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Cythereal posted:Or a villain who dies and all the heroes weep over them because they were such a victim and it was never their fault (I'm not going to name names, but in my opinion there's a character who represents a case study in this in a game I've been playing lately). The current Ur-Example for me right now are the villains from Xenoblade 2 where the main character openly mourns the death of a man who tried to kill them multiple times, who executed the staff he hired to help him with a project including the protagonist (he literally runs the protagonist through with a sword), murdered hundreds if not thousands of people with 0 remorse not even a week ago, and whose stated goal is total genocide of the human race. Does the villain at any point recant, change their ways, or do anything at all penetent? Nope! You fight and kill him while hes trying to break into the genocide device and as hes dying he reveals he decided to kill all humans because 500 years ago a human woman he loved was killed during a war by other humans. The guy who started that war by the way is still alive, isnt human, and this villain never directly goes after him. In summary, gently caress you Xenoblade 2 writers! Night10194 posted:I am real glad someone else gets that Gendo is a loser. Finding out how people read Gendo is a very useful way to intuit how they consume and understand media and narratives.
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Mar 15, 2019 01:45
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I admit I wasn't big into Evangelion, but I feel validated that I never liked Gendo.
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Mar 15, 2019 03:03
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Cythereal posted:Yeah, what irks me isn't villains being given redemption stories. I love a good redemption story, but they're hard to do well. The comparison that sprang to my mind was comparing the story arc of Darth Vader with Kyp Durron. Barudak posted:The current Ur-Example for me right now are the villains from Xenoblade 2 where the main character openly mourns the death of a man who tried to kill them multiple times, who executed the staff he hired to help him with a project including the protagonist (he literally runs the protagonist through with a sword), murdered hundreds if not thousands of people with 0 remorse not even a week ago, and whose stated goal is total genocide of the human race.  "My wife died of skin cancer, so I will blow up the sun!" truly a deep and tragic character
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Mar 15, 2019 04:39
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In total fairness, Xenoblade 2 is extremely Gnostic, and the entire thing revolves around a Gnostic theming of the perfect union of male and female to overcome the Demiurge and become God. The personal relationship there and the failed unity of Blade and human leading inevitably to working with the Demiurge and aiming to destroy all in grief at failing to achieve perfect unity is the point. Thematically it fits incredibly well, and from this Gnostic view...none of those deaths matter compared to the depth of personal connection and the divine unity. But the problem is Gnosticism is kind of insane. I deeply appreciate Xenoblade as a series for its exploration of Gnosticism and fully embracing the insane theological stuff it entails, but it reeeeeeally doesn’t work well with conventional morality, especially if you don’t factor in the Gnostic divine importance of the personal scale over the grand but uninitiated.
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Mar 15, 2019 04:46
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There's a weird recurrence of Gnostic themes in JRPGs in general and the Xeno- games in particular, where all religion ends up being Gnosticism. Maybe because it means you can have the final boss be God.
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Mar 15, 2019 04:47
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The leads behind the Xeno metaseries are obsessed with Gnosticism, Xenoblade is just the first time they’ve managed to do it cromulently, compactly, with proper funding and in an accessible-ish way. Other JRPGs usually don’t understand actual Gnosticism nearly as well; I spent most of my play of Xenoblade 2 plotting out the story against fuckin Simon Magus.
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Mar 15, 2019 04:51
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Also in case it wasn't clear from Hats Now, I'll be covering the Old World Armory next. I'm going to be summarizing a lot, most likely. It's a realllly dry book but it's fascinating to me because for the most part (a couple rules stand out, and the worst are specifically called as optional) the book doesn't have much to do because it's options were 'break the WHFRP2e gear system' or 'Be kind of dull' and they picked the latter.
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Mar 15, 2019 04:59
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In some Cyberpunk 2020 news, apparently there's been a play test commentary about Cyberpunk Red, the upcoming edition I'm not terribly impressed. 
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Mar 15, 2019 05:22
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Thanks Night; the whole reason I brought up the 2.0(?) GM Guide - which I guess got clumsily stapled into the Core rules without an editing pass - was to make sure those bullshit adventures and especially the unusable nonsense that is Keter would be part of the review. Even years ago, when I thought Ad Eva was fixable - enough to lose two friend groups over it - as I tried so hard to get something useful out of that fanwank, mining one of the “Easy” Archangels for puzzle-boss ideas, and adapting one of the adventure ideas into “you guys are minor celebrities and companies want to use you for endorsements” as-is, without a dozen player-punishing subsystems. Even at my most optimistic, I knew most of that was unusable, and that Keter was just a dev making me watch him jerk off.  Night10194 posted:I am real glad someone else gets that Gendo is a loser. Gendo hosed up so hard he isn’t even allowed to be tanged.
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Mar 15, 2019 05:53
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 The Rifter Rifts Round-Up Special '99, Part 2: "Many players have a tendency to make combat-maximized characters instead of realistic ones that they might expect to see in a movie or novel."  The Rifter #6 The Rifter #6 posted:We typically sell around 8,000 copies of every issue of The Rifter® in just the first month or two. Plus, since it is a valuable and fun sourcebook, not just a magazine, The Rifter™ keeps selling month after month. We had to reprint Number One last year, and I think we've sold around 15,000 copies. So if 10,000 copies is the average, and if three people actually read every copy sold, that means 30,000 Palladium fans are enjoying every issue! 50,000 if five people read every issue! Way Cool!!  Those who read the first Rifts Round-Up may remember that Agents of Gaming had gotten the license to do Rifts miniatures... okay, I kid. None of you remember that, I'd presume. But: The Rifter #6 posted:Palladium Books has cancelled its license with Agents of Gaming to produce a new series of Rifts® miniatures.  Reaver here has a heart of gold behind all the reaving.
  Enjoy your daily dose of sexual dimorphism in gaming.
The Rifter #6 posted:Caleb was coughing within his helm, trying not to swallow the blood that seemed to leak from his ears, nose, mouth, and eyes. It was difficult to see with his eyes clouded by a red haze. The energy core at the center of his body and soul fought valiantly to put him back together, or at least slow down the bleeding, but it could not match the furious pounding he received from the Zodoran weapon's onslaught. Lothar seemed to be faring better, but Caleb knew his own wounds were hidden beneath his suit of armor; Lothar's must be too. Still, the Wolfen never faltered, never cried out, never gave in. No matter the agony, he threw his ax with the same determination and strength each time. Next: Now and Later. Alien Rope Burn fucked around with this message at 15:15 on Mar 15, 2019 |
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Mar 15, 2019 05:56
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The Hammer of the Forge felt like somebody's Green Lantern fanfic masquerading in RIFTS.
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Mar 15, 2019 14:45
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Old World Armory HATS NOW You remember how the Bestiary was full of lots of really good and interesting setting writing that helped paint the Hams world as a place where fantastical things happen on a regular basis and many of its monsters actually have interesting lives and perspectives of their own? Old World Armory is, uh, not as good of a book. What's interesting to me, and why I want to cover this one, is that it chooses to be boring rather than to completely shatter the game's equipment system. As you might have noticed all the way back in the Core Book, WHFRP2e doesn't have much room for gear to have variation. Armor goes from 1 to 5 (up to 7 if you're using Rune of Gromril but I've gone over the balancing issues with that before). Most serious weapons do SB or SB+1 if they're an especially strong and awkward weapon like the lance or flail. Weaponry is highly generalized. You simply can't get the dozens and dozens of individual, fiddly weapons out of the system that you do out of 40kRP. Old World Armory could have tried to change that, but for the most part recognized there just aren't very many mechanical levers to differentiate gear, and so instead it contents itself with being something we've all seen dozens of times in this hobby: The slightly tedious and questionably researched repository of medieval/early modern weaponry so you can decide which one sounds coolest to count as your Hand Weapon. I won't be going at length about what a Ranseur is vs. a Partisan, because I'm not Gary Gygax and I don't have a fetish for polearms (actually I think polearms are awesome and want more polearm fighting styles and martial arts in games, but that's different). But you know, I'll take a book of 'things the author thinks are cool that you can pick for flavor for your weapon' over 'book full of massive numbers of extra fiddly rules about gear that contains dozens of broken options in a game that didn't have the mechanics to handle this'. There's also some decent stuff on trade and commerce in the Old World that helps sell that the world is pretty interconnected; international trade is huge and there will always be ships and caravans for your PCs to hire onto as guards for an adventure. A lot of the actual rules about commerce start to hit the point where they aren't necessarily useful for an adventuring band that's going to be focusing on fighting hell-knights with tentacles coming out of their heads, but there's nothing really wrong with talking about how Bretonnia mints its coinage, or how the Norse from the southern parts of their country have started to adopt trading scrip to deal with Marienburgers and started to talk about maybe not worshiping tentacle Gods anymore. Similarly, later writing on how much rare, old elven coins are worth to a collector or how much you can get for treasure can be genuinely useful for a campaign; knowing an old elven silver-leaf is worth 200+ GC means you can imagine adventurers getting involved in murder and mayhem over rumors of a lost chest of them from an old elf colony. Knowing how much the PCs could get for what they find in an old treasure horde can be helpful. Knowing the exact exchange rate of the Imperial Karl against the Bretonnian Denier? Eh. Easier to abstract a gold coin to a gold coin, especially as all prices in the game are given in Imperial gold anyway. On an organizational note, I appreciate them reprinting several of the critical rules from the Core Book equipment chapter right at the start of this book; the intent is to make it so once you have Old World Armory you don't have to flip back to the Core Book to find those tables. I also appreciate them re-emphasizing that the Encumbrance rules are optional. If you don't want to use them, you use the normal rules for armor penalties in their place and just sanity check how much PCs can carry. Every game I've played in has done so. Also, I never noticed but the general rule for selling off your items is actually pretty generous to players IF they're good at haggling: You make an opposed Haggle test, if you succeed over your opponent you sell at 100% of the item's value +10% per degree of success (note: Not per DoS over your opponent, just per DoS you scored while winning). If you lose, you sell at 50% of value -10% per DoS they scored. A character who is actually good at Haggling can thus get an awful lot of money for the group selling off spare gear or treasure. That's going to become especially apparent when we get to the treasures. The section on Currency is where we start, and it says the average person in the Old World does a lot of their trade in kind or services, as coins are scarcer outside of the cities. But everyone will take coins for their work; coins are a big mark of wealth and they're useful to any person at any level of society. Everyone likes money, it's just that a butcher in a small town is more likely to accept keeping part of the meat from butchering a farmer's animal in return for doing the work. Neither of them has a lot of coins from their trading at the market at the nearest larger town or city, so exchanging services directly and saving what money they have for taxes or unusual purchases is the norm. Somehow, everyone in the Old World uses the same basic denominations of currency, which is hilarious, but at the same time I'm happy with a standardized valuation because I don't want to get too deep into the mustard trading rabbit hole. 12 brass pennies to one silver shilling, 20 silver shillings to one gold crown. The names and designs of the coins change, but the basic brass-silver-gold and the proportions of their valuation don't. Also, given that a person who isn't preparing their own food can live on 5-10 pennies a day, this means a silver shilling is actually a lot of money for the average person. A single gold crown is enough for an average person to live on for a month, even including some minor luxuries like drink or the very occasional meat dish. When you contextualize how much you're actually spending on adventuring gear and how much you actually get paid for fighting monsters, PCs actually see a hell of a lot of money flowing through their hands, which is something both this and the core book pointed out. Why do people take up a job where they have to fight Chaos Warriors without an entire army to back them up? Because you get paid enough to live on for a year or two in one night's (dangerous) work. Bretonnian coinage is simple and not especially ostentatious. The golden Ecu is their most valuable coin, featuring a stamped bust of Giles d' Breton to commemorate their best knight. The silver Denier has his coat of arms and the date of his death. Their brass pennies just print out the coat of arms of the Lord of the land they were printed in. Coinage is pretty uncommon in Bretonnia, though, given the subsistence agriculture and crushing oppression. The majority of coinage in the Old World comes from the relative economic superpower that is the Empire, and I suspect the reason almost every land uses the same denominations as the Empire is because Imperial coins are traded everywhere. The Imperial Mark is the closest to a standard currency for the Old World's international trade; everyone will take an Imperial Gold Mark/Gold Crown and give you good value for it, and these coins are everywhere. Every single major city mint and Imperial province prints their own designs of coinage. Altdorf, for instance, puts a figure of Morr on the back of every silver coin to commemorate the victory over Vlad von Carstein (the book doesn't point this out, but I note they do this with silver coins. The anti-vampire metal). Middenheim is printing commemorative coins to honor the regiments that fought to defend the gates against Archy. Hochland is the first province to put a gun on their coins, in honor of the Hochland Longrifle. The halflings mark every coin with their glorious symbol, their gigantic cocks. They love chicken in the Moot! Sitrlanders still mark their coins with the ancient queen who died at Blackfire Pass fighting alongside Sigmar, as they refuse to change anything. There's a ton of regional flavor to Imperial money and it's actually pretty cute. Estalia uses the Excelente, the Real, and the Duro, but they're the same as Imperial coins, even being measured to the exact same weights to ensure they can be traded freely. Kislev devotes a lot of effort to its gold Ducats, because each bears the image of the Tsar or Tsarina and then the Bokha Palace on the back. They commission the dwarfs of the World's Edge Mountains to make new stamps every time they have a new Tsar, because it is important to get the highest quality machines to represent the core of their state. The silver Denga isn't quite as majestic, but still bears the image of Tsarina Katarin. The simple brass Pulo has an image of a bear, because bears are cool, and an image of an eagle, because eagles are also cool, and does not change printing. Norsca has abundant silver, and as Norsca has begun to trade more with the south (at least along the southern coastal regions) they've begun to mint their own silver trading chits, which are accepted by Marienburgers. Gold is never used for coinage by the Norse, because gold arm bands and necklaces are valuable gifts for a Jarl to give warriors (since it isn't as common as silver) and much more valuable being traded for status than made into coins. Tileans have highly un-standardized money, with every city-state using different weights and measures, so you're never entirely sure how much a Tilean coin is worth. This makes their money much less likely to be accepted, and dwarfs flat out refuse to take Tilean money because they see it as shoddy craftsmanship and an insult to coinage. Debased and clipped currencies are common without any standard of weights and measures, though they try to stick to the Gold-Silver-Brass standard. Dwarfs engrave their gold coins with images of the Great Book of Grudges, because gold is usually used in international trade and they want to remind everyone they trade with that there could always be a grudgin'. Silver and brass coins usually feature mountains and runes. Dwarfs just call them 'gold, silver, and brass' because they think making up dozens of names for them is a waste of time. Elves also make coins for international trade, though they prefer to avoid putting swords or images of battle on them. They hand-craft their coins because they're elves, and that's just how they do. The book mentions they often don't use coinage among other elves, preferring to trade in favors and long memories, and I like to imagine this is because it takes so drat long to make their coins by hand that they don't actually have enough to use at home. There is also a little mention of Cathyan money (often found with a hole through it so it can fit on cash-strings) being made of steel, or how the Lustrians have started to trade nuggets of pure gold with travelers in exchange for fighting against evil in the jungle. There's also a big table of exchange rates but if that honestly comes up in your game I think your GM is kind of boring. They just needed to put a table somewhere in here, I think. This is an earlier book, from before they'd become as comfortable with the model of '100+ pages of pure fluff, then some rules'. There's also some rules on forgery, but it's so hard to do that you're better off just killing some monsters and having an adventure or stealing the money. There's also a bartering system, where you assign a thing a number of points based on its rarity and how badly the item is needed where you're bartering. It's a little cross-matrix of numbers but generally you'll get what you need once you trade something the other person agrees is of equal value, same as most economic transactions. You can also barter your services the same way, so if you're down on your luck and starving that's one of the uses for your Trade skills, I suppose. The currency section is really a good look at what we'll be getting all book. There's some fun flavor and details, but it's just not as interesting as the setting's history and this book doesn't have quite the same focus on direct adventure hooks as later books. Still, it's worth covering. Just don't be surprised when I skip around a lot more than I usually do. Next Time: Trade Routes of the Old World
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Mar 15, 2019 15:09
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Night10194 posted:So that's it for this, a weird, terrible game about a weird, flawed, and fascinating work. Thank you all! 
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Mar 15, 2019 16:56
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I hope this means no more anime talk. This is a dignified thread for important topics after all.
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Mar 15, 2019 17:16
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By popular demand posted:I hope this means no more anime talk. speaking of horrible giant robot games, i should do gurps mecha sometime unless someone has done it already
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Mar 15, 2019 17:19
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By popular demand posted:I hope this means no more anime talk.
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Mar 15, 2019 17:28
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Cease to Hope posted:speaking of horrible giant robot games, i should do gurps mecha sometime I think we've had a shot or two at the parent Vehicles rules, but not Mecha. So 
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Mar 15, 2019 18:18
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Bieeanshee posted:I think we've had a shot or two at the parent Vehicles rules, but not Mecha.  I should go back and finally finish Pathfinder Horrible Adventures first
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Mar 15, 2019 18:51
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By popular demand posted:I hope this means no more anime talk. Let me tell you about the Kantai Collection tabletop rpg
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Mar 15, 2019 21:10
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Merilan posted:Let me tell you about the Kantai Collection tabletop rpg Please tell me you can make your own ship-woman. I want General Belgrano-chan.
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Mar 15, 2019 21:17
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By popular demand posted:I hope this means no more anime talk.
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Mar 15, 2019 21:20
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Merilan posted:Let me tell you about the Kantai Collection tabletop rpg Wouldn't that just be one of those dense wargames that first inspired Gary Gygax (e.g., where the term "armor class" comes from)?
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Mar 15, 2019 21:21
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Merilan posted:Let me tell you about the Kantai Collection tabletop rpg
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Mar 15, 2019 21:21
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Young Freud posted:Please tell me you can make your own ship-woman. I want General Belgrano-chan. It’s been a while but I think you can make oc ships yeah
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Mar 15, 2019 21:21
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Davin Valkri posted:Wouldn't that just be one of those dense wargames that first inspired Gary Gygax (e.g., where the term "armor class" comes from)? Nah iirc it was a jttrpg in the same vein of say Meikyuu Kingdom
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Mar 15, 2019 21:23
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Merilan posted:Let me tell you about the Kantai Collection tabletop rpg Please do this. I must know these horrors.
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Mar 15, 2019 21:25
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Oh no now the onus is on me Too bad I’m leaving for Japan for two weeks no hooo hoooo hoooo (In all seriousness it’s just a harmless random table heavy game like double cross is. If I can find the doc file with the English translation I might one day do it)
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Mar 15, 2019 21:27
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Merilan posted:Let me tell you about the Kantai Collection tabletop rpg In a way I'm not surprised but I'm very curious to see how deep the shipwreck goes.
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Mar 15, 2019 21:28
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Cooked Auto posted:In a way I'm not surprised but I'm very curious to see how deep the shipwreck goes. https://ontlogy.wordpress.com/2014/04/03/fantranslated-japanese-tabletop-rpgs-kantai-collection-trpg/
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Mar 15, 2019 22:50
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Tibalt posted:Guess I'll just put this Goblin Slayer OSR back then...  Funimation also put out 5e sheets for the cast as the show was airing, which were a little too faithful IIRC:     
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Mar 15, 2019 23:39
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... “It”
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Mar 15, 2019 23:40
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so how much rape is in this? because Goblin Slayer is just very full of rape
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Mar 15, 2019 23:46
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Mors Rattus posted:... I've not seen the show - is that not the pronoun that Lizardman generally uses?
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Mar 15, 2019 23:47
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The Priestess's description also uses 'it' as a pronoun.
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Mar 15, 2019 23:49
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I'm not defending this but that could be parsed as "the party's rolls"
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Mar 16, 2019 00:01
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There's a good amount of unnatural language in those write-ups, at odds with the plain writing style D&D books typically go for. To me it's more odd that these are monster write-ups rather than PC stats. Or are these not actually the protagonists of the show?
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Mar 16, 2019 00:25
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Just Dan Again posted:There's a good amount of unnatural language in those write-ups, at odds with the plain writing style D&D books typically go for.
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Mar 16, 2019 00:28
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AmiYumi posted:Trap sprung and everything, I know, but: Fun Fact: the first pic of the Goblin Slayer tabletop RPG is sold in Japan, but to my knowledge it uses its own ruleset and not the 5e system. Edit: Between the fact that the tabletop hobby has a non-negligible number of sex pest GMs who like to spring rape in game sessions on unwitting players and that Goblin Slayer's first TV PG episode was this in anime form, the show makes sense when you find out that the two gods in the world are revealed to be an edgelord GM and a player's decisions being up-ended by the former to maintain the Crapsack World. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 00:41 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 00:35
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So is Goblin Slayer anything more than some sort of "dark action" show that wanders way hard into edgelord territory? I know there were people whining about an outcry and I wasn't certain if I should just ignore them or what. (I'm familiar with the revolting business of the Slayer's backstory, at least.)
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Mar 16, 2019 00:48
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NGDBSS posted:So is Goblin Slayer anything more than some sort of "dark action" show that wanders way hard into edgelord territory? I know there were people whining about an outcry and I wasn't certain if I should just ignore them or what. (I'm familiar with the revolting business of the Slayer's backstory, at least.) Nah, you hit it pretty hard on the noggin. It tries for a lot of its episodes to appear as yet another normal cliche fantasy JRPG setting with cute girls whose protagonist wandered out of a Dark Souls game...but with multiple instances of rape or attempted rape or rape in the background, which in fact serves as the primary driving threat against female adventurers should they lose or be overcome. It ain't just the goblins; the intelligent ogre warlord also threatens to rape the women once he kills the men. That was the moment I NOPEd out of the show for good, when I realized that this was going to be the only means of staking conflict. The outcry was primarily due to the TV PG rating, as well as the fact that the anime itself gives no indication that it has grim depictions of rape or any sort of content warning until after Crunchyroll added them in after the facts. There's also the fact that while toned down in the anime, the manga portrayed the rape scenes in an almost porny fashion, like one women in the spine-twisting boobs and butt pose. For a serious media critic analysis, I'd recommend the Mother's Basement video. It's the best one I've seen on the subject and one that I'd use to those somehow still unfamiliar with it in the anime/D&D fandom. Libertad! fucked around with this message at 01:08 on Mar 16, 2019 |
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Mar 16, 2019 00:50
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