FATAL & Friends 2014-15: The Neverending Storygame

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FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

To be fair, Wick presents it in a different way which is interesting (maybe not practical, but interesting), but it's not a new idea in the slightest.

From what I remembered of Wick's Orks, they were very very similar to RuneQuest's Trolls.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 19:15

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# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 08:26

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

LatwPIAT posted:

A far better example of what Wick seems to want to accomplish was done by (I think) Ken Hite; he proposed a game where the GM sat down with the players and roleplayed out a psychotherapy session where the PC's latest actions were questioned as if they were the actions of a delusional murderer.

That was John Tynes, IIRC. The game was called "Power Kill". He has it up for free at: http://johntynes.com/revland2000/rl_powerkill.html

# ¿ Dec 3, 2014 21:25

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

theironjef posted:

Yeah, you just want to tell him "This. This is why there aren't very many women in this hobby. Because the moment you feel like you have a tiny whiff of power you start acting like this. And the worst part is that you think she either can't tell what your gross tones mean, or that she's into it. You've got such little regard for her agency that you think her literally shrinking away from your attentions is a cue and not a warning sign. Oh also because you think it's up to you to not only decide, but subsquently inform us about why she is a "girl" and not a "woman."

The start of that description makes it sound like he's going on and on about his perfect anime waifu.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 00:54

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

If you don't know Mojo Nixon then your show could use some fixin'.

He don't work here. :shrug:

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 15:40

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

I honestly can't get mad at Desburough anymore. All I feel is sorry for him. I just see stuff like this, shake my head, and think "this is what he's choosing to do with his life."

Yeah, it's moved on to being full-on pathetic at this point. For big laughs, check out his Patreon - he's managed to get 3 people pledging a grand total of $8/month to support his bold, iconoclastic truth-telling. His twitter feed is this manic-depressive let's-conquer-the-world/oh-god-I-give-up pendulum. He's been run out of every RPG forum on the internet (I'll never forget the time his dad logged into RPGnet to back him up in argument). Who could have guessed that choosing to fight and die on a hill marked "The freedom to tell rape jokes is the highest freedom imaginable" would turn out so badly?

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 17:35

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

theironjef posted:

the first song that popped in my head was Happy Boy, and I knew that wasn't right (it's by the Beat Farmers)

Country Dick Montana.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 17:40

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

LatwPIAT posted:

By analogue, it would also be attacking an author's livelyhood if a publisher refused to publish a (bad) e-book. A publisher does not have an obligation to let anyone use their storefront, and if Desborough desperately needs the money, the route of independent publishing is always open to him. It's not like he's unknown either, so he doesn't need a publisher to boost publicity among his target audience.

The thing about freedom that these goofs can't understand is that other people have the same freedoms. Desborough is free to write and publish his own hate-wank nonsense, but DTRPG is free to choose what to carry in their marketplace. He's free to express his views, but other people are also free to voice their opinions of him and his work and his ideas. The government isn't censoring him, smashing his printing press, or throwing him in jail. His works aren't being gathered up and destroyed by authorities. The marketplace of ideas is working out exactly as intended. He can still publish and distribute and promote his sad-sack little card game, he just has to do more of the heavy lifting himself. Boo hoo hoo.

That's the catch with freedom, other people have it too.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2014 23:26

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

This was a huge problem with Torg later down the line: they assumed everyone was buying and reading everything. And this was in the mid-90's, where you couldn't just go to an internet forum or wiki to see what you missed. So many important events happen in the newsletter or in a novel, and when these events influence or intersect books in the main line, they never told you where said event happened, or never gave you a brief summary in case you missed it. They just brought up the event or NPC or whatever like it was common knowledge.

That went all the way back to the very start of the line. The setting was "modern earth invaded, bad guys thwarted by heroes, bad guys stopped for now, status quo is an unstable stalemate" and if you wondered who those heroes were or what they did to stop the bad guys, you had to read the paperback fiction trilogy that was released with the core box set. And it got worse from there.

It's really hard to overstate just how much the RPG industry treated their products as just ancillary goods to get you to buy and read the novels after the success of Dragonlance in the mid-1980s.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 20:14

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Bieeardo posted:

I've always thought (prayed) that statblock for the Lady was a bit of fan work, because I ran into it outside of any context and it seemed both stupidly fiddly and amazingly misguided.

Sigil is the most valuable piece of real estate in the entire multiverse. It's the High Ground from which you can invade any and all other planes - inner, outer, elemental, prime material, whatever. Entire pantheons of gods have spent eternities wracking their brains to try and figure out how to overthrow the Lady and seize control of it, to no effect. None of them have ever come close to succeeding (and I'll bet that not a few of the Dead gods floating in the astral plane got that way because they tried to gently caress with Sigil). She's as far above Thor and Orcus and Asmodeus and Ra as those gods are above level 1 PCs. She's the last person in the entirety of D&D that should have a stat block.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 22:20

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Kavak posted:

So White Wolf didn't invent that? I want to hear more.

Nope, TSR did in 1984 with Dragons of Autumn Twilight, the first Dragonlance novel. It flew up the charts, sold a ton of copies (most to non-gamers), led to spinoff merchandise (calendars, atlases, cookbooks) and a zillion sequels and prequels. Oh, and more novels - including Forgotten Realms novels which led to a second moonshot success with Salvatore's Drizzt stories. Seriously, look at a best-seller chart for fiction paperbacks from the late 1980s or early 1990s - half the slots will be filled with novels and collections from TSR. For the longest time, TSR's financials showed them to be a fiction publisher that maintained a legacy sideline in game products. TSR also did great work in licensing their RPG properties into other kinds of products, most notably computer games (of the Gold Box/Baldurs Gate variety).

Well, every other company saw the fountain of money that RPG setting tie-in novels generated for TSR and moved to launch their own lines - so you get shelves clogged with WoD and Warhammer and Torg novels, among others. There's even a Paranoia novel by Ken Ralston! This was, I think, a key part of the push towards 1990s RPG products being less toolboxes and more metaplotted storylines with signature NPCs running around doing all the things your PCs are supposed to be doing.

The real story is just how hard it is to make money with RPGs. It's a small market, hard to grow, and once you sell someone (often times only a single person in a playgroup) a set of core books, 90% of them never buy another product (except for maybe a crunch-heavy "Player's Guide" or two). To make money at RPGs, you have to use them as a peg to produce things that are not RPGs (books, boardgames, comics, TV shows, miniatures lines, calendars, action figures, etc.)

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 22:54

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

I'm convinced that Dragonlance (and later Forgotten Realms) novels took off because there was this huge unmet demand for D&D-style fiction. Various editions of D&D had recommended reading lists in them, but the novels they sent you to read (by Tolkien, Moorcock, Lieber, de Camp, Vance, Hodgson, Howard, et al) really weren't anything like D&D or feature D&D style characters. Lots of it was out of print, and the stuff you could find was written for the pop culture of several decades ago, which made it hard to approach for a teenager in the 1980s who just wanted to read some stories about wizards and fighters fighting monsters and scoring fat loot. So when that first DL novel appeared, there was a ready audience of nerds who wanted to read fiction set in the kind of fantasy worlds (i.e. D&D-style ones) that they were already familiar with. And so you get the mid-late 1980s boom.

The DL/FR novel booms were also, IMHO, responsible for AD&D's ridiculous overproduction of world-settings in the 1990s. They were hoping they could get lightning to strike a third time, so her comes Dark Sun and Planescape and Red Steel and Ravenloft and Al-Qadim and Birthright and Spelljammer and so on until TSR is reduced to crapping out Dragon Dice novels to pay the bills.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 23:50

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Evil Mastermind posted:

There were actually multiple novels and a 6-issue comic.

That's right, there were three novels, one of which was a Torg/Paranoia crossover story.

So, if anyone out there was wondering "Is there anything that 1990s West End Games wouldn't publish?", the answer is "No."

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 23:52

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

True fact: OJ Simpson killed West End Games when he allegedly murdered his ex-wife and her friend.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2015 20:32

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Fossilized Rappy posted:

If you couldn't guess, Exodus: Post-Apocalyptic Roleplaying is an exercise in just how much you can get away with treading the line, and somehow it manages to succeed. Rather than undergoing a metamorphosis from a caterpillar into a butterfly during Glutton Creeper's loss of the Fallout license, what instead happened was that the caterpillar glued on some cardboard wings and donned a mask with "NOT A CATERPILLAR" crudely scrawled on it in crayon. I almost dissuaded myself from reviewing Exodus about a year back because I wasn't sure there was enough material to have any words beyond that it was a mediocre d20 Modern setting book with some odd rules choices, but then I reread it and it hit me that there is such a low effort to mask what the product once was that there is even a prestige class to replicate a single unique Fallout NPC! Hell, there are even some things that are straight up still using Fallout names.

Games that are essentially "Popular Thing X But With The Serial Numbers Filed Off" show up quite often in RPGing. Cyberpunk 2020 was an unofficial adaptation of William Gibson's "Sprawl" cyberpunk novels, Vampire is Anne Rice's "Interview" novels, Conspiracy X is X-Files, there was a very handsome D20 book that was essentially Harry Potter with some names changed, and on and on.

Even by those standards, this sounds pretty egregious.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 03:04

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

theironjef posted:

Good that'll get us out of covering FATAL for a while. This book made me so mad. The slap dash nature of it, the ludicrous cheesecake, the "realism." What's with these industry guys that pick one thing they saw in a documentary about medieval life and run it into the ground as if that's a setting?

Listening to the podcast, I was really struck by how half-assed the whole thing was (Fantasy Imperium, not SM). Usually these Fantasy Heartbreakers are an obvious passion project for the person making them - that's part of what makes them so heartbreaking, the way someone pours their heart and soul and credit card balance into producing yet another forgettable AD&D-but-with-more-rules clone. But it sounds like this guy just lost interest in it halfway through and couldn't be bothered to finish the manuscript, much less edit it or proof it. That's an impressive level of contempt for your paying audience.

The weird mixture of Maxim-targeting titwank fantasy artwork and church lady moralizing was kind of original, I guess.

# ¿ Jan 7, 2015 17:10

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Living Land was also the first book in the line, and I think the mechanical blandness of the setting was intentional (its a pretty simple cosm without too many moving parts). Basically, they were figuring the game out as it went along, and they needed to successfully establish a no-frills setting book before moving on to make books with magic spell construction systems and pulp equipment and cyberdecking and all that.

I remember reading that the original GURPS playtest setting was a low-tech post-apocalypse world so it was just the skill system and basic combat - no firearms, no magic, no psi, no robots, no spaceships - so they could make sure the basic systems of the game worked before they started piling on more crunch. I suspect Torg's first setting was the way it was for much thesame reason.

# ¿ Jan 8, 2015 22:14

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Harnmaster is a really good game for what it is - a bunch of people back in the early 1980s looked at AD&D and said "this is good, but way too comic-booky and unrealistic" and then looked at RuneQuest and said "that's better but it still needs work" and then went to work making and testing a "realistic" medieval fantasy RPG. It's both simultaneously a fantasy heartbreaker (hey guys, lets make a more realistic version of AD&D!) and the exact opposite version of a fantasy heartbreaker (it's actually very tightly designed and shows evidence of being extensively tested and limits itself to supporting a very specific playstyle and is professionally produced). It's just a really, really, really, really good and focused variant of early D&D. The world it's set in is pretty excellent, too.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2015 15:44

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Carrasco posted:

Once again, the solution is guns.

Is there anything they can't do?

# ¿ Jan 13, 2015 01:48

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Mors Rattus posted:

All I know is, two years ago at Origins I saw a book called THE CYBERPAPACY and I had to buy it despite knowing nothing about it because it was a book called THE CYBERPAPACY.

You chose...wisely

One of my favorite things about the Cyberpapacy is the way that it handled cyberspace (the classic c-punk flying-through-holographic-neon-grid-canyons with a wire hooked directly into your brain kind) - it got rid of a lot of the fiddly rules and arguments by flatly asserting that when you jacked in to cyberspace, you were literally projecting your soul into another dimension. Because, in the Cyberpapacy, that's exactly how jacking into the matrix worked.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2015 17:38

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Lightning Lord posted:

I vote for Orrorsh because it's an anagram for "Horrors" and knowing that I can't help but laugh every time I see the name.

One of the Cosm Axioms is that all proper nouns are pronounced as if they were spoken by late-career Sean Connery.

"I'll take Horrorsh for shix hundred, Trebeck"

# ¿ Jan 13, 2015 19:09

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

e: Never mind, repeating something I forgot I said a couple of pages ago.

# ¿ Jan 20, 2015 04:06

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Yeah, feats were a nice idea. I always thought they were a way to make character classes less cookie-cutter, so every level 7 fighter wasn't exactly the same as every other level 7 fighter, or so every wizard didn't just read off the same spell list as every other wizard, without having to invent a whole new character class for each kind of fighter or wizard. If you wanted to be a thief-acrobat, you didn't have to create a whole new thief-acrobat class, you just picked acrobatic feats when it was time to level up your thief, that sort of thing. Hell, I even liked the basic idea about prestige classes - a way to add some regional/setting differentiation or specialization to a game without scratch-building an entire character class (like the Knights of Solomania from Dragonlance). Plus, giving humans a bonus feat was a nice balancing mechanism for settings where elves and dwarves got a boatload of racial special abilities. But they weren't balanced, didn't level up with you, had inconsistent mechanics, could be min-maxed to hell and back, soon ran into the hundreds and then thousands of "official" options, and so on and so forth. My personal (least) favorite feat trait - the way some classes would let you choose from a sub-list of feats every so often, which meant that your reward for leveling up was the opportunity to pick from a shrinking list of options, all of which you'd passed over multiple times before. Whee!

# ¿ Jan 26, 2015 17:20

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

What I don't get is that so many furry RPGs are so... drat... serious. I mean, Furry Pirates, Ironclaw, Albedo, and Hc Svnt Dracones are certainly of wildly varying quality, but there's not much room to play Disney's Robin Hood or anything that's even slightly "funny animal". I have to wonder if this is just a general tendency of nerd-dom to try and drag anything they loved from their youth into "maturity" or something specific to furs I'm just not aware of.

That was a big feature of a lot of the furry stuff that came out of the indie comix subculture of the 1970s and early 1980s. They were your favorite fuzzy cartoon animals from your childhood - but done seriously. Which in the 1980s meant swearing and drugs and sex and brutal violence and everything else that makes something "mature". Fritz the Cat, Omaha the Cat Dancer, Cerebus the Aardvark - they all got along on a contrast between cartoon style and serious themes. That's also where you get things like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a silly idea done as a dead-earnest retelling of Frank Miller's grim Daredevil stories and then re-worked back into a silly cartoon with the TV show and movie and action figures, and Usagi Yojimbo, which is just an excellent all around.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2015 16:16

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

D&D = Fantastic adventure taking place in a made-up fantasy world with wizard's towers and swamps full of undead and flying castles and shooting darts of purple energy out of your fingers at monsters

WoD = Fantastic adventure taking place in the real world which is full of hidden supernatural entities and conspiracy theories

One of them is a much worse combination with people who have trouble differentiating between fantasy and reality...

# ¿ Jan 29, 2015 06:11

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

In the early V:tM citybook supplement for Berlin, Heinrich Himmler (former head of the SS) is an antitribu Tremere and Hermann Goring (former head of the Luftwaffe) is the leader of the Nosferatu.

I apologize for anyone currently bleeding because the information contained in this post was so edgy.

e:
http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Hermann_G%C3%B6ring
http://whitewolf.wikia.com/wiki/Heinrich_Himmler

FMguru fucked around with this message at 18:46 on Jan 29, 2015

# ¿ Jan 29, 2015 18:44

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Kurieg posted:

The Technocracy, the Big Bads of Mage, are all about imposing their view of reality on the world. But from humanity's point of view they aren't precisely evil, per se, outside of the fact that their view of reality doesn't have Mages, Vampires, or Werewolves in it. They are all for the advancement of humanity and the increasing standards of quality of life for all mankind, they just want it to happen on their schedule and their terms.

They're a combination of a magical R&D Department, the Men in Black, the Illuminati, and a mad Geneticist, depending on which faction of the Technos you're talking about.

Well, it depends which era of WoD you're talking about. Early Mage books had them as cartoonish incarnations of The Man going around squashing creativity and nonconformists - pretty much straight out of The Wall. Exactly the sort of people who a ragtag band of young techno-hippie hackers and steampunk goth-wiccans should be fighting against. It was only later writers who started to admit that an overconspiracy of scientists pushing monsters to the periphery of existence and replacing healing draughts and crystal balls with antibiotics and television just might have a point about the proper way for humanity to advance itself.

# ¿ Jan 29, 2015 22:36

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

MonsieurChoc posted:

I don't know why, but this makes me think of Usagi Yojimbo a lot.

Sanguine also used the same system in their official licensed Usagi Yojimbo RPG. Which, sadly, is not the best official licensed Usagi Yojimbo RPG (that would be the Greg Stolze design published Gold Rush Games, which also happens to be one of the finest RPGs ever written).

# ¿ Feb 1, 2015 17:33

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Halloween Jack posted:

Will any of you admit to being hardcore simulationists, if that's the correct term?

*raises hand*

Well, I was once. I played original Rolemaster (in the parchment Arms Law and Claw Law days), before switching to GURPS, and I had a lot of love for Traveller and Megatraveller and their ridiculously detailed systems for calculating planetary albedos and flickering your starship's null-energy field so that it blended in with cosmic background radiation. Played Car Wars and collected all the equipment catalogs and made design spreadsheets. Bought and played both Star Fleet Battles and Advanced Squad Leader (but I never got into Europa or World in Flames, thank God)

I remember the exact moment I fell out of love with that style of gaming - it was when I bought Fire Fusion and Steel, the vehicle and weapon design system for Traveller. It's an amazing supplement (GURPS Vehicles is pretty much the same thing). Flipping through it was like flipping though a mechanical engineering textbook, and I realized that if I was going to sit down and master this system, I might as well just take a class in MechE. And then I wondered what all these details I'd been collecting and digesting really meant. My vision didn't blur and I didn't wake up in a filthy motel room a week later with a copy of Fiasco in my hand and a scar across my abdomen with no memory of how either got there, but I just lost my taste for really detailed RPGs. I still have all my GURPS books (even weird and rare ones like Conan and The Prisoner) and if someone wants to play I'm down, but I just can't be bothered. Real life is complicated enough, and if I want to sit down and learn a complicated thing, I'll teach myself something actually useful like regular expressions or MS-SQL.

That said, I totally recognize the appeal and legitimacy of simulation-style play, and have no problem with people choosing that as their preferred way to engage the hobby. I do have a problem with simulation-style games that are terrible, or simulation gamers who think they are society's elite because they distinguish between muskets using corned instead of fine-grain powder in their games, and fully reserve the right to make fun of those and them.

The big problem I have with sim-style games is that all these complicated rules are based on...what, exactly? When I got far enough in college and grad school to understand the sources that so many complicated games are based on, I discovered that there's no scholarly consensus on how medieval warfare worked or how medieval economies functioned, and that what consensus existed was forever shifting based on new research. Even Gary Gygax included historical armor types in AD&D that appear to have never existed in real life. A great example is SLA Marshall's research in how modern soldiers fight, which was tremendously influential in the design of many crunchy wargames (including my beloved ASL). Except later scholars went through his findings carefully and found that a lot of what he was saying was incorrect or disproven by later studies (it is very much not the case that most soldiers just fall to the ground uselessly and only two of three men in a ten-man squad actual fire their weapons to any effect in a given engagement). So that means my ASL rulebooks, all 300 pages of densely-written legal case rules, are based on very shaky assumptions.

One of my favorite moments on Usenet was when a bunch of people in rec.games.frp.misc were complaining about how completely unrealistic the combat rules in Twilight:2000 were, when the designer of the game showed up to conclusively argue his case based on real-life gun battles of the sort RPG players get into (Border Patrol versus smugglers, SWAT team versus well-armed bank robbers) and showed that all the "real" assumptions about how the gun fights "obviously" work were 100% incorrect. Most gunfights go on for between 30 minutes and several hours, hundreds of shots are fired for every one that hits someone, even PC-grade professionals revert to spray-and-pray covering fire 99% of the time, people hunker down and hide behind cover, whole chunks of time would go by without anyone doing anything, and even people wounded multiple times by gunshots stayed in the fight until the end. Some SWAT battle against a drug crew in 1980s Miami ended up with 5000 rounds fired, four people wounded (most multiply), and no one dead.

In short: when it comes to simulating real life 1) nobody knows nothing and 2) nerds are particularly bad at understanding how things work (which is how you get the D&D/Pathfinder design teams generalizing from their experience flipping computer mice into their hands, or nerds arguing long-disproven BIOTRUTHS as if they were cold hard rational scientific fact).

# ¿ Feb 4, 2015 20:25

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

pkfan2004 posted:

I like 3:16's metaplot and story. I like how you're the people who aren't cut out for this incredibly flawed "perfect mankind utopia". As written, on Earth mankind lives forever and the only way out is suicide and it's boring and "perfect". It's an elaborate form of suicide for people who can't handle Earth but don't want to just step into a death booth. So the leaders of Earth have basically come up with a snipe hunt and treated it with the utmost pomp and circumstance for a pointless game. You can never return home and the leaders are probably laughing at you the whole time for being gullible. Because you're not "perfect" and they are. And eventually you'll get desensitized and bored of the slaughter of (relatively innocent) alien species and then what? Play another game? Or get even with them?

IIRC, the final secret of the setting is that the fleet is never, ever allowed to return to Earth. when they run out of aliens to kill or are so desensitized by the genocides they've committed that they decide to return and destroy Earth, the fleet admiral is supposed to detonate the black hole bomb in the center of the flagship and wipe out the entire fleet. The whole thing was just a way rid utopia of possible malcontents, there never was any alien threat (shades of Forever War and Arc B from HHGTTG).

# ¿ Feb 6, 2015 02:56

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

I am also a big fan of one of the [REDACTED] cosms because it was so loving bizarre to see something like that just show up.

Can I interest you in some magic Incan space trees? Just got a shipment in.

# ¿ Feb 10, 2015 22:58

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

PurpleXVI posted:

They think that apparently a classless system is breaking new ground.

Well, it has been only 37 years since RuneQuest was released...

Hyper Crab Tank posted:

Sounds like a heartbreaker that decided just fantasy wasn't interesting/ambitious/edgy enough. What could possibly go wrong?

Usually an FH's main rulebook is fantasy, but there's a lot of talk about how their breakthrough RealmCore WorldEngine system will soon expand to have sci-fi and steampunk and horror and giant robot supplements (those supplements never come out, the game line and the publishing company both disappear once the core book fails to set the world on fire).

# ¿ Feb 22, 2015 17:52

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Pussy Cartel posted:

The only adventure besides Chaos Principle were the two "green" books that were basically Mekton Zeta campaign books, originally made back when DP9 just made supplements for R. Talsorian's games. Those two covered the JC setting and included a series of adventures that were later referenced in the actual Jovian Chronicles RPG, but never really talked about in depth.

That was my favorite thing about JC - the way it made references to events in a pair of long out-of-print Mekton supplements, and assumed you were familiar enough with them that they didn't have to do more than briefly summarize them.

# ¿ Feb 24, 2015 18:42

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

To the extent that TSR had any lasting influence on anything, it was because of Williams. She took the company away from the Blumes (who, at one point, had several dozen relatives on the TSR payroll, each with a company car), imposed some professional discipline (employees couldn't just play their home D&D campaigns all day and get paid under the rubric of "development"), invested heavily in production values, moved aggressively and smartly into new spaces that paid off huge dividends like novel (the Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms juggernauts) and and computer games (Gold Box, Baldur's Gate, etc.). Her voodoo stopped working in the 1990s as the RPG marketplace changed (hello, Vampire), TSR missed the boat on new forms of gaming (especially Magic), and they were unable to develop a third franchise to follow up DL and FR. She was far from a saint - that Buck Rogers stuff was pretty inexcusable - but she saved TSR when it was in danger of being looted down the baseboard by a family of good ol' grognards from the days of Gary's table, and she ran the company through its most lucrative glory years (all those setting people loved about AD&D - Planescape, Ravenloft, Dark Sun, etc - were all done under her watch). She frankly deserves to be carved on Mount Grogmore, yet for some mysterious reason she has gone down in nerd history as The Horrible Bitch Who Ruined Everything.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2015 16:56

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

PresidentBeard posted:

could you elaborate on these?

FMguru posted:

the Blumes (who, at one point, had several dozen relatives on the TSR payroll, each with a company car)

# ¿ Mar 13, 2015 17:16

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

PurpleXVI posted:

I also seem to recall it had like ten kinds of elves, which is also usually a pretty dire warning.

The red and orange dice represented the faction: lava elves

# ¿ Mar 13, 2015 17:53

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Seriously: lava eleves

# ¿ Mar 13, 2015 17:54

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Zereth posted:

Man, elven abilities to settle in a place and take a generation or two to pick up location-specific adaptations doesn't really have a limit on what kind of environment it'll work on does it.

The blue and green dice were: coral elves

# ¿ Mar 13, 2015 18:15

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

ZorajitZorajit posted:

Can anybody elaborate on the idiosyncracies of the Japanese tabletop gaming scene? I've heard a lot of hearsay and some "Japan is weird LOL." But I've also heard stuff like non-d6 dice being really hard to acquire. I'm willing to accept that it's just more niche than in the West but I'm fascinated in the way it's evolved.

Two credible things I have heard about Japanese RPGs:

1) Weird polyhedral dice were (are?) really hard to come by in Japan, so most games use d6s for everything.
2) Rulebooks often have very extended "example-of-play" sections.

# ¿ Mar 15, 2015 19:45

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

RPGnet is mostly full of older nerds, and they're often very very provincial about their particular nerd tastes. And any game out there, no matter how mediocre or stupid or downright bad, is somebody's favorite game, and they are going to defend it to the death against all criticism. I mean, there was one poster there who battled everyone for the honor of Gary Gygax's otherwise unloved DANGEROUS JOURNEYS: MYTHUS until he was run off the forums for reasons unrelated to his Gygaxophilia.

Culturally, the forum tilts left-of-center, and the moderation takes positive steps to weed out the worst neanderthal impulses of fans (casual homophobia, lecturing transpeople about what their gender really is, and denying the experience of rape and harassment victims are all bannable offenses). But fan tastes are fan tastes and most nerds never lose their attachment to the things they loved in their late teen years.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2015 22:13

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# ¿ Apr 16, 2024 08:26

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

homeless poster posted:

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.

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.

# ¿ Mar 26, 2015 23:52

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2014-15: The Neverending Storygame

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