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

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FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

AmiYumi posted:

Next time I run a game, this is how dwarven society works. Every dwarf has a rank, they are all gray metals (iron, silver, steel, platinum, chrome, etc), they are ranked by dwarfy criteria rather than monetary worth, and their forms of address require you to be able to tell them apart on sight.

Dwarves created gold rank for humans, who are honored because they don�t understand it means �soft and useless�

That's about 80% of the way to describing Dwarfs in Glorantha. They're distinct types, all named after different substances (clay, iron, silver, copper, etc.). If a dwarf manages to perfect itself through its craft over thousands of years, it may become elevated to diamond dwarf status.

vvvv That is also very, very Gloranthan. A dwarf thinking for itself instead of tireless toiling at its part in the Great Plan to restore the World-Machine is guilty of the heresy of "Individualism". Other Dwarfen heresies include Openhandism, Octamonism, and Vegetarianism.

FMguru fucked around with this message at 00:10 on May 30, 2019

# ¿ May 30, 2019 00:02

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 22:07

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Freaking Crumbum posted:

edit: like he completely misses the point that the weird mysteries in other games are enabled because there's enough baseline, commonly accepted notions about the game world that the mystery stuff can then stand out as being cool or weird. when the default setting is the land of intangible dreams and every other word is a Proper Noun with Special Meaning, it just becomes repetitive and boring and not a mystery at all

It reminds me of another one of Cook's designs, Planescape. One aspect of the setting was "portal keys" which were a feature of the big city at the center of creation (Sigil). Sigil was the City of Doors, and there were portals (known and hidden) to pretty much any place in the multiverse scattered all over the city. Except...the definition of "key" was completely open-ended. It could be a literal physical key-shaped object, or some other object, or a memory or an emotion or a series of dance steps or the whistled chorus of a song or...

So a key could be anything or nothing, and therefore it rises to the level of pure GM fiat, and what could have been a cool or interesting part of the setting to interact with just becomes another arbitrary device for the GM to mildly annoy the players with.

# ¿ May 31, 2019 19:39

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Ratoslov posted:

Different Cook.

That's right, Monte wrote for the line, but David "Zeb" Cook was the designer of the core.

# ¿ May 31, 2019 20:40

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Alien Rope Burn posted:

Yeah, Monte was only a writer on the late-to-the-end supplements of the line.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QrGrOK8oZG8

# ¿ May 31, 2019 22:56

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

The nonsense logistics would be a lot easier to take (and handwave away) if Rifts wasn't so full of hyper-detailed setting information about numbers and costs and resources and populations and unit sizes and a zillion other pieces of ungameable garbage.

Here, have book after book of tedious almanac data that actually makes your game worse and harder to credibly run the more deeply you engage with it.

# ¿ Jun 2, 2019 17:18

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Kaza42 posted:

Chim-panzer?

# ¿ Jun 13, 2019 18:47

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

Part of the problem with coming up with Gorilla Warriors is the best names are all already taken.

The best one I saw that wasn't already canon was James Bonobo, Jammer Superspy.

My favorite is the Big Macaque Attack.

SAM Simeon is good, too.

# ¿ Jun 13, 2019 18:56

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Seatox posted:

Of course Haste breaks a Monte Cook game over it's knee.

Incredible.

Like, "things that give you extra actions/turns break most games" is a well-established black-letter bit of game design knowledge. Hell, nerfing Haste (and Potions of Speed) was one of the prime reasons Cook's own D&D 3.0 was so quickly replaced with 3.5.

And Cook just drops it in there like it's still 1982 and no one knows what an "action economy" is.

What next, a mechanic that requires you burn your collected XP in order to do cool things in the game?

# ¿ Jun 21, 2019 01:28

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Seatox posted:

Reset-time-anywhen-you-like is the domain of computer games, where the book keeping is automated and player agency is limited by the inflexibility of computer game rules. And even then I can only think of one RTS game that had that level of on demand time-stream manipulation allowed (Achron). Every other example I can think of is basically save states as a game mechanic, like Caves of Qud's Precognition power.

The roguelike Tales of Maj'eyal has a Chronomancer class, whose big ability is "See The Threads - You peer into three possible futures, allowing you to explore each for 4�16cTS turns. When the effect expires, you'll choose which of the three futures becomes your present" which is pretty neat and flavorful effect.

Doing that in a multiplayer game, with tabletop rules and tracking, sounds like pure misery for everyone involved.

# ¿ Jun 21, 2019 02:08

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

Feats are just another place where D20 really suffers from the fact that it's very loosely designed despite how fiddly and heavily mechanical it is.

The way D20 has no real design delineation between Skills and Feats and Class Abilities and Prestige Class Abilities and Ability Scores and just makes such a mess of things.

Also, the James Bond 007 RPG had three levels of ability (with three different build points) - Rookie, Veteran, and '00'. The prepackaged adventures rated their difficulty by saying things like 'suitable for 4 rookies, 2 veterans, or one 00-level agent'.

# ¿ Jun 24, 2019 22:11

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

Something I should expand on quickly: The Modern Arms Guide is also a great example of one of the issues of the 90s/00s development cycle, especially in the d20 space: You had to be putting out new supplements. A lot. Which meant inventing things to put in to write supplements about, really.

You saw that the White Wolf/Vampire Heartbreaker space, too - your setting had dozens of splats and factions, so you could write and sell dozens of splat and faction books.

One of the main drivers of big 1990s game settings being giant sprawling unfocused messes was the economic model that they were published under.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2019 18:05

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

megane posted:

The best kind of parody is the "joke" X that is also, simultaneously, an excellent "straight" example of an X. See: Weird Al songs, Galaxy Quest, etc.

Hackmaster is a pretty good example of that in RPG form: a ridiculous version of AD&D plus one zillion house rules and unnecessary added details which also work surprisingly well if actually played.

# ¿ Jun 29, 2019 22:51

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

megane posted:

I feel like a lot of WW stuff follows the same sort of pattern. They come up with a passable and straightforward idea, but then I guess they struggle to fill out however many pages of copy about it, since they kinda conveyed the whole idea in two sentences. "Defenders are protectors, who choose a place or group of people and keep them safe. Sometimes this makes them too cautious when aggression is called for."

So in comes the questionable filler stuff -- the stereotype lists, the in-character pontificating, the whiny equivocations about whether drowning babies is really bad, the "twists" and unnecessary examples that weaken and confuse the concept. If they'd just know when to shut up about things it'd be so much more palatable.

Like with so many bad things about 1990s RPGs, the publishing model (supplement treadmill) is to blame.

# ¿ Jul 2, 2019 20:51

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

PurpleXVI posted:

White Wolf is, to me, notorious for not understanding their own games or players. Because what they seem to insist you shouldn't play, aren't allowed to play and try to discourage you from playing, is in my experience what 90% of the playerbase actually players and has fun with.

"ah yes you must be this angsty shadowy pseudo-sexual predator in the shadows who has a hard life and also here are the rules for when you're powerful enough to throw a truck at a werewolf and you surf the truck through the air there while firing dual-wielded submachineguns and did i mention there are DEEPEST DARKEST VAMPYHRE POLITICKS?" meanwhile the player cashed out of reading that fifteen minutes ago and is calculating how much XP it'll take before he can do the surfing-truck-throw, and it'll be a cold day in Hell before the GM describes the feeding as anything beyond "alright you hoover five blood points out of some guy, now, moving on..." rather than making it a deep dramatic thing.

That''s very, very nineties though - games that talked a lot about the centrality and importance of narrative and drama and character and theme, and then had nothing in the mechanics to support any of it (but plenty of mechanics for traditional power-fantasy combat-mongering). My favorite example is Kult, which is a game of Clive Barker/Jacob's Ladder-esque reality fuckery, and whose core rulebook was mostly full of gunbunny nonsense about supressing fire, anti-tank rockets, and grenade scatter diagrams.

Hell, as an RPG tradtion it goes back to the very start of the hobby, with D&D and its endless lists of cool magic spells and powerful items, combined with neverending essays on how you were never, ever supposed to let your players get their hands on any of it until they had put in the hours and hours to earn them.

# ¿ Jul 3, 2019 15:51

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Cooked Auto posted:

Highly illogical population numbers are honestly a staple when it comes to RPGs.

I've always really enjoy the combination of really precise numbers that are also completely nonsensical.

"This isolated mountain town that can't feed itself and has no economic reason to exist has a population of 81,794"

# ¿ Aug 2, 2019 18:49

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Halloween Jack posted:

That looks reasonable to me. My understanding is that Glorantha isn't exactly Bronze or Iron Age, or even comparable to Earth at all, what with all the shenanigans and goings-on. But yeah, that's comparable to 1000-0 BCE.

Nochet is unusual at 100K population, but it IS the biggest city (and most important port) in all of Glorantha, and it does have ridiculously productive farmland surrounding it (that little town of Ezel to the northwest is the largest and most important temple to the earth/fertility goddess on the entire continent, so there's crop magic out the wazoo).

On another note, I always found Harn to have pretty reasonable demographics.

# ¿ Aug 2, 2019 20:45

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Flail Snail posted:

Coming soon to a thread near you.

Cool, someone made a follow-up to HYBRID.

# ¿ Aug 6, 2019 13:53

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Wrestlepig posted:

Imagine how many cleric levels god has.

The weird early RPG "Fantasy Wargaming" actually had full stats for God, Lucifer, Mary, and other biblical figures.

God was a Leo, and had the ability "operate as three independent figures"

# ¿ Aug 13, 2019 22:06

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

This was always such a headscratcher. The closest you could get to a birth sign is obviously Capricorn. Was there some esoteric reasoning going on? Did they count back to when the stars were created, and some exegesis tradition claimed that happened between July 23 and August 23?

The whole book is just the most baffling thing. A Fantasy Heartbreaker from 1981.

# ¿ Aug 14, 2019 03:25

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# ¿ Apr 26, 2024 22:07

FMguru: Sep 10, 2003; peed on;
sexually

Night10194 posted:

The extent to which futurism and all this junk reconstructs religious ideas, but with some technobabble thrown in so it isn't 'religious' and is instead 'rational', is legit fascinating.

It�s been observed many times that The Singularity is just the nerd atheist version of The Rapture.

# ¿ Aug 19, 2019 00:19

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > FATAL & Friends 2016-19: Bad Rules and Hidden Jewels

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