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Lynx Winters
May 1, 2003

Borderlawns: The Treehouse of Pandora

Ithle01 posted:

Weapons of the Gods in general had a lot of good ideas. That and Legends of the Wulin. Unfortunately, the core dice mechanic, while cool in theory was actually a huge pain in the rear end. And LotW ripples were another cool idea that kind of fell flat because of the core dice mechanic. I've never read the WotG comics, so I have no bearing for how that game mapped onto them, but when it was just doing general kung-fu stuff it seemed like a cool game.

Unfortunately, despite reading the WotG core book like a dozen times I've never actually gotten to play or run a game (I did a game o LotW for about four sessions before we all quit). If I had some actual experience to relate stuff to I would love to do a read through of it, but coming from me it would be just my dumb-rear end uninformed opinion about what works or doesn't.

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.

How in the gently caress did it take that long to take anyone out, what the hell. Like I have some serious questions as to what yall were doing that would make anything require double-digit numbers of d10s to end a fight.

Also I have a couple issues of the original WotG comic and it's super different from the game other than like, NPC and faction names and general wuxia stuff. At one point the main character is flying through a canyon shooting chi beams at giant bees, which is rad as gently caress but also not what the game does. I talked to Brad Elliott a bunch of years ago and asked him about it, and they pretty much just got the license included the stuff that made sense to include and then let Jenna Moran write a whole lot more.

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Lynx Winters
May 1, 2003

Borderlawns: The Treehouse of Pandora

Night10194 posted:

Exalted 2e is one of those things where I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone remembered it fondly. Since even people who like it a lot have a thousand caveats of 'Well, once you get past all the extremely weird sex poo poo and sexual menace/assault and bad writing and unplayable rules...'

It's the same as any other mediocre RPG: "my friends and I had fun and there were some dice and books nearby, so now we just assume these are related"

Lynx Winters
May 1, 2003

Borderlawns: The Treehouse of Pandora

8one6 posted:

Didn't one of the World of Darkness books explicitly say that the WoD was a shittier version of the world where people do just go missing or die of "spontaneous blood loss" in dark alleys and regular people just look the other way?

Basically every core book, yeah.

I've been flipping through my copy of Kindred of the East out of morbid curiosity and it actually does have a population figure, saying the ratio of mortals to kuei-jin is the same as Western vampos: 100,000 to 1.

Lynx Winters
May 1, 2003

Borderlawns: The Treehouse of Pandora
Imbued hunters and zombies come from all the nonsense that was going in WoD's metaplot at the time, though not the same exact source. Right before H:tR came out, the Wraith line ended with Ends of Empire, detailing how the land of the dead falls to just a boatload of horseshit happening at the same time, including the detonation of two ghostly atomic bombs. All of that kicks up the biggest ghost storm ever and unleashes an unprecedented number of malevolent spirits.

The Risen were a kind of ghost that would possess a dead body and be basically a zombie, but not usually the slow brainless shambling kind, and they were fairly rare and powerful. During the ghost apocalypse, one of the most powerful Risen peaced out of ghost land into a dead body in the living world, but because of the giant ghost storm making weird poo poo happen, she ended up accidentally pulling a few thousand other ghosts with her, some into dead bodies, some just roaming free. The ones that ended up in bodies didn't have the training and powers to control the body like the old Risen, and that's how Hunter ends up with a bunch of regular-rear end zombies and ghosts to deal with.

Lynx Winters
May 1, 2003

Borderlawns: The Treehouse of Pandora

The Lone Badger posted:

In GURPS Monster Hunters, by default characters are built on 400 points. This puts them somewhere between 'action hero' and 'low tier superhero'.
The default assumption is that the pcs aren't magical or otherwise special. They're just incredibly loving badass to the point they can take on monsters with nothing but their wits and weapons.

Yeah I was gonna bring up Monster Hunters too but it's pretty disingenuous to say the PCs aren't magic when there's psychics, half-vampires, and two levels of wizard. It just helps that "beef man with sword" and "walking bag of guns" are also extremely viable classes.

Monster Hunters also has actually mechanics for investigation and monsters have defined weaknesses for PCs to take advantage of. It's nice.

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Lynx Winters
May 1, 2003

Borderlawns: The Treehouse of Pandora
So, people waited how long for Alas Vegas? Because as much as people seem to talk up the writer's other stuff, I have a hard time believing it when it took so long to deliver the most railroaded adventure I've seen since old World of Darkness attached to a pretty poorly thought out system. It says a lot to me that it tries to sell the idea of initial magical realism giving way to afterlife intrigue, but the only real examples of using the ruleset have to do with fighting instead of anything the genre would suggest.

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