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Crossbows and how warrior archetypes are treated have become my two litmus tests for fantasy games. If crossbows suck for no reason and being a fighter boils down to "roll to hit, roll damage, wait for your turn to come back around while magic is resolved" then I know the game was built on some goofy principles.
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Aug 8, 2018 16:21
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
I know it's Rifts, but good lord this illustration bothers me. It's just a forest, with a mountain in the background and two mushrooms in the foreground. It looks like a Bob Ross composition but much too busy, way too many distinct layers of trees for no particular reason. To top it all off, this could be any coniferous forest in the world- they could have at least given one of the mushrooms a fuzzy hat or a hammer and sickle or a pet bear or something. Alien Rope Burn posted:
That is one smug horse. That smug horse would make a hell of an avatar.
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Aug 10, 2018 23:31
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Thanks to this Night's posts introducing me to the wonder of Warhams Fantasy Roleplay I'm going to be running Deep Carbon Observatory as a WFRP 2e one-shot. It's an incredibly cool set of ideas, but it reads more like a collection of GM notes than a published product. Veins of the Earth, Stuart and Scrap Princess's much higher budget project, reads the same way and has a lot more evocative SP art. While I generally enjoy the base ideas and the grim tone, I get the impression that cannibalism is a... thing for Stuart. We've seen cannibals already in Deep Carbon, cannibalism is presented as a mechanically reasonable option for survival in Veins of the Earth, and Maze of the Blue Medusa (which Stuart was co-author on) has a cult of cannibal critics in a section of the dungeon that spoils all other food. It's almost at the point of self-parody at this point, but I'm not sure if that's intentional or not.
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Aug 18, 2018 20:09
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Feinne posted:Adventure! time! Jumping back a bit in the thread and ahead a bit in time, this passage reminded me way too much of how my Aberrant game tended to go. I'd craft a social situation or a combat encounter, I'd know the general powersets of the characters involved, and then a combination of seemingly reasonable powers would turn the whole thing into a walk in the park. Running supers games in a crunchy setting really relies on NPCs that can threaten characters in ways that don't tie into their powers. Any straightforward mechanical challenge has a solution somewhere in the tremendous PC toolbox. Of course, that requires the characters to be fleshed out enough that they have levers to pull, and the players to be invested enough in storytelling that that's something they're interested in.
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Nov 3, 2018 16:32
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I know that people have lives and families (and holidays to celebrate), but man I have a hankering for some Rifts. Don't get me wrong, I'm loving all of the content that's rolling through the thread right now! It just doesn't seem like FATAL & Friends without a Rifts review churning away.
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Nov 27, 2018 06:18
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Night10194 posted:I think a crossbow killed a D&D designer's dog at some point. It's the only explanation for D&D Crossbows. Crossbows have become one of my RPG litmus tests. If using a crossbow is a bad decision, the game probably has some other goofiness in its structure that'll be annoying to deal with. WHFRP seems like it does pretty well with crossbows- they do a bunch of damage, most people can use them, and they've got good range, but you're probably not using it more than once before you wind up in a scrum. Using a crossbow as your primary armament probably isn't as good as being a gunman, true. But at least a crossbow can actually threaten a normal person enough that it's respectable.
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Nov 28, 2018 03:33
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I've been writing a lot on stuff that's generally more positive if somewhat less nerdy lately. Coincidentally, I just started writing on them again this week, though. The major issue is that I'm looking to get 3-4 books ready to go in a row, because World Books 20, 22, and 23 are all on the same subject - Canada. So I'd like to be able to just fire off that whole lot at once (like I did for Russia), and that'll take awhile. Glad to hear you're doing more enjoyable work, and looking forward to the walls of Canadian text  Thanks for the recommendations! Gotta get that Siembieda nonsense in my brain one way or another...
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Nov 30, 2018 03:24
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PurpleXVI posted:I was browsing the F&F archive the other day, and can it really be that no one's reviewed Lamentations of the Flame Princess? I see that a couple of adjacent/supplements have been reviewed, but not the thing itself. Seems kind of surprising considering how much of an incompetent fuckbag Raggi is. I'd certainly be interested in seeing one. Its various issues are kind of familiar from conversations in the thread, but seeing it through it chapter by chapter would make for a good read.
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Dec 3, 2018 15:38
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The Godbound sourcebook about Ancalia presents a fairly compelling take on four Chaos-style gods. They each have their main shtick (smashing, corrupting, decaying, tricking), but the material really pushes that individual demons interpret their chosen Court in their own way. It's not just "every single Slaanesh daemon is a hermaphroditic crab-clawed sex maniac," it's "gamines of the Poxed Court twist established human values in perverse ways." The book provides a lot of guidance on how to make that compelling in different scenarios and pushes you to make individual enemies stand out from one another. One of the really important things, I think, is that the four Uncreated Courts in Ancalia aren't all of the Uncreated in the world- the demigods that lead each Court just happen to be the ones who managed to get a foothold in the material realm within the past few years. Presumably there are any number of other Uncreated poking around the darkened corners of the universe, so the whole thing doesn't seem so monolithic. They're also very clearly presented as powerful foes that can actually be defeated. Chaos in Warhammer is always put forward as this endless and eternal thing that is tied into the emotions of humanity and blah blah blah. The Uncreated are beings that can be destroyed face-to-face by powerful player characters. Their interaction with human characters is what makes them interesting. Each Court has its own weaknesses; not just supernatural weaknesses, but holes in their twisted logic that heroes can exploit. Even the Shackled Court, which maps fairly well to Tzeentch, has places where their plans of mustache-twirling wickedness will fall apart because they don't really understand what makes people do the things they do. Each Court has a section on human cults, with some even straight-up admitting that the Court doesn't really need humans for anything. The Incendiary Court, which maps to Khorne, only barely tolerates human worshipers since they can smash poo poo just fine on their own. The Courts that make sense to attract worshipers do so, the rest don't, and everyone gets on with it. There's no obligation for Chaos Cults to be this vast-reaching conspiracy in every single settlement.
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Dec 5, 2018 05:49
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Praise be to Rifts, and to its prophet ARB!
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Dec 26, 2018 05:46
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Halloween Jack posted:I don't know exactly why, but I think hobgoblins are rad as hell. I used to have one of those Slayer's Guide books about Hobgoblins, and it's combined with various other RPG book sources over the years to have me really develop an affection for them. They just want to take over the world! Is that so wrong? Obviously yes, it's wrong, because they'd have to grind every other species on the planet under their heel to do so. But I think they're a way to do the Lawful Evil archetype in a way that's unapologetically monstrous without being cartoonishly unbelievable.
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Jan 3, 2019 05:40
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Thanks, Night! It was a lot of fun getting another look at Double Cross. I love the crunchy aspects, particularly how well they fit into the story that the game is trying to tell. It was a little disappointing to see that there were a number of powers that weren't very good within each archetype. Does it seem like those were intentionally weak, or would some houseruling be in order to make every power work as intended?
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Jan 8, 2019 06:04
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Night10194 posted:The other serious issue with the game: There are like, absolutely 0 rules for doing anything in space. The rules for combats between spaceships and such are just 'Look, we can't write filled in, detailed rules for this and it's on a scale we don't want to handle, so just transition to boarding actions or make some Transport rolls to simulate dodging Remanence patrols or whatever.' I'll admit, I've skimmed over and forgotten every set of RPG space combat rules I've ever read. Mechanically modelling it just never seemed worth it to me. Then again, my first exposure to space combat was in d20 Star Wars so maybe I just got burned young. Re: edit, it's a really good sign to me that the attitude of "follow the queues your players put on their sheets" is spreading amongst the RPG community. That Sanguine was on board with that as far back as Ironclaw 1e speaks really well of their attitude toward games and the people who play them.
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Jan 11, 2019 04:50
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gradenko_2000 posted:Chainmail In Playing at the World they mention this chapter specifically in the history of wargaming and D&D. Apparently the reviews and letters sections of a bunch of wargames magazines lambasted Chainmail entirely because it had the gall to include fairy tail bullshit. Wargaming was historical and dignified, damnit! If the boys at the office found out that my tiny metal men fought against dragons and elves, why... they'd all laugh at me!
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Jan 11, 2019 15:14
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Night10194 posted:Myriad Song I joined the "bought Myriad Song because of this review" club a few days ago, and I'm similarly conflicted about advancement being tied to Gifts so tightly. My eyebrows went up pretty high when I saw that the Host was instructed to give the PCs a gift of the Host's choice, but to be ready for them to sell it back for XP. It just seemed like such an odd bit of rigmarole to me. I've definitely had players who would have never ever cashed those [random Independent planet] insider gifts in, just in case they needed to interact with those NPCs again at some point in the future.
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Jan 16, 2019 05:31
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It seems particularly silly to me now, in 2019, to cling to the sourcebooks as if there is some one True Licensed Game World that your group's stories mustn't betray. The idea that anybody ever bought that line for the big metaplot games is pretty wild to me. I wonder if it ties into the tradition of gatekeeping in the hobby- "REAL fans know exactly what happened during the Avatar Storm and how it affected the Kiasyd's kinfolk Fianna allies, and if you're not a REAL fan then you can't play rock-paper-scissors with us at Denny's on Friday night."
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Jan 17, 2019 06:55
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Alien Rope Burn posted:Well, bugger. Every time I see those "Warning! Violence and the Supernatural" posts, I get a big dumb smile on my face. You're doing god's work, ARB, and that's at least 40,000 MDC worth of work.
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Jan 31, 2019 06:54
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Mors Rattus posted:I am now imagining the Xiticix as being intensely Midwestern stereotypes, just, bee people. It’s much better than the actual Xiticix. If you play their buzzing sounds backwards you can make out a distinct "ope" pattern
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Feb 2, 2019 05:54
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The Chad Jihad posted:So it came to my attention that an RPG was made set in the universe of Rune, the UT engine third person viking slasher. Has it ever been written up or are there any good reviews for it? Doesn't look like anybody's done a write-up, though I've been tempted ever since picking up a used copy a couple years back. It was written by Robin D. Laws, who also wrote Feng Shui, and has some pretty interesting mechanics. I remember the basic shtick being that adventures are supposed to be mechanically balanced such that the GM is actively trying to challenge and injure the PCs in order to score points. The players in turn are trying to score by killing monsters and getting treasure with their PCs. Each player takes a turn at GMing to give them an opportunity to score their own GM points. The shared GMing responsibility and the board game-like open competitiveness between roles at the table seemed interesting, but I'd have to do a deeper dive to figure out whether it really worked in practice.
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Feb 3, 2019 16:45
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Mors Rattus posted:To be fair, this is pretty much every mecha game except Lancer. Lancer looks amazing and I'd love to write a review of it, but it's the kind of game that seems like it'd really benefit from hands-on experience before trying to expound on it. The system definitely looks like a good blend of mechanical complexity and simplified application. My local crew tends to struggle with games that provide a bunch of different crunchy options to choose from, though, so it'll probably be a while before I can smash mechs together.
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Feb 7, 2019 17:24
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Give us The South! We need the pain. We crave it.
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Feb 17, 2019 01:19
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wiegieman posted:LANCER does not fall down, but that's because it literally uses a separate tactical combat ruleset when mechs are involved. Lancer pulls much more from successful mech games than from mech anime. Anime mecha stories work by having the narrative dictate how fights play out, while drawing inspiration directly from games allows more freedom to let the fights push the narrative. I get a strong Armored Core vibe from Lancer's treatment of mecha, and that was a game series where I really got the visceral feel of controlling a giant robot. It also has the advantage of designers who don't feel the need to use a single system for everything. Out-of-mech pilot content is mechanically simple and more narrative, while the robot punching is unabashedly tactical and boardgamey.
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Mar 9, 2019 08:01
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There's a good amount of unnatural language in those write-ups, at odds with the plain writing style D&D books typically go for. To me it's more odd that these are monster write-ups rather than PC stats. Or are these not actually the protagonists of the show?
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Mar 16, 2019 00:25
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jakodee posted:The Burning Wheel did some pretty cool stuff with players being able to influence each other with it’s “Duel of Wits” subsystem. Basically each of two players (one of which can be the GM playing an NPC) decide what concessions they want from the other party and engage in a mini game influenced by their skills and stats that results in either a total concession from one party or, more often, a compromise from one or both parties. The system, if I remember correctly, cannot force your character to believe anything, only to honestly promise to do try to do it to the best of your ability. My concern with Burning Wheel's Duel of Wits (and all of its subsystems, really) is the huge number of skills available. A successful master debater seems like they'd need a ton of skills for different situations, and figuring out which ones to take would be a task in and of itself. There's also the standard issue of all of these skill points coming out of the same overall pool- if you're a master debater you're probably going to be useless when a fight breaks out, and if you're a paragon swordsman you're not going to do much during a duel of wits other than shout encouragement from the background.
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Mar 27, 2019 15:20
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NGDBSS posted:Going back to talking about Godbound... The rules being pretty light around Godbound powers also helps with house-ruling and creating custom content. I still have to think about how a new Gift or Word fits into the overall story I'm telling, just like with any balancing act, but given that the out-of-the-book powers include stuff like "know all scholarly knowledge in the world" you can get pretty wild without having to do a lot of math.
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Mar 28, 2019 20:36
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Reading the finale for Torg makes me want to see an analysis of the four books that WW used to end their various World of Darkness Lines in the early 2000s. Those books at least gave the GM a handful of different scenarios for each line, though odds are good that a healthy proportion of them were the GMPC wankfests we're seeing from War's End.
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Apr 15, 2019 14:15
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Thank you for the Torg, EM! I first discovered Torg in a Half-Price Books back in 2004, but I'd never have picked up Torg Eternity if not for your reviews.
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Apr 16, 2019 06:56
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I'm very excited to see this game reviewed. After seeing tons of White Dwarf articles and ogling the miniatures in the huge GW Catalog, I was super curious about Inquisitor. I bought the rule book but could never figure out how I'd get a group of people together to actually play it.
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Apr 26, 2019 06:25
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megane posted:e: to be somewhat constructive, are there any game settings with a big central state that's not super fascist Union in Lancer is explicitly set up to be the central superpower in the setting whose goals consist of keeping humanity alive and preventing abuse of human rights. They don't have snappy uniforms, or even a signature mech chassis. What they do have are Emancipator squadrons who go kick the poo poo out of slavers and fascists.
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Apr 29, 2019 05:58
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That last piece of art looks really cool, but it could have been from literally any of the Cypher games. Numenera, The Strange, and Invisible Sun all have settings that are so completely wide open in terms of what's possible, that they're ultimately only separated by broad themes and metaphysics. I get that you could probably cram "huge magic city with floating buildings and big robot guards" into any number of settings, but I feel like Cook's games don't have their own aesthetic. It makes me appreciate games that have a tighter focus.
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May 31, 2019 05:31
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A couple days late, but just read the Rifts wrapup and wanted to join the chorus: Thank you and congratulations, ARB! You've done a god's work, and that's at least 12,000 MDC worth of work! I have vivid memories of reading and mocking Rifts while hanging with a bunch of other tabletop nerds in college. We couldn't have known that we were just probing the uppermost layers of the endless 80's toybox that was (is?) Rifts. I'll certainly be reading through those reviews a few times more.
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Jun 26, 2019 03:38
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Seatox posted:Wait, I just checked: there's no mention of aggravated damage in Hunter: The Reckoning? When did that concept enter the Storyteller system? I think I remember a sidebar about that in one book or another. The thought was that Hunter worked out ok with just Bashing and Lethal, and that Aggravated damage was unnecessary in a game where the PCs didn't have special weaknesses. I think every other game at that point in the line had the distinction between Bashing, Lethal, and Aggro, though, so it's weird that this is where they decided against granularity. One of the odd things about werewolves in their own line was their ability to soak every kind of damage (except for silver, which did unsoakable aggravated damage) by default, so even supernaturally dangerous things that did aggravated damage were quite a bit less dangerous to werewolves than to anybody else. That might be part of why they simplified damage in the bestiary- even if Hunter stuff does aggravated damage, then in Werewolf rules terms it still doesn't really make it dangerous enough. E: I say every game, but Wraith probably didn't since Wraith was taken out back behind the woodshed right before Hunter was released. Just Dan Again fucked around with this message at 05:03 on Jul 4, 2019 |
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Jul 4, 2019 05:00
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Ultiville posted:Or how boring it is. It makes for an excellent opportunity to play Super Smash Bros and completely lose interest in the session. If you're dead you can at least roll up a new character and stay invested in the game a little bit.
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Jul 14, 2019 15:47
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Jerik posted:Deities & Demigods 1E Seeing all that 1e AD&D art really up close isn't doing it a lot of favors. Not trying to knock the artists of the time, it's just strange to see something that was a presented in a few square inches on rough paper blown up on a monitor
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Jul 18, 2019 16:19
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I see there's both an AM and PM version and I'm too terrified to even wonder why.
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Aug 7, 2019 05:08
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Mors Rattus posted:Werewolf Dr. Moreau and Werewolf Anti-Christ It's stuff like this that makes me really enjoy Forsaken 2e in a way that Werewolf: the Apocalypse doesn't scratch. The world of Forsaken is super weird and full of mysteries. What's more, those mysteries seem like they'd be fun for a GM to make up solutions to and for players to solve. There's no expectation that whatever strangeness you find was intended to have a canon solution in a book that you don't own or that was never released.
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Aug 22, 2019 22:50
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golden bubble posted:I think you need bullets made from their ban. So every single Host and Idigham requires a Buffy episode where you figure out its weakness before killing it with this week's special bullet. Half of their banes seem to be somebody's bones, so if you need another session you can throw a little graverobbing in there too
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Sep 5, 2019 14:36
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Big Mad Drongo posted:I really had no interest in Werewolf before this review, because all I knew about woofs was that they are terrifying combat monsters and that Apocalypse was full of weird eco-terrorism. Learning that the thrust of the modern game is that said terrifying combat monsters mostly have to solve problems that can't be solved through combat makes it seem like tons of fun. 2e Forsaken really opened the game up, I think. The Sacred Hunt mechanic is particularly good since it gets you into combat, but only after following other interesting steps and doing your magical homework (which may well be another adventure or a series of adventures). Finally getting to flip out and kill people is generally a reward for doing the rest of your job well. nWoD mechanics are still a bit weird for combat, but the werewolf bonuses make sure that your pools will be good enough to contribute
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Sep 5, 2019 16:39
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I like the potential gotcha of someone thinking that the geryo has to win in order to survive, so they choose something like tic-tac-toe so they can always force a draw. Then the game is over and Quattuor just eats their head. I'd probably have a smug NPC try this just to demonstrate what kind of opportunities the ban actually provides if my players weren't seeing it themselves.
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Sep 5, 2019 20:59
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Zereth posted:Can you challenge it to another game while a game is currently in progress? "I challenge you to another game of Campaign for North Africa as soon as this one is completed!" Maybe that's the play- lure it to an arcade game tournament and set up some minor spirits in the area that make sure the line of quarters on its machine never runs out.
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Sep 6, 2019 05:29
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