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wdarkk posted:Lots of people don't count the Manhattan Project (or the B-29, or the B-36) as wonderwaffen when they maybe should. 100% agree. The Manhattan Project in particular is exactly that sort of super weapon bullshit... except ours terrifyingly turned out to be as-advertised. Young Freud posted:Project Pluto? I have to explain so people realize just how loving insane this thing was. It's a nuclear powered supersonic, potentially hypersonic, cruise missile. Not nuclear armed (though it is this as well), nuclear powered. It uses a light weight, un-shielded nuclear reactor to apply heat to a ramjet engine. In theory it could fly for months at a time, and supersonic speeds at near treetop height, all the while spewing fission products out its tail pipe. It was designed to carry multiple nuclear bombs to drop, but that's actually the boring bit. Just the shockwave from its low level flight could cause significant damage, and remember its supposed to be making these passes for days, weeks, months. And when it finally did run out of fuel, the plan was to crash it into a final target at top speed. It wouldn't be a nuclear explosion, but it would gently caress up whatever it hit real bad AND throw all the remaining radioactive waste on board all over the landscape. They canceled the project because they were scared they'd prompt the Soviets to build their own, and because ICBMs seemed more promising.
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Jul 3, 2016 03:41
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Nessus posted:Post-post-apocalypse, for want of a better term, has always been really common in fantasy, at least. Hell, the reason for all those giant empty wastelands in Tolkien was because of a huge plague a couple hundred years before the Hobbit. And in a less controversial form, it's been a major plot point in most of the Final Fantasy games. The population was significantly lower in most places for a very long time - in the early Medieval period, the population dropped by 30% or more. By the time of Charlemagne, the population was less than half what it had been. Productivity dropped through the floor, local warlords took over amidst low-scale conflict, and The nations that followed lacked the technical ability or organization to replace Roman roads or bridges or aquaducts - the best they could manage were patch jobs. If one failed, a whole community could go under. So as much of a cliche as the idea of the fallen empire is, it's worth remembering that our own world is probably fairly accurately described as post-post-apocalyptic.
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Jul 14, 2016 01:08
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Ultiville posted:So is the New World, at least most of it. Mesoamerica is less clear, but in the South and North European settlers basically took over in the aftermath of the apocalypse caused by their own arrival and the disease and other upheaval it brought. That being said, the Fragged Empire setting does have a lot more in common with the Americas. There really isn't tech beyond the current races - or at least not very much - it's just a lot cheaper to re-use what was left behind.
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Jul 14, 2016 20:54
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Kai Tave posted:Well the various global powers certainly seem to think that the Nazi's many weird science experiments have the potential to be awesome, but the book goes to great pains to illustrate that no, it would be for the best if everybody just left that poo poo alone but the Cold War is in the process of ramping up so rational policy-making is going to go out the window because you can't let there be a shoggoth gap. 
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Jul 18, 2016 18:44
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Halloween Jack posted:Do you mean the one that talks about how the Nazis gave their Untermenschen special badges, and then the Allies reminded them of a cool new military technology called "a sniper?"
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Jul 19, 2016 16:03
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I find myself agreeing that the reasons as to why the designers made the choices in 2E that they did don't ultimately hold up, both in terms of how the game functions and in terms of what makes for good game design in general. That being said, it's a design philosophy nearly 30 years old and it's really interesting to see that they were thinking about these things, even if ultimately we've figured out there's a better way to do it since then. I think the broader idea of having the DMG mirror the PHB and provide this kind of explanation and deeper discussion is an incredibly good one. It's just a smart layout choice, and its perfect for what a GM's guide should do - you've got the rules already. Knowing why the designers made them that way gives you a much firmer foundation for making decisions when you run into marginal cases, or when you're considering making a houserule.
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Aug 16, 2016 18:25
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The big problem with Beast is that there's no metaphor happening. Yes, there are iffy things about Vampire and Werewolf, but because its allegorical there's some space to take a step back from it. And because they're identifiable myths with well established places in fiction, there's already a lot of discussion around them to tap into, to come to grips with the problematic elements and get something meaningful out of them. Beast doesn't have that. Beasts don't look like an allegory for anything, they look like a (slightly) exaggerated version of people who are in the news every day, with a thin veneer of supernatural slathered over it. And because they lack a cohesive mythos to tap into, there's no structure to explore the issues they bring up. Yes, they're supposed to represent an archetype in fiction of the boogeyman, but the way their written just isn't weird enough to support that. They're trying to encompass far too many different concepts that are too disparate, and in some cases ones that aren't really supernatural. Hannibal and Jigsaw shouldn't be PCs. They're fundamentally different from the other monsters in WoD, because each of them is essentially cursed to do something awful to survive and the game is on some level about the struggle between that and whatever humanity they have left. By including movie serial killers in its inspirations, Beast undercuts all of the justifications that make the other games work. And of course the one allegorical aspect, the Beast's opponents, backfires because the Beasts are written so they lack that fundamental conflict between survival and conscience, so at best you have a situation where both sides deserve it. Beast could have worked if it had stuck with a narrower core idea, if it had really been about boogeymen, like Stephen King's IT or the babadook or similar characters, and built up a structure around that like the other WoD games do with their subjects. But it failed to do that. In a way, Beast is the archetypal bad Fatal and Friends game. Like CthuluTech or even Witch Girl Adventures, there's something at the heart of those games that's compelling, a version of them that would make an amazing game. But the version we actually have use that idea to support awful, indefensible content instead. These games aren't just lovely. If they were just lovely we'd ignore them. Instead, these games are like someone gave you a slice of delicious looking chocolate cake - and when you take a bite, that's when you realize it's not chocolate.
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Aug 19, 2016 01:46
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The Lone Badger posted:Do the Crab trade much with the ratmen? It seems to me that if the Crab sent a few carts of grain and second-rate weapons and the Nezumi then kept them in the loop on what went down in that section of the Shadowlands over the next six months then both parties would be very happy with the deal.
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Aug 21, 2016 14:24
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Robindaybird posted:The Ikko-Ikki were more or less anti-feudal massive peasant revolts, weren't they? For a non-Japanese example, the legacy of Rome is always a complicated one. On the one hand Rome used its military might ruthlessly, and made it policy to Romanize the regions under its control. On the other hand, in nearly every region Roman rule after the conquest led to improvements in virtually every measurable condition related to quality of life. And the Romans did not attempt to stamp out local customs - they often adopted local gods into their own worship, and accepted foreign cultural practices, eventually making them Roman themselves (they learned to make hams from the Celts, for example). So is Rome good or bad? Can their military actions be justified by the outcome? It's not just modern scholars who argue over it. There are accounts from all over the Roman empire where provincials would argue for both cases - some decrying Roman tyranny, others praising Roman beneficence. Even contemporary Romans themselves disagreed on the subject. That doesn't mean we can't ultimately decide today to condemn the violence. But even in the absence of biased reports and with good evidence, it can be incredibly difficult to make definitive statements on this sort of thing.
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Aug 21, 2016 22:35
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Japan is complicated by not having much in the way of independent scholarship. Most historical accounts at the time were commissioned by lords to tell the story of how awesome they were, and so the closest thing to "truth" about the Sengoku period is often a Venn diagram of where more multiple records intersect.
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Aug 22, 2016 03:57
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Alien Rope Burn posted:There was a running group gag with a friend had a Shinjo character who did all of his poetry on a horse because, hey, he adds his Horsemanship to all rolls while mounted.
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Aug 22, 2016 04:42
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Crasical posted:The irony of half-swording and European fighting styles being treated with the same awe and reverence that FOLDED 1,000 TIMES katana were fifteen years ago is not lost on me.
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Aug 23, 2016 17:54
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I love pole-axes if only because once you see one, you get a whole new appreciation for the secondary definition of an expression of shock.Robindaybird posted:There's no one "Best sword" - which is imho the biggest gripe against Katana-nerds. The Katana is an amazing weapon created for an environment with very low and poor source of iron, and the sheer dedication to the craft, but it's not inherently superior to the Scimitar, the Longsword, Claymore, or Falchion. But sometimes people just figure out a better way to do things. I'd much rather had an arming sword than a spatha, for example. And earlier the Romans themselves (and probably the Carthaginians as well) put aside their indigenous designs to adopt the short swords they found in Iberia (Spain), which were just better at doing what the Romans were already doing with their blades. hectorgrey posted:Well, swords were used in battle; just not as a primary weapon. Soldiers were (up until around 18th century, I believe) armed with whatever they had the money for, and second hand arming swords and backswords were usually fairly cheap and relatively light, so they made for good backup weapons should anything happen to the main one. It was the firearm, and particularly the musket, that put paid to swords as a primary arm. There were infantry who relied on the sword all the way up to the point that firearms drove all purely hand-to-hand weapons into secondary roles. But they tended to be specialists - either a counter to a specific opponent, or part of a warrior class (knights and samurai and so forth). The spear dominated the battlefield in the sense that far more combatants used them than they did swords. The one major exception was the Roman system of the Republic and the principate. Roman armies relied on the sword as the killing weapon in a way pretty much no other military force did before or since. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 21:53 on Aug 23, 2016 |
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Aug 23, 2016 21:40
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The cleric's use of blunt weapons comes from the idea that Medieval clergy who served as knights preferred them, supposedly to avoid shedding blood. Odo of Bayeaux was particularly noted for this. The evidence for this is pretty shaky, but it's a popular notion in historical fiction and literature. Plus back when clerics first showed up in D&D, a lot of classicists would have just taught it as fact.
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Aug 24, 2016 19:32
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Davin Valkri posted:Where did that idea come from, then? Anybody who has squished a tomato or (more grisly) seen the aftermath of a bad car accident knows that blunt impact sheds blood just fine. The tapestry goes out of its way to explain that Odo - Bishop of Bayeaux and half-brother of William the Conqueror - didn't shed any blood at Hastings. That would have been unseemly at the time for a cleric, especially against other Christians. This got interpreted in some sources as him fighting but preferring a mace for the reasons discussed above. But the more likely explanation is that the mace is a symbol of leadership. The tapestry shows William with a similar one, and depictions of other warrior-clerics include both maces and swords. The description of Odo not shedding blood is probably intended to mean he didn't fight at all, just supported moral or issued commands to others.
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Aug 24, 2016 20:28
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Alien Rope Burn posted:There was one guy who always wanted to have Ratling Ally as a wife, explaining it had been part of a negotiation with a ratling tribe. I don't think he intended it in a nasty way; it was mostly just a gag that got old very, very fast.
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Aug 25, 2016 23:05
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Night10194 posted:It sounds like multiple clans being major line staff's special babies was a serious problem for L5R.
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Aug 26, 2016 06:34
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JcDent posted:
As a graphic designer, this book is 100% what happens when you let a couple graphic designers loose with no constraints.
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Jul 29, 2017 19:22
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Nessus posted:It's just economic anxiety, don't you see. The REAL wicked people are the shadowrunners who stole the list!
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Aug 9, 2017 16:32
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Night10194 posted:E: Like, if you want to, say 'He somehow inspired fanatical loyalty in a bunch of disparate psychos, who will fight to the death' or something. But every hack author trying to talk up their 'waves of my own men at it' guy as a great general gets on my nerves. I think it's more of the usual problem of hack writers. They want to write someone as brilliant or skilled in a particular field, but they don't really know what that means and are too lazy or arrogant to do the research. So when they try to demonstrate the genius of the character, what you see is the writer's lack of understanding come through. Inescapable Duck posted:Not like it doesn't happen in real life. Even the famous Pyrrhic victory doesn't really count. Greek historians report that Pyrrhus of Epirus gave his famous response - "Another such victory and I come back to Epirus alone" - in response to someone congratulating him on beating the Romans at Asculum. The battle that inspired the very term we use for a damaging victory was seen as a praiseworthy one except by the guy who won it. Plus, sometimes it does take a skilled general to look at a situation and realize that waves of men are the correct solution. Especially after less clear thinking commanders have failed with overly clever plans.
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Aug 13, 2017 15:28
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Mors Rattus posted:Oh hey, a fan-made Lustria/Southlands supplement. Gonna have to read this and see if it is unfortunately racist.
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Aug 15, 2017 16:15
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Mors Rattus posted:Well, yes, but there's the dimension of 'is the racism spawned from GW and this guy tried to make it not as bad' or 'oh hey, spearchuckers' A very fair point, and the excerpt looks promising. Halloween Jack posted:Those are the pseudo-Soviet people from Dilbert, right? Sadly the Dilbert strip one is Elbonia and thus a different kind of stupid pun, robbing us of a truly hilarious meeting of terrible minds.
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Aug 15, 2017 16:42
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Wapole Languray posted:Yes, but not in Europe at the time. Archaeologists have no evidence of spear-throwers existing until around 10,000 BCE. Same for Bow and Arrow. As primitive as it seems, Wurm is set about 30,000 years before the first evidence they existed. Wurm is set far enough back that it likely predates spear throwers, but its close to the probably horizon of their development.
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Aug 16, 2017 03:47
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It's another instance of cargo cult gamer culture, like hating Monty Hall GMs. High PC mortality isn't inherently bad, but it requires a system and mindset designed to handle that. Playing dungeon Vietnam in Dungeons & Dragons from at least AD&D1e on is a terrible idea - character creation is an involved process that encourages you to invest in your character, so dying is a disappointment and tends to take you out of the game for long periods. But the earliest D&D stories were fun PC murderfests because it took a couple minutes to make a new character, and anyways Gygax and crew were totally okay with contriving a way to intro your new PC in the very next dungeon room (or even the current one). Hell just erasing the name at the top of the sheet and writing in a new one was kosher. If you build your game around high mortality and make sure it doesn't bar participation, it's a potentially interesting mode of play. It's when bad GMs shoehorn the attitude into games that actively make dying a huge pain in the rear end that it just becomes dickish behavior.
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Aug 20, 2017 04:53
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Mors Rattus posted:Yes, my point is more that the translators of Kuro were against using the actual word 'gimmick' for some reason and it's the most weeb thing.
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Aug 28, 2017 14:57
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Hostile V posted:It bears repeating: this was not written in Japan. This was written by a French company setting a game in Japan that was then translated into English. It's Gimmiku because someone in France thought it would be cool to use that Japanese word. That would also make it more evidence that the translation here is a bit lazy. The translator looked at the skill list and translated all the French on it, and left the Japanese... and didn't bother to consider that the "Japanese" skill name is actually English. e: Or decided to keep the Japanese for "cool" factor which is just as silly. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 17:16 on Aug 28, 2017 |
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Aug 28, 2017 16:38
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wiegieman posted:Numenera is a perfect storm of D&D sacred cows and bad design decisions.
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Sep 18, 2017 18:16
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Cheek pouches would be really cool in a different game where it doesn't come down to a minor bonus to hiding small items. EDIT: Also all the art of those species was clearly ordered as two separate pieces per, and then they ham-handedly overlapped them in the layout. It's kind of amazing. I'm sure they're using them separately somewhere else, but still.
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Sep 28, 2017 17:33
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JcDent posted:"Monks have to be all vaguely spiritual in the Yin-Yang sense, and we're in space, what can we do... oooh, I have an idea?" What 4E did differently is allow paladins to be of any alignment, and to champion any god, right from day one. There was some discussion of them championing whole pantheons as well. There was a similar note to the D&D Cyclopedia one about philosophical paladins or paladins of non-deities, but that had mostly to do with Dark Sun, where one of the setting conceits is that there are no gods/the gods are dead. Even that was a semi-optional rule, a way to justify Divine power source classes if you didn't want to ban them as the setting defaulted to. Eberron, where the gods are distant and uninvolved, had a bit of it as well. But even in Eberron the power is explicitly divine - it's more that the gods aren't persons you could actually meet in the sense of Greek or Norse deities like in most D&D settings. There wasn't a whole lot of rule support for it other than declaring it possible if you thought it was a cool concept, and it was brought in with pre-4E settings.
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Oct 2, 2017 10:37
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Thuryl posted:Also, once a god invests a 4E divine class with power there are no backsies, so paladins aren't at risk of losing their powers if the player and GM disagree on the right thing for a paladin to do. That was a pretty significant difference from previous editions.
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Oct 2, 2017 13:09
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Terrible Opinions posted:I can't really imagine it'd make paladins any less disruptive. I mean given that almost all of the disruption comes from GMs they're liable to reverse the rule anyways. There is no cure for the reddit Atheist GM loving over the paladin besides not playing with reddit Atheists. The problem historically with paladins is the game outright told players and DMs to act a specific way. One that made the game less fun for everyone involved. It's an especially big land mine for new players, who would read the advice and quite reasonably assume that's how it should work. Time and again I've seen perfectly reasonable people get twisted up in knots over it because that's what the book said to do. It's not an unreasonable stance to think that if a game suggests - or in the case of paladins, mandates - a specific playstyle, that's the appropriate way to go about things. There are certainly plenty of toxic DMs who use the paladin rules as a fig leaf for assholery, but that's far from the majority of paladin horror stories. And even in their case, taking away the official sanction can't hurt. Also, a lot of lovely DMs got to be lovely because they played with lovely groups and think that's how it's supposed to work. You can't do anything about existing grognards, but at least you can remove a rule that helps create more.
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Oct 2, 2017 13:33
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Kurieg posted:I love the mental image of a paladin proffering their holy symbol and some titled noble running away screaming about communism.
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Oct 2, 2017 19:36
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Wish I'd been reading GimpInBlack's PATROL review from the start, I'm really digging it and hope someone runs it at some point. Also, I recognize each of the characters in the squad except Ratcatcher. I can't place the reference at all, what's the inspiration there?
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Oct 3, 2017 16:51
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GimpInBlack posted:Yeah, in Warhammer Fantasy, arguably the most well-known starting Profession is the ratcatcher, whose starting equipment included "a small but vicious dog." I was wondering if you were still doing that contest based on the Serial Numbers; if so, do the Easter eggs use all six numbers?
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Oct 3, 2017 17:34
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GimpInBlack posted:I am still doing the contest, and yes, all of the easter eggs use all six digits.
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Oct 3, 2017 17:58
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In that case: Dutch, 12040806 - The Black Lagoon anime started airing on April 8, 2006 (04/08/06) Radar, 17012570 - The MASH movie was released January 25, 1970 (01/25/70) Ferret Face, 15092939 - Larry Linville's (who played Frank Burns on the MASH TV show) birth date is September 29, 1939 (09/29/39) Alien, 31055426 - 055 is LV in roman numerals, LV-426 is the planet Aliens is set on Ratcatcher, 24862051 - Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 1e published 1986, catalog number GW2051 Punisher, 12129274 - First appeared in The Amazing Spider Man #129, February 1974 (2/74) EDIT: I can't type properly. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 18:12 on Oct 3, 2017 |
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Oct 3, 2017 18:09
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GimpInBlack posted:100% correct! Congratulations Comrade. I really thought the Warhammer one would stump people. Let me know your DTRPG account email, and I'll get you your PDF. DTRPG is gorbash.kazdar(AT)gmail.com. Thanks so much!
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Oct 3, 2017 18:25
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open_sketchbook posted:I mean, basically. There's so much interesting (which is to say, loving horrifying) stuff about atomic warfare, especially our attitudes towards it in the early Cold War, it really does deserve its own book. open_sketchbook posted:Though I need to write some uplifting poo poo about magical girls or star trek futures first. gently caress, I done made myself depressed.
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Oct 3, 2017 21:02
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GimpInBlack posted:The funny thing about this approach is that Pathfinder has rules for scaling magic items, so you can, e.g., start the campaign with your mother's ancestral sword and still be using it at 20th level. But rather than lean into that and recognize it as something players want (there are a lot of forum posts and 3rd-party supplements for this kind of thing for pretty much every version of D&D that has expected-treasure-by-level rules), they give us the Galaxy of Boring Weapon Adjectives. I mean, seriously, "ultraserrated?"
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Oct 5, 2017 15:36
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Red Metal posted:The traditional weapon of the vesk, the doshko is composed of one to four triangular blades arranged in a row and attached to a long haft. Ideal for devastating overhand blows and catching and parrying enemy weapons, its use is a highly respected art form in traditional vesk society, but it also sees use by creatures of other races as a variant axe. Traditionally, doshkos are made of steel, but in recent decades they have been crafted using advanced metallurgic techniques and even quantum technology to improve the stabbing edges. It also matches up really well with the gunstock clubs common among Native Americans, especially tribes of the Great Plains. Those typically have a knife type blade on one side, but versions with three blades in a stack exist. If you've seen Last of the Mohicans, think of the weapon Chingachgook (the older Mohican) uses. EDIT: In functionality and game terms all of those examples are pretty comparable to axes. Just that while it sounds pretty goofy in description, there's a real world analog to reference that makes it a bit more interesting. Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 16:55 on Oct 5, 2017 |
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Oct 5, 2017 16:47
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