Register a SA Forums Account here!
JOINING THE SA FORUMS WILL REMOVE THIS BIG AD, THE ANNOYING UNDERLINED ADS, AND STUPID INTERSTITIAL ADS!!!

You can: log in, read the tech support FAQ, or request your lost password. This dumb message (and those ads) will appear on every screen until you register! Get rid of this crap by registering your own SA Forums Account and joining roughly 150,000 Goons, for the one-time price of $9.95! We charge money because it costs us money per month for bills, and since we don't believe in showing ads to our users, we try to make the money back through forum registrations.
 
KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Zereth posted:

It's not really a great sign for their ability to avoid less obviously bad design decisions, that might be harder to talk them out of, or notice you need to in the first place.

I was going to say that CD Projekt have good form building game systems from first principles, but thinking about it the Witcher games could be pretty marmite, and they had to iterate pretty heavily on them to get to where they are now.

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Night10194 posted:

I kind of miss our ridiculous Eldar campaign about a craftworld full of bakers and merchants suddenly having the Farseer go 'Well, okay, guys, I've checked it four times, we gotta save the universe.', though.

...by baking the galaxy's best cake and shuttling it around so everyone just sort of chills out and stops hating each other?

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Night10194 posted:

You know Senzar doesn't sound that bad. Silly, but it doesn't sound like the bad kind of silly.

Mors Rattus posted:

Yeah, it honestly sounds like it'd be fun for a big dumb metal album cover game.

Guys, it's got an AGE OF SCREAMING SKULLS and a BURNING DEATH MOON OUTSIDE OF TIME. I think we can safely conclude that SenZar is the best game of all time.

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

EthanSteele posted:

it meant people kept yelling about how it meant you weren't actually strong, you were just using a magical spell called Nine-Aeon Thews to lift a thing? loving hell.

I always thought that it was this particular dumb nerd slapfight that prompted the "charms aren't real, they're an abstraction" ruling. And, frankly, I am okay with the book taking a page to dunk on that species of brain spider.

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

megane posted:

Exalted has some excellent monster / animal / spirit designs. Lots of weird giant prehistoric animals and gods with actual personalities you can interact with.

"Little weirdnesses" is definitely a strong point of the line's. Some lingering influence of Jenna Moran's, maybe, two editions removed.

Which reminds me.

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Night10194 posted:

Just how many of these drat swords are there?

I honestly wish there were more. Even after Arms of the Chosen, I wish there were more, because they’re all super specific and rolling up a custom one is a lot of work.

Like, you’re building an Exalt and she’s got this sort of “anti-occultist” theme going on, and you’re like, okay, I’ll get her a sword that fucks up demons, that seems like an easy ask. And so you go to the shiny doohickey shop and you open up the catalog and it turns out the demon-loving sword is actually a lance and, yeah, that’s fi- and also half the charms are about loving up demons from horseback and oh no now this is ten times as much work as you signed up for and who really has the time to write a custom nine-charm cascade for a belt buckle and there aren’t even any proper guidelines for this poo poo aaaaaa

It’s, maybe, super cool that all the important and powerful magical artifacts with storied histories are actually those things, but Jesus Christ sometimes it feels like adding an artifact to your charsheet is as complicated as chargen, in a game where that is already far too complicated.

Roll on Exigents.

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Night10194 posted:

Charms seem like a core issue with the entire system because everything is Charms, and more importantly, everything is also ten Charms.

I agree with the latter more than the former, but yes.

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

EthanSteele posted:

Speaking of breaking weapons, there's the cool picture of Panther having a hammer break as it hits him and I don't think there's a way to recreate that other than with a weird craft charm that instantly breaks things?

Mors has been slacking with the art, so I'll post this one:



It's probably one of the better pieces in the core book, but I've always been struck by how washed out it is.

This, for the record, is my favourite:



So cool it makes me want to engage with Craft, every time. :shepicide:

Adbot
ADBOT LOVES YOU

KOGAHAZAN!!
Apr 29, 2013

a miserable failure as a person

an incredible success as a magical murder spider

Ithle01 posted:

edit: just to give you an idea of what I mean about LotW ripples. I tried a test fight with my players against some fairly easy opposition and it went on for about three hours. By the end we were rolling about 30+ d10s looking for matches and the penalties when you acquired injuries just didn't seem that interesting.

potatocubed posted:

I had the same experience playing it. Against a handful of equally-competent enemies combat was about normal speed for a crunchy game, but against one powerful opponent it slowed to a crawl as he just picked up a gigantic stack of ripples that never resolved.

LotW's low lethality is pretty infamous, so you're not alone. One explanation I've seen given, though I'll caveat this by saying that I'm not sure there's anything to push you to do this in the rules, is that fights, especially fights against player-equivalent or stronger antagonists, are generally supposed to end in one or both parties running away. Fights to the death are supposed to be infrequent, climatic moments, marking the conclusion of an arc. This being in line with wuxia genre conventions.

But even if that is the case I don't think it has to be as difficult to sword someone to death as it is.

Ithle01 posted:

It doesn't help that the die resolution mechanic is, shall we say, extremely unintuitive when you're trying to figure out what an average roll is. I think that my players and myself were trying to build giant ripple stacks without realizing that you really don't get much from going up from around 9 dice to 15 dice. It's been a long time though I might be confusing things in my memory because trying to recall specific rpg experiences from six (?) years ago isn't exactly reliable for me.

The background system and the xp system for LotW was cool though. Really, almost everything was, it's just that combat was too confusing for half the group and took too long to resolve for those of us who were able to sort of get what was going on with the dice system.

I took a crack at graphing it once and the way LotW's dice pools work the average magnitude of your sets grows very, very slowly. What does grow significantly is your average number of sets. Which doesn't sound like much help until you realise that each additional set you roll is another minor action you can take in a single combat round. So having a larger pool is more about being able to do more at once than doing any particular thing better. Vertical growth in the system comes more from the bonuses you get from styles.

  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5