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Congratulations, Raggi, you did what you thought would be impossible and what your previous work indicated was, created an adventure better than Keep on the Borderlands. This thing isn't without problems, but I'm kind of awed the guy who brought us Death Frost Doom and wrote an essay on how originality sucks could create something that's actually kinda interesting.
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Mar 21, 2014 06:43
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 11:22 |
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There's the Raggi we know and love! Play along with the crazy evil railroad wizard or have your de-aged, skullfucked corpse added to his statue collection. This is what I get for having hope.
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Mar 21, 2014 08:51
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PleasingFungus posted:Is there any way for the players to actually find out about these rules, other than by breaking them? Player skill 
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Mar 22, 2014 03:27
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I figure players will probably assume the title is about the Seven. And I figured the horsefly thing was a nod to wizards always crossbreeding everything being a long-running D&D joke, even though the owlbear is the only such monster to gain any traction, so it's kind of just stupid. Saguaro PI fucked around with this message at 03:27 on Aug 13, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 08:10
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The thing that gets me about Better Than Any Man is that the Karlstatd stuff is pure gold. Seriously, if the adventure was just about this city on the brink being ruled by these ladies who have good intentions but are way in over their heads and in a week's time the But instead you have a paint-by-numbers apocalypse cult with lol surprise cannibalism and Evil McDark the Railroad Rapemurder Wizard and the boring as hell infinite tower with the TPK trap and a whole "secret dungeon" that only serves to murder you so Raggi can chide you for having the gall to adventure places and it's bullshit. All of which the best solution to is to just quit the region and let the Swedish army roll over it in a few days. (That's it for the horrible run-on sentences, I'm sorry) But what the hell. Raggi, you get a gold star for creating something I actually want to steal ideas from and proving that you have occasional bursts of creative thought, maybe there's hope after all. quote:Probably because he's either too dumb to make his own system, or too delusional to think anything but D&D could be better. This is the man who said he couldn't hope to top Keep on the Borderlands, so definitely at least the latter, but I'd say both! Saguaro PI fucked around with this message at 23:53 on Mar 23, 2014 |
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Mar 23, 2014 23:50
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ProfessorProf posted:
 It's funny once you know what the power source is.
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Mar 27, 2014 06:16
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So it seems like you could salvage the concept of the Beast (sexually repressed person who turns into a cobra when they let go) by sorting out the central move and building from there. Maybe something like this (warning, below is probably bad)? -When someone turns you on, you may instead negate the result and take the condition Feral. The next time you successfully lash out physically or shut someone down while Feral, pick an extra option and remove Feral. If someone successfully turns you on while you are Feral, pick one of the following: You mostly retain your human shape You mostly retain your human intelligence and personality The intent here is that you get an element of choice, you get some form of benefit (you become really good at being a jerk when repressed) and is still complicated (you need to be a jerk while repressed) in a way that will make other PCs sometimes avoid you but also sometimes create interesting experiences (I really need someone to get up in this NPC's space, better go flirt with cobra boy).
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Oct 19, 2014 01:25
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I'm not the only one who thinks that dude's hat looks like a butt, right? Just so we're clear.
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Oct 22, 2014 06:11
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Halloween Jack posted:The Creature is the one that made me decide that none of the Skins for the Skinless would probably appeal to me. "You're the Creature from the Black Lagoon, and also an annoying activist" just didn't make any sense to me. I wouldn't go that far. The Creature is probably the biggest dud in the collection, I'd say even more than the Beast. The Beast is a salvageable concept that I think works overall even if the execution sucks, while the Creature just seems like a poorly thought-out mashup and it shows. Plus, The Muse, the Minotaur and the Proxy are cool, even if they have a couple of wonky elements.
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Oct 25, 2014 04:01
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These modern Pokemon designs, I swear.
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Nov 8, 2014 09:03
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The Proxy is the biggest heartbreaker for me because I actually like to concept of both a Slenderman/Creepypasta playbook and also think there is room in Monsterhearts for a playbook that isn't just capable of being hosed up but just unashamedly the bad guy. I think it's completely valid for a game about teenage monsters to question how we deal with someone who is just completely loving evil and won't stop doing evil things, because you can look at how that happens to regular people and also exactly what makes someone like the Proxy different from the dude who will flip out and wolf people to death if he's not careful. It carries a shitload of risks and I think groups that would use such a playbook should probably agree that it's a temporary thing with a large part of the game being dedicated to dealing with that character, but it's not an entirely worthless concept.
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Nov 9, 2014 01:38
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Tasoth posted:I think a target of ridicule/abuse could work if you stuck some kind of overarching tormentor on them, like a ghost, demon or their throat slitting parent who is stalking them. Give them a base move that lets them handle incoming damage/resolve suffered damage better and build around the idea of the party/player getting benefits for the abused drawing the bad things to them. Give 'em another move where they get a bonus for fabricating the abuse coming from a genuinely good act and make their Darkest Self turning into what is haunting them, making them complete the cycle and dishing out torment and abuse against their nature to round out the concept. Make the character's story less about a countdown to wiping everything out and change it to whether they can break out of the cycle, realize there are those who do care about them and become a good human(ish) being. See, I think this is why the Slenderman angle of the Proxy would still work. "It" then becomes a metaphor for the horrifying, complicated bundle of things that turns someone into this hosed up person, hard to understand and something most people don't want to understand anyway. Something that acts in such an incomprehensible fashion that we can't really be sure how many of the hosed up things the Proxy is doing are being driven by this outside force and how much are simply the proxy being caught up in the cycle that it's all they know. Also, "I like this monster, let's make a playbook" is totally an acceptable starting point for making a Monsterhearts playbook, sorry guys. I understand you've got to really think about what teenage experience analogues you're using the monster to represent if you want it to really shine. But I'm not going to blame someone for using "what monster do I think is cool" as a starting point and I think "why not just play a ghost or werewolf" kind of misses what's trying to be achieved.
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Nov 10, 2014 01:03
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LornMarkus posted:I'll disagree with your disagreement for a simple reason: considering the teenage drama aspect directly alongside the monster is important because it makes the social aspect central to the design. Most of the skins that are broken are terrible are specifically bad because they and/or the other players have no incentive to interact with them. That comes primarily from that lack of focus, looking instead only to make stuff that fits with the monster theme. Well sure, I'm not denying it's important to good playbook creation, I'm saying it's perfectly valid to start from "I really like creepypasta/harpies/minotaurs, can we make a playbook out of that?". I think a little too much of the criticism here goes straight past the failure to match the monster and highschool aspects correctly and goes all the way into "well the werewolf is already violent, why would you want to play <some other monster that's violent>?"
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Nov 10, 2014 02:46
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Cythereal posted:I think one of the issues with that approach is my personal response of "Why are you trying to make an entirely new Skin for a very similar concept rather than renaming/refluffing an existing Skin, maybe with one or two move tweaks?" Refluffing is cool and I am in favour of it, but it's not the 100% the solution every time. I think trying to boil down every monster that's kind of stalkery to the Ghoul or every monster that's actually an ordinary person tied to a supernatural entity to the Infernal can get needlessly reductive and discourage people from looking at new design space.
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Nov 10, 2014 04:03
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*shrugs* I like the giant, and I really like Size Matters. Not only do I think Size Matters isn't a bad move, I think "2d8 but consequences for 8s" is actually a really good tool for PBtA tinkering, albeit one that should be brought out once in a blue moon and extremely carefully at that.
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Nov 27, 2014 08:26
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The Deleter posted:If you don't play the battlebabe as a smouldering sexy male that defeats enemies with a glance and a single bullet, I send you a dissapointed letter explaing your poor RPG choices. Ours was essentially Oscar Wilde with a triple-barreled shotgun.
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Dec 21, 2014 01:33
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| # ¿ Apr 19, 2024 11:22 |
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Godlike, the first proper ORE title and precursor to Wild Talents, had a D20 version that was just kind of there in the back of the book. Even back when I first read it and was having my tiny teenage mind blown by non-D20 things, I thought it was incredibly odd and ill-fitting.
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May 1, 2015 08:06
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