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I never know how to approach WoD-like fan stuff (or even the official stuff, really). On one hand, mad science is totally a concept that has the potential to be fun to play. But here, it gets crammed into the same and extremely predictable WoD framework we've seen a million times before, because WoD. It's not even that it's a lazy approach, because clearly a lot of work went into this and there are quite a few genuinely good ideas in there. It's just... I don't know. It's not even that I don't like rules and crunch, because I'm crunchy as all can be, but somehow everything just becomes bland, predictable and formulaic when squeezed into the WoD format.
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Apr 8, 2015 17:58
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Man, you reminded me of that movie that popped up on Netflix a few weeks ago that was blatantly not a movie at all, but a TV series pilot for a Sliders-like show that I thought would be really fun to watch. But alas...
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Apr 10, 2015 12:10
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Oh yeah, that's what it was called. As a movie, it was terrible, but it would've made an excellent pilot if there was an actual TV show attached to it. I mean, that's clearly what it was supposed to be. The pacing is nonsensically bad for a movie. Man, I'd watch the hell out of that.
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Apr 10, 2015 15:25
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I interpreted "pulp" as "pulp noir" for a second there, and now I wonder what fantasy Egypt meets noir would be like. "I could tell from the moment she stepped into the office that she was going to be trouble, and trouble was the last thing I needed. But there was something about her that wouldn't let you say 'no'. Maybe it was the sway of her legs, long and snaking like the Nile, or the way her voice reminded you of a wet-season night wasted away forgetting your sorrows over dates and jugs of wine. Or maybe it was because she had the head of a crocodile."
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Apr 10, 2015 19:05
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On some level, isn't all of Genius about that? Making contraptions work despite the laws of reality rather than because of them, until someone skeptical enough points out you just plugged a power strip into itself and it all falls apart? Except I guess these guys are good enough that they point out no, the real question is how is your power strip working when it isn't plugged into itself?
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Apr 14, 2015 22:14
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I would've expected a reference to phlogiston theory, myself. I guess "Phlogistonists" doesn't quite roll off the tongue. But I do like the idea of a modern Genius who is obsessed with conspiracy theories (reptile men, chemtrails, fake moon landings, etc.) to the point where his insanity makes it all work, somehow.
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Apr 15, 2015 19:10
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Cythereal posted:I meant that as an example of a lost continent - think Atlantis or Mu or the like. A lost world filled with weird stuff and probably a degenerate offshoot of humanity. Or, indeed, Lemuria.
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Apr 15, 2015 21:43
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It seems a big part of why caster supremacy happened is because there's too much source material and D&D tried to incorporate all of it at the same time. You can start with something simple and subtle and not game-breaking, like what Gandalf does or whatever, but then someone mentions they read this awesome fantasy book over the weekend where a wizard summoned lightning from the sky, so that goes in the game because yeah that's wizard stuff all right. Then some other source book had a wizard who could levitate, and scrying is in all kinds of stories, sure, and teleportation, lots of examples of that in fiction too. And the people doing this were all wizards, in some form or another, so when you've got all this source material you want to make work in your game sooner or later you hit that critical mass of versatility where wizards can instantly scry-bomb any villain within 200 miles who looks at the PCs funny. Warriors, meanwhile, don't display nearly the same breadth of ability in fiction. There are only so many ways you can hit someone with a sword, and even the flashier and fancier ones rarely tend to extend to the likes of flight, teleportation, summoning bear swarms, and the like. No matter how many pulp fantasy books you read, you're probably not going to end up with this problem. In most fiction though, wizards were often villains. Their powers were depicted as terrifying, world-threatening stuff, and only the demands of plot and author restraint kept them from just nuking the heroes into oblivion on page 10. If a wizard in a work of fiction is not a villain, he's a temperate mentor who barely uses magic except in a real pinch, or a student or someone else of deliberately limited capacity. But when you give player characters access to the same (or greater; see above) breadth of magical tools, without any of the restraint, you get caster supremacy.
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Apr 25, 2015 21:57
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Is it this one? It has the good taste to use Papyrus on the cover. How can it not be excellent? e:f,b
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Apr 29, 2015 23:24
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I don't know how any of this actually ends up playing, but there is something seriously seductive to me about taking classic mechanics and boiling them down to something way simpler and less enamored with tables, math and modeling things that don't need to be modeled. I especially enjoy a feat system that doesn't look like it's complete balls, and that you actually get to start out as a hero doing heroic stuff rather than someone only barely above shitfarmer.
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May 14, 2015 01:02
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theironjef posted:What's the difference between a Magical Girl game and a superhero game? Like Magical Girls as a genre is just women with secret identities and superpowers, right? There's a good argument to be made it's a subgenre of superhero fiction, yeah. There are a few more features that are particular to the subgenre - the superpowers are always magical in nature (hence the name) rather than, say, caused by radioactive spiders or having an awesome utility belt, for instance. But a lot of the usual superhero tropes are there. Fighting other superpowered villains, struggling to maintain a normal civilian life in the meantime, etc.
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May 18, 2015 18:56
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The "adults are poopyheads who consider magic to be nonsense" thing is a pretty universal trope, though, especially in media aimed at young people - which magical girl shows generally are. Once you hit 18, you ain't Peter Pan no more, and there's no going back. As for the glutton thing, that's a pretty common trope too, and honestly shows up just as often with dudes, so I think that's reading a little much into it. Someone who eats a lot is just a funny character archetype (unless you make it into something more sinister... which some shows have done). e: Xelkelvos posted:Arguably, it's a subgenre spun out of another subgenre. Tokatsu specifically. Whereas toku is male oriented and features mostly science based or extraterrestrial based powers (at least initially), magical girls are the opposite with magical sources and female oriented. Both run off of some sort of emotion with friendship/camaraderie as part of it. Hot-bloodedness, courage and bravery in toku and love, kindness and hope in magical girls. They're both two sides of the same four colored and sometimes campy coin. Definitely. The genre is pretty much a fusion of tokusatsu and highschool romance comedy in a lot of ways. Except I guess the romance kind of had to take a backseat? Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 19:27 on May 18, 2015 |
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May 18, 2015 19:24
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Cythereal posted:Introducing magical girls to the World of Darkness to me just feels like a goddamn weird choice. Genius has its problems to be sure, but I have no trouble buying mad scientists as a game line in the World of Darkness, new or old, and the core themes are not bad. Magical girls, though... the whole idea feels out of place. It's pretty easy to see why: WoD is, at its core, a highly cynical place. You do what you do to survive because the world is hosed up and if it's not the vampires it's the werewolves, and everyone is a little bit hosed up one way or the other and none of it matters because the Wyrm is just going to eat everyone anyway. The magical girl genre, by contrast, is idealistic to a fault. Triumph is had through friendship, love, and the magic derived from it. You fight for justice, not yourself, and you win by the strength of your friends in the end. Then you all eat cake.
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May 18, 2015 19:32
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theironjef posted:So in the end is it big enough to support a core book or is the genre easily covered by slapping sidebar about transformation sequences, togetherness, and villains based on negative emotions into a hero book? I'm sure you could, if for no other reason than at least hypothetically being able to really flesh out the details in a core book tightly focused on the theme, rather than retrofitting it onto an existing system. I'm sure it's great for marketing too, if you don't mind the niche being what it is.
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May 18, 2015 19:44
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On the topic of bizarre German toys/games with balls popping out of mouths and chickens being prevented, the one that tops the incomprehensible list for me is Trötofant (just the name alone looks hilariously foreign), in which players use those curly paper party favor things (  ) to hook cardboard logs off a spinning centerpiece and attempt to evaluate in mid-toot whether you actually wanted that log or whether to dump it on an opponent. I just don't even.
Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 20:28 on May 19, 2015 |
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May 19, 2015 20:26
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Dulkor posted:It's more that the modern interpretation of 'the devil' draws from a number of separate sources, which the MegaTen guys decided to make into individual entities. So Lucifer, Satan, Beelzebub, etc all get to be their own entities based loosely off their actual appearances in myth/theology. Interestingly, the Persona spinoff reconceptualized the various demons as expressions of concepts formed in the sea of the collective unconscious by human minds. In other words, because some humans have an image of Lucifer and some other humans have an image of Satan, and the two images don't exactly correspond, the sea of souls gives rise to both as separate entities. They exist because humans subconsciously want them to exist, and it is those humans' shared idea of what they should be that gives them their form, not because they have an independent existence of their own that predates the human understanding of them. I thought it was a pretty nice way of doing it, myself.
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May 22, 2015 23:24
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Halloween Jack posted:By the by, if you like the Madness Meters, Stolze translated them into ORE in the free Nemesis RPG (direct link to pdf). From there you can translate it into other dice pool systems if you like; people have done it for nWoD. I'm really digging the way the Madness system works here, although after reading a bit of Nemesis (which seems neat, mostly) I think the examples given in it come out a bit strange. For example, it mentions that having 10 hardened Violence notches (signifying sociopathic numbness to violence and total disregard for the wellbeing of others) is a common trait among serial murderers... yet, you can't get ten notches without experiencing (and succeeding at) an intensity 10 check at some point in your life, and all the examples of traumas above intensity 5 are all explicitly supernatural in origin, going from "get attacked by undead" at level 6 to "get impregnated by a Great Old One" at level 9... implying that most serial killers have in fact witnessed something worse than that? I don't know, it could just be that they didn't give mundane examples of high-level violence checks. But it also seems like the only mechanical consequences kick in at ten notches, and intensity 10 events are explicitly listed as fantastically unlikely kinds of events... and you still need to somehow succeed at the check in order to get that tenth notch. It seems like the scale there isn't quite functional they way it feels like it's meant to be.
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Jun 6, 2015 17:46
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So can an entropomancer piss on a biker's shoes with the intent of using the charge to mitigate whatever retaliation he has coming, or is that too close to the whole can't use magick to generate magick clause and would just result in a black eye and no charges?
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Jun 8, 2015 16:40
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How far-reaching can the changes made by a Cliomancer with a major charge be? Like, say, there are a lot of things people believe about history that we have no way of corroborating with solid evidence - particularly when it comes to religious beliefs. Would it be possible for a sufficiently crazy Cliomancer with a sufficient charge to more or less instantly erase a major world religion just by making everyone on Earth believe without a shadow of a doubt that [significant religious event X] definitely, absolutely never took place? Because that's kind of terrifying.
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Jun 9, 2015 20:56
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Speaking of which, is there like a Matrixmancer adept that, like, believes the world is a computer simulation and that therefore whoever can see/controls the Code can control reality, because reality is the code?
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Jun 11, 2015 21:46
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All I'm thinking is "drorpion" sounds dumb as hell.
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Jun 12, 2015 10:58
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I don't know if it's just me, but the restrictions on Plutomancers seem... really easy to uphold even as a normal, functioning Joe, if you don't mind only getting a few charges a week. Even a minimum wage job should get you steady minor charges, or a monthly significant charge plus a little extra. Set up some kind of escrow scheme where you get regular payouts of $100 instead of weekly or monthly paychecks, even. Get a friend to help you out and funnel your money to you slowly. Keeping to taboo seems really simple; how often do you spend more than $1000 at once, anyhow? Not even rent is that high so long as you don't live in a major urban metropolis.
Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Jun 12, 2015 |
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Jun 12, 2015 19:59
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I don't get the feeling that the Motor Shaman is really about fame or even performing great feats, it seems like more of a personal thing between you and the road. How about something like... being the first person to drive from one end of a major roadway to the other? Being the first to form a unique bond with that road, sort of thing. It's virtually impossible to do today since every major road (in the US, at least) has been traversed from end to end many times, unless you can find something newly constructed. There should be restrictions on what kind of road counts, in terms of length, construction etc. A dirt road that no one ever heard of probably doesn't count, but something like Route 66 definitely would (if it wasn't already charged out, that is). vvv You don't drive crazy for the sake of driving crazy, though. You do it because driving safely means putting an artificial, human-created barrier between yourself and the road, i.e. the laws of traffic. It is only when you ignore all restraints and make it all about the road, your vehicle, and yourself that you can attain a significant charge. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 15:30 on Jun 16, 2015 |
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Jun 16, 2015 15:19
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I misclicked on the poll, but don't worry, in my heart Donatello is forever the objectively best turtle. Who cares about a dumb horse though seriously
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Jun 16, 2015 22:27
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Archetypes seem especially fertile ground for a lot of silliness and weird poo poo. My new character is PowPowndCake, an Avatar of the Annoying Youtuber. His first level Channel makes everyone flock to him no matter how repetitive his jokes are or how inappropriate his remarks about things are!
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Jun 17, 2015 14:00
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The pornomancer in particular strikes me as hideously depressing if you think about it for more than a few seconds. They're basically taking an act that's usually intimate and loving or at least fun, and turning into a rote mockery of itself stripped of any intimacy or enjoyment. They basically become unable to enjoy sexual activity at all, don't they? It just becomes a sweaty, exhausting exercise in imitating something you can't actually have anymore.
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Jun 17, 2015 14:14
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point of return posted:Isn't that what being a porn star is like, though? Exactly the point. They're Pornomancers, not Sexomancers. Hence, interpreting them as silly, oversexed free-love hippies or something seems totally wrong to me.
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Jun 18, 2015 10:58
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That Merchant power reminds me an awful lot of an old Twilight Zone episode (the Self-Improvement of Salvadore Ross) wherein a guy finds himself with the power to do just that - trade abstract things like diseases, age, and eventually compassion, which ends up getting him killed by the man whose compassion he buys. Interestingly, it didn't make me think of Faust at all... what Mephistopheles gives to Faust is his own servitude and use of his powers. Also, the thing that bothers me most about Avatars is that they don't really seem to have a code of conduct so much as a few things they have to not do - the Mother doesn't actually have to help children, she just has to not hurt them. I guess it ends up working out in the game itself, sure, but it still seems kind of haphazard. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 08:29 on Jun 22, 2015 |
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Jun 22, 2015 08:26
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I'm guessing the expectation was that there would be more archetypes and avatars around to choose from, so it wasn't a big deal if a few of them were kind of weak?
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Jun 22, 2015 16:34
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So, hold on a second. If star signs in part determine social class, then it follows that higher nobility never have children of certain star signs, or at least do so much more rarely than others. In order to become the firstborn child of a baron, you need a social ranking stat that is high enough to be (baron rank - 1), but the star sign prevents that from happening or at least makes it less likely. Therefore we can infer that barons simply don't have firstborn children of "bad for your social rank" star signs. Right? 
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Sep 17, 2015 11:40
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Pope Guilty posted:You determine your parents after your star sign, which means that childbirth is retrocausal. That's a shockingly modern idea for something written in 1980! Yes, but that doesn't change anything. Your parents may not be barons, but unless all barons are childless, someone has to be born with a configuration that works out so that their social rank is exactly one less than their parent. And if their parent is of sufficiently high rank, then by necessity that person's star sign can only be one of the few that don't create a gap greater than that. Near the top cap of social ranks, that means certain star signs are flat out impossible, and others are unlikely.
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Sep 17, 2015 13:47
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theironjef posted:Luckily there's only one star sign that's bad for social rank, and also luckily, you can just buy social rank. So let's say you're a Baron (social rank 16) and your bastard son is a Pisces (-3 for being so far from inheritance of your lands and titles, -1 for being a Pisces), he gets shot all the way down to Rank 11, which is basically like "High ranking mercenary." It makes some sense, that's basically what Jon Snow was for example. That stuff would only come into play when you're actually playing as the father, though. When creating your character, you wait until you determine your own social rank before figuring out your dad's. If you roll an 11 and are an Aries (+1), you come up as a non-landed knight (12), and your dad is automatically of higher rank than you (you start this game at 16 years old, no rolling). You can choose how distant you are from your dad's lands and titles, and that determines his rank. You can either be his heir for a +1 to his rank, or stretch that line of succession out all the way to +3 (he is a Poor Baron and you are his third son or his bastard, or God forbid, his daughter). Are there star signs that are good for social rank? How high do they go?
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Sep 17, 2015 17:10
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You know, I've always wondered what kind of creative process ends up with something as disjointed as this. Okay, I get that a failure to actually try playing it has been a critical factor in the end result, but playtesting only uncovers faults that are already there, especially faults that are not immediately obvious. Playtesting something and finding that it doesn't work out as well in practice as it looked like it would on paper - okay, fine. What I don't understand is how someone can just completely leave out entire sections of rules, rendering the product unplayable and unfinished, and yet allow the thing to proceed to printing. * Did they just forget they hadn't finished writing some particular set of rules? * Did they think some rules weren't necessary at all? * Did they change something, but forget to erase references to the changed rules from the rest of the book? (Unlikely when there's entire sections referring to parts that are missing.) * Did some third-party editor (it's unlikely, but thinkable, that such a being exists) with a loose grasp on the thing as a whole lose or re-insert material without consulting the writers? * Aliens??? Heartbreakers are ostensibly labors of love (or at least sufficiently focused hate masquerading as love), so I'm just struggling to understand where major, sweeping errors like that are coming from.
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Sep 18, 2015 19:04
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It better be some kind of giant anteater like its namesake.
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Sep 21, 2015 23:06
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Put a silhouette of a dragon perched on top of Big Ben on there. Would be perfect. Seriously, this game sounds pretty badass except for all the cruft and weirdness around the edges that sound like they make the thing unpalatable to actually play. I'm sure you could clean it up into something workable, even.
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Sep 30, 2015 14:16
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Does the book come with a introductory module or something, at least? It strikes me that I'm not really sure what you do with your newfound dragon powers. Do you go out and have turf wars with other dragons? I can't imagine plugging the hole would be very high on your list of priorities since you'd go back to being a boring old raver or something then.
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Sep 30, 2015 21:18
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I think it just kind of annoys me in general when a system decides to put the baseline for "how much armor is enough to count as more than zero armor?" at "wearing ordinary clothes". It feels to me like that abstraction has failed on some level if that's where you're going. The whole abstraction is meant to facilitate people getting into fights, and giving players a defensive option that is easy to calculate and work with, and no one goes naked into a fight. How often do your campaigns end up involving fighting a lot of naked people? (Don't answer that.) Really, if what you're wearing isn't designed to be damage-resistant, it should just be a zero. If you somehow find your system really needs to model in an advantage for when a madman runs flailing at you in his birthday suit, do it some other way. It's especially dumb in any system where the principal class of weapons is firearms.
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Oct 3, 2015 18:12
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| # ¿ Apr 20, 2024 00:37 |
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That's the curse of all popular media. What, the story is over? But we're making millions every year on merchandising alone! No, you're going back in there and you're making it work somehow, Mr. Writer. If you don't, well, we own the rights, so we can just hire some other writers and keep it going - I'm sure among the throng of fans there're one or two that aren't completely incompetent, and more than willing to write more content...
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Dec 13, 2015 10:44
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