more what I meant. Dimension hopping craziness with PCs turning into stuff that fits wherever they go if they're not careful but having a limited ability to break the rules? Definitely not a bad base concept. Just everything about the execution is terrible.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2015 19:01
|
|
|
I'd have more respect for that kind of thing if the authors just straight up said 'gently caress it, it works this way because I really want it to and I think it would make a cool story.' Speaking of weird transhumanist furry stuff, I think it's finally time I begin my review of Albedo: Platinum Catalyst by Sanguine. Sanguine is an odd duck of a company. They make furry RPGs, but the furry RPGs they make are mechanically interesting (if complicated) and somehow less furry than something like HVD, if that makes sense, in that they don't really read like someone wrote them with one hand. The focus is much more on the classical sense of using anthropomorphic animals as shorthand for people groups than fetish work. Their debut game, Ironclaw, will always hold a place in my heart for being Redwall+Game of Thrones+The Renaissance with combat mechanics that were actually fun to play and a setting that got across the grit of a world changing over to a new era without being overly grimdark or making the PCs ineffectual shitfarmers, so when a friend said they'd made a sci-fi game as well, we picked up the rules for fun. I should also preface that I have never run a long campaign in this system, though I have played a few adventures and run a couple missions, myself. Albedo: Platinum Catalyst is based on a comic called Erma Felna: EDF, written by a former Air Force technical illustrator named Steve Gallaci. Wikipedia tells me it was a foundational comic in the nascent furry fandom, which does not sound promising. Honestly, most of the stuff I've read about the comic in looking for background on the game doesn't sound especially interesting, but the basic setting is thus: One day a century or two before present, the random anthropomorphic animals of the setting achieved sentience. They simply awoke to already find they had histories, backgrounds, families, loved ones, jobs, all of it, but none of them could remember much beyond these pre-programmed backstories. They also discovered they had the Net, an omnipresent surveillance system that acts as both the internet and a general monitoring AI that will assist with inquiries and monitor the economy. Now, to their credit, they find the whole setup pretty fishy and pretty quickly come to the conclusion that they are an engineered people, and figuring out exactly who created them and why they were created, with theories ranging from the obvious (massive experiment in the development of cultures) to the insane (RABBITS UBER ALLES BITCHES!), and the Net quietly sabotaging any definitive attempts to discover why they exist. They're initially created with a cosmopolitan, atheistic, socialistic system of government, with a number assigned to a person called their Sociopolitical Intelligence (SPI) via automated personality testing, government performance evaluation and Net monitoring, and this number is used as someone's primary qualification in life. It values conformity and cosmopolitanism, preferring people who make no trouble and avoid questioning the general system, and the inputs from government performance assessment tend to ensure that this 'rational and objective' means of measuring someone's abilities promotes well-connected and relatively unimaginative people. Then they have their waves of colonization, once they discover FTL. This is where poo poo starts to go wrong, because there's no Faster Than Light Communication, and so small FTL transmitters are used to beam Net data around the colonies, but otherwise it's easy to lose track of people. People who are dissatisfied with the gentle and vaguely sinister form of Net-enhanced surveillance-socialism strike out for the colonies, forming different sorts of government and independent planetary colonies. One such set of colonies is populated primarily by bunnies, and if you've read Watership Down, you know poo poo is about to go wrong, big-time. The Interstellar Lapine Republic starts out as crazy hypercapitalists, but the oligarchs quickly find their legitimacy is based solely on their ability to provide exorbitant amounts of goods and services to their people. They need something else to keep people happy and keep them from questioning the rule of their wealthy plutocratic masters. They discover that something when they start writing tracts about how incredibly awesome bunnies are and it gets people all jazzed up about the superiority of the rabbit race. Yes, the bunnies invent fascism from first principles and proceed to go on a tear of invasions, causing a massive war that forces independent colonies to band together with the inner worlds to form the Extraplanetary Defense Force, the EDF, which is essentially Furry Space NATO. The EDF fights the ILR back to its colonies, but the war is absolutely devastating to occupied colonies and comes down to the deployment of WMDs from orbit, with the EDF forced to choose between accepting an ILR surrender that leaves them in power in their core worlds, or risking causing billions of deaths to affect regime change. They decide to go with the former, and the war ends, about 40 years before the game starts. Forty years of this has not gone well. The EDF's emergency powers never really went away, and the ILR hasn't really given up, either. They now resort to terror tactics and political warfare, trying to force brutal, limited EDF responses in minor proxy wars to gain the loyalty of 'Ethnic Lapine' populations, while corruption eats away at the EDF from within. Some of the EDF's highest commanders have figured out how to gently caress with the Net, which allows them to alter the SPI system, the economic monitors, and alter historical records (society is mostly paperless with the huge ubiquity of handheld devices and tablets, which considering this was written before the 21st century is pretty prescient) to suit their own agendas. Now, the problem with an AI monitored system of hypersocialism is that it sort of relies on the AI having accurate data, so all of this tinkering and upheaval is risking making their semi-benevolent but mildly sinister AI god have a meltdown and wreck the entire inner system economy. Meanwhile, the EDF's corruption means it bullies outer planets, which is doing the ILR's work for them. Into all this, your PCs are meant to be newly minted squad leaders, assigned to various peacekeeping and counter-terror operations to try to fight these fires, and maybe discover the heavy dystopian elements of the setting for themselves and try to help correct them as best they can. Worlds are leaving the EDF for totally legitimate reasons, but the ILR are psychopaths who you absolutely must stop if you can. Innocent lives and the lives of your troops are in danger constantly, proxy and brushfire conflicts are all over the place, and in the middle of all of it, a created people are still wondering why they were created and what exists in the universe to give a drat about beyond their own existence. It's honestly not that bad a setup for a semi-hard sci-fi dystopia/mil-sci-fi game. Its justification for the furries makes a hell of a lot more sense than HVD, and why they were created and by whom is left ambiguous (which is much better, considering answering that question is a potential major campaign hook) in the core book, though the one solitary expansion book spells it out (If you guessed they were created by humans to study cultural development in the case of a historical vacuum, you get a prize). Next we'll get into the mechanics of the game, like the insanely complicated character creation, but also the very interesting squad and combat mechanics.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2015 21:23
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 24, 2024 11:34 |
|
|
I'm sorry, I can't review The Last Stand as I've never played it. But yes, when I was briefly running Albedo my players liked to break into EDF! EDF! EDF! sometimes.
|
|
#
¿
Jan 11, 2015 22:21
|
|
