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PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

DigitalRaven posted:

Not just bad at editing in that they missed things that us writers done hosed up. Scribendi introduced errors into the text. Stupid schoolkid poo poo at that.

To give you a great idea of just how incompetent they are, they managed to misspell my last name in a credits page... which wouldn't be so bad, except the very next name was my wife's and they somehow managed to spell the same last name correctly THERE.

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PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
Enforced morality in RPGs is heavy-handed and poorly thought out, news at eleven.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

Yessod posted:

There was a guy I knew from the local (bad) LARPs who believed he was a Cultist of Ecstasy for real and all of the books were true and being published as a Malkavian prank. The police started looking for him after they heard rumors of underage stuff. Rumor mill at the time also said he decided that several of his coven had sold him out to the technocracy, and may have been involved in two of them being found in the bay. He spent some time in prison for the underage stuff and is apparently on medication now, so there's one less customer for Brucato I guess.

poo poo, and here I thought the guy who brought a replica gun to ours was bad. This one takes the cake.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
I don't think it was necessarily intentionally crazy-enabling. It's just that so many of the PC roles were "you are a special snowflake who sees the secret hidden truth behind the boring everyday world" along with the seeming pitch of the line toward disaffected youth that it tended to attract the crazy or at least the easily affected. I'm sure other media does the same thing to a degree, but I don't think it's as visible. I've never encountered any college cults that thought RIFTS or Michael Jackson's Thriller were teaching secret truths, but I drat sure had a nasty brush with one that followed the "secret teachings" of Werewolf and Mercedes Lackey.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

Macdeo Lurjtux posted:

Man, all the spikard talk makes me sad Zelazny died before he could write the next 5 books where they were going to be a major focus.

Somewhere out there you can find the short stories that he wrote that lead up to it, and it's pretty clear that they were going to be pretty crazytown bananapants (in a good way). My favorite has to be "A Salesman's Tale,", which picks up from Luke's narrative slightly before the last time we saw him in Prince of Chaos, and explains the potentially apocalyptic meaning of his last words in that story.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
The lich is arguably the best part of that movie, mostly for just how big of a dick he is. The same applies to the rogue.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

Evil Mastermind posted:

You laugh, but a friend of mine actually owned this back in the day. We almost played it, too. It's not even "Highlander with the serial numbers filed off", it's "Highlander with a Sharpie line through the UPC code".

poo poo, it's not even just that, it's vaguely cyberpunk Highlander in the World of Darkness with a very transparent sticker over the serial numbers. I'm pretty sure that the author pitched this to both the Highlander license holders and White Wolf and was laughed out of both buildings.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
It pleases me immensely that for the Basic edition they kept the same incredibly terrible art from the original. I wonder what the difference is between the versions? I'd imagine the basic version strips out the World of Darkness copycat stuff (not-vampires, not-mages, etc) but that might be a generous assumption of competence.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
So this is a game where everyone thinks they're playing Dexter's Lab but they're really just playing David Hahn? What forum did this spawn out of? i've only ever seen it referenced on RPGnet but I thought it came from somewhere else.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
At least you get a Natural Weapon (club) out of it.

PantsOptional fucked around with this message at 21:03 on May 1, 2015

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

unseenlibrarian posted:

Oh god, is that Legacy: War of Ages? I recognize that border and the bad photographic art and the bit of a dumb section header quote.

It is, and here is my shame: if memory serves, this is in the section on psychic powers near a power that's about inflicting psychic damage and they intended the picture to represent that, the quote is the bit about heads exploding from Dark Side of the Moon, and I'm pretty sure they mangled the quote as well. You can't just purge stupid like that from your memory, sadly.

E: Oh, I can see from the picture that they absolutely did mangle the quote. On the one hand, it's easy to throw stones from the comfort of the far future of 2015 with our robo-dogs and lyrics easily found through Google; on the other hand, they put as much effort into deciphering the actual lyrics as they did for writing the rest of this book, which isn't a lot.

PantsOptional fucked around with this message at 13:45 on May 13, 2015

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
Every time I see Division Six I get a little sad that they're not Division X from the Invisibles.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
It sounds a little like Children of Fire.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
Regarding the Famous Guests portion of the Bacchanal, how famous can you get here? Is it famous within Hunter circles, or can you throw a bunch of points into this and have Taylor Swift show up at your werewolf sodomy orgy?

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
Obama and/or Putin for Ghost loving Blood Orgy 2K15.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

Mors Rattus posted:

The Beauty Jar (5 dots) contains the severed head of buxom 50s starlet Jayne Mansfield. She died in a car crash, age 34, when a truck swerved to avoid another truck. Her decapitation is said to be a myth, but that is itself a myth to cover up that her head was stolen by a mad doctor hoping to reanimate an undead bride. The Aegis stepped in and took it back. The head itself is well-preserved in a brine-filled jar, but the hair is rotten and resembles seaweed. To use it takes a lot of willpower, plus it curses your driving skills. What you do is drink from the brine, which will mystically reproduce itself over a few days. This grants Fame 3, Striking Looks 4 and the ability to use any social skill as if you were trained at it. Your body becomes intensely attractive, lasting until you kiss someone. That's the only way to end the power. The kiss is profoundly foul, tasting of bug repellent, rot and brine. You're going to destroy your relationship with whoever you kiss, too, giving a mutual social penalty to each other for a month.

This is literally all I could think of: the severed head of Keith Moon.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

Halloween Jack posted:

I despise people like you who can only see the world in terms of money. Money is a ghost, haunting the world. That's all. A ghost has made you its slaves.

This is how the collapse appears to those doomed to live in it. Harumageddon is happening now.

Honestly this comic has affected more of my UA games than anything else out there (and rightfully so).

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
I played an Avatar of the Fool in the first UA game I was in, and while you might think it's a comedy option, it's actually pretty horrifying. Because of your taboo you're constantly leaving yourself wide open to manipulation and betrayal, and when the inevitable consequences come you're never the one who ends up paying your share of them. Early on someone took a fairly close-range shot at me that by all means should have hit me, and instead it misfired and killed someone else who really didn't deserve it at all.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

Mr. Maltose posted:

Also, rules as written means that even with your chemistry degree you're inflicting a capped amount of damage based on your roll. Apparently a lot of people talking about Mage on the internet overlook that.

Also you can't change a vampire into a lawnchair except in the very first edition of original Mage without having so many points you should be doing something else.

Absolutely. I feel like 90% of "Mage is OP" wankery originates with people who maybe read old Mage once or twice back in the day and feel confident that nothing has changed in the past 20 years.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

Doresh posted:

I think this started with Games Workshop making huge pauldrons for their Space Marines and Chaos Warriors for easier arm attachment. Then Blizzard borrowed the design quirk and it became a ridiculous trend.

Yeah, it's done to hide the fairly obvious and large seams between arm and body and probably to allow for some better poseability.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
Yeah, it was always my understanding that this was never meant to be played as an actual game. It was a drunk joke of an idea that somehow managed to make it to print.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

theironjef posted:

We address that, and indeed perhaps we fell for the writers original big joke. That's okay, we're due. I still get grumpy letters from people that are peeved about Duckman not being real.

Ultimately though, it's not funny. I mean, it's like it was written by Dave Barry's teenage goth son.

It's me, I am the guy who's rustled about Duckman. I listened to about 3/4 of it on the way to work the other day, thinking "wow, this sounds completely insane, I have got to find this" and then Googling it at work pretty much resulted in a sad trombone sound.

You're 3000% right about HoL being horribly unfunny. At best it's definitely one of those "well, it was funny to us" kinds of jokes.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
9. Poorly drawn cross-hatched art of big-boob elves, preferably with gears on their hats for no reason

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
Icons explicitly have to be both famous and dead, so no Vin Diesel and no Pewdiepie. The guidelines are laid out pretty bare: in order to become an Icon, the subject has to be instantly recognizable to over a hundred million people, held in high esteem by the majority of those who know them (so, as the book states, no Hitler), and they must have died after World War Two (preferably in a tragic fashion). There is one person who meets these criteria yet cannot be channeled: Jim Morrison.

PantsOptional fucked around with this message at 19:51 on Sep 2, 2015

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
Maybe? Would 100 million people instantly recognize Paul Walker? I honestly don't know as I haven't seen any of his movies.

Who might be some other Icons that might work? Their listed ones are Marilyn, JFK, Nixon, Gandhi, Elvis, Mao Tse Tung, Charlie Chaplin, John Wayne, and Lady Di. Maybe Robin Williams? John Lennon (evoking that weird summoning from the beginning of The Invisibles)? MLK? Maybe Che Guevara?

PantsOptional fucked around with this message at 20:15 on Sep 2, 2015

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
I was wondering the same thing. It says that they have to be "held in high esteem by a reasonable percentage of those who know of them," which I'm guessing maybe indicates that state propaganda has done a good enough job by magickal standards.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

theironjef posted:

Jim Henson. Though I wouldn't want to, it'd just make me sad again.

Echoing the sentiment: Mister Rogers.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
Guys, come on, Monte doesn't do that sort of -

quote:

"what about what I like to call "passive perception"?

- well, gently caress.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

gradenko_2000 posted:

I mean, some of it had to be fake, right? Cactus people? Aliens AND robots in every given setting? A book just for Australia? How deep does this rabbit hole go?

Please, never ruin this innocence of yours.

PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce
I'm 90% sure that Femme Darkle is a really awkward goth drag queen.

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PantsOptional
Dec 27, 2012

All I wanna do is make you bounce

unseenlibrarian posted:

Also, I've only heard one "Let's stat your character based on yourself" scheme that's worse than Immortal's, and that's the new FFG Post-apocalyptic games, which by default is apparently based on -other players voting what stats you should have-.

I participated in a character creation session of this recently, and it was pretty bad, but it was also hilariously easy to game the system.

The way it works - or, at least, the way that it worked in our session - is that you have three categories of traits and two attributes within each category. They split down the lines of Physical (Dexterity/Vitality), Mental (Logic/Willpower), and Social (Charisma/Empathy). Each attribute starts at a value of 1 and you have 10 points to spend on them, with a rating cap of 5 on any individual attribute. You also note down a freeform positive and negative descriptor for each category - for example, I might put down Nearsighted and High Pain Threshold for physical traits.

Once everyone in the group has done this, it's time to shame the gently caress out of your fellow sweaty nerds, and find out what they think of you, by voting on the overall categories. In turn, each player presents their scores for one of the categories and any explanation they might have for those values. The other players then vote on whether they think you should have higher or lower scores in that category (or, presumably, if your scores were correct and need no adjustment). You then adjust your scores up or down by one, and take another descriptor in that category to balance it out. So for example, if the group decided that my Physical category needed to be higher, I might balance it out with a negative descriptor like Clumsy Driver or some such.

Here's where it gets fucky: the group can't decide how your final scores end up. They vote on the category overall, and you decide which score changes. So in theory you could load up on Vitality and put a point in Dexterity. Then when your group rightfully calls you on your bullshit, you note down a positive trait (such as "expert brawler"), lower your Dexterity, and proceed to play as Musclefist Punchman. Sure, you'd be an rear end in a top hat, but you're all playing a game where character creation is based on judging your friends on their self-image, so gently caress it.

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