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Mors Rattus posted:In Nomine: Too Dumb To Be Insulting 
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Jan 14, 2016 00:32
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Kurieg posted:I actually can't find the first leak anymore. Though I vaguely remember bits and pieces of it, like that Heroes used to have their own Lexicon section and it was bad. quote:Hero Slang PUT IT ON KICKSTARTER
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Sep 29, 2016 01:54
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I suspect that the DM is supposed to elaborately overdescribe the empty room and make the players paranoid as hell. I've heard that idea for a "trap" pop up all over the place.
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Oct 5, 2016 00:36
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I've actually been meaning to do these for a while, and this seems like as good a time as any. The Book of Vile Darkness: Introduction The BoVD was, no joke, the first D&D book and second RPG book I ever bought, not realizing that I probably should have stopped at Changeling: the Lost. I was 13 or so and probably impressed by the mature warning label and all of the tits strewn about in the art. I was fascinated by it and it launched me into the waters of D&D and, later, the broader RPG community. Anyway, it's ten years later and boy howdy does this book suck. There are some relatively good parts, but overall, it's mostly just laughably juvenile both in general content and it's approach to morality. As Nuns with Guns points out, this book was, as far as I can tell, the sole work of Monte Cook, so it's nice that we know who to blame. Written in 2002 for D&D 3.0, it was (I believe) the first such product with a "Mature Audiences" sticker prominently displayed on the front. Wizards focused on this angle when pushing the book, including issues of Dragon and Dungeon with special, sealed sections featuring "mature" content (I'll cover these and other miscellaneous content at the end), that prompted a truly hilarious rant from Tracy Hickman, along with a number of other flame wars and arguments. Later tonight, we'll cover how cutting yourself is evil, and the mechanical benefits of doing so. Take us away, Monte. quote:Let this be a warning: Book of Vile Darkness is intended for mature audiences. The topics covered herein are not for the immature, squeamish, or faint of heart. This book deals with fictional gore, extreme violence, human sacrifice, addiction, corrupt magic, and deviant behavior. Its content is not a lighthearted take on “badness”—it is about evil, pure and simple. quote:I do not condone, endorse, or seek to glorify anything in this book as it might relate to the real world. This is bad stuff, and I’m not a bad person. Really. Tulul fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Feb 5, 2017 |
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Feb 5, 2017 03:47
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The more simple reason for Godlike's timeline going "but the future refused to change" is that WWII is heavily linked with a relatively few key events in the public mind, and they want them to take place so you can stick the PCs into those events. If a Polish Talent assassinates Hitler at the start of the war, or if Japan conquers Hawaii with Talent forces, then there's no D-day, Iwo Jima, Battle of Britain, or anything else you've seen a billion times in movies.
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Mar 21, 2017 19:24
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Cease to Hope posted:so I guess that's a no on some 13A sample characters, heh Since OUT are literally Dramatic Hooks...  Jack Burton, Human Fighter*, just fell through a portal in the Netherworld, doesn't get this at all. *Or a similar class that is effective at random times.
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Apr 11, 2017 05:57
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The litany of bad Dragonmech PrCs reminds me that I never commented on something back in your original review!Mors Rattus posted:The riftwalker... You're dead wrong here, the riftwalker is busted even by 3rd-party D&D standards. Take a 12th level party, for instance, just using the 3.5 core books and Dragonmech. You're a Ranger 1/Wizard 3/Riftwalker 8. The DM throws an adult Lunar dragon at you. At CR 16, the dragon is a bit out of your wheelhouse, and is supposed to be a difficult, risky fight for the whole group. You go "lol" and cast gate, summoning a CR 23 solar, and it effortlessly kills the dragon while your party sets up for a picnic. Assuming you aren't already an unstoppable monstrosity with infinite everything, because gate is the single most broken spell in the game. If your DM has sensibly ripped that section out of the spell list, you can call a buddy or two using greater planar ally, getting a pit fiend (CR 20), marilith (CR 17), planetar (CR 16), or similar depending on your alignment. If your DM rips his hair out in frustration and bans all summoning spells, then the dragon kills you, which doesn't matter because you and your party aren't real and you all just wake up back at home. 
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Apr 30, 2017 06:01
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To be honest, I think UA 3e is pretty strictly worse than 2e. It's not bad, but it's not what I'd hoped it'd be, either. I admit that there's some nostalgia bias there; UA was the coolest thing ever when I was barely old enough to vote, so it's pretty hard for 3e to wow me in the same way, but ultimately I've come away kind of disappointed.wiegieman posted:Is Merchant avatar still the only sane and rational choice to make in this edition? The name has been changed (it's the Salesman now) and it's not in the core book, but nothing else has, so yes, it's still a GM headache and the munchkin's delicacy of choice. JcDent posted:Still, I thought Unknown Armies was about fighting the unknown, not capitalizing on it? Are the three (from you're snooping at mysteries to you're fighting global cults) levels of play still in? Nope! The change is kind of a mixed bag. It makes the game more streamlined and focused, but one of my complaints is that 3e feels a lot less Unknown, and removing the tiers of play/knowledge is part of that.
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Jul 18, 2018 01:59
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DalaranJ posted:Did D&D even have any “famous fantasy figures” at this point? Not sure how you could forget stone-cold classics like DREX™ Evil Barbarian and his new Battle-Matic™ Action.   e: The woodburning kit doesn't have any characters labeled, but obviously you can recognize the iconic characters on sight, such as the old wizard with a beard and the old wizard with a beard. 
Tulul fucked around with this message at 20:53 on Jan 17, 2019 |
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Jan 17, 2019 20:47
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It's probably worth noting that 3.0 psionics were way shittier than their 3.5 incarnation. Most notably, all of the six disciplines were associated with a different ability score, and you used that ability for that discipline's powers, making Psions really bad with the majority of their powers. Powers which were also worse, both in general and because augmenting was a 3.5 creation. There was also a whole subsystem of psionic combat with 10 individual modes (and a table, natch) that each had a different interaction with each other and their own power point cost. Using it against other psychics was mostly useless, because it did pretty minor amounts of ability damage, and using it against non-psychics was useless, because they got a huge bonus to their saves. That is until you leveled up a few times and got mind blast, which attacked everyone in a giant area, gave non-psychics a penalty to their save, and stunned everyone in the area for 3d4 rounds, making it the only thing worth doing as a Psion.
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Jan 23, 2019 23:11
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Hostile V posted:Dan Olson has a solid two-part series discussing Evangelion and authorial intent that is good watching to get a handle on Eva if you never have. In short, people didn't get the message of "you should accept yourself and utilize introspection to understand you're worth it" due to a mixture of A: scheduling issues that resulted in budget cuts, B: the author being unable to tell the story true to their vision due to hella depression and budget cuts and C: fans being absolute dogshit at any form of critical analysis, relying on a surface level reading of the work and hitching their horses to the Christian symbolism because that's more acceptable and accessible than "it's okay to be depressed". Just FYI, A and B are completely false but super-persistent myths. The show never suffered budget cuts. They had some serious problems with deadlines and plans for the story changed throughout production, but that was all down to Gainax/Anno, not money. Anno had serious depression a few years before the show was made, which was a huge influence, but he wasn't in a psych ward when he wrote the show. C is 100% true, though, and is probably the reason A & B get repeated so often and Evangelion got memed up as some kind of anime Ulysses. It being incomprehensible because the director was off his pills and all of the money walked out is a better story than it being incomprehensible because you're bad at comprehension.
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Mar 5, 2019 21:43
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As with a lot of TRPG adaptations, it seems like it would work much better to make an Evangelion pastiche instead of trying to map the show one-to-one to a game. Most narratives just doesn't follow all of the constraints that RPGs necessarily have.LatwPIAT posted:You don't need to be inside a psych ward to be depressed though. Things can get better and you can still be depressed. Which doesn't necessarily mean that Anno must have been depressed when he wrote it, but that he wasn't presently institutionalized is not evidence to the contrary. Oh, for sure, you're absolutely right. I was being hyperbolic, but "Evangelion got hosed up because Anno was incredibly depressed when he made it" gets repeated a lot despite not being something anyone at Gainax ever said.
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Mar 9, 2019 02:03
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While you're on the  analogy, the attitude of Deadlands towards the South reminds me a lot of the "clean Wehrmacht" mythos, which is constructed to let you segregate all the things you like (Rommel, tanks, uniforms) from the Nazis (who are bad). Racism is only active and obvious in its evil, in forms like lynching and gassing, and your hands are clean as long as you didn't directly participate in it. There's the very brave condemnation of genocide and slavery (wow!), but there's either no recognition or avoidance of the infinite other ways bigotry expresses itself, because that could be the precursor to some very uncomfortable questions about yourself and your hobbies. Libertad! posted:Archeological expeditions in the 1700s and 1800s unearthed the bones of very tall humans, creating rumors that a race of giants lived in eastern North America. They ranged from a more realistic 6.5 to 7 feet tall than the towering creatures in Deadlands. Fun fact: This is part of a century-old conspiracy theory that the Smithsonian engaged in the destruction and cover-up of thousands and thousands of giant skeletons found all over North America, which further splits into a bunch of sub-theories about nephilim, aliens, the NWO, and/or creationism.
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Mar 10, 2019 18:51
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Cooked Auto posted:Where things get dicey Spoiler alert: it does not make a pretty graph.  If you're curious, paste the following into AnyDice. You can change the maximum depth up to 8 or 9 before it starts throwing an error, but that mostly just bloats up the charts. code:
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Apr 1, 2019 21:54
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Ono-Sendai was the company that made Case's deck in Neuromancer, IIRC.
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Apr 24, 2019 04:23
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His actual statblock will inject pure '90s roleplaying writing straight into your eyeballs.    e: This is from the big metaplot adventure supplement where the climax of the adventure is basically Mal showing up to beat up Aberrant-Superman and be smug about it. Tulul fucked around with this message at 21:58 on Aug 1, 2019 |
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Aug 1, 2019 21:56
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