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Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Night10194 posted:

We'll get to it when we get to Sigmar's Heirs, but Halflings have the only functioning democracy in the Old World and are uniformly fairly prosperous over in the very rich and fertile mootland.

When they aren't forced to fight vampires who are only held back from conquering them from the fact that it's always sunny in the Mootland, halflings taste terrible, and that every other Von Carstein would mock a Von Carstein trying to conquer the halflings for lacking ambition and class.

Aren't Halflings also the only ones that don't spontaneously burst into tentacles when warp shenanigans occur?

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Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
"This is the spawn point for bullshit that walks/charges/runs/flies/teleports into your gunline"

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
Has the Empire ever noticed halflings never seem to mutate or is this just counteracted with trying to ignore their existence and the inability to take them seriously under any circumstances, potential cultists or otherwise?

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
You'd think they'd ban axes instead of guns.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
"Barbaric human and dwarf toys which no self respecting real person would ev-" BOOM "HAHAHA, holy gently caress give me one of those."

psudonym55 posted:

Cavalrymen also come with an expensive horse worth 15 gold crowns. Sold even for half price that is a lot of starting cash for a character.
I had a Cavalryman as one of my players starting career. First thing they did was sell the horse to buy decent armour and a shield.
Then moved to a warrior career that didn't require a horse so they could make use of their shiny new equipment.

Its not really WFRP unless you're just forced to eat the horse for emergency rations.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
GM's having little obsessions related to their interests outside gaming can either make a game great or really really obnoxious.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Mors Rattus posted:

WFRP 4e - History of the Reikland

2505: The playwright Detlef Seirk is hired by Imperial appointment to stage a play in Castle Drachenfels for the Emperor and the gathered nobles of the Empire. It goes extremely wrong.


Hmm?

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
Isn't "nazis fighting demons" something :vomarine: already covers?

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Mors Rattus posted:



Pigeons are bred largely to be messengers. Recently, however, they have become famous for carrying a deadlier cargo - engineers have begun using the little birds as deployment for explosives, with varying degrees of success. They have absolutely awful stats except for Ag, but...pigeons. They are Bestial, Fly 100, Size (Tiny), Skittish and Weapon+0. Optionally they may have Size (Small) or Trained (Broken, Home).

Countdown until Nuln experiences a Bat Bomb incident?

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Mors Rattus posted:

It is fairly explicit that kids born mutated are better off dead then left to the Beastmen, and that mutants are not evil in and of themselves, but rather that the terror and hate that they're subjected to tend to drive them to the Dark Gods or suicide.

Don't most mutants that don't die turn into chaos spawn?

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Night10194 posted:

Who ever actually played halflings, anyway?

I got a lot of mileage out of playing halfling fieldwardens in 2nd, especially if the game goes long enough to get into vampire hunter.

"I AM THURBOOT TUMBLEBOTTOM, DIE MONSTER, YOU DON'T BELONG IN THIS WORLD." etc

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

wiegieman posted:

There's the fact that vampires are enemies of Sigmar, mostly because Nagash is an rear end in a top hat and cursed them to be harmed by Sigmar's symbols after failing him.

Draculas vs Skeleton Clown God is also one of the better match ups in the game.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Night10194 posted:


Said Friars now have a reputation for wandering around getting drunk and getting up to party antics. Good job, Witch Hunter. Good job.

Low level banal hooliganism might be a decent way of keeping people from advancing to "jam needles in eyeballs in order to feel something again."

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
Of course we would go from "a wizard did it" to "toy breeds."

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

megane posted:

How literally every version of fantasy or scifi China was made:

1) list all the ideas, stereotypes, half-remembered facts, etc. about Chinese history or philosophy you can think of in five minutes
2) write: "but with [robots/magic]"
2) design document complete, well done




Has there ever been any alt-history where the God-Worshiper jacobins manage to topple the Quing Emperor?

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Communist Zombie posted:

Are you talking about the Taiping Rebellion? They used to exist as one of the splinter countries that made up China in older versions of the KaiserReich mod for Hearts of Iron / Arsenal of Democracy, but from what I can remember their fluff leaned heavily on the kingdom part (read imperial China) of the "Heavenly Kingdom" and not so much on their proto communist weird christianity.

Yes, and ah, that's a shame,

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

grassy gnoll posted:

Please, these people may be comparatively primitive, but they're still from our future and they traveled 20 light years further than any of us have ever gotten. They have minidisc players.

What's the state of the Ariadna/Nomad alliance in the current fluff? Also, wasn't there some sort of unobtanium on the planet that makes their comparatively primitive guns shoot harder? Like if a bolt action rifle could blow through both sides of an armored vehicle?

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
I assume letting them onto the Nomad servers was treated more or less like the existential hate the 20-something year old 4chan grubs felt when the Q-anon boomers flooded in and started posting wine mom memes. Or the Ariadna version of the goon that spearhunted pigs and posted pictures of himself with the corpses, but with giant wolves.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Loxbourne posted:

I recall an old marketing truism for both tabletop and computer games is supposedly that a large number of potential players simply will not touch anything but a recognizably modern-day human faction. Human factions (supposedly) outsell non-human ones across the board by a massive margin. If you don't put your Imperial Guard/GDI/Halo marines faction into the game, this large and well-funded chunk of the audience simply will not buy in.

It's always struck me as an incredibly cynical and depressing failure of imagination, but by heck games of both forms that neglect to have a Space America usually crater hard.

That, I think, is Ariadna. I remember there being a lot of buzz when they were in the works as a new faction, and Infinity certainly had a big local upswing in recognition and store space when they came out.

I'll admit it, Ariadna weirdness is the only reason I'm interested in the setting, honestly. I usually like the "Guts, Guns, Grit" faction in most settings.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
Yeah, but don't many/most game settings that keep adding stuff eventually get into that kind of overkill? For example, Aridana is still a lot more coherent than any description of Warhammer 40k that's more detailed than "Large potato men wearing refrigerators hit each other with chainsaws."

Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Oct 19, 2018

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
As someone who has played in 40k rpgs for over a decade, I absolutely concur. Feed me from the garbage can of ideology elfgaming.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
Mind control is only an interesting theme for me when its encouraging someone to do what they already wanted to do. When its just outright hijacking someone and driving them around like a car, my feeling is a resounding "meh."

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Angrymog posted:

Based on some of the questions that Trump has asked about nukes, you could see him nuking the ME with only a little nudge from War, rather than outright mind control.


I think this has to do with many people, even as recently as three years ago, thinking of the presidency as some sort of :decorum: thing with Serious, Good Intentioned People Doing The Best They Can. So obviously despite any political disagreements I have with the guy, surely the president wouldn't kill millions for laughs?

Even as dumb as GWB got, writing for an audience of the 90's/2000s people and telling them there'd be an orange goblin clown with an anus mouth building literal child concentration camps would've got you accused of exaggerating for effect. The apocalypse would be as dumb and cretinous as anything else in 2018.

Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Oct 20, 2018

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Young Freud posted:

If Trump was more political during the early '90s instead of getting self-owned with the Taj Mahal and trying to ingratiate himself in the New York elite, he would definitely would have been part of Ray Winninger's Underground.

Underground is the only RPG i can think of that captures the grotesquerie of the current zeitgeist. Maybe SLA industries.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
I give it a .5 on the Oglaf meter.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Comrade Gorbash posted:

There is a pretty common view in certain evangelical circles that the gods of other religious traditions are in fact demons or literally the Devil. Which is already layered on top of the fact that many US evangelicals fall into the dualism heresy, of imagining the Devil as an all-evil omnipotent being on par with the all-good God.

Back when I was stuck with a regular radio and nothing else in traffic, it landed on a local christian station where the guy blurted out "Satan is a super-being, you cannot, as a human, defy him without God's help."

Also later on in the presentation: "Does your stock portfolio glorify God?"

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
Well, I suppose someone had to one up Wraeththu's suggestion of using bb guns for LARP play. :psyduck:

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
For those of you whose verisimilitude would not be satisfied without a sex pest mind reader.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

MJ12 posted:

Infinity is basically a game of deep black ops by the CIA-equivalents of every power, so you get to see a lot of incredible assholes basically everywhere. And it absolutely does have this ambiguity baked into a lot of its factions about their actual intents and goals, and the implicit answer seems to be basically 'a little of both.'

PanO is at the same time an enlightened liberal democracy with the best living standards of humanity and the guys who have the Hexas, who make the CIA and their coups and death squads look like pikers.

Yu Jing is at the same time a state which will kill you dead if you become an enemy of a state and one which takes its role as guardian of its people seriously. There's a thread on the CB forums with the Yu Jing fluff and it's still an authoritarian state with strong national security powers to do just about anything, but it's also not exactly North Korea: https://forum.corvusbelli.com/threads/the-bright-side-of-yu-jing-a-fully-referenced-guide.22915/

Yu Jing has the weirdest tone dissonance out of all the factions tbh, especially after Uprising, because it can't decide whether it's an authoritarian bureaucratic state which has some extremely nasty black ops types or if it's Took A Wrong Turn From Warhammer 40,000 Guys. I'm mostly mentioning this because of the Kuang Shi. Some of the fluff suggests that Kuang Shi are not all that common, and then you have the stuff that suggests that they're... actually pretty common. (Incidentally, the Japanese Secessionists are simultaneously brave rebels seeking independence from an oppressive overbearing state and gigantic militarist terrorist assholes who just want to personally be on top).

Haqqislam are enlightened and moral and well-governed, and they're also immense funders of space pirates and run a massive section of extralegal assassins.

It's not clear if the Nomads hate ALEPH because they're right, and they're a sensible loose alliance of left-libertarians, right-libertarians, and people who know a bad thing when it sees it, or basically a bunch of bitter fringe political groups, criminals, crazies, and ne'er-do-wells who are just mad that they're outcasts.

ALEPH is Big Sister and pretty clearly does not follow the laws it should be following, and is definitely engaging in power grabs, but at the same time there's no indication that she has any malice towards humanity as a whole.

The Tohaa are like, humanity's only major allies in fighting the alien invaders and are pretty clearly racist jerks who are very much smug in their own racial superiority.

The EI are unique because you're seeing the absolute worst of the Ur Civilization and everyone tacked onto it and until the Sygmaa showed up, they were pretty clearly just Bad Guys in the most stylish and ludicrous of ways. The Sygmaa were probably put in intentionally to blur the lines there, and show that EI conquest might actually be not that bad for the majority of people, and maybe fighting against them is just going to cost a lot of pain for not much gain in the end. Of course, they also added in the Umbra, and there's a fluff quote about the Umbra by some alien who says something to the effect of "no matter what the EI says about its kindness and generosity, no matter what it shows you of the Combined Civilization's happy citizens, any power which would resurrect the Umbra doesn't deserve to be followed."

Ariadna also have that werewolf slavery thing going on, plus probably a lot of gross cultural quirks from the pre-fall West.

I thought I liked Nomads more than I did, because when I read the fluff here I instantly went "Uh, that's a Mobster state, not an anarch commune." Which seems to be a major threat for anarchists in real life, if they manage to throw off the state, and they're sitting on any remotely valuable resource, service, or location, the gangsters try to move in.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
Given the themes presented so far, I would've been disappointed if bug lady boobs weren't present.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
Also, you know, sometimes you just hit the guy with your sword, especially if its round 5 or whatever of the combat.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Zereth posted:

Yeah, but anybody who's got the right mindset to be a dispomancer in the first place won't live a normal life. Being an adept isn't just "If I get drunk, I get magic powers", it's having a skewed view of how reality works and believing in it so hard that reality bows to your unbending will and you get magic powers from your crazyness.

My Serentity Adept can only gain charges when accepting the things they cannot change, having courage to change the things they can and should, and being wise enough to know the difference while being a wholesome, productive member of society with their needs, wants, hopes, and fears in balance.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
The UA magic system seems like it would be experimented with during some kind of cold war u.s. govt psyops projects that's abandoned for being useless.

Like, the gov't knows about magic. It just doesn't care. Like, there's like a 500 billion dollar program trying to farm adept charges by getting people to self destruct doing dumb poo poo. None of it is useful but it keeps getting a senator reelected.

Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 03:32 on Nov 5, 2018

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
What's the ratio on adept killers vs just regular killers in a successful magical plutocrat's retinue?

Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Nov 5, 2018

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.
I guess its the difference between what would make a good novel vs what makes you able to have a character that can function. Similar to how 40krpg psykers can theoretically explode and that makes for a fun story but usually not a good game.

Also how Dorf Fortress stories are fun to read about but I would never actually play it again.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Feinne posted:

Aberrant mechanics

I know you've already said this, but the game seems to be a choice between "Do I want to do something flavorful, or do I just want to break the action economy over my knee"

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

grassy gnoll posted:



You know what poo poo everyone loves and is a great idea to introduce into your rapidly-growing game, so that new people are exposed to it as part of your cross-media push? That poo poo where there’s a grown woman trapped in a child’s body! :suicide:

Uhahu hails from some hosed-up Nomad experiment and now she looks like a child, forever, even though she’s thirty-something. There’s apparently a whole other group of adult-children out there with brain problems and murderous impulses. I am really unhappy writing these words! She’s a decent hacker, with some launchable repeaters. She’s probably your best hacker option in StarCo, and there’d never be a reason to take her in any other army ever.

What really galls me is that they don’t even pretend to justify this perv crap or work it into the story. Being a hosed-up child soldier has no impact on Uhahu’s character, and neither the sculptor nor the comic artist knows how to render a child, so you just have this short kinda deformed character hanging around for no explicable reason. But they sure as balls want you to know she’s an adult, but she looks like a child! Not lovely at all, CB!

"She may look like a child but she's actually a 3000 30 year old vampire Mobster-Anarchist!"

:suicide:

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Dawgstar posted:

Man, I remember somebody taking Disintegration innocently enough and finding out how uber it was in the first fight. It's just super gross. We moved on to another supers game soon after.

This seems like one of those systems where its a solved game in initially non-obvious ways, but once those ways are discovered, doing suboptimial stuff becomes a deliberate choice on your part.

Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Dawgstar posted:

That's about right. Were I to fall and hit my head in the tub and decide to run it, I would indeed insist on a gentleman's agreement and that's never a good sign for a system. Often happens with supers games, but still never a good sign.

The thing is I see some interesting parts in there its just that I see too much turn-of-the-century era White Wolf, specifically 1st edition Exalted (mechanical clunk, high power level, general "You are an uncontrollable obnoxious man-child destined to blow up the world", etc)

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Ronwayne
Nov 20, 2007

That warm and fuzzy feeling.

Feinne posted:

You roll a bit higher difficulty and then you get your EXTREMELY NASTY poo poo.

It should be noted that your immunity to your own powers would not cover the exciting consequences of creating degenerate matter outside the sort of physical situations where it is comfortable existing. Or the still exciting but less so consequences of not bothering to look into what constitutes a critical mass of plutonium.

I guess the standard for a superhero/modern magic game is "how, at chargen, or soon thereafter, can you destroy the earth?" I think someone calculated that with forces 4+earth something in NMage you could rupture the earth's crust.

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