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Basic Chunnel posted:Anybody got a handy link to the Beast rundown? I have the burning desire to learn from some other sucker's misfortune The full write up of the main book might be up on inklesspen's archive. Otherwise Kurieg starts covering the main book here. Later, he covers the fiction anthology and the baddie splat about heroes/antagonists beasts/super-beasts. Sin of Onan covered the hunter/beast tie-in thing here at about the same time the baddie splat was being reviewed.
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Mar 30, 2017 05:21
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PurpleXVI posted:Based on this review, I'm kind of baffled why anyone would play 13th Age. It feels kind of... Pathfindery, an attempt at "fixing" D&D without actually understanding what needs fixing. Some of that is the general exhaustion a lot of people here feel towards D&D and D&Disms. (Which is understandable when you have a hobby overrun with permutations and knockoffs of it.) If you need a game that does D&D, 13th Age is a functional and simple (core book formatting aside) version of it. It falls flat for a lot of people because the more unique and appealing aspects are often underdeveloped and don't deliver on the interesting potential they have. It also manages to twist its ankle on some of the D&Disms it feels obligated to retain, which is especially grating
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Apr 1, 2017 18:34
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D&D is a big drain in terms of price and time (to read the books/roll the characters/design the campaign/run a session), and it's ubiquitous to the hobby. So you get a lot of people hit hard by the sunk cost fallacy and the assumption that every other tabletop game must require the same level of money/work.
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Apr 1, 2017 23:29
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I always ran 3e with a grid map and so did the D&D group I started withsenrath posted:I don't think I ever ran into that particular argument before. I wonder if anyone ever pointed out to them that the 3.5 rules explicitly reference grids in pretty much every section of the core rules, including their oh-so-precious magic rules. The combat chapter in 3e also demonstrates positioning, attacking, cover, etc. using images of characters on grid layouts. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 12:35 on Apr 4, 2017 |
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Apr 4, 2017 12:32
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Sucks Mark Diaz Truman decided to play tone police through Magpie's own website and at the worst possible moment in ttrpg discourse. Because that game sounds cool, but I would never feel comfortable supporting him again
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Apr 5, 2017 01:23
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The Wildfire devs showed up on RPGnet back when Ctech 2.0 was announced and swore up and down that they were trying to distance themselves from all the rape in the first edition. I think they also said they were hoping to split up the five different and mutually-incompatible playstyles (street-level normals, not-guyvers, regular mechas, eldritch wizards, and not-eva mechas) into multiple books to give all the concepts more breathing room. I can only imagine that would mean devoting several extra long essays to how NO TEENAGERS WILL NEVER BE MECH PILOTS IN OUR EVANGELION MEETS CTHULHU GAME IT'S SO UNREALISTIC!!!
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Sep 14, 2017 12:27
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Maybe we'll even get an essay about how awesome and sexy their anime drow are, too!
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Sep 14, 2017 12:46
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Glazius posted:That's actually a different game entirely, called The Strange. The Strange and Numenera are pretty interchangeable. About as much as 1e and 2e Numenera, it seems. The big add-ons to The Strange are the ability to swap the adjective and the reality-jumping mechanics which is a glorified skill check with a big table of random crit fails. Numenera is even suggested as an alternative prime world instead of Earth, and possibly a place you can travel to through the Strange Starjammer-style. Speaking of The Strange I swear I'll keep going with my writeup now that I'm caught up on the thread again. Got 30 pages beind at one point.
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Sep 18, 2017 20:33
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PurpleXVI posted:That last one is amazing. I love the idea that Darklord Grimdeath the Negasorcerer just bellies up in some random tavern for a pint. In fact I like to imagine he shows up on purpose to wow everyone with his new Nightmare and show off. If I bound a flying, flaming demonic horse to the material realm as my steed, I'd totally ride it on daily errands or out to the bar. It's intelligent enough that you could trust it to remember its way home if you'd had a few too many, too. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 23:29 on Nov 26, 2017 |
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Nov 26, 2017 23:26
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Man, I swear that Blue Planet got a full write-up years ago, but I guess all the ocean rpgs are running together in my head? I'm pretty sure I'm not thinking of the RIFTS ocean books or that awkward one with an unhealthy focus on breeding the fertile people.
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Nov 28, 2017 01:31
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JcDent posted:You're still positing it as a fetish, as if I'm saying "naw, sister loving is cool and you should focus game on it". I say that I don't understand why it is suddenly too real or too spooky when it appears in the setting background with ghoul inbreeding, nature spirits doing something to squirrels and so on. Where's the line between fun and games where mass slaughter/substance addiction control/urban conspiracy cover ups are still cool, but some villain having the Habsburg jaw is super bad on cheapening-of-rape level? A big factor in how far or bad a game can go with that is if it's a background setting detail because you really want to do a historical game set during the collapse of the Holy Roman Empire or mythological Greece where it crops up versus providing in-depth rules with the presumption that player characters will use them. It's the same sort of divide between whether or not, say, The Lady of Pain should be statted out or left as deliberately incomprehensible. The minute you start providing rules, you have to expect some player or GM to abuse them. Then you have to contemplate how far other people are willing to carry those rules, and how putting down bestiality rules alongside combat and faction management or whatever will alter a reader's perception of their importance to the game's creator, the people who play it, and the game/its setting. It doesn't help that the vast majority of times where deviant or transgressive sexual stuff comes up in RPGs it's clearly part of some fetish the writer has, like in Witch Girls Adventures, everything Chris Field writes, and probably a lot of the oWoD stuff. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 14:07 on Dec 2, 2017 |
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Dec 2, 2017 14:05
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Oh gosh, could it really be? The triumphant return of... Part 12: In another dimension/With voyeuristic intention Well, it’s been a bit of time since we visited this game, huh? That’s fine because we came to a pretty natural break in the rules before this. The book shifts into that familiar sort of in-between section that players can totally read if they want, but everyone knows only the GM will pay that much attention. That’s right! Setting rules! The first portion deals with what exactly these darn recursion things are, how they’re made, and general attributes of them. Okay, that’s a lie, the first bit of this chapter deals with recursion gates, portals, and fractal vortexes, but I put that at the end of my last update because I don’t see why you wouldn’t include them alongside the general rules for recursion travel.  Recursion Attributes So, right, recursions. As a refresher, recursions are limited little worlds that are a part of the ~dark energy network woooo~ that the Strange is composed of. If you’re at all familiar with Dungeons and Dragons, you might recall they had a couple of famous campaign settings from 2nd Edition that dealt with reality hopping between seemingly different worlds: Planescape and Spelljammer. Recursions work… basically just like the planes/worlds in those games. You can shift between them or hike through portals just like you were jumping between planes in planescape. You can also travel through the Strange directly in  You could even swim along in the “fractal currents” if you had some idea of where you needed to go. However, it's usually impractical to jump into the Strange and hope you manage to drift to the right spot. Either you’ll be sailing from one world in the Strange to another, or translating directly between worlds. I suppose you could be Dark Matter Pirates if you want to be cool or whatever, but the book would very much like you to know that planetovores are a thing and probably dangerous! (We’ll get to those eventually.) Recursions are seeded into the Strange by prime worlds like Earth. As the book puts it, they’re the byproduct of “the creative resonance” of “pure imagination”, or as the book also puts it, “fictional leakage”. You can think of them as fungi growing on the rotting bark of Earth’s fallen tree. Recursions will grow and mature. Over time they may even form into very realistic, nearly standalone worlds. These worlds are often inspired by fictional and mythic places from our [Western, European] lore, filled with fairies and sea monsters and Native Americans! (We’ll get to that eventually, too!)  We’re told that hundreds of other recursions are scattered across the dark energy web around Earth for PCs to explore. Of course, the two major recursions we keep mentioning, Ardeyn and Ruk, weren’t randomly spawned from imagination pollution. Ardeyn was created by downloading an MMO into The Strange (yes, really) to stop those pesky planetovores from eating us. Ruk was a dark matter life raft from an alien civilization that escaped getting eaten by a planetovore. It crashed into Earth’s shoals eons before any of our pre-human ancestors even entertained the idea of descending from the trees and walking upright. Those are interesting hooks, I’ll give it that, but still a bit weird that one of the key features of The Strange (the game) doesn’t apply to its biggest recursions. Recursion Attributes Each prime world and recursion has what you might call a “block” of “stats” associated with it, which the GM will reference for the current conditions of that reality. the book posted:These high-level truths are called attributes. Level: The level is the number that determines how difficult it is to translate into a recursion. This number is set by a combination of the age of the recursion and entirely arbitrary bullshit like the availability of valuable materials and useful NPCs. Law: How physics works in this reality. The options offered are Standard Physics (real-life physics), Magic, Mad Science, Psionics, Substandard Physics (real-life physics but technology past the early iron age doesn’t work), and Exotic (catch-all for random things like the Candy Kingdom, Lumpy Space, and other weird environments in Adventure Time.) The physical law descriptors occupy some vague space between real rules and relying on your preconceived notion as to what they’d cover. It does ever-so-helpfully note that “generally speaking” recursions with Exotic laws won’t have a level lower than 4! My favorite bit, however, is this: the book posted:Standard Physics is actually a more complete and robust set of laws than the more extreme laws, which is why it’s more difficult to find “exploits” in Standard Physics that allow for amazing effects. Playable Races: The different species intelligent enough to take on class levels and sometimes have a will of their own. Earth, and most of the other recursions, are predominately human. Some have two races, like Ardeyn’s humans and qephilim. One has three species: humans, vampires, and werewolves. I can’t say I mind having a small list of memorable races versus 15 variations of elves, but it is one D&D-ism I’m surprised they dropped. Foci: A sufficiently mature recursion can support one or more foci. Remember those? The themes that let you be a golem or a positive-energy lich or dual-wield weapons? The ones outlined at the front of the book are focused on Earth, Ruk, and Ardeyn, but you can pull from that list for another recursion in addition to making new foci. Foci on a recursion should be themed around the physical laws of that reality. Skills: Unique or interesting skills that can be found on this recursion. A PC wouldn’t naturally gain a skill when they translate, unless it’s part of their new foci, so just take these as suggestions of skills you can purchase. the book posted:Mature recursions may host a society of inhabitants, some percentage of which possesses the spark. Recursion natives without the spark probably still have some kind of culture, which means they also know one or more skills unique to the recursion. Connection to the Strange: What connections, if any, this world has into the dark energy network of the Strange. Normally a recursion has to be fairly mature to have any access points. Size: Recursions grow with age. This section gives size dimensions. The Spark: The percentage of a recursion’s population that is conscious and self-aware instead of some shallow imitation of an intelligent being. Again, the older the recursion, the higher the percentage. Traits: Qualities of a recursion that can affect PCs and residents. It’s things like bonuses to a health pool or the ability to reroll one die roll. There’s a full list we’ll cover in a hot minute. Rules for Creating Recursions This is for PCs to make a recursion. GMs can do whatever they want. Any quickened being has the ability to make a recursion, including the character classes in The Strange. When PC feels like playing god this way, that’s the cue to launch a ~genesis quest~. Genesis quests follow these ever-so-simple steps: 1. Find a reality seed. 2. Locate a nexus. 3. Invest reality seed in a nexus. --a. Choose PC contributors --b. Determine desired attributes for the recursion --c. Spend XP --d. Make a seed investiture roll --e. If the investiture roll is successful enough, determine traits based on the PC descriptors 4. Plant invested reality seed.  The miracle of life. Acquiring a Reality Seed Look, realities don’t just grow on trees. Calling them “seeds” is also misleading. They’re bits of dark energy matter, and while they’re drifting around in the Strange, they look like “iterating spiral[s] of semisolid material” in a “near-infinite sea of similar structures”. They’re easier to find after they “condense on the shores” of a random recursion because at least they take on a recognizable form like a sword, chest, zip drive, or your mom. Whatever makes sense in the context of that recursion. No matter what it appears to be on the outside, though, it is still essentially a supernatural blueprint/genetic code that provides the baseline parameters to create a recursion. Reality seeds are special. They’re so special even those dumb unquickened, spark-lacking doofuses can tell there’s something important about them. Like the morons they are, they do idiotic things like build shrines around them, lock them up somewhere secure, or keep as trophies on the mantel. Whatever makes it difficult and interesting for PCs to overcome to obtain. Locating a Nexus So, you’ve got your reality stem cell, now you need to tell it what it should be when it grows up and how it will disappoint you by falling short of your expectations. You need to be in a special spot to do this in, which is called a nexus. It’s a dark energy spot out in the Strange that’s filled with energy that’s simultaneously chaotic while also capable of being channeled into the seed. There’s three identified nexus locations near Earth, but also probably a ton more out in the far reaches of the Strange. You can call them N1, N2, and N3 if you’re a boremo. Or you can use the names they’re referred to in the rest of the book: the Orb of Worlds, Baldran’s Maw, and the Kray Nebula. You can try to invest a reality outside of a nexus but it will more than likely fail. The Orb of Worlds is near Ruk, and has structures in place to help facilitate the birth of new realities. You can also hang out with the mute monks that maintain the place and use their lodgings if you’re not a dick. Baldran’s Maw is made of “fractal waves” that are “partly ephemeral” and partially “solid, flexing fundament that can crush the life out of an explorer in an instant.” There’s not much reason to go there unless you want privacy or hate monks. The Kray Nebula is nearish to Ardeyn and is also terrible! It’s infested with kray. Investing a Reality Seed Now that you have your seed and are sitting in a nexus, you can start the ritual to invest the seed with the qualities you want. In total, you need the following: Duration: 1d6 hours Participants: 3-5 Components: 1 reality seed Location: A nexus of the Strange XP: A minimum of 6 XP, each participant must contribute 2 Process: Everyone involved in the investiture must agree on the nature of the new recursion. If anyone starts having second thoughts in the middle of the ritual, the entire process fails and the reality seed is forever ruined because gently caress YOU GARY WE ARE NOT PUTTING A GODDAMN PISS FOREST IN THIS RECURSION SHUT UP ABOUT IT. Investiture Roll: This is actually two rolls. First, one person rolls Intellect-based task  with a difficulty of 5. If the result is a natural 17-20, you get a bonus to the result roll. +1 for 17, +2 for 18, +3 for 19, and +4 for a nat 20. Other players involved in the process can contribute using the helping action, too. I hope someone in your group decided take “creating recursions” as a trained skill!!!So how good or bad can this go? Let’s consult our friend the random results table:  Planting the Seed Congratulations, you’ve done it! Or maybe you didn’t, and you hosed up this thing you had to have an involved quest for. Whatever, now plant that fucker. A reality seed should be planted on a prime world or a recursion that’s connected to a prime world. If you plant it out in the middle of the Strange without some kind of anchor to a prime word, it’ll double all age requirements for maturing the recursion. You really don’t want that. Anyone can plant the seed with an action, so I guess give it to the vector to do so he feels like he contributed to this in some minor way. A planted seed will turn into a tiny pocket dimension-sized recursion. It needs some sort of containing object to form, so it should be planted on/in a box, a book, a cave, inside a wardrobe, over a tunnel painted on a cliff wall, etc. This will form a gate, either of the Translation-type or Inapposite-type, to the new recursion. It doesn’t say how that’s decided. Does the planter get to pick? Is it one of the qualities all the investiture people have to decide on? Who cares, I guess. After the seed is planted, you can destroy the thing it was planted in, if you don’t want people to access the recursion through a gate. It won’t harm the recursion, but you’ll have to initiate a translation to get to the recursion going forward. Recursion Traits Depending on the results of the investiture rolls, PCs can imbue a new recursion with a trait that corresponds to their descriptor. More likely than not, there will be more PCs involved in the roll than available traits to give to a recursion, so everyone gets to argue over which descriptor is the most useful. Let’s take a look for ourselves… Appealing: When a creature with the spark attempts to persuade a creature without the spark on this recursion, the difficulty of the roll is modified by one step to the spark-possessor’s benefit. Brash: When a creature with the spark is attempting to overcome or ignore the effects of fear or intimidation on this recursion, the difficulty is modified by one step to its benefit. Clever: When a creature with the spark is attempting to identify or assess danger, lies, quality, importance, function, or power on this recursion, the difficulty is modified by one step to its benefit. Fast: Any creature with the spark adds +1 to its maximum Speed pool while in this recursion. The Speed pool limit goes back down upon leaving the recursion. Graceful: Identical to Fast. The only exact copy. Was it too hard to think of something else for this? Intelligent: Same as Fast, but +1 to the Intellect pool. Lucky: Any creature with the spark can reroll one d20 roll per day on this recursion. Sharp-Eyed: When a creature with the spark is attempting to search or find anything on this recursion, the difficulty is modified by one step to its benefit. Skeptical: When a creature with the spark attempts to see through a trick, illusion, rhetorical ruse designed to evade the issue, or lie on this recursion, the difficulty is modified by one step to its benefit. Stealthy: When a creature with the spark is trying to be a sneaky sort on this recursion, the difficulty roll is modified by one step to its benefit. Strange: When a creature with the spark is trying to recognize and understand the Strange and its denizens, identifying translated visitors from alternate recursions, and identifying and understanding cyphers, the difficulty of the roll is modified by one step to its benefit. Strong: Identical to Fast, Graceful, and Intelligent, except for, you guessed it, +1 to the Might pool. Tough: A creature making a recovery roll adds +1 to the roll. It doesn’t specify that the creature has to have the spark, so this is the only trait that applies to all things on a recursion.  A Growing Recursion Recursions mature from two factors. Primarily, they mature as time passes. Growth can also be accelerated by careful maintenance from its creators. Recursions start out really basic and boring, and slowly develop the qualities chosen at investiture. Changes in the recursion are broken up into age categories that start with months and quickly accelerate to years, then decades, then millennia. A recursion’s size will naturally expand over a year, but as it comes close to reaching a new age category, the growth rate may accelerate or decelerate to match the starting size for the next age category. Thank goodness recursions understand the Earth conception of time and know when they need to kick their expansion into high gear.  That's right, no hyperbolic time chamber shenanigans for you dicks! Pocket Dimension (0-6 Months) Recursion Level Maximum: 1 Laws Allowed: Standard Physics Only Playable Races: Whatever is available on the prime world or recursion it’s connected to. Foci: Draggable only Skills: None Connection to the Strange: As designed Connection to Earth or Recursion: one gate only Size: Up to 225 square feet (21 square meters). Spark: 0% Traits: As determined by investiture Functionally, it’s a single open space with small hints of terrain, architecture, and inhabitants. It’s like being in a very snug one-room apartment. A useful place to dump treasure or bodies, but not much else. Young Recursion (6 Months to 4 Years) Recursion Level Maximum: 2 Laws Allowed: Standard Physics Only Playable Races: Still whatever is on the world it’s connected to. Foci: Draggable, plus one new focus. Skills: None Connection to the Strange: As designed Connection to Earth or Recursion: Up to two gates. Size: Up to 5,000 square feet (465 square meters) Spark: 0% Traits: As determined This recursion is now the size of a small park or mansion. It can have up to 15 discrete spaces separated by the appropriate barriers established in its qualities. Basic flora and fauna can be present. Juvenile Recursion (4 to 10 Years) Recursion Level Maximum: 3 Laws Allowed: Standard Physics or one other Playable Races: Up to one special one. Foci: Draggable, plus two new foci Skills: Simple skill or skills possible Connection to the Strange: As designed Connection to Earth or Recursion: Up to three gates Size: Up to 2 miles in diameter (3 km) Spark: 5% Traits: As determined The recursion is the size of a small city or forest. There’s many discrete spaces with whatever visible details allowed by the space, as established by its qualities. A few sentient and complex native inhabitants can be here and could even possess the spark. Developed Recursion (10 to 500 Years) Recursion Level Maximum: 5 Laws Allowed: Standard Physics or up to two others Playable Races: Up to two others Foci: Draggable, plus up to four new foci Skills: Complex skill or skills possible Connection to the Strange: As designed Connection to Earth or Recursion: Various gates Size: Up to 100 miles in diameter (161 km) Spark: Up to 25% Traits: As determined The recursion is now the size of a small nation or state. There’s even more discrete details established by the nature of the recursion and an even higher chance for beings with the spark. This could lead to an emergent culture beyond what was initially seeded. Old Recursion (500 to 200,000 Years) Recursion Level Maximum: 9 Laws Allowed: Standard physics or up to two others Playable Races: Up to five others Foci: Draggable, plus up to fifteen new foci Skills: Complex skill or skills probable Connection to the Strange: As designed Connection to Earth or Recursion: Various gates Size: Up to 1,000 miles in diameter (1,609 km) Spark: Up to 80% Traits: As determined This recursion is the size of a small continent. Your layout, architecture, terrain, etc. will be as big as allowed within that space. If there are inhabitants, the majority have sparks and, therefore, a thriving culture beyond what was initially seeded. Ascendant Recursion (200,000+ Years) A recursion that is so matured as to develop wholly new qualities, cultures, species, and civilizations beyond anything initially seeded. It could perhaps even bridge the gap between the dark energy network and the real universe and become a prime world in its own right.  All of this time stuff is really starting to give me a headache. Recursion Improvement You might have noticed that it takes quite a bit of in-game time for a recursion to become something other than a large portable hole or Leomund’s Tiny Hut the natural way. Well don’t worry, PCs can speed up the process to creating something cool…. sort of. All they have to do is spend more of their XP to improve the recursion in some way. Ah, XP, is there any problem you don’t solve? Hasten Maturity For the low, low cost of just 1 XP, the recursion matures by one month! Let’s see… assuming you don’t roll high enough to start out with a young or juvenile recursion, that means you’d need to spend 6 XP right away to advance it from pocket dimension to young. Then it’s 42 XP to advance it from young to juvenile. After that, it’s 72 XP to advance it from juvenile to developed, and now I don’t feel like doing more math because it’s not like the PCs would care about or be able to achieve a recursion higher than that from scratch without time travel or a generational campaign. Special Translation Zones Once a recursion becomes large enough to host multiple separate locations, PCS can spend XP to create one or more special zones within the recursion. Most commonly this is where translation is restricted. A zone can also be designated as a spot that channels free translation attempts in or out, or have other special qualities to it like being higher level than the rest of the recursion. To create a special zone within a recursion whose level is higher than the recursion average, PCs can spend 10 XP per level for the zone. This zone is up to 100 feet (30 m) in diameter. To create a special zone within a recursion that requires a special element to translate into (a pass phase, a gate key, a badge, etc.) PCs can spend 10 XP per level of the zone. The area created is up to 100 feet (30 m) in diameter Other Unique Features Generally, PCs can create other immobile, one-off features not described here by spending 10 XP per level of the unique effect desired, unless the GM thinks it’s stupid or improbable.  "So I'm going to add boxes that walk along on other boxes and they piss light." "Why is it always about pissing with you, Gary?" Recursion Design Elements Not sure what to make a recursion out of? How about we toss some clichés around to really get the creative fires going. Valuable Resources, Powerful NPCs So besides the ego boost of playing god, or a place to crash while the heat dies down, you might think it’d be nice to have a place you can go and strip mine or enslave the populace for your nefarious plans. Well guess what, jerk: the book posted:The hard and fast rule is that until a recursion hits level 5 overall, no particularly valuable resources exist in large enough quantities to be worth collecting at the location. NPCs are even more challenging. You won’t start seeing any of note until the recursion hits juvenile-age, and at that point they might start spawning with “minds” and have “opinions” about their “civil liberties”. It’s also a small population at first, and they’ll mostly be at the same level as the recursion’s level. A small number will be higher, but those ones are more likely to have the spark. Culture and Theme Do you want some suggested high concepts beaten to death in genre fiction to base your recursion on? There’s two tables here, one with themes that would fit with any physical law, and one that only fits under weird laws. I’ll just stick both next to each other.  Characteristics and Quirks Customize your recursion even further by adding random little features to it. Get as weird and funky as you’d like.  And now that you know how to make your own, why don’t we take a closer look at all those premade realities the book has been teasing us with? Next…. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfPWpEKhgfk Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 18:33 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 07:16
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Nessus posted:A world in the shape of a ring? It'd never fly. What a bout a world in the shape of the ring, made out of hair, where the nazis won, and everything smells like men's cologne?
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Dec 3, 2017 07:35
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JcDent posted:How do standard physics allow you to live on a snowflake made of acid or bugs? Like potatocubed said, they wouldn't and you'd probably die. But by the point your recursion can be weird enough to be composed of bugs or acid, it's probably spawned a physical law that allows you to live on it normally. I hope. Unless you really just wanted to make a big body-disposal dimension for all your killing antics. In this game that would like to emphasize adventure and discovery over fighting, but also made one of the three base classes "fighter" again. Mors Rattus posted:The gently caress is perceptronium? That table is the only place in the book that mentions it, so your guess is as good as mine Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 19:01 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 16:35
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Joe Slowboat posted:Still ridiculous but I can see sticking that in a table if the table were weird, optional, and in a much looser, more PBTA-ish game where you're intended to make poo poo up off of general setting implication. Cypher System games like The Strange occupy this weird trench between open games that feed on player input like PbtA and FATE, and the firmly-defined dimensions of d20. The game loves to talk about PCs giving things flavor and background dressing. Then it abridges every suggestion with "at the GM's discretion" because it doesn't provide the kind of clear limits or guidelines for what is appropriate the way PC moves in a PbtA game do. The GM Intrusion is the clearest example of "not getting it" when you compare it to the way Invoking and Compelling work with Aspects in FATE. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Dec 3, 2017 |
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Dec 3, 2017 20:44
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Robindaybird posted:yep, with Ravenloft, the rule of thumb is to times the population number by ten to get a more reasonable number. Even Eberron messed it up. It's supposed to be some kind of pseudo early-modern magepunk world and the largest city is Sharn, the New York/London analog, with bustling population of 200,000.
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Dec 6, 2017 03:28
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Mors Rattus posted:So, y'know...that was the population of New York, broadly, in 1900. (Mind, it doubled within a decade, and London was already at a million before that, and was nearer to 10 million by 1900, so.) This definitely doesn't look like a city of 200,000  Night10194 posted:Eberron is the Wizard 20s, though. Well the Cogs of Sharn are basically Detroit. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 04:02 on Dec 6, 2017 |
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Dec 6, 2017 03:59
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It's an adjustment to get use to the idea of willingly invoking an aspect to make things more difficult, but the value of fate points in the system makes it worthwhile to do. It can also be a pain as the GM to manage all the aspects on PCs, NPCs, the nearby area, and the setting as a whole. It's still a very inventive way of encouraging characters to interact with each other and the world around them. It helps a lot that aspects aren't constant negatives, but also character-defining features that can be used for good, which change and grow with the character.
Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Dec 7, 2017 |
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Dec 7, 2017 02:57
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Hostile V posted:The other thing that drove people bananas was the OSR revolution wherein one could make any setting they wanted as long as they nominally acknowledged the existence of who owned the D&D 3.0 rules. This started...well on paper it started an indie revolution where anyone with an idea could grab d20 and run giggling into the hills to start making a family out of it. I think you're mixing up the d20 bubble and the OSR movement there. OSR is separate from d20 D&D stuff and focused on OD&D, the various stripes of Basic, and AD&D 1/2e. Not to say a lot of OSR people don't do the same shameful things with the D20, but to the older rulesets, because that does totally happen. e- Also, I didn't get to say this at the time, but your write up of Abandon All Hope was really cool. I really don't get how that game was expected to be played, though. Not just as an ongoing adventure, but how it expected players to approach any encounter. Even a PC that was a fine-tuned optimization machine looked like they'd get murdered because nothing about the statted-up enemies was balanced or fair... unless you expected each character to start with a crate of grenades they could drop in front of a demon or robot and detonate from a distance. Like, if you're going to present yourself as being intelligent connoisseurs of 3e D&D rules, how could you mange to gently caress up the monster design even worse than the first two Monster Manuals? Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 03:40 on Dec 13, 2017 |
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Dec 13, 2017 03:29
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Eventually the thread will just start breaking due to its size and radium coding, but this thread is almost two years old and hasn't cracked 1k pages so we're probably safe for a while yet
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Dec 13, 2017 03:45
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I could get making the monsters ultra deadly to set a tone (but why bother treating them as combat enemies at all when being escape-or-die fail conditions would get the whole miserable affair over with sooner?) Then the adventures treat every enemy as a D&D combat encounter you're expected to beat in order to advance/nab loot, and you start seeing how approaching genres and settings with rules designed for high fantasy dungeon crawling was a terrible idea that poisoned the well for a long, long time.
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Dec 13, 2017 04:26
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Freaking Crumbum posted:the other thing is that the setting as presented had incoherent internal logic, which makes every other facet really have to shine on its individual merits. Since d20 combat is already a well documented cluster gently caress of poorly executed systems, expecting the combat to carry its own weight was unrealistic at best. Seriously, before that review I wouldn't have guessed that anyone could gently caress up "space prison falls into hell and everyone fights demons" as a game premise in so many surprising ways
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Dec 13, 2017 05:10
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When will you youngsters learn that mass market appeal is killing your soul, unlike my heroes Bruce Springsteen, Rick James, the Ramones, Judas Priest, Prince, Frank Zappa, Patti Smith, and the B-52s!
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Jan 30, 2018 05:34
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Kavak posted:How mass market was Frank Zappa? Genuine question. Pretty sure the minute you get inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame your soul is eaten by the slumbering Old One beneath Wall Street.
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Jan 30, 2018 05:44
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Night10194 posted:Also the whole technomagic machine signal just seems like a way more boring idea than just, you know, playing resistance people. I mentioned it before in the Kickstarter thread discussion but the portion of the pitch describing it as "cyberpunk" is particularly bizarre because his big selling point of putting the game in an 80s time period is how low-tech it is; i.e. smuggling secret recordings in cassette tapes, having to rely on pay phones and face-to-face time for interactions, having to a lot of walking and talking to research and recruit instead of relying on the internet, etc. Except the player characters are still Adam Jensen'd up and getting superpowers from radio signals. It's a really strange clash of themes.
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Sep 25, 2018 00:52
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Nessus posted:It is hilarious to me how even these period pieces have to fall over themselves to tell you that NO, THE COMMIES WEREN'T GOOD EITHER. I remember that WWII-with-Quirks game having to outline a bunch of different comical non-historical atrocities undertaken by the USSR in grisly detail (and none, of course, for poor old Germany). Sigmata is pretty bad with history. As someone pointed out in the Industry thread, Joseph McCarthy was elected president in 1960 in the setting. Three years after his irl death. The entire alternate timeline split because nobody censured him or criticized him loudly enough to stop his red-scaremongering.
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Sep 25, 2018 13:34
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