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I played Alternity all through high school, and the biggest gripes my group came up with were the overtly convoluted skill system, and the fact that the classes are either non-functional or actually work oppositely the way they're described. The skill system struck me as some kind of malignant outgrowth of the 2E D&D Non-Weapon Proficiency system, where in order to shoot a bow and arrow, you now had to have Primitive Weapons -> Medium Distance Weapons -> Mechanical Energy Delivery System -> Bow & Arrow. I think that they game should have either used exclusively Broad Skills or Specialty skills and just given the axe to the other half.
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May 17, 2014 18:05
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Finishing up the podcast, I think the question of "who plays something like Maid? misapprehends the tone. It's that weird anime thing where the sexuality is generally played for laughs, in theory... but it goes too far. I'm reminded of an old anime called Sorcerer Hunters that would constantly bust out S&M as a punchline (I was about to type "gags", but, well...), and it's loaded with sexual kinks in a very creepy an ignorant way, intending it as humorous, but it got me to generally walk out of the anime club whenever it came up. And I think Maid is very similar in that regard - it's not intended for folks to do hardcore sex RP, but is stuck in that weird anime tease realm where characters constantly try and inflict their desires and kinks on others but the stories often stop short of actual sex, or veil the sex in some bizarre metaphor. It's a sort of weird ignorance in the anime subculture where you have that kind of thing that is a joke because it makes the characters uncomfortable without realizing that it makes a lot of readers uncomfortable. I've still never met a group of people that I enjoyed gaming with, but thought "the only way we can really enhance our Sunday game night is if each of us has embarrassing boners and we verbally detail our personal sexual fantasies. Also, dice rolling".
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Dec 22, 2014 06:16
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DNA Cowboys posted:The companion book goes into this, but it's not really focused into anything beyond "learn the setting's secrets, which are GM-only." I never finished writing about the second book, did I? You didn't, but your review inspired me to track down a copy of it on my own, and I have to say it's definitely worse than if they had just left everything vaguely explained. The main book aludes to all of these weird, mysterious things, which sound cool and menacing in your imagination, and then the Book of Knots just straight up stats out the Cheshire Cat and the Queen of Hearts and provides a definite explanation for the Chessboard levels and why they exist and it just kind of deflates everything. I really wish they had pulled a Greg Stolze a la Unknown Armies and had the GM section be like "The Queen of Hearts - We don't know why she's so loving nuts, so use you imagination and whatever explanation seems the coolest to your players". Instead it's just pages and pages of really dense crunch for NPCs and locations that will basically insta-gib any PC who is dumb enough to engage them without massive GM fiat (at which point the concept of this being a game kind of becomes moot). EDIT: There's also this weird tonal shift where chessboard levels 1 and 2 become progressively more Silent Hill-y and creepy but then it flips and level 3 and down become progressively more monkey-cheese-omg-how-random. The authors still seem to think that the randomness of the lower chessboards somehow conveys the same kind of terror, but it's hard for me to imagine that a floating island made out of raw desire, where gnomes mine nuggets of our subconscious feelings of insatiability, and a crazy rabbit is the god king who rolls into town at random times and kills everyone, is the same kind of scary as what's described on levels 1 and 2. Freaking Crumbum fucked around with this message at 19:23 on Mar 9, 2015 |
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Mar 9, 2015 19:17
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theironjef posted:Now that'd be the Twittermancer. You can get all the powers of Kanye by repeatedly updating his twitter as fast as f5 can be pressed. The other piece of the Videomancer is that their powers weren't derived from their fetish show, the fetish show was just their source of power. If your Videomancer's fetish show was The Simpsons, you didn't have a different power set from a guy who fetishized the local news. It actually worked that way for all of the -mancers, and prevented them from being as vulnerable to min-maxing and power creep that spell casters in other games encounter. A boozehound doesn't get different powers depending on whether he drinks scotch or light beer (being drunk is what matters) and pornomancers, for example, can only get power from ritualistically mimicing the sexual exploits of one very specific pornstar - they actually lose all their power if they ever have sex outside of the ritual context. UA is a fairly rules-light system, so not having to worry about how a Videomancer who fetishized Loony Tunes was better or worse than a Videomancer who fetishized Dexter was intentional.
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Mar 26, 2015 22:31
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FMguru posted:You see this in other parts of the design, too, like the way each school of magic has a single blast spell that are all pretty much equivalent to one another (if different in the way those effects look). Point your finger at someone, burn a minor charge, they take X damage. Point your finger at someone, burn a significant charge, they take Y damage - whether you're an Urbanomancer or a Bibliomancer or a Personamancer, it's all the same. Yeah, I really enjoyed that every flavor of wizard got an evocation spell (or equivalent ability) and then that was that and the rest of their spells were thematically cool and weird things that were still useful, without having to make one wizard the damage school, or worry that the damage wizard would be stronger/weaker than all the other wizards.
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Mar 26, 2015 23:44
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