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Just Dan Again posted:I know that people have lives and families (and holidays to celebrate), but man I have a hankering for some Rifts. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving all of the content that's rolling through the thread right now! It just doesn't seem like FATAL & Friends without a Rifts review churning away. Alien Rope Burn needs time to mentally recharge, I would expect. You can only spend so much PPE at a time.
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Nov 27, 2018 13:55
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Just close your eyes and envision like thirty nigh-identical robots with lasers and hidden micromissile launchers and skulls on them, plus a hundred pages of new classes that are exactly like previously-existing classes except they get Operate Radio Equipment at 34% instead of 15% and have slightly more obvious racist overtones.
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Nov 27, 2018 14:52
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megane posted:Just close your eyes and envision like thirty nigh-identical robots with lasers and hidden micromissile launchers and skulls on them, plus a hundred pages of new classes that are exactly like previously-existing classes except they get Operate Radio Equipment at 34% instead of 15% and have slightly more obvious racist overtones. A racist stereotype RCC
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Nov 27, 2018 15:16
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Back to one more update of the Aberrant core book. We get a chapter for the Storyteller which is a bunch of loving waffle of advice on how to make this not really like a superhero game maaaaan except it loving is. It’s also got some advice on railroading at the end that is actually pretty okay? They note that while you shouldn’t be a poo poo and try and force players to play the game a way they aren’t enjoying, it’s equally your job to keep poo poo coherent and to put forth obstacles that are fair to what the players are trying to do. It reminds me of a pretty good article I once read, actually. The author was DM and someone in the party got everyone all hepped up to go hunt a dragon when they were really, really not prepared for that. He tried to hint to them that it was a bad idea and give them the idea that they were about to get hosed, they didn’t listen, then they finally reached the dragon and predictably got absolutely murdered because they were like level 1 and it was a grown-rear end dragon. The person who suggested the hunt apparently got really upset that they got TPK’d because he expected to win every time. The point of the anecdote is the same as the good advice here, the party should not feel like victory is certain and they can just do whatever the gently caress they like at all times. The Appendix is pretty fun actually. The melee weapon rules give you minimum and maximum Strength values, so you both need certain strength to use them but equally can only hit with them so hard. There’s rules for hitting people with cars and trucks and poo poo, which requires Mega-Strength but is super funny. There’s some sample characters but gently caress that I’ll just do some of my own eventually. Next time, though, we’re moving to the Player’s Guide.
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Nov 27, 2018 16:31
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Feinne posted:Back to one more update of the Aberrant core book. It's interesting to me that, at the time, 'conspiracies but also superheroes' was not the well-tilled field as it is today. You could have absolutely taken that ball and ran with it, and in fact what with the Ellis-inspired stuff you certainly had precedent. Except WW always forgets gamers really like having a support system, whether to change things from the inside or just because you like the idea of Resources 5, and defaults to 'scrappy rebels.'
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Nov 27, 2018 16:36
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JcDent posted:A racist stereotype RCC A Racist Character Class, if you will.
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Nov 27, 2018 17:40
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Young Freud posted:A Racist Character Class, if you will. I got you, fam
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Nov 27, 2018 18:00
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: WHFRP Companion Who would ever want to play a group of rag-tag outcasts confidence scheming their way to fortune? Alright, I can admit when I'm wrong. I hadn't actually read the section on carnivals in my first readthrough months ago because I saw 'carnivals' and 'warhammer' right after the hyper-racism in the almanac and my 'oh god there's going to be anti-roma stuff in here' alarm went off and I skipped it. I was wrong to do this! The anti-roma stuff comes later, in the chapter about rivers! This is actually the one kind of decent part of the book, a pleasant surprise that mostly does what the introduction says the intent of the book was: It's a short article/chapter about a subject that couldn't sustain its own book, but that provides enough material to use it in your games and fit it properly into the setting and tone. So, fair job, Andrew Peregrine: You made the idea of playing carnies sound kind of fun. Carnivals are one of the diversions and breaks from normal life that people can expect to get in Hams, and something I've always appreciated about the 2e fluff is that it actually does pay attention to how people have fun. The festivals, holidays, the nightlife and theater in the cities, etc are all part of the setting. For rural towns, passing carnivals and troupes of performers fill the same role: Something to break up the monotony of rural life and bring a little of the exotic and the odd in a setting that won't cause too much trouble. The Carnival provides people a way to see exotic creatures, performances, and have an excuse to take the day off farming, and all they ask in return is that they be allowed to scam you a little in the process. The key to the carnivals in Hams is that they're never entirely what they look like, but they're rarely entirely a scam, either. For instance, one of the few safe jobs for a mutant is hiding among a carnival sideshow, specifically because 'everyone' knows their mutants and freaks are faked and so people will assume your mutations aren't real. A mutant hiding in plain sight with their adopted family of performers while people congratulate themselves on seeing through the 'excellent makeup' sounds like a fun way to get a mutant PC into a party if you wanted to play one, so fair enough! Similarly, the fortune teller might actually be able to see the future a little, or at least perceive the Winds; she's just going to use that to supplement her normal cold-reading rather than giving you a detailed prophecy. Old World carnivals are a place where people can have contact with the 'forbidden' in a 'safe' environment. The aforementioned sideshows of mutants, and seers are one way, but performances that break norms a little (but not enough to be Chaos) are also common, in part because sex and (staged) violence sells like crazy. Carnival life is hard on the performers, because they're constantly moving in a world where travel is both difficult and dangerous. They need to keep moving both to make room for one another (even if you've found a long-term town, it's considered impolite to stick around too long and mess up other carnival's circuits) and because people only have so much spending money. Not only that, while petty theft and scams are common in the business, people will only put up with losing money for so long before they start looking to get it back. The carnival is thus always in a state of flux, setting up, tearing down, performing, or moving on. There are occasional periods of rest between days of showings, if the town doesn't chase the performers off or run out of money, and during this time the performers rehearse, repair their props, and come up with new scams, games, and performances. Carnivals in 1600s not-Germany having rides is a little odd, until you remember dwarfs exist; one of the example carnivals is a family of dwarven toymakers who were kicked out of their hold for having the idea of building big, steam-powered toys people could ride on. They were thought insane for enjoying this 'fun' thing and wanting to expend so much energy on building things solely for entertainment. Thus, the occasional lucky carnival will have dwarf engineers who can set up rides, and those that don't will still put out play equipment for local children. Rides and playground stuff are 'fair'; these are targeted at the poorer people of a town and stealing from poor children is A: unprofitable, B: evil and C: makes Ranald angry at you and a traveling pack of charlatans don't want to make Ranald angry. Sideshow games are rigged all to hell, of course, but that's part of the fun. Everyone 'knows' the card games and tests of skill and strength are rigged, and everyone thinks that knowing this means they can beat them. Sometimes, someone does! Imperial carnival games are things like 'prick the Greenskin', where the guests try to cleanly drive a nail through the folded up hide of an orc (this is actually surprisingly hard to do and the average man of average strength can't manage it), chasing greased pigs, and every card game you can think of and cheat at. There are, of course, fabulous prizes for winning. Note: Prizes may not be fabulous. Winning not intended. Finally, there's actual performances. Burlesques masquerade as 'exotic cultural dancing', swordsmen and martial artists put on exhibitions, strongmen lift heavy things and put them back down, 'mutants' (both real and fake) are on display, priests give revival tent sermons or put on morality plays to demonstrate the myths of the Gods, and actors perform plays and read poetry. If you can imagine an act, a traveling show has probably given it a shot at some point. The priests are especially interesting; the carnival is one of the few times they're allowed to talk to the public more openly about Chaos, under the guise of lurid heroic tales of brave priests and knights striking it down or morality plays about how it worms in and destroys lives. Having a priest along doesn't draw crowds the same way as more exotic performers would, but it smooths things over with the locals, helps keep the Hunters from raiding your sideshow to make sure that's all makeup, and helps you claim your presence isn't deleterious to the morality of the community. Carnivals also tell the news they've picked up on their travels, usually embellished a bit to make it a good story. In this way, their performances are one of the places Imperials can have contact with the wider world outside of their rural town, which is one of the biggest things that keeps towns welcoming itinerant bands of performers/confidence men. We also get a nice sidebar on the kinds of PC Careers likely to show up in a carnival-based adventure or story. There's the ones you'd expect, like Camp Followers, Entertainers, etc, but also Protagonists as martial artists and security, or the occasional Apprentice Wizard passed off as a GREAT AND POWERFUL SORCERER, or Spies who think that traveling around telling 'the news' helps them keep abreast of their employer's realm and the 'real' goings on within. The bits of advice on fitting PCs into the sub-setting are nice, and appreciated. It's the kind of stuff you want in this sort of thing. Most of the folk who join a traveling carnival are outcasts who would have a much worse life if they weren't doing this. From the freaks who are hiding their mutations to the showmen who couldn't bear normal burgher life, most would be doing something else if they could have an easier life. Being members of a traveling troupe helps these unusual people band together against a very strange and sometimes harsh world; people on the run from the law, mutants in hiding, apprentice wizards who flunked out of mage college, folk running away from some other part of their past; all these people still need support structures and their troupe provides one and helps keep them from starving. A somewhat outlawed and lawless life is dangerous, constant performance and labor can be draining and exhausting, but it's safer than spending your whole life hiding in a basement and praying the Hexenjaeger never notices you wear a hat over your third eye. Getting tricked and scammed by the carnivals is as much a part of the expected expenses as the entry fees and ticket prices. Again, there's enough information on their common confidence schemes (like an underwhelming performance where they then let people in on the joke and challenge them to trick their friends into seeing it for a penny, too) and tricks to help players get an idea of how to get into character. The key to most of the scams is that they A: Go for people who were foolish enough to bring a lot of spending money to lose and B: Make a joke of it. They rely on embarrassment, good humor and a sense of 'everyone knows' to keep people from demanding their money back before the carnival moves on. There's also the fact that each individual scam rarely takes too much money from a customer; most people aren't going to try to kill you over losing a couple pennies at a time. Losing a crown might cause some violence, but the people stupid enough to lose a whole crown at a carnival are usually the people stupid enough to be kept from noticing they've been tricked. We end out with a couple interesting example carnivals, and these are honestly fun enough that I might have a few show up in my games even though I don't have any real interest in running a carnie campaign. Mordechai's Wonderous Waxworks is our designated evil/dark carnival, and amazingly, they're not a Chaos cult. No, Mordechai has a carnival based around displaying exotic, lifelike wax statues, posed in fine clothing and all manner of poses. Many of them are unusual and strange, weird figures of highly lifelike mutants. As you might guess, these mutants aren't wax at all, they're people. The evil showman has realized that he can lure in mutant 'performers' by promising food and safe harbor, but that they can't go to anyone for help once he gets his claws on them. So he's exploiting the fact that his workers have no route for normal legal recourse to enslave them, even selling them to rich clients as permanent servants or 'pets' if they'll pay enough. The plotline here is obviously for your PCs to throw the evil sideshow man out a window at some point and rescue his abused performers, but he's also got some warpstone and isn't smart enough to know not to use it if his back is against a wall. That would be a fairly fun little adventure. The Travelling Shrine of Healing is the weirdest group. They're made of a group of Shallyan missionaries who have been trying to find ways to get people to listen to lectures about public health, cleanliness, and preventative medicine, and a group of Ranaldans who have been trying to get a respectable front so that they can teach the youth to question authority and do sleight of hand (in hopes of inspiring some to become Ranaldans). While complaining about their difficulties together (The Shallyans can only ever seem to get people to drop by who are already sick, the authorities catch on to the Ranaldans too fast) they hit on the idea of joining forces. The Ranaldan's performances and plays draw in crowds, while the Shallyans' healing gives them a respectable front. By promising free tickets for the illusionists and performances of the Ranaldans if people listen to their lectures, the Shallyans manage to get people to sit still and be told about the importance of delousing to prevent the spread of plague. The Ranaldans love to put on plays showing the myths of all Imperial faiths, and they run teaching sessions where they show bright youngsters how they got conned at the shows and carnival games and encourage them to try doing the same to others. All in all, both groups are happy enough with how their alliance came out. The Smoke are the aforementioned dwarfen toymakers, otherwise known as the Sturcheim Dwarfen Circus of Mechanical Marvels. The smoke-belching steam-wagons and massive rides are some of the most impressive displays of any traveling carnival in the Old World, such that this is one of the few carnivals you'll find nobles visiting as well as commoners. The Sturcheims were run out of their hold for 'wasting' time building tiltawhirls and trying to divine the secrets of the rollercoaster, but they found that humans loved their work as much as the Longbeards had hated it, and so now they've found a new life funding their developments by traveling around and showing them off. Nobles will actually commission them to come to their towns as a 'reward' for obedient subjects, such is the fame of the Circus of Mechanical Marvels. Fun-loving hams dwarfs sounds like a good time to me. The final group is Dieter Keynsbiery's Fighting Pitwives, which is a traveling women's martial arts exhibition. They naturally feature at least one 'disgraced' Bretonnian lady-knight at all times, along with Estalians, Imperials, Kislevites and Tileans, all fighting in staged gladiatorial combat designed to show off both the 'novelty' of women warriors and the flashy or impressive sides of their homelands' martial arts. The longer the night goes on, the more exotic and ridiculous the plotlines in the pit become. Also, the women traveling with the carnival might be performers, yes, but they are actually serious fighters if trouble comes up. They're putting on a show for the crowd, but they all know their way around their weapons; they have to, to avoid killing each other when doing exhibitions with sharp weapons at full speed. So yeah. Actually kind of a fun section. Odd, but fun. It has enough information to get in character, it does a good job of fitting its material into the Old World, and the example carnivals are pretty flavorful. If the whole book was mostly like this, it would be way better; this is a good example of how to do an odd niche element of the setting well. Also, no racism! Next Time: Fall In A River And Die
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Nov 27, 2018 18:15
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The aberrant PG should be fun. There's some choice 90s-WW in both mechanics and condescending rants in that one.
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Nov 27, 2018 18:22
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Warhammer Pro Wrestling! WARHAMMER PRO WRESTLING!
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Nov 27, 2018 18:40
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Ratoslov posted:Warhammer Pro Wrestling! I was genuinely and pleasantly surprised that all 4 example carnivals actually sound pretty cool. Martial arts and pro wrestling stuff is always fun, dwarfs who like building things solely for enjoyment being considered weirdos is a good hook, the evil carnival guy is a slimey bastard PCs can throw out a window, and Shallyan-Ranaldan buddy times is adorable.
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Nov 27, 2018 18:47
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The Fighting Pitwives are just someone's PC group, which is good, because that owns.
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Nov 27, 2018 18:49
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Mors Rattus posted:The Fighting Pitwives are just someone's PC group, which is good, because that owns. I believe the one Bretonnian one they list is actually the Breton Example Knight Errant from their book after she gets caught posing as a man and leaves the country. Same name, at least. And described as being exceptionally strong, which was Mathilda's standout stat.
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Nov 27, 2018 19:03
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Prick The Greenskin is brilliant world building and flavor.
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Nov 27, 2018 20:24
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: WHFRP Companion Drowning So, the Reik. The Reik is one of the most important geographical features of the Old World. It is, in many ways, the key to the Empire's centers of power and a major international and national trade and transport route. It's an obvious choice for the subject of an article in a book like this. Sadly, our article on the Reik is going to be more concerned with rules (that aren't especially great) than with describing why the river is so important to the world. The book is correct: Its location in a defensible place on the Reik is a major part of what turned Reiksdorf (now Altdorf) into an important city to begin with, and the flow of the Reik is one of the keys to the Unberogen's surpassing of the Teutogen tribe to become the per-eminent pre-Imperial civilization. The Reik stretches over a thousand miles, all the way up to the World's Edge Mountains, where the persistent snowmelt begins to feed it. It picks up speed as it flows southwest, through part of the Kislevite Oblast and the River Urskoy, then down into the Talabec, and finally into what Imperials recognize as the river Reik. Tributaries of this river feed both the transport needs and the irrigation and floodplains of much of the Empire's most populous and fertile territory. The modern Empire would not exist without the Reik, and most of its most important cities and settlements either sit along the Reik, or can reach the Reik by river. Something I wish the author had gone into more (because it's definitely the case in Hams) is that Hams is one of the only fantasy settings I've seen that acknowledges the vast, vast gulf in utility between overland and river/sea travel in an early modern or medieval context. Almost every major city in the setting is on a river or sea route, and the exceptions always have very important reasons (strategic locations, etc) not to be. Overland travel is depicted as dangerous and expensive, while rivers and sea travel still have to contend with dangers but are much faster and more convenient for both goods and people. We get occasional mentions of this here, and an acknowledgement that the river is the most important geographical feature of the Empire, but the author's much more interested in drowning rules or how much it costs to get an 18 yard barge vs. a 24 yard one. We get a lot about stevedores and teamster's guilds, and classes for both (classes that don't really add anything and don't even have interesting exits, so I can't really see anyone playing them), and there's a lot of attention paid to how many men are used to unload a ship and things but it's not very interesting. There's no real plot hooks, despite talking about one of the most vital trade arteries of the Empire. We get the numbers of crew on a typical pirate ship (and a class for river pirates, which is basically just Outlaw but with some boat skills and worse at fighting) but no actual plot hooks about river pirates. Do you see the pattern? There's a lot of fiddly rules and numbers, but not very much flavor, despite talking about what should be a pretty exciting subsetting. I mean they make pirates boring! PIRATES! Pirates are fun! We also get a class for riverwardens, who are just roadwardens who sail instead. They patrol the rivers for the same reason roadwardens do the roads, and they're extremely similar in flavor and concept. Your usual semi-corrupt, overworked Warhams lawmen. And then comes the Strigany. You guys remember them from Night's Dark Masters, right? The survivors of Ushoran's kingdom of Strigos, the human relatives of the Strigoi vampires? They're still Warhams Roma. They're hated and persecuted by everyone because they're itinerant tricksters and thieves who worship their old vampire masters and get a -10% to Fel because they're so disliked. They're just as bad here as they were in NDM. There is at least the suggestion the blame they usually get for any local happening is misplaced, but seriously, -10% Fel for being so 'untrustworthy' and being described as having a culture that does nothing but 'prey on superstition' to swindle folks? Errrrgh. This is the second time I've had to call Turbo Racism in one book, Hams! The second time! Also we get actual HP and DR for boats, and at about 80 Wounds and 7 DR, a party can chop a river barge in half with a little work. Arrows and personal scale attacks can threaten them. This system is really not well set up for vehicle combat rules. Then we get to the rules for swimming, and every single bit of expansion on the swimming rules is towards 'player drowns'. As in, every new bit of complication to the rules is entirely in favor of loving the players if they ever touch the water. Wearing any kind of armor? -20 even for the lightest gear. Wearing clothes? -10. Fast river (like the Reik)? -20 to -30. All stack. Also if you don't drown (somehow) you now get waterborne diseases for touching the water. We also get rules for getting dysentery any time you drink from any kind of natural water, which I'm sure players will enjoy. We even get rules for how to determine the exact movement speed in game terms of a river's current based on where in the river you are and god does anyone ever ACTUALLY use this kind of minutiae in a game? Who stops their swordfight to go 'hold on, Steve, I gotta calculate the river's current so I can roll to see how badly you drown and/or start making GBS threads yourself to death/getting worms?' Every bit of additional 'realism' here is designed to gently caress players, as is the way of 'realism' in most games. It adds nothing. It's a waste of page space, a boring bunch of stuff that only serves to make Swim an even bigger emblem of the problems with the game's skill system than before. It's also emblematic of how the game tells you 'roll at +0' is meant to be a difficult situation AS IS (since a starting character will only have a 30-40% chance on average) and then dumbass pre-made adventure writers go 'but this is supposed to be HARD or GRIM' and then toss an extra 'minor' 10 or 20 point penalty on top. gently caress you, Andrew Law, for making me hit both the Turbo Racism button AND the verisimilitude button about the same article, while not telling me hardly anything about the extremely important and cool river system that underlies almost all Imperial politics and economics. Next Time: Traveling Mustard Salesmen
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Nov 27, 2018 21:06
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 Arianda vs. Vedic Turn 1 With our armies deployed, we’re already in a position for dumb things to start happening.  Sometimes it’s good to get a look at some physical items, since humans tend to be bad at scale. On the left, you can see all the orders and camo’d units from ALEPH. On the right, way more of both for Ariadna. The space-westerners have nearly as many units off the board as ALEPH has in total. That’d be an intimidating sideboard at a tournament. First, ALEPH spends one command token to remove two orders from the Ariadna Group 1 pool. These will regenerate normally at the start of Ariadna’s next turn. As is, Group 1’s operating off 1 LT order and 8 regulars. Ariadna begins its turn with Impetuous orders, as is required. One regular order out of Group 2 is spent to countermand Duroc’s impetuous order, so that he doesn’t immediately leap into combat and get shot down. Next come the Irmandinhos, who seek their nearest targets. One is completely out of line of sight of the enemy and does a double move, while the other runs toward the waiting guns of the Mk 5 Proxy. The proxy whiffs its shot entirely, while the Irmandinho pops a smoke grenade.  This is basically all the Mk 5 can see, and therefore affect. Sucks for ALEPH. The Desperado moves up on the other side of the board, but blows his own attempt to throw a preparatory smoke grenade.  The Irmandinhos get to the Armory door and, in the first expenditure of a regular order on the table, pop the locks. Not too bad for order economy. The FO Foxtrot and Chasseurs are the first ones into the armory, and they take their positions against the far wall, ready to ambush any ALEPH units that come in.  The Foxtrot reveals itself so it can dip into the panoply, coming up with +1 ARM. Not great, not terrible. It’s potential points at the end of the game, however, and that’s what counts. Meanwhile, the Scout LT belly-crawls up along its walkway, so he can pop up in the former exclusion zone. A prone camo marker is a pretty good sign that something is either very valuable and squishy, or that someone’s playing head games with you. Either way, there’s not much ALEPH can do to it right now. After that, I decide to rip the bandaid off and end the showdown on the sniper tower.  Which has got to be a really interesting sight from the ground. Just an explosion and a huge tongue of flame lashing off the top of this building, seemingly unprovoked. The Naga’s under the big flame template, by the by. Somewhat surprisingly, the Grunt passes his blind fire check, so the Naga tries to dodge and fails. It burns, falling unconscious but not dying outright. Meanwhile, the Grunt just has to eat the mine exploding in his face - and does. He’s rattled and fails his Guts roll, but he’s got nowhere to retreat, and he’s already prone, so he just sits there for a moment contemplating his brush with death. After a quick breather, the Grunt starts climbing down the tower in the hopes of setting some more robots on fire. Similarly dramatic events unfold on the other side of the board, as Uxia bolts from her position under the ruined For a baseline human, Uxia does pretty well, by virtue of shooting enough bullets at something. She’s at a good range, but the Asura is in cover, so that nullifies the range bonus to her attack. The Asura would ordinarily be at -6 to shoot back due to Uxia popping out of the camo state, but the robot’s got MSV3 and gets to ignore that penalty - another reason I went ahead and berzerked the SAS operative up there now, instead of letting her get shot to pieces. Finally, the Asura’s in a neutral range band, neither good nor bad, so she’s just rolling under a 15. Odds are on regular roll, the Asura wins. She actually ties one of Uxia’s shots, negating it, but the Ariadnan is rolling five dice. More dice very nearly always means better than, so do that thing. As a result, she gets three net hits. The Asura’s in cover, so she’s rolling an effective ARM 8 (higher than many TAGs) versus Damage 13 (about a standard rifle shot). 13 - 8 = 5, so to block the damage, the Asura needs to roll 6s or better on a D20. Astoundingly, she biffs two of her armor rolls, and is knocked into the No Wound Incapacitation state. With the ALEPH combat monster tantalizingly close to dead, Uxia pushes up into melee with the Asura, where she actually has a statistical edge - she’ll roll better dice, she gets a bonus to hit and damage, and between her AP knife and jumping past cover, she’ll negate a lot of the Asura’s advantages.  First melee order results in a tie, while the second sees Uxia crit by the Asura, so she goes straight to unconscious. To add insult to injury, that’s the end of Ariadna’s first turn, and the first two orders of ALEPH’s turn see a helper bot ambling up to the wounded Asura and healing her back to full. So much for that alpha strike.  With the Asura all patched up, the AI isn’t about to run it into a mine. So the Mk 5 proxy does that instead. Though it has to dodge at a -3 penalty, the Mk 5 easily manages to set off the mine without coming to harm itself, which is apparently a theme this game. With its accomplishments as a posthuman minesweeper set, the Mk 5 blasts away at the flamethrower Grunt at the other end of that building, neatly waxing the ambusher. With the poor placement of Ariadna’s ARO pieces, ALEPH has an easy time moving up the board. Mostly. The Deva fireteam comes to a bit of an impasse as they easily avoid the remaining flamethrower Grunt. There’s that Desperado lurking on the other side of the wall, with a chain rifle that could get all three of them if they moved directly to the other side of the doorway. Fortunately, a solution presents itself.  The Mk 3 proxy is fast enough to move around cover and get juuuust enough of a bead on the Desperado, while slinging four dice at good range to the Desperado’s one (terrible) shot at bad range. Moreover, cyclists dodge at a penalty, on account of it’s hard to tuck and roll while you’re on a moving vehicle. The best option the Desperado has, facing four hits, is to drop another smoke grenade. Remember everything I said about forcing your opponent to make a choice between two bad options?  The Desperado successfully beats out the Mk 3 on his smoke roll, but leaves himself vulnerable to a shot from the Devas as they advance behind his cloud - they can either see through it and shoot him, or they can blindfire a template weapon and tag him anyway. The Desperado fails his dodge, tanks the hit, and retreats in a panic.  With motorbike McCree banished behind a puff of smoke, the Mk 3 advances to clear the way for the Asura. The minelayer Chasseur, the one who failed her Infiltration roll and has been sloooowly working her way up the board, takes a shot at the proxy as it passes. This time, her surprise shot mod from dropping camo does come into play, but but the Mk 3 wings her anyway. The Chasseur passes her ARM and WIP checks, and remains alive and in place. By this point, ALEPH is running very short of regular orders. Fortunately, the Asura comes with two free ones. She spends her first LT order, announcing the obvious to the world, as well as moving up the board toward the armory. The Chasseur is the only one with an eye on the Asura and takes another ARO shot, but the Asura ignores camo mods entirely, and with two hits, casually drops the French infiltrator straight to dead as the machine ambles on up to the objective.  Peeking around the corner, the Asura can just see one of the Irmandinhos, who fires her chainrifle at the synthetic. The Asura ignores the storm of shrapnel hitting her in the face and kills the Irmandinho. Rather than play the odds again, the Mk 3 spends the last ALEPH order for this turn to run up for more room clearance, dropping two shots each into the Chasseur and the Foxtrot inside the armory. In spite of extra armor from the panoply, his camo and his cover, the Foxtrot is taken down by the proxy; the Chasseur, however, is remarkably untouched, which is good, because torching the proxy with a flamethrower is an unopposed attack. The proxy fails all of its ARM rolls and goes unconscious. At the end of round 1, Ariadna has successfully occupied the armory with more points than ALEPH for one turn, and wins one objective point.
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Nov 27, 2018 22:51
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The Infinity Battlereport thing is actually really interesting for seeing the system in motion. Thanks for putting in the effort on it.
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Nov 27, 2018 23:03
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AD&D: 2nd Edition Chapter 5: Proficiencies  In 2e, Proficiencies, i.e. combat and non-combat skills other than those baked into your class, are entirely optional, which honestly feels like a bit of a shame, because in basic 2e AD&D, outside of stat rolls and equipment, they're basically the only way to really differentiate two characters of the same race/class combo. I presume there are people who actually treat this section as optional and don't always use them, but I don't know who they are, and as the various supplements advanced towards Player's Option, it started feeling more and more assumed that everyone was using proficiencies, especially once kits and the like got introduced. Weapon proficiencies, in particular, got heavily expanded on as time went on, and account for a good chunk of the combat potential of pure Fighters, since they're able to access them at a higher level than other warrior-type classes(especially in the basic game, later on they just had an easier time of it, and a higher cap, rather than entirely exclusive access.). Weapon proficiencies in core 2e are pretty simple. Your character starts with X weapon proficiency slots, and every so many levels he gets another proficiency, based on his class. For instance, the Fighter starts with 4, and gets another every 3 levels, contrasted with the Wizard who starts with 1 and needs 6 levels to get another. Being proficient in a weapon, though, just means that you can use it normally, that you're not taking any penalties from employing it, but what's special about Fighters is that they also get to Specialize. They can invest two slots in a given weapon for a variety of benefits. For any melee weapon, it's a +1 to hit, and considering that it's a straight +5% chance to whomp anything, that's pretty big on its own. Additionally, it's another +2 to damage which is holy poo poo huge considering that the biggest gently caress-a-dude-up we get is the 1d10 of a two-handed sword. For bows and crossbows, it means a massive +2 to hit when used at close ranges, as well as a free attack the instant combat is joined if an arrow or bolt is already prepped to fire. On top of that, Warrior classes are the only ones who get more attacks per round as they level up... but the weapon they're Specialized in gets a further bonus to the number of attacks and, in fact, it's the only effect it has on thrown weapons, but it allows you to hurl an absurd number of projectiles per round. Most of these will do negligible damage compared to just whomping something with a sword, sure, but if you have sufficient Strength, then keep in mind that thrown weapons also benefit fully from that, and the more attacks you're making, the more times you're adding your Strength bonus. Essentially this means that the guy with the bulging biceps and a bag full of lawn darts is scarier than the guy with a sword as tall as his enemies are. With just a modest +1 to damage, and assuming specialization, it's either 1d10+3(for the big ol' two-hander) vs 4d3+4, i.e. 4-13 vs 8-16, and the differences are just going to keep being exaggerated by level and higher strength. Anyway, long story short, Fighters can do some silly things with unexpected weapons thanks to Specialization's eyeballed-feeling effects on rates of fire with weapons they probably expected no one would seriously focus on, and considering that 2e doesn't really have DR and as far as I can recall no effects that subtract a flat amount of damage per attack, a swarm of small attacks has no real mechanical disadvantages compared to a single huge swing. So while weapon proficiencies are what we can use to make the system creak at the seams, how about the non-weapon proficiencies, which I'll abbreviate as NWP's from here on out since I don't hate myself? Well, as anyone could probably have guessed, at this point, they use a totally different mechanic from everything else so far. Because why wouldn't they? Firstly, the way we get them can be determined one of two ways, either the player can randomly roll the occupation they had prior to being an adventurer, which gives them a packet of related skills(for instance a Fisherman would know about nets, sealife and piloting small vessels) or it can use a system similar to the weapon proficiencies where we get a class-determined lump of starting points, and then more points at class-determined intervals to invest. The latter is further split up into five categories(General, Warrior, Priest, Rogue, Mage) that our class determines our access to(everyone has access to General, and hybrid classes like a Paladin get access to both sides of their hybridization, for instance, General, Warrior and Priest categories for the Paladin). By and large, General is for "flavour," like if you really want Maurice the Bold to be an excellent carpenter or cobbler, alongside a couple of useful skills like riding and literacy, while the class-specific skills are where actually generally handy stuff like Engineering, Healing, Disguise, Forgery, Weaponsmithing and Gem Cutting are. Each proficiency is related to a stat(often with a modifier) so, for instance, say we want to use Forgery, we would be making a roll-under check against (our Dexterity-1) on a D20. It's also possible to invest multiple slots in a proficiency to get a bonus to it, but considering that no class gets more than 4 to start with, or increases more often than every third level, you're probably better off spreading your slots wide. Fundamentally it's a good way to make your character more personalized while also increasing their out-of-combat utility. A few well-chosen skills can make a huge difference for a Rogue for instance, allowing them to ply their trade in a hell of a lot of situations beyond cracking locks in a dungeon, while a Fighter familiar with Mountaineering, Survival and Hunting suggests someone who's not unfamiliar with travelling into the wilds and killing monsters in their homes, or perhaps a grizzled veteran with guerilla-warfare experience. As for the actual system they use for it, though... hoo. If you're not using one of the more generous chargen methods like point pools, arrays or 4d6-drop-lowest, then characters' proficiency checks will rarely succeed beyond a 50% chance, and considering that they'll only ever get to boost them by 5% five or so times in an entire 20-level adventuring career, they're flavour, sure, but not reliable tools in any way. It's one of those systems that either need houseruling if you're running the base game, or to be employer in combination with Player's Option to actually make it work. Also for poo poo like Weaponsmithing it takes almost an entire loving month just to make a sword, so it's not like you could use it to replace a busted weapon while you're in the wilds or something. Instead all you can really use it for is to make a few bucks during long-term downtime. Weapon proficiencies suffer from issues we'll see in the next chapter, Equipment, so let's jump right into that. Chapter 6: Equipment  This chapter's not too long or interesting, so have a nice piece of art This chapter's really just shopping lists, first the "common" stuff, and then weapons and armor. The common lists are... well, a mixture of stuff adventurers would care about, like mounts, rations and the prices of services, and stuff they'd never give a drat about like the cost of 100 eggs and a pound of coarse sugar. I suppose it's relevant if they want to run a trading empire(but then they probably wouldn't be playing D&D), loot some commodities rather than the gold and gems or just for getting an idea of what 1gp is actually worth in common life(for instance, when you know that it costs about 35gp to have a normal standard of living for a month, it gives you an idea of what sort of bribe or payment 50gp is to a commoner), but it's rare I've ever actually found a use for them. Also, unlike 3e and onwards, there really aren't many "useful" items outside of weapons and armor. Sure, there's rations, 10-foot poles and rope, but if I remember my 3e right, the equipment tables there were bristling with a variety of alchemical mixtures and consumables. I mean, I also seem to remember that they were primarily utterly useless thanks to the devs' fundamental failure to understand their own game and its maths, but in theory it added more stuff for the non-magical classes to do in combat. As it is, all you can do here is buy a ridiculous amount of live swans or geese. The armor tables are more or less uninteresting, as armor really only has two stats(unless we hate ourselves) which is what they set your base AC to and how much it costs. Also the weight, I suppose, but I've yet to play in a game of D&D where encumbrance was actually being meticulously tracked. The most interesting thing about the armor table is that the cost and weight are on one page, before the weapon stats, and then actual AC is about five pages later, after the weapon stats. The book could've used more editing, is what I'm saying here. There are also multiple suits of armor with the exact same AC, but wildly varying prices, and the only tradeoff being about 5lbs of carry weight for taking the cheaper one. If we wanted more detailed armor, there are optional rules which give each armor different AC vs blunt, slashing and piercing damage, but that's a fuckload of intricate bookkeeping, and most monsters don't indicate what kind of damage they do, really only weapons do, so be prepared for arguments about whether a beast's claws are slashing or piercing and so on. Welcome to the Hell Zone. As for weapons. EIGHTEEN loving POLEARMS. Eighteen. loving. Polearms. When in all my years of running 2nd ed I've never seen a player use any polearm. The reason for this is... there's no real reason to use any but a small number of superior weapons that roll up with better speed factors(initiative modifiers) and damage than the rest. Costs are somewhat forgettable unless you need to replace your weapons constantly because your GM is a fuckface that keeps bombarding you with rust monsters or otherwise disarms your character. So, really, since the weapon stats are simplistic enough that there's not really such a thing as niches and different tactical uses for these weapons(barring a few that can be braced against cavalry or have noteworthy bonus damage against large monsters), what you're going to do is you're going to buy the weapon with the best stats, which you probably also specialized in, and maybe grab a backup just in case a Rust Monster eats the first one and your GM makes you use a looted short sword at a massive non-proficiency penalty. Also, blunt weapons and axes are explicitly worse than swords, though your GM could be a dickhead and flood the game with skeletons which take reduced damage from everything that isn't blunt damage or some sort of magical attack. So spend one of those spare proficiencies on hitting things with hammers. Crossbows are also utterly useless, but in this case for multiple reasons. Bows have a superior rate of fire, any kind of bow has a 2x rate of fire compared to light and hand crossbows, and a 4x rate of fire compared to heavy crossbows. Heavy Crossbows cap out at an unimpressive 1d4+1 damage, while bows do 1d6 or 1d8(depending on arrow type) and can benefit from Strength damage bonuses(up to a limit defined by the bow's pull weight, for really high strengths you might need custom jobs or special materials). These are the sorts of flaws I'd mentally tuned out while playing the game for so long, because of having a small sheaf of house rules intended to deal with them, but Christ, reading this for a review helps indicate just how egregious it really is. Analyzing Chapters 5 and 6: Proficiencies and Equipment  Chapter 5 is probably the first DMG chapter where I'm unhappy with the tone of the book, because it suggests weapon proficiencies mostly as a way to gently caress with the players. "Ah, BUT! What if Longsword Jane loses her longsword and suddenly has to use a shortsword so now kobolds can kick her rear end?" I mean, I can see the idea that a hyperspecialized character without their signature weapon might be challenged by the loss of it, but the book specifically calls out that the player will likely be frustrated and start arguing, and establishes an extensive argument for why a Longsword proficiency wouldn't apply to a Shortsword, in order to pre-emptively beat down the complaining player. Really, it's almost an entire half page's worth. Practically, the game has little room for disarming maneuvers except for AoE stuff blowing up the character's gear or specific monsters like Rust Monsters that can melt stuff out of your hands. So unless the GM fiats some sort of thing that causes it, or there's a good excuse(like a natural 1), it's really rare that a character will be without their chosen weapon barring a vindictive GM out to "teach them a lesson" in some bullshit way. The tone switches near the end to "don't gently caress the players over too badly, use it to add tension, not to make them despair utterly and stop having fun!" but it still comes off really badly from the way the section starts. Somehow, though, the weird "gently caress min/maxers"-attitude even leaks into the NWP section. It suggests, firstly, and reasonably, that you tailor NWP lists to the region(for instance, it suggests, in a fishing town, sea-related skills might be General skills because everyone growing up there has some contact with the industry and the shoreline), but then suggests not showing the players your tailored list, and instead having them submit vague orders for the NWP's they'd like, and choosing the most appropriate ones for them, just so they don't somehow "game" your intricately designed skill selection. Then the next section whiplashes around and goes: "Heck, if players want to introduce new NWP's, let 'em! Sure, sometimes they might be trying to get one over on you with an OP idea, but give them the benefit of the doubt!" so either someone on the writing team had a Jekyll & Hyde thing going or their editing needs work. What a shocker, right? I really like the writing when it suggests to let the players design their own stuff, and to give them the benefit of the doubt, and explains that NWP's are good because they add some depth to characters and suggest a background to them, and give them new tools to be creative with. That's when the DMG is at its best, not when it's suspiciously watching every player for attempts at min/maxing or seeking ways to take them down a peg. Chapter 6 in the DMG is mostly advice on worldbuilding if you're not using a pre-made world, being mostly historical trivia about trade, currency and technological availability(for instance, if there's platemail around, it's probably a society at least into the Middle Ages, if players can buy an arquebus, you're probably hitting a local equivalent to the Renaissance, etc. There's also a short section about letters of credit and barter economies, and their roles in the development of the economies we can recognize today. It's really fascinating stuff if it's your first exposure to those facts and ideas), but the focus is primarily on how to add flavour to the game, by turning Gold Pieces and Silver Pieces into some more interesting, local currency rather than a generic item. It also takes the slightly player-hostile tack again after that by going into what to do if you give your players too much money. Why, clearly you should find bullshit and arbitrary reasons to remove it by having their poo poo burn down or just plain be stolen! It concedes that maybe you should let your players foil some of these, but you should always be ready with new bullshit shots at their fortune! I just feel like it's a completely alien approach, why not tempt them to lose the fortune instead? Have NPC's come to them seeking aid for dubious investments, or promising to sell them legendary artifacts at a tenth of the asking price. Let the players' own agency determine what goes wrong, and if someone really is just gunning for them and their stuff, always let them have a chance to counter it if they're clever or perceptive enough. Mechanically, this chapter is the hiding place for a couple of somewhat important rules. One is that this is the only place where you have rules for variant materials to make stuff from, though only one of them actually matters(well, two, but you can't actually buy Elven Steel gear, only find, loot or steal it), as most of the non-standard materials are actually penalized. Why would I even want to know the price variant and AC modifier for making a suit of gold armor if it's literally just me paying extra money for something that's extra garbage? Maybe tell me how much I can sell that trash for instead. The other important rule is item saving throws, about the only place where you can find info on what happens if a Fireball sweeps through an area, or a Lightning Bolt blasts through someone outside of the damage they do to living things. It is, in fact, another reason why the Fighter is so much more useful than the Mage: He won't blow up, melt or disintegrate the sweet loot they're carrying, which the Mage might well. This table generally serves two purposes, to arbitrate whether a PC's Lightning Bolt can be used to blast a door open or not, and to destroy half a player's inventory when he flubs his Save vs Spell, if you really want to play it entirely by RAW. Getting hit by a Lightning Bolt, in particular, and loving up your save, has an excellent chance of destroying everything you're carrying that isn't made of ceramics, ivory, bone or wood. 
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Nov 28, 2018 01:34
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I think a crossbow killed a D&D designer's dog at some point. It's the only explanation for D&D Crossbows.
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Nov 28, 2018 01:46
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Night10194 posted:I think a crossbow killed a D&D designer's dog at some point. It's the only explanation for D&D Crossbows. Crossbows have become one of my RPG litmus tests. If using a crossbow is a bad decision, the game probably has some other goofiness in its structure that'll be annoying to deal with. WHFRP seems like it does pretty well with crossbows- they do a bunch of damage, most people can use them, and they've got good range, but you're probably not using it more than once before you wind up in a scrum. Using a crossbow as your primary armament probably isn't as good as being a gunman, true. But at least a crossbow can actually threaten a normal person enough that it's respectable.
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Nov 28, 2018 03:33
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Just Dan Again posted:Crossbows have become one of my RPG litmus tests. If using a crossbow is a bad decision, the game probably has some other goofiness in its structure that'll be annoying to deal with. So the only games crossbows end up being GOOD in, by design, are those where everything's bad and they're mildly ahead of a mediocre lot, in more dirt-farmingly low fantasy settings.
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Nov 28, 2018 03:52
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Crossbows in WHFRP are really good weapons if you aren't a ranged guy and you just carry one to shoot at the start of a fight if you don't charge. Ironclaw 2e's Crossbows (and honestly, 1e, too) are actually damned good and a perfectly reasonable alternative to guns, where they trade huge crit potential for faster reload and very reliable, consistent heavy damage. Like even a marginal hit from a heavy crossbow in IC2e threatens to one-shot drop a character if they don't save any of the damage, in place of not having the huge 'i hit by a lot' Slaying damage of a gun. I think it's one of the only systems to really make a crossbow a totally viable choice in addition to a longbow or a musket. Night10194 fucked around with this message at 04:05 on Nov 28, 2018 |
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Nov 28, 2018 03:58
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Speaking of Ham Fantasies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGm4NFhhbfo&t=515s
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Nov 28, 2018 05:43
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JcDent posted:Speaking of Ham Fantasies: thanks I hate it
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Nov 28, 2018 07:02
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great, with YT's algorithms, I'm going to get a bunch of garbage incel takes recommended to me.
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Nov 28, 2018 07:07
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Night10194 posted:Crossbows in WHFRP are really good weapons if you aren't a ranged guy and you just carry one to shoot at the start of a fight if you don't charge. Crossbows are slow, but I think they should be a good pick for low-level pre-cantrip Vancian Wizards. You don't really need that much training in their use, you don't need that much strength to draw them, and you do solid damage. Sure, a longbow in the hands of practiced longbowman can pants you, but it should be a good option if you need a ranged weapon for a non-martial character.
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Nov 28, 2018 08:53
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IIRC, the Momentum or whatever it's called mechcanic in WFRPG 4e encourages even less combat-oriented characters to plink away with a crossbow or throwing knife or whatever to keep foes off-balance. And rollercoasters and other carnival rides are probably a LOT older than people think, prototypes of them anyway: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Mountains It's certainly not the most anachronistic thing dwarf engineers have come up with in any case.
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Nov 28, 2018 10:56
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JcDent posted:Speaking of Ham Fantasies: Oh God. That guy.
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Nov 28, 2018 11:34
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I've promised myself to never ever look at one of the Arch Warhammer videos and I'm not going to break that vow anytime soon. Blacklisted that poo poo off my YT feeds the moment I found out how.
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Nov 28, 2018 11:59
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Cooked Auto posted:I've promised myself to never ever look at one of the Arch Warhammer videos and I'm not going to break that vow anytime soon. Blacklisted that poo poo off my YT feeds the moment I found out how. You can do that? I would love to blacklist every 40K LORE VIDEO WHAT ARE THE MISSING PRIMARCHS video.
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Nov 28, 2018 12:08
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JcDent posted:You can do that? I would love to blacklist every 40K LORE VIDEO WHAT ARE THE MISSING PRIMARCHS video. If you have Tampermonkey for Chrome/FF you can just grab this script that lets you blacklist users and channels.
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Nov 28, 2018 12:28
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I find if you just delete this stuff from your history if you accidentally end up on one of these channels, they don't get recommended.
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Nov 28, 2018 13:23
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: WHFRP Companion Calculate your Trade Units on the Availability Matrix I get the appeal of playing as a traveling merchant. I really do. A game about going from place to place, having adventures as you and your buddies try to build a career? Navigating backroom politics and the struggle between guilds and the landed gentry of the Empire over their legal rights as the world slowly moves away from the old feudal order? Having to deal with secret societies and 'merchant clubs' without getting ensnared by a Chaos Cult? Fighting off bandits and monsters? Or playing the crew of an old smuggling riverboat, having to take on risky jobs just to keep things together and staying one step ahead of the taxmen while dealing with river monsters and shady clients? Those are all fun ideas for a game. So when I say the upcoming 16 pages are bad as all hell with their Advanced Trade Rules, it isn't because the idea of playing a merchant campaign is bad. It's because the next 16 pages of the book are devoted to adding a complex subsystem to the game designed to calculate exactly how many crates of chickpeas you can trade for how many crates of salt cod that you can sell for how many crowns at the next town, minus tax and guild fees. It also completely relies on two other books, Old World Armory and Sigmar's Heirs, because the subsystem is reliant on the (extremely stupid) population numbers and the 'source of wealth' quotes in the Gazetteer and the trade goods make extensive reference to Armory's section on economics. Yes, you can't actually use this system very well without owning two other books. Moreover, there's an interesting bit in Old World Armory where they explain why the game doesn't have detailed crafting rules: The intent is that you don't have rules for working a day job in a blacksmith shop because the game rules are mostly intended for adventures. You know, the thing this entire chapter/subsystem isn't really about. So not only is it referencing another text, it's then doing exactly what the text it's referencing said not to do. First we get the requisite bit about joining a Merchant's Guild. Costs 50-100 GC (not insignificant), you must own a warehouse in the guild's main town and a legal residence in the guild's main town (and as this is own, rather than rent, according to the Old World Armory's stuff on property values this will be a massive, massive expense), and have a letter of credit and a letter of recommendation from a recognized mercantile mentor. You'll also owe your guild 10% of any future profits. 'Less than a quarter of younger traders will ever become full Merchant's Guild members', the book says, and unless you're a full member guilds won't permit you to do more than 200 GC of trading per week on their turf. If you aren't even a journeyman member, you won't be able to do more than 20 GC of business a week in their territory, which seems awfully odd considering Adventurers run around selling 500 GC gems and stuff all the time. That's another fun thing about this whole section: The salt cod business isn't actually that profitable compared to actually having an actual adventure with actual treasure, according to the treasure rules in, again, the book it's referencing (Old World Armory). There's more bureaucracy if you do business off guild turf, but it mostly relates to getting permission from the local racket to buy and sell, probably via bribes/letter of recommendation. Merches have an odd relationship with nobles in the Empire. Nobles mostly have the money not to have to bother with business, and while the barrier isn't as big as it is in Bretonnia, a landholder engaging in mercantile affairs is a little unusual. Merchants mostly supply goods and moneylending to nobles against their considerable inherited property, instead, while nobles tax merchants for their own income. Merchants do everything they can, using those goods and moneylending as leverage, to lower their own taxes. I wish they'd gone into another thing that other work in the line does: Merchants in the Empire can become nobles fairly easily by marrying into the family or buy outright purchasing a title and enough land. It isn't like Bretonnia where it's all bloodline; a rich person with a respectable business can bust into the nobility, and this has been happening quite a bit, devaluing the titles of nobility in the Empire. Our section on nobles instead focuses solely on tax, and an example where the nobility have levied a massive surcharge on arms and armaments to ensure that private citizens can't buy up all the weapons in panic over 'Archaon coming back any day now, we swear!' so that there will be gear to equip the State Troops. The State Troops' armories and favored merchants obviously don't have to pay these taxes, so getting a military commission to supply the army is an instant ticket to massive profits in 2522. Gee, that almost sounds like an adventure seed, book, are we going to talk any more about that? No, instead there's some stuff about how you have to use the Stevedores and Teamsters' Yes, matrices. Also get some stuff about moneylending and interest, and stuff about secret societies and religion, comparing Handrich and Ranald. It's nothing interesting if you've read ToS, and through me you've basically read ToS now so hey. There's also a powerful magical ritual to Handrich that 'raises the Wealth Level of a settlement' if it succeeds, so Handrich worshipers meeting in a back room, smoking cigars and drinking expensive wine as they worship LOCALLY MADE FINE PRODUCTS will actually cause the economy to improve. However, if these powerful economists are insincere in their worship of LOCALLY MADE FINE PRODUCTS (failing an Int test as part of the ritual, which I take to mean they have to jabber some nonsense about job creation and the stimulus effects of tax cuts) they lose all their magic and Handrich curses them for a year. There's something kind of hilarious about capitalistic cargo-culting so I'll allow this. We also get a map of the Empire by TRADE ZONE and a note that the Northeastern Empire won't let you sell goods, only buy and barter because everything up there is currently on fire. You might remember Ostland and Hochland had a bad time, after all. This is also where we're told you'll need Sigmar's Heirs to look up if a specific settlement sells wine, salt cod, etc. We then get a smattering of some of the major settlements and their population (hearty lol at the powerful city of Altdorf having only 105,000 people, yet again) and WEALTH RATING, and then we're into the trading rules. I'm gonna be straight with you: I'm not going to go into detail on them. You know why? Because no-one ever actually uses these kinds of rules. They exist, sure, and people will nod sagely and say how verisimilitudenous it is that, say, the authors innovated by having Trade Units be a unit of value (the average is 25 gc) while the actual value of the goods determines how much cargo space they take up (100 enc of cathyan silk is a single TU, while 900 enc of cheese is the same), but how often do people actually sit down and do all this poo poo? The thing is, I get it. I get the design goal. The authors (Jude Hornburg and Dan White) want to give you complex subsystems that will let a character who went into Merchant use their Merchant skills as a central point of mechanical complexity the same way warriors and wizards get to use their swords and magic. I get this and it's not in and of itself a bad idea; there's a lot to be said about the fact that combat tends to be one of the major points of mechanical complexity in almost every RPG system and what that says about the assumptions of RPG design. The problem is, this system is a low fantasy system geared towards adventure, treachery, and investigation. The system and its genre are designed such that combat, investigating, etc should be major parts of the system. And the subsystems added here mostly just add a bunch of 'roll for supply, buy as much as you can, roll to see what rate you trade your goods at, go to the biggest city, sell everything for cash' rigamarole that could already have been accomplished without an additional subsystem. You could easily just say 'You've taken out a loan to buy a load of Cathyan silk at Erengard, now you have to get it down by river and sea to Marienburg, then out to Altdorf to sell. Along the way you encounter some adventures, and at your destination using Evaluate and Haggle and deciding who to sell to determines how much profit you make' without needing a Supply and Demand Matrix and Wealth Levels and Availability By Population. Like, tell me this. What sounds like the fun part of a game about merchants? The adventures and interpersonal relationships and betrayals and the tension of running ahead of bankruptcy and credit? Or spending an hour calculating the exact amount of Salt Cod you get for 20GC? And in spending so much time on the latter, this section has almost nothing about the flavor and setting info that would enhance the former. Especially when you only have 16 pages to do it (and this is one of the longest 'articles' in the book). Trying to establish an entire RPG subsystem of rules instead of trying to tell players and GMs cool stuff about being a merchant in the Empire is sort of a waste of time, since it's bolting a whole different resolution mechanic onto a game that already had a (simple, but feasible) mechanic for haggling and bribing and selling. In trying to expand the options for a mercantile campaign, they focused on the accounting rather than the adventure, and it just doesn't seem like any fun to use. Plus, like I said, the actual mechanics are just layer after layer of RNG without any real meaningful decisions to make as a merchant, so it's not like they actually succeed at adding the kind of extra, dramatic, fun complexity that could make them interesting to use. They're just extra kludge. Next Time: I don't even know how to cover this one.
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Nov 28, 2018 15:48
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This is a post partially to push us nearer to a new page, but also an honest question: has there ever been a game where being a merchant is not the primary task, but trade has been both fun and not a huge waste of time? There's Fragged Empire, though it's both pretty abstract and not a primary focus of the game, and then everything else I'm coming up with is tedious bean-counting and hauling rusted swords out of a kobold den.
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Nov 28, 2018 17:45
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I can't think of any game that does it better or even as well as Fragged Empire. It's really absurd that it took decades to make playing in the subgenre that Traveller created actually fun. Closest thing I can think of is playing a commercial enterprise using Reign's Company rules.
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Nov 28, 2018 17:57
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grassy gnoll posted:This is a post partially to push us nearer to a new page, but also an honest question: has there ever been a game where being a merchant is not the primary task, but trade has been both fun and not a huge waste of time? Has there ever been a game where being a merchant was the primary task? Because I'd actually be down for that
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Nov 28, 2018 17:58
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Kaza42 posted:Has there ever been a game where being a merchant was the primary task? Because I'd actually be down for that There's a ton of board games, but I can't offhand think of an RPG where that's the case.
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Nov 28, 2018 17:59
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: WHFRP Companion This section doesn't really deserve a joke title Kevin Hamilton and Robert J. Schwalb, you guys are on notice: The Star Signs chapter is one of the worst in the book (not the worst, that's coming next) because it's just such a pile of loving nothing. I'll go over the material some, but for the most part it's just lovely prose about what your horoscope says about you in the most hamfisted way possible. This'll probably be a short post. So, Star Signs are a thing in the Core Book. You can roll for your star sign, and they say little blurbs like 'You were born under the Greased Goat, the sign of passions denied' or 'you were born under the Big Cross, the sign of clarity'. They don't have any game effect, they're just a little flavor thing because the setting has a lot of divination and astrology. They're cute. We usually roll them for PCs as a little character detail, much like Dooming. This section tries to expand on Star Signs to give more detail about what they say about a character's personality. It does this by having a little description of what people from that sign are like, then a couple little prose paragraphs about a character born under that sign in a situation like 'encountered a horrific monster' or 'getting a drink at the pub'. The problem is twofold. Firstly, the book itself even acknowledges Star Signs are best when they're vague and believed to be influences on a person with the truth or lack thereof left up to the individual. Secondly, the little 'what're they like' paragraphs have all the subtlety of a brick to the face and make pretty much every Star Sign sound like kind of a lovely character. Also, the main categories for it are 'drinks at a pub' 'fighting a mutant' 'discovered you are a mutant'. The gently caress, guys? That's a very odd pair of 'typical situations' to talk about a character encountering. Really, the reason seems to be so the authors can write about things 'spewing effluvia' as they 'shamble horribly' at the various example characters. So let's get on with it! Here's the Big Cross, the Sign of Clarity. That's an evocative idea for a sign, right? Well, Big Cross people are sensible, make good decisions, and generally face life rationally. That's it. That's what clarity means here, no other interpretation. The Big Cross guy also never bothers to go to the pub, just gets right to facing off with mutants. Encountering the mutant, the Big Cross has the big cross clarity revelation: "It's ugly and has to die!" Really showing off that rationality there, big revelation, total clarity. But what if the Big Cross IS the mutant? She rationally starts cataloguing what the tentacles growing out of her stomach mean, whether or not they can be removed, and doing cost benefit on seeking a doctor or turning herself over to the Hunters to be killed. That's it. Boy, this sure is exciting information about playing characters in the setting! You sure would benefit from giving yourself a firm hat that reacts to everything through a single character trait, wouldn't you? Okay, maybe that was just a bad entry. Maybe never going to the pub hosed that one up; that must be key, go to the goddamn pub. Let's take Grungi's Baldric, the Sign of Martial Pursuits. It's named for a dwarf God because it's a sacred star sign for dwarfs, and symbolizes serious warriors who care about their art and their practice. Okay, fine, how's this guy (who is dwarf inspired) do at the pub? He orders a single drink and a meal, and in paying for them 'displays GREAT DISCIPLINE' and 'REMAINS READY FOR BATTLE AT ALL TIMES'. I didn't think paying for a meal counted as displaying mighty discipline that would shake the Gods themselves, but whatever. Okay, so these people are boring. How does fight guy do in a fight? Oh, he doesn't get to fight a mutant. He just gets to be one. He notices he's got an eye in his thigh staring at the sky while he's taking a poo poo. Then calmly knifes the eye and pulls it out of his leg after he's done. Okay. Lots of personality on this guy. They're all like this. Totally useless for making characters. The Sign of Wisdom takes notes on the 'relative quality of drinks' the whole time at the bar, the sign of the indistinct laughs about mutation and flips a coin to see if they'll 'stick around', they're all dumb, stupid single-trait character examples being defined by lovely prose and a bad idea for a gimmick. This is the ENTIRE SECTION. It's the same length as the Carnie article, yet it feels much shorter because it doesn't have anything to actually say. It's just completely worthless. You know what would have been better than this? A section on why the star signs are what they are. What's the legend behind Grungi's Baldric? Why is there a sign of the Greased Goat? What are the stories, where are these in the sky? The kind of stuff that a Celestial Wizard or Navigator would know. Some interesting fluff and flavor about why people believe these signs symbolize what they do would help them fit into the world better while leaving them very open to your PC's interpretations. And it wouldn't be this pile of horseshit. Next Up: Medicine, the worst chapter in the book.
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Nov 28, 2018 18:08
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grassy gnoll posted:This is a post partially to push us nearer to a new page, but also an honest question: has there ever been a game where being a merchant is not the primary task, but trade has been both fun and not a huge waste of time? Red Markets? Although "fun" might not be the right word..
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Nov 28, 2018 18:09
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Kaza42 posted:Has there ever been a game where being a merchant was the primary task? Because I'd actually be down for that Yeah, Merchants are an untapped place for RPG shennanigans and I'd like a game about being an actual merchant some day. I guess Rogue Trader kind of counts except that's more a lovely conquistador simulator and doesn't actually have any commerce rules.
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Nov 28, 2018 18:11
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