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ZeroCount
Aug 12, 2013


So if you free the balor he won't show up for the final fight right? Or does he specifically have to die?

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DAD LOST MY IPOD
Feb 3, 2012

Fats Dominar is on the case


ZeroCount posted:

So if you free the balor he won't show up for the final fight right? Or does he specifically have to die?

Only if he dies. If he lives Acererak ganks him with his true name.

Simian_Prime
Nov 6, 2011

When they passed out body parts in the comics today, I got Cathy's nose and Dick Tracy's private parts.

Kurieg posted:

Who would take the place of Kirk Fogg though? Kirk Fogg but a zombie?

"Your party proceeds to the end of the hallway. There you encounter a stone devil head; it appears to be trading dad jokes with a zombie in cargo shorts."

Simian_Prime fucked around with this message at 03:19 on Oct 9, 2016

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer
Vampire in gaseous form.

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!
So wait a moment, why does the 3.5E Blackball have 30 points of Charisma? It has no methods of communication with anyone or anything, no Charisma-based skills, and as far as I remember, no saves are based on Charisma. I guess it's just a really dashing and seductive sphere of absolute entropy.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

PurpleXVI posted:

So wait a moment, why does the 3.5E Blackball have 30 points of Charisma? It has no methods of communication with anyone or anything, no Charisma-based skills, and as far as I remember, no saves are based on Charisma. I guess it's just a really dashing and seductive sphere of absolute entropy.

They just want you to know that they are born Bards. Who would've guessed that the face of the party doesn't actually need one?

Rigged Death Trap
Feb 13, 2012

BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP

PurpleXVI posted:

So wait a moment, why does the 3.5E Blackball have 30 points of Charisma? It has no methods of communication with anyone or anything, no Charisma-based skills, and as far as I remember, no saves are based on Charisma. I guess it's just a really dashing and seductive sphere of absolute entropy.

Its because of their highly attractive personality

Loxbourne
Apr 6, 2011

Tomorrow, doom!
But now, tea.
It's because they're just so frigging adorable.

DancingShade
Jul 26, 2007

by Fluffdaddy

(and can't post for 25 days!)

The blackball is just a negative energy plane beachball possessed by the innocent spirit of a ritually sacrificed care bear that just wants to hug everyone.

Kurieg
Jul 19, 2012

RIP Lutri: 5/19/20-4/2/20
:blizz::gamefreak:

PurpleXVI posted:

So wait a moment, why does the 3.5E Blackball have 30 points of Charisma? It has no methods of communication with anyone or anything, no Charisma-based skills, and as far as I remember, no saves are based on Charisma. I guess it's just a really dashing and seductive sphere of absolute entropy.

Because it's 3.5 and his save DCs have to be based on something and he lacks a Con score, therefore he has a sky high charisma.

Tasoth
Dec 13, 2011

PurpleXVI posted:

So wait a moment, why does the 3.5E Blackball have 30 points of Charisma? It has no methods of communication with anyone or anything, no Charisma-based skills, and as far as I remember, no saves are based on Charisma. I guess it's just a really dashing and seductive sphere of absolute entropy.

The image of an erudite and eloquent weapon of mass destruction makes me smile. It doesn't hunt down and destroy adventurers, it snares them in charming and interesting conversation until they forget it's a sphere of annihilation. Then it asks them to kindly pass the tea/biscuits/that book over yonder and, whoops, sorry about that. I forget I do that all the time.

Bieeanshee
Aug 21, 2000

Not keen on keening.


Grimey Drawer

DancingShade posted:

The blackball is just a negative energy plane beachball possessed by the innocent spirit of a ritually sacrificed care bear that just wants to hug everyone.

I think I've seen that somewhere.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

PurpleXVI posted:

So wait a moment, why does the 3.5E Blackball have 30 points of Charisma? It has no methods of communication with anyone or anything, no Charisma-based skills, and as far as I remember, no saves are based on Charisma. I guess it's just a really dashing and seductive sphere of absolute entropy.

The beauty of annihilation, nothingness, and cosmic void, I guess?

PurpleXVI
Oct 30, 2011

Spewing insults, pissing off all your neighbors, betraying your allies, backing out of treaties and accords, and generally screwing over the global environment?
ALL PART OF MY BRILLIANT STRATEGY!

Doresh posted:

They just want you to know that they are born Bards. Who would've guessed that the face of the party doesn't actually need one?

All the Blackball wants to do is play the guitar, but it was created without limbs and if it did touch a guitar, it would destroy it. That's why it's so angry all the time.

Selachian
Oct 9, 2012

PurpleXVI posted:

So wait a moment, why does the 3.5E Blackball have 30 points of Charisma? It has no methods of communication with anyone or anything, no Charisma-based skills, and as far as I remember, no saves are based on Charisma. I guess it's just a really dashing and seductive sphere of absolute entropy.

Doresh
Jan 7, 2015

Kurieg posted:

Because it's 3.5 and his save DCs have to be based on something and he lacks a Con score, therefore he has a sky high charisma.

The funny thing is that his Disintegration is based on CON, meaning his HD total is the only thing raising the DC (10 + 57/2 = 38).

PurpleXVI posted:

All the Blackball wants to do is play the guitar, but it was created without limbs and if it did touch a guitar, it would destroy it. That's why it's so angry all the time.

His name is Linkin Ball.

potatocubed
Jul 26, 2012

*rathian noises*

Doresh posted:

His name is Linkin Ball.

And since he's a construct, his wounds they will not heal.

Count Chocula
Dec 25, 2011

WE HAVE TO CONTROL OUR ENVIRONMENT
IF YOU SEE ME POSTING OUTSIDE OF THE AUSPOL THREAD PLEASE TELL ME THAT I'M MISSED AND TO START POSTING AGAIN

Tasoth posted:

The image of an erudite and eloquent weapon of mass destruction makes me smile. It doesn't hunt down and destroy adventurers, it snares them in charming and interesting conversation until they forget it's a sphere of annihilation. Then it asks them to kindly pass the tea/biscuits/that book over yonder and, whoops, sorry about that. I forget I do that all the time.

The Moment from Doctor Who/the bomb from Dark Star?

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

Traveller, thanks for going through all the effort to post Legend of the Five rings stuff. It's a game I've always seen talked about but the massive metaplot looked like too much of a clusterfuck to bother with on my end

Are you going to review all the major metaplot books up through whatever the current status quo is?

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso

Comrade Gorbash posted:

I find myself agreeing that the reasons as to why the designers made the choices in 2E that they did don't ultimately hold up, both in terms of how the game functions and in terms of what makes for good game design in general. That being said, it's a design philosophy nearly 30 years old and it's really interesting to see that they were thinking about these things, even if ultimately we've figured out there's a better way to do it since then.

theironjef posted:

Ultimately, level caps were a binary solution to a non-binary problem. Eventually writers realized the solution to their desire to make the world more humany was to make humans good instead of capping every other race, but the backfilled 2nd edition explanations come off as passive aggressive ways to deal with a problem player at the design table.

gradenko_2000 posted:

The thing that really makes it fall apart is the assumption that the game's rules define the world ... rather than just being the rules to play a game with.

Spiderfist Island posted:

The openness of Battle Magic to all characters underlines just how unlike AD&D RQ2E is when it comes to the basic idea behind how a player character is made. In AD&D, a PC belongs to a class, an archetype that has a pre-set rate of growth and unique abilities, such as spells. In RQ2E, a PC is meant to be a simulation of a person, without any level or class structure guiding their development. While other new RPGs that followed AD&D also were guided by a desire for “realism,” RQ2E managed at an early date to make a mostly unique system for basic checks, character structure, and character advancement rather than a more derivative clone of AD&D, a feat that can be appreciated even if you consider the design goal of realism in RPGs to be a flawed one. I don’t know what the first classless RPG was, but I have to say that the way RQ2E does it is still easy to understand today.

Welp, this is one of the things I went back through a lot of pages to comment on. The problems with AD&D2 is that it's not 1989 design, it's still basically 1977 design in so many ways. I'm really fascinated by the melange of influences that made D&D what it was--it's awesome that it's this weird mix of Vance, Anderson, Burroughs, Lovecraft, St. Clair, and the wargaming hobby, but the key problem is that D&D isn't generally "sold" to people as that very specific list of influences coming together in a unique way--it's sold as an introduction to the roleplaying hobby through the lens of heroic fantasy adventure. And its many assumptions really start to break down when you try to do certain specific things with it--for example, the whole attack/defense system is built on what kind of armour you're wearing, so if you're doing piratical swashbuckling or John Carter of Mars, you have to come up with a different way of determining defense.

(I don't know a lot about the design process for AD&D 2, but I do know David "The Z-Man" Cook wanted to implement things like ascending attack and AC bonuses and discarded them because he was afraid it was too different for the existing fanbase. There's nothing I hate more than a design decision that was made solely because they were afraid the alternative would make baby cry.)

Granted, most 90s design was still very much stuck in the idea of RPG rules as virtual reality simulation, but D&D carried a lot of design assumptions that became very annoying to implement or work around in its own well-regarded campaign settings. I can't help but think it would be so much easier to do Planescape or Dark Sun or Ravenloft using the RuneQuest rules.
Also this is easily one of my favourite B&W illustrations from a RPG manual, hot drat.

Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 02:39 on Oct 10, 2016

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

INTRODUCTION

Let's talk genre mashups.

Let's talk about two tastes that don't necessarily go together but can be combined into something new and interesting. Specifically, let's talk about the worst thing they can do: be boring and be derivative. I bet you can name a few off the top of your head that make an effort to avert that cardinal sin. Take Shadowrun (mostly because it's pretty relevant with where I'm going). Shadowrun, at its core, is combining generic fantasy with Gibson-era cyberpunk and promptly goes buck wild with it, building a future that feels approachable but new. Shadowrun also commits to its core thesis of "the players are people dancing around in the grey areas of society and doing odd jobs for money" and works with that. The players might actually change the future and the world somehow.

It's not hard to imagine where Shadowrun could've gone awry. It does have some Metaplot Issues but it could have been worse. The world could have been bare bones or worse, too complicated and too set in stone. The species of metahumanity could've been too one dimensional, too niche. The advantages and disadvantages could have been too cumbersome. The developers tread a fine line creating a game that was both enjoyable but comprehensive, fluid (with some odd mechanics, but that's inherent in the genre) but structured.

But I'm not really here to talk about Shadowrun. I'm here to talk about Victoriana 3rd edition, a game which honestly feels like it might've been built out of Shadowrun's possible shortcomings.



VICTORIANA is a fantasy game set in an altered 19th century Britain. Specifically, it takes place in the year 1856 in a nebulous time where the Crimean War has not yet ended and the Second Opium War has not yet begun (never mind the fact that there were scant months in between them). Victoria is the Queen, Albert isn't dead yet, tensions are mounting in the Americas for the Civil War in a few years and Britain is the biggest empire in the world. As you can tell, Victoriana hews closer to the historical fiction side of things.



On the fantasy side of things, you have the Shadowrun approach of metahumanity. Humans are a subspecies alongside Dwarves, Elves Eldren, Ogres, Hobbits Huldufolk, Beastfolk and more. Magic and monsters are real but not as world-changing as you'd think with one of the major differences being air cavalries of Wyvern Riders but not god-sorcerers raining death on everyone. In fact, magic is actually naturally fading and the rise of industry and steam is filling the gap.

Socially and culturally, things are a mixed bag. Britain views certain subspecies with polite disdain but they also have that reaction towards British Chinese, British Eurasian Indians and other assorted foreigners living within the Empire. However the subspecies are not forced to be outsiders of society and have a place; your subspecies is less of a social identity than your social class is. Christianity, Islam and Judaism don't exactly exist as we know them, influenced by a different sort of angelic choir and different sort of Heaven and Hell. The majority of countries and nations of the time still exist, albeit it with non-human rulers and maybe some other changes.



To paraphrase the book, Victoriana is a world of fantastic races, magic, steam, horror and adventure.

Dropping the airs of introduction for a bit, it's also not particularly...gripping.

So far as I've read into it and looked at it, Victoriana falls prey to the "like the real world BUT" traps of mashups. Like the real world BUT with fantasy races. Like real history BUT with Wyvern Riders and prosthetic steam limbs replacing legs lost in Crimea. Like real religion BUT with chaos vs. order and eight messiahs instead of one Jesus. And the worst part is it's not particularly compelling because if it's going to follow the "like the real world BUT" logic...well. You do have to suspend your disbelief to a certain degree with the core concept, that it's still pretty much all turned out the same despite new elements. But it feels like the Civil War is still going to happen and World War I will happen and revolution will sunder the royal system. The future is, unfortunately, pretty well set in stone but also far enough away that the player characters won't be able to see the impact of what they've done (though Eldren do live roughly 200 years). That's a rough limit to put on a game centered around Having Adventures and seems to be less focused on telling stories about characters.


It's a lot like how loving overstuffed this picture is.

But I think I'm getting ahead of myself and my criticisms. Point is, I'll be reviewing Victoriana 3e not because I'm interested in the setting or its ideas but because I'm interested in its flaws and what it could do right or better.

The game is divided into five different books (read: chapters). They are, in order:
  • Book One: The Encyclopaedia Victoriana, or world building and cultural business.
  • Book Two: One's Full Measure, or making characters.
  • Book Three: Cogs and Movers, or game mechanics.
  • Book Four: Sorcery and Steam, or all of the different magical systems (there are a LOT) and the much less advanced tech system.
  • Book Five: Trials and Tribulation, or running the game and making adventures.
I will also probably be interrupting some of the chapters to share entire sourcebooks! There are some supplemental books that are pretty short or reasonably-sized to go into. I won't be, say, launching into the Indian sourcebook when India comes up but I can definitely spare some room for the Beastfolk rules and how they raise way more questions than they answer.

So stay tuned, dear reader, for the first chapter to Victoriana proper and its first flaw: you can include in-universe documents all you want but for the love of god don't just rely on those. At least put some summaries in blunt language for the purposes of explaining what you were presenting in more lofty language.

Oh, also there are some snippets of in-universe stories. The book's introduction starts off with a pulp story/Penny Dreadful about a British adventurer named Sir William infiltrating a submarine that belongs to his nemesis, the (sigh) sinister Irish terrorist/supervillain called Lord Clover. Sir William ends up rescuing the daughter of Dr. Arno Hartmann, a German Gnome with an interest in the lost continent of Thulia who is working for Lord Clover because Clover is holding Eva Hartmann hostage. The sub (the Leviathan) sinks, Dr. Hartmann dies, Lord Clover is presumed dead as he goes down with the sub, the mission is completed. It's your typical nationalistic trashy novel.


As a high point, the art for this book is very nice.

Tasoth
Dec 13, 2011
I know it goes with Victorian prejudice and the fight for Irish independence, but why couldn't it be an Irish adventurer taking on a British villain that the world doesn't see any problems with?

Barudak
May 7, 2007

So is it safe to assume Victoriana is rife with oblivious anachronistic racism, but with steampunk?

By popular demand
Jul 17, 2007
Probation
Can't post for 20 hours!
Who was it that coined the term 'Cogservatism'?

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

Barudak posted:

So is it safe to assume Victoriana is rife with oblivious anachronistic racism, but with steampunk?

Reason #1 why I fell out of the Steampunk scene - I'll predict we'll see a fuckton of Imperialism wanking without a critical examination of the attitudes of the era.

Nessus
Dec 22, 2003

After a Speaker vote, you may be entitled to a valuable coupon or voucher!



Robindaybird posted:

Reason #1 why I fell out of the Steampunk scene - I'll predict we'll see a fuckton of Imperialism wanking without a critical examination of the attitudes of the era.
Yeah, this is why the only 'steampunk' stuff I really like is Fallen London (which is only very vaguely steampunk) and Iron Kingdoms (which is a whole complex fantasy universe)

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Robindaybird posted:

Reason #1 why I fell out of the Steampunk scene - I'll predict we'll see a fuckton of Imperialism wanking without a critical examination of the attitudes of the era.

One of the reasons Arcanum was great was it actually had stuff like labor organizers...who were going to get gunned down with a maxim gun if you didn't step in and help.

Nuns with Guns
Jul 23, 2010

It's fine.
Don't worry about it.

Robindaybird posted:

Reason #1 why I fell out of the Steampunk scene - I'll predict we'll see a fuckton of Imperialism wanking without a critical examination of the attitudes of the era.

Cubicle 7 made The One Ring rpg (a fantastic game) and Rocket Age, which is a lot like this and generally handled imperialism and historic racism with tact, so I'd be surprised if that was an issue here. then again steampunk seems to bring out the worst in people.

unseenlibrarian
Jun 4, 2012

There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.
Don't know about Victoriana, but the other game they built with the system, Airship Pirates, is pretty open to the idea that an actual Steampunk universe as conceived by Steampunk fans would be a nightmarish dystopia.

(The basic premise of Airship Pirates is that the band Abney Park gets a time machine and runs around loving with history while enormously drunk to try and produce the Steampunk world of their dreams and sobers up to discover they done hosed up bad. It is also written by members of Abney Park, which suggests a certain amount of self-awareness.)

Robindaybird
Aug 21, 2007

Neat. Sweet. Petite.

unseenlibrarian posted:

Don't know about Victoriana, but the other game they built with the system, Airship Pirates, is pretty open to the idea that an actual Steampunk universe as conceived by Steampunk fans would be a nightmarish dystopia.

(The basic premise of Airship Pirates is that the band Abney Park gets a time machine and runs around loving with history while enormously drunk to try and produce the Steampunk world of their dreams and sobers up to discover they done hosed up bad. It is also written by members of Abney Park, which suggests a certain amount of self-awareness.)

Unfortunately Captain Roberts is kind of a bigot himself.

unseenlibrarian
Jun 4, 2012

There's only one thing in the mountains that leaves a track like this. The creature of legend that roams the Timberline. My people named him Sasquatch. You call him... Bigfoot.
*googles, immediately comes across the dude being asked not to use the G-word for Romani and refusing because he has Romani friends who say it's okay to use*

God loving dammit. Him and Peter David's nonsense this weekend.

Night10194
Feb 13, 2012

We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

unseenlibrarian posted:

*googles, immediately comes across the dude being asked not to use the G-word for Romani and refusing because he has Romani friends who say it's okay to use*

God loving dammit. Him and Peter David's nonsense this weekend.

Is he American? Americans have this weird blindspot on anti Romani prejudice because we never actually encounter it much.

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Nuns with Guns posted:

Cubicle 7 made The One Ring rpg (a fantastic game) and Rocket Age, which is a lot like this and generally handled imperialism and historic racism with tact, so I'd be surprised if that was an issue here. then again steampunk seems to bring out the worst in people.
Yeah, Cubicle 7 also handled the most recent publishing of Victoriana and the game itself is pretty aware on a mechanical and textual level that Victorian society was not socially enlightened. For example: if you want to play the game with "Historical Realism", character creation has certain choices which are basically meant to be for female characters to be able to select (such as getting a Church Education as opposed to going to a Boarding School for what you did as a kid). There's also the notion that certain subspecies belong in certain social classes...but if you're British, you still "belong". So while Eldren are generally Upper and Middle class, a British Beastfolk is vastly preferred to, say, a Comancherian (Southwestern American Indian) Eldren. So at the very least the game does acknowledge to the reader that yes, what is going on is generally not right and that the presentation of the world is biased towards an Imperial view for intentional reasons. It's not like Unhallowed Metropolis which unapologetically painted Neo-Victorian society as a horrific dystopia and without irony asked why you would want to set a game anywhere else, those Prussian air pirates suck and are boring.

Though there are gonna be some Issues with the subspecies and how that all is handled, I'm not gonna lie. You're gonna see me compare it to Shadowrun a lot. You're also gonna see me review from the seat of my pants, because I'm an idiot and that's generally how I roll. I got tangled up trying to help a friend make a character as an example and that's pretty much as far as I got before I knew I had to talk about this game.

Barudak
May 7, 2007

Night10194 posted:

Is he American? Americans have this weird blindspot on anti Romani prejudice because we never actually encounter it much.

Looking him up he appears to be very American so it wouldn't surprise me there if that was a partial influence.

I can definitely tell you its a huge surprise to a lot of American's that a) that's a bad word and b) anybody currently actively hates Romani and most critically c) they are not an entire culture of princesses riding in vardos.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

Night10194 posted:

Is he American? Americans have this weird blindspot on anti Romani prejudice because we never actually encounter it much.

That and we all grew up thinking it just means "wandering free spirit with a pretty corset dress" because of Fleetwood Mac songs.

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003

La morte non ha sesso
I remember leafing through Victoriana years ago. The two things that stuck out to me were a) they did not even bother to look up what Nihilism meant in the context of 19th century politics and just assumed it means Batman villain morality, and b) elves and dwarves, no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.

LaSquida
Nov 1, 2012

Just keep on walkin'.

Night10194 posted:

One of the reasons Arcanum was great was it actually had stuff like labor organizers...who were going to get gunned down with a maxim gun if you didn't step in and help.

Victoriana just makes me want an Arcanum tabletop game, but who the hell knows who actually owns that IP now.

Hostile V
May 31, 2013

Solving all of life's problems through enhanced casting of Occam's Razor. Reward yourself with an imaginary chalice.

Halloween Jack posted:

I remember leafing through Victoriana years ago. The two things that stuck out to me were a) they did not even bother to look up what Nihilism meant in the context of 19th century politics and just assumed it means Batman villain morality, and b) elves and dwarves, no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no.
Not a fan of the whole Elves vs. Dwarves dynamic or is there something else to it?

Simian_Prime
Nov 6, 2011

When they passed out body parts in the comics today, I got Cathy's nose and Dick Tracy's private parts.
Maybe, like me, he's just bored with Tolkien races in general?

I feel like there are lots of game where they just get stuck in there because "that's what the D&D crowd expects." And sadly it seems true; I can remember at least more than one instance where somebody refused to join a game because it was humans-only.

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wiegieman
Apr 22, 2010

Royalty is a continuous cutting motion


There's also the possibility of the game about Victorian England having various social strata be literally inherent to the species of characters. It really annoys me when that subsection of British people who are really into it decide to push their class issues on the rest of us.

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