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There's a surprising amount of good ideas buried in that wall of crap. I feel like the Millennium Religions would be a lot more interesting if there weren't defined sides and five or six of the least-dumb ones had a "marketplace of ideas" type thing going down, or just tried to compete in a variety of not-necessarily-violent ways.
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Oct 30, 2017 05:17
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Jesus of course the developers decided to give the religions theme songs they think are appropriate.
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Oct 30, 2017 05:25
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Barudak posted:
A E I O U and sometimes whites
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Oct 30, 2017 05:32
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Barudak posted:
Wait, art by Kieran Yanner? This Kieran Yanner? The guy's come a long way!
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Oct 30, 2017 08:18
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kommy5 posted:Time for another entry in Children of the Horned Rat This has always been a sticking point for me. How does the actual downtrodden, one-in-untold-billions, always scheming and hateful skaven clanrat actually live? Does he live in an adorable little skaven mouse hole, wake up in the morning as his warpstone-powered alarm clock rings, take the explosion-prone train to work and whip slaves all day? Does he get his cheese from a store run by an entrepreneurial fellow rat or is it some kind of collectivist nightmare of endless lines at the community canteen, with everyone trying to skip ahead? Of course it doesn't really matter and the Skaven are just there to set up the plot or throw at the PCs when chaos cultists and orcs start getting tired. But I can't for the life of me imagine how the day to day buisness of a place like Skavensville, under-Middenland actually works.
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Oct 30, 2017 08:38
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Which is also notable when you consider that you can, in fact, imagine the day-to-day life of pretty much everyone else in the setting pretty easily. That's even one of the primary things Fantasy has over 40k, that it's much easier to imagine people actually living in it. That said I'm gonna go with explosion-prone train, tiny adorable alarm clock, and collectivist nightmare with constant skipping but also an extremely active black market of cheese shops that often turn out to have no cheese, leading to tragic gun violence.
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Oct 30, 2017 11:25
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Your home-brewed encounters may be lame, but after acquiring 20,000 EXP and 40,000 gp worth of rare spell components, they can undergo a ritual that will transform them into  The Deck of Encounters Set One Part 13: The Deck of Small Children, Skeletons, and Spiders 82: The Follies of Youth In a town where the PCs are known as heroes or prestigious adventurers (or at least where they’ve boasted as such), a small girl comes running to them just as they’re setting out. Her name is Katie, and she has a backpack full of what is, no doubt, incredibly awesome and useful equipment, and she insists on coming with the PCs. If they just tell her she can’t, she’ll try to follow them anyway. The card says the best course of action is to find out where she lives and drag her home immediately. If badly handled, they’ll “earn themselves the hatred of one small girl.” Keep for that phrase alone. 83: A Bone in the Throat A weird mini-set-piece combat in a dungeon. Outside a heavy door in a 100-foot hallway, there’s a skeleton with all its limbs shackled to the door by light chains. When the PCs get 30 feet away it jerks to life, tries to head toward them but can only go 5 feet, then starts firing its knuckles and fingers at them! They’re magic missiles, basically - unerring and dealing 1d4+1 damage, and it can fire two per round. Turning is ineffective because it has nowhere to flee. Well, if you’re going to fight a single skeleton in a dungeon, it may as well be a bizarre rocket-punching one! Keep. 84: A Skeleton in the Closet In “an unoccupied dungeon room big enough to hold four skeletons,” there are... four skeletons. They’re standing motionlessly around a chest, holding broadswords, and wearing ruby pendants. They’ll only fight if someone gets within 5 feet or attacks them. The ruby pendants are engraved with the symbol of an evil god, and make the skeletons difficult to turn (as wraiths). In the chest is 300 gp of treasure, and a dagger +1, +2 vs tiny or small creatures. Nice, that’ll come in handy when the PCs take that quest to collect 7 rat tails. Oh, and other than making these (extremely fragile, AC 7, 4 HP) skeletons highly resistant to turning, “the pendants are otherwise worthless.” Aren’t they set with rubies? There’s almost something interesting here, but in the end, it’s just four skeletons guarding a treasure chest. I’d rather have a room that’s an anti-turning pendant factory, with skeletons working assembly-line style and one of them at the end praying to the evil god entirely in tooth-chattering noises. Pass. 85: Bad to the Bone Near a graveyard, in a large city. The graveyard is “poorly maintained,” to the point of having “open, ravaged pits where graverobbers have carelessly left the souvenirs of their trade lying about.” As the PCs walk by, six skeletons with rusted long swords leap up and attack. The swords “carry tetanus, which can cause gangrene.” With rules for that included, of course. Meh. It’s a “boring creatures attack in a normal way in their normal environment” encounter. I do like the implicit story that these skeletons drove away or killed some graverobbers, and now are salty towards life in general, but it’s not quite enough for me. Pass. 86: Step Into My Parlor In a steamy tropical swamp that seems alien and dangerous, the PCs find “a relatively high, flat piece of ground, a seeming ‘oasis’ of safety in the swamp.” Then four giant trap door spiders leap out and attack them. “If the characters seem to be winning too easily, the sounds of battle can draw other swamp dwellers to the scene.” You know, large alligators or whatever. The stuff of legends. There’s not much here. Is the staging enough to justify this card’s existence over simply rolling “giant trap door spiders” on a random table? I think not. Pass. 87: Sword Strokes While in a jungle, a sword spider attacks one of the PCs at random! I’m sure that’ll end well for it. Good hunting instincts. [/sarcasm] The rest of the card is just the spider’s tactics, which are... not interesting. (Drag away a dead person quickly! Finish off a wounded person! Retreat if there’s danger!) There’s no content here to speak of. Pass. Dallbun fucked around with this message at 20:36 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 13:20
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Dallbun posted:The Deck of Encounters Set One Part 13: The Deck of Small Children, Skeletons, and Spiders  The room with four skeletons makes it sound like the dungeon architect was given very specific instructions; off the second floor bathroom is the Room With Four Skeletons In It, and it'd better be exactly the right size, mister.
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Oct 30, 2017 13:49
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megane posted:
I feel like four skeleton folk that can remain perfectly motionless if they want wouldn’t take up very much space at all. Maybe 1 five foot square including the chest? You open the door and an immediately there are four skeletons up in your grill shouting at you to stay away from their treasure.
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Oct 30, 2017 14:40
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DalaranJ posted:I feel like four skeleton folk that can remain perfectly motionless if they want wouldn’t take up very much space at all. Maybe 1 five foot square including the chest? You open the door and an immediately there are four skeletons up in your grill shouting at you to stay away from their treasure.
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Oct 30, 2017 15:06
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Night10194 posted:Contemporary historians (as in, actual historians) do not generally use the term Dark Ages anymore. wdarkk posted:There's a surprising amount of good ideas buried in that wall of crap. I feel like the Millennium Religions would be a lot more interesting if there weren't defined sides and five or six of the least-dumb ones had a "marketplace of ideas" type thing going down, or just tried to compete in a variety of not-necessarily-violent ways. hyphz posted:I have once had someone tell me about their design for a board game where they said "there's zombies and humans and the zombies try to bite the humans and the humans try to cure the zombies and when everyone is zombies the zombies win, and when everyone is humans the humans win!"
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Oct 30, 2017 16:08
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Halloween Jack posted:A real sticking point for me, with WoD and various WoD-alikes, is that they're rarely written with the understanding that the organizations they're talking about are very small. The structure for a single local chapter of the Ordo Dracul set down in its book would require hundreds of vampires to fill every critical role.
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Oct 30, 2017 16:12
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Halloween Jack posted:Vampire also had this rather regressive view of world history wherein everything from Late Antiquity was "The Dark Ages" until the Renaissance happened everywhere at once, and nothing outside "Western civ" is really thought about. But they ended up kinda making that part of their brand, until the NWoD devs came right out and said that the WoD is a cinematic version of reality wherein Rome was one long sword-and-sandal film.
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Oct 30, 2017 16:32
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Halloween Jack posted:Vampire also had this rather regressive view of world history wherein everything from Late Antiquity was "The Dark Ages" until the Renaissance happened everywhere at once, and nothing outside "Western civ" is really thought about. But they ended up kinda making that part of their brand, until the NWoD devs came right out and said that the WoD is a cinematic version of reality wherein Rome was one long sword-and-sandal film. Given the general elite population bias among vampires in the oWoD (since they are the secret masters of the world and all that) and their incredible longevity, I'd have instead leaned into their history being their own massive misrepresentation/mis-remembering of events.
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Oct 30, 2017 17:18
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FMguru posted:I always thought it was pretty clear that the Dark Ages in Vampire:Dark Ages was the exaggerated pop historical version of the Dark Ages turned up to 11, with complete ignorance and superstition and illiteracy and 90% infant mortality and constant witch burnings and degenerate priests and inbred nobles and The Inquisition and plague and so on and so forth - which made it an easy place to set and run adventures. The general lack of attention paid to non-Western cultures doesn't stand out as much as it might, because the Vampire corebook doesn't do a "[Secret Monsters] Round the World" section like later games and supplements would do. The Revised corebook actually does have a "History of the Kindred" section that's entirely Western (after we get past mythical Bronze Age origins of course). But by that time, they had figured out that East Asia is dominated by the Kuei-Jin and Africa by the Laibon, so it doesn't prompt you to ask "What do vampires in, like, Thailand make of this thoroughly Abrahamic mythos?" Night10194 posted:Given the general elite population bias among vampires in the oWoD (since they are the secret masters of the world and all that) and their incredible longevity, I'd have instead leaned into their history being their own massive misrepresentation/mis-remembering of events. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:21 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 17:19
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Halloween Jack posted:Vampire also had this rather regressive view of world history wherein everything from Late Antiquity was "The Dark Ages" until the Renaissance happened everywhere at once, and nothing outside "Western civ" is really thought about. But they ended up kinda making that part of their brand, until the NWoD devs came right out and said that the WoD is a cinematic version of reality wherein Rome was one long sword-and-sandal film. Interestingly, nWoD has actually been generally quite good at portraying history accurately but with vampires. (It also tends to take the position that supernatural creatures didn't generally push social developments in the human world, but were instead pushed by them - the werewolves of Rome, for example, were a big part of the Legions but didn't run them. They invaded Germany because the Legions were invading Germany.)
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Oct 30, 2017 17:28
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Mors Rattus posted:Interestingly, nWoD has actually been generally quite good at portraying history accurately but with vampires. One feature of the nWoD that makes this so much better is that things tend to be much more local. Vampires don't run a worldwide conspiracy, because most vampires stay in a single city and never leave. Sure, it's becoming more and more possible to run things remotely, but vampires just don't have the national influence to pull out wider scale manipulations. They couldn't have started WW2 even if they wanted to
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Oct 30, 2017 18:56
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I always thought it was kind of funny that in oWoD the old and crusty vampires hated or didn't understand technology and had people who had people to do that stuff for them, because they're exactly the types who spend all of their time on message boards and chat rooms and never go outside. I mean, I know it's because they're a metaphor for old people who are holding the world back because they literally can't change and have too much money and power to fight, but then the old people all bought smartphones and got on facebook. The technocracy won, and it's kind of great.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:02
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Meanwhile NWOD elders who've just woken up apparently have dreams that catch them up with the recent history so they can blend in. Of course, that means their kids are the crusty old farts who aren't hip to today's youth until -they- sleep and so on. It also means the right sort of rear end in a top hat vampire wakes up demanding a MAGA hat or whatever and then you have to stake him until the local zeitgeist changes.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:08
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That particular change was because there's only so many times you can have a scene of 'tell me about this thing you call tee-vee' before it becomes the most irritating loving thing in the world.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:11
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DalaranJ posted:I feel like four skeleton folk that can remain perfectly motionless if they want wouldn’t take up very much space at all. Maybe 1 five foot square including the chest? You open the door and an immediately there are four skeletons up in your grill shouting at you to stay away from their treasure. If your skeletons are grappling each other, then they occupy the same space and you can theoretically compress an infinite number of medium sized skeletons into a given five-by-five foot square.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:20
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Mors Rattus posted:That particular change was because there's only so many times you can have a scene of 'tell me about this thing you call tee-vee' before it becomes the most irritating loving thing in the world. The new, less tired version is now: 
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Oct 30, 2017 19:23
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ZorajitZorajit posted:If your skeletons are grappling each other, then they occupy the same space and you can theoretically compress an infinite number of medium sized skeletons into a given five-by-five foot square. Give each skeleton in a very large group a magnetic element, and initiate the grapple while floating in a deep cylindrical pool of dense liquid surrounded by a conductive coil. As the skeletons grapple they cause more mass to occupy the five-foot square and the density of the resulting skele-composite configuration increases, causing it to fall through the liquid and generate a current in the coil due to a moving magnet. When the skeletons reach the bottom of the pool, they release the grapple, instantly expanding and reducing their density, which causes the expanded skele-composite to rise through the area contained in the conducting coil, also generating a current. Through the wonders of necromancy and buoyancy, we will solve the world energy crisis.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:27
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And I thought that my christ/antichrist reaction was revolutionary.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:45
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wiegieman posted:Give each skeleton in a very large group a magnetic element, and initiate the grapple while floating in a deep cylindrical pool of dense liquid surrounded by a conductive coil. As the skeletons grapple they cause more mass to occupy the five-foot square and the density of the resulting skele-composite configuration increases, causing it to fall through the liquid and generate a current in the coil due to a moving magnet. When the skeletons reach the bottom of the pool, they release the grapple, instantly expanding and reducing their density, which causes the expanded skele-composite to rise through the area contained in the conducting coil, also generating a current. You realize, of course, that you can solve the world energy crisis by just putting skeletons on treadmills, right? They're perpetual motion machines already.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:49
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Kavak posted:The structure for a single local chapter of the Ordo Dracul set down in its book would require hundreds of vampires to fill every critical role. Yeah, but the Ordo are a bunch of nerds who would spend days deciding on and writing down eay too many titles and go full Brainy Smurf whenever there’s a meeting.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:54
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Mors Rattus posted:You realize, of course, that you can solve the world energy crisis by just putting skeletons on treadmills, right? They're perpetual motion machines already. Of course, conventional treadmill applications are a tried and tested solution. However, solid state machines such as fluid systems requires far less maintenance. Eventually, moving structures break down. When fully enclosed, this structure is a black box from which current will emerge, virtually forever.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:55
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Meh. I'm too lazy to set that up. I'll use a bone ooze instead.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:59
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ZorajitZorajit posted:If your skeletons are grappling each other, then they occupy the same space and you can theoretically compress an infinite number of medium sized skeletons into a given five-by-five foot square. In Pathfinder this is not true; they occupy adjacent spaces. This is true regardless of the creatures' reach, so if two giants grapple each other they are adjacent. (A Murphy is that it makes no accomodation for creatures who are small enough to not have any reach at all. It says 'If you successfully grapple a creature that is not adjacent to you, move that creature to an adjacent open space', so presumably you do even if you can't reach that space rather than the very small creature being in the same space as its opponent. A weasel, which automatically grapples if it successfully bites, is moved five feet away from whatever it just bit; weasels are Tiny, so it can't actually reach five feet with its bite.) In 2E who the hell knows, did it even have proper grapple rules? Edit: I forgot this wasn't the Murphies thread but you get the tiny grapplers issue anyway. Prism fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 20:03
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Prism posted:In 2E who the hell knows, did it even have proper grapple rules?
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Oct 30, 2017 20:07
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Does any game have proper grapple rules? I'm not ruling out the possibility that someone, somewhere has managed it.
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Oct 30, 2017 20:08
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Comrade Gorbash posted:Does any game have proper grapple rules? Exalted 3e has decent grapple rules, although I'm not sure at what point it becomes "proper" or "good". The key thing is that Gambits (of which grapples are a type) draw from the same resource as "actually kill/injure enemies", so you aren't grappling someone as a shortcut to injuring them, you're grappling someone as an *alternative* to injuring/killing them. It also makes it harder to just shut down characters without brawl by opening with a grapple.
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Oct 30, 2017 20:10
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Prism posted:In 2E who the hell knows, did it even have proper grapple rules? Of course it did. Comprehensive, intuitive ones that were a pleasure to use in play. 
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Oct 30, 2017 20:16
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Dallbun posted:Of course it did. Comprehensive, intuitive ones that were a pleasure to use in play. I actually remembered that punching table but forgot it has a wrestling half.
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Oct 30, 2017 20:18
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Dallbun posted:Of course it did. Comprehensive, intuitive ones that were a pleasure to use in play. I love that your move is independent of your positioning, so you can go from a leg lock to a bearhug at random based on a roll of the die. also, you can't intentionally decide what kind of strike you're making. you just swing your arms wildly around you and hope for the best!
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Oct 30, 2017 20:29
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Kavak posted:The structure for a single local chapter of the Ordo Dracul set down in its book would require hundreds of vampires to fill every critical role. Obviously, every vampire in your local Ordo Dracul chapter holds hundreds of titles and performs all of their duties themselves, which are fairly light duties when your entire organization can fit in a full-sized van with room for luggage.
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Oct 30, 2017 20:36
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Ratoslov posted:Obviously, every vampire in your local Ordo Dracul chapter holds hundreds of titles and performs all of their duties themselves, which are fairly light duties when your entire organization can fit in a full-sized van with room for luggage. That reminds me of our high-school web club giving ourselves impressive-sounding titles to put on our college applications.
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Oct 30, 2017 20:38
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Freaking Crumbum posted:I love that your move is independent of your positioning, so you can go from a leg lock to a bearhug at random based on a roll of the die. Rounds in that version were one minute, so there was plenty of time to shift around between actual clinches, I suppose. Or you can maintain the bearhug. Though this also means that, on average, you're gonna have to headlock someone for several minutes straight before they pass out.
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Oct 30, 2017 20:39
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Kaza42 posted:Exalted 3e has decent grapple rules, although I'm not sure at what point it becomes "proper" or "good". The key thing is that Gambits (of which grapples are a type) draw from the same resource as "actually kill/injure enemies", so you aren't grappling someone as a shortcut to injuring them, you're grappling someone as an *alternative* to injuring/killing them. It also makes it harder to just shut down characters without brawl by opening with a grapple. Well, not so much in my experience, mainly because Brawl-dedicated grapplers will have a bunch of tools that basically end a fight once they're in there, particularly because they generally have a higher strength than most of their targets do, so they can basically own the grapple once it connects. It's balanced in terms of the fact that it's not necessarily easier to hit with (though Brawl gets some really cheap adders to attack when grappling) but once it connects a lot of characters will be utterly helpless unless they have a specific counter to it, whereas most characters will have some defense against normal attacks.
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Oct 30, 2017 20:51
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Ratoslov posted:Obviously, every vampire in your local Ordo Dracul chapter holds hundreds of titles and performs all of their duties themselves, which are fairly light duties when your entire organization can fit in a full-sized van with room for luggage. Or a town where the Ordo Dracul is basically vampire Amway.
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Oct 30, 2017 20:56
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