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The God-Machine is some serious Unknown Armies poo poo and is the first WoD thing to really pique my interest. Is there a specific line concerning it, or is it just an overarching antagonist across the whole setting?
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May 25, 2016 00:10
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Alien Rope Burn posted:One of the few issues I had with God-Machine was some of their examples just seemed random rather than creepy, like the cave full of nails. I mean, that's odd, sure, but it just feels to me like the authors ended up coming up with stuff that's non-sequiturs than something I would actually find unnerving. The only major issue for me is that what the God-Machine does is often presented as so random and arbitrary it just feels like a big ball of random plot justification than a fully-formed concept. Maybe the adventures help out with that - I admit I never read them, mainly just the setting material - but there's a certain level of "you can't understand it!" that keeps me from a GM from understanding fully what I'm supposed to do with it. That's definitely fair, but it's also part of why I like it. Rather than give the GM a way to justify any plot development, it seems like a good jumping off point for the players to shape the narrative. Even something vague, like the ATM that hands out 20s for the hair of people it's never been fed before, seems like the sort of plot hook you can put in front of your group and the funnest explanation they come up with is what you make true. Is it cataloguing all the residents of the city? Preparing some powerful ritual that requires a sympathetic link to thousands of people? Feeding a subterranean hair monster that gets bored with the same tastes incredibly quickly? Weaving the most inclusive wig ever created? Grab whatever the players come up with and run from there.
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May 25, 2016 04:37
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Halloween Jack posted:Meanwhile, another Beast is planning to punish all the parents for not noticing the other creepy single childless dude at the kids' soccer game. I wonder what it would be like to play the Beast who teaches the most valuable lesson of all, that Beasts are terrible and need to be wiped out. I feel like one of the shadier Hunter groups would put me on payroll.
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Jun 7, 2016 21:05
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Big Mad Drongo posted:I wonder what it would be like to play the Beast who teaches the most valuable lesson of all, that Beasts are terrible and need to be wiped out. How is this different from any other Beast? 
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Jun 7, 2016 21:52
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Night10194 posted:What else is weird is (and I swear I'll go back and finish my review some day) very few of the WHFRP2e games I've run or played in have turned out quite like that. I mean I'm currently playing a ridiculous Spanish fencer lady who is trying to raise a stolen gryphon while arguing with a depressed frenchman that we live in the best of all possible worlds, and running a buddy game about a cosmopolitan elf and a college dropout who break into ancient ruins to try to be german low fantasy Indiana Jones. That's how WFRP can go, too. Didn't realize they made a Fantasy Candide RPG, good to know.
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Nov 30, 2016 02:33
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PurpleXVI posted:Middenarde Actually, the point of a spear is the bit at the tip.
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Nov 30, 2016 12:49
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RE: Gritty, semi-realistic low fantasy games, I'd love to see a high mortality game designed around one-shots, with the setting conceit being yeah, most adventurers die young and horribly, but grab the treasure from a dungeon or two and you are set for life. You're now a mid-tier celebrity, possibly minor nobility if you went on your mission for a proper royal, you never have to work another drat day, and you're drowning in attractive members of your preferred sex. In my head the game would be in two halves, the first revolving around a horribly deadly adventure, and the players who bit it would use the downtime stat up some local leaders/come up with some social norms for the second half, where everyone roleplays how the surviving heroes settle in their new lives/spectacularly fail to settle in their new lives/use their crazy loot to challenge the status quo through politics/violence. Big Mad Drongo fucked around with this message at 23:20 on Nov 30, 2016 |
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Nov 30, 2016 23:18
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Night10194 posted:Admittedly that's partly because 13A is designed to have fights usually end within 6 rounds, more commonly 3-4. True, but that's one of the best parts of the system. Three to four rounds makes for a good combat length in 13th Age, though it kind of sucks for some classes (sorry Monks  ).
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Dec 6, 2016 23:34
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
Are... are those nipple tentacles?
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Jun 8, 2017 21:03
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I feel like Fellowship can be a better PbtA game about Dragons and Friendship despite not necessarily being about either. Just bring along a Squire and a Dragon and you're golden.
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Jun 22, 2017 17:25
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hyphz posted:Betrayal At House On The Hill, 1 I generally like the game despite the flaws, but gently caress Death.
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Oct 20, 2017 03:15
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DalaranJ posted:One of the few benefits of the d20 system is that you could tell probability exactly. Which as a consequence meant you could tell exactly when bonuses/penalties were going off the rails. Advantage is roll twice, take better, right? As someone who doesn't get probabilities, how does that mess things up more than a fiddly pile of +1s and +2s?
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Nov 3, 2017 01:43
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Wapole Languray posted:OK fixed. Most of the names are gibberish or execrable dog-Latin so you're not missing much. And I've added the proper title, so we never forget this is a game with a literal METAL FONT title. In all honesty, if you had me guess I'd assume this review is the April Fool's joke.
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Apr 2, 2018 22:44
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So is Donald Trump the Godwalker of the Fool, or just a high-level avatar?
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Aug 10, 2018 12:02
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JcDent posted:This tidbit doesn't make the universe sound too Dystopian. Probably because elves are more likely to be magical, and Goblins ill like fire.
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Sep 25, 2018 21:10
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EclecticTastes posted:-A non-uplifted society has acquired something above their tech level that the Transcendentals' future selves have seen will prove detrimental to their desired future, take it away from them. I'm not completely down on the game yet, but this comes across as Actually, Magic Future Colonialists Do Know Best. Which is not a good look. Like, I do appreciate the hopeful tone, but it's giving off that Sigmata vibe of "comfortable middle class men tackling topics they don't really comprehend."
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Oct 11, 2018 15:02
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Night10194 posted:Like in general it just feels like Sufficiently Advanced doesn't have sufficient imagination. It's raised a potentially interesting question: What happens when something with a wholly different perspective on reality happens to reach a homogeneous opinion that the kindest thing it can do for reality is move all intelligences into its model of viewing existence? What happens when this is a genuinely well intentioned perspective reached by all available data to the computer Gods? Is this a function of their new perspective on reality being able to see past different forms of conflict, or have they become trapped in some kind of false consensus by the peculiarities of how they experience reality? Is this a higher level or a sidestep masquerading as one? That way you aren't arguing about intentions; they remain benevolent in intention. You're arguing about whether or not you could even say that a perspective on reality is necessarily optimal and how you argue that. It isn't just a matter of good and evil, it's a matter of the value of perspective and experience. I feel like the most interesting campaign for this setting would be a post-singularity Candide with Candide and Professor Pangloss as the PCs. Like, they take the Patent Office's mission completely straight while sci-fi chaos rains down around them as a result of their actions.
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Oct 16, 2018 22:00
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The real stirge was inside you all along. Take 2d8 damage (save vs. breath for half) as it bursts from its fleshy tomb.
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Oct 17, 2018 14:26
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I really appreciate the WHF reviews, before this I was under the impression the game line was "WH40k, but with magic swords instead of chainswords" instead of a pretty rad setting with an extremely rad take on a trickster god.
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Oct 18, 2018 14:40
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I think my problem with the farmer adept is I know a couple farmers, and the lifestyle required to generate charges by raising livestock means they won't have any time to actually do anything but use those charges to help them farm more. Since the whole Adept thing is based on obsession, I'm going to assume you can't have some chickens in the backyard you tap for the occasional minor change. Running a farm is a 24/7 operation, so it's a compelling NPC class (particularly with the human sacrifice angle) but not something I could see working with PCs unless it's a very, very low-stakes campaign or something where sessions can have months of in-game time pass between each setpiece.
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Nov 5, 2018 16:27
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Strange Matter posted:Turns out farmwizards are UA3's version of Videomancers. Sounds about right, yeah. Though the one dude I have in mind has what could be an interesting paradoxical "gently caress nature even as I nurture it" quirk: his hobby is growing plants in New Jersey that have no business growing in New Jersey. Between his tiny farm, some estates he's worked at and family members' houses there's a bunch of rare, often tropical vegetation that has no loving business being here but it's alive and he won't loving let some measly ice and snow kill it.
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Nov 5, 2018 17:27
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There's a dude who can literally turn anything biological into anything else biological with a lab and time, but iirc he's more interested in creating new kinds of livestock than messing with humans
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Nov 13, 2018 17:53
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Tibalt posted:Whoever heard of a zombie with a specific physical weak point anyway. Even outside of pop culture, it's all made up, so why not say rogues know how to slice up anything in just the right way? Hell, it makes the character more interesting; any chump knows to aim for a humanoid's heart, but your bad-rear end rogue knows how to find the equivalent point in an undifferentiated mass of goo.
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Nov 19, 2018 23:28
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Rifts is utterly fascinating, because it's somehow the longest-running Saturday morning cartoon ever despite not actually being a Saturday morning cartoon.
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Dec 26, 2018 15:14
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Find someone sees in you what Kevin Siembieda sees in a robot with hidden micromissiles.
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Dec 27, 2018 17:37
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Halloween Jack posted:
Thanks for reviewing this! I really appreciate a game that tries to do "gritty" without meaning "you're a shitfarmer who sucks at everything and will probably die of infection."
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Jan 28, 2019 22:50
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Night10194 posted:Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 2e: Old World Bestiary I'm also generally not a fan of in-universe takes on monsters, but this book has won me over. Rikkit'tik in particular is a pro, and I respect that.
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Feb 28, 2019 22:15
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They should compromise, have a guy name Whitby wander in and describe it as Absolute Terroir.
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Mar 7, 2019 19:55
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PurpleXVI posted:Meanwhile, Earth turns into a giant evil space crystal. No, really. This is the future Marianne Williamson wants
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May 26, 2019 11:37
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potatocubed posted:My reward for going in blind to CultSim was to die of starvation over and over then give up. If you're ever interested in trying again, go for the doctor start. You get a permanent job that never fires you and gives two money every 60 seconds when used, which is enough to pay for food and have a bit left over for emergencies. That said I agree the gameplay is rear end outside of discovering how the mechanics work, which is a problem because it runs out of new mechanics about 1/3 of the way through the game and the rest is a tedious grind until numbers big enough to win. E: Still way better than Invisible Sun, particularly lore-wise.
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May 28, 2019 23:00
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Piell posted:I think you mean Close, but have you considered https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXp8Th41rBs
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Jul 16, 2019 22:59
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I have to admit, the whole two yolks thing would be a fun little quirk for an inkeeper who has harnessed a seemingly useless power to become the world's best omelette chef. You know, a fun little aside for a minor character that drives home the fact that literally EVERYTHING here is magical. It's, uh, just not something that's going to be memorable on anyone approaching PC status.
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Jul 22, 2019 15:27
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kommy5 posted:I prefer baking, myself. But putting down a pizza at a gaming table is almost traditional, even if it's unusual to make it yourself from scratch. Cookies are also a good bet. I'm just thankful none of my friends or family refuse gluten. Plus baking a pizza in a pan is surprisingly low effort especially if you have a machine to knead the dough for you. Pizza from scratch is actually great for gaming parties, because good dough is made anywhere from 24 hours to several days in advance. The main bottleneck in my experience is oven size, you can only really fit one at a time and homemade pizzas tend to be on the small side. Then again my group runs game nights as rotating elaborate dinner parties so my idea of gaming food is probably very off.
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Jul 25, 2019 21:32
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EthanSteele posted:The concept is not bad, encouraging players to accept their characters loving up and even desire to gently caress up in the interest of good stories is what Burning Wheel and Chuubo's are good at. It's the execution and that tying having a miscarriage and your wife dying in childbirth directly to your advancement is real bad news. A narrative where that happens? Not for me, but nothing inherently wrong with that as a story. Making it so you do that directly for xp so you can learn Fireball is real nasty trash. This totally sounds like it could be an Unknown Armies thing. Call them Bunglemancers, colloquially known as Screw-Ups or Failsons.
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Aug 6, 2019 18:16
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The most feared Bunglemancers, of course, were a trio of Dukes known only as The Stooges: they terrorized well-meaning countesses and other society ladies well into the middle of the 20th century.
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Aug 6, 2019 18:54
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Flail Snail posted:I can see how all of the problems being handled by NPCs could work, but it doesn't sound like the designers went that way. This is more or less the pitch for Progenitor: it gives you a 30-ish year timeline from when the first supers showed up through 1999, when the titular Progenitor leaves Earth and a few other plot hooks are going down. Said timeline is super-detailed down to a month-by-month basis, specifically so you can drop the PCs in wherever it sounds like fun and send the canon timeline careening off the rails from there.
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Aug 16, 2019 19:42
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I actually think the Flesh Party would work, edge and all, if it was an Unknown Armies-style rumor rather than a statted monster. Like, just add a page or two of "things survivors saw on Earth during the fall" and fill it with all this ridiculous grim poo poo, mention it all seemed extremely ineffective at actual genocide and add a bit to the mystery of why the TITANS did what they did. "Was all this just a ploy to psychologically torture use for some unfathomable reason? Why?" seems like a more interesting mystery than trying to decide between "the TITANs just went all Skynet on us" or "they became too smart and as gods" or "lol alien computer virus."
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Aug 24, 2019 01:46
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Moonwolf posted:So what level influence do you need to summon infinite puppies to distract your enemies? Just distract?
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Sep 3, 2019 00:56
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PurpleXVI posted:Wrt missing in combat in RPG's... I've been thinking. Age of Wonders 1, 2 and Planetfall had attacks that either hit or missed, which made combat extremely swingy because either you did full damage or you did no damage and lol gently caress you enjoy your wasted turn. IIRC (it's been a few years since I last played) 13th Age has a lot of attacks with some variation of Do Your Level In Damage on miss, with daily abilities generally doing half damage on miss, and status effects either have their duration reduced to a single round or inflict a less dangerous status on miss. It can still be pretty swingy (the difference between, say, 3d6 and 3 can be pretty huge) and I don't think Your Level damage applies to basic attacks, but it's something. Also, enemies pretty much never roll for damage. Their attacks just have a set damage number.
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Sep 4, 2019 15:12
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I really had no interest in Werewolf before this review, because all I knew about woofs was that they are terrifying combat monsters and that Apocalypse was full of weird eco-terrorism. Learning that the thrust of the modern game is that said terrifying combat monsters mostly have to solve problems that can't be solved through combat makes it seem like tons of fun.
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Sep 5, 2019 15:32
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