|
Neopie posted:Oh, for sure. Just, an earthquake isn't morally wrong. It's an earthquake, it just... is. What if the earthquake is some kind of sentient earthquake actively seeking out towns to happen to, though? It might not have the moral framework to consider itself evil, but the people in the town would disagree. It's a problem I have with a lot of "plague god" characters. They say they're part of the natural world, I say one aspect of capital E Evil is deliberate harm and you should shoot them with magic bullets before you hand out free vaccines.
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 21:04
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 21:51 |
|
|
Night10194 posted:One of the things people writing Cosmic Horror RPGs tend to miss is that Cthulhu shouldn't be the primary antagonist the PCs usually struggle against. The dipshit High Priest they have to uncover and stop from performing the Ritual until the Stars Aren't Right Anymore is. And that High Priest so happens to be a character with motivations and ideals and reasons you can follow to track them down and stop them, even if they're irrational ones. The Dipshit High Priest works where the exsurgents don't because the DHP is convinced that Cthulhu will give him babes, a bigger dick, ten cadillacs and a mountain of gold, so you can deal with him as a rational actor(albeit one with extremely wrong assumptions), and basically every Mythos creature below the Old Ones, Outer Gods and Elder Gods are like that. Even the Elder Things, the Shoggoths, Byakhee, etc. have some sort of motivation and personality, plus an intellect not too far removed in power from the human(and if they're far removed, it's downwards, like the Byakhee who are basically just flying animals), so that you can ascribe them goals and reasonably assume what they will do. In EP, the only TITAN-related antagonists not patched into Channel Fishmalk are the cultists who haven't gotten themselves infected by the exsurgent virus yet.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 21:05
|
|
|
Having goals behind the viruses can even lead to more hosed and and morally terrifying settings. TITANs want humans to die, but don't want to go through all the trouble of killing them. So they create a virus that encourages humans to kill each other. But in order to be effective, it needs a reward as well as a stick. Since you're rewriting genetic code anyway, how about curing diseases? But it's unstable so while infected your health deteriorates slowly. So now you have a society with a common - possibly even omnipresent - virus that cures you of whatever illness you have and extends your life by about a year any time you kill someone. Virus doesn't care if they were good or bad, young or old, sick or healthy. One death = one reward. This does a few things: 1) Emphasizes the class divide that's part of any good transhumanist story. The rich and powerful can live forever by hunting poors. Poor people turn to even more desperate crimes as the virus slowly kills them unless they kill someone else first. 2) Establishes the TITANs as both rational actors (have a goal, too understandable step towards goal) and inhuman minds (the reward system is "dumb" and can be gamed) 3) Lets you write weird cultural history stuff. What would a culture where this virus has existed for generations look like and how hosed up would it be? And that's just the first idea that popped into my head. Give me an editor and a month and we could do even better
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 21:05
|
|
|
wiegieman posted:What if the earthquake is some kind of sentient earthquake actively seeking out towns to happen to, though? It might not have the moral framework to consider itself evil, but the people in the town would disagree. Werewolf is actually on your side - being natural doesn’t make it good. You absolutely should fight the plague wolf! He’s bad to have around! It just doesn’t say he is a moral evil, because that’d be Soulshitter, the Spirit Who Demands Human Sacrifuce For It’s Own Amusement. Both are bad to have around and should be fought, it’s just one is a talking natural disaster that can’t comprehend morality and the other thinks hurting people is funny.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 21:10
|
|
|
Re: absences For a group of 5+, you're generally okay with 2 people missing. With a group of 4 or less, we cancel at 1 down - effectively, the minimum group is 3. If someone knew beforehand they weren't going to be there we'll generally work out what their character would be doing instead of being with the main group, but normally we just handwave the absence away. If it's a system where missing a character could have serious repercussions or they had abilities that would be really useful, their character sort of toddles along in zombie mode, with the assumption that nothing too bad will happen to them. If the player is exceptionally erratic (e.g. someone with shift patterns), their character basically becomes a guest star - nothing important depends on them. Mouse guard has a fun little rule for when someone misses a session - they say what they were doing off-screen to help the group, and get a little relevant bonus, or some important info. re: kicking players - I've been kicked from a game because the GM suddenly made rules changes without talking to anyone first - specifically suddenly counting grid squares Pathfinder rather than 5e style, which he only told us after I'd popped a Rage and started to count my movement. So I said that that wasn't particularly fair, and then he stressed about it all week before kicking me. What was most galling though is that they decided to keep my character in the world, because he'd basically become the head of a organised crime group.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 21:12
|
|
|
AmiYumi posted:Also inklesspen, I went back and timg'd the banner on all my posts because I had been inconsistent about it. I don't know if your archive does timg-ing or not, but figured I should mention. Yeah it does, but it doesn't pick up changes after I've already archived a post; I'd have to do it manually.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 21:13
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:The Dipshit High Priest works where the exsurgents don't because the DHP is convinced that Cthulhu will give him babes, a bigger dick, ten cadillacs and a mountain of gold, so you can deal with him as a rational actor(albeit one with extremely wrong assumptions), and basically every Mythos creature below the Old Ones, Outer Gods and Elder Gods are like that. Even the Elder Things, the Shoggoths, Byakhee, etc. have some sort of motivation and personality, plus an intellect not too far removed in power from the human(and if they're far removed, it's downwards, like the Byakhee who are basically just flying animals), so that you can ascribe them goals and reasonably assume what they will do. Yeah, that's actually what I meant. In most cosmic horror that works you still have some guys running around with hooks you can understand; in those contexts the monsters and stuff are the weapon/means these jerks think will get them what they want, so it doesn't matter that the monsters might be cosmic forces with no actual character of their own. E: To go further, in that kind of scenario, Cthulhu isn't the enemy, it's just the means that the actual antagonist is using. It might be a very foolish means, and one that will backfire and kill everyone or cause a greater threat if it isn't stopped, but because the actual antagonist is something you can interact with and deal with it still makes a satisfying story. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Aug 27, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 21:15
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Werewolf is actually on your side - being natural doesn’t make it good. You absolutely should fight the plague wolf! He’s bad to have around! It just doesn’t say he is a moral evil, because that’d be Soulshitter, the Spirit Who Demands Human Sacrifuce For It’s Own Amusement. Both are bad to have around and should be fought, it’s just one is a talking natural disaster that can’t comprehend morality and the other thinks hurting people is funny.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 22:01
|
|
|
the TITANs would be scarier without having been turned evil by the exsurgent virus. it kinda makes the ETIs look like dickheads that their civilisation killer did such a bad job killing off a species that should have been easy. EP (and also real life) Earth was weakened by constant war and climate change, and it still only killed 95%, leaving like a billion people still alive. the TITANs just reaching singularity of their own accord, and going from being hugely aggressive to progressively more insane and absent, is much cooler. for a start it makes you wonder what happened to make them stop.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 23:34
|
|
|
Personally I like the combination of 'the universe is a death trap' and 'because of resleeving a character being dead or dying doesn't end them' - the setting should be full of ambient murder (or at least the part where the PCs get into fights) precisely to push the strengths of a posthuman setting, the unique events and occurrences. I don't think EP is quite as much an ideological tract for Yuds that some people here do. For one thing, Yuds ideology says that once you have a TITAN humanity just loses completely. No quarantine can be successful, hence why you need to pay him money now to stop future god. Also, the Yuddites are more libertarian-authoritarian than anticapitalist socialists and anarchists. EP also definitely doesn't act like their magic Space Virus is realistic at all. Now, it is a techno-anarchist hacker manifesto of the least coherent kind, but I don't mind that nearly as much. Posthuman/transhuman SFF is a cool genre and it's good we have a game that can run an uploads-and-resleeves setting, we just need to clean the setting up of the uninteresting stuff. But 'the setting ensures you'll have to change bodies' is like how Mage: The Awakening ensures you'll have to do wizardry things and have vast hubris if you want to have fun. It's genre implementation. E: I don't mean to undersell the amount of cleaning it needs, but the core concept of 'forks and clones and robot bodies in future culture-shock societies' is good to have an RPG for.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 23:36
|
|
|
Joe Slowboat posted:E: I don't mean to undersell the amount of cleaning it needs, but the core concept of 'forks and clones and robot bodies in future culture-shock societies' is good to have an RPG for. I feel like if you want to capitalize on that, moving it off of Earth, or out of Sol, at all, hurts the focus. If you want to focus on those parts as both A) driving mechanics and B) driving parts of the fluff, scrape out the aliens, pandora gate, psi powers, TITANs, the Fall and focus on how it actually changed Earth, religions, individual nations and go for a more grounded cyberpunk limited to colonies in Sol.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 23:52
|
|
|
The universe is a death trap that forces you to resleeve a lot is a cool idea on paper, but then putting it into practice is another thing entirely. What do I do for the session while I wait to respawn because I failed my save-or-die roll on round one? edit: also, everything is a death trap sucks to play in as I already expressed earlier with Night. Everything is potentially a death trap is perhaps a better model if done correctly, but that's an easy one to screw up too. Ithle01 fucked around with this message at 23:56 on Aug 27, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 23:53
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Werewolf is actually on your side - being natural doesn’t make it good. You absolutely should fight the plague wolf! He’s bad to have around! It just doesn’t say he is a moral evil, because that’d be Soulshitter, the Spirit Who Demands Human Sacrifuce For It’s Own Amusement. Both are bad to have around and should be fought, it’s just one is a talking natural disaster that can’t comprehend morality and the other thinks hurting people is funny. That's cool, like a lot of nWoD seems to be cool. They seems to Get things a whole hell of a lot better than the clowns in charge of oWoD.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 23:55
|
|
|
Ithle01 posted:The universe is a death trap that forces you to resleeve a lot is a cool idea on paper, but then putting it into practice is another thing entirely. What do I do for the session while I wait to respawn because I failed my save-or-die roll on round one? Play Paranoia instead because that's a hyper-lethal setting where you have spare bodies and the setting plays to the absurdity of it rather than the GRIM DARKNESS of it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 27, 2019 23:57
|
|
|
PurpleXVI posted:Play Paranoia instead because that's a hyper-lethal setting where you have spare bodies and the setting plays to the absurdity of it rather than the GRIM DARKNESS of it. Yeah pretty much that's what we've all been saying. The fluff of EP wants to go in one direction, but the game mechanics - and oddly enough game art - go in another direction.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 00:30
|
|
|
Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Yeah, like if WtF didn't want you to fight the plague dog, the dog that is plague, they wouldn't put it in Night Horrors: The Book Series About Antagonists You May Reasonably Encounter In A Hostile Fashion Just to reiterate a core concept of the game, you're the spirit cops. Any type of spirit, regardless of if it's a spirit of joy, cars, or death, is bad if it gets out of line, tries to throw the balance of the area to gain more power, and/or then enters into the material world to gain more power. Magaths are always bad because they're an amalgamation of multiple, unrelated or contradictory concepts and because of their unnatural, dual or multiple natures, they're dangerous and destructive. WtF is much better about promoting maintaining balance as player goal in my opinion because of instead of basing everything on the Triat like WtA, it's more about stopping spirit fuckery and the fans of spirit fuckery. EDIT: The hosts are all bad too but they're an amalgamation of spirit and animals like the Uratha but worse and want to screw up the world to meet their ends. RocknRollaAyatollah fucked around with this message at 01:40 on Aug 28, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 01:20
|
|
|
It seems that being a Werewolf is just dangerous. Step 1. Don't get kidnapped for experiment/Essence fodder as wolfblooded Step 2. Don't go insane from First Change Step 3. Hope you get picked up by a good Forsaken pack instead of Pure or just walking into many spiritual landmines that eat up Ghost Wolves Step 4. Pray to Luna your pack isn't subverted by either a local or outsider Bane Woof Step 5. Pray to Luna your totem doesn't get eaten by some eeevil spirit Step 6. Don't get turned into a Bane Wolf Step 7... At this point, you're basically a powerful psyker: powerful, but everyone is gunning for you. By the way, what does it mean that humans don't have resonance or whatever?
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 07:02
|
|
|
Yet another unfortunate side effect of the supplement treadmill is that every splat has roughly 15 eeeevil mirror versions running around. You can't swing a cat without hitting an angsty pseudo-vampire with a CORRUPTED SOUL and DARK REFLECTIONS of the normal vampire powers.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 07:13
|
|
|
Shouldn't that be a good reflection? Who have been twisted into becoming self-sacrificing good guys?
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 07:43
|
|
|
The Lone Badger posted:Shouldn't that be a good reflection? Who have been twisted into becoming self-sacrificing good guys?
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 08:38
|
|
|
JcDent posted:It seems that being a Werewolf is just dangerous. I mean, this feels to me like complaining that, say, D&D is full of monsters that want to kill and eat people. Anyway, humans have no reflection in Shadow. Their actions can produce spirits of various abstract concepts, things they make or other changes to the world, but there's no such thing as a spirit of humans. They don't exist. No one knows why. e: that said, yes, it is in fact dangerous to be a violent spirit cop whose instincts require them to hunt! But it's more dangerous if they don't.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 13:10
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:I mean, this feels to me like complaining that, say, D&D is full of monsters that want to kill and eat people. I'm saying that there's a lot of stuff hunting said hunters and they have a leg up. Do nvamps have that many factory reject vamps going after them? Can humans still be ghosts or are they essentially soulless?
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 13:14
|
|
|
JcDent posted:I'm saying that there's a lot of stuff hunting said hunters and they have a leg up. Do nvamps have that many factory reject vamps going after them? Humans can be ghosts. Humans have souls. They just don't have spirits. The spirit of a thing has nothing to do with that thing's soul status. Rocks have spirits, but no souls. And vampires have their own issues. There's a lot of weird things out in the nWoD, many of them dangerous or bad to be around or evil. Fortunately, werewolves are doing a decent enough job of keeping their bad guys from destroying society, in part because when it comes to a straight up fight, werewolves are real good at it.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 13:20
|
|
|
JcDent posted:It seems that being a Werewolf is just dangerous. Vampires have each other, literally all of them, and also half of the day if they go outside they just die. Mages have going crazy, going regular banal evil, going super duper evil, opening a hole out of reality by using their powers, among other things. Prometheans have bad versions of each other, a couple different flavors of broken versions of each other, people who want to study them, and also people in general want to kill you or just make your life and theirs miserable if you hang out too long. Changelings start with both a mirror version of themselves out there who stole their lives, and a whole pseudo-spiritual ecosystem that exists to make you suffer in order to please something massively stronger than you that's still out there now. And associated parties. Geists (as of 2e) have about a bunch of different variations on "these are the bad ghosts" "no these are the REALLY bad ones that might not even be ghosts now" as well as conflict with other groups over ideology or territory being almost as central to the conceit as Werewolf. Hunters are...everything, god forbid anything you're tracking down finds out you exist in the first place. Basically everyone is gunning for you in everything all the time. But also, the toolbox approach of Chronicles of Darkness /nwod is that not necessarily any/all of the stuff in any book is assumed to be canon for your game, due to lack of metaplot or anything. So really stuff only sucks as much as the ST's home campaign wants it to, explicitly. e: That having been said werewolves ARE the only ones whose default power set regardless of any X-axis or Y-axis splat is "turn into giant murder machines" so Chernobyl Peace Prize fucked around with this message at 13:43 on Aug 28, 2019 |
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 13:39
|
|
|
Well, that clears it up somewhat, yeah. To the book's credits, all of the guys mentioned (except for the haunted Indonesian orphan, I guess) are something you really want to kill. E: What do werewolves think about IEDs?
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 13:43
|
|
|
JcDent posted:Well, that clears it up somewhat, yeah. What do humans think about IEDs?
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 13:46
|
|
|
Seriously, Haunted Indonesian Orphan really seems like someone half my PCs would make friends with, and endeavor to beat up her spirit bad influencer, her mom, her dad, any of those mean girls that are still alive at school, and basically everyone else in her backstory.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 14:07
|
|
|
Hot take I'm parking here before we get to the new Hosts: Hosts and Werewolves both just want the spiritual ecosystem to resemble their ideal state, and it's coincidental and convenient to humanity that the Werewolf ideal state for the Forsaken is also the one that doesn't get humans ultra-murdered or soul-dead (which is another strike against the Pure from the perspective of lay humanity, since the Fire-Touched and Predator Kings both love spirits-crazy-get-nuts times, and Ivory Claws just want to get Maximum Werewolf with it which has the additional impact of 'yeah but people don't count'). Basically all this is to say there's nothing wrong with feverishly stanning (spoiled til we get to them) Lamprey Hosts.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 14:11
|
|
|
I think Haunted Indonesian Orphan is an NPC you're meant to save because it's apparent that she's not the problem, merely a victim of circumstances that could become a serious threat or antagonist if allowed to slide down the path she's on. Killing a bathroom full of mean girls during a first change is pretty average for an Uratha. Forsaken is much more upfront about the fact that you're playing a morally suspect monster that does a very necessary job to make sure people don't get eaten en masse or turned into Cronenberg monsters. It also doesn't have the tonal disconnect Apocalypse had where it couldn't decide if they were doomed, noble manchildren heroes, brutal killing machines disconnected from the humanity they protect, and/or custodians of an unbalanced world that's dominated by a very 90's new age belief system. Forsaken is very much a horror game instead of gothic Captain Planet.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 14:26
|
|
|
EimiYoshikawa posted:Seriously, Haunted Indonesian Orphan really seems like someone half my PCs would make friends with, and endeavor to beat up her spirit bad influencer, her mom, her dad, any of those mean girls that are still alive at school, and basically everyone else in her backstory.  Although I realize if I ever made a Werewolf PC they'd be inclined to guide the Luna killer and Lune onto a better path as well.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 14:31
|
|
|
This write-up of antagonists is doing a lot to sell me on nWoof.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 14:34
|
|
|
EP2 has a mod for withstanding extreme pressures, but nowhere does it not what pressures morphs can withstand without it. Biomorphs of primarily human stock we can figure out from actual data. But what about synths? Or pods? Or neo-octopi? On the same page the game notes how that high-oxygen atmospheres have explosions that do more damage... but no rules or even guidelines for it. Maybe if your game has a large segment of it devoted to exploring non-Terran planets, and in fact all of the planets available in Sol aren't Earth, and even Earth has inclement conditions at this point, maybe you should actually hack out some solid rules or guidelines for adjudicating the potential conditions. I mean why waste any of your book detailing the exact rules effects of being on Venus, Mars, Titan or a given exoplanet, perhaps in the relevant planet's section, rather than spreading it across the book as several vague hints on how you could choose to hand-craft the rules for operating in these situations. That would be just silly.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 14:37
|
|
|
potatocubed posted:This write-up of antagonists is doing a lot to sell me on nWoof.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 14:41
|
|
|
Chernobyl Peace Prize posted:Vampires have each other, literally all of them, and also half of the day if they go outside they just die. Also they have evil owl spirits with no greater ambition than to mess with and/or kill them.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 15:00
|
|
|
Dawgstar posted:Also they have evil owl spirits with no greater ambition than to mess with and/or kill them. Making them the most relatable antagonists, because really, gently caress vampires.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 15:02
|
|
|
Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Career Compendium A Degree of Freedom So, Advanced Careers are much more loosely designed than Basic Careers because they don't actually give you anything for free for getting into them. Squire needed to think about how many Skills and Talents I get for being a Squire, because I can start as a Squire and get most of Squire's Skills and Talents immediately, barring a few places I'll be asked to take one or the other. Knight doesn't need to worry about that as much, and some Careers can't fully anticipate what skills you'll already have when you go into them and thus can take a very long time. Having all of the Careers in the line here in one handy reference book really helps with examining the overall design of Careers in this system, and helps highlight some of the rare ones that broke the rules. So, what does a 2nd Tier class look like? They're usually twice or three times as long to complete as a character's Basic Career, since not only do they have to buy a lot of stat advances but they probably need new skills and talents and might also want to 're-buy' some redundant skills for +10 to those skills. For all the focus on playing Ratcatchers and stuff, 2nd Tier is often where the majority of a campaign happens. It's also about where you start to become more impressive and competent, or at least good at doing your 'thing'. The very variable 'length' of Advanced Careers because they don't have to worry about you getting anything for free for entering them means there's a lot more variety; your 2nd Tier having a ton of advances and taking forever isn't necessarily a bad thing at all anyway. Take Highwayman: They have an extremely wide array of stats they need to develop compared to most 2nd Tiers (Discounting whatever you already have from 1st tier, Highwayman has 35 Stat Advances. Compare that to 25 for Veteran) and also a wide array of Skills and Talents. But you're paying the EXP for all of them. Sure, you're going to be a Highwayman for a very long time, but that's fine; you have the same number of actual upgrades as the rest of your party, so there's room for the Highwayman Career to try to be a dashing rider and social person who is also a decent duelist. In general, many of the more 'civilian' 2nd Tiers tend to be faster. They don't have to learn a wide number of combat talents, and their skills tend towards being a question of how many +10s you wanted to take from what you already know from 1st Tier. Going from Tradesman to Artisan, for instance? Artisan isn't an especially long Career, partly because it's not as fully suited for adventuring (though a merchant is always useful) but also because you already had a ton of overlap and non-combat skills often take less investment to get to high levels compared to combat. It's not that hard to get all the way to, and through, 3rd tier in a 'civilian' track like being a master artisan and merchant (Tradesman, Artisan, Guildmaster, and Guildmaster is actually a pretty good 3rd tier) before your buddy who went from Outrider to Highwayman finishes their 2nd Career. This is, incidentally, why trying to balance a party of pre-mades by 'number of Careers taken' like in Lure of the Liche Lord is silly, and PCs should always be balanced/judged on how much EXP they've earned. The whole reason Advanced Careers can get away with not having equal numbers of advances is that a character's power is measured by what they've advanced in, not exactly how many Careers they've blown through. A guy who hangs around doing similar 1st tier Careers will finish a lot of Careers. And will also suck. It's one of the few ways to actually make a bad character. Which is actually another reason people tend to think fondly on Careers. Careers are very good at giving you benchmarks and signals for when your character is competent. You want to be a good ranger type? Start as a Hunter, you get everything you need to do the basics of what you wanted to do as your character. Same for Woodsman, if you wanted to be more of 'person with a big axe who is swift in the woods' rather than 'shoot a guy in the head while he's stuck in your snare'. The Exits also mostly provide this; the above Hunter or Woodsman going into Scout has an obvious and easy route to get better at the thing they're already doing. They also have other options for focusing on other things, but they'll always be decent at being a ranger type because of their first Career. Which is another little thing I forgot about the Basic Careers that I want to go back and point out: Basic Careers are, for the most part, where the +5% Talents live. This is because having those in your Basic Career, along with the Shallya's Mercy 'set a stat to what it'd be if I rolled an 11' rule, makes it really hard to be genuinely bad at the thing you ended up doing even with random rolling. There's a lot of effort put into making sure characters have a decent base to work with, as long as you don't have a GM who does a ton of 'Roll at -10 or -20 to continue plot' stuff early on. If the game's pre-made adventures actually followed the advice of the GMing chapter with respect to that, I'd be far harsher on people who make that GMing error, but given how many of the examples of adventure design they have to look at make that mistake it's not necessarily their fault. Anyway, to bring this back to Advanced Careers, Advanced Careers and Exits usually provide a similarly good signal for 'what do I want to get better at'. You're a Soldier and you want to focus on being a party's main fighter? Go into Veteran. You're a Soldier and you want to branch out into social and political stuff? Go into Sergeant. Any Advanced Career is going to contain the means to make you very good at the thing it does. I had a player complain a lot about the Career system once because 'you're just filling in a pre-determined build and choosing what to learn first', but I'll take that if it helps guide players into making their PC able to do the thing they want their PC to do. You can confidently assume you're going to be good at Dueling by taking Duelist, or good at politics if you go into Courtier or Politician. Which is also why multiclassing isn't a bad idea here like it can be in other systems; you'll always be good at the things you previously did, and while it might take you a long time to learn a new thing, you still have a solid base to fall back on and at the end you'll be good at your new thing. There's a lot less worrying you'll end up kind of bad at everything unless you stay and jump around Basic Careers for more than like, one additional Career. The other strength of all this is it actually makes designing your own Careers pretty easy, especially if you have this book. I can look through Career Compendium and pretty easily pick out what's a reasonable benchmark for the stats on a 2nd or 3rd tier, and the firm design of 1st Tiers makes designing new starting classes easy. When I was making an Amazon Career track while working on Lustria for fun, it was pretty easy to flip through and design classes based on what already existed. Same for working on ideas for Lizardman Careers. This is another reason the Compendium is a really good resource; it's much easier to get a sense for how not to break a foundational system for the game by having all the examples of that system in one place. It's a really convenient resource to have for loving around with this system. Also, the Career system being pretty in-depth already means if you're working on a new track or something for a new part of the world you want to fill in, you don't really need to make a ton of classes. Say I wanted to write a campaign in Ulthuan and do some silly High Elf stuff; I don't really need to make a Sea Guard of Lothern Career because Veteran already does their thing just fine. Most of the stuff you might want to make is already there in some capacity, but if you want extra flavor the firm design on the Career system makes it pretty easy to add your own. This is not to say the designers don't break down their own system in a few places. Let's look at some very typical Advanced Careers and then some that break things some. Fence is an example of a Career that looks like it sucks, but is actually very powerful, because it gets into one of the other facets of how varied Advanced Career length can be. Almost any criminal type or merchant type can get into Fence. They sell stolen goods. That's their thing. They pick up some assessing and mercantile skills, they inexplicably get a 2nd attack and Strike to Stun (I guess something you gotta punch a guy and run when things get hot), but mostly their skill list is short and focused, their Talents are just being good with numbers, dealing with criminals, and business, and their Stats aren't that high. However, this means that if, say, Pierre the Tomb Robber had become a Fence? He'd have needed only about another 1000-1500 EXP to finish the career. Same for Thieves, or Burghers, or most people who can go into Fence. And would also pick up some useful mercantile abilities while doing it. And then it Exits into Master Thief. Or Crime Lord. So while it seems like a weak Career, it's actually very focused. Grab some useful stuff and then move up to the next level of your track. A similar example is the Elf-only 'Ghost Strider' (Why they didn't just call it Waywatcher is beyond me). Compared to the Scout you used to be to get into it, and compared to other 3rd Tier careers, it looks kind of unimpressive. At a time when other Careers are doing crazy +40 BS/WS warrior stuff, this is a Warrior career with +20 WS, +30 BS (And you already had +20 WS, +20 BS from Scout). It only advances all its stats a little from Scout, almost all its skills are redundant to Scout (meaning it's a matter of how much you want to buy skill bonuses), and you already know the shooting talents from Scout. BUT. It gets +2 Attacks (like most 3rd tier fighters). It gets Fleet Footed (Very valuable +Movement speed talent). It finishes off making your ranger into a 3rd Tier fighter with exactly what you need to qualify, and a Scout can finish it in like 1000 EXP. And then move on to doing something different. You finish out being a Warrior-Ranger type very strong and very quick, and then get options to go harder on being a warrior type if you want or to go do something else, because whatever else you do after this you're going to be a total monster with a longbow in addition to it. So you can mock that the 'elf only' unique ranger 3rd tier doesn't have great stats all you like, it's actually very focused and gets you exactly what you need. Which is generally the model for Advanced Careers when you look through them all in the Compendium: They sort of split between 'fast, focused, efficient' or 'Do a lot of things and become widely skilled'. Neither is really better than the other. One other notable 2nd Tier is Journeyman Wizard, which is specifically designed to be very long; Master Wizard is actually pretty short after it, since you learned so much already as a Journeyman. This is because it's okay for a wizard to be stuck in their 2nd career for ages, because they get their Lore there and so they can do their 'thing', even if they can't do all of it. A Journeyman Bright Wizard is already tossing around Fireballs. A Journeyman Shadow Wizard can get up to tricks and mischief. Etc. You have to make due with Mag 2 and a Lore for a long time, but Mag 2 and a Lore is enough to accomplish a lot. There are also a few that break the general scaling of the game slightly. They do this by abusing the +5 Talents and a few other things. One of the big examples for me is Knight Panther, which was primarily intended to be an antagonist class for Chaos PCs. They're Imperial Knights whose Grandmaster was outed as a Cult Magus and now they try to make up for it by making themselves available to the Hunters as muscle. They're basically a significantly better Imperial Knight, and most of the Careers that go into Knight Panther are 2nd or 3rd tier themselves to make up for their stats and Talents being better...except you can still enter it directly from 1st tier Squire. And it gives you Warrior Born (+5 WS) and Sturdy (No Heavy Armor penalties). And already gives you +30 WS in a 2nd tier class, which usually limit WS/BS growth to +20 or +25. While effectively giving you +35 since it gives Warrior Born. Yes, you still have to buy all of it, but by breaking the stat caps so to speak, it lets you decide to go heavy into being a swordsmaster faster than you'd normally be able to. Also, it has better Exits than Knight; you can go directly into Champion or Witch Hunter from it, while Knights cannot do that. In essence, this Career isn't a sidegrade, it's simply mechanically better than the basic Knight Career if you started out as a Squire. This is an example of bad Career design for an Advanced Career. This kind of thing is actually pretty rare, which is why Knight Panther stands out. It's rare for an add-on Career in a new book to simply be better. The other really big example of this is the Warrior Priest. The Warrior Priest in ToS is simply better than Annointed Priest. Yes, the Annointed Priest gets a bit more in the way of academic skills, but to be real: Academic skills are highly situational and a lot of games would do much better to just make a single 'Academics' skill and be done with it instead of playing 'guess which specialty will come up by having 6 of them'. Meanwhile the Warrior Priest still gets their full divine Lore while getting Dodge and a bunch of stuff that makes them a capable combatant, while having their learned and social abilities from Initiate and Priest. The Priest track in general is one of the least well done 'long class tracks', which is a terrible shame because ToS is great and playing Old World Priests is fun as hell from a roleplaying standpoint since the setting has pretty richly done cults and religious politics. It's poorly done because it takes forever to actually be able to do Priest Magic, because in trying to be one level behind the mages in actual magic use they made it so you have to be 3rd Tier before you actually cast spells for your God. It simply takes too long to be able to use your marquee abilities. Meanwhile, everyone else is becoming really good at their thing by Career 2. Anyway, this is the last of the big 'mechanics' posts on this. From here on in, I'll just be going through the fluff of the Careers that stand out and the anecdotes and adventure hooks that I think are cool. I'm also open to suggestions on the kinds of Career fluff people want to see written up; if someone's curious about the job fluff on various aspects of the setting, I'll be happy to go into it. Really, the extra fluff and the huge number of hooks in this book are what make it stand out; if it was just a convenient reference manual that helped with understanding class design and the workings of the Career system it'd be good, but I wouldn't be trying to find a way to write it up considering how awkward a task that is. The extra fluff is what elevates it. Next Time: Fashion is the most important part of the job
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 15:40
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:What do humans think about IEDs? You tell me! I dunno if it's wolf-spiritually apropos to cap a Sacred Hunt by luring Mongolian Angender Kharn or some Void Reaver somewhere where you can test their ability to withstand daisychained 152mm shells.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 15:40
|
|
|
JcDent posted:You tell me! I dunno if it's wolf-spiritually apropos to cap a Sacred Hunt by luring Mongolian Angender Kharn or some Void Reaver somewhere where you can test their ability to withstand daisychained 152mm shells. The answer is 'it varies by individual and pack.'
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 15:44
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:The answer is 'it varies by individual and pack.' I'm taking it as a "yes" 
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 15:49
|
|
|
|
| # ? Apr 25, 2024 21:51 |
|
|
The real question is how useful it will be - conventional weapons against a werewolf are usable right up until they really, really aren't because it's gone into Gauru form and heals all the damage it takes each round that doesn't deal Agg. But that's why you want things like spiritual backup, silver bullets and traps to hold it in place while you lay down overwhelming damage when you're a werewolf hunting other werewolves.
|
|
#
?
Aug 28, 2019 15:53
|
|