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Halloween Jack posted:I'm curious, how many games have tried to be the kitchen sink for sci-fi that D&D is for high fantasy? I'm thinking games where you can basically play Star Wars, Guardians of the Galaxy, Buck Rogers, etc., travel to dozens of different planets with dozens of alien races and so on. I suppose Traveller counts, and definitely Star Frontiers, Encounter Critical, Humanspace Empires, and that French game that was covered here. I think they're rarer because "Generic Sci-Fi" is basically just "Star Wars/Trek with the serial numbers filed off" and thus it looks kind of indistinguishable from a generic Star Wars without the license game. Furthermore I think that the 'sci-fi' label implies a much greater deal of rigor than fantasy does, so people are more likely to ask themselves if having starfaring nomadic super cyborgs and superhuman AIs is going to 'realistically' change the politics of the region. Which means that you don't get kitchen sink sci-fi which supports, e.g., Peter F. Hamilton & Neal Asher games in the same space as Star Trek/Star Wars games.
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Dec 4, 2017 20:21
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FMguru posted:Another thing about faction-based games is that you have to build the setting so every faction have a reason to fight with every other faction (so that any pair of armies or decks that show up at a table have an in-game reason for being there), and also a reason for each faction to fight among itself (in case two space marine players meet each other or two ork players or whatever). Some settings go the extra distance and set it so every faction has a reason to ally with every other faction. I really liked Infinity's explanation of "all of these are basically deniable deep black ops operations," which is why you can have like, even nominally allied forces killing each other in the middle of nowhere. More games should recognize that just because the scope is small, the stakes don't have to be.
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Dec 5, 2017 23:10
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Down With People posted:Won't protect them from the Dark Young around the clearing, and if Grandmother gets the jump on them they're hosed. She's got some nasty spells. I think there's a place (of "Cthulhutech but not poo poo") for a game where you have people exploiting unsafe Mythos artifacts they don't understand to fight, but not CoC. My pitch for Cthulhutech-but-not-poo poo is to straight-up get rid of the characters that aren't somehow touched by the Mythos as PCs. You don't play a soldier, you play a special forces tager, a man bonded to an alien thing which might not be entirely benevolent but seems to hate the other guys more than it hates humanity so ok. You don't pilot a giant robot, you commune with a god-machine built from impossible extradimensional genetics, imprisoned and barely controlled by 20 tons of armor plate and locking system that exist primarily to protect humanity from its own weapons systems driving them insane and/or murdering them. Etc etc. Then get rid of all the secret cult nonsense and make it straight-up about acting more openly while wrestling with the fact that the very abilities that allow you to act more openly are themselves corrupting and maddening. If I'm playing "punch Elder Gods with giant robots" as a game I probably don't want to be playing Delta Green. I want to be able to wave my warrant card and show people that I am an Official World Government Operative with all the clearances for Militarized Body Modification and I want people to obey me, part because I have the card, part because they're scared I might flip out and eat them or go rogue like that guy they heard of in rumors...
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Jan 9, 2018 03:45
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Night10194 posted:The more I think on it the more I think Scion's premise would be way more interesting if it explored a world where the concept of Monotheism simply didn't happen *because* the polytheistic faiths were evidently and abundantly correct. That just, uh, probably wouldn't look a lot like ours. It would be, but I think it'd make it much harder to have that sort of urban fantasy feel when you can't say 'things are basically like the modern day, except with a little more superstition and the supernatural.' I wasn't too hot on the worldbuilding before, but I think this sort of not-really-hidden urban fantasy works super well for Scion as it was implemented.
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Jan 28, 2018 02:43
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That spell list sure is something. A lot of them sound cool but are incredibly underwhelming and then you have wacky nonsense which is either broken one way or broken in another way.
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Mar 7, 2018 03:59
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grassy gnoll posted:The Sygmaa, better seen in the photo above, unfortunately. Sygmaa likewise don’t get their own subfaction (but it’s probably a matter of time). These are the Quisling Tohaa, traitors to their race, etc etc. 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."
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Oct 29, 2018 11:25
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grassy gnoll posted:This is a good post. Yeah Yu Jing feels really weird because it almost seems that there are two Yu Jing writers. One, who knows a bit more about Chinese politics and history and is writing a Deng Xiaoping thought-like state where the party and the state apparatus have internal checks and balances and the whole thing is a bit oppressive and sometimes callous but perfectly livable and does more or less right for the majority of its citizens, and one who basically writes it as an evil empire with Judge Dredd types running amok killing babies for being Japanese.
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Oct 30, 2018 06:02
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grassy gnoll posted:Speaking of absorbing the cultural and techonological distinctiveness of others, it's Some notes: Unidron Batroids are also Dogged, which means that if you knock them out, they can stay functioning until they drop dead at the end of the turn, and you need to re-kill them. On a fairly cheap combat platform, this is a massive pain in the rear end because it means that you need to spend a lot more orders kicking them in the face. The EI's signature weapons are plasma weapons, which are really nasty because they have two chances to wound every time they hit. They're particularly nasty against Ariadnans because the first chance to wound is saved by armor, the second is saved by BTS, and Ariadnan units pretty much universally have BTS 0, which means that EI gunners can basically vaporize heavily armored Ariadnans pretty often, as Ariadnans also have a distinct dearth of multi-wound units. The Overdron Batroid, the big swole guy, is notable for how he's actually big and fat and slow. Most infantry move 4-4, medium infantry typically move 4-2 outside of some exceptions (most of whom are in ALEPH, I believe), most TAGs move 6-4 (the Sphinx moves 6-6), and bikes move 8-6 or 8-4. The Overdron moves 4-4. The Overdron is also amusing because he's got a ludicrously cheap option, the twin heavy rocket launcher option, who costs less than 60 points, which is within the price range of the smallest, weediest TAGs (like the Gecko or Xeodrons). Finally, you forgot one unit (well, character), Cadmus-Naish Sheskiin. Who sort of doubles as a preview of the other overbearing AI.  Yes, another green alien space babe. Sigh. Cadmus-Naish Sheskiin is a Cadmus agent who managed to win the holy grail of Morpho-Scan targeting and Morpho-Scan Achilles, who has the absolute highest overall statline of basically any soldier in the game. This means she runs as fast as a TAG, is swole enough that she can kill a giant robot with a sword, can gunfight with the best Panoceania has to offer (and remember that Panoceania is the 'shoots good' faction), and can outfight all but a small handful of units in close combat. She also has a nanoscreen (something Achilles doesn't have) to make up for her weaker defenses by basically allowing her to carry portable cover with her in all situations, and carries demolitions charges for some reason. Thankfully she doesn't inherit his high armor and ability to eat multiple wounds and is actually kind of fragile for her ludicrously high cost. She costs 50 points, which is a lot for someone so fragile. Although she keeps her ability to be a vampire and suck health out of enemy soldiers, that can be pretty risky to use. Amusingly, she can join fireteams, although that means that some jerk with flamethrower or shotgun can annihilate a hundred points of dudes in one fell swoop if she ends up in a bad position.
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Nov 2, 2018 13:25
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grassy gnoll posted:
I'd actually disagree with the characterization here. All ALEPH forces are immensely hard to kill and punch above their weight-ALEPH's signature things are above-average armor ratings, Dogged/No Wound Incapacitation on pretty much everything, defensive equipment such as optical disruptors or cloaking devices, and extremely good statlines. It's not uncommon for a basic trooper like a Myrmidon to be able to go toe-to-toe with an elite soldier from another army and have a good chance of kicking that other guy's rear end. Vedic is fast, stealthy assholes who have a little of the Nomad flavor of dirty tricks, but generally unlike the Nomads they're much better at winning face-to-face confrontations due to their elite statlines (while Nomads are often kind of weedy). They can play a pretty mean stealth game and have some ridiculously good sneaky jerks, but they can also win face to face firefights better than most other factions. The Steel Phalanx are just incredibly straightforward, unstealthy motherfuckers who are very good at bulling through opposition because they don't have any other options than bulling through opposition. Their signature thing is probably sky-high close-combat skill on every person, which means that they are ludicrously brutal in cramped maps where they can easily engage in melee.
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Nov 3, 2018 09:13
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Feinne posted:He's all that and more, he's even more so than any of the rest of the Teragen members the avatar of 'The Worst Guy You Know Has A Good Point". He's factually correct about most of what he says regarding Novas but he's also a fucker even to the people who are ostensibly is friends and allies (to say he doesn't play well with others is a resounding understatement) and as noted in spite of having essentially infinite power Max-senpai is not going to notice him in this era and nothing he can do will change that. I think the most interesting thing about Divis Mal is just how petty his motivation ends up being. His motivation ends up being basically that he's incredibly, massively lonely and wants someone who he can spend the rest of his life together with. It's probably the most sympathetic bit about him and he'd probably have been a better character if that had been emphasized more.
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Nov 8, 2018 05:48
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Night10194 posted:Well, those greeks sure are kind of disappointing and not nearly as wild or interesting as I was hoping. The thing about the Assault Subsection is that they're the new builds after ALEPH found that its original forces were inadequate against the technological advantages of the EI. Basically, it's ALEPH trying to create anime protagonists. Every one of them is deliberately built to be unstable, because ALEPH is trying to beat an AI that is smarter than her and isn't going to manage to do that by making more cold professionals. The Phalanx is basically just enough semi-professional folks (Phoenix, Hector, Atalanta) to keep it from completely imploding and a bunch of dysfunctional special forces psychopaths who are intended to confuse the EI's logic circuits. In that context, Achilles makes perfect sense. You want someone who isn't a consummate professional, but yet is a martial prodigy. Also grassy knoll forgot to mention the most amusing thing about Achilles, which is that he's been nerfed several times because he gets pretty goddamn ludicrous. Generally, TAGs have significant weaknesses to make up for their speed, armor, extremely good accuracy, and high firepower. Most TAGs have really crap close combat skill, which means you can tarpit them with even basic troops-a generic Fusilier or Ghulam or Zhanshi getting into a knife fight with a TAG is often hilarious because there's a real chance that the TAG will miss ineffectually while your dude bounces a knife off of its thick armor. Few TAGs have more than basic camouflage or mimetism, and the only ones which do (the Sphinx and Avatar) are super expensive. Furthermore TAGs are huge and can be possessed by hackers, which takes a really powerful piece off the board very quickly. TAGs can't dodge for beans, which makes them vulnerable to suicide flamethrower dudes, and oftentimes they don't have a good weapon to respond to close-range threats. Achilles basically stabs every one of these weaknesses in the dick. He has one of the highest close combat skills in the game, plus high martial arts, which means the 'tarpit with cheap CC troops' strategy doesn't work so well because Achilles can just cut those fuckers in half. He has ODD and 15 ballistic skill, which means he gunfights almost as well as an Avatar (although the Avatar has a better weapon). He has a pistol, which isn't really a good weapon, but the main benefit is that it means that he has more options to respond to close range gunfighters. And he's only the size of a standard infantry unit, which makes it much easier for him to hide, use cover, or negotiate buildings, and as infantry he can dodge much better than TAGs. Finally, because he has martial arts, he has Stealth, which means that he can safely cross hacking areas. In his first appearance, he was ARM 6, PH 16, so just as strong as Ajax, with better armor and 3 full wounds rather than 2 + NWI. ARM 6 only shows up on one other HI unit (the Morat Sogarat) and is generally reserved for TAGs. In fact, there are light TAGs with less armor (like the Gecko). So basically, you had an infantry unit which could gunfight as well as literally the absolute best gunfighters in the entire game, had the armor, speed, and durability of a TAG, was much less vulnerable to the standard TAG weaknesses, and cost much less than most of the comparable TAGs. The Sphinx is a slightly worse shot and cost 50% more. The Avatar costs nearly 80% more. The Cutter has better armor and equivalent gunfighting ability with a better weapon, but basically got completely dumpstered by hacking due to its trash WIP and also cost 50% more. Probably for this reason, literally the next book nerfed him to ARM 5 PH 16, and the changeover to N3 nerfed him to ARM 4 PH 15, and removed his heavy shotgun profile. His V2 restores him to ARM6, but loses ODD for mimetism. Also, rumor has it that until he was playtested, he was originally capable of linking with Myrmidons, which is just all kinds of ludicrous.
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Nov 14, 2018 13:30
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grassy gnoll posted:
grassy gnoll is really good at understatement, because the Anaconda is awful. The Anaconda has ARM 6, BTS 6, TAG vulnerabilities (crap dodge and possession vulnerability), 4-4 move, no tools to inflict negative modifiers on incoming fire besides suppressive fire, only 2 Wounds, and a mediocre BS of 13. You pay 64 points for this. Meanwhile, 64 points is within the price range of extremely elite heavy infantry, which are generally as tough and better at outfighting it. The HMG Hac Tao is 68 points, and is almost as tough (losing only a point of ARM), much better at dodging (PH 14 instead of 16, but it doesn't take -6 from being a TAG), and has Thermoptic Camouflage, which is a straight-up -6 to most people's BS if they shoot at it and also means you can deploy entirely hidden and safe until you choose to make a move, and you have a marker state that prevents units from firing on you. To add insult to injury, the Hac Tao is also smaller and fits into spaces more easily and also has a better BS than the Anaconda. The Sogarat has equal BS and ARM, and has BTS 3 instead of 6 (so they're more vulnerable to hacking and certain weapons), but also costs nearly 10 points less and gets an Armor-Piercing HMG which means that in a gunfight the Sogarat is probably going to dumpster the gently caress out of the Anaconda pretty easily. Hell, the ORC troops, which are the generic HI that people basically never take because they're so generic, vanilla, and uninspiring, might have ARM 4 instead of 6 and BTS 3 instead of 6, but move just as fast, can't be possessed, are better shots, and their HMG platform costs 20 fewer points. Anacondas are incredibly sad and I have no idea where their points actually go. It really seems that their costs are typoed and they should be ~10 points cheaper. quote:The Free Company of the Star, commonly StarCo, is a semi-deniable, wholly-owned subsidiary of Corregidor. If Druze are the shady mercenaries, these are the rag-tag white-hat mercs. They primarily draw their units from Corregidor, with some Ariadna and Haqq thrown in for flavor. They’re also loaded with special characters - only Steel Phalanx has more unique units. Yeah that seems a lot like the whole "Gutier can't make up his mind on anything" bit that you mentioned. There's clearly some deliberate gray areas in PanO and Yu Jing and whatnot but Uprising and the NA2 seem to be particularly bad about inadvertent inconsistency in the tone. And like, I actually kind of like StarCo as white hat mercs with a sense of social justice even though the first clause is kind of... iffy? If you check the fluff of what's banned in the Concilium Convention and is considered a war crime, half the weapons list is. Basically the only ammo types that aren't Concilium-banned are Normal, AP, Stun, Adhesive (and Plasma/K1, but that's probably because they're too rare to be banned yet), and most template weapons are banned. The cutest thing in the Mobile Brigada fluff IMO is that sometimes they just show up to murder strikebreakers and force contract renegotiations with corporations that oppress their workers and I kind of like the Nomads showing that face once in a while instead of RAAAARGH ALEPH or "we are the criminals and furries and lolicons." I mean I like ALEPH more than the Nomads but I think ALEPH works best when its foil is nuanced and interesting.
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Nov 18, 2018 06:26
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Also, as a fun fact for our favorite man-sized TAG, Achilles might be a beast on the tabletop, but in the RPG, he's even more ludicrous. On the RPG scale, an attribute score of 8 is considered 'human normal,' 10 is exceptional, and anything above 10 generally means you're some sort of transhuman superman. None of Achilles's stats are below 11 and his combat stats are all at 13. That's not super-impressive by itself, sure. But wait there's more! Achilles has more health than an actual TAG. I don't mean a mini TAG like a Gecko, I mean that Achilles has 18 health, to the Guijia's 17. The Guijia is a full-sized, if unimpressive, 'modern' TAG. The Guijia has more armor and more strength, but even competing on this level is impressive. Achilles also has Superhuman Attribute +2 (All). He is superhumanly strong, agile, coordinated, perceptive, intelligent, and everything else. How Superhuman Attribute works is that normally, in the RPG, you roll 2d20, and if it's below your stat + skill, you gain a success. If your successes match or beat the difficulty of the roll, you succeed on it. You can add more dice to that via various methods, and there are ways to have a die count as 2 successes, but in general getting over 2 successes requires putting in real effort, even for a very specialized, very good character. Superhuman Attribute + 2 (All) means that he straight-up tacks on 2 successes on every single roll he ever makes. Before he rolls a single die, he just tacks on 2 successes. And for all combat-relevant rolls, he basically succeeds on 18 or under, and he gets double the dice if the GM spends dice on giving him extra dice to roll. He is so good at shooting that his MULTI Rifle outdamages a Guijia's HMG. The GM guide basically says "Achilles is here largely as a reference to what ALEPH can produce when she goes all-out and the limits of what can be handled by the system, putting him in the path of the PCs is a very quick way to end a campaign, and using him to assist the PCs can easily do the same."
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Nov 18, 2018 07:57
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grassy gnoll posted:
Oh yeah, the best part about the Uprising is that there's a new Mercenary Shasvastii character who was heavily involved in the whole thing, so the entire revolt might literally be an alien plot. My dream for Uprising would have been like, an actual Japanese civil war, between the guys who were mostly okay with the Yu Jing hand because well, at least they were safe and protected and had some opportunities for advancement (remember, the JSA is supposed to, in fluff, exist because the Japanese were complaining about how they were being treated like poo poo, so as a response they were given their own force structure and semi-autonomous status as a sop to national pride) and the guys who wanted full sovereignty. Take JSA + YJ forces versus other JSA + YJ forces. You could represent that by tanking the AVA of most of the JSA units in Yu Jing forces while folding the JSA off to NA2, to represent that a good chunk of them up and vanished and now the Yu Jing folks are kind of leery of the ones who haven't proven their loyalty. It would work better than straight-up taking the units off the board I think. The Infinity factions are at their best when they're questionable, rather than out and out evil, and I think the biggest failing of Uprising was leaning right into full evil (and the Sygmaa are great because they make the EI more than just full evil).
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Nov 20, 2018 05:46
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Zereth posted:Going with this would also seem to open the door to making it easy to have variant skaven, like all the ones coming out of this facility have a huge-rear end human ear growing on their back for some reason, or whatever. Yeah this sounds incredibly metal in the best of ways. megane posted:I remember when somebody first explained Chaos' basic shtick to me and I thought, "wait, they're called Chaos, and they're supposed to be these insane marauders who hate structure and law... aaaand they're all utterly, dogmatically devoted to one of four very specific and consistently detailed deities?" I get that it's supposed to be kind of ironic maybe, but man, the Empire's religion is more chaotic than Chaos. One thought that I had regarding how Chaos (especially in 40k) is boring was that Chaos could be more interesting if it was more cosmic horror than personal horror. The four Chaos gods might exist, but they're basically irrelevant entities that generally don't act or have comprehensible plans or desires on a mortal scale. Instead, people can just harness Chaos to achieve goals, and it's basically like nuclear power-if you use it carefully, you might be able to do it 'safely' but it'll probably blow up in your face and give you cancer. This probably works better in 40k, because it would make the Horus Heresy emphasize that the Imperium is a lovely enough place that when push came to shove, literally half its demigod supermen decided to flip it the bird and start a rebellion rather than be another "woooooga boooga Chaos" thing, though.
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Dec 5, 2018 06:58
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Feinne posted:When we see the Level 4 -6 Powers the real question is whether a YHVH built as 'omnicompetent' under Aberrant rules and thus ALSO having theoretical access to everything could survive being hit by the best offensive power (I think he could not). Okay, at Quantum 10, YHVH can buy 10 dots in the "Armor" power, with the Mastery 3 extra, which gets him 60 Bashing and Lethal soak per dot (Mastery 3 multiplies all parameters by x20), and turns Aggravated damage into Lethal damage, which can be soaked normally. Presumably YHVH also has 5 dots in Stamina and 10 dots in Mega-Stamina, giving him 30B/20L soak from that. So he can soak 630B/620L. The best offensive power, Quantum Inferno, at 10, can dish out 1000 levels of Bashing damage per cubic meter of target. Unfortunately, the average volume of a human being seems to be less than 0.1 cubic meters. So he easily bounces that poo poo off. What is equally nasty would be a Mastery 3 Quantum Bolt, which when dealing Bashing damage, deals [600] levels of Bashing damage plus another 800 dice of damage, and therefore basically instantly vaporizes YHVH via the power of Bashing damage overflowing to Lethal. However, if YHVH also has 10 dots of Force Field, he gets (Quantum x 20) + (successes from a Stamina + Forcefield roll x 40) Bashing/Lethal soak, giving him on average 840 extra Bashing soak, letting him tank even that attack unless he gets a really bad roll, at which point he probably vaporizes. You'd need to shove a pile of Strengths into that Quantum Bolt to deal more than ping damage if he gets an average or good one though. Stacking defenses in Aberrant can be ludicrously bullshit, but if you don't stack defenses you are ludicrously fragile. MJ12 fucked around with this message at 07:30 on Dec 11, 2018 |
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Dec 11, 2018 07:28
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Bio-Wizard Organisms It's kind of impressive how aggressively worthless these things are. It would at least be interesting if you made them legitimately work as-advertised and made them better than close equivalents (or cheaper) and you had at least something resembling a moral quandary of your patronage helping a bunch of evil space wizards. That would also give them a better excuse to show up in the gear lists of baddies so you could get them the morally upright way of murdering their former owners and taking it from their corpse. What's a little bit of corpse mutilation?
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Jan 3, 2019 09:51
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Barudak posted:Yeah and while 4.0 isnt out yet the 3.0 movie was basically "This is the Evangelion setting showing you what would happen if Shinji did like what your fanfic wants" Something that a lot of dumb memes about Shinji also forget is that he is literally the best pilot in the entire show. The first episode where he gets knocked unconscious and the Evangelion does all the fighting for him sticks in people's minds, but literally the moment he started actually being trained rather than being forced to drive a complex trillion-dollar cyborg war machine with absolutely no understanding of how they work he was extremely effective at fighting things. The Zeruel fight is probably the best example-both Asuka and Rei get trashed in seconds. Shinji basically gets five whole minutes where he is kicking Zeruel's rear end up and down the curb, and if it wasn't for the Evangelion's battery running out he probably would have won. My personal thought is that although the primary focus of Evangelion is on isolation and depression, there's also a conscious and knowing rebuttal of the typical "boy grows up to be a man because he falls into the lap of a giant robot and learns to save the earth" narrative that Evangelion superficially resembles. Instead of gaining fulfillment by getting that so-common wish to become the chosen one who can save the world, it destroys him because being the Chosen One isn't what he actually wanted or needed. It's actually kind of beautifully fitting that Shinji's depression and isolation make it impossible for him to use his talents in a productive, constructive manner-but they also make it impossible for much of the audience to appreciate his talents.
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Mar 13, 2019 08:43
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Night10194 posted:I always thought the whole 'The Empire were the good guys!' stuff really took off after the prequels' terrible writing made the Jedi seem like a bunch of total pricks, but I'm probably wrong because some nerds have always loved fancy uniforms and jackboots with big guns. There's also the whole insane Star Trek versus Star Wars subculture which led to some incredible hot takes about how the Star Trek Federation were actually evil dystopian communists who were inferior to the Empire and supporting the Empire was totally a-ok because they were better than communists. It's pretty insane.
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May 8, 2019 09:03
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Yes, even if you're playing a villainous character, you should do good things! Because karma! Makes sense. I know this isn't what the book means, but I kind of like the idea that 'good' or 'evil' characters are defined not by how they behave typically, but how they behave at their worst. Of course doing something like that would probably make it very hard to claim that the Coalition are just misunderstood. It feels at some points that the emphasis on the fact that not everyone in the Coalition is a baby-killing genocidaire was initially an attempt to demonstrate the banality of evil-you don't need that many people willing to commit mass murder and run death camps to actually make those happen, and it's very possible to make them a thing that people largely ignore because it's not emphasized and important. The grunts just take prisoners and the prisoners go to places and the grunts don't ask questions. The citizens just do their jobs, not knowing that they're also supporting fascist death camps. You don't need that many people to run the fascist death camps, after all. You don't need everyone to be gung ho about them, so long as everyone knows that Those Types are the enemy and don't ask hard questions about whether they're being treated right. But at some point it spiraled into believing that the existence of these people who were ignorant of the Coalition's cruelty somehow justified it, rather than making it more awful because of the banality of it all.
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May 22, 2019 10:44
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Night10194 posted:Feng Shui 1e I think the book that gave you Hardware shticks also said that if you play a Cyborg you can trade Arcanowave shticks for Hardware ones, which makes the Cyborg significantly more viable because Hardware shticks can be pretty powerful. I wonder if Volkov becomes better if you do that and literally take 100% Hardware instead of Arcanowave?
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Jun 9, 2019 04:08
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Night10194 posted:Extremely, I said as much in another post, I think. It is 100% a better idea, because Hardware schticks and basically everything mechanical in Gorilla Warfare are busted as hell. Couldn't you take a -Agi and/or a -Dex Schtick at chargen and catapult your fighting AVs even more post-chargen?
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Jun 9, 2019 05:48
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I think part of it was just organic that the Coalition got a large fanbase (mostly on account of Long's cool designs and partly because of Siembieda's hand-wringing justifications) and that led into a self-feeding bit where that fandom is catered to. And right now they're being really catered to by Siembieda with Heroes of Humanity, The Disavowed, and Heroes of Humanity Arsenal (if the latter two books ever come out). It actually feels weird that they didn't, I don't know, have the early genocidal Coalition government deposed and have a less-awful one take over if you wanted to play the Still Somewhat Racist Heroes of Humanity (but at least they're not running literal death camps and they don't have a literal genocide crusade going on). That seems like it would have basically accomplished the simultaneous goals of "let people use the Coalition as a playable faction" and "not jerking off Nazis." Given that a metaplot exists, they don't even have the excuse of "but we want to avoid having a metaplot."
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Jun 18, 2019 12:14
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SirPhoebos posted:
According to a post made on Reddit by Mike Pondsmith, the entire Exotics section was written by one dude who just wanted to troll another guy who really hated furries so um, this explains quite a lot about the section and its magical-realmness. The 'actually going to a decent hospital over a ripperdoc gets you lower HC costs' thing kind of gets elaborated on with European hospitals, which are apparently better enough compared to American ones that they can halve HC costs for cyberware implantation. Combine that and the therapy rules and you can cut down the net humanity cost of a Dragoon to a positively svelte 10d6 + 1d6/2 + 0.75, which means that you can almost certainly have a playable character at the end of the implantation. I think this is more of an issue that there was no really definitive understanding of what humanity costs meant in the first place. You can also see this play out a little in how the corebook says that Realskinning a cyberlimb reduces its humanity cost slightly, but here the Gemini doesn't have any reductions in humanity cost despite looking and feeling identical to a human. I don't think the numbers they give are actually bad though-the prohibitive humanity cost of implant weapons was incredibly punishing from the start, especially since very few of them are particularly worthwhile.
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Jun 24, 2019 05:57
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Night10194 posted:Hunter: The Reckoning I'm not super familiar with Hunter but I am familiar with a lot of oWoD combat and at least so far, not a single Hunter you've described has any of the cornerstones of oWoD combat effectiveness, which probably explains why they'd struggle and die against a werewolf or vampire or combat focused mage. I don't see any sources of extra actions, there's exactly one source of passive defenses (either soak or active dodges or weird nonsense), and they don't have extra health levels, rapid healing, or anything else. It seems that they're also lacking in init boosters, which is bad. Because you have so few health levels outside of a very few exceptions (ironically, these exceptions are basically 'mages who optimize for combat') and wound penalties are high, you want to have rapid healing so you can avoid penalties. You absolutely want good passive defenses (oftentimes this was a high level of natural soak) because mundane armor is really meh and dodging eats precious actions you need to put damage onto a target. You want extra actions because of how the best way to reduce the enemy's ability to hurt you is to kill them first, which extra actions helped you with a lot. Finally, you wanted high-damage tools to pierce passive defenses and put someone on the floor (crippled or dead) ASAP. Every A-splat in oWoD (vamps, werewolves, mages) had access to these, and werewolves got their reputation as the premier combat monsters of the oWoD because they literally got all of them as free chargen bonuses. Werewolves basically could easily end up doing 10+ dice of aggravated damage base, would easily have enough natural soak to swole through a hit or two, had regeneration to make that hit largely irrelevant, and could burn Rage for an enormous alpha strike. It's why their silver weakness, although real, wasn't as huge of a deal as you'd think because you innately started as a supercommando from hell who could do incredibly powerful hit-and-run attacks and with your physical bonuses and a combat focus you could easily murder whoever had silver bullets long before they could try shooting at you. Vampires got really easy access to all of those, through blood healing, Fortitude, Celerity, and Potence, as well. Mages had a little bit of difficulty accessing the core combat suite 'naturally' but made up for it in sheer power and by having some ridiculously bonkers magical gear. You could access the core combat suite with Life 3 and Time 3. You wouldn't have the ability to have it permanently on, but you could scale it much harder than any other splat (because you could also tape permanent -3 Difficulty to all your actions in the process). Then you had the Talisman/Wonder/Devices background, or the Blessings background, could easily be leveraged for some ludicrously loving bonkers results. You had poo poo like exomuscle, which basically gave you Crinos form, except better: +2 Strength, +1 Dexterity, +2 Stamina, +2 armor, *6* extra Bruised health levels, and 1 point of innate countermagic (which in Mage applied to a lot of things). Oh, and it let you soak lethal and aggravated damage with your boosted Stamina. Sure, it cost some permanent paradox, but because the real secret to Mage was that vulgar magic was for losers and you could do a gently caress of a lot of nonsense just relying on 1-dot and 2-dot spheres and coincidental effects plus decent mundane skills, that didn't matter. Remember, these magical gear items stacked with your own magic. To fight something like this, you either need a core combat suite of your own (which Hunters seem to lack any access to) or some way of bypassing it, which the Innocent's solar flare is an okay example of (but again, no init boosters...). If Hunters lacked access to the pillars of a combat suite, and also were hit-and-miss on having the tools to bypass these problems, it's no wonder they got hosed hard. The other important thing to remember is that because of how oWoD mechanics often were, any combat-oriented supernatural would do so by legitimately being extremely good at normal combat and using their supernatural powers to amp that up to ludicrous levels. A combat-focused werewolf wouldn't rely on weird werewolf magic as their primary fighting method, they'd just be really loving good at swinging a big-rear end sword. So you take away their massive ability to resist damage, and their extra actions, and their superhuman stats and... they're still a guy with a sword who is very good with it. And a Hunter's still going to have a bad day against one of those. And worse yet, supernaturals in the oWoD aren't solitary. Werewolves hunt in packs. Vampires have their coteries. Mages have their cabals.
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Jul 4, 2019 11:53
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Night10194 posted:Hunter: The Reckoning Not quite. Vampires still maintain Potence and Fortitude, meaning that they can still be swole and tough. They just can't heal (and vampire weaknesses, like fire, are relatively easy to access) and don't get Celerity's extra actions. A lot of the weirder powers get shut down, but again, weird powers are often unnecessary to fight normal people in the World of Darkness. Werewolf healing is entirely passive and costs no resources, same with transforming into the werewolf's warform. Werewolves lose access to their Gifts and Rage, which is a huge deal, but they're still an angry, mostly bulletproof face-eating warbeast. Also, werewolves get +3 Stamina in warform so that roll's Difficulty can become pretty high. The only thing that mages require Quintessence (their mojo) to do is create permanent objects out of nothingness, build magical items, and heal Aggravated wounds. Normally it's just a thing you use to drop the difficulty of your wizardry when you absolutely need some weird effect right now and therefore can't take an action to boost your magic (or just do it mundanely).
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Jul 5, 2019 19:06
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The Lone Badger posted:I'm probably just mistemembering then. I thought PCs were typically spies and other conspirators. That's GURPS Black Ops, which has default PCs built on a 700 point budget IIRC. Like, just straight up superheroes except their superpower is "good at loving everything." It's at least a solution to the typical problem that you're only useful in your specialization, even if it kind of goes about it in a ludicrously roundabout way because well, it's GURPS.
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Jul 9, 2019 13:00
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ChaseSP posted:The werewolf beat reminds me of a lovely suggestion for interaction that a Beast should threaten to reveal a Demon not realizing this is an utterly stupid and horrible idea. It is a legitimately brilliant idea if you want to make an enemy who will do exactly what you want for exactly as long as they need to set up a fallback cover and dedicate their life to setting you on fire.
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Aug 22, 2019 07:24
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