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

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Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

oriongates posted:

Pretty much, with I suppose Godbound being the more successful one (what's the term for a successful Heartbreaker? Just...an RPG I guess).

Spiritual successor.

# ¿ May 21, 2018 16:03

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 12:40

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

PurpleXVI posted:

I'd suggest "sect" rather than "cult," in the sense that they're an offshoot of a major religion that hasn't really become big enough to be its own.

This, and I would actually go further - cult isn't just negative but pejorative in the English usage.

# ¿ May 30, 2018 22:49

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

The Anabaptist thing really seems like they knew about the historical radicals and just flat out didn�t know or bother to find out that there are more moderate sects are still around.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2018 20:34

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Speleothing posted:

Degenesis? The game that took 4chan by storm? Racist?

Edit: The authors just tore up bread and thew it into the pond. How were they to know it'd be eaten up by things that walk and quack like ducks?

To be fair 4chan pretty routinely does this sort of thing:

So it's not a given that something that's popular over there is actually terrible. It deserves a closer look, but it's not a 100% thing.

Sadly Degenesis seems to be, at best, a case where the developers became enamored of their aesthetic and executed it in a shallow way and without self reflection. And it might be something worse.

# ¿ Jun 4, 2018 21:26

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

JcDent posted:

Dear nerds: this is the second or third time I had to read the paragraph. And the first bolded bit always throws me for a loop: it states or implies that all the doctors were killed before the looting commenced. But then the second bolded part comes and you see that some doctors survived and went on the defensive. So are my English skills failing me, or is this some lovely writing?

It's a bit of clumsy wording, but no, the phrasing doesn't imply "all the doctors" in English. Using "doctors" without a modifier or article there only indicates more than one, without specifying how many more. Whether it's all, most, some, or a handful depends entirely on context. In this case I wouldn't read it as "all" but "many." Also the second part would work even if all the doctors died; a past tense explanation of how they fought before they went down would be perfectly reasonable.

# ¿ Jun 11, 2018 13:51

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Zereth posted:

Oh no

new circuit designs

how horrible

Clearly you haven't designed a circuit board :colbert:

# ¿ Jun 14, 2018 16:48

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

JcDent posted:

Yeah, it's interesting how Montagne is just France with Portals and on the whole Wester Europe seems only a wee bit magical. Get out of it a little, and it's Vaticcine missionaries who don't really have any powers spreading the good word to the people who occasionally go to drag their dead ancestors to chill in the land of the living or go into caves hunting for the cure-all scales of the world serpent.

You seem to be mistaking cultural differences for fantastical elements. Every non-Thean nation is just as much a direct map of real world plus some fantasy elements as "France with Portals." Mandan for example is literally "Mali but what if the legendary history was true," which means its a precise mirror of Avalon being "Britain but the Arthur stories are true."

# ¿ Jul 7, 2018 16:23

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

JcDent posted:

Didn't even get Pegasus Knights out of the bargain. Could have held out for a Green Knight, too.

Also, where does it say that Elaine is bi? Sure, she was pregnant a decade ago, but, ugh, noble marriages and pregnancies don't seem like a thing that bends to the whims of the parties involved.

It's in the text of the post and the book. She's explicitly in a relationship with both Colleen MacLeod and Lawrence Lugh. The Lugh writeup specifically is just in the next update.

# ¿ Jul 12, 2018 14:47

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

The thing is, you don't need a tacit agreement to avoid the best tactics in combat. The simple fact is that the every party member gets to draw down on a single target and deal a bunch of dramatic wounds without them having a chance to respond is just not going to come up unless the players have done something to contrive it. Cythereal's example is the one to apply - if you've managed that, don't bother with combat, the party has already won via other dramatic actions.

The actual real world case in a game like this is that pistols are something that either gives you an edge or lets you delete one or two minor combatants per encounter. You aren't realistically going to be reloading in combat except in rare cases, and while occasionally you can come in with a brace of pistols on hand, much more often you may have one or two available. And all this assumes you actually hit with them.

That's why they deal dramatic wounds. Firing a pistol in a fight uses up a pretty significant resource. In D&D 4e parlance, they're encounter powers.

# ¿ Jul 17, 2018 23:56

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

This argument is dumb because the prior is wrong. Guns are very strong, yes, but five party members shooting the villain to initiate combat almost certainly won't actually defeat the villain, between misses and villain abilities to negate hits/wounds/otherwise gently caress with the situation.

It gives you a big advantage, yes, but it's not a casual win button. You really have to sell out on firearms specialization to have it work reliably, and then you're going to be sub-par at basically everything else, to the point that shooting things is pretty much going to be your only viable option.

This whole discussion is based on a misunderstanding of the mechanics in question, and that's before we get to the fact that the 5 party members vs 1 villain situation is atypical for the kind of game this is anyways. If the party has managed to create that circumstance and the villain doesn't have the tricks to negate it - don't do combat! They almost certainly did a lot of work to create that situation and by pulling it off they've already won the encounter, same as you shouldn't bother having an 11th level D&D party fight level 1 goblins after they snuck around to the hidden back entrance of the evil fortress.

The game can already handle party members carrying around a couple of pistols each, even as powerful as they are. It's not going to negate encounters or rule out quip filled sword play.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 17:07

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

There is literally a dueling style in the post above yours that can negate dramatic wounds from gunshots.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 18:24 on Jul 18, 2018

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 18:19

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Night10194 posted:

'Not even heroes can dodge bullets' is a pretty stupid line for an action story to take.

That, I agree with, especially since it's not functionally true in the mechanics.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 18:28

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

LGD posted:

(for completeness I should also note I ignored the "hard to kill" quality (gives an extra dramatic wound) and some forms of sorcery (specifically glamor's bullet catch and mother's touch's regeneration) that would allow you to spend danger points to counter a limited number of gunshots)

This is precisely my point. You're crafting a nightmare scenario that requires pretending a bunch of other mechanics in the game don't exist, and then saying other people don't understand the game.

Maybe the reason you're getting push back because you don't actually know what you're talking about.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 18:45

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Night10194 posted:

Something's been bugging me about Theah and I can't tell if it's just the omission of player facing hooks or what but it just feels too full. Every plot already feels like somebody's on it, between the dozens of secret societies and NPCs.

There are actually a lot of player facing hooks, but Mors isn't including all of them. Basically every NPC or NPC group comes with a two or three, and there are more in location descriptions, often specifically pegged out at the end of each write up.

Also I think the NPCs and plots don't quite play out that way. A lot of the situations are in unstable equilibrium at the moment, and PCs can easily tip the scales if they take an interest.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 19:19

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Josef bugman posted:

Is there any system that does not, in some way, let you do this?

I mean the more complex ones, not like Heroquest or BiTD or Apoc world?

Generally no but some systems are better about keeping the effective but boring option from being the best option.

# ¿ Jul 18, 2018 22:06

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Mors Rattus posted:

I love GM beatsticks, they make no sense because why would the GM need them when they control the entire game if they want to be a dick?

Cargo cult design strikes again. They make sense in games explicitly designed for adversarial GMing and where the GM is also playing by a strict set of rules, which early D&D often was, but it's yet another thing copied without consideration in so many other games.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2018 14:49

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

BinaryDoubts posted:

All I want on this earth is a review of Stigmata, and of Monte Cook's BLACK CUBE

I mean, it's a Monte Cooke production, so just imagine D&D 3.x but with an unconscionable amount of cards.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2018 20:48

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Kult just feels like the Ministry cover band of RPGs.

I'm honestly not sure who should be more insulted by that analogy.

# ¿ Jul 30, 2018 18:10

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

JcDent posted:

You might want to read up about where the Cossacks came from.

[quote="Mors Rattus" post="486625661"]
The actual Cossacks claimed to derive from the actual Khazars, who were an actual group of Turkic origin.

Which is to say, the same culture group as Mongols.

e: even if they were wrong about being Khazar-originated, they were definitely Turkic in origin before intermarrying heavily into the Eastern European ethnic groups in the areas they lived in.

On top of which Mongolian successor states and steppe empires built on their model were a going concern well into the 16th century, and throughout the 17th and 18th were mostly converted to semi-autonomous vassals of sedentary empires without much changing their character or behavior. Their was an shift in ethnicity and religion during the 16th and 17th century but the political/military organization remained largely the same. And even then there was, as ever, significant cultural exchange across the steppe all the way from the Crimea in the West to Manchuria in the East.

# ¿ Jul 31, 2018 16:16

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Young Freud posted:

It tends to be something that happens a lot in these dystopian cyberpunk games: the megacorps are superpowerful that you can't topple them, might as well as work for them or pick up the crumbs that trickle down.

This narrative can sometimes be interesting to explore in its own right, but yeah probably not for a traditional long-running campaign.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2018 15:02

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

ChaseSP posted:

I think it works fine in Sadowrun due to the implicit part of your characters being you're all violent criminals very much just looking for the next payday that just happens to be striking against something much worse than you are. Not to say you can't be a "moral" runner but it sure as hell makes the job harder when Joe Guard is about to call for the Knights and your only option is capping them in the head.

The problem with Shadowrun as an example for any kind of cyberpunk story is that the underlying assumptions about who 'runners are and just how pervasive megacorp control is has never been consistent, even within editions. You can play Shadowrun as described, but the text also supports the idealistic revolutionary striking a major blow against a corrupt and immoral system. At most each edition has a more dominant narrative, and even then it's never all one way or the other.

Sometimes this works to the game's benefit, appropriately complicating lazy reads of complex situations. Other times it reflects the laziness of the game itself, a shallow pop-culture read of politics and a meta-textual both sidesism as the least effort way to get through a tricky thematic element.

Most often it just makes the edition wars extra nasty as fans take sides as to which is the right way to play the game, especially since it seems less an intentional decision and more an artifact of the long history of dysfunction in the game's development.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2018 15:25

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Night10194 posted:

I always thought Shadowrun was more noir with a punk veneer, where you don't really intend to be the person bringing down all these sorts of insane power structures. You were just doing one more job, they came hard after you, and one thing leads to another and now a megacorp is on fire and there's a dead dragon the lawn.

I think that's also a fair way to approach it.

That's really the core issue with the game. It works with all of these interpretations, but it doesn't seem to be because the devs wanted it to, but because they didn't successfully execute whatever their vision actually was. Or, more likely, everyone involved had strong, non-compatible visions about what Shadowrun was supposed to be.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2018 15:36

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Really it's the introduction of the socket bayonet that truly drives the wholesale rethink of warfare.

# ¿ Aug 8, 2018 22:44

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Or the HRE is just Calakmul but German.

EDIT: Also in this case the group being described is not!Maya, mostly Post-Classical but with more surviving Classical elements.

# ¿ Aug 23, 2018 20:58

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Mr.Misfit posted:

Edit: Isn�t that more of a popular myth and they were well underway even before he became chancellor?

The Autobahn was conceived of prior to Hitler taking power, but it really was just an idea with haphazard and limited effort applied towards it prior to 1933. So the connection there is accurate.

What is mythologized is its importance to the German economy and war effort. The construction did provide a major jobs creation program. But even before the war kicked off, Germany never had enough petrol nor enough trucks to do any serious hauling of goods for either military or industry, and private transport became increasingly rare as the war progressed. Trains continued to do the bulk hauling, with the majority of last-mile delivery relegated to horse drawn transport, even in the army.

The Autobahns were used as auxiliary airstrips, but the importance of that is vanishingly small. The Germans certainly could have constructed equally useful ones at far less effort and the impact of having them was extremely limited.

EDIT: After the war the Autobahns did become increasingly important, in West Germany at least. The Allies used them extensively, since they had a stupendous number of trucks and copious petrol, and in the last months of the war they'd done a very thorough job of blowing German railways and rolling stock to bits. It really wasn't until the 50s that it turned into the national highway system we see it as today, instead of just a make work and prestige project.

Which gets to another myth - it wasn't during the invasion that Eisenhower discovered the usefulness of a national highway system. It wasn't strategically important to anyone then. It was during the occupation and reconstruction that he saw its potential, especially when applied to the United States.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 13:32 on Aug 24, 2018

# ¿ Aug 24, 2018 13:26

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

JcDent posted:

The WWII pidgeon experiment mentioned earlier was about getting pidgeons to guide bombs by pecking extremely early touchscreens. It had a good success rate.

WWII was wild.

Coming in late, but worth pointing out that the pigeon bombs are distinct from the chicken bomb - namely the Blue Peacock nuclear mines. Since early nuclear weapons were very large and hard to fit in planes, the UK experimented with tactical nuclear weapon designs intended to be buried and left behind if they had to retreat in the face of a Soviet invasion. The electronics of the day were very susceptible to cold, so one proposal to keep them warm was to seal a live chicken, with food and water, inside the device and use its body heat to keep the electronics warm.

The Cold War sees your weird, and raises.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2018 05:05

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

JcDent posted:

Blue Peacock starved the chicken to death.

Pigeon Cruise Missile let the pigeon go down in a blaze of glory.

Only if the mine didn�t get detonated. Doesn�t get much more blaze of glory than a 10kt nuclear fireball.

# ¿ Sep 26, 2018 23:25

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Halloween Jack posted:

I haven't read these sections in detail but I'm going to bloviate regardless...in defense of SA this time!

Conventional wisdom is that hard and fiat currencies evolved out of barter economies. Newer research says that's not true--barter economies come in times of economic collapse. (It's not intuitive to develop the idea that a sword and cow and a jar have some fixed abstract value, even if it's only in relation to each other instead of a currency, if you don't already have the concept of currency.)

So you would have barter, but not in the sense that Patent X is worth 2.7 Patent Y. More like social credit, but in a social network much larger and more intricate than a village. The value and cost of an exchange would depend a great deal on inter-faction and intra-faction relations, with the Patent Office serving as a forum/court for grievances and a regulatory body.

It's kind of interesting that it goes with this model; I wonder if it's an artifact of when it was made. It's a system based on assumed good-faith actors with an authoritative, centralized third party as regulatory body and source of truth, which is entirely opposed to the zero-trust and anti-regulatory stance more popular with technocratic Silicon Valley types these days.

EclecticTastes posted:

I mean... yes? If someone sets the conceits of a setting, I kinda just roll with it, unless it's obviously being used as allegory promoting abhorrent ideology.

EclecticTastes posted:

I know, I probably shouldn't be going in like this, I just feel like a lot of what people are saying is because I didn't explain the game well enough, and I feel a certain responsibility to help clear up any misunderstandings, I don't want what I think is a pretty charming little game to get a bad rep because I hosed up and didn't present it correctly. Sorry.

To be extremely frank, the problem isn't that you're not presenting the game correctly. It's that the position of refusing to critically engage with the conceits of a work of fiction is ethically suspect at best, and the idea that you can "just roll with" racial coding and defend it as "oh that's just how the setting works" that's gross.

You're the one getting the bad rep.

Comrade Gorbash fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Oct 16, 2018

# ¿ Oct 16, 2018 20:20

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

JcDent posted:

I wonder... how much of a mainstream American protestant thought is the gods of other religions exist, but God is keeping them captive?

Because
1) I DON'T recall that from my baptism class
2) I think it was mentioned that some of these gods are what has been released after the end

And why make specific geographic (as in city level) splats for a setting where everything was hosed up and nature is reclaiming stuff posthaste?

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

# ¿ Oct 25, 2018 18:54

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Tsilkani posted:

I also love the Tau aesthetic from 40K, but god drat if I don't hate how they decided they weren't grimdark enough and took them from naive, well-meaning newcomers to sinster pawns of Ethereal mind control.

What I don't understand is why anyone thought "naive newcomers interacting with the 40k universe" is LESS grimdark than the nonsense they decided to go with.

# ¿ Oct 25, 2018 20:52

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Night10194 posted:

Goddamnit ALEPH just make Cyber-Themistocles.

Whatever you do DO NOT make Cyber-Alcibiades, though. That would go SUPER BAD.

Counter point: it would go SUPER GREAT.

Edit: The MilHist thread decided a while ago that there was the right way, the wrong way, and the Alcibiades way - which is like the wrong way but faster and with more booze and sex.

# ¿ Nov 14, 2018 09:35

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

By popular demand posted:

So a heavy fortification line forcing the enemy to risk the forest might actually work...

It did work in history too! At least, the fortress bit. It�s all the other parts of the scheme that fell on their faces.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2018 23:09

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

If you�ve got a relatively short haft on a halberd it�s actually a really good close quarters weapon. Naval boarding axes are a good example of the type. Halberds are really flexible weapons and if you might end up fighting in lots of different situations they�re hard to beat, which is why they�re so popular with guards. On the other hand if you know exactly what sort of fighting you�re going to do there�s usually a more specialized option that will work even better.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2018 17:43

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

Part of the issue with the Warhammer antagonist factions in general is just an artifact of the war game requiring an eternal stalemate for game balance and marketing reasons. The way that manifests with Skaven in particular is that, when a writer finds themselves in a corner, they just default to "Skaven plans always blow up in their faces" and return things to the status quo.

But that doesn't have to be true when you're running the RPG, which immediately makes the Skaven much more credible. And as OvermanXAN pointed out, it might make Skaven one of the [i[most[/i] useful antagonist factions since a Skaven scheme coming off doesn't automatically mean "you lose, everyone dies" the way it tends to with Chaos and the like.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2018 20:41

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

MonsterEnvy posted:

Their planned capstone being Karl Franz's brother when he came to visit in hope of starting a civil war.

This sounds familiar :thunk:

# ¿ Dec 12, 2018 22:41

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 12:40

Comrade Gorbash: Jul 12, 2011; My paper soldiers form a wall, five paces thick and twice as tall.

MonsterEnvy posted:

Probably cause It was brought up earlier in the thread.

It's a joke about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, which I imagine is an inspiration for the plot point.

# ¿ Dec 12, 2018 23:15

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

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