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

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Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Huh, I missed the new thread for a few days, somehow.

The Asia stuff in World of Darkness is some of the most painful Asia stuff I've seen.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2016 09:18

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 07:53

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

What it comes down to is that trying to relate an imaginary evil it as the cause of a real evil is a cheap way to try and give it weight. That's not to say you can't ever relate an imaginary evil to a real evil, but it really helps if it isn't the cause, and it also helps for it to be necessary to the setting or story you're telling.

The necessity and a clear-eyed theme is really important to pulling this off, as is making sure you don't deny the agency of the people involved in the event. I've often found if a game claims supernatural poo poo was behind everything ever but oh man Hitler is super special and the one actual human doing actual human things it's equally disgusting from another standpoint, because the only place the author is allowing agency is in tragedy and evil.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2016 09:58

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I mean if you're going to have the Nazis be a thing that went out of control while the self-styled masters of the world panicked and tried to fight communism because they feared for their massive wealth and power, uh, you'd actually not be that far off what happened considering that fascism was originally embraced by some political elites as convenient street thugs to throw at communists.

Feng Shui 2 had a sidebar that started great about this: You probably don't want to put Hitler in this game as an Ascended plot or something because holy poo poo, but also because it sets your players up to constantly ask 'Is what we're doing more important than killing HITLER' and say no. Shame it goes off and goes 'Oh but feel free to make Imperial Japan a plot by the chicken illuminati!' :suicide:

# ¿ Jan 9, 2016 10:12

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Cythereal posted:

Go read the military history thread in ask/tell. The goons there will readily agree that the Germans had some really good equipment, but it's almost never the stuff you hear much about. The StuG III, for example.

Stug Lyfe, yo.

# ¿ Jan 9, 2016 16:22

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Thesaurasaurus posted:

Given the line' s canon of heavy supernatural involvement in politics throughout human history it'd be great if Hitler and Nazi Germany were at least partly consequences of all their cynical machinations that blew up spectacularly in their faces and got a whole mess of supernaturals killed as well. Like maybe they weren't behind the Youth Brigades or Kristallnacht, but they were party to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, and the entire byzantine fuckfest of alliances that led to WWI in the first place.

oWoD could be salvaged in a lot of places by having the supernaturals all be like 'YEAH! WE TOTALLY CONTROL THE WORLD!' and then the writing be more about how they're a bunch of deluded assholes clinging to the ears of the tiger of history as it scrambles about wildly without much heed for their wishes.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2016 17:46

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Traveller posted:

I'm not gonna front, I'd play this. Pulp horror supers against Nazis!

Operation Darkness: The RPG is and always should be an option.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2016 18:46

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Kurieg posted:

I just googled this and how have I never heard of that game before?

Because the game part is sadly, sadly not very good. My experience with it comes from Mors Rattus' LP of it years ago, and it looked janky as gently caress.

Still, it gave us the immortal line: "Last time, on Operation Darkness, Operation Valkyrie failed because we failed to account for Hitler being a Dark Wizard." and SAS Werewolves vs. Nazi Vampires. One good way to do Weird War 2 is to have the 'real' war happening as known and then have all the weirdos cancelling one another out on the sidelines.

# ¿ Jan 11, 2016 19:09

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Kurieg posted:

Thank you. So far the most ludicrous thing I've stumbled upon in this game with werewolf soldiers is that a machine gunner in the british army would be able to perfectly describe nuclear fission without prompting.

Believe it or not, that eventually makes perfect sense and is actually a surprisingly subtle bit of good foreshadowing about him.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 00:02

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Ugh, two of my players who don't like anime vetoed Double Cross for our next game. Instead they get 1708 Russia Darkest Dungeon in a ruined estate and hamlet out on the Oblast, which will still be good.

Sucks, though, I was looking forward to running Parasite Eve: The RPG.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 20:08

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Simian_Prime posted:

I found that randomized as a whole tend to be more useful for GMs than players. Players tend to come into a game with a specific concept in mind, and so they want the agency to create a character they'll be happy playing for at least a few sessions. But as a GM, I've found random tables to be a godsend for those days when I don't have anything planned and I need to generate interesting plot hooks.

I have a couple long-time players who absolutely love randomization as prompting, which they then fill in from or once they've got an idea, stop rolling and pick the rest of their PC themselves. It's a taste thing, I suppose.

# ¿ Jan 12, 2016 22:31

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Man, Mors, re-reading that Operation Darkness LP makes me really want to run a Weird War 2 thing again some day.

Are there any actual, good, dedicated systems for that kind of stuff?

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 05:17

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

wiegieman posted:

Isn't the whole point of storm knights that they don't have stupid disconnection problems? That they can go be a wizard in a a place magic doesn't work?

I don't know if you've noticed, but Torg has a real issue with PCs doing stuff like 'being important' or 'accomplishing things'.

I honestly think Torg is more 90s than oWoD and I hate it.

# ¿ Jan 13, 2016 18:39

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Evil Mastermind posted:

The best part of that cover is that I'm pretty sure there's no way by the rules that a character could have cyber and a magic sword without worrying about disconnection all the drat time.

You just succinctly covered why Torg is bad. That should be the thing making PCs special! That you can have a cyber-cathar who wander off and brings back strange magicks (WITH THE K) that would disconnect anyone else and that the Cyberpope sure as hell isn't expecting, etc. It's an easy idea for how to make the PCs stand out and...instead they make you pay permanent EXP points to keep it for a couple minutes.

E: When I was in high school I wrote a game called Gate of Manywhere, with a lovely 'teenager who just got disillusioned with D&D' system, but my friends loved it because it was a game where Vanessa van Hellsing could get help from Dr. James C. Cockaroosh, a sentient cockroach scientist from a world where WWIII happened, to develop a nuclear powered UV laser so she could take on badass sauve Dracula. The whole point of these mashup settings is the actual mashup, goddamnit. I suspect this is why Torg makes me so irrationally annoyed.

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 19:20 on Jan 14, 2016

# ¿ Jan 14, 2016 19:16

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

LatwPIAT posted:

They seem to offload a lot of the development and even quality control on the STs, rather than providing rigorous and elegant mechanics

I find in general this is to more rules light/plot based games as 'Eh, they'll houserule it to balance' is to crunchy ones.

# ¿ Jan 15, 2016 07:12

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Brucato is exactly the kind of person who comes to mind whenever I read oWoD stuff. I think this is the meanest thing I could possibly say about him.

# ¿ Jan 16, 2016 20:31

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Count Chocula posted:

He's Destruction from Sandman, which I appreciate. In Nomine sounds cool if you want to play Supernatural/Preacher style ambiguous 90s angels.

And if I wanted to be REALLY pretentious about M20, I could claim that the slow discarding of Paradigm mirrors you/your character's understanding that all religions and traditions are one, man, just different glosses on the same universal understanding. D&D and its ilk has the unexamined assumption that it's players know and care about math. Mage panders to those of us who instead studied comparative religion, which I appreciate.

Actually, the stupid 'all these faiths and stuff are the same, maaaaan' is exactly the problem with Mage.

# ¿ Jan 17, 2016 01:15

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Ahahaha. Brucato thinks loving :tvtropes:

is a 'great resource for storytellers'?

# ¿ Jan 17, 2016 16:50

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I feel like the Ascended in Feng Shui did the Technocracy's thing better and also did a better job of making it clear they were tremendous motherfuckers.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 01:01

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

The fact that the arguments it produces aren't any fun to have is what kills Mage for me.

Ars Magica, though? That sounds like my jam. A grumpy wizard academic and their buddies/employees having to navigate their place within and without a wider culture and world is way more fun.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 01:53

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Exalted is a game about people going 'This time, it will be DIFFERENT!' and then it not being different at all, while many PCs never notice.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 05:30

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I mean, I despise Exalted for a lot of reasons (its system, some of the grosser aspects of the setting, and seriously the system is awful) but the core concept of 'You are a godlike being of ultimate divine destiny. You are also a major reason everything is so hosed up. Go!' is a solid core idea.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 05:38

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

I'm going to get back to my Warhams review, I swear. I have so many books on it to cover, just got knocked out of my momentum by some stuff I had to deal with with the GRE tossing my test scores and torpedoing my PhD applications for this year. :smith:

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 06:26

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

See, this is why I like Percentile systems. Their application is often off (like designers deciding the base success rate should be 30 and then penalizing PCs from there) but I'm not a statistician and with them, I can at least see the exact odds of an action when I'm trying to design my adventures or modify the system.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 16:50

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

WINNERSH TRIANGLE posted:

It was a couple of pages ago, but re:mage faction worldview, who has it right, etc., I've always had a soft spot for nMage's Silver Ladder:

Well, that's a sentiment that never ended in misery and/or fire before, no sir.

# ¿ Jan 19, 2016 02:33

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Really RPGs are a time where "storytelling!" and "rules light!" often are just an excuse not to test anything, because pffft what kind of a philistine are you that let yourself be bound by the rules, amirite?

This is accurate. Not for all rules light systems, but it's still accurate.

I mean rules heavy systems don't test much either. Effective playtesting is a too-rare thing in RPGs.

# ¿ Jan 24, 2016 20:57

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

LatwPIAT posted:

John Ringo writes bad books. He occasionally writes offensively bad books with horrible characters. He's also aware that some of his books are terrible and can genuinely enjoy that people mock them. Kratman just writes offensively racist, hateful revenge-porn about people he doesn't like. A friend of mine got into an argument with Kratman over a technical detail in one of this books - the result of which was that Kratman has written her into several of his books as a cowardly pedophile, and has killed her off in several of them out of pure spite.

(Also, Ringo can write, while Kratman has trouble constructing sentences.)

If Ringo is Chris Fields, Kratman is Bryon Hall.

Read the John Ringo thread in, of all places, TFR. It will quickly disabuse you of the notion Ringo is anything but human filth.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 02:16

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Count Chocula posted:

I was a bit surprised when even Feng Shui made the future bad guys a giant UN conspiracy.

The thing about Buro was they were a satire of the insane paranoia of right wing Americans. Having run an entire Buro campaign in FS (They really caught on with my group, contrary to most of Feng Shui's players) the joke with them is that a lot of the stuff they do is either so transparently silly (forced inter-racial marriage! Using buddy cop formats to make the homosexual subtext of them into text as propaganda!) or secretly not actually that awful, just how they try to do it is insane (And then there's the CDCA and Boatman, who, uh...well, yes, they are about that bad and served as the villains in our Buro game, which was about trying to reform things). We always took them as a warning to the PCs not to let heroism turn them into Bonengel (trying to force the world t be virtuous via a gun to its head) nor let power make them Boatman.

Seed of the New Flesh will always be my favorite FS book because it suddenly made Buro something I really wanted to use for the game.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 18:06

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Doresh posted:

Funny, I just got that recently to complement Only War. I even have Rites of Battle, which lets you roll up custom chapter names like "Steel Blood".

The best name you can roll is the Brothers' Sons.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 18:10

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Simian_Prime posted:

One of the things that bugs me in Western RPGs is the constant need to have some sort of breakaway Confederate State, or and alternate Southern victory. For once I'd like to see a Western game where the Civil War ended exactly the way it did in our own history. Or, possibly, one that turned out better (promises of Reconstruction are followed through, black civil rights are protected and Jim Crow never takes root, etc.)

This game was done by Goodman Games, the makers of the awesome Dungeon Crawl Classics. It's really a shame they're still selling this on their site.

Why do they need a Confederacy at all, anyway? Like, what role does 'Oh and there's a breakway slaver state to the south' really fill in the Western milieu?

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 19:21

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Mors Rattus posted:

Westerns often used the Civil War backdrop to establish a guy as a badass by being a former soldier, and out in the West to avoid penalties for desertion. Generally Southerners, as the Northern stereotype is the city slicker.

Yeah, but that doesn't require the South to have won the war.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 19:59

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

oriongates posted:

In Deadlands there is at least one reason for the Confederacy (although it requires a significant amount whitewashing, blissful ignorance and make-believe), it helps keep the Wild West "wild" a bit longer.

By keeping the Union and the Confederacy locked in a stalemate you keep the western region mostly free from either influence, because they're too busy fighting each other. In Deadlands that allows you to have the weird independent territories like the Sioux Nations or Deseret which would otherwise be steamrolled by the unified eastern US in 1879, which is the time when the game is set.

Of course, there's other ways to accomplish this, a more lethal Civil War could have ended and left the unified East without the resources or manpower to tame the west or a USA with a greater internal conflict or an external threat from another source (say renewed hostilities with europe) could also have worked out.

There's also the fact that the west is overrun with space wizards and spooky cowboy ghosts. I'm pretty sure that'd keep it a little 'wilder' longer as is.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 20:57

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

You'd think the hellmouths and terrible monsters would both explain the reason people are inventing fantastical new weapons quickly and why those haven't immediately settled things.

# ¿ Feb 3, 2016 23:17

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Lillith would be nice.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2016 05:51

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

The base concept of Lillith is cool. Someone who was wronged, felt used and betrayed, sought freedom and then grasped it in a FYGM way that makes them a champion of doing to others what was done to them seems like a nice cosmic cycle of abuse hook. Just the execution is not quite so interesting.

I think that's the real core of the 90s game, more than anything else: Good core, shame about the other stuff.

# ¿ Feb 4, 2016 22:44

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

GURPS Fantasy definitely has some issues with being a somewhat static world, but I suppose being yanked from one planet to another might retard the march of progress for awhile. It's certainly not as bad as many fantasy worlds where technological innovation stagnates for millennia or longer for no readily discernible reason.

In D&D I recall seeing it was an intentional ploy of the Gods, but then the D&D Gods are a bunch of bloated parasites and hypocrites who deserve death at the hands of a glorious revolution. :ussr:

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 04:37

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Terrible Opinions posted:

The wall is also by itself why I'd argue no god save Kelemvor can actually qualify as good aligned in Faerun. He was the only guy who looked at the status quo and went "holy gently caress that's evil" and actually tried to do something about it.

I'm really looking forward to my 18th Century Invaded By D&D setting's heroes reaching Epic tier, discovering the Wall, and going 'You know what gently caress THIS.' and doing what Obsidian should've.

An Inquisitor, a musketeer, a kabbalist, and a chemist tearing down the order of cosmic psychopathy is going to be FUN TIMES.

Night10194 fucked around with this message at 06:04 on Feb 7, 2016

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 06:02

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Why the hell would anyone bring back Mystara she is the worst.

Free Waukeen.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 06:10

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Kurieg posted:

It's Mystra, Mystara is something completely different.

And because she's Ed Greenwood's personal wank fantasy, and that makes her important to all the nerds who demand that the Forgotten Realms stay eternal and pure.

Right, Mystara is the cool place the awesome D&D arcade games happened, right?

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 06:18

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Goddamn, the D&D arcade games were cool. If D&D was more like those, it'd be way better. Princes in airships showing up to shoot Satan in the face with cannons while fighters do crazy devil may cry poo poo and wizards bonk people with sticks? Sign me up.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 06:21

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 07:53

Night10194: Feb 13, 2012; We'll start,
like many good things,
with a bear.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Nah, that's Sigil.

My only real knowledge of Sigil is the stuff from Torment, and then a bunch of poo poo I filled in.

My players love visiting it as a bunch of European mercenaries.

# ¿ Feb 7, 2016 06:30

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