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Ratpick posted:e: Also, I don't really see a direct thematic conflict between volatile and combative Infernal and the naive kid who's just in over their head. Like, give any awkward and naive teenager demonic performance-enhancing drugs and what's the first thing they do with them? They abuse the hell out of the power without thinking of the consequences, lashing out at people they had no hope of lashing out at before and doing other stuff they would've never dreamed of before. The real drama comes the first time they lose their powers and actually realize that, holy poo poo, they kind of made a terrible deal. Another thing to remember is that Volatile isn't just about being swole as gently caress. It's about being unpredictable and impulsive and, well, volatile. Even if the nice naive teenager isn't abusing their new demon powers, they still have a demon on their back asking them to do things and now you're in their face telling them to do things and can't you just give them a little goddamn space and then they do something they'll regret later but at least now they can run away to think about it. Admittedly, part of that's just me projecting my own anxiety issues onto the Infernal, but there's still more to being Volatile than being actively violent.
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Aug 22, 2014 21:32
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PresidentBeard posted:edit: I realize that this comes off as me just trying to justify my own disinterest in Monsterhearts, and that isn't really helpful to the continuing conversation. The point buried there is that for nerd things like Buffy the hook is already there as character that people latched onto first and then started caring about the melodrama because they cared about the melodrama. Whereas Monsterhearts needs you to care about the relationship for their own sake or become super invested at character generation. Though this is a bit projecting as I never actually watched Buffy. To steal a point Jackson Tegu made when he was starting the Second Skins kickstarter, each skin is on some level playing it's own game with it's own set of rules. Someone like you would be better off choosing something like the Chosen or Infernal whose personal games are "I MUST FIGHT THE DARKNESS" and "I made a literal deal with the devil and I have to deal with that" over something like the Ghost whose personal game is just being stuck in a cycle of blaming people for ignoring you and apologizing after you blamed them way too hard. Just stick to the ones that come with setting hooks built in.
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Aug 22, 2014 22:10
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Gazetteer posted:Sex Move So, this is another problem Skins For The Skinless has. Namely, the skins are blatantly specific references. In this case, the Beast is the main character of Cat People. Literally, the sex move is the entire plot of Cat People. There's a hot lady, she thinks she'll turn into a monster if she has sex, she has sex, she turns into a panther and won't turn back until she kills someone. It even has the weird incest-y bits of the 1982 remake. It's just an entire skin that's Cat People. Now, there's nothing wrong with being explicit about your influences. There's nothing wrong with making a Werewolf variant that focuses on being afraid of your inner sexy beast instead of being a dominating rear end in a top hat. The problem's when you get so focused on your influences that your skin can only be used for a blatant ripoff of your source material.
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Oct 18, 2014 23:14
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Tulpa posted:The Sasquatch is mostly cool and one of the most conceptually developed of the Second Skins but some of the moves (in particular, Musk) tend to completely undercut the tone of the game and make it a farce. The mechanic reason for Musk is good. Namely, it makes people want to interact with you even though you're an antisocial mess. The flavor... Well, sasquatch mythology is really dumb. For reference, Musk. Every Sasquatch stats with this move. Second Skins posted:Musk You see, the Sasquatch is a very antisocial skin. It's built for fading into the background and running away from your problems and dealing with them later. If it didn't have Musk, it'd be way too easy for a Sasquatch to just never interact with anyone ever. So, they have a move that makes people talk to them, one way or another. The fluff is embarrassing, but weird musky smells are a surprisingly large part of Bigfoot lore and it'd be weird to fictionally justify the trigger for a move called Mystique Of The Bigfoot or something so I'll take it. (For what it's worth, the only other smell reference in the Sasquatch is in the sex move. Namely, unless the other person scrubs it out they get the condition scented. Unless they really try to hide it, everyone is going to know that they banged that one weird kid.)
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Oct 20, 2014 07:29
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Also, for people who aren't up on their internet video series from five years ago, the Proxy is an open reference to noted Slenderman vehicle Marble Hornets, specifically the guy with a mask. It's openly a reference. It also doesn't really do much that the Infernal doesn't already do conceptually and it only has moves that let you be an incomprehensible stalker/slasher and nothing that really focuses on the whole "paranoid obsessive" part of things. Also, can I just say that it's really weird for someone to take a pack of playbooks someone else is writing up and writing a post about a skin that has four other skins between it and the point the other reviewer left off at?
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Nov 8, 2014 22:24
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Gazetteer posted:
Fun fact, there used to be only one picture per SftS skin. Someone requested versions of the skins with both guys and girls pictured, and Topher added them. It's nice that he did it but it's pretty obvious which ones he didn't have a good idea for and just used a random picture that looked kind of relevant. Also, I'm up for another post on the Proxy later down the line. It'd be nice to have a calmer writeup of it. Also a writeup that isn't by a random goon that decided to write a post for someone else's review out of the blue.
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Nov 9, 2014 04:56
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Green Intern posted:The "hoax became real" origin is probably referencing this one episode of Supernatural where that exact thing happened due to thousands of people on a creepypasta/urban legend site sharing a magic symbol along with their versions of the story. It was way more interesting than this skin. It's also the plot to the EverymanHYBRID video series, which is about some guys making fitness videos on Youtube who decide to get some of those Marble Hornet views by having a friend in a Slenderman costume stand in the background of their videos only to have Slenderman actually start showing up. And that is also more interesting that this skin, because it's a Youtube series and not something that you're supposed to play.
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Jan 9, 2015 05:30
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Evil Mastermind posted:Sort of; if your show gets cancelled, you lose all your charges and you're stuck getting minor charges off reruns forever. You can just dump a show but doing so also makes you lose all your charges, and you need a significant charge to attune to a new show. Watching reruns only gets you minors. Well, or you can get your poo poo together and stop being obsessed with a show that's been cancelled for five years. You won't be a videomancer any more, but at least you can act like more of a human. Anyway, Netflix and Tivo and video streaming didn't ruin the videomancer mechanically, but they did ruin the thematics behind it. One of the big things about the school is that you're having a shared experience with millions of people across the country by sitting in your room alone and staring at a little metal box for half an hour. These days that can technically still happen, but unless it's something crazy like Game of Thrones there just isn't the sense that the next episode of something is an event.
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Mar 26, 2015 22:08
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Kai Tave posted:Okay, now figure out what the Personal Defense Swarm is a byproduct of. So, your agents come back with a bunch of weird statues that spring to life when you feed them a dead man's bile. That's really weird, but if R&D can figure out how they work they could do some really interesting things with metal that turns into flesh. They do a bunch of testing and attempt to make something useful out of it, but no matter what happens whatever they make the metal into keeps turning into weird Geiger monsters instead of anything useful. So fine, now you're stuck with a warehouse full of metal that can turn into Geiger monsters. You can't just melt it down, because metal that turns into a monster when exposed to bile is not something that you can feasibly dispose of in a way that won't break your budget for this fiscal year. So, it's time to figure out something vaguely useful to do with your weird Geiger metal. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 06:08 on May 31, 2015 |
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May 31, 2015 06:05
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Tasoth posted:Is there a SJWmancer? It has a great paradox of fighting for equality but tilting at everything that comes up whether real or imagined, a taboo where you have to die on every hill even if you realize it isn't a good one and a charge scheme that moves from being embedded in tumblr for minor acts and physically being involved in greater and greater efforts for bigger charges. Although I can't imagine what the rituals would look like. I don't know. Could you make a school around the paradox that unironically using the term SJW just makes you look like the kind of weird jackass that justifies social justice's existence?
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Jun 14, 2015 18:00
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Count Chocula posted:The Ghostwalkers in Hunter sound awesome. Are they from nWoD Geist? Yeah, they're the titular Sin-Eaters, who are the people brought back to life by the Geists if you don't know how the splat works. Also, if you don't know how the splat works, you know how the compacts' idea of what they are sound interesting because nobody knows much about them? Yeah, the book doesn't really build on that interestingly-vague base very well.
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Jun 17, 2015 07:21
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Halloween Jack posted:Geist seems like a rather narrow, idiosyncratic concept in the first place. They're practically unkillable by default, they are no mechanical downsides to having an unknowably ancient ghost riding on your back, and most of their special powers are mostly ways to make them better at fighting people. Also, remember how Mors said they want artifacts associated with death? That's a thing in the rules, and it lets you get more dice on rolls tied to that artifact than you'll ever need. quote:Actually, while we're on the subject? What makes mages so overpowered? I only played a mage in a couple of sessions in a disastrous mixed game, so nobody was tapping into the real ultimate power. The impression I get is that nWoD mages were intended to be like, say, John Constantine or The Invisibles, able to do great things with ritual and preparation but not so much casting Fireball at people, but in practice that worked out to being able to do anything with ritual magic and also walking around with buff spells cast on themselves and killer spells in their pocket as long as they prepared them ahead of time. Maybe that impression is totally wrong. It's the old Linear Fighter Quadratic Wizard problem, really. A vampire gets a third dot of Celerity, they're just faster than they were before. A mage gets a third dot of Space and you're going to see some poo poo you've never dreamt of before. And that disparity's only going to get bigger as they get more XP and the vampire progresses relatively linearly and the mage gets more and more stuff that mixes with the stuff they already had in new and interesting ways.
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Jun 17, 2015 16:06
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Just Dan Again posted:I had a fun time reading everybody's explanation of caster supremacy, something that I'm thoroughly familiar with in 3rd, 3.5, and Pathfinder (not sarcasm, I really did enjoy the step-by-step, thorough analysis and elucidation of the concept!). My focus was on the constant cries of "Caster Supremacy Returns! All Hope Lost!" in regards to 5th edition. From what I've seen and read, the spells seem well-balanced to their level of play. For example, the Sleep spell in 5e will often make a big difference in a low-level encounter but won't simply wipe it. There are certainly still times where a cleverly-used or unexpected spell can turn an adventure on its head. That being said, I've been in plenty of non-D&D games where a player's bizarre decision changed the course of a game despite their complete lack of narrative-defying powers. This isn't an effort to say that my anecdotal experience renders any dissenting opinion moot, I just think that the response to casters having access to spells in 5th edition in a manners similar to 3rd and previous editions has been overblown. 5e still has the fundamental problem with caster supremacy: spellcasters get narrative control and noncasters get none. At level one, a fighter can roll to attack things and roll skill checks. At level one, a wizard can roll to attack things, roll skill checks, and three times per day say "these five goblins are asleep now" or "this person likes me" or "I do 4d4 damage to this orc automatically". At level five, a fighter can roll to attack things more often and roll skill checks. At level five, a wizard can roll to attack things, roll skill checks and can say things like "I'm doing 6d6 damage to everyone in this room" or "I can fly" or "it is impossible for anyone to see me for the next five minutes" multiple times per day. At level 20, a wizard can roll to attack things, roll skill checks and bend the laws of the universe with their arcane might. At level 20 a fighter can roll to attack things and roll skill checks, but that's okay because the fighter can roll to attack things a lot of times in one turn. It's just a fundamentally unbalanced framework, and it's one that 4e mostly left behind and 5e brought back because of tradition. quote:When I was a little kid learning about dungeons and dragons, I wanted to play a dragon. Dragonborn are pretty cool, but they're not dragons. Using 4e, if I wanted to design a class that was "Dragon" rather than "dragon-inspired warrior" or "dragon dude with a breath weapon and wings" I would have to create all of the powers from the ground up, providing options at every odd-numbered level for encounter and daily powers (not to mention Paragon Paths and Epic Destinies). I did that in 5th edition and it felt much easier. You'd be justified in saying that I could have just played a dragonborn fighter and reskinned everything, but this has felt more right to me. I will say that making a full 4e class is a lot of work, but the standardized framework does make it a lot easier to, say, make a custom daily or two if a Dragonborn Fighter is close to how you want your dragon to play but you want more breath attacks. Also makes it easier to predict how those homebrewed powers are going to act in actual play, for that matter.
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Jun 29, 2015 01:48
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Kai Tave posted:There's one bit which that makes me look askance at it though which is the mention that transgendered characters might seek a means of living as another gender (okay so far), and the possibility they suggest for this is the Flesh Shaping arcanum. But this is sorcery, as the book helpfully reminds us, and is this a price your hero is willing to pay? On the one hand, it's nice that Blue Rose comes right out and says "Hey, you want your character to be transgendered? That's cool," and it's fine that they suggest a goal for such a character might be to find a way to bring their body in line with where they want it, but I find it a little questionable that they decide to couch this in terms of "will you risk dabbling in the dark side of the Force to transition?" I dunno, I can't speak with any authority on the matter not being trans myself, but this seems like a lovely dilemma to throw at transgendered characters, especially if they're being played by transgendered players. Yeah, demonizing the desire to transition is a really garbage thing to do. I mean, I'm still going to give them some praise for being a ten year old RPG that's actively trying to be welcoming regarding gender stuff, but this whole plot hook makes it sound like they never actually had a trans person look at it to make sure it wasn't completely out of touch. As an aside, it didn't really sink in that Blue Rose's Roma equivalent are named the Roamers until this post and I am legitimately kind of mad about it now.
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Aug 15, 2015 17:30
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Pope Guilty posted:Isn't that Phil of Phil and Dixie? Phil Foglio has glasses, Phil from Phil and Dixie doesn't. Other than that... yeah, they pretty much just look the same.
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Aug 17, 2015 03:33
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chiasaur11 posted:Err, I feel awkward mentioning this, but... when did this whole Vectron business get started? I think I missed something. There's a sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Look about a sci-fi future religion that's pretty much just worshiped by constantly mentioning Vectron, hallowed be it's name, DtD includes Vectron as one of it's gods because it's a collection of references anyway, and everyone started their references early.
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Aug 21, 2015 19:58
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Tulul posted:That's part of the sketch. Well gently caress me then.
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Aug 21, 2015 20:06
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RandallODim posted:Does Age of Worms keep bringing up Kyuss? Because the soundtrack that conjures in my mind has a very different tone than the adventures. Well, that band named themselves after an AD&D monster called the Son of Kyuss that's a zombie filled with writhing green worms, so you can probably guess where this is going.
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Aug 29, 2015 17:40
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Falconier111 posted:I'm not sure whether I hate this for its pretentious tone and bizarre approach to history or love it for its creativity and bizarre approach to history. I think I'm going to end up in love, though. Dreamhounds of Paris does have rules on how to change Trail of Cthulu's character creation to work with it's unique mechanics, but the premades all have slightly better stats than created characters because RPG nerds have a huge aversion to playing premade characters in non-con games even when the premades are all really interesting people with a wealth of information on them. EDIT: Okay, when I say "rules on how to change character creation" I mean more "make someone whose occupation is Artist or Author and take some of the unique abilities they add in this book". You don't really need to change a lot to make it work. Lurks With Wolves fucked around with this message at 21:59 on Sep 2, 2015 |
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Sep 2, 2015 21:49
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LornMarkus posted:I mostly agree with you but there's another issue that comes up for me. It's actually the same issue I had back when the generally progressive setting of Blue Rose came into question, in fact: rape, along with those kinds of bigotry, is the sort of thing where I do feel it's kind of lazy and to a degree wrong to make a background radiation of your setting. Not because that isn't a real issue, not because those things shouldn't be talked about, but because I really feel they shouldn't be there unless your group of players specifically wants to engage with that kind of material. If somebody comes in and says they want to do a gay character who was specifically motivated to start adventuring because they wanted to find their own way in life and be themselves, or that they want to do a child of rape who's hunting down their offending parent and struggling with deciding whether they themselves deserve to live, then they can be there. But those things really shouldn't just be a footnote in the setting, or a value on your character sheet somewhere that only matters because it gives you +x to some skill and a starting trauma disadvantage or some poo poo. Not that I disagree with your point, but your examples kind of make it sound like you're putting LGBT representation and casual hints at rape in the same category and they just... aren't. Anyway, I agree that the biggest problem here is that this raises the amount of "acceptable" rape references in the game, both because that makes the game feel generally rape-y and because it makes it seem that much more acceptable for people to include more rape in their games. It all comes together to make Cthulutech feel like a really uncomfortable game to sit down and play, even if a good group could and probably will spend the time and effort to avoid all the weird casual rape references.
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Sep 15, 2015 17:01
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LornMarkus posted:Not presentation, I was referring to settings that have baked in bigotry toward LGBT folk. Obviously you should be allowed to play a gay or trans character if you want, my reference there was more "the player should only have to face bigotry for their character being LGBT if that's what they want to roleplay." I can see what you meant, in that case. Wasn't as clear as it probably should have been, but I see what you meant. Also, on a similar note to Night's comments about Bretonnia, I really like how Legends of the Wulin handles women. You see, wuxia traditionally doesn't exactly have the best gender dynamics and it would have been really easy for them to go "this is a quasi-historical setting, things suck for women, deal with it". Instead, they had a whole section of the book talk about women in China in the time periods wuxia cribs off of and they give you a few disadvantages like "everyone thinks of me as a woman and not as a warrior" and "everyone thinks of me as a warrior and not as a woman". And if you don't take those disadvantages, congratulations, you don't have to deal with that kind of sexism because you didn't put "I want to deal with that kind of sexism" on your sheet, the same way your GM would be an rear end in a top hat if they had your character be constantly hunted by the army if you didn't write "Disadvantage: I am wanted by the army" on your sheet. It's just something that more RPGs should do.
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Sep 15, 2015 18:34
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Night10194 posted:Another important bit about skills that the game is kind of schizo on: One of the reasons an Average PC starts with like a 35-45% success chance in their skills is that's supposed to be your odds under really dangerous, crisis situations. In general, a skill test is only called for when poo poo has gone down and you're in real trouble (like rolling Weapon Skill in combat). The problem is, the example adventure in the back (and other published scenarios I've read) are full of 'Roll Perception at -10 to progress the plot' gates. This gives the wrong impression about skills (namely that you have to roll for everything) and it's bad adventure design to boot, but it muddles the skill system further and really isn't productive. The first edition of Dark Heresy had this same exact problem, and it's just as bad there. You need to be generous with bonuses when you're using this kind of system to make PCs not look like a bunch of incompetent scrubs, and here's the example adventure requiring a Challenging (+0) Acrobatics check to climb a slightly steep hill. It's like no one told the adventure designers how the system actually works.
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Oct 1, 2015 22:25
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Covok posted:How does it do that, exactly? Because the art was drawn with everything facing a certain direction, so all the little touch-ups were done with that in mind. The art looks fine, then you flip it and wow that arm looks kind of freakishly long now that you're looking at it fresh, and that shading isn't as good as it looked before, and wow this whole thing looked better before you flipped it. It's something you should do because it helps you find the stuff you do good enough that you really need to do better, but it's not something you should do willy-nilly in an actual printed product.
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Jan 1, 2016 23:13
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