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

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Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

unseenlibrarian posted:

Weirdly, none of the DC characters called "The Human Bomb" actually explode. They just make anything they touch with bare skin blow up.

There is actually now one version of Human Bomb that does explode now. He appeared in Grant Morrison's Multiversity and his powers essentially allowed him to convert and store any damage to himself (not caused by his own explosions) into an explosion. This is displayed by intentionally getting captured and getting tortured so as to store as much potential destructive energy as possible

# ¿ May 31, 2016 22:59

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 07:27

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Cross posting from the chat thread regarding some of the numbers involved in the Green Ronin A Song of Ice and Fire RPG

Xelkelvos posted:

Someone with good Warfare can direct everything or a 1 die bonus, but everyone else may as well just make sure to put their characters out of harm's way. Combat focused characters are really good at combat and Marksman type characters can really trivialize combat while everyone else just twiddles their thumbs a little. The corollary to that is Social focused characters presumably dominate the entire thing while those not quite as adept just get led around. I've only played it once and one of the players who made an apothecary-type character basically checked out because they were absolutely useless while the low to no armor Ranger types pretty much shot holes into just about every threat. Ostensibly, the ideal is to make a game that's less combat heavy than a typical fantasy RPG and much more politics heavy, but I don't think it works well, even then. Agility is basically the god stat for Combat since it factors into Defense, damage dealt from certain weapons, movement and Initiative. Athletics and Fighting is the melee corollary.

Having 5 Agility and Marksmanship can and will ruin most enemies in a few hits since their average roll is 17.5 with base damage with a hunting bow is 5. A longbow is even more brutal since the damage gets +2 damage with 1 piercing and since a Standard Attack is a lesser action, they can generally get off two hits on an enemy before anyone else even gets to act. Give them specialty in Bows and their average goes up so even Marksman 4 Bows 1 will get 16 on average while Marksman 5 Bow 1 will get 20 on average. Since each degree of success is a multiplier, take the stock Scout with Marksman 5 Bows 3 and Agility 4 against a Knight and on average, they'll have 4 degrees of success (average roll is 23 against the Knight's 7 Defense) for 24 base damage and 18 total damage. They have 9 health. Against a Knight of Quality, they'll get the same base damage (same 23 vs 7), but the DR from Armor makes it 13 damage with the best armor and shield available to them. They have 12 health. Welcome to combat against humans in this game. Against a Giant, the results are largely the same, except that it's 18 base damage that goes to 15. Their health is coincidentally that much. About the only things listed in the core book that wont die to a single average shot by the Scout is the Mammoth (two shot), certain steeds (same) and The Others (three shot, or one shot if using fire arrows).

Combat is brutal and bloody (and at least accurate in regards to how effective the Longbow is) since all of these same statistics apply to players but at least PCs can take Wounds and Injuries rather than just die to no Health.

Someone who's more familiar with the system might shed some more light on how it's meant to be run, but afaict the combat is horrendously bad and could probably be better done in something like Reign or something with modifications in order to keep whatever level of brutality is desired by the table while still maintaining some semblance of complexity in the warfare and social conflict sections.

# ¿ Feb 14, 2018 02:24

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Halloween Jack posted:

"Everyone knows Muslims are logical and good at math and astronomy" is technically racist, but I'll take it.

It's a harkening back to the Islamic Golden Age in a sense and so it ends up being a little racist as a consequence of reference rather than out of stereotyping.

# ¿ Oct 15, 2018 20:07

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Strange Matter posted:

That's actually not quite what happened.

As I understand it, that did happen, and the universe was supposed to end and be reset on March 3, 2003 (3/3/03), with the Comte de St. Germaine ascending as the First and Last Man as scheduled. But he crossed paths with The Freak (The Godwalker of the Mystic Hermaphrodite/Sexual Rebis) en route, and the two of them hatched some kind of occult agreement and entered the Rooms of Renunciation, and had their identities essentially reversed, with the Freak becoming something called The Human Eternal and the Compte becoming Old Mother Apocalypse. The implication is that this somehow broke the standard rules of reality, the ramifications of which I'm not fully informed on. That's how you wind up with adepts charging off farming and wearing clothes.

This honestly seems like a great set-up or season finale for a TV series.

# ¿ Nov 5, 2018 16:59

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Night10194 posted:

God, I don't have the expansion books. I know they exist, but I don't have them.

I think at the point where you've written 400 pages you can no longer hide behind 'it is a joke' to excuse it.

Hi, I'm one of the three people who started, and then abandoned a D:tD 40k 7thEd F&F 3 or 4 years ago. From what I remember, the expansion book added ship rules, new races (one of which is literally a Mass Effect race mixed with plants), gunman and piloting classes, and some new Exaltations I think.

I basically continued off from where AccidentalHipster stopped and then stopped because of school and other things and just didn't feel like going through the rest of the book after talking about the deites in the mishmashed setting. Admittedly, having Vectron as a god in a meme RPG book was an amusing choice

# ¿ Mar 22, 2019 20:31

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Night10194 posted:

I think my issue with all of it is that it hides the fact that is has no actual original ideas (literally everything is a reference or mashup, without even any interesting connective tissue), and that it doesn't even attempt to do the slightest game design work, behind 'it's a joke!'. But 'It's just a little joke' wears really thin when I'm wading through the 300th page of this stuff.

I'll be able to start writing soon, I've finished my refresher readthrough, but man is this going to be an undertaking.

Take a look at the other F&Fs because some of that work may have been done for you. It REALLY lacks a lot of polish and linkage between all of the subsystems, but it does appeal to a certain sort of novelty in just thrown all sorts of stuff into a pot and mixing it together. It doesn't hide where it takes all of its stuff insofar as it doesn't literally slap a sticker on every reference, but it's fairly obvious by anyone who's even vaguely aware of what it's referencing.

There is a semblance of sincere effort in its construction, IMO. It's not great, but it seems sincere.

# ¿ Mar 22, 2019 21:35

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

DtD Spoiler: The lack of Fightan' schools for guns is resolved in the expansion book. They are called Gun Kata.

With Aasimar and Teiflings, while they're basically Space Marines, they're also a touch of their D&D namesake in that the former are touched just a little by the Blessed Pantheon which they're meant to serve and the latter are touched by the Ruinous ones. The Eladrin are also named after a D&D race and are basically a chaotic good elf subrace from a plane called Arborea. Since Elves in DtD are meant to be the hippie forest kind, Eladrin basically play at high space elf instead mixed with a Mass Effect counterpart. Another Mass Effect mash-up race or two will show up in the expansion book as well.

Mors Rattus posted:

It is my contractual requirement to note that neither Bahamut nor Tiamat is a dragon, and aren't even from the same mythology.

Tiamat is the primordial ocean, she's from Babylon. She is an ocean, but mad.

Bahamut is a fish from medieval Islamic cosmology. He has a giant bull that stands on top of him, which has a giant emerald tablet on top of it, which has an angel standing on top of it, who holds the globe of the Earth in place so It doesn't swing around wildly.

Blame D&D and Japan.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2019 19:48

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Leraika posted:

No surprise that the dwarfs in a /tg/ project are cool and awesome and largely without flaw.

There's a setting in the Japanese RPG, Alshard, that does them one better and makes them high flying, rock music loving, drunken blacksmiths.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2019 19:54

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

The Promethians in DtD have less to do with the White Wolf Prommies and more to do with the Exalted Alchemicals despite the naming.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2019 20:05

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Night10194 posted:

It just bugs me that this project had so much effort put into it, but still ends up 'just a joke'. It could have at least been a funny one.

I think it's a funny joke :colbert:

Also, iirc, DtD's Werewolves also take a page out of Lunars since their patron, so to speak, is Luna who's more similar to her Exalted counterpart than her WoD version so it comes out as W:tA + Lunars

# ¿ Mar 29, 2019 16:27

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

DtD claims another soul, lmao.

What RPG on Inklesspen's archive has the most abandoned attempts at an F&F?

# ¿ Apr 1, 2019 19:47

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Night10194 posted:

It's just sort of pointless to write about. There's nothing there, so why keep wasting time?

E: It's the first thing I've ever tried to write up where each time I'd sit down to write I'd be like 'You know I could be doing anything else right now'.

I wont disagree with the points you've made, but I still see it as a sort of amusing curiosity that was spawned that has enough connective tissue to sort of limply hop about, but obviously not have enough for the proper get up and go as a system generated from the ground up. If the tying of all of the poo poo together, at least in the fluff was tighter, it'd probably be a bit more interesting. There is a fluff chapter that tries to tie everything together and give everything a place, but it's not tied as tight as it could be. It's one of those projects that probably could've used a kick in the pants by some editing and criticism passes by the /tg/ board but the system is definitely far more ambitious and complex than any other system spawned from the board at the time.

Strange Matter posted:

Reign's been attempted twice without getting anywhere near completion.

Night's attempt is #4 for this game. Mine was #3 and I didn't even start from the beginning of the book.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2019 20:05

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Nessus posted:

Wasn't Princess basically "We saw Madoka and Utena and decided that yes this deeply needs to be a World of Darkness splat"?

Like the "joke" of something upbeat and cheerful owning the World of Darkness has been tried many times at this point

It was originally trying to emulate Sailor Moon and maybe Utena, iirc. Then Madoka came out and there were massive rewrites to try and incorporate that and at this point is just a mess of fluff disjointment.

I also tried to tackle Princess and failed. :shepicide:

# ¿ Apr 1, 2019 20:12

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Halloween Jack posted:

I'm not the best person to ask, but I can say that all those Storyteller homebrews tend toward the same mistake: statting up a vast catalogue of very specific things they liked in a genre, which never coheres into a clear theme. I remember some other poster pointing out huge gaps and glaring omissions in the listed set of inspirations for Princess, which is also common.

I'd say that there's one homebrew, at least based on the F&F that actually has a clear theme if only to not be quite as fleshed out as it could be. Leviathan: the Tempest or somthing. I don't recall the other issues it had, but it was the best one between it and the others that were being F&F'd. The themes of family, destiny, dying glory was pretty clearly illustrated compared to Genius which was basically Mage and Princess which was initially being a point of hope and Light to contrast the rest of the setting (which then got usurped by Geist as actually being properly optimistic in the face of death) and then transitioned into sacrifice and raging against they dying light and despair or something. idk.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2019 20:21

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Halloween Jack posted:

In order for Leviathan to make sense, it would also have to draw on, for example, Cat People. But then you have the problem that Werewolf and Changing Breeds already exist.

Change it from fish people to Lizard people and draw upon the sort of conspiracy theory stuff about Lizardpeople hiding among humanity and it might be there. Unfortunately, like any conspiracy theory stuff with powerful people in disguise, it starts treading on stiff like the Bilderberg group or stuff from the Protocols and it can go south fast.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2019 21:08

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Mors Rattus posted:

you, uh, you know David Icke is pretty explicitly conflating those guys with jews from the start, right

Did that stuff start with Icke? I wasn't aware.

# ¿ Apr 1, 2019 21:32

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

I don't know if it exists as a mod, but I imagine a Crusader Kings mod using the Exalted map would be perfect.

# ¿ Apr 29, 2019 18:57

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Basically, the Realm is still running on Mercantilism principles or whatever countries like Imperial China or Feudal Japan ran by.

# ¿ May 8, 2019 16:33

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

kommy5 posted:

Maybe this is elsewhere, but... what is the plan for after the Realm? This ageless conspiracy has a desired end state for the people there, right?

Or is it really just �we will be greeted as liberators�? Or, you know, post-Soviet collapse and New Empress Two: Electric Putin-aloo?

They'll figure it out after they conquer all of Creation.

# ¿ May 16, 2019 20:28

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

PurpleXVI posted:

The text also claims that a population of 180 individuals would be enough to prevent catastrophic inbreeding. I'm not sure if anyone has the biology chops to kick that one over, but it seems a bit low to my brain.

I believe the scientific consensus is a minimum of around 10,000 individuals in a species to maintain a healthy and diverse genepool. It's possible to have less without catastrophic inbreeding (and even among 10,000 it's not as though there wouldn't be any inbreeding), but it's obviously less healthy the fewer there is.

With regards to inbreeding, anything more distant than the First Cousin is genetically distant enough to be statistically indistinguishable from a complete stranger.

# ¿ May 25, 2019 20:06

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Ronwayne posted:

Only Some Dynasts are Bastards.

Of course. What else would you call illegitimate heirs :v:

# ¿ May 28, 2019 16:38

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

jakodee posted:

I will Stan Numenera until the day I die. That game would be great if only for the exact same mistakes Monte Cook made in every rule set and every setting he ever wrote. So if you know how to counteract some powerful Cookery, you should try that game.

Basically, if it wasn't a game made by Monte Cook, it'd be good? :thunk:

# ¿ Jun 1, 2019 00:02

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Lynx Winters posted:

The spell box is one of those things that works pretty well in a video game where you're not wasting other people's time by trying to find your perfect configuration, not mangling someone's cards, and not taking up a bunch of table space with a half-assed minigame that only you interact with. But this is Monte Cook, so of course we don't even get basic ideas like "this spell uses a weird shape" to at least justify why you'd use physical space instead of slots or just a capacity score. A game about how everything is supposed to be all weird and not like the real world and he can't even rip off Tetris correctly.

As a video game, a spell system that's essentially tetris where your day starts with you filling your bag with spells whose size corresponds to power and trying to pack them in a densely as possible as using them requires you to pull them out from the top down without pulling out or dislodging another spell. On the table, it'd be fiddly as hell, but it'd be a neat thing to do ala Torchbearer.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2019 19:44

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Zereth posted:

You're allowed to, with the right upgrade, fold them in half, I assume you're allowed to rotate them.

Folding printed cards for a TTRPG just rubs me the wrong way. But then, I'm the sort who doesn't tear up cards for Legacy games and such.

# ¿ Jun 3, 2019 22:11

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

EthanSteele posted:

Not human obviously, but pandas are big and have super tiny babies for their size. Pandas weigh like 230 lbs and can have babies that are around 3 ounces. It's generally about 1/900 of the mother's weight, compared to 1/20 for humans, so its not outrageous for even a pretty big creature to have a tiny baby. Marsupial's have a bigger difference between parent and child, but that's cos they're super weird. The not knowing if you're pregnant thing is definitely out the window though.

If the races are meant to be humanoid, I'd assume they'd follow the same proportional distinctions as humans. i.e. A human (Medium) baby is around the mid point of Tiny so proportionally, a halfling (Small) baby would be around the same proportional spot for Diminutive, at least by height. This is assuming halflings are just proportionally smaller humans and not straight up dwarfism proportioned or something where their babies fall on the low end

https://dungeons.fandom.com/wiki/Table:_Creature_Size_and_Scale_(3.5e_Other)

Xelkelvos fucked around with this message at 20:01 on Jun 18, 2019

# ¿ Jun 18, 2019 19:47

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# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 07:27

Xelkelvos: Dec 19, 2012

Getsuya posted:

Japan released what may be the most Japan TRPG ever.

http://r-r.arclight.co.jp/rpg/skdc

It's called Divine Charger, and it's the Gacha TRPG. You play as warriors chosen by the gods in a fantasy world, fighting against evil. Only these gods are stingy, so in order to get the holy weapons to fight the evil folks your character has to pay money to them to take a spin on the Holy Weapon Gacha. Your character has a cool skill with knives? Too bad, you rolled an axe. Better spin again. What's that? Out of money? Well you could go into debt to pull again, but if you don't manage to pay the debt back with dungeon treasure by the end of the session you start the next session with curses on your character. Yes, that's a real system from the game.

I'm going to Japan soon and I'll be going to a monthly TRPG club while I'm over there. They seem to have at least one table running this each month so I'm definitely going to try it out. And buy it. It sounds fun as hell.

Japanese RPG gaming always seems to have really off-beat and interesting mechanics for games that don't crop up here, partially because the nature of their "campaigns" are more oriented towards short run games rather than long narratives as well as not being as obsessed with aping D&D.

The game you described is the sort of thing I'd run as a three session campaign. No more, no less. I hope there's a mod to that where even your stats and stuff are RNG rolled so one party member can start as an S class but another starts as a C class, but the trade off is that the S ends up getting 99% of the aggro and their item drops aren't as effective

# ¿ Jul 18, 2019 13:58

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