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hyphz posted:And ugh, Shadowrun 4e characters. Half of the sample characters are allergic to gold for no reason at all - thus giving every munchkin player justification to take irrelevant disadvantages because "it's in the example!". I keep wondering if I should write up Ghost Cartels but just its characters would be enough:
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May 13, 2016 18:29
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Maybe you'll prefer my upcoming game, where Mormon missionaries visit a town full of horny teenage monsters...
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May 13, 2016 20:15
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Nessus posted:Star Trek even has a secular example of the problem with the Prime Directive - in that setting, yes, cultural contamination is bad (and I think you can safely assume the Enterprise is permitted to quietly redirect comets and lethal volcanic eruptions away from Bronze Age civilizations).
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May 16, 2016 20:51
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Evacuating them from their home planet would irrevocably damage the culture they've developed over thousands of years. Yes, even more than the tide of lava.
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May 16, 2016 21:10
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Hostile V posted:
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May 17, 2016 13:15
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Late-era TSR cranked out a lot of reprinted material in their sourcebooks, didn't they? I remember a lot of derisive reviews in magazines like Inquest Gamer.
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May 17, 2016 21:05
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Idunno why, but the Cat Lord illustration is iconic to Planescape to me. Did they use that to advertise it a lot?
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May 18, 2016 16:51
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Check your campaign setting, catlord.
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May 18, 2016 17:14
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Maybe I'm missing the forest for the trees here, but the Yugoloth seem like they were kinda just tossed out there to fill the Neutral Evil box on the alignment chart. I like most of the illustrations, though; their combination of humanoid and animal traits is more in line with what I expect from medieval demonology than the other fiends. The Dergholoth looks like something out of a Bosch painting.
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May 18, 2016 18:33
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I'm not saying that this is fair, but when I was a teenage gamer in the 90s who had skimmed AD&D books but never played D&D, mephits and the quasiplanes looked like a pretty good summation of everything that was wrong with D&D, at least setting-wise. Thirty-one elemental flavours of basically the same creature looked like a lazy way to crank out supplemental material, and devoting pagecount to describing dimensions of pure [whatever] that were basically impassible and unusable made it seem like the people who made AD&D must have been out of touch with their own plane of reality. Mephits are kind of funny, though.
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May 18, 2016 20:29
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I seem to recall there was some monster race aligned with pure Chaos, who if you encountered them, were likely to do things like attack for no reason, offer no resistance while you hack them to death, or explode, or disbelieve their own existence and vanish. Was that not the slaad? I had a mental image of what those creatures looked like, but it was the Rast. I swear I'm not making this up. Maybe it was just something from a Planescape fanpage.
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May 18, 2016 21:15
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It's been a long, long time since my last update, so links to previous chapters are here. Chapter 7: Pillars of the Universe Dune does something I rarely see in a game: it has two separate chapters on gamemastering. The last chapter, called “A Voice from the Outer World” was full of advice on how to run a session in the moment--describing scenes, when to use or ignore the dice, that kind of thing. This chapter, however, is about how to structure the campaign, with sections on implementing theme, characterizing NPCs, and writing scenarios. The chapter opens with a section on theme--overarching themes, which it calls “pillars of the Dune universe,” and more narrow, specific themes that can inspire plots for a story. This section is the reason this chapter took an absurdly long time to review. It’s not long, but it’s dense, and section on theme in particular had me ruminating upon the themes of Dune and how they can be implemented in the roleplaying medium. The authors obviously have an excellent grasp of Dune and its themes, even if the specific examples they provide for incorporating them into an adventure are hit-or-miss. Epic Drama: Simply put, everything that matters in the setting is huge and ancient. The Spacing Guild, for example, has been around for thousands of years and spans galactic civilization, and you see that manifested in the form of ships which are big enough to hold two cities (with enough space between them that they’d never know the other was there). The PCs aren’t space truckers roaming around somewhere in this setting--they’re part of the elite ruling class, playing for the highest possible stakes. Human Conditioning: Many of Frank Herbert’s books deal with directed human evolution. (The Dosadi Experiment is a prominent example.) In Dune, humans are trained from birth, by organizations that have perfected their methods over millennia, to be superhuman by our standards. Following up on the advice from the last chapter, the authors encourage you to apply this to your games by embracing the characters being incredible polymath badasses. Mentats are smarter than computers, and Swordmasters are both generals and master martial artists like ancient epic heroes. Preservation & Evolution: The institutions of the Imperium have remained more or less stable for tens of thousands of years, but the system creates prodigious individuals with grand ambitions, and even the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood itself has a long-term plan that would upset the whole system in their favour. Dune games aren’t meant to be a series of adventures with the backdrop of a status quo that never changes--it should be expected that the fall of Great Houses, the rise of illicit technology, all-consuming wars of religion, etc. should play a role in your campaign. Karama & Jiaz (Miracle and Prophecy): This one is a little trickier, and concerned with the phenomenon of prescience in the Dune universe. If one can see the future, is free will an illusion? Do prescients only see possible futures? Is prophecy affected by the prophet’s biases? Does glimpsing a possible future doom you to follow that particular path? The book provides an example: You could invent a great historical catastrophe, then run a campaign where the PCs are presented with developing events that mirror the catastrophe, raising the issue of history repeating itself. While I think this could work if you’re ready to do a campaign that mirrors, say, the Butlerian Jihad and changes the setting as much as Paul’s jihad, it still strikes me as contrived. I think it’s easier and better to do a campaign that explores the political impact of religious prophecy and mysticism, with prescience serving to give the prophecy undeniable substance. Plans Within Plans: Everyone in the Dune universe has a scheme going, and it’s never obvious. The PCs shouldn’t be presented with tasks that are as simple as “go to a place and retrieve a thing” or “go fight these bad guys.” The closure they get at the end of each session should raise questions about what to investigate next. The game does a good job presenting this theme: even in the example of combat from the rules chapter, the Mentat PC determines that the attack is a feint to distract them from a frontal assault elsewhere.  Your face-dancer belongs to Noxzema. After covering the “pillars,” the chapter covers more specific themes, or topics. To paraphrase the book, if pillars describe what the Dune universe is about, topics describe what a particular Dune story is about. This is where we get to that “hit and miss” part I mentioned--while I agree that all the topics listed show an admirable grasp of the setting, some of the suggested ways to introduce them to a story are just so-so. Specifically, I find that the examples given along with a description of the topic are often weaker than the ones succinctly listed in a sidebar on the following page. Preservation of Key Bloodlines: The Imperium is a feudal, caste-based society, even if the fiefdoms encompass entire planets. The nobility are fighting for the survival of not only their genes but their way of life. The Bene Gesserit manipulate the system to serve their own ideology. The game says that this is the easiest topic to incorporate because, as elite members of a House, the characters are dealing with threats not only to their own lives but to their entire House and the society it represents, and can be explored in stories including everything from House vendettas to political upheavals to natural disasters. While this is true, I feel that it doesn’t fully address the element introduced by the Bene Gesserit. To put it bluntly, the BG breed people like livestock. Among the nobles they largely control who mates with whom, the sex of their children, and thus if they have male heirs. Arranging political marriages is as old as politics, but the Sisterhood is in fact principally concerned with genetics. That’s a very powerful and disturbing theme that goes beyond Machiavellian backstabbing. Science of Tradition: This one’s relatively straightforward, concerned with what happens when one of the venerable traditions of the Imperium is challenged, or one of the power groups tries to exploit it for their own benefit. The caste system, the bans on technology, even the Great Convention itself. Moral Incertitude: While Dune has obvious good guys and bad guys (or at least bad guys) it doesn’t really deal in simple good vs. evil narratives. Due in large part to how planetary feudalism works, the Great Houses have free rein to develop radically different ideologies on their home planets. The Atreides value integrity and noblesse oblige while the Harkonnen see themselves as apex predators who have the right to abuse and degrade everyone beneath them. Meanwhile, corporate entities like the Guild and Bene Gesserit have their own ideologies which supposedly promote the common good, but don’t respect individual rights or dignity. The relevant blurb suggests that you can demonstrate this theme by contrasting, for example, an Atreides and Harkonnen character, which I find pretty weak. Examples from the sidebar include forced relocation, the fall of a demagogue, and labor strikes--immediately political topics that are much more interesting. Taming of Worlds: Houses in charge of a world have to “learn the language of the planet,” both its ecology and its culture. Although the nobility develop their own ideologies, they’re usually removed from their populaces and united by a cosmopolitan, courtly culture. Failing to understand the worlds they rule is a recipe for a repeat of every colonialist fiasco in history. The game suggests that, rather than something as monumental as the change of fief on Arrakis, you can explore this theme in any story where the PCs’ House is given control of a region, an industry, or another planet, and has to physically explore the territory or overcome a rift in understanding between them and the common people. (In previous chapters, I complained that the model for the PCs’ House Minor assumed they would just be controlling a region ranging in size from a city district to a continent, but not a whole world. Now we know that the PCs can indeed be given fiefdom over a planet, but I wonder if that makes their Fief stat pointless.) Messianic Prophecy: The official religion of the Imperium is “Orange Catholicism,” but in practice, the ruling class are agnostic and adhere to the Great Conventions as a secular religion. But the lower castes follow any of a bewildering variety of religions, most of them esoteric hybrids of the ones we know. The books make reference to “Buddislam,” “Mahayana Christianity,” and most importantly, the “Zensunni” that is the basis of Fremen religion. Also, the Bene Gesserit have infiltrated many religions to “seed” them with myths of, among other things, prophesied messiahs and wise-women with mystical powers, in order to better manipulate them. The thing is, none of those religions get a long extended discussion of their theology in either the original books or in this game, and that’s okay. The game is mainly concerned with how religion and superstition impact society. The PCs might find that their subjects project religious roles onto them, positive or negative, and they will have to deal with the consequences of adopting that mantle or rejecting it, as Paul Atreides did. Suggested story concepts include a prophet inciting religious war, the arrest of a religious leader causing riots, and the discovery of ancient texts prophesying an apocalypse.  Your Majesty, it’s very cold in here. Your penis candle just isn’t warm enough to heat the entire throne room. The Supporting Cast Dune reiterates that the PCs are the stars of the story, and everyone else, from nameless slaves to the Emperor himself, are all the Supporting Cast. This is where the game’s core philosophy of gamemastering comes into play, and it’s a good one. To sum it up: Everything in your game, particularly scenes and NPCs, should have a specific purpose. If you know the purpose of everything, you can describe it with some flair, get to the point, and know when to wrap up and move on. First, decide what the character exists to do in the story, whether you intend for them to be a recurring antagonist or source of information or just a disposable messenger or thug. You don’t have to write a detailed biography, but you should give them a goal and a motive, however simple. It’s suggested that you give them a name along with a brief description that sums up their role and personality, like “talented and pompous Swordmaster” or “Loyal and subtle Mentat.” You can swap these traits around to get vastly different characters. It’s suggested that you only give NPCs the stats you actually expect them to use, devoting the time saved to detailing their appearance background in proportion to how much screen time you expect them to have. Regardless, we’re told it never hurts to at least name characters in order to humanize them, no matter how minor they are. There’s more impact in a NPC lieutenant reporting “Sir, the Harkonnens attacked. They killed Murad and Hamza,” instead of “We lost 2 soldiers to a Harkonnen raid.” Lastly, Dune wants you to tie the Supporting Cast into the story by emphasizing what it labels “the out-freyn (casteless) and unfamiliar” and “common origins.” While I’ve gone on at length about the Houses shape their fiefdoms in their own image while being part of a courtly, secular galactic society, there are some universalities among the common people, too. And it’s the little differences that often stand out, or turn out to be not so small after all. Wherever the PCs go, there is a universal language (Galach), the faufreluches caste system, the laws of the Great Convention, CHOAM’s economic bureaucracy, and representatives of the Guild, the Bene Gesserit, the Mentat and Suk schools, and so on. You can set the scene with differences in accent, fashion, and cuisine while also finding parallels between the worldviews of groups as different as the Fremen and the Sardaukar.  Disney lost millions on their “Magic Ziggurat” resort. This is a good opportunity to go on a rant about what I see as a vital key to Dune’s overall themes. I say this as a fan of the series, not as a critic of this game--I don’t think it’s something obvious the authors missed or failed to grasp, just my own analysis. To me, the throughline of Dune’s themes, and a useful lens through which to view its principal characters, is that culture is a survival mechanism. Our cultural differences are differences in how we adapt to our environment. Colonizing a foreign country is like introducing strange species to a different ecosystem--both the native and non-native species must adapt to survive the abrupt change in the environment. The frighteningly evolved, capable, and Machiavellian main characters in the Dune series experience love, lust, greed, pride, and religious ecstasy like other people, but they have an alienating degree of sober awareness about the purpose and impact of their own attitudes. This raises disturbing questions about the deliberateness of their actions--for example, elite classes throughout history have often asserted that they are superior to the commoners by dint of genetics and education, and carefully controlled who marries who. But talking about controlling the breeding of people to produce desired traits is something else. So is engineering a religion in order to produce desired social consequences decades or centuries down the line--can you sincerely believe in a religion while manipulating and exploiting it towards a practical end? And expanding on what I said above, Dune is very concerned with what happens when our ideology doesn’t serve us in an unfamiliar environment. The story of the first novel is a great example: The Bene Gesserit are obsessed with genetic purity, but they dismissed the Fremen as superstitious primitives. The Harkonnen are obsessed with profit and exploitation, but dismiss the Fremen as desert trash. The Emperor is obsessed with his military supremacy, but never suspected that the Fremen are better fighters than his elite commandos. The Guild is obsessed with spice, but cut secret deals with the Fremen for spice instead of investigating its source. This is an important point to understand if you’re going to try to play a game in the Dune setting: Even these ancient societies of superhuman geniuses make mistakes when their ideology blinds them to possibilities that don’t fit their worldview. Don’t fall into the trap of assuming the Imperium is too rigid and too powerful for the PCs to change it.  Nite Brite, Nite Brite, make a face to glow at night. Bilal kaifa. Creating a Story Although Dune is full of advice about crafting campaigns and individual scenes, it doesn’t prescribe exactly how many scenes should fit into a session or how many sessions should comprise a campaign. It prefers to discuss things in terms of “adventures” and “stories” and leave that up to you. So if the details going forward seem vague, that’s why. First, the game is concerned with Homeworld vs. Off-World adventures. Homeworld adventures, set on the PCs’ home planet in and around the fief of their House Minor, serve to ground them in the setting and introduce many central themes of the game. Off-world adventures are opportunities to change the scenery, present different themes, and perhaps allow the PCs to confront some of the major power brokers like the Guild or BG in ways that wouldn’t normally happen in a House Minor’s domain. But a whole series of off-world adventures leads to the PCs just feeling like adventurers or “space truckers” like they would in many other sci-fi games. PCs wandering from planet to planet on miscellaneous adventures also don’t participate in House Ventures (which are covered in the next chapter) or aren’t around to see their impact. Dune suggests that story creation should start with choosing one of the central themes discussed earlier, then creating a central conflict. If you’re at a loss for a plot framework, it suggests you borrow one from history, mythology, or Shakespeare. When advising us on creating scenes, Dune hammers on the principle that you should have a clear idea of the scene’s purpose. That guides you in setting the scene properly (describing environments and such) and knowing when to wrap up and move on to the next scene. Character interaction is good, but if the scene has served its purpose, wrap it up. We’re told that handling scenes this way will, over time, teach players that each scene is a set of opportunities. Dune instructs you to script the overall story according to the classic Three Act Model, including scenes that contain the setup, the turn, the midpoint, the second turn, a climax, and epilogue scenes. And while the advice for setting these up and executing them is good, this is the point where I find Dune’s GMing philosophy too scripted for my taste. Continuing from the previous chapter, the example story goes like this: The PCs are trying to find a Moritani assassin. An artist in the capital reveals that the assassin has retired to a quiet life as a craftsman in a forest village of woodcarvers. When they find him, they’re suddenly attacked by Sardaukar! After making their escape, they later learn that the assassin played an important role in the Moritani-Ginaz war that wiped out the latter house. The PCs now have a moral imperative to safely escort the assassin to a Landsraad council, where his testimony will reveal that the Emperor had a hand in the affair, which is why the Sardaukar are after them. But what if the assassin dies in the initial assault, and the PCs have to obtain the needed information some other way? What if they’d rather cut a deal with the Emperor to conceal the scandal? What if they fail to elude or fight off the Sardaukar? The model seems fairly linear, and doesn’t provide much wiggle room for the PCs to “fail forward” in way that’s interesting (and not totally obvious). Granted, this particular example assumes the PCs have been given a good reason to find the assassin in the first place, but it makes too many assumptions for my liking. I’m not the kind of GM who thinks that he can never fudge a die roll, or that PCs going monkey cheese crazy has to be accommodated, but I like to give them enough room to make big decisions that are logical to them, but not obvious to me, without being caught floundering. Next is advice on crafting the campaign, or chronicle, as a whole. Episodic chronicles are exactly that, and a series of story arcs done this way can be said to comprise a “book.” This kind of chronicle allows you to complete a story arc and then move onto a different theme, present a different antagonist or central conflict, while remaining part of the same overall story. From time to time, a game session that explores a tangent can set up future story arcs. The other model discussed is the “Epic Chronicle.” The main difference between the two is just one of attitude and vision: an episodic chronicle can chart the history of the PCs House Minor, perhaps as they take it from obscurity to greatness. Epic chronicles are more concerned with theme than with history, and every story arc needs to have an eye on that central theme. An episodic chronicle can be a picaresque, whereas an epic chronicle definitely cannot.  Mark Hamill was never the same after his drum majoring accident. Next time, on Dune: Rules for advancing your character...and your House!
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May 19, 2016 21:23
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It was written by the kind of 90s edgelord who wrote lousy knockoffs of White Wolf games, complete with fantasies about what a badass monster you'd be, how cool all the other edgy monsters will think you are, and how you're going to get revenge on Wayne in your trig class. Except this one's actually published by White Wolf's successor.
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May 24, 2016 14:07
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I always find it interesting that Rifts was an entry game for a lot of folks, since it A) explicitly says it isn't, and B) has one of the worst GM sections even for a Palladium book. I mean, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was the first game I bought, and I was amazed I ever made heads or tails out of that.  I never bought or played Rifts as a kid because they were kind enough to warn me not to play their game. These ads appeared in a ton of Marvel comics, though. I imagine it was a successful ad campaign with middle-to-high-school boys. MonsieurChoc posted:My feelings are that the slow return of old White Wolf started somewhere around Geist or Mummy, but that's all just my completely irrational feelings.
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May 24, 2016 17:42
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I'm glad that at the same time we're beholding the horror that is Beast, we get the God-Machine Chronicle. My favourite thing about the God-Machine is how material it is (it's not some spirit entity residing on an astral plane, it's a vast distributed computer that needs materials to maintain it) and how pervasive it is. Maybe the God-Machine owns the Dunkin' Donuts down the street. No occult hijinx involved, it was just a good business investment.
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May 24, 2016 19:26
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Alien Rope Burn posted:The ad of Palladium's I really want to find again is one put out as a reaction to D&D 3e where it proclaims Palladium is the "original d20 system". Not sure where it originally appeared, though.
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May 25, 2016 04:04
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gradenko_2000 posted:So the System Mastery RIFTS review informed me about the existence of the Palladium Fantasy RPG, and I've sort of fallen into a hole of reading through it out of sheer curiosity. It's more interesting as a case study in system design from the early 80s, because it has all of the vices common to new games at the time, to the point that it reads like a parody. A lot of games showing up at that time--particularly ones that would go on to become multi-genre universal systems, like Megaversal, BRP, and Rolemaster--were stuck in the mindset of needing to define themselves in terms of how they were different from D&D. And the idea was either "D&D, but I fixed it," meaning more detailed and "realistic," or "This ain't D&D!" meaning that is isn't set in the D&D milieu. Either way, the games have AD&D's fingerprints all over them. Lots of them have 3-18 ability scores, a combat system that is basically D&D with a bunch of fiddly extra rules, plus a skill system (often percentile-based). You also see sops to D&D cliches in the setting--Tekumel has dungeons and Glorantha has elves and dwarves but different, okay? Or still defining gameplay in terms of overland travel, encounters, and dungeon delves. Really, they have many of the faults Ron Edwards identified in fantasy heartbreakers. But as Ron himself said, in the late 70s D&D but fixed! was commercially viable.
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May 25, 2016 13:45
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Oh, you definitely can't. Just saying that the guys who wrote heartbreakers weren't committing any sins that can't be found in earlier, well-known, respected games that also started life as AD&D knockoffs. But the designers of BRP and Runequest have the excuse that there just weren't as many games in 1980; there were many things we can do with the medium that hadn't been thought of yet. I'd say that BRP and GURPS (which derived from The Fantasy Trip books) were ongoing successes, even if they never attained the breakout, smash-hit status that games like Shadowrun and Vampire achieved for a time. I'm disinclined to say anything nice about Dancey, but at the time D&D 3 was released, I can see where he was coming from with the "one system to rule them all" thing. In the late 90s/early 00s it was trendy for games to have a unique system for the sake of having a unique system. (I ranted about this a couple weeks ago.) White Wolf, Alderac, Eden, Dream Pod 9, and Last Unicorn all had house systems wherein character traits are rated 1-5 or 1-6, but each system used a different resolution mechanic. And it seems the designers weren't even choosing their specific resolution mechanic because they wanted a particular results curve, or difficulty scale, or achieving a particular kind of balance between characters with different abilities, or any other coherent design goal. It was just for the sake of having a unique system. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 15:16 on May 25, 2016 |
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May 25, 2016 15:03
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Cythereal posted:Something about the God Machine as an antagonist bothers me some: how would you even know it's some alien God Machine unless you're a Demon, and why would you even want to fight it? There's a million and one shadowy forces doing seemingly inexplicable things for their own mysterious purposes, both in real life and in the World of Darkness, and the God Machine is at least not outright malevolent which puts it a cut above many. Alien Rope Burn posted:One of the few issues I had with God-Machine was some of their examples just seemed random rather than creepy, like the cave full of nails. I mean, that's odd, sure, but it just feels to me like the authors ended up coming up with stuff that's non-sequiturs than something I would actually find unnerving. The only major issue for me is that what the God-Machine does is often presented as so random and arbitrary it just feels like a big ball of random plot justification than a fully-formed concept. Maybe the adventures help out with that - I admit I never read them, mainly just the setting material - but there's a certain level of "you can't understand it!" that keeps me from a GM from understanding fully what I'm supposed to do with it. That's not to say I don't like some of the weird poo poo, like the ATM that wants people's hair. I can think of several good reasons the God-Machine would want to collect such things surreptitiously (like Big Mad Drongo pointed out). And the stuff that is too random can be tweaked. A cave filled with heaps of 10-penny nails that magically never rust isn't interesting to me. But a cave converted into a secret warehouse, with tarps on the floors and plastic sheeting stretched overhead, stacked with cases of washers and ball bearings (probably because there's Infrastructure nearby) actually points to something the PCs can investigate. But stuff like "The God-Machine controls a shoe store, and every third Tuesday of the month, a guy comes in and buys every size 8 shoe" not so much. Another thing I really like about it is that it's thoroughly insinuated itself into mortal infrastructure. It fosters paranoia. Like, reusing my previous example, say the God-Machine owns the Baskin-Robbins down the street. Maybe it was just a good investment. Maybe it projected that the slight congestion in foot traffic this would cause would be beneficial to its plans. Maybe it's something less arcane, like the store is a good observation post or meeting place for its local agents. But if your PCs figure out the store is a God-Machine asset and stage a frontal assault, they'll probably just kill a hapless Baskin-Robbins employee.
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May 25, 2016 15:40
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Why does the World of Darkness have vampires in it? Mobsters and rapists are already things that exist.
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May 25, 2016 15:50
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Night10194 posted:Or take this Deviant game they're pitching, where you're escaped experiments on the lam from the people who made you. The OP guys have said the main enemy will be normal humans who are organized conspiracies or powerful government agencies. That sounds kinda interesting; how is that concept benefited by having cold war devilmen and wizards hanging about? Who are also often powerful enough to override that A plot. If the problem with the God-Machine is that it seems too big and powerful to oppose, well, none of the WoD games really posit a campaign where you take on the big antagonists and completely vanquish them. Like, I don't think the prototypical Mage campaign assumes you'll kill all the Exarchs, crush the Seers and close the Abyss. If anything, the GM presents the PCs with clear measurable ways to strike a blow against it: foil its plans and physically destroy pieces of its infrastructure. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 16:06 on May 25, 2016 |
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May 25, 2016 15:59
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Count Chocula posted:Comics blogs are starting to reevaluate the 90s and it's terrible reputation. Brave New World is a reminder of why it got that reputation. It's a grimdark point-missing of Moore and Miller and other British Invasion guys like Howard Chaykin, topped off with horrible art. It's like Alan Moore's quote about all the comics based on his bad mood. Young Freud posted:I had thought that same thing but, as a satire, it was something that was done better and way more obvious in Ray Winninger's Underground. I think it was something I touched on in my review of the game, the developers got the appeal of big iron but also viewed it as an almost self-destructive quality that was subject to manipulation by the elite: the gun book that's not really a gun book "Fully Strapped Always Packed" has a meeting transcript of some gun manufacturer execs and an advertising executive from "Demo Fear", specialists in capitalizing on fear-based marketing, discussing marketing guns to scared housewives and kids, up to including .22 ammo in Happy Meals from the cannibal fast food franchise Tastee Ghoul, which produces this handy infographic to describe where everyone fits in the Circle of Life...
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May 28, 2016 17:50
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Luminous Obscurity posted:Demons are revolutionaries. Beasts are institutionalized powers who co-opt revolutionary and progressive language to strengthen their brands. TBH them hating each other kinda works. NutritiousSnack posted:Beast literally is the dude shouting at Hitler while he goes "wow, I just want to murder all the Jews. Looks like you got to learn buddy"
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May 29, 2016 01:11
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Kurieg posted:Hengeyokai has some literal hadoukens in it, but Metis can learn "Create Element" AKA "I summon 8 cubic feet of fire into their engine compartment, the car chase is over." Just Dan Again posted:Apocalypse also had Kailindo, a werewolf-specific martial art that incorporated partial transformation into its techniques.  Gonna review this someday.
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May 29, 2016 16:02
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Well Savage Worlds: Rifts is a thing, and in two weeks I'll get my PDF of it.
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May 30, 2016 01:10
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Poser is only good for creepy deviantart fetish pics of Psi-Stalkers and, actually, not even that. World, please stop using Poser.
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May 30, 2016 23:24
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In-universe slang is difficult to get right (or maybe it's just easy to get wrong). But when it's good, it definitely adds to a game. The slang in Unknown Armies, such as it is, is pretty good because it's believable that this "Occult Underground" made up of drifters, dropouts, no-hopers, and nutjobs. On the other hand, it's a big red flag when one of these Dark Modern Urban Fantasy expects me to believe that vampire gangbangers talk at each other in pseudo-Latin or words like, Idunno, "Empyrean" or "Reverie."
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May 31, 2016 20:19
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I remember that the Forsaken 1e game I played had a lot of Dalu wielding magic weapons, as we felt that the other Merits available to us mostly weren't as good.
Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 01:04 on Jun 1, 2016 |
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Jun 1, 2016 00:15
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If I remember right, he's specifically taken aim at the "Let's give someone superpowers by torturing them and making them hate us!" cliche. Kinda related, since I've been ragging on Brave New World and Underground: Garth Ennis' The Boys is, to a great extent, all about the idea of superheroes as a defense strategy. To make a long story short, superheroes are a poo poo idea for national defense for a number of obvious reasons, but that doesn't mean that a multi-billion dollar corporation won't lobby (and downright infiltrate) the gently caress out of the federal government to try to make it happen. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 13:22 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 13:08
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I've been guilty of writing some really long rear end entries, so with a few exceptions where I really want to critique something at length, I sometimes look at the wordcount of a chapter and make sure that my review is a small fraction of that. Of course, I mostly review old bad games. Truth is, if someone wants to know absolutely everything about it, they'll pirate a copy. SirPhoebos posted:So like the F-35, then? The series features a lot of Ellis' childish and gross sense of humour at work, I admit. But there are benefits to this, like "crossover events" (invaders from Mars and whatnot) being an excuse for the superhero community to blow off steam at a massive week-long sex party every year. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 13:48 on Jun 3, 2016 |
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Jun 3, 2016 13:27
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Kurieg posted:I don't like doing mechanics dumps in favor of going into the more meaningful implications of what they mean. Like for Beast I'm definitely going to go into detail on their feeding rules because that's a pretty damned important thing but I'm not going to faithfully reproduce the rules for all the nightmares and atavisms unless the implications of those rules are bullshit like they are with "You Deserve This". Evil Mastermind posted:Speaking as someone who does go into mechanical detail for the Torg stuff; do people not like that? I try not to get into the insane detail the actual books get into on the fluff, but I try to mitigate the crunch with some discussion. Like, Legacy is an unremarkable, slapdash little game, in a vacuum. The review would have been significantly shorter had I just summarized it, but it wouldn't be worth doing at all just to summarize it. It was one of the earliest and most egregious of the "Me, too!" games that came out after Vampire became a smash hit.
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Jun 3, 2016 15:17
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I read a lot of reviews without providing feedback, and I think a lot of other people do, too. Sometimes people don't have time to follow and comment on everything as it's posted, especially when there's multiple big reviews being posted simultaneously.
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Jun 3, 2016 17:37
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I've also been guilty of letting reviews slack because I wasn't getting as much feedback as I wanted. But the main reason is that I have a bad habit of reading 6 books at once and chewing through each of them a bit at a time.quote:I've had reviews like Low Life or certain Rifts books that feel like I struggled to have them be noticed. You can always just ask "do people want to see more of X?" and see what you get out of it, though. Silence always feels very negative but it often isn't intentional; I've had people comment on how much they enjoy certain reviews who never post in this thread at all, so I'd just ask and see what kind of response you get.
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Jun 3, 2016 20:25
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The servitors are definitely more interesting than the disciplines.
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Jun 4, 2016 00:18
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That's a significant factor in Greg Stolze's GODLIKE. Super powers only manifest in life and death situations, so the most beleaguered and oppressed populations wind up with a surprising number of Talents. The setting has a default timeline going through the end of the war, implying that this will be a big problem for the Great Powers in the post war era.
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Jun 4, 2016 00:28
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Alien Rope Burn posted:I think Beast is a more important review than people give it credit for. It's probably getting more attention than it deserves overall (in this and other threads), of course. I'd rather see bad RPGs like it just die a quiet death, but with it hanging onto the top RPG sales charts right now, raising awareness is pretty important. And there's going to be the eternal train of people asking "so what's so bad about Beast?" in the World of Darkness thread and elsewhere, and having something to just point people to instead of having to explain it endlessly should help out future generations.
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Jun 4, 2016 07:40
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Nancy_Noxious posted:See, even if later stuff is better, I still cannot stomach it. In the end Jason Buhlman is still an opportunist that copy-pasted a piece of poo poo that GREATLY contributed to the toxic evironment that led to Next. Does anyone need to be reminded how Paizo CULTIVATED edition war rethoric in order to promote their low-effort carbon copy? Alien Rope Burn posted:I don't get why people hate on 13th Age, so much, probably because it got propped up as a savior initially. And then when it turned it had actual flaws, people lost their poo poo because they felt betrayed, somehow. Like I said, I don't get it. Kurieg posted:More to the point, there are currently three 5 star reviews, one of which was written before the book came out giving it a glowing review, one of which simply copies, word for word, the press release blurb. And one last one that describes it as a "Build a bear workshop for monsters" which leads me to believe that the person has not read the book at all. Night10194 posted:There's nothing wrong with Pathfinder's players. My scorn is entirely reserved for the people who keep writing rules for that hot mess and it's tempered some by the fact that it's really hard to make any kind of living in the RPG industry so most of them are probably lucky to have a job at all. Evil Mastermind posted:One thing I see a lot is people saying stuff like "don't listen to reviews" or "just write the game you want to write", and it makes me so frustrated. It's just saying "quality doesn't matter, just put out poo poo and be proud of it."
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Jun 4, 2016 19:10
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I'm not convinced that "Dumb babby class for Timmy!" is anything any sentient being in the history of the universe has ever actually wanted or needed.
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Jun 4, 2016 20:49
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Maxwell Lord posted:To be fair, it's not like best-selling authors or top filmmakers think in terms of "what do the critics think I should do?" But to be a good artist you have to have a level of self scrutiny and perfectionism that means you're not easily satisfied with your own stuff, so you refine and rework it just to meet your own standards before anyone else even gets a look at it. Alien Rope Burn posted:The big difference is that the TRPG industry is so small and incestuous that unlike novels or movies, you're more likely than not to run into a given creator at any given point if you regularly attend conventions. Monathin posted:Sometimes you want to run a game for friends who don't/rarely tabletop, and having more simple options is better for getting people -into- the game. Count Chocula posted:Overwatch has Soldier 76, who is a Call of Duty soldier in a game with a space monkey, a healer DJ, and a robot ninja. He's explicitly designed to teach new players the game, and I used him that way yesterday. Dark Souls has the pyromancer. Tons of games have starter characters or classes. Tons of games have starter warrior classes or whatever. chaos rhames posted:Wizards aren't hard anyway. You pick a thing from a list and do what it says. There's just some simple book-keeping. Ultiville posted:They're not hard for people who are going to read a thread like this. But they heavily reward investment. If you aren't the kind of person who likes reading RPG books for fun, thinking about weird uses of spells, or at least researching them on the Internet, you lose a ton of the power of the class. People who just show up to play every day and don't think about the game much between sessions are going to take a long time to get the most out of a class like that. Doresh posted:And it's not like "D&D for dumb babies" classes like the Fighter don't ideally have you map out your Feat investment from start to finish in advance to be anything but a sub-optimal waste of space. At least the Wizard and Cleric let you "respec" your spells each day.
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Jun 5, 2016 16:02
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Nancy_Noxious posted:This thread is really great! Let us exacerbate 13th Age's flaws and stay mellow about Pathfinder's because
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Jun 5, 2016 19:08
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