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Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Kellsterik posted:

I'm still not totally sure I understand why the Covvies are even part of the Brave New World setting.

Why is anything a part of anything in BNW? That's the overreaching problem with it. Why is there a race of merpeople randomly? Why do people in America have literal old west style showdowns in the middle of the street? Why anything about Evil Inc? Why Bargainers? Why is there an Asian character named the Yellow Journalist? The answer, as always, seems to be because Matt Forbeck has absolutely no internal editor whatsoever.

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Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Selachian posted:

Note that the pottery also shows both men and women without pubic hair, for much the same reason -- body hair was considered gross and animalistic, and a well-groomed ancient Greek would remove as much of it as possible.

Which just goes to prove: a penis shaved is a penis urned.

How is this not getting more love?

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Doresh posted:

What are the odds of this just turning out to be another Heartbreaker? With totally-not-D&D stats and classes, including the obvious trap choice of "I hit things with my sword"?

It's by Sean K Reynolds, so no bet.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

FrostyPox posted:

I read that Imagine review and holy balls that sounds like a miserable loving game. I'm sorta burned out on Pathfinder so any and all "Old school" or "OSR" fantasy games cause my eyes to glaze over, but that... hoooo boy. It's so much worse when you read how hyped the creators were about their game.

Bear in mind that Imagine was circa 2000. Plus ça change etc.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

FrostyPox posted:

Ah. I'm not too familiar with RPGs back then TBH since I had literally only played and was aware of Dungeons and Dragons as far as RPGs go and had basically just taken my first tentative baby steps into traditional gaming. Is that par for the course for circa 2000 RPGs? It seems really needlessly complex.

Oh you sweet summer child.

Even though D&D3E wouldn't be released until 2001, AD&D2E was still considered the big king daddy of TRPGs even though TSR was essentially imploding from within. Overly complicated, unnecessarily convoluted fantasy RPGs involving classes and alignments and poo poo were still considered peak elfgame technology by many even though you were beginning to see things like the World of Darkness or Feng Shui challenge these assumptions (or at the least pay lip service to challenging them). People have been trying to reinvent D&D's wheel practically forever. Sometimes they did it well enough that it managed to gain some traction...these are your Rolemasters and your Palladium Fantasies...but way, way more RPGs out there than you have ever heard of were sent out into the world buoyed by the promise of being D&D But Newer And Better Because My Elves Are Blue And I Have 15 Alignments Instead of Nine only to instantly sink into obscurity because, well, who the gently caress needs another D&D-alike when D&D exists? Bear in mind as well that this was back in the day before print-on-demand, digital RPG publishing, Kickstarter, any of that good stuff, which meant that to actually publish an RPG meant going to a for-real print publisher and commissioning a batch of books usually no smaller than 10,000 copies and hoping that you could get them sold in brick-and-mortar stores.

This sort of game is where the term "fantasy heartbreaker" comes from. Ron Edwards coined it in a 2002 essay about, well, how people keep trying to publish their fantasy RPGs when it's clear they've pretty much only ever played or even heard of D&D and a few knockoffs thereof. What makes them heartbreaking is the kernel of a good idea or two buried in 400 pages of extremely derivative class-and-race fantasy gaming with elves and magic and guys with swords.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Alien Rope Burn posted:

It definitely feels like something that would have been better as novels in the first place; it just doesn't seem a really fun world to play in or a really fun game to play with.

On the contrary, I think it would have sucked no matter what form of media Forbeck had tried to shove it into because once you lay the whole thing out it's basically on par with terrible fanfiction. None of it hangs together, it's just a mishmash of whatever Forbeck thought sounded cool at the moment and in it goes. Evil JFK? Who's also a shapeshifting imposter? Superheroes, only they're actually all the great-great-etc-grandkids of multiversal squatters? Zombies and merpeople and vampires and Catholic superpowered monster hunters and duels in the street and Bargainers and and and

Like okay, the actual western superhero comic book universes that everyone making games like this are drawing inspiration from are pretty fuckin weird and full of random dumb crap that someone stuck in there one time and then it winds up ingrained into everything because these fictional settings are the equivalent of a hoarder never throwing anything out. But the stronger examples of stories people manage to tell in those universes frequently know where they're going from the outset and also ignore everything else that isn't relevant or would actively detract from what they're trying to say. Nothing in BNW is curated even a little bit, I guess for reasons that are at least somewhat understandable because it's an RPG meant to be played and not a story meant to be read, but at the same time focus can help make games stronger as well.

And then there's just a bunch of dumb crap like the Unabomber and the Yellow Journalist aka "this totally isn't racist, and now here's my character to tell you in his own words how totally not racist this is." And that's when you realize that, no, Brave New World just kinda sucks period.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Dr. Worm fuckin rules.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

wiegieman posted:

Dipsomancers are one of the few types of Adept who can live relatively normal lives, then slam a few drinks and make some magic.

I mean for certain values of "relatively normal" sure, but pretty much every Dipsomancer is, or will inevitably wind up, a hardcore alcoholic. It's an entire school of magic based around needing to drink to feel powerful and in-control, you don't get to just flip a switch and turn that off when it's time to go into work for your 9-5.

Probably the most normal and least self-destructive adepts in 2E UA were Bibliomancers whose thing was essentially being book hoarders, one of the rare adept schools whose side-effect of accumulating inordinate amounts of books is something that some people might actually consider a virtue.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
Honestly a school of magic based around people fetishizing guns to an unwholesome degree is the most insightful thing Stole could have come up with for a game set in America of 2018.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

oriongates posted:

It can definitely be hard to grok that Adepts are a completely warped point of view. If you're trying to play a dipsomancer on the weekend you aren't getting the idea. To a dipsomancer sobriety is the nightmare world that everyone else lives in and alcohol is the only way they can wake up from the nightmare. The world only makes sense when it's kind of fuzzy...AA is like a group of cthulhu cultists worshipping some mad, evil god they can't understand.

They might dabble in sobriety in order to blend into normal society, but they do it the way a priest might dabble in dark magic in order to fight against the forces of evil, knowing that they're playing with awful forces they can barely control.

And while a clued-in normal with money and connections can be an absolute terror in the occult underground, using their "sanity" and their "ability to hold down a job" against the crazier elements UA. But that doesn't change the fact that magic is a big deal. That's the whole idea of cosmic-level games in 2e. While normals get the opportunity to push things around a lot, it's the Avatars who get to actually become gods and cast the vote for what the next universe is going to be like. The occult underground may not be able to get their poo poo together enough to run for president or become a celebrity, but they're the ones who get build the universe after the world ends.

This is an extremely important point. Unknown Armies isn't really playing some long-form "gotcha" about magic. All the stuff about normal non-magical people being able to hold jobs, have positive relationships with others, etc, that stuff is important not to try and tell you the reader and/or player "god these adepts are so fuckin stupid for doing this," it's to emphasize that magic exacts a terrible cost but people still pay that price because magic is still real powerful poo poo. If magic was both insanely costly and self-destructive as well as being completely worthless the entire premise of the game would fall apart. Which isn't to say that a lot of adepts don't wind up face down in the proverbial (and literal) gutters, but UA is in large part a game of "what are you willing to do to try and grab a handful of real power?" There's a reason that Alex Abel, a man who by all accounts had won at life as hard as it was possible to win, bent his vast fortune towards the pursuit of magic instead of just bankrolling his own puppet US President or something.

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Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

Strange Matter posted:

It's telling that Avatars are basically how the mystical underground is supposed to work. You get broad but largely subtle power in exchange for proscribed behavior, but the rules are lenient. You don't even need to really believe what you're doing. As long as you follow the rules it works.

Then you have Adepts who like speedrunners in the video game of life, taking advantage of glitches in the universe's code to blast themselves into higher tiers of power, but only by walking a razor's edge of viable action. If you falter for even a moment in the bizarre rituals that make your schtick work your entire power base collapses entirely, because magick isn't supposed to work that way.

The universe wants Avatars to exist because they interact directly with the Stratosphere and are playing by the rules. Adepts are an ugly side-effect of an anthropocentric cosmology where the creator is a composite demi-urge of individuals who are super into a specific way of life and not so concerned about the coherence of the world they made, as long as they get to inject their flavor into it.

What's funny is that "speedrunning the universe to cheat your way into True Power" is exactly what the guy in Fly to Heaven did by attempting to brute-force his way into the Statosphere by turning himself into an Avatar of The Terrorist.

And if they players don't manage to stop him it works.

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