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Kurieg posted:The KOTOR series and TFU (at least the first TFU) were pretty big on the fact that sometimes a lesser evil can create a larger good, and good intentions can often lead to evil ends. (This is basically Kreia's whole shtick) In regards to KOTOR2 at least, there are extremely few characters that can be described as good or evil or even vaguely representing either of those factions. Considering Kreia is about the most complicated character in video games and that game in particular, no, that is not her shtick. The premise of KOTOR2 is explicitly about how Light Side and Dark Side can be deep, rich and rewarding to explore and do not map almost ever to capital-letter Good and Evil. The shtick is that there is no Good or Evil only flawed people.
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Jul 16, 2014 22:03
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Not to jump on the Arcana Evolved hate train, but that's the most generous description of a warmain I've ever heard. Every other class has a great deal of flavor where a warmain is defined almost solely by their armor. They are the tank class but built before 4th ed. introduced real tanking mechanics to D&D. Their strengths are: 1) be a wall with only your hit points and AC, no CC, marks, or taunts; 2) break objects better than anyone else, which I guess is versatile; 3) access to a very, very small number of combat rituals and 1 to 3 times a day auto-crit ability. 3e fighters are more interesting than this, no poo poo. The problem is still Wizard Love. Casters and casting classes are still lavished with sparkly abilities and flexible options that the warmain is almost completely denied. (And to a lesser extent, the unfettered.) The ritual warrior IS given options and flexibility, even (extremely rarely) out of combat! But to pay for that, he has to become more caster-like, with medium BAB progression and a lesser hit die. And the options he is given are not even comparable to spells of equivalent level. I'm a Monte Cook apologist (because of this and Dead Gods/Great Modron March and others) but even I recognize that Monte can't stop touching the Wizard Stick because he defines magic-users as "Guys that can do anything" and fighters as "Guys that are juuuust aware enough to put the sharp end in the soft part until the DM says to stop rolling dice". But just as the rogue was the most competently designed class in 3e, the akashic is the real take-away genius move in AE. A skill monkey class that justifies its skill monkey-ness by accessing the racial memory of all sentience? gently caress yeah. And you get to almost completely define how rogue or fighter or face guy you want to be? With extremely unique powers? What a baller class. What a fantastic idea. And splitting spells into simple/complex really let a lot out a lot of design space for half-caster classes to explore, which was awesome! Even if some abilities stretch to mandatory or garbage tiers. (The mind witch gets a sword that targets touch AC, which is ridiculous. The sea witch gets to make turgid sea voyages half as turgid, which is ridiculous the other way. Both of these cost the same ability pick.) Even if the world seems less than fleshed out, the campaign expresses a huge amount of flavor in the mechanics. Basically, the opposite of Numenera, where the bizarre setting is the draw but the classes are "incredibly generic fighter, wizard or fighter/wizard" plus "Hey, I like superhero comics, wanna be Hawkeye? Magneto? Or Electro?"
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Aug 30, 2014 13:07
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Halloween Jack posted:DUNE DUNE DUNE DUNE DUNE "karma" So my google-fu tells me "karama" is an actual Arabic word meaning "dignity" and specifically in Dune it means "a miracle or other action taken by the spirit world." Considering Dune draws a lot from the Middle East and not much of anything from India or Hinduism, let's assume the game's use of "karama" isn't a reference to "karma" and it's just a coincidence that other games use karma points while Dune uses karama points.
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Sep 4, 2014 13:16
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Midjack posted:For any game, has there ever been a game or supplement focused on love/romance/sex that hasn't been completely loving terrible? Does Pendragon have mechanics for courtly love or getting married or anything like that? I'd think if any game could do an awesome job of setting-space+mechanics for love, it'd be Pendragon.
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Oct 12, 2014 03:46
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That sounds fun and goofy and you're doing great!
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Oct 22, 2014 03:29
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I don't know anything about any slender dude, but that Proxy looks exactly like Halloween's Michael Meyers. Faceless serial killers would take a lot of effort to make interesting in a game about character conflict. Maybe if it was less Jason and more Rorschach?
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Nov 9, 2014 02:01
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I've been a HIPPY STORY NERD ever since I looked down at my 2000 word character sheet and realized there were no adjectives. I figured out what I like about RPGs is what emerges in play, not the intricacies or "elegance" of whatever baroque system we happen to be inflicting on ourselves in order to game. So when I read things like Polaris and Apocalypse World where the medium is the message, it's a breath of fresh air. 3:16 is pretty loving great at that, too: it models enough of the tension of the Aliens movies that you feel good screaming poo poo like, "We'll never make it!" "No, we can make it. But someone has to stay behind." and doing explosion noises with your mouth. I've only run it once but it worked just like I wanted it to. Maybe because when you handwave poo poo, the system is so light that everyone is just okay with it. When you play, it's really hard to feel bad because you never got to use your Punishing Strike feat chain and it doesn't inspire the existential dread some experience when they realize the referee isn't properly using the Chasing Bad Guys Logarithmic Distance Chart F. You might feel the rules are stupid but as long as they're easy I'll defend them. For my money, having a fun genre focus justifies rules as light as a puff of air, especially with a fast-action, one-shot genre in mind. That puff of air is a Glade Plug-in. I like the smell and the fact that I can wave it away easily. To you, watching it fall apart in a slight breeze is a turn-off and it smells like soap farts anyway. I got exactly what I wanted out of 3:16, I even had plans to use it to run a splatterpunk samurai game. It's fun and easy which for me means a lot.
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Feb 6, 2015 00:32
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Hyper Crab Tank posted:The only Final Fantasy class I can recall missing from that list would be Viking (a.k.a. Pirate). Given that they dug deep enough to have Black/White Callers (which are from FF3, the Japanese one - well, actually, in that game there's one class that has both black and white versions of summons, but whatever - and if this came out before FF7, then there was no translation of that game into English yet), you'd think that would be in there. Do they actually have good and evil summons or are they like adult Rydia who can summon and also just cast black magic spells?
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Feb 7, 2015 11:05
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wdarkk posted:I'm not sure where you'd find a heavy-g solid world in our solar system. Define high gravity. Earth has a dense core of molten metal. Terrestrial planets that have cores as dense as Earth's are likely very rare. Higher density means higher gravity. Earth is a high-gravity terrestrial planet.
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Feb 9, 2015 01:10
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Night10194 posted:Steampunk is cool when it remembers the punk part. When it's got labor organizers, colonial uprisings, new governments clashing with the old landed elite, and then maybe also some weird rear end laser cannons or something. But just 'gears and laser cannons and oh my Tesla' Steampunk is boring as hell. I use the term "steampulp" to differentiate the "nerds with gears on their head have imperialistic adventures plus Tesla" genre from the "everyone has black lung and/or syphilis and proto-computers" steampunk genre.
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Feb 22, 2015 17:20
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RocknRollaAyatollah posted:It should be noted as well that it gets worse than Minovsky Particles when newtypes come in, they start riding the rainbow, and everyone's weapons explode. That's a plot point in Gundam Unicorn, newtypes are space wizards, and psychoframes can cause everyone's weapons to blow up. What the gently caress are these sentences. I'm pretty sure they are bad because they are not about elves but they might be.
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Feb 24, 2015 18:33
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The story of Dragon Dice is, as has been noted by its popularity and its winning awards, the success that killed TSR. Spellfire was not the Magic card killer TSR wanted and Dragon Dice weren't either, but the game had a drat fine run. The issue was that TSR was making deals with big book stores like Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks to carry their stock. That's fantastic for TSR! So they wanted to push their collectible dice game on the same market, and its profitability was good or at least better than most CCGs of the time. The deal with book publisher/retailer relationships is really weird. At the end of a year, each retailer sells its excess stock back to the publisher. So when the end of the year came around, TSR had to buy back not only a larger portion of their books than they expected (because of course of the competition taking sales away from them) but also aaaaaaalllll those bags of dice that sold well but were not the Magic-killers they had really hoped they were. They couldn't cover that with their already dwindling finances and, luckily, Peter Adkison threw them a life line. The big, big failure of Dragon Dice, as has been wisely pointed out, was lack of branding. Lava elves and coral elves would not only sell like crazy then, they would probably sell like crazy now. But what the gently caress do they look like? I dare anyone to find a piece of actually cool art for this game. Even their ads were bland as gently caress. That's the weirdest part - in the 90's TSR made so many amazingly rad game worlds. But their killer app's setting was a bizarre mishmash that made FR look like it was designed by Steve Jobs.
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Mar 13, 2015 21:59
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| # ¿ Sep 10, 2024 21:44 |
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They should be stuck in the Matrix MMO. Then, in a twist, they all realize they are actually caricature drawings on a novelty placemat in a family restaurant.
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Mar 15, 2015 13:15
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