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I feel like "A Hill" is a really meta dependent list which quickly gets out-paced by "One guy and a hill" as a silver bullet for your mirror match against the other guy playing "A Hill."
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Dec 13, 2016 18:04
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Anecdotal, but I saw more interest and regular play of 40K during Dawn of War (1, of course) than any other time. If I remember correctly that period had rules for skimmers that granted cover to your troops but also gave them a clear shot because the hover tank could hover higher or lower than depicted.
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Dec 13, 2016 19:12
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Evil Mastermind posted:Yeah, RuneWars: The Miniatures Game. It looks nice, inasmuch as I'm any judge as a non-wargamer. First, I honestly loved the 40K RPGs and am very glad to have basically the whole of Rogue Trader in print (and everything in PDF of course.) I'll be very sad to see them fall into Specialist obscurity. Although, from my overheard-through-the-grapevine GW was more concerned that FFG had A) merged with Asmodee, GW's main European competition, and B) makes mad bank on Star Wars licensed games actually does bite into GW's miniature sales with the three minis games from that line.
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Dec 14, 2016 07:03
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MonsieurChoc posted:Mekhet are more like this guy: Off to rewatch all of Justice League again
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Dec 15, 2016 04:19
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Prism posted:I mean, eta is appropriate for the time period but I would also not use the term when their descendants are still discriminated against, especially given its literal meaning. I'm gonna guess it's the weeb compulsion to use weeb words as part of their keikaku to teach you Japanese. What I'm wondering is why not just start the adventure with the PCs arriving with the Thunder Guard, or very shortly thereafter. Y'know, when they have their first opportunity to DO anything. There's not even a bullshit GMPC to beat the Oni singlehandedly.
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Jan 12, 2017 18:18
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SotDL keeps looking sweeter and sweeter. I'm going to have to get this one for myself, because so many of its ideas are stuff that I've half-assed into my ongoing Pathfinder game. Also, I love this picture, because it looks like it could be plopped into literally genre setting without changing it. "Cyberpunk Robot with Holograms?" "Industrial Pulp guy in a Spacesuit?" "Armor Person Casts a Spell?"
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Jan 24, 2017 18:29
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Mors Rattus posted:Isn't Nephilim the one that is what the author honestly believes is true? I honestly thought that was Wraethuthu. Which really needs to get a spot on the show if it's not simultaneously too uncomfortable and too kinky.
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Jan 31, 2017 16:10
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Halloween Jack posted:Zir'An is yet another one of those games that had an interesting premise, but the inclusion of Tolkienish races really killed it for me. Agreed, that felt like the weirdest point. I don't reflexively hate Elfs/Dwarves/etc. but they felt really out of place in the otherwise weird fiction setting of the rest of Zir'an.
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Mar 14, 2017 18:11
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hyphz posted:FFG Star Wars has exactly the same problem with auto fire weapons, too.. I'm not 100% convinced that FFG Star Wars didn't start out as an overhaul of 40K RP. The system of buying advances struck me as fairly similar, especially coming from the same company.
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Mar 15, 2017 13:47
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So, quick shoutout to System Mastery for tipping me off to #GOPdnd. I'm sitting at 900+ retweets right now and am kinda 
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Mar 19, 2017 02:39
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theironjef posted:Hah I thought our 62 was a big deal, you musta said something real good. Honestly, I thought it was only middling, I saw much better ones. me posted:DM:"The dragon rests on a hoard of gold."
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Mar 19, 2017 03:45
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Ah, yes, the last survivors of the edition wars. Now gray and pockmarked, meeting at the front lines. Not friends, but with a long-scarred respect for one another.
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Apr 4, 2017 13:17
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Alien Rope Burn posted:If I did a Favored Enemy mechanic I'd have a mechanic where the Ranger could throw down the narrative resource du jour to say "this adventure / location / dungeon will have an otyugh in it", so they can use their Otyugh Murdering Mastery. There'd obviously be some refinement, but that'd be the notion. I've been doodling for years with the idea of a DM-less dungeon crawler with some similar ideas. Idea started with the Hearthstone item from World of Warcraft which teleports the player back to an inn. Which got me thinking, "What if the party isn't going out and doing these adventures, but telling the people at the inn about them after they're over." Which explains why they keep telling the same story (running the dungeons) over and over; and why, when they get too drunk and blurt out "And then fifty whelps came from both sides and killed everyone!" the party just rewinds back to before they said that. There would be a kind of built in resource of 'audience excitement' when the party ups the stakes that could take a hit when they need a deus ex machina, or certain things could be set up at the start of a story "Let me tell you how I recovered this Holy Avenger," so we know the party is claiming to have done so, but then the story will determine what they've actually based on how "truthful" their story is,
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Apr 12, 2017 18:39
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SirPhoebos posted:The cover of the 3rd Edition Draconomicon is very I want to get really mad about the biology going on here. Multiple offspring make no sense for Dragons. They're long lived, intelligent, apex predators. They should need an enormous range to support any population. Having half a dozen whelps might make sense if they were pack hunters, but they largely ignore or fight with other like cats. Also, that dragon brought back a whole horse like a cat with a mouse. But that dragon is probably hundreds of years old and as intelligent as any sapient creature. I'll grant that they just prefer not wearing clothes, and prefer living in caves, that's fine. But unless those dragons live so far from civilization that they have to butcher their own kills, that horse should be neatly packaged steaks and sausages wrapped and tied and left out weekly by the cowering locals.
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Apr 17, 2017 16:41
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with a red dragon couple and several hatchlings (the mate is on the back cover bringing a war horse for dinner.
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megane posted:Probably "lack of creativity" is also a factor. We have evil elves, and they're distinguished from other elves by being black-skinned and living underground. Clearly we need an evil version of [GNOMES], and they'll be distinguished from other [GNOMES] by, uhhhhhh... Repeat ad nauseum. If I may offer a historical perspective with regard to western European mytholog, without looking like an apologist for lovely 20th century writers, it's probably because they all started from the same place. The Dark Elves of Norse myth share some of the same stories as the Black Dwarves of Germanic myth and the faeries of Celtic myth. Which is not to suggest those are all the interchangeable. But Elf / Faerie / and Goblin meant the same thing for thousands of years until nerds codified them. This is why I dig authors that look farther afield, or just make up their own, monsters. Give me more Peng and Set Animals and handlingers.
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Apr 19, 2017 19:35
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theironjef posted:We wanted to ride the zeitgeist of the Talislanta Kickstarter happening, so we covered Talislanta. Some other edition. It is impossible to read in a week, this is a lot like reading an RPG by James Joyce. At the risk of being a China Mieville fanboy, this reminded me of a less focused, more excited Mieville joint with it's wild abundance of different races. Specifically the Bas-Lag books, which had human protagonists (mostly) and a supporting cast of all sorts of poo poo. The "Roman Robots building stuff" was rad, sort of between the Construct Council and the Anophelii mosquito people. Which mostly just reminds me that I'm sad the Bas-Lag rpg never happened. Plus Mieville's work has the sweet sweet current of anti-capitalist sentiment in the background.
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Apr 26, 2017 20:04
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So, FATAL & Friends, I have some ...developments... that I'm going to share here. I'm running MAID tomorrow. The table is myself, two guys, and two girls. Our D&D campaign wrapped in early February and this is our gag session / get back together for the first time. We've agreed to go 'weapons free', for lack of a better term. All the weird poo poo is on the table, everyone has been made aware of what they're in for and that they can back out at any time. There may be safe words. The setting will be a demonic library from the D&D campaign, I'll be reprising my role as the sex-positive, succubus librarian. I'm open to any suggestions as to what I should have on hand to include. Gin is already on hand.
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Apr 27, 2017 14:07
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Angrymog posted:wide words Hey, bud, can you reformat this please? The code blocks don't wrap lines so much. VVVVVV No harm done -- thank you so much! ZorajitZorajit fucked around with this message at 14:38 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 13:34
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Rand Brittain posted:The idea that 13th Age has bad writing is bizarre to me. Having really strong, distinctive writing is what sets it apart from all the editions of D&D it's reacting to. Claiming things have bad writing, especially fantasy, genre, and pulp fiction is a long standing tradition leveled at goddamn everything. Prose has bad writing like illustrations have "bad painting." It's certainly possible, but without articulating why it's a pretty meaningless jab. Does the dialogue sound like a socially-deficient robot wrote it? Are there moral undercurrents that make Ayn Rand look reasonable? Would the plot have been resolved if someone had done something simple, obvious, and in-character?
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May 8, 2017 20:29
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Covok posted:I see your argument on the devolutionsit, but the ape thing may just be a reference to mankind evolving from a shared ancestor with apes. Like, Gorrilla Grod (except not thinking he's upgrading people). The problem isn't the authorial intent, its what the audience is invariably going to read into it. More than a decade now and there's only been the tiniest bit of movement away from writing for and marketing to the people that are now literal fascists. Paizo's QA could have caught this and not included it, or included it with a big sidebar calling out anyone that "goes there" with the class. But they didn't because they knew it would blow up in their faces if they did. It's gross, Pathfinder is bad, and Paizo needs to be excoriated for it. e: The Living Grimoire is a neat idea. For me, it hearkens back the glut of Japanese-style RPGS of the PS1 era, where every character had a unique set of weapons like books, soup laddles, and water polo balls. ZorajitZorajit fucked around with this message at 05:32 on May 21, 2017 |
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May 21, 2017 04:37
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Mr.Misfit posted:The problem with multiple colours is that for many the brown and grey and dark brown is an aesthetic borne out of the grimy and human-defying oppressive mood of the era as recreated in the 1930s, where people needed something to look down upon and the past century was a great place to do that. Counterpoint, those statues look way better in the plain white marble, because they were painted in like this:  An aesthetic is all about what metaphors you want your setting to evoke. Industrial dehumanization works in sepia and gunmetal, people associate heavenly marble columns with enlightened philosophy. There will eventually be a day when we are old and complain that "not everyone in the 2010's wore yoga pants and Nazi haircuts."
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Jun 13, 2017 17:56
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Halloween Jack posted:As Mr Aldous Huxley has truly remarked, a dark Satanic mill ought to look like a dark Satanic mill and not like the temple of mysterious and splendid gods. Fair play, I didn't mean to suggest that we shouldn't sometimes juxtapose contrasting visuals to put an audience at odds with their expectations -- or any other motivation for that matter. Only to quip that sometimes it's okay to lean on popular perception because the truth of the matter is more nuanced than the narrative needs. (Which sounds like a really lovely thing to say, I don't want to sound like an apologist for reactionary portrayals.)
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Jun 13, 2017 18:40
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Cease to Hope posted:games workshop used to sell the cone-shaped pewter personification of death in their warhammer undead line Oh, so that's what DA MF Sharezone was doing before Twitter
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Jun 26, 2017 00:42
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I'd been reading it assuming it was a more complicated way to file the serial numbers off Event Horizon and Doom.
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Jul 7, 2017 13:35
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unseenlibrarian posted:Man, He-man's setting is way more interesting than Age of Sigmar. And here I was in blissful ignorance that He-Man could be free of continuity and could be free to just indulge itself in camp and beefcake. But, no, of course there's a loving backstory.
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Jul 24, 2017 18:31
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U.T. Raptor posted:This is also the basis of the best sidequest in Jade Empire. Aaand reinstalling. And mourning the gutting of Bioware and fact that we'll never get a Jade Empire 2.
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Jul 25, 2017 15:03
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The worst edition of D&D judged solely by the cover. Nope. I'll die on this hill because I love the 3.0 covers. Granted I was eleven or twelve when I first owned them but those covers drew me in. The little latches printed on the illustration and the sorta "I Spy" look of them said to pre-teen me: "There are secrets and wonders in here that no one else knows."
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Jul 31, 2017 18:38
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There might be interesting questions to be asked about the gender identity of nine-foot tall post-human monster people. Like, what does it mean to be any gender as an Astartes. Never mind the English language's shaky relationship with non-gendered pronouns (not just 'they', but also identifiers like "Brother"). Of course, I suspect it's equally likely that the new Doctors' Who will prompt GW to announce that Marines can now be whoever they want to be. VVV: English Grogs ZorajitZorajit fucked around with this message at 19:08 on Aug 3, 2017 |
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Aug 3, 2017 18:59
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occamsnailfile posted:"Eight foot tall acid-spitting killing machine who can chew through metal, survive the loss of multiple limbs and even place itself into suspended animation for centuries" sounds more like a Tyranid than a human and yet people say female space marines "aren't realistic." It's like people flipping out over the idea of a brown hobbit. I would ask, where would you have come down on if the GM had addressed this like: "You can absolutely be a female Space Marine. But a woman who becomes a Space Marine is an eight foot tall, acid-spitting killing machine, unlikely to have any secondary sexual dimorphism beyond being named 'Susan'." and/or "Your character will be addressed as 'Brother' because 'Brother' is the honorific applied to a Space Marine." I get the latter case potentially runs up to the line on misgendering folks. Personally, I think the setting would justify it, but its not really my place.
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Aug 3, 2017 19:55
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Seriously man, I've always admired WFRP from afar but these write ups are wonderful. I've got sprawling notes for my collected homebrew setting and these are wonderfully insightful in how to make interesting locales and peoples.
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Aug 7, 2017 19:00
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Maybe it's just me, but mutation as it exists in Warhammer Fantasy (and to a lesser degree 40K) always felt like one of the weirder hangers-on of the setting. The presentation of it as being tied to chaos exposure reads like nuclear fallout fears. And I know, right now I may need to offer my apologies and condolences in hours or days; but for Warhammer to be so informed by the Cold War might be one of those things that hangs around as an artifact for future study. From a more direct perspective, why does Fantasy need mutants on top of everything else. And why is mutation this random thing that just happens, oh well. Mutation and body horror can be great, but its almost always a personal thing. The loss of self and the corruption of the body. If Alien of The Thing breaks out across a population those stories are radically changed.
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Aug 9, 2017 16:29
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Halloween Jack posted:It's a lot simpler in Age of Sigmar; all the hilariously stupid names are inspired by a single intellectual property lawsuit. Is that the same lawsuit as this one that threatens to mildly inconvenience their massive licensing deals of an allegedly flagship property? I know they had a row a few years back about their claim to "Space Marine" around the time they stopped using the phrase "Imperial Guard." I wouldn't be surprised to learn that Age of Sigmar was related to one of those debacles as well.
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Aug 9, 2017 21:59
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Night10194 posted:The Grim Feast, a 5 century old picture of people being fed their relatives at a fancy dinner. It's got Khorne in it. Looking at it for too long makes you make a WP test or try to murder your own family. It can be solved by the application of fire since it isn't magically warded or anything. It's not really a worthwhile plot thread. Murder you're famil?
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Aug 10, 2017 17:38
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theironjef posted:System Mastery back once again with King Arthur: Pendragon which is a solid if stuffy old game (we covered 4th edition). It is fine. So maybe you guys were being facetious and I misconstrued, and if that's the case then egg on me but... if you're playing Pendragon is it really the fault of the game for not encouraging you to be Frodo the Pizza Hobbit? That tacked way up Fish Malk territory for me. There's gotta be a degree at which it's on the player to make sense in the context of the game and not tell the GM "suck it loser, this is what I want." I totally agree that it's weird to include information for all sorts of things that aren't really supposed to be in the game, personally, a Spanish Muslim knight sounds like a great character. And I get that there's comedy to be derived from the crunchy stuff like rolling up your eleven horses that wouldn't be there in a Rules-Lite game that said "Your character gains [Horses]." I honestly thought Pendragon made a pretty good case for having its crunch. Part of the game was about managing your chivalrous affairs, so handling all that inventory and year-by-year progression kind of made sense to me. It lends a certain "Historical" feel to the game that I don't think would have been as well conveyed without it. ZorajitZorajit fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Aug 30, 2017 |
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Aug 30, 2017 01:25
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Mors Rattus posted:Fun fact: the Afghanistan War is still going. In a few months it will be eligible for a driver's license. Sometime soon, the Afghanistan war will kill an American younger than itself. To say nothing of the thousands of Afghani, Pakistani, and other children than it has already killed. He typed from his computer while working a job for the military industrial complex. Aside: What was that micro rpg about a patrol in Afghanistan? Road to something?
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Sep 26, 2017 20:48
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So, apocryphally this is called a 'Nuclear Tesuji' and is a psuedo-real move in go (the way en passant is a specific, albeit rare thing in chess.) It happened at least often enough that there are lots of old wood cuts of people attacking each other with Go boards (could have been an 18th century meme of course.) The way it was explained to me is that you throw the board, uppercut your opponent and storm off; you actually win the game if your opponent retalliates, because you made a "legal" move, and then they chose to fight you. Also, want to concur about Ken Burns The Vietnam War it's worth a watch (it's not short or easy though.) Man, it messed the boomers up. Good thing our generation didn't press gang its poor into an endless, objectiveless war.
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Oct 9, 2017 20:51
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wiegieman posted:Literally all that's needed to make the Fighter a viable class is to go over feats and make them powerful enough to compete with spells -- which means that the 11-ish (plus bonuses) feats fighters get need to be as powerful and flexible as the 40-ish spells wizards get. That would be Changing Things though. But you would also need to allow Fighters to rewrite reality, break the action economy, change the fundamental way characters fight each other, and be so muscle-y that they can intimidate and seduce anyone they wish. Addressing the ultimate result of caster supremacy ignores the issue that D&D is a fundamentally broken property with no redeeming value, made worse by every fanboy's flailing attempt to fix it -- and usually just making casters better instead. 4e evaded this by dispensing with the idea that your character abilities and character's plot-actions are in any way connected, but was still a system of vestigial attributes and feat taxes that needed multiple relaunches even as it rotted on the vine. Ideally, your character sheet should be a single note card onto which you write your character's preferred name and, whenever anything changes or does not change about that character, write down a tag to incorporate into playing that character.
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Oct 16, 2017 20:26
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Nessus posted:A note card? What the gently caress, you simulationist. NAME TAG ONLY. We have to have more than that, otherwise we're just doing freeform roleplay like animals. If I can't take strings on the other members of my clique and then use a Spend to roll +Unpleasantness to advance their Harm Clock two motes I don't even know how you can call yourself a rule set.
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Oct 16, 2017 20:41
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The nonsense of D&D healing isn't worse than the cliche of a dying speech.
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Oct 23, 2017 18:10
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unseenlibrarian posted:Solarians can make sun weapons with their mind and get a magic hilt to upgrade it so there's the missing chunk of the Solarian inspiration, it's Thundarr! Wasn't that a power some of the characters had in Tenchi Muyo too? Can I use have Starfinger Waifu Adventures?
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Oct 24, 2017 15:25
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