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Count Chocula posted:Does any book have stats for the Jews in Space from the later books? quote:Can this game handle long time scales? Like charting the rise and fall of Houses? wiegieman posted:Requiem feels like it can't decide whether it wants to be a game about vampire politics or strix paranoia or something else entirely.
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Dec 29, 2016 04:35
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I think the first update in this thread was for the Vampire chapter of Everlasting: Book of the Unliving, so if there's a new thread you better class it up with better vampires, Mors. By the by, even the original Vampire (or at least the second edition) had info about groups that were never explained and left up to the Storyteller. I don't think it devoted as much pagecount to the Sabbat and the Black Hand that Requiem 2e does to the Strix.
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Dec 31, 2016 19:19
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Barudak posted:If I had to hazard a guess sleeping to level feels natural in so far as sleeping is the moment in most of these games where your energy is restored so it makes sense. It also, in a more classical game where you're constantly earning fractional bits of a level, a more elegant way to ensure players only need to dick around with their character sheet and stats during downtime rather than in the middle of a dungeon or a gods forbid a fight.
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Jan 2, 2017 19:41
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Babylon 5 seems to be a love-it-or-hate-it show, even on this very subforum. I remember hppayfle bitching me about about declaring the show stupid and dropping it after only seeing one of the TV movies. The thing about the game is that you pretty much have to talk about the show and make fun of it. The game itself is a pretty unremarkable, by-the-numbers deal, much like the Firefly game and plenty of other adapted games. The Farscape game was D20, and while 99% of D20 is crap, you can always remark on how D20 adaptations/conversions cram things into the D20 mold.
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Jan 3, 2017 17:11
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LongDarkNight posted:I've watched B5 a bunch of times but for the life of me can't remember this episode so I'm going to assume you mean the guest appearance by Penn & Teller.
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Jan 3, 2017 18:10
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Cythereal posted:Or like "Can we do Rogue One, only with no cameos from Vader/Leia?" thelazyblank posted:Firefly or Serenity? Not that the former was some amazing example design, but I don't know if I'd call it by the numbers. It was one of the better books at explaining how Cortex Plus should work at least. Serenity was a tirefire, and was downgraded to technically playable once they released the second book.
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Jan 3, 2017 19:25
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Whenever "terraforming" is brought up in sci-fi, particularly in games, I begin to wonder how technology is used to move a planet closer to its sun, or significantly change its mass, or...well, I hope you brought a few million bags of topsoil.
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Jan 3, 2017 21:06
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Night10194 posted:I played Starfleet Command 2 when I was younger (and really enjoyed it) but was baffled to discover Star Fleet Battles was this entire insane alternate setting where everyone in the galaxy is super gung ho for war. The guys in charge of the game are ex-military sci-fi geeks who've been doing this since 1979, and right-wing Republicans to boot. And, of course, it's a wargame. So this is a bizarro version of Star Trek that reflects the dry, cynical, pessimistic attitude of 70s military sci-fi rather than what most people would consider to be in the spirit of the Trek franchise.
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Jan 3, 2017 22:07
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I like the idea that there's a reason so many new aliens Starfleet encounters have a really douchey attitude: The Federation does stuff like make a terraforming gadget that, whoops, doubles as a planet cracker!Bieeardo posted:The Bajorans were as flat as any other Trek nasal appliance of the week, and they traded beating the poo poo out of Worf for simply making GBS threads all over O'Brien.
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Jan 3, 2017 23:23
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As a general rule, anything that pisses off Star Wars fans by not treating the half-robot psychic laser sword master seeeriously enough is Cool and Good.quote:The End of a Dream(150 to 250)
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Jan 4, 2017 03:18
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NutritiousSnack posted:buck rogers 2019 is the future my friend Count Chocula posted:I actually watched the latest Underworld movie this weekend, and I cursed White Wolf and the WoD for 'inspiring' the endless scenes of vampires in bad corsets sniping at each other and politicking over an endless series of Convenents and meaningless titles. I don't think 'vampire politics' was a thing before WoD, was it? Old vampires were metaphors for decadent aristocrats, not the thing itself. Doresh posted:Man, what's the closest thing to Matrix in the WoD? I guess Mage or Demon? Mors Rattus posted:The Mekhet are amazing, but I'll admit the core doesn't do a great job of presenting them, perhaps because it just recommends you turn to the book that does the single best job possible presenting them - Clanbook: Mekhet from Requiem 1e, which is largely written in character. It is framed as a collection of information on the history and culture of the Mekhet clan, commissioned by some unknown person and compiled by a young Mekhet named Frances Black. Pareidolia features prominently in the Mekhet she interviews...except that occasionally it isn't wrong. Frances herself is a postmortem Embrace, which is more common among Mekhet than other clans, and is also a subtype of Mekhet known as the Hollow Mekhet. The tragedy of Vincent Moon's shenanigans, and why Frances throws in with him, is that they simply have nothing better to do.
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Jan 4, 2017 05:49
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Bieeardo posted:Is that what happened to her? drat, that's pretty awesome. It's nice to know she did better than Denise Crosby's movie career. 
Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 14:53
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Evil Mastermind posted:We're all familiar with rules-as-physics, but Torg may be the only game with magic-as-physics. Wapole Languray posted:That's not surprising. Wick has never really been bad about rules or being a grog, his issues are more he's kind of an egotistical dick. He makes really solid games that are ruined because he writes like an rear end in a top hat. quote:Also it's hilarious seeing this thread's reaction to Kevin Crawford. Stars Without Numbers and Other Dust are rock solid, then when he wanted to make a non-western fantasy game he converted them into Spears of the Dawn, Silent Legions is basically OSR Delta Green, Scarlet Heroes is D&D but designed around super-fast solo gameplay with 2 people or a GM Oracle if you want. Then he made Godbound extrapolated from Scarlet Heroes rules. He's not some nobody, he's got a solid track record of really good games with lots of support (Stars Without Numbers has TONS of supplements) and a rock solid release and work ethic. The OSR label doesn't apply to mechanics so much as it's a compatibility layer (Just take any D&D dungeon and find-replace SWORD with LASER) and is familiar to most people who play RPG's. Asimo posted:This is your regular reminder that Mike Pondsmith is a goddamn game design genius and never gets any recognition for it. Alien Rope Burn posted:the TT mechanics Edit: VVV Oh, from the surrounding posts it sounded like people were joking about taking badly-implemented mechanics in the Cyberpunk PC game and adding them back to the tabletop game. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:19 on Jan 4, 2017 |
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Jan 4, 2017 16:20
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chiasaur11 posted:To sum up, New Hunter is badass (mostly) regular humans who can, with a lot of luck and solid planning, loving wreck almost anyone's poo poo. Meanwhile, Old Hunter was empowered former humans (they can't awaken, can't be turned, their souls work different...) who mostly can't do crap. RocknRollaAyatollah posted:I don't know what went on during the development cycle of Hunter the Reckoning but I would imagine there was a point where any attempts to make the Hunters actual threats to supernaturals was shot down. They seem pretty threatening with some of their abilities but even at their very rare rank 5 powers they're not that threatening, especially to the truly evil and threatening groups. Their rank 5 powers relative to other supernaturals are about two level behind in terms of what they can do as well. They can gang up on a lone threat and come out on top but the second they go against anything with cohesion or synergy, they're beyond hosed. Count Chocula posted:Besides, look at who the monsters are metaphors for. With the exception of vampires, who usually stand in for the aristocracy/1%, there's usually a connection to marginalized groups. oHunter includes the Hunters in on that, whether as militia or just general outsiders. Half of nHunter does too, but the SWAT Team stuff...eugh. Nuns with Guns posted:My favorite hunter group are the sorority girls who banded together to stop vampires from feeding on their college campuses. Count Chocula posted:With Internet banking and other services, I don't see the daylight thing as a huge problem, assuming you live in a city with a good nightlife and no stupid 1:30am lockout laws (which I suspect were put in place to deter vampires, even though they could just feed on the walking corpses in the pokie rooms). There's tons of hospitality and other late night jobs, too. That was always part of the attraction of vampires- they got to live the 20something party life for ETERNITY! There are lots of services that still require you to go someplace during daylight office hours. Need a new social security card? A loan? A driver's license? God forbid you have any legal trouble whatsoever, because court dates are during the day. Now if you're an elder or very well-connected vampire, it's alright. There are fake IDs, entire fake identities. You can have your lawyer represent you; hell, one of your lawyers can just be you for legal purposes. But that requires a base of money and influence that takes a long time to acquire. It's got to be a very tight ship; you don't want to lose all your temporal assets because another vampire filed a simple civil suit over some zoning bullshit or something. (In strict powergaming terms, this should be the appeal of the Invictus and Carthians over the covenants that give you magic poo poo.) And like any crime boss, you now have to deal with being a walking institution, keeping watch over all these assets that aren't listed in your name. Any edition of Vampire, played with obsessive realism, would cast you in the role of Wallace and Bodie, trying to become Avon Barksdale, who is trying to become Clay Davis and join that Illuminati 1%. But Avon Barksdale has had his whole life to be Avon Barksdale; you're probably some clueless middle-class guy who thrust into this life when you went home with that weird pale girl. So you're Wallace, with all the implied not-quite-childhood.
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Jan 4, 2017 20:22
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Crasical posted:Protean's first dot, incidentally, initially underwhelmed me, but not necessarily needing a Haven to rest in during the day actually has pretty solid repercussions for vampire activities. Go throw yourself in a river and burrow into the mud at the bottom, you're safe from the sun and your vampiric enemies are going to have a really hard time sending people who need to breathe after you, if they even know where you are. Vigor still seems underwhelming to me. Does the burst of Strength allow you to add your Vigor to a combat roll twice? Kellsterik posted:I really like that the Lancea just found Theban Sorcery and make a lot of unsourced claims about how it comes from the Christian God. This obscure Roman covenant of weird self-flagellating religious vampires has, by complete chance, achieved immense power and influence over the ages thanks to this magical secret they stumbled upon. Hostile V posted:Other vampires hate them!!! Click here for more!!!
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Jan 4, 2017 21:02
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I've only mentioned Polaris so far to pick on it, but actually it seems pretty cool in a lot of ways, and more focused on playability and player buy-in than Blue Planet.Maxwell Lord posted:It'd be interesting if a Vampire game adopted the old, pre-Nosferatu trope of Vampires not being destroyed by sunlight but just being completely powerless in it. Speaking of which, I may review Damnation City if Mors doesn't want to do it. It's one of the best supplements for any game, ever.
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Jan 5, 2017 16:16
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Cool, but not until I review the long-abandoned Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand!  
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Jan 5, 2017 16:40
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SirPhoebos posted:I listened to RPPR After Hours episode on Dirty Secrets, and didn't quite get why it was so bad in comparison to what the rest of WoD was like. In Dirty Secrets..., we're introduced to the Black Hand, but told that there's actually a False Black Hand and a True Black Hand. And even the True Black Hand has factions, with secret histories connected to mages and wraiths and werewolves, and on and on. This is an example of adding complexity without really introducing new meaning. Tons of "lore" that rewards buying supplements and obsessively memorizing information, but doesn't reward analysis. I find the metaplot, and the attendant action-movie excesses, to be especially grating when it comes to Vampire because it puts the core conceit of the game (drinking blood) into the background. Like, some late-era Vampire sourcebook would go on and on about some Tzimisce conducting horrible Grand Guignol experiments in a secret laboratory, or how this Clan has a squad of super-commandos, and I'm like, okay, but where do you get your supply of human blood night after night? (Requiem, by design, has a real hard-on for never letting you get away from that central concern. Like okay, you're an Ordo Dracul wizard, you want to perform weird experiments to transcend your state of being and blah blah blah. But first thing's first, you have to establish a Kindred Mafia so that you can get your nightly blood supply without too much fuss. You have to deal with that before you can accomplish anything else.) Anyway, back to the classic WoD. What this points to, over time, is moving from dealing with conspiracies as subject matter to actual conspiracism—there’s always another layer to the onion, another shadowy level of control, and everything is connected, etc. I don’t believe that this happened because White Wolf was actually helmed by kooky conspiracy theorists. More likely it was just the emergent result of managing a large line of books with a lot of writers. All of them want to leave their mark on the franchise, and some will inevitably fail to understand the overarching themes. (In which case, Dirty Secrets... may be the exception that proves the rule: I’ve read that it was written by a freelancer on his way out, who would go on to author The Everlasting series. Yep. Unless I'm mistaking him for a different Steven C. Brown.) In this light, it’s not surprising that Vampire (and a lot of people’s Vampire games, I’d wager) practically forgot about its characters needing to drink blood—let alone what blood-drinking means on a thematic level. In keeping with the overall attitude of not trusting the reality of the world around you, they imitated the attitude of Blade and The Matrix where normal people are nonentities and just scenery. (Notice how Blade operates in secret, but he walks around dressed like that? And fights cops in broad daylight with no fear of repercussions?) Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:06 on Jan 5, 2017 |
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Jan 5, 2017 20:02
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Jack Carter
Ohhhh"
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Bieeardo posted:I don't know about other vampire authors from that era, but Anne Rice's novels were guilty of this kind of thing from front to back. They start out exsanguinating people in instants on park benches, and in a later novel Lestat owns the World's Most Awesome Shopping Mall, which is loaded with secret passages from which he can pounce, eat, and hide the corpses of people who will never be missed. Granted that they're written from the POV of absurdly unreliable narrators, but I'd lay odds a lot of players and writers were still influenced by them. wiegieman posted:Blade getting arrested (when it's not a vampire conspiracy) is really boring. That's why he doesn't get arrested. Zereth posted:It also requires you to, as part of the spell, go through the actual process of shearing a sheep for the magic to work.
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Jan 5, 2017 21:07
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JackMann posted:Yeah, but Blade literally is a superhero with fangs. It makes sense for the genre. Evil Mastermind posted:Yes, every person in Aysle has an inborn talent in one casting skill and one knowledge, but the odds that someone will have those two skills and need to shear sheep on a regular basis are pretty drat slim. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 21:19 on Jan 5, 2017 |
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Jan 5, 2017 21:16
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Liquid Communism posted:Isn't that a big part of Lestat, though? I mean, the guy intentionally made himself into a Rock God with the plan of outing all the vampires because he was tired of hiding.
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Jan 6, 2017 06:27
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 Book 3, Chapter 13: The Spacing Guild This chapter takes a deeper look at the Spacing Guild, the organization that controls all interstellar travel in the Dune universe. This may seem odd, since there are no Guild PCs, and the Guild’s workings are opaque even in the original novels. But the chapter tells the Narrator and the players what they need to know about space travel, and the game expands on the Guild in ways that help rationalize some significant features of the setting. The Founding of the Guild Faster-than-light travel in the Imperium uses the Holtzman Effect to “fold space,” traveling through higher dimensions so that a ship seems to disappear in one place and reappear in another, as if someone had folded a map to make two points adjacent. (Yes, just like that scene in Event Horizon). The mathematics involved in safe foldspace travel are incredibly complex, achievable only by an intelligent supercomputer. Like the other “Great Schools,” the Guild was founded in the wake of the Butlerian Jihad. Without AIs, the civilization of the Known Universe would fragment. The Guild was a cabal of scientists and spacefarers determined--like the Bene Gesserit and the Mentat schools--that the only solution to their problem was to train the human mind to superhuman levels. They created training programs centered on mathematics, particularly logic and chaos theory. After decades of experiments (including some lethal disasters) they hadn’t gotten any further than test flights in which a navigator moved a shuttle in and out of “foldspace.” This all changed when the Zensunni migrations brought news of melange, the “awareness spectrum” drug named for the diversity of its chemical properties. After a few more decades of dangerous experimentation, the Guild discovered that massive doses of melange allowed a pilot to see forward in time, envisioning safe paths through higher dimensions without the aid of supercomputers. Veteran spacefarers flocked to the Guild’s banner, and after the better part of another century, they had trained the first generation of Guild Navigators. When they announced their findings to the Known Universe, they were effectively announcing their monopoly on interstellar travel. The Guild’s monopoly is twofold: Only they have the Holtzman drives that can fold space, and only they can train Navigators to pilot those ships. The Guild’s monopoly on interstellar shipping extends to a monopoly on banking. The Emperor, the Landsraad, and the Guild are the tripod of political and economic power in the Known Universe. The Guild controls entire planets, “nexus worlds,” devoted completely to shipyards, factories, fuel stations, and banking facilities. The Guild’s importance is such that the Imperial calendar reset to measure years as BG and AG (Before Guild and After Guild).  In the grim darkness of the far future, there is only En Esch Headtube Dracula. Navigators and Heighliners Like Mentats, future Navigators undergo a lifetime of rigorous mental training. But Navigators go a step further: throughout their training they consume massive doses of spice, multiplying their lifespan and mutating them into amphibious creatures who live cloistered in large metaglass tanks. “Addiction” is too mild a term; they literally swim and breathe in clouds of spice gas. In the Known Universe there are ultimately two kinds of ships: Guild Heighliners, and everything else. Only the Guild’s vast Heighliners are outfitted with space-bending Holtzman drives, and they are kilometers-wide ships that can hold hundreds of House frigates and millions of tons of cargo. Heighliners can’t land on a planet, so all cargo and personnel have to be ferried up to the edge of a planet’s gravity well in frigates and shuttles, which are mostly owned by the Houses. A single Heighliner could easily transport all the assets of several Great Houses at once.  Guild Policy The Guild may be a cult of transhuman math nerds, sure, but first and foremost it’s a business. The Guild and the Houses need each other; without clients, they’d go broke like any other business. The Guild’s interest is in keeping the wheels of commerce turning. The Guild’s universal Shipping Contract is built into the Great Convention, and the Guild maintains a strict neutrality. They deal with any House or corporation that can afford it, charging everyone the same rates. Law enforcement isn’t the Guild’s responsibility, so in most cases they don’t care who or what you ship. (If your drugs get seized or your assassins get arrested as soon as they disembark, it’s likewise not their problem.) That said, the Guild maintains extremely strict security--most of the time spent in space travel is actually spent on safety and security procedures. If you should, say, try to conceal hazardous cargo to avoid paying hazard rates, the Guild will punish you with confiscation, fines, price hikes, and potentially, the revocation of shipping privileges. Losing Guild shipping privileges can destroy a House, assuring that they will never again rise above the level of a petty House Minor. The most notable restriction is on the transport of military personnel and materiel. War is bad for business, and the Guild discourages it with insanely high shipping rates for any kind of military transport. This is the primary reason that war in the Imperium is fought by commando squads and not mechanized divisions, even moreso than personal shield technology. (The Guild could easily tip the scale of a war by offering discounted rates to an allied House. But for all their faults, the Guild doesn’t lean toward risky, short-term profit thinking.) Guild security also requires all passengers to remain in their vessels during transport, with shields down. Supposedly this is because shifting mass and active shields disrupt the Navigator’s ability to plot a course through foldspace, but it’s really to prevent any violence onboard and to prevent anyone from infiltrating the inner workings of a Heighliner. I’m sure someone is going to point out that it should be impossible for such a large and widespread organization to remain impenetrable and prevent all but the most trivial corruption, but again: absolute monopoly on the technology that sustains the Imperium.  Traveling with the Guild Traveling across the Known Universe through foldspace only takes a few hours, but your actual journey could easily take the better part of two weeks. Most of the time is spent embarking, disembarking, and waiting in line. First, it’s the House’s responsibility to prepare their cargo. Packing a cargo frigate takes 6-18 hours. Then, of course, the Heighliner is boarding perhaps hundreds of ships every time it visits your planet, so all of these ships have to fly up to the Heighliner and wait in line to be conducted into the holds, a process that can take up to 20 hours. (If you’re just traveling, you show up with your luggage and travel on Guild shuttles like any commercial flight, but there’s still plenty of waiting around.) The whole process repeats in reverse whenever the Heighliner makes a stop at another planet, with numerous security checks by the Guild’s Spacing Authority along the way. Once you’re aboard, your travel time depends on how many more stops the Heighliner is making on its way to your destination, which depends on where your takeoff and destination planets lie on the shipping routes. Travel between two high-traffic worlds can take as little as a couple days, whereas traveling from one minor world to another can take up to 14 days. It’s not as bad as ocean voyages in the Age of Sail, but enough time to get cabin fever. (On a backwater planet, you might even have to wait for weeks until there’s enough shipping traffic to justify a Heighliner stopping by.) This info is mainly to give you an idea of how long space travel takes, and what kind of scenes the Narrator can set on a Heighliner. Travel from planet to planet can and will be totally glossed over in most adventures, but scenes aboard the Heighliner can focus on smuggling, dealing with stowaways, or forbidden cargo that the Entourage doesn’t even know about. Dealing with a traitor in their own House while trying to smooth things over with the Guild can make for an adventure in itself.  One of these days, one of these days, gotta get a word through one of these days Other Spaceships The Houses themselves actually control most spaceships, sublight vessels capable of traveling around their own solar system. All Great Houses have cargo and transport ships, and possibly heavy cruisers and space stations for planetary defense. Sublight ships are classed as lighters (shuttles), frigates, cruisers, and orbital stations. Cruisers and stations are military vessels too large to make planetfall. There are descriptions of several different kinds of vessels, but thankfully, no rules for space combat or prices for these ships. Frankly, spaceship combat is too far beyond the scope of the game’s focus, and too far out from what is actually depicted in most of the novels, to be worth giving a full treatment. Notably, most kinds of heavy cruisers (Monitors and Crushers) are actually made of of several armed frigates that lock together. “Crushers” lock together in order to literally drop on planetary defenses and crush them. The thing is, specific descriptions of battleships just brings us back to the muddy question of how and when the Houses actually deploy these ships against each other, and what that means for the supposed supremacy of groups like the Sardaukar, who are the most feared army in the galaxy because they’re extremely well-trained foot soldiers.  The aptly named House Not Appearing in This Book. Nonetheless, your Entourage might make a journey on a House-owned spaceship, and there are suggestions for standard space-trucker RPG obstacles like asteroid fields, mechanical problems, and meddling patrols by the Spacing Authority. There’s also a chart that allows you to calculate the cost of booking passage with the Guild, and I’m not sure why. Since you’re playing the elite Entourage of a vastly wealthy House, all references to exact costs seem like a pointless sop to thinking more appropriate to games with a different mindset, like D&D or Shadowrun.  And you don’t even get a little bag of pretzels. Next time on Dune: Imperial Planetology, and an overview of the Great House homeworlds.
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Jan 6, 2017 18:23
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Crushers are listed in the glossary in the back of the original Dune, and get a single off-hand mention in the narrative. But crushers and their Constructicon nature never play a role in the story at all. (Maybe in some prequel book I haven't read, Idunno.)
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Jan 6, 2017 20:07
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Desiden posted:I think this was another area where the writers never fully agreed on: what "a gothic-punk World of Darkness" actually meant. In some books, it was at most stylistic: it rained more, there was more statuary and decrepit buildings, but even if behind the scenes there was supernatural control, police were about as effective as they area in the real world, government about as functional, and "off screen" most of the world lived about the same as they do here and now. In other books, things deviated a lot more, supernatural badness and beyond the pale atrocity was lurking everywhere, and the "real world" was just a thin veneer that people regularly fell out of without a trace. The former tended to stress the need to really consider how you lived your life, as even minor feeding could lead to major complications. The latter tended to assume that a low level of supernatural activity was just background noise, and that you only had to watch out for really blatant actions in the public view.  Well, since you brought it up... It's very hard to get a sense of the overall worldview in the WoD. Like, Vampire assumes the God of the Old Testament and the story of Genesis are true, but is cynical about religion. The "Gothic-Punk" World of Darkness is deeply anti-establishment, but reflects a sheltered white middle-class suburbanite's idea of what the outside world is like. The books are often guilty of ethnic stereotyping but ascribe some sort of mythical "authenticity" to minorities, to the point that ethnic stereotypes literally become super powers (e.g. WoD: Gypsies). I believe that ultimately, these contradictory attitudes reflect a questioning of the worldview that mass media feeds to the hypothetical white, male, middle-class gamer. But it's mostly written by those same people, and manifests itself in, I hate this word, problematic ways, resulting in themes like romanticizing minorities and exaggerating fears of "urban super-predators" to the point of parody, intentional or otherwise. When the WoD's worldbuilding became completely unmoored from what we'd recognize as day-to-day life, it should go without saying that a lot of that was just the inevitable result of a ton of writers working on a ton of books, in different product lines that shared continuity but were very different games. WoD monsters seem to mostly just fight each other. Sometimes that's because they're too rare and too self-involved to have much impact on the world at large. Sometimes there's literally a monster in every Pentex-produced consumer good, and monsters only fight each other because they already control everything and human society is just background noise. Desiden posted:
(It's amazing how, in the absence of GM advice that directly and consistently addresses the reader concerning playstyle, what is implied to the reader can be incredibly divisive. The rift between Shadowrun's writing and it's art made for a schizophrenic online fanbase. I got so tired of stuffy idiots whining that a Gibsonian dungeoncrawl game shouldn't have combat in it, ever, or you and your players are dumb babies.) I think another part of the problem is that Vampire was breaking new ground for most gamers, and despite having a pretty drat good GM chapter, we were sometimes at a loss for what kind of adventures to run. It was easy to fall back on dungeoncrawlish stuff. (Remember how the 1st and 2nd edition mentioned the possibility of acquiring magic items, something that was quickly dispensed with after a handful were included in the player's guide?) Dirty Secrets is an easy scapegoat/punching bag because so many things people disliked in the oWoD were, in one book, rolled up and layered on top of each other to an absurd degree. quote:That's part of what made the revised era so weird to me. I liked some of the changes and attempts to rein in a bit of the crazy, but a lot of it (particularly in vampire) seemed obsessed with the notion that once upon a time VtM was only focused on personal horror and existential angst and that somehow the game about playing made up living dead creatures *had* to be about that to be "realistic". Then of course on top of that, you *still* had elder lesbian ninja vampires having street battles in magical darkness because, just like in the beginning, none of the writing staff seemed to really have a consensus of what the point of the game was. All of that, I felt, was part of what made the first few nWoD offerings so bland and muddled. They weren't bad, but they seemed so intent on winning the debate about what VtM should NOT be that they didn't really try to consider what VtR was supposed to be on its own. Luckily later authors in 1st, and definitely by 2nd, seemed to put a lot more thought into giving the lines their own voice. Or, perhaps a better analogy: imagine if they made a new Mission: Impossible series modeled after the original, but it was set in the continuity of the movies, and acknowledged that yes Tom Cruise is still out there protecting democracy with kung fu. Robindaybird posted:and basically doing the vamp equivalent of sleeping with influential vampires - Rice's vamps are very... incestous, everyone knows everybody either through Lestat (because he's her pet character) or Armand. You almost never see a vampire that isn't connected to either one of them somehow.
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Jan 7, 2017 04:51
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unseenlibrarian posted:My impression of Fading Suns system-wise was always "Slightly overcomplicated Pendragon" which is what I wound up using for it for at least one game.
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Jan 8, 2017 03:13
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unseenlibrarian posted:Sadly, this was like...15 years ago, I don't even have the basic notes for it anymore.
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Jan 8, 2017 17:38
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Desiden posted:I think it was too. The time and place for the oWoD to get started, circa 91-92, is a sorta interesting place for relating to punk. The "classic" punk scene was already past its peak by then and was morphing into a variety of other niches. The oWoD relationship to it always felt to me like later fans recollecting an imagined past of what "authentic punk" was, with all the attendant rose tinted glasses. It wasn't homeless gutterpunks crashing in abandoned vans around LA, it was the idealized notion of what that life was "about". Edit: VVV I'm thinking more "wear a swastika and call people faggots because who life sucks and who gives a poo poo" than actual devoted Nazism. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 20:22 on Jan 9, 2017 |
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Jan 9, 2017 16:22
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Thing is, whether LARP or tabletop, the Camarilla actually gives you a structure of NPCs to give you adventures (and compel you to actually go do it), and a system of ranks to work your way up, etc. The Anarchs by comparison are a disintegrated mass that aren't really fleshed out in the corebook. If your group doesn't immediately get the vibe of Vampire, you can have the Prince order them to go do missions like like in D&D or many other games.
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Jan 10, 2017 01:38
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Desiden posted:Both true things, I think. I always felt like the anarchs got the short end throughout VtM's lifespan. They had no real definition in the beginning, but at least for a very short time before the sabbat PG, they were a distinct voice from the death cult boogeymen. Then the PG happened and the sabbat suddenly had "freedom" as their core tenet, plus they had been like the first anarchs before it was cool and had developed special-do-not-copy Sabbat only powers and rites. So the anarchs started looking essentially like posers who weren't willing to full on rebel. The Vampire: Bloodlines video game, which is set in the Anarch Free State, actual does a much better take on this. The ancient vampire all the factions are worried about really is just some Assyrian mummy. It's a bogeyman that catalyzes what is fundamentally a political conflict between the Camarilla, Anarchs, Sabbat, Kuei-Jin, and other minor antagonists. Evil Mastermind posted:Oh you loving wait until we get to the Tharkold book. That guy's practically Chris Pratt by that world's standards. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Jan 10, 2017 |
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Jan 10, 2017 19:34
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Night10194 posted:Wait, the Sabbat weren't part of Masquerade from the very beginning?
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Jan 10, 2017 22:26
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The Living Land was universally voted the least popular cosm, wasn't it? And not because people didn't like the premise, but entirely because of the execution.Desiden posted:They were, but their earliest depictions were a little different from what we got. I forget if we had any depiction of the Lasombra or Tzimisce prior to the Sabbat PG, but overall the Sabbat were very much mysterious boogeymen, a lot more in line with something like the Baali or maybe VII for Requiem. Not necessarily in theme as being demon worshippers or whatever, but very much weird guys with alien powers who seem to be able to break rules like the blood bond which are supposed to be impossible (and will show you how, if you want to make a deal with the devil). Their whole schtick of being freedom warriors for Caine against the antedeluvians emerged early on, but not quite at the start. The Sabbat, also called the Black Hand, controls most of the Northeast US (including Philly and NYC). They Embrace people by torturing them to death first, then burying them, so any who dig their way out are totally nuts and ready to be brainwashed. They're dominated by two clans called the Lasombra and the Tzimisce. The Sabbat acts like a Satanic cult from a horror movie. They love doing stuff like brutal mass-murders, rituals in graveyards, and burning Camarilla vampires alive for stepping on their turf. They enjoy being undead monsters and treating people like food they can play with, like a cat with a mouse. They hate the Camarilla and any vampires who care about acting human. Rumor has it that they allow their young vampires to diablerize the elders to preserve their strength, and that they know how to break the Blood Bond, which tempts some vampires to join them. That's it. They're crazy Omega Man/Texas Chainsaw Massacre serial killing cultists, with hardly a hint of their being some genius conspiracy running it all. They're basically disposable, slasher movie orcs for you to fight.
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Jan 10, 2017 23:31
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Night10194 posted:Honestly they'd have been kinda cool in a 'We need to put down these stupid bastards before they draw the hawthorn and silver down on us.' kind of way if they'd stayed there. 1. The Sabbat were probably based on the "Children of Satan" coven in Rice's Vampire Chronicles; these were the vampires who rejected humanity, had a sort of anti-Catholic religion, and believed in doing stuff like sleeping in open graves and wearing stolen grave clothes. They didn't exactly revel in mass murder, but believed in feeding without remorse, and in killing vampires who lived among humans. None of them lived longer than about 300 years, because they inevitably go mad, and give their blood to the younger vampires. (Marius later explains to Lestat that actually, spending 300 years living like a hobo in a graveyard is what drives you crazy.) 2. In Requiem 1st edition, the Sabbat role is more or less split into Belial's Brood and VII. The Brood are the My Life With The Thrill Kill Kult types, who get powers from making a connection with "The Adversary" as they lose Humanity points. VII is the inscrutable evil conspiracy; by design, no one knows what they're about, and there was a VII sourcebook that presented several possibilities. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 03:28 on Jan 11, 2017 |
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Jan 11, 2017 03:09
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Like I've said before, some of us love crunchy tactical games, and don't want every game to be Fate--but Torg seems like a setting that really, really needs to be run in a system that is more about measuring concepts than the precise differences between a pistol and a crossbow. So I've skimmed these reviews, but I have a hard time grasping Torg because the rules stuff is so dense. Is the idea that when you travel to another cosm, you can either stay yourself, or "transform" into a version of your character that matches that cosm's genre? I still don't get how cross-cosm stuff really works.
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Jan 11, 2017 18:57
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So when my Nile Empire pulp hero travels to the Living Land, instead of being converted from The Shadow to The Phantom, my guns just turn to sticks and my character turns into a caveman and sucks at everything? Yeesh, Torg enacts its premise in the most dull and punitive way possible.
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Jan 11, 2017 19:38
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Even the Gods (PCs) must obey the Norns (90s mechanics).
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Jan 11, 2017 20:38
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So was Sucker Punch.
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Jan 11, 2017 21:02
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 Godlike, Chapter V, Part VII My last Godlike update (link here, as it’s been awhile) left off at the end of February, 1944. The Allies continued to press the advantage, as the German Army had met with one disastrous failure after another on the Eastern Front, the Americans are rolling through the Pacific islands in the war against Japan, and the Allies have invaded Italy and established air superiority as they bomb German industry. However, these victories have been offset by bloody and demoralizing losses at Anzio and Monte Cassino. At Anzio the Allies lost Zed, the British Talent for whom the Talent-nullifying power is named. Months earlier the RuSHA SA discovered Null, the most powerful Zed Talent in history, and made him the personal bodyguard to an increasingly paranoid Hitler. Estimates by an American Hyperbrain now place the world Talent population at over 150,000.  3/4/1944, Disaster at Berlin: The U.S. 8th Air Force launched 600 B-17 bombers in a raid on Berlin that ended in disaster. Fewer than 30 planes reached their target. German Talents destroyed 40 aircraft; most notably, a huge “Chinese dragon” that incinerated 6 planes before being shot down. The attack dropped 1,600 tons of explosives, but lost 60 planes and 9 Talents. 3/7/1944, Operation U-Go: “U-Go” was a Japanese plan to seize the road between Imphal and Kohima in India to contain Allied advanced in Burman. The 33rd Japanese Division attacked the 17th Indian while two other Japanese divisions crossed the border. One division crossed into Kanglantongbi, the home of Lord Yama. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a living god. Yama’s followers, many armed with no more than knives and rocks, launched suicide attacks on the Japanese. In two days, every single member of the Japanese 15th Division was dead, and Japanese forces in India retreated to Burma. 3/20/1944, Hitler Invades Hungary: Fearful of Allied propaganda and numerous guerrilla attacks in the wake of Operation Carpetbagger, Hitler invaded Hungary and installed a pro-Nazi regime, leaving the pro-Nazi Admiral Miklós Horthy in command. The Nazis prepared to stem a Soviet invasion. On April 3rd, an Allied force bombed Budapest, causing light damage. By this point, Hungarians were fed up with the occupation, the Reich economy, and staggering military losses. Hungary had come to realize that the fruit of allying with the Nazis was to have their country used as a buffer state and a battleground. 4/8/1944, the Crimea Push: General Tolbukhin’s forces attacked and divided the 200,000 Germans remaining on the Crimean peninsula, preventing a mass evacuation by sea. Stalin personally promoted Tolbukhin to General-Polkovnik. Two days later, General Malinovsky’s 3rd Ukrainian Front drove back General Ferdinand Schörner’s German and Romanian Axis forces; Hitler’s orders forbade an orderly withdrawal. Soviet forces destroyed several German divisions and killed or captured 22 Übermenschen before seizing Odessa. Schörner’s last-ditch attempts to save the city only resulted in more losses, and Schörner himself was killed when an unknown Soviet Talent ripped his plane apart with a “giant hand.” On April 20th, Tolkbukhin’s forces captured Sevastopol, where the remaining 115,000 Germans surrendered. In 3 days, Soviet forces intercepted several transport ships and captured another 15,000 German troops trying to cross the gulf. Crimea was now in Soviet hands, and the German 17th Army had ceased to exist. 4/15/1944, Kilroy Was Here: American Ship Inspector James J. Kilroy went to bed and woke up in the Reichchancellory in Berlin. As soon as he figured out where he was, his new Talent power transported him back home to Boston. Kilroy was a teleporter whose power unconsciously, and randomly, teleported him to restricted locations when he slept.  I wish I had a picture of the Kilroy my grandfather spraypainted on the wall of the garage where he worked in his spare time for over 40 years. Kilroy was already a minor legend thanks to the graffiti he left on unfinished ships sent overseas. “Kilroy was here,” a mark that the rivets had been properly checked, was found in sealed hulls no vandal could have reached. After evaluation by Section 2, he was transferred to Army Intelligence’s propaganda arm. Soon, “Kilroys” were found all over Germany...and Russia. Hitler discovered it in the Wolfsschanze, his secret Eastern Front headquarters, while Stalin found it in his private bathroom. In 1945, the Kilroy was almost as common across Europe as the “V for Victory.” 5/11/1944, the Taking of Rome: Allied forces advanced toward Anzio, with British forces suffering and inflicting heavy losses. After French troops threatened to flank their line, the Germans were forced to make an orderly retreat toward Rome. The U.S. Army VI Corps pushed forward, and Allied forces linked up at Sezze on 5/23. Meanwhile, Polish forces defeated the Germans and liberated the monastery at Cassino. Generalfeldmarschall Kesselring obtained Hitler’s permission to abandon Rome, and his 14th Army retreated across the Tiber. Uncoordinated Allied attempts to cut off their retreat failed, and General Clark heeded public pressure to focus on Rome. Neither the Axis nor the Allies wanted a terrible urban battle that might level the city. Kesselring declared Rome an “open city” at the Pope’s behest, and most German forces fled the city. General Clark and his 5th Army seized Rome on 6/4, capturing about a thousand soldiers from the German rearguard, including 2 Übermenschen. One, Der Nebel (“The Fog”), was a high-ranking SS officer who provided valuable information on the Nazi Talent program. 6/5/1944, the Superfortress: The B-29 Superfortress debuted in a raid on Bangkok. The B-29 was the first pressurized long-range bomber, with greater speed, altitude, and range than any other. Seventy-seven were launched; 5 were downed due to technical problems.  For thousands of soldiers, D-Day was their first combat experience. 6/6/1944, D-Day: Supreme Allied Commander Eisenhower gave the order to launch Operation Overlord, the invasion of France across the English Channel. The operation was launched in spite of bad weather that had already delayed it by two days; Allied command felt that the world had waited long enough. Operation Neptune, the landing of several forces along the coast of Normandy, comprised 156,000 troops in 4,000 landing craft and 2,000 warships, preceded by gliders and paratroopers. It was the largest amphibious invasion in history. British Major John Howard’s forces landed 6 gliders along the Caen Canal at midnight, to seize the bridge there. Three were scattered by wind, but the others landed within yards of the bridge. Thinking that the gliders were the spearhead of a large force, the Germans abandoned their posts, and the glider troops captured the bridge with only 1 casualty. At 1:00am, Lt. Col. Terence Otway’s British 6th Airborne parachuted in to destroy a German coastal gun at Banville. Winds scattered the troops across 50 miles, and Otway was only able to assault the battery with 150 of his 750 men. Half the assault force were killed, but the coastal gun was destroyed. The American 82nd and 101st Airborne, comprising 18,000 paratroopers, landed near Carentan at midnight. Though these troops were also scattered by wind, this confused the German forces, who often hesitated until it was too late. Aided by 115 Talents split into 3-man TOG groups, this force secured the bridge across the Taute river. Two groups of the 82nd Airborne landed in the middle of Ste.-Mère-Eglise, a small village. After a stray firebomb set off a blaze, the German garrison was alerted. Most American troops were dead before they hit the ground, picked off by machinegun and even rifle fire. Amazingly, after the slaughter, the Germans retired to sleep! This allowed another group of 91 paratroopers (including 4 Talents) to land outside the village and capture it within 2 hours. The most important paratrooper landing consisted of a single man: the Czech called Pevnost. Dropped at the Orne river bridge just after it was captured, Pevnost created one of his “passages” on a bridge doorway to transport 140 commandos and 150 Talents to France instantly, in a sequel to 1941’s Operation Rascal. While Pevnost rested, these “Rascal” teams spread out to “cause trouble in the way only Talents can.” Their goal was to draw Überkommandogruppen away from coastal defenses before the first Allied troops hit the beaches at Normandy. The second Operation Rascal succeeded brilliantly. “Invincible” Brown defeated an entire Panzer division before leading Überkommandogruppe 13 on a wild goose chase, away from their post at Caen before the British 2nd Army landed. “Tag” Montgomery was captured, but not before teleporting 12 German tanks into the ocean from a coastal repair depot. “Wrongway” Mertz had an entire German garrison at St. Laurent firing their guns at illusory bombers for an hour, while he snuck into their command post and stole their codebooks and orders. Soon, 350 Allied Talents were operating in occupied France. At Pointe du Hoc, Lt. James Rudder’s 2nd Ranger Batallion assaulted a 155mm cannon emplacement atop a 100 foot cliff. Sadly, the nine-man TOG 41 were all killed as they surmounted the cliff carrying heavy equipment, mowed down by a Heer machinegun nest. The Rangers cleared the nest minutes later, only to find that the cannon had been moved. At 5:30am, Allied warships began attacking the coastline, supported by 10,000 aircraft. At this point the Germans realized that they were under massive attack. Over 100,000 French resistance fighters, supported by the Rascals, had severed communications. It would be over an hour before news reached Berlin. All these actions were to clear the way for five beachheads, codenamed Utah, Omaha, Sword, Juno, and Gold. Major General Barton’s U.S. 4th Infantry was forced 2,000 yards south of its target by currents and mines, but the result was that they landed on a more lightly defended beach. Brigadier Gen. Theodore Roosevelt (son of the former president) made the snap decision to order reinforcements to arrive at the new landing sight, and was later awarded the Medal of Honor for this decision. The 4th Infantry quickly established the beachhead, supported by a 2nd Talent Assault Group assembled from 32 TOG teams which destroyed a few tanks and gun emplacements. By nightfall, the 4th had linked with the 502nd Parachute Infantry and brought the 90th Infantry ashore.  Into the jaws of death The landing force at Omaha Beach was not so lucky. Hitting the beach at 7:00am, their amphibious tanks were almost completely destroyed by high seas. Without armored support, the infantry had to swim to shore while under fire from machineguns, mortars, and enemy Talents. Überkommandos and mortars sunk 14 landing craft were sunk with all hands aboard, and the weather left many troops off-target and bunched together, pinned down by German machineguns. Heroism by leaders like Col. George Taylor and the mortally wounded Capt. Laurence Taylor rallied the survivors to push inland toward the “shingle” where the sand offered partial cover from enemy fire. Enemy Talents continued slaughtering Allied troops...until the 1st Talent Assault Group waded ashore. The battle that followed was dubbed the “Ten Minutes of Hell” as Talents tore each other apart in an assault on the German fortified positions. Übermenschen snipers inflicted heavy casualties in seconds, but Allied fliers and teleporters achieved flanking maneuvers that turned the tide. The Indestructible Man was teleported into a 75mm gun blockhouse and calmly pulled the pin from a grenade. Captain John “Iron Man” Kelly hurled half-ton logs like javelins into German bunkers. Entire squads were incinerated, entire portions of the beach teleported into the ocean, and super-strong Talents ripped each other apart in hand-to-hand combat. Casualties were high on both sides, and most of the dead Allied Talents were killed not by Übermenschen, but by machinegun fire. By 10:00am, the 1st U.S. Division had established a tenuous beachhead. But with only 24 survivors out of 289, the 1st Talent Assault Group no longer existed. At 7:30am, British forces landed at Sword Beach southwest of the Orne river. With heavy tank support, the landing was a huge success. Defenses were eliminated within an hour. British Talents captured a gun emplacement, allowing the 2nd Battalion to link up with the glider troops who had seized the Caen and Orne bridges. British forces hesitated before attacking Caen, believing it to be defended by the 21st Panzer Division, which was actually just returning to the town. This would prove a costly mistake. In the small town of Banville, Cien and the British 6th Airborne encountered Der Flieger. The Übermensch had already downed 11 aircraft and buzzed Allied troops on Sword Beach. When he flew in low to identify Cien’s group, he was swatted out of the air by an enormous shadowy hand. A combat photographer snapped a picture of Der Flieger, sitting in the mud with a broken leg and ribs. Though Der Flieger took to the air and escaped, Cien had forced one of the most potent Axis talents to abandon the air battle over Normandy. The photograph made the cover of Time with the headline “The Super-Man in Defeat.” It became one of the most famous photographs in history and a boost to Allied morale.  All loving Nazis must loving hang Five miles west of Sword, the 3rd Canadian Division landed at Juno Beach. With fire support from two battleships, they pushed inland despite lacking any tanks. The Canadian troops broke through German defenses on the path to Caen, and killed 15 of the 16-man Überkommandogruppe 16 without any Talent support at all. By nightfall, they’d linked up with British forces from Gold Beach in time to repel an attack by the 12th SS Panzers, and were holding a line outside Caen. Further west, the 50th British Division landed at Gold Beach with heavy support from the Dorset Armored Battalion, the cruiser Ajax, and minesweeping “Crab” tanks, protecting the infantry from mines and coastal guns. The 47th Royal Marine captured Arromanches and linked up with American forces. At the cost of thousands of lives, the Allies now controlled a single unbroken beachhead in occupied France. 6/7/1944, Cormorant Dies: Captain Michael “Cormorant” Foreman and 9 members of his British commando team were killed by an artillery shell in Banville. Pevnost had used his powers to turn Banville into a staging area for commando ops, and the Heer retaliated with an artillery barrage. He was not reported KIA until 4 days later, when a survivor from his team regained consciousness in hospital. Next time on Godlike: Heavy casualties on both sides as the war continues all over Europe and Asia...and the disastrous Operation Market Garden.
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Jan 11, 2017 21:50
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Bieeardo posted:Godlike's Kilroy makes me giddy. To his dying day, my grandfather hated sauerkraut.
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Jan 11, 2017 23:08
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Strange Matter posted:It's kind of nice how the whole time through Godlike the timeline is being fairly ginger with Talent influence over real events, mostly relegating them to side missions with minimal relevance to actual events, and then Omaha Beach happens and it's total craziness. Especially the image of whole chunks of the beach being teleported into the ocean.
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Jan 13, 2017 19:56
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Tasoth posted:So is it actually possible to have 'Fremen Fedaykin' or 'Titan Pilot' as end game builds in SotDL? Because that's kind of fantastic if it is.
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Jan 16, 2017 00:10
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