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Has anyone done a read of Diablo II: Diablerie for the thread yet? It's, uh, something special. It released almost simultaneously with 3E's core books and it really, really shows that the designers were really confused at the time. Like, really confused - there are abilities that don't do anything that basic game mechanics don't already, the classes go to level 25, and spells only go up to level 6. It's bonkers, and if it hasn't been done I'll try and take a glance over it for the thread.
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Dec 5, 2017 12:00
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occamsnailfile posted:But the general tone of 'The Emprah did nothing wrong!' from GW writing these days is pretty off-putting. I could accept the IoM as a lovely place that was the source of all its own worst problems until they started saying 'nuh-uh! they're actually good!' and wiping out that little bit of nuance. Also it is hilarious how every chapter of loyalist marines is described as 'exceptionally fanatical.' I dunno, the current tone feels to me as it has shifted over to "The Emperor did plenty wrong" based on how he's been depicted in Master of Mankind as well as Dark Imperium. Which in turn has pissed off a lot of people with the previous mindset because it tore the rug out from under them. Loomer posted:Has anyone done a read of Diablo II: Diablerie for the thread yet? It's, uh, something special. It released almost simultaneously with 3E's core books and it really, really shows that the designers were really confused at the time. Like, really confused - there are abilities that don't do anything that basic game mechanics don't already, the classes go to level 25, and spells only go up to level 6. I've seen that book at least a couple of times in old PDF format but I don't think I've ever actually read it so it'd be curious to see what it has.
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Dec 5, 2017 12:29
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Cooked Auto posted:I dunno, the current tone feels to me as it has shifted over to "The Emperor did plenty wrong" based on how he's been depicted in Master of Mankind as well as Dark Imperium. I always felt that, at least in the older fluff, the Emperor was intended as powerful, usually right, but occasionally fallible(see the whole mess with getting backstabbed by Horus and managing to alienate the Thousand Sons). But the point being that now, everyone has forgotten the point of a lot of his messages(that he was really a fan of humanity as a whole and generally loved humans), and is just using him as a symbol(and literal puppet on the Golden Throne) to further their own goals, which occasionally coincide with what he originally stood for, but is often a horrifying mockery of it. Which also served to make the Imperium a place which you could be aligned with and adventure within without being a monster, because there were good ideas somewhere at the core, but a lot of corruption and misunderstanding getting in the way. Compounded by an increasingly more and more fanatical mindset making things worse and making it even more hostile towards the rest of the universe(not always without reason, a lot of the universe IS portrayed as trying to annihilate humanity from day one, which you could say has given humanity a bit of a cultural, species-wide trauma that makes them prone to hitting first because "no one gets to hurt us again, we're not taking any chances."). So you've got explanations for the Imperium of Man without having excuses for it.
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Dec 5, 2017 12:44
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Also, one of the things faction-based games want marketing-wise is for players to identify with their chosen faction. But at the same time the writers of those games don't want any one faction to be objectively right, for fairly obvious reasons. But the players of those factions would like to be objectively right, and so they'll come up with whatever justification they need for that, even if their faction is something like the Galactic Empire or the Space Marines. They probably don't even realize they're effectively championing fascism, they just want guys in cool armor too order around and to not feel like a heel when doing so. Then give things a decade or two and some of those players and fans end up running the franchise, and then all nuance is lost.
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Dec 5, 2017 12:46
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40k is also rooted in/stemmed from 80s British counter cultural thought, not entirely intentionally but just as a product of its time, it reflects and satirizes, respectively, the thoughts and politics of the time.
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Dec 5, 2017 13:36
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Night10194 posted:What's kind of funny is how little conflict there actually is in 40k as a setting. The Imperium is never going to change, Chaos is always going to be a pack of fuckups, there's no viable alternative to the Imperium as presented in the setting to the point that coming up with one means you'd be better off making your own setting, and everyone on both sides trends towards being an idiot. It's an eternal stalemate where no-one really makes any meaningful progress ever. It means there aren't all that many stakes and it's hard to care about what happens in any of it. Now the Tyranids and the Necrons, on the other hand... Terrible Opinions posted:You kinda have that with the Bismark. Not nearly as strongly and the Bismark did get a single whole victory, but it was still an overly expensive failure that's held up as some icon. Alien Rope Burn posted:Also, one of the things faction-based games want marketing-wise is for players to identify with their chosen faction. But at the same time the writers of those games don't want any one faction to be objectively right, for fairly obvious reasons. There are reasons why faction-based games setting all seem weirdly unreal and very similar to each other, and this is a major one of them.
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Dec 5, 2017 13:36
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When a psionic character’s PSP total falls to zero, his defenses crumble and his mind is left open to The Deck of Encounters Set One Part 48: The Deck of Tritons, Tableaus and Time Bombs Look, they’re actually paintings, not tableaus, which are a completely different thing, but I’m trying really hard here, okay? 283: Fish Out of Water A triton got washed a half-mile inland by a tidal wave. Its legs are stuck under a rock, it’s barely surviving in a disappearing pool of saltwater, and it needs help. It will reward them with a coral dagger worth 100 gp. Ugh, I hate how this retroactively specifies something that happened. “The day before the encounter, there was a large tidal wave (caused by a quake).” But the PCs definitely did not notice either the earthquake or the tidal wave, no matter where they were the previous day. Still, if they’re in the middle of coastal overland travel, I guess I could just drop the earthquake now and have them run into the triton the next day. And I like the coral dagger - you just know someone is going to keep it around as cool character bling. Keep. 284: Trial by Triton The PCs are underwater, they wander into triton territory, where the locals try to capture them and then put them on trial. “During the trial the tritons will try to determine if the PCs intentionally trespassed or were treasure seeking.” If they’re found guilty, the penalty is all their stuff. If they’re found innocent, they get… nothing. Sorry for the trouble, I guess? We already went through one of these triton trials back in 90: Intruders. I still find this whole affair a little tedious, but this one is much better than the previous one. For one thing, the DM didn’t have to declare a shipwreck to put the PCs a the tritons’ mercy. Here, the PCs have the opportunity to surrender, or to flee or fight back if they prefer. Second, the only charge before was “trespassing,” a pretty dumb accusation when the humans are clearly shipwrecked and obviously don’t want to be there. The PCs needing to insist that, no, they are absolutely not murderhobo treasure hunters, is potentially more fun. Keep. 285: ...And Now I Feel Like I'm Being Watched In a spooooooky castle, house, etc, there’s a portrait of an admiral (the card gives it more description than that). It has striking eyes that seem to follow the PCs around. Anyone who gets too close needs to save or become obsessed with the eyes, giving them modest penalties to other stuff and causing them to fall into a fitful sleep that night. At which point the spectre of the admiral comes to kill them. I like this one - it feels like there’s a larger story here that the PCs are only intersecting with the very end of. Keep. 286: Seascape There’s a painting of a “doomed” ship on stormy seas. A hook slipped, so it’s hanging at 45 degrees. You can see the lighter patch on the wall where it’s supposed to be hung. If you right it, though, the water starts gushing out of the painting at high volume and force until the painting is turned 45 degrees again by two people with a combined strength of 30. Once you do, the painting shows a ship sailing on a placid ocean, after which presumably you can’t make it release water again, or else the PCs would have a really awesome (though extremely fragile) firehose. Will it “recharge” eventually and become stormy again? Who knows? The card doesn’t mention the possibility. Endearingly weird, in my mind. Keep. 287: A Most Attractive Painting This can happen anywhere a painting can be found. Do we need a new Terrain: Art Gallery category for these cards? Why are there so many of them? Anyway, it’s a painting of ten bandits attacking a unicorn. If you touch anything other than the frame, you’re sucked into the painting, and the bandits attack you, too. Kill all the bandits and the painting ejects everyone who came in, and it shows the unicorn standing triumphant around the dead bodies. I’d like this more if it wasn’t just a combat, or had any further effects at all. Pass, but I’m sure someone could come up with some ideas that would redeem it. 288: Time Bomb The PCs lay down to sleep and (with a WIS-3 check) notice an hourglass in the rafters with the last few grains slipping down. They have a few moments to respond before it explodes in a 5th-level fireball effect. Since this is for medium-level characters (levels 5-9), that’s not incredibly deadly, but it could light the place on fire. Maybe it was intended as a warning shot. It was planted by some of their enemies, of course. Keep.
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Dec 5, 2017 14:30
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PurpleXVI posted:So you've got explanations for the Imperium of Man without having excuses for it. Yeah the specific tone of the setting has been somewhat lost in favour for the darkgrimness of the grimdarkness over the past decade's amount of writing (even if the issue was really noticeable during 6th and 7th edition, to me at least). Mostly because that's been done and overseen by fans of the original writing in a lot of the cases and sometimes have a tendency to overlook or miss the core tenets of the setting. It's an issue I also have with the Warcraft setting but at the same time I recognize that as an issue common to a lot of major and long time running settings. I guess it's just extra egregious with 40k.
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Dec 5, 2017 14:31
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Loomer posted:Has anyone done a read of Diablo II: Diablerie for the thread yet? It's, uh, something special. It released almost simultaneously with 3E's core books and it really, really shows that the designers were really confused at the time. Like, really confused - there are abilities that don't do anything that basic game mechanics don't already, the classes go to level 25, and spells only go up to level 6. It will never not be funny to me that 3e=Diablo and 4e=WoW, but guess which edition got two official vidjamagame sourcebooks?
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Dec 5, 2017 15:04
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Inescapable Duck posted:Big fancy impractical wunderwaftens are always built to impress, often succeed in doing so and always underperform at best. Wars are nearly always won by whoever can muster the most bodies, guns and bombs to throw at the enemy before the enemy beats them, and so the great big superweapons are rarely on the winning side. (Nuclear weapons maybe being an exception) Getting wrecked before they even got to be used just makes people think 'what could have been'. Interestingly, at the time the Yamato and Musashi were regarded by many IJN officers as cursed ships. They were built in violation of the Washington Naval Treaty, and by 1944 many sailors and officers commented that the utter uselessness of both ships was probably karmic justice for Japan in its pride building them despite the treaty.
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Dec 5, 2017 15:23
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Davin Valkri posted:Eye in the Sky is a good example of what could be done, yes. I was thinking that that was a bit overdramatized at first, but then I realized I had it confused with Good Kill. My favorite part of Eye in the Sky was definitely the American SecState going "what the hell are you calling me for? you already got the guy, go blow them up now!", along with the "Senior Legal Advisor" chiming in after him to say the same thing. And by favorite I mean "it sucks how true this rings" Halloween Jack posted:It will never not be funny to me that 3e=Diablo and 4e=WoW, but guess which edition got two official vidjamagame sourcebooks? The Warcraft Mage gets to cast Frostbolt, but the Vancian casting system means they get to cast it x times per day.
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Dec 5, 2017 15:27
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The World of Warcraft RPG books were worth their weight in gold as setting and lorebooks... before Wrathion and Garrosh's Excellent Adventure happened and someone at Blizzard realized "holy poo poo we need to nail all this poo poo down!" and now they're not canon anymore.gradenko_2000 posted:The Warcraft Mage gets to cast Frostbolt, but the Vancian casting system means they get to cast it x times per day. True, but they did at least pioneer the "Prepare x spells per day but cast them like a sorcerer" Thing that 5e ripped off.
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Dec 5, 2017 15:41
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Dallbun posted:286: Seascape This is Addams Family silliness. I love it.
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Dec 5, 2017 15:48
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Kurieg posted:The World of Warcraft RPG books were worth their weight in gold as setting and lorebooks... before Wrathion and Garrosh's Excellent Adventure happened and someone at Blizzard realized "holy poo poo we need to nail all this poo poo down!" and now they're not canon anymore. I know most of Garrosh's exploits, but who is Wrathion and what has he done?
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Dec 5, 2017 15:55
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Hunt11 posted:I know most of Garrosh's exploits, but who is Wrathion and what has he done? The last Uncorrupted Black Dragon who orchestrated garrosh's escape back in time to built the perfect army against the Legion. Then once Garrosh got back in time he went "gently caress you both I'm hanging out with my cool dad and making a death army for our own benefit." because Wrathion is an idiot.
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Dec 5, 2017 15:58
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wiegieman posted:What, putting a fighter sweep over it that didn't encounter resistance and then tossing a few dozen bombers at it from over the horizon? They use the same animation sequence but it's American fighters instead of alien ones.
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Dec 5, 2017 16:01
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Kurieg posted:Wrathion is an idiot. Frankly this is all you need to know about Wrathion.
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Dec 5, 2017 16:43
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ArkInBlack posted:Frankly this is all you need to know about Wrathion. Yeah I won't disagree with that notion. Much like a bunch of other characters from the WoD period, bar Khadgar, he's been sidelined and mostly ignored despite mentions that he'll be back. Kurieg posted:The World of Warcraft RPG books were worth their weight in gold as setting and lorebooks... before Wrathion and Garrosh's Excellent Adventure happened and someone at Blizzard realized "holy poo poo we need to nail all this poo poo down!" and now they're not canon anymore. Could've sworn they were classified as non-canon way back as either Burning Crusade or Wrath of the Lich King as they all were based on just Warcraft 3.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:13
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Cooked Auto posted:Yeah I won't disagree with that notion. Much like a bunch of other characters from the WoD period, bar Khadgar, he's been sidelined and mostly ignored despite mentions that he'll be back. The problem was with white wolf's development cycle and their acquisition by CCP. Dark Factions languished in development hell for years, even though they were working on the Burning Crusade book in the backend. Eventually they were able to convince CCP that releasing a book they had already written would bring in money, and that EVE and WOW didn't directly compete in any meaningful sense, so they weren't 'helping their competition'. Even so they let the license lapse afterwards.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:24
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Thinking about it Wrathion is maybe Blizzard's best writing in a while, all of his plans seem exactly like what a two year old would think up as cunning plans to bamboozle nations.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:26
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Cooked Auto posted:Yeah I won't disagree with that notion. Much like a bunch of other characters from the WoD period, bar Khadgar, he's been sidelined and mostly ignored despite mentions that he'll be back. WoD was possibly the biggest waste of story potential Blizzard has ever done, without hyperbole. So many opportunities for people to meet their alternate past/future selves and they never once did it.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:39
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Nope, WoD was basically Thrall's dreamtime happy land and even Grom got to pull a karma-houdini at the end for SOME REASON. The ending of the Nagrand questline as an Alliance player is probably the least satisfying thing ever.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:44
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Wait, the World of Darkness is part of WoW now, too? I'm behind on my edition wars.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:45
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Warlords of Draenor, you go back in time to an alternate version of Draenor pre-Warcraft 1 where nobody drank the Fel-Blood Kool-aid and get to slaughter your way through hundreds of thousands of orcs... again.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:54
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JcDent posted:Yeah, it would be hard to make a grimdark setting with IoM that's competent (not perfect), in, like, just using the massive hive world populations to keep factories running in 8 hour shifts without interruptions, having an imperial faith that not only does good but fights the more regular kind of corruption within it, and flak armor being 5+/4+ against explosions, but that would be super hard and would require a new setting... and you can't have orks in an original setting :/ GW has never understood numbers as they relate to scale. In Hams Fantasy they are restricted a lot in how many people are in a medieval city, but in 40K they just don't get how many a billion or a trillion actually is compared to the size of an Astartes Chapter. Loomer posted:Has anyone done a read of Diablo II: Diablerie for the thread yet? It's, uh, something special. It released almost simultaneously with 3E's core books and it really, really shows that the designers were really confused at the time. Like, really confused - there are abilities that don't do anything that basic game mechanics don't already, the classes go to level 25, and spells only go up to level 6. I should do the Official Starcraft RPG that used the Alternity rules set.
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Dec 5, 2017 17:58
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:GW has never understood numbers as they relate to scale. In Hams Fantasy they are restricted a lot in how many people are in a medieval city, but in 40K they just don't get how many a billion or a trillion actually is compared to the size of an Astartes Chapter. In Sigmar's Heirs, if you total the number of people living in the Empire up you get somewhere between 1 and 2 million people, which is less than one tenth of the population of the HRE in the equivalent time period. The Empire is supposed to be the largest and most populous nation in the Old World. They solved this error by just not giving population figures in future books, which was the right call because who really cares exactly how many people live in Altdorf? What matters is it's the biggest city and full of adventure and wizards.
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Dec 5, 2017 18:04
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The word "taunt" does not show up in the World of Warcraft RPG once. The Warrior class does not gain any abilities of their own accord, but instead gains a Bonus Feat every even level (and has full BAB, and bad Reflex and Will saves, and a good Fort save) And Thunder Clap is a spell
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Dec 5, 2017 18:04
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:GW has never understood numbers as they relate to scale. In Hams Fantasy they are restricted a lot in how many people are in a medieval city, but in 40K they just don't get how many a billion or a trillion actually is compared to the size of an Astartes Chapter.
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Dec 5, 2017 18:23
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Kurieg posted:The last Uncorrupted Black Dragon who orchestrated garrosh's escape back in time to built the perfect army against the Legion. Then once Garrosh got back in time he went "gently caress you both I'm hanging out with my cool dad and making a death army for our own benefit." because Wrathion is an idiot. Heh, they shoved Wrathion down the ladder of valuable surviving black dragons in Legion pretty hard. They introduced Ebyssian, an even older uncorrupted son of Deathwing, who spends all his time spiritually advising some fancy moose-antlered Tauren.
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Dec 5, 2017 18:24
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Yeah, population is mainly important when you need to give a sense of scale and intimacy. I've complained in the past about how Vampire seemed to forget its own guidelines about how many vampires actually live in any city--even a globally important metropolis.
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Dec 5, 2017 18:25
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theironjef posted:Heh, they shoved Wrathion down the ladder of valuable surviving black dragons in Legion pretty hard. They introduced Ebyssian, an even older uncorrupted son of Deathwing, who spends all his time spiritually advising some fancy moose-antlered Tauren. It's okay, in BfA Wrathion moves in with the Alliance in Stormwind and Ebyssian with the Horde in Orgrimmar so both factions have a black dragon.
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Dec 5, 2017 18:33
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Kurieg posted:The World of Warcraft RPG had the Alliance players guide, Horde player's guide, more magic and mayhem, and I think the Kalimdor setting book. Whoever was in charge of the lore bible at the time read through all the books and approved anything that they said. So they were as close to official as you could get. Oh that I know. I just have vague memories that the books were classified as non canon either around the time the original WoW came out or around some later expansion. Kurieg posted:The problem was with white wolf's development cycle and their acquisition by CCP. Dark Factions languished in development hell for years, even though they were working on the Burning Crusade book in the backend. Eventually they were able to convince CCP that releasing a book they had already written would bring in money, and that EVE and WOW didn't directly compete in any meaningful sense, so they weren't 'helping their competition'. Even so they let the license lapse afterwards. Now that I wasn't aware of really. wdarkk posted:WoD was possibly the biggest waste of story potential Blizzard has ever done, without hyperbole. So many opportunities for people to meet their alternate past/future selves and they never once did it. I admittedly stopped playing the game around Cataclysm (at which point the writing took a massive nose dive in quality after they changed lead writers to the guy whose resume included writing a popular webcomic about the game) so I admitted missed out on a lot of the story in WoD but even then I snapped up a lot of details about how much it had missed the mark. Cythereal posted:It's okay, in BfA Wrathion moves in with the Alliance in Stormwind and Ebyssian with the Horde in Orgrimmar so both factions have a black dragon. Ugh, everything about the main plot for that expansion makes me groan to my core. But that feels like a discussion suitable for another thread entirely. FMguru posted:Nerd settings always, always, always screw up the demographics. Always. Always funny to consider that fact considering you're dealing with game system s that usually involve a lot of numbers being thrown around.
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Dec 5, 2017 19:01
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FMguru posted:Nerd settings always, always, always screw up the demographics. Always. yep, with Ravenloft, the rule of thumb is to times the population number by ten to get a more reasonable number.
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Dec 5, 2017 19:05
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Cooked Auto posted:Always funny to consider that fact considering you're dealing with game system s that usually involve a lot of numbers being thrown around. Just because you're throwing around a lot of numbers doesn't mean you know the first drat thing about numbers.
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Dec 5, 2017 19:12
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Half the reason I prefer to work with percentile systems is because I have no stats training and my last math course was over a decade ago.
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Dec 5, 2017 19:13
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FMguru posted:Nerd settings always, always, always screw up the demographics. Always. I can bring up Ravenloft again, where the entire setting has less people than Montreal.
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Dec 5, 2017 19:15
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Cooked Auto posted:Now that I wasn't aware of really. You can probably still find the stats for blood elves, draenei, and the blood elf archetype for paladin on an web archive site somewhere. the main line dev posted them to his personal blog back in.. like.. '08 or '09.
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Dec 5, 2017 19:36
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Kurieg posted:You can probably still find the stats for blood elves, draenei, and the blood elf archetype for paladin on an web archive site somewhere. the main line dev posted them to his personal blog back in.. like.. '08 or '09. Huh neat. Ratoslov posted:Just because you're throwing around a lot of numbers doesn't mean you know the first drat thing about numbers. 
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Dec 5, 2017 20:08
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Cooked Auto posted:Huh neat. Jesus poo poo it was a geocities page. my eyes
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Dec 5, 2017 20:32
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Kurieg posted:Jesus poo poo it was a geocities page. Oh god. 
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Dec 5, 2017 20:42
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