FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

So I managed to find a weird unfinished RPG called New Horizon while participating in a video for the Fangames thread over at LP. Long story short, the mechanical basis has some interesting combat but lacks any comprehensive non-combat mechanics beyond rolling for some gradation of success/failure. But the setting? Hoo boy. The creators originally wanted to make some fangame spinoff based on the Mega Man Zero series and market it to Capcom. (Hence the video I mentioned.) For obvious reasons this didn't pan out so well...and thus they decided to make a foray into TRPGs instead. (They still kept the MMZ styling and mixed it up with some JRPG fare.) And I have no real clue as to why. For now, I'll leave the thread with some art from this heartbreaker. :haw:

# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 02:33

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# ¿ Dec 2, 2024 08:50

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Ratoslov posted:

I have absolutely no idea what's going on in this picture. Were Bikini Robot Lady and Slobbering Brokenhearted Giant Poor Anatomy Guy playing cards, and she suddenly turned towards the camera to pose? What does the quote mean, given that there are a total of zero humans in the artwork? I am totally confused.

It's on their website to demonstrate that the setting supposedly has intrigue (how? :psyduck:

), but at least I can guess that the giant man in the back is some sort of heavily modified human.

Evil Mastermind posted:

I like that their "innovative system" is just "roll 2d20, take the lowest versus a DC"

To their credit they've swiped a few different things from the scene, such as a wound system that's a hybrid of WoD and Fate.

NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 02:56 on Feb 17, 2016

# ¿ Feb 17, 2016 02:47

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

Warmains, Unfettered, and Ritual Warriors are pretty buff non-spellcasters in Arcana Evolved.

edit:Oathbound are complete garbage though.

Pretty much everyone who's read the book knows that Oathbound are poo poo. The fan nickname for their 15th-level ability (which grants spell resistance) is "Eschew Sucking".

# ¿ Mar 4, 2016 19:17

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Lynx Winters posted:

The one instance of giving the GM XP I've seen that makes sense is in Double Cross, where XP is given to players rather than characters because losing a character is basically inevitable. New characters get however much extra XP the player has, so replacement characters are just as powerful as the character that just died or went crazy. The GM also gets XP so they can keep up if someone else takes over as GM. It''s really just codifying what most groups do anyway, but it's good to see it spelled out.

Of course, the idea that anyone will ever volunteer to take over as GM to give the regular one a break is just adorable, but at least it makes sense.

Double Cross is intended to be episodic, so the idea is that the group as a whole would just periodically swap GMs. I'm not sure if that's a thing that Japanese TRPGs do regularly or no, but nonetheless it's an interesting way to go.

Descent (both 1E and 2E) also has GM XP in the campaign modes, but in that case it's designed as part of a tug of war between the PCs and their adversarial GM as part of a board game (instead of a relatively freeform TRPG).

# ¿ Mar 8, 2016 19:42

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

ProfessorProf posted:

I've tried to homebrew a system that captures the FF game feel a few times, and what I've realized is that there's two immediate problems that needs to be overcome:

1. If you try to imitate canon mechanics, you end up spending huge amounts of effort on combat subsystems and having absolutely nothing for non-combat encounters.
2. Final Fantasy gameplay is only engaging because you're controlling 3-5 people at once - the things each one of them is doing are pretty boring.

Somewhere on my hard drive I have a Final Fantasy homebrew (which might be the same thing as presented here) which has these exact problems. It's as if they didn't understand that random encounters in a video game are not even close to random encounters in tabletop.

# ¿ Mar 18, 2016 17:01

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Beyond a few merits that look new, is there much difference mechanically between nWoD plus the God-Machine Chronicle/Demon rules updates versus Chronicles of Darkness as a stand-alone book? Or was CoD intended rules-wise to be a compilation of the newly published rules changes into a single stand-alone text?

# ¿ May 5, 2016 21:03

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

ProfessorProf posted:

What did M20 do differently here?

It was mostly some extremely insensitive appropriation.

LatwPIAT posted:

This means that women gravitate towards this Tradition, because when your Tradition is determined by your strongly held personal beliefs about how the world and magick works, how women-friendly they are heavily factors into this. And, of course, this gem:

M20 posted:
Two leaders (taking priest and priestess roles although both might be male, female, or transgender) govern the larger covens
Yay. Transwomen aren't actually women, transmen aren't actually men. Brucato writes loftily about inclusitivity and gender and non-traditional roles, but displays supreme ignorance about the transgender community. It makes it all seem so cynical; why should I believe the message of inclusitivity when trans people are just shoehorned in with no respect in order to fulfil some western-liberal-guilt-quota? gently caress you Brucato. gently caress you and your wishy-washy appropriation of trans identities to sell a gaming product. gently caress you. There are so many other ways to phrase this. "Taking priest and priestess roles, no matter their gender identities." "Taking priest and priestess roles, although both might be male or female, cis or trans", "Taking priest or priestess roles, though there is no actual gender requirement." "Two leaders of any gender (even if one is formally titled priest, and the other priestess)"...

LatwPIAT posted:

And then we get my un-favourite sidebar:

M20 posted:
And between the old associations of mystic power and the new freedom to transcend gender roles without getting burnt at the stake for it, the idea of gender identity is more fluid � and more magickal � than ever before. Especially in queer, polyamorous, transhumanist, neotribal, and psychedelic cultures, it�s often more unusual to be conventionally �straight� than it is to hold, embrace, and enjoy the hell out of an identity outside the traditional polarities.
Trans people are magickal! Real-world trans people are real-world magickal, even! gently caress you, Brucato. Trans identities exist for the trans people, not to validate esoteric world-views. It's also worth noting that every time Brucato mentions trans identities, he's talking about non-binary ones; transgender is almost always mentioned in the context of being a third gender, or transcending the concept of gender altogether, rather than binary trans people. The reasons this is problematic are long, complicated, and controversial, but in short it is seen by some[weasel word]/many[who?] as a form of transmisogyny that marginalizes trans women - already one of the most marginalized groups there is. Talking about this kind of stuff requires tact and understanding, and often compassion, which are qualities I have so far failed to find in this book.

LatwPIAT posted:

Gender is dynamic, not static? Ze/zir are "Generally used in socially progressive circles"? Gender is a bit of a nebulous concept, but it being "dynamic" or "fluid" (as in the earlier sidebar) is not really an established fact. Some people have proposed that it is, but this a very academic and sometimes abstract idea of gender that people in "socially progressive circles" don't necessarily subscribe to. The idea that gender is not static is not an idea that has much recognition among trans women, because these trans people have a very clear impression of their gender being set (it just happens not to match with their bodies), and on the political side of things, see claims that gender are fluid or dynamic as attacks on their identities and a transmisogynistic attempt to erase their identities. It's a claim that has a lot in common with gender being a social construct, which is a concept that in cis-trans relations is almost always used to invalidate trans identities; gender is a social construct, so you're not really a woman since that's meaningless - you're just a man (an equally meaningless term, but we'll still insist on it). I again point to how Brucato's conception of trans people seems to be non-binary identities; the things he's writing here are rather ignorant of trans women's struggles. In my experience, almost nobody uses ze/zir as pronouns; they're somewhat awkward neologisms compared to the singular they, which has gained a lot more traction among socially progressive circles.

# ¿ May 6, 2016 17:41

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Flavivirus posted:

Man, I really thought it was a lot more ambiguous than that. My apologies for arguing about that earlier - I guess my brain must have edited the memories of the game into something a lot more palatable.

It is more ambiguous than that. While "demons" are a thing in the game, they're never characters in their own right but instead exist to drive people to go against church teachings. There's a quote early on about this:

GMing Character Creation, pages 28-29 posted:

3. How much supernatural effectiveness are we building into our characters? Don�t judge whether it�s too much or too little� you�re to keep an open mind and follow our lead. The supernatural in the game will be somewhere on a continuum. At this end, barely any, where the demons are really just bad luck and the pressures a town has to struggle with to survive, and the ceremonies of the Faith only reassure the Faithful and remind them of their commitments to one another. At the other end, lots and lots, with the Dogs as powerful exorcist-gunslingers battling demons, sorcerers and ghosts, where calling a person by name can restore him to life and bullets slide off a Dog�s coat, striking sparks. Look at the Traits we give our characters, and you�ll begin to see where on that continuum this particular game will fall.

Similarly, in play Demonic Influence serves as the stakes against the players when there's nothing more concrete to present against them. The exception to this is that a sorcerer can use the stat as well, but a sorcerer is basically an agent of anti-faith and thus Demonic Influence would represent some sort of crisis of faith in that situation. And as for changes to the possessed...let's just say that people can still look "off" in the real world as a result of various mundane things.

That said, the religious doctrines are very much something I won't be an apologist for except to note that to a certain degree they're supposed to drive conflict. In what manner they should drive conflict is something you can take them to task about, but they aren't there for no reason.

# ¿ May 16, 2016 21:36

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Kurieg posted:

Chapter ???: Get off the loving tracks

We just did a podcast on Beast Come listen to me say "Like" and "You know" a bunch because I'm bad at forming sentences in my head!

We do talk about the whole book though, so if you want to remain unspoiled (hah) you might want to wait until later to listen!

_{This is why I haven't been posting in a while, and I'm probably going to take some time off from this after shotgunning the entire book in two days.}

I've listened to this twice now because it's fascinating to hear you folks just take the game apart piece by piece, but holy poo poo is the recording quiet. It's so soft that when I was listening in my car (tablet plugged into the audiocassette player via an adapter), I had to turn up things up to the point that a mild hiss of static also came through.

# ¿ May 31, 2016 04:43

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Kurieg posted:

I can't hear any hiss on my end when I turn up the volume, it was probably because you were playing it through a tape adapter combined with the fact that most tablets limit the amount of volume they themselves output through the headphone jack so that it won't blow people's ears out.

One complaint I have heard is my dire need of a shock mount for my microphone.

The thing is that I've never had to turn it up that loud before, even for audiobooks (which tend to be quiet). I had similar volume issues when listening on my desktop, for instance. According to some fiddling on Audacity you're at least a full 10 dB quieter than Mike Duncan's Revolutions podcast, which is one of the softer things in my library.

That said, I checked several other episodes on your site and it sounds as if #72 is an outlier; the rest are at a more standard volume. Perhaps you guys had the gain turned down on this particular episode or something?

# ¿ May 31, 2016 06:51

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

NutritiousSnack posted:

What ratings is it getting on DriveThruRPG

It's apparently got 4.3/5 stars, and the three user reviews loved it (though I'm guessing they didn't really dig into the issues). That said, DTRPG has a policy that usually prohibits you from rating a product if you haven't purchased it. Thus I can see that such is a real problem here (because folks who've been turned off by the game here or back in the Kickstarter days won't have purchased it), but as a more general rule I can understand why OBS set that policy in the first place (to prevent bots and spammers from distorting the relevant results).

# ¿ Jun 4, 2016 04:56

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Bieeardo posted:

I've never understood that. RIFTS lends itself to stacking stupid poo poo from the word 'go' (hi, physical skills) and building on that only seems logical.

For my part, CJ seemed like the only one who realized how silly and toyetic the setting was and ran with that, throwing in all kinds of goofy kit that horked up swarms of missiles or laser beams inches in diameter. When Coalition War Campaign hit (shortly after Carella left the company?), it felt like Siembieda trying to outdo him and missing the point of it entirely.

From what I recall of prior discussions in the Rifts thread and here, the damage numbers crept up on the player side of things because Kevin Siembieda kept publishing monsters with absurd amounts of health. (Seriously, even the early books print critters with thousands of MDC.) The intention on his end was that large parties of over ten people could take them out in roughly a fair fight, but the problem with that is that no one ever actually did that besides Siembieda himself at conventions and the like. Plus KS would deviate from his ruleset like mad for the sake of fun/keeping the game moving, which is fine to be doing as a GM at the weekly game night but terrible for understanding how the mechanics actually work.

Anyway, from what I recall the other writers like CJ realized that most people played instead in groups of 3 to 6 and actually used the written rules (for the most part), so in order to deal with the Souped-Up Monster of the Week the PCs had to be at a similar power level.

# ¿ Jun 9, 2016 03:17

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

wdarkk posted:

I'm starting to feel that if a Demon could eliminate all competition and gain enough power, they could become a new God Machine.

There's certainly the implication that some of the Integrators have also thought of this.

Mors Rattus posted:

...If you have a Cover, you can burn it to Go Loud. No roll needed - you just destroy the Cover permanently and reflexively. Your Cover drops to 0 instantly, and you assume demonic form. For the rest of the scene, you are Primum 10. Your Aether pool instantly fills to your new cap. You have access to every Embed your Incarnation has an affinity for, and every Exploit. Once the scene ends, you drop back to normal stats and lose access to any powers you don't normally have. Unless you have another Cover, you become one of the Burned. And, last, you get the Hunted condition.

For those unfamiliar, Going Loud is the last of last resorts, but is brutally powerful if you do it. Demons with Primum 10, a giant pool of Aether, and access to every Exploit at once basically function like high-level D&D 3E wizards.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2016 18:17

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

potatocubed posted:

When a Demon forms a pact with a mortal, do they have to provide the promised odds and ends themselves, or do the various Merits just... 'appear' out of nowhere?

From the mortal's perspective, the latter. As the final sidebar implies, though, external Merits do come from somewhere by virtue of the Demon engineering reality/probability manipulation as part of the pact.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2016 18:06

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

The book does mention that you can choose to save up Cover Experiences for such an occasion, and in addition if need be you can always spoof a Merit you don't have but which is in-character for your Cover by using Legend. You just don't get your Cover's Merits by default for game balance resources.

# ¿ Jun 25, 2016 01:26

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

That Old Tree posted:

Don't forget also that part of the Golden Path is to make women the militaristic, "dominant" gender for 3,000 years, to "balance out" humanity and make us True Gender Neutral. The following books then descend into outright sex magic that is female-only until, once again, a male counterpart arrives to save us all.

How much of this weirdness falls on Frank Herbert's shoulders, and how much on his son and Kevin J. Anderson? I only read Dune itself, and even then it's been perhaps a decade since my last reading of it.

# ¿ Jul 9, 2016 02:58

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Kurieg posted:

NO MORE WIRE HANGERS! YOU DESERVE THIS!

Wait, wasn't the wire hanger sequence from Mommie Dearest? Regardless, it still fits the theme of the "outraged" abuser that Beast unintentionally emphasizes.

# ¿ Jul 20, 2016 03:25

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

It even appeared in one of the FATAL & Friends threads, so...well, have a read.

# ¿ Jul 28, 2016 07:15

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Night10194 posted:

The other problem with it came early, and that's the Man Portable Lascannon. I am firmly of the belief that this is where poo poo Started To Go Wrong. The weapon is in there kind of like a joke, since in the TT it's often used to snipe special characters since it does double their toughness in Strength and thus insta-kills them. So they gave it 5d10+10 Pen10 Damage, making it blow through any personal armor and one-shot almost anything in the original book (which was generally much lower powered). The problem is, the designers then got it into their head that that meant that's what a heavy or powerful weapon looks like and soon we're up to our eyeballs in 4d10+5 Pen8 Autocannons (the original Autocannon was batshit insane) and rifles that do 2d10+6 Pen8 or whatever when the average PC has Armor 4, Toughness 3, and HP 10 with more HP being ridiculously expensive AND ONLY GETTING MORE EXPENSIVE with each new book, while still only giving you a single HP per advance bought. It is impossible to tank most of the weaponry in 40kRP past the original scale they intended, where people would be in flak and wielding lasguns fighting mostly human cultists. And hilariously they've only made it worse every new game, making the only way to survive to dodge-tank as hard as possible or pray the DM remembers to put hard cover everywhere.

The community also isn't so great at actually examining the system's design choices and mechanical knobs. That lascannon? It was printed in the very first release of DH1E - the one by Games Workshop, not FFG. And yet every so often a thread pops up on the FFG forums in which someone's got hot and bothered about Accurate weapons (which turn a poo poo-tier weapon into a solid mid-tier one). Or someone else tries to put out a bunch of mechanical bells and whistles in their choice of subsystem without understanding that the given subsystem already has a bunch of detail, perhaps too much, and that Gitting Gud is already a solved problem.

My group still plays 40K RPGs, but I totally understand not wanting to get into them as someone new to things. Why do we do it?

I'm the person in the group who can most easily cut through extraneous detail, so as the GM no one minds me giving advice on what the top-tier stuff is. (And as pointed out, there's a huge difference between some tiers.)
Gear really matters, and holy gently caress is there a lot of it. Which is why I compiled all the poo poo I could find and distributed it in a bunch of packets printed from Excel sheets.
We've stuck to Black Crusade and Rogue Trader (well, a hacked-up version running on the newer chassis of DH2E), so generally the point for the PCs has been to do something bold and wild without caring too much about the fascism of the setting. Plus they're actively trying to fix the fascism of the Imperium, a colossal but commendable task, so in general the group is in more for the 80's-metal-album-cover feel than the grimderp.
If a subsystem does come up but turns out to be poo poo (mass combat from RT), we'll still step back to examine it.
It's something we're used to.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2016 18:38

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Night10194 posted:

I do not think there has ever been a good subsystem in a 40kRPG. It's to the point that I think a trademark of FFG's 40k design is 'This sounds interesting and exciting in the elevator pitch but then has no depth and doesn't do anything and will either become a chore, a millstone (because we baked it into every level of the rules) or get dropped.' See: Comrades, Gear Assignment and Random Mission Gear, Starships, Endeavors, Kill-Marks, Squad/Solo Mode, Subtlety, and basically every other thing like that. I think only the Infamy-Corruption track in BC really worked.

I think my favorite unintentional thing is that Aptitudes actually ended up making characters far more uniform because the costs are so immense to do anything out of your specialization, and the 'good' talents and few actually useful skills are so well known by now to anyone who has been playing the system for awhile.

A bunch of those subsystems would likely work better if they weren't bolted to an out-of-its-depth system to begin with, but the community has had to be dragged kicking and screaming towards any semblance of change.

That said, my group uses Mathhammer for starships (to make macrobattery salvos less modal, among other things) and a retooled experience chart for aptitudes (to not require specialization so hard). We're not running on zero houserules here.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2016 19:37

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Halloween Jack posted:

Hypercoordination 9: Successful HTH attacks have their Width reduced by 2. You can catch bullets in flight.

You may wish to expand that acronym, since otherwise it's caught by the filter. Alternately, you could just insert useless tags in the middle like so: HTH.

# ¿ Aug 9, 2016 18:06

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Mors Rattus posted:

So, how well did the Japanese market take Legend of the Five Rings, anyway

My uninformed guess is that their opinion is about the same as our opinion of things in the general category that Metal Wolf Chaos fits into. That is, that it was kinda weird and distorted. (Metal Wolf Chaos is specifically really awesome because it's kinda weird and distorted, but it's an exception.)

# ¿ Aug 21, 2016 04:02

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Traveller posted:

"[...]and any High or Bugei skill." So yeah, a Battle Maiden could take Horse Archery and use it with her Rank 1.

In fact the very first L5R character I played (in 4E) was a Battle Maiden who went for horse archery. She ended up being pretty vicious, even despite the lesser Rank 1 effect. (In 4E you can add +Honor to one attack roll per round, or instead to damage if mounted.)

# ¿ Aug 22, 2016 02:42

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

BinaryDoubts posted:

Doing Things
So: how do you actually use these skills to do stuff? Well, the game has one of the most unique dice systems I�ve seen in a while � still deciding if it�s cool or badly overcomplicated. Basically, when the GM calls for a skill test, the player will always roll five dice and look for at least one success. Before rolling, you assemble a pool of d10s equal to your attribute rank, and then add enough d6s to get you to a total of five. These extra d6s are called fate dice, since they represent the little bit of extra luck heroes always have in fantasy stories.

Example: If you�re making a Feat of Strength test, and your Strength is 4, your dice pool is going to be 4xd10 and 1xd6. Remember those descriptors from earlier? Well, they decide the number you need to roll to have a die count as a success. A Trivial test requires a 4+, a Challenging test requires a 6+, and a Tough test requires a 8+. You�re just looking for a single success on any of your dice � multiple successes only make things more dramatic. There�s a catch, though: rolling a 1 on a die counts as a botch, which cancels out a success. If you have enough botches that your overall result is in the negatives, it means you not only failed, but that your failure was spectacular.

Another wrinkle: fate dice don�t work like your d10 attribute dice. Fate dice only succeed on a 6, regardless of the difficulty (so even if the task is Tough, a 6 still counts as a success). On the other hand, a roll of 1 or 2 counts as a botch � so relying on Fate is a sucker�s game.

So there�s the basics: roll five dice, look for successes, and hope to God you don�t botch things up too badly. Opposed checks are basically the same, except the GM doesn�t set a difficulty to, say, overpower an enemy: the difficulty is just equal to their Core rank � nice and elegant. There�s also rules for long-term skill tests and group tests and what have you but in the interest of time I�m going to skip over them.

Writing this out kind of solidified my feelings on the core mechanics, which is that there�s a nice elegance to the way difficulties and ranks tie together, but that it seems a little awkward in practice. I�ve never played the game so I can�t say for certain, but my feeling is that assembling die pools and quickly parsing the results would be a major slowing factor. The fact that fate dice use different rules for success/failure is annoying, too � I wish they�d found a way to have them use the same resolution system as d10s. (I can�t immediately see a problem with having the fate dice work like lovely attribute dice � they�d be useful for trivial tasks, dicey for challenging tasks, and useless/dangerous on tough tasks). Overall, though, I like a lot of stuff about the system! The skill list is to-the-point and laser-focused on the kinds of things the PCs will spend their time doing: mostly, skullduggery.

Fate dice seem mostly to be there explicitly so that you can get rid of them. Based on what you've said, I concocted an Anydice program to show off both the probabilities of getting certain levels of success, or of succeeding in general. (For the second, use Transposed mode.) Most of the various options are commented out, but you can reenable them by adding or removing backslashes ( \ ) in appropriate locations.

# ¿ Aug 22, 2016 22:59

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

The data I put together does actually take the exploding dice into account, though after taking a look at things I found that I made a small programming error with some of the Attribute 0 stuff. Apparently your chances of hitting Difficulty 9 with Attribute 0 are ~3.25%?

How high can advantage/disadvantage go? Even introducing just one point in either direction allows for a considerable amount of complexity when we're going from a two-variable problem (Attribute + Difficulty) to a three-variable problem (+ Dis/Advantage), and that's not counting the fact that the third variable involves the weirdness of order statistics.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2016 03:41

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Doresh posted:

Oh boy. Will this be better or worse than Prime Directive with its "Punish players by forcing them to pick a dictionary and read all entries from a random letter of the alphabet"?.

Nah, that part about playing away from the table is just another instance of Monte Cook reinventing the wheel, sort of like the "passive perception" incident when he was a designer for 5E. In this case he's claiming (in his ignorance of advances in game design) to have discovered blue booking...which is a practice more than twenty years old. He's not being dishonest (I hope), just really sheltered.

# ¿ Sep 10, 2016 12:21

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

MonsieurChoc posted:

Sounds like that should have been the fiction anthology's theme: Beasts arrogantly meeting other supernaturals and learning painfully the error of their ways.

From what I've heard it effectively is the theme. The fiction anthology was not at all kind to Beasts. Kurieg et al. can likely comment more on that, but I recall hearing of one story where a Beast captured an ascended Promethean and tortured them with the excuse that they were denying their true nature by becoming a normal human. Naturally the Promethean's former posse found out, and proceeded to (after some degree of self-sacrifice) blow the Beast's head clean off. Plus there was the one in which a vampire - an immortal bloodsucking parasite of the night - was hanging around with a group of Beasts and was taken aback at how hosed up they were.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2016 04:46

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Lynx Winters posted:

Rank 5 powers in Reckoning were also mathematically impossible to get, and required GM fiat (and a derangement, I think?) to get something kind of cool.

Wait, how does that work? I can understand something being stupid difficult to access because it requires a lot of questing and/or accumulated XP, but it being "mathematically impossible" to access is another level of game design :wtf:

# ¿ Dec 20, 2016 05:41

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

PurpleXVI posted:

Wasn't Taffy 3 when miscommunication and general bad decisions by the US Navy lead to a pretty outmatched force facing the Japanese, and then managing to punch remarkably above their weight? In part because they didn't turn and run when they knew they were screwed, but instead started punching and kicking with everything they had, landing blows that made the Japanese think they were in for way more of a fight than they actually were?

Basically; in the absence of warship guns that could match the Japanese they settled for aggressively pressing their other advantages. Speed, superior fire control, and an aircraft advantage certainly helped.

Edit: Nah, let's separate that into another post.

NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 06:50 on Jan 26, 2017

# ¿ Jan 26, 2017 06:33

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Night10194 posted:

Escort Carrier took out a heavy cruiser with a 5 inch deck gun that hit the Chokai's torpedoes.

Oxygen torpedoes were fantastic torpedoes. But extremely volatile.

A comparison I like to pull up on how volatile those can be is between the Japanese heavy cruisers Mogami and Mikuma at the Battle of Midway. So as a result of evading a US sub's torpedoes and some communications/navigational errors, said two cruisers collide and incur some damage. The Mogami ditches her oxygen torpedoes (and other explosives) in case more planes come by, because the aforementioned damage has hindered her ability to move quickly. But the Mikuma isn't so damaged (aside from an oil spill), and hence doesn't ditch her own torpedoes. So when dive bombers fly by the next day to hit them with several bombs each, the Mogami is able to limp home while the Mikuma is destroyed by exploding torpedoes.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2017 06:51

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

So far this looks like another example of the fine Pathfinder tradition of spending zero effort playtesting their new subsystems. At least it's not so immediately insufferable as the abject nonsense that was Sacred Geometry.

# ¿ May 10, 2017 05:37

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

So how did no one working on DragonMech have any self-awareness when designing the Unborg? From what I can see it's almost entirely the druid class, except awful because your rate of acquiring druid powers is severely gimped.

# ¿ May 13, 2017 17:35

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

What were the issues with The Crystal Star, in short? I last read it and a number of other Star Wars novels almost two decades ago, and my sense of literary taste was considerably less developed then as a middle schooler. (The last time I paid serious attention to the EU was when the Hand of Thrawn novels came out, and even then there was just too much to keep up with.) At this point I only have a few pieces remaining - the Rogue Squadron set, mostly for Wraith Squadron, and ~~a few anthologies~~ one anthology which was refreshing in not focusing on the core film cast like nearly everything else (counterpoint: Rogue Squadron) did.

NGDBSS fucked around with this message at 16:13 on Jun 14, 2017

# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 16:09

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

It's the one with Callista, the self-insert Mary Sue character that has a romantic fling with Luke Skywalker.

Weren't there at least three novels in total that featured Callista? I also recall Children of the Jedi (which I never read) and Planet of Twilight (which I did read, but similarly long ago).

# ¿ Jun 14, 2017 17:34

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Robindaybird posted:

Yeah, I'm a bit surprised given how the Brotherhood of Islam had a huge influence in African American culture and politics, and that several north african countries are predominantly or heavily islamic - you think they'd get a decent write up.

It's basically "we didn't do any research" on several different levels - like the assumptions that Muslims = Arabs (Arab Muslims are only around 10% of the total because except for Egypt the Arab nations tend to be underpopulated), leading into the concept that Muslims and Jews are always in conflict (when the problem is primarily a regional conflict sparked by land distribution and kept alive by various uncompromising actors over the years*), that no sects exist beyond the Sunni and Shia (despite being something of a fringe sect with messianic teachings, the Ahmadis still have worshippers on par with the entirety of Judaism).

So as Fossilized Rappy said way earlier, the book is very 90's. :v:

...

*Which isn't to say that Islamic anti-Semitism doesn't exist beyond the lens of the Israel/Palestine conflict, but that's more a problem with fanatical shits being fanatical shits regardless of creed.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2017 04:26

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

theironjef posted:

Hey thread, been a while, please do enjoy episode 99(!!) of System Mastery, The Sailor Moon RPG and Reference Book.

I remember playing this years ago, and boy howdy did we realize even then that what was essentially proto-BESM was still busted as hell. Though I knew barely anything about Sailor Moon itself, as the group was running it as a side campaign as a favor to a guest player.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2017 03:24

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Nessus posted:

I have a friend who made a convention one-shot of "KILL SAILOR MOON," in which you had various Negaverse types attempting to - well - Kill Sailor Moon. The problem is that this is nigh impossible, rules as written, so nobody MANAGED it, but they had fun trying.

I never had a chance to read the book in its entirety (mostly just the player-facing stuff like chargen and the like), so I've not seen the writeup for Sailor Moon herself. But I'm guessing this involves a whole bunch of stats between 10 and 12, plus a splash of action economy cheese? I do recall the attack sequence being an exceptionally bad affair in BESM 1E/2E, in which you could effortlessly dodge everything once you pumped things high enough, without much way to stop you because doing so was completely orthogonal to any attack roll.

# ¿ Jul 19, 2017 04:36

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

Night10194 posted:

I can't see how it wouldn't be. Wasn't it the original 'This will sound useful to a new player but sucks on purpose' feat?

At this point the consensus is that Monte Cook didn't understand why MtG had its archetypes and card tiers but was instead just trying to justify his own half-assed d20 design after he'd left WotC. Keep in mind that "half-assed d20 design" still continues to encompass his work to this day, so despite writing that essay Mr. Cook didn't actually learn any of the lessons he wrote down.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2017 22:39

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

True. The intent there is to limit how many things you can stack in one place, but the problem there is that such design is fixing symptoms of a problem rather than the root cause. Better to just limit how many drat things provide bonuses in the first place, and make them each meaningful as opposed to piddly +1's and +2's that you're supposed to grab a horde of in your accounting homework.

# ¿ Oct 4, 2017 22:51

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# ¿ Dec 2, 2024 08:50

NGDBSS: Dec 30, 2009

On the topic of "intended" play vs. what the rules actually encourage in Pathfinder, or more generally in D&D and its clones, I've taken to calling that whole business of dungeon crawling and risk/rewards-adventuring as "playing fantasy actuaries". After all, Gygax himself used to work as an insurance underwriter before cofounding TSR. So why then haven't we seen any games in which the group plays as literal fantasy actuaries?

# ¿ Oct 17, 2017 05:34

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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