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Night10194 posted:Also I think I could probably use Myriad Song to run Panzer Dragoon, which would end my 15 year quest for a system for that. I'm excited to see your Myriad Song review! (Also, you know that Sanguine just released another game, ya? Urban Jungle - sort of a Blacksad, Lackadaisy bit?) RiotGearEpsilon fucked around with this message at 05:25 on Oct 27, 2016 |
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Oct 27, 2016 05:21
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Mors Rattus posted:I also like the flat delivery of the line 'I'm a cat.' I actually think the Changing Breeds as a concept have a place in the game. This place would involve throwing out literally their entire book. What I would go with is, essentially: you don't just have an animal soul, you were an animal. Human is not your natural form. You are a shapeshifter because sometimes, animals become people. Why? Well, the furries would buy it up like hotcakes, and the furries do have money.
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Nov 1, 2016 16:33
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We can figure that out later.
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Night10194 posted:So! What first? Want a summary of more of the setting (there's no actual big Setting section, mostly, outside of the setup and summary in the front of the book and a bunch of example planets and plot hooks later on) or should we get into the races and things you can play as? The races in this game are tremendously weird and range from brain-eating accidentally sentient plants to a giant bat-monster with a symbiotic cordyceps infection (that the PC is actually playing as), for a barometer of how odd they are. Gimme these weird fuckin' playable species!
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Nov 1, 2016 17:49
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Cythereal posted:I was going more with the idea that immortality not only isn't all it's cracked up to be, it will gently caress you up something fierce. I played the Threshold, as Valkyrie called the phenomenon, as what happens when an immortal of whatever sort starts to really understand what immortality means - and it usually happens around the time their former peers start dying of old age. That's an extreme moment of psychological stress that breaks a lot of young immortals, be they vampires or other types, and no one comes through it unscathed unless they were already so deranged they never really noticed it. I recently had a moment of extreme, deep awareness of my mortality, of the inevitability of my death. I could easily see myself accepting vampirism, or something like it, while in the state of mind I was in then. Since that moment I have been aggressively scrubbing that knowledge and awareness from my mind; it did me no good at all to have the distant horizon so firmly fixed in mind.
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Dec 23, 2016 16:41
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Nuns with Guns posted:Man, only count chocula is supposed to post like this in this thread he died
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Dec 23, 2016 22:43
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Halloween Jack posted:I would like to see a sci-fi game that took technology beyond the "posthumanism" of even Eclipse Phase and all the way to the "indistinguishable from magic" phase. I don't know much about Niven in particular, but something like Known Space, Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time, Jack Kirby's Fourth World, and Alan Moore's Miracleman...the closest stuff I can immediately think of is Ashen Stars and maybe Mark Rein-Hagen's unpublished Exile. This is the target setting for Farflung, a PbtA riff by Sanguine. Might be your cuppa. https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/196384/FARFLUNG-SciFi-RolePlay-After-Dark
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Oct 17, 2017 22:21
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Night10194 posted:Holy poo poo, that's Sanguine's latest game. What the hell happened. They didn't abandon Cardinal, they just put it down for like ten minutes to crank out a fun weird slightly filthy space game.
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Nov 14, 2017 02:39
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JcDent posted:I would take that perk and eat my way to bliss. Cookies and pizza and confectionaries and whatever for days, without getting fat, though I guess vampire bowel movements are pretty nasty. in that they regurgitate the completely undigested food about 30 minutes later, yeah
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Dec 10, 2017 08:12
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Hostile V posted:Like I know for sure the Mi-Go actually do that poo poo, they legitimately forget they left an immortal and indestructible serial killer on Earth and will respond to appropriate SOS thrown their way with "oh for gently caress's sake we did do that, didn't we" and then leave behind a fix for it before heading out again. Okay I need the story behind this.
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Jan 26, 2018 20:51
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Rand Brittain posted:That was an interesting scenario but I just couldn't get over the fact that it's all about a magic fez, and the book doesn't really seem to grasp that the reader is going to find the concept of the fez inherently ridiculous. What's ridiculous about a magic hat? Edit: Never mind I just heard myself say 'magic hat' out loud
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Jan 27, 2018 01:01
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Night10194 posted:I'm sorry, are you not terrified of the fez? It was described as BLOOD RED. That is every fez!
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Jan 28, 2018 01:32
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I thought Yahweh/The Father was a Titan, and the Son and Holy Spirit were his jailers? Or something else amazingly blasphemous but kind of coherent if you squint at it, like that.
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Jan 29, 2018 23:53
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Night10194 posted:This is hilarious if you remember they commissioned her to do terrible Slayers-esque furry art for the cover of their first game and now, finally, they have a game where they just let her do what she's amazing at. Hey, like it or not, that lovely cover moved units!
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Apr 9, 2018 21:41
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Night10194 posted:a wandering judge who was killed in a box full of bees while trying to prosecute a strange nature cult out in the sticks did they really just throw in a wicker man reference?
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Sep 20, 2018 16:15
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Freaking Crumbum posted:so the players are the antagonists in this game, yeah? i can't imagine playing transhuman pre-crime cops of the intergalactic nanny-state straight and having them be the good guys. I'm actually loving that the AIs in this setting are widely regarded by themselves and others as being genuinely benevolent and helpful but that doesn't mean that some people aren't going to find them and their creatures utterly horrifying. This is a natural moral ambiguity that's hard to write.
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Oct 11, 2018 20:21
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MonsterEnvy posted:The exception is rune magic. Giants are drawn towards magic symbols and runes. Stone Giants are the primary practitioners due to the artistry and environment they live in. Most giant groups have at least a few rune cutter among them, even the stupid hill giants who stomp them into the ground or gorge them into their flesh. I'm always exasperated when an RPG presents this kind of interesting magical tradition which makes absolutely no sense in the larger context of how magic works in a game. What the gently caress is 'rune magic' in DnD?
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Nov 9, 2018 06:10
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I'm willing to applaud this insane evil gnoll poo poo because it finally means we can have monstrous humanoids that cannot plausibly be viewed as a metaphor for any real ethnic group no matter how hard you squint.
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Dec 5, 2018 00:30
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Night10194 posted:It was a huge commercial failure from what I understand, and basically only ever got its core book Not so! https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/158966/MYRIAD-ALIENS--Even-Stranger-Options-for-RolePlay-Adventure
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Jan 8, 2019 21:25
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PurpleXVI posted:Thing is, how many games actually manage to make this work and be interesting, rules-wise, either the ship design or the ship combat? I have trouble thinking of a single one. This is one of the main things that guided our decision to de-emphasize space combat and ship design as a game element. But people still clearly care about it enormously, and the absence of it cause them real confusion and unhappiness in our customers. We take the criticism we've received over this issue quite seriously, and we plan to address it if we have the opportunity to make more content for, or a new edition of, Myriad Song. Night10194, I'm really enjoying your review of our work, and I'm glad you find Myriad Song to be clear and comprehensible. It's one of the most complex incarnations of the Cardinal system, and we put a lot of thought in to making sure it was presented in a way that would clarify that complexity, not muddle it.
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Jan 11, 2019 18:14
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Night10194 posted:Some content about buying nice stuff for your flying home base and maybe some minor benefits from it wouldn't be amiss, though it's also the kind of stuff I can obviously come up with myself for my group. One thing that a lot of games have touched on recently that I enjoy is the appeal of base-building - of having a space that you control and retreat to between adventures, whose well-being you're invested in, like the proverbial keep or barony you'd eventually acquire in the original editions of DnD. Making your spaceship a special case of this concept probably has some legs. Night10194 posted:(we always ran it that space 'combat' was almost entirely boarding actions so players could use their player scale weapons and abilities and have fun action sequences instead) This was specifically what we hoped would happen, so I'm glad to hear it. Night10194 posted:I'm curious what caused the shift in weapons design to including way more Traits in combat, rather than the IC2e style where you could buy 'I get to use Mind in place of Body because I took a Gift for it'. This is a side effect of one of the main design principles Sanguine holds to, which is, incentivize players to remember the rules. Players are more inclined to remember rules that give them a benefit than rules that make them weaker. (Plus, when someone corrects them about a mistake and as a result they become stronger, they become happy to have learned instead of sad that they are weak.) Because of this, when we wanted to make weapons suitable for specific archetypes of characters - 'this gun is big and chunky, it should be used by a big and chunky guy', or 'this weapon is bizarre and complicated, you should need to be smart to use it' - it makes much more sense to make the weapon weak by default, and give suitable characters special advantages to use it. The alternative, making the weapon strong by default but unless you qualify for it you get a penalty, both incentivizes players to conveniently forget that rule and makes innocent mistakes more frustrating when they're corrected. It's like how World of Warcraft turned the XP penalty from exhaustion in to an XP bonus for being well rested. The math is exactly the same, but players hate one of them.
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Jan 11, 2019 20:21
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Night10194 posted:E: I will probably have a lot of other questions as this goes. To be clear, I'm the contributing editor, Richard Hughes, not the lead designer, Jason Holmgren. Temper your hopes and dreams accordingly. Night10194 posted:That is something else that gets emphasized a lot in all of Sanguine's games, after all: You are playing above average people.
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Jan 11, 2019 20:40
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PurpleXVI posted:I have to say, this is some pretty hefty game design wisdom here. (I'm just the editor, to be clear.) PurpleXVI posted:So probably the magic solution would be to run the space combat/exploration tier on the same system as everything else, and make more or less every non-space skill have a space use, both of which are much easier said than done. RiotGearEpsilon fucked around with this message at 23:03 on Jan 11, 2019 |
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Jan 11, 2019 22:52
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Night10194 posted:Which means if you put a d4 in everything and had a spread of 6 separate skills from your Legacy and Career, you could theoretically start with a little skill in every single type of test in the game. It wouldn't be a great idea, but you could do it. It's far from theoretical. One of the sample characters, Captain Diprova Brugabi, intentionally highlights this. She's competent at everything, which means there is absolutely no task in the game she can't Rote for 1 success. That's not always enough to deal with hero stuff, but combined with having a d8 in all her primary Traits... Well, specialization is for insects, and she's a mammal. Ghost Leviathan posted:Or just make the ship its own character. Either have players in charge of specific things (which may or may not translate into what station they're sitting at all Star Trek style) or decide what to do next as a group. Planet Mercenary does the latter iirc, though I haven't seen it in practive. That's what we wound up doing with Farflung - 'the Ship' is one of the playbooks. To our great dismay, this didn't stop people from complaining there were no starship rules.
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Jan 14, 2019 17:39
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Night10194 posted:That starting goal, though. Forever and for always, that will never be achieved. Being Brugabi is suffering.
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Jan 14, 2019 17:46
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I have just finished reading through these rules. I am the editor of this book, and you should know that I am now shuddering with delight, like Sisyphus astonished to find the stone set stable at the hilltop.
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Jan 14, 2019 19:18
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Night10194 posted:One issue I have: Experience Points aren't even in the Index, so I'm not actually sure if their only mention is in the Character Growth section or if I've missed something about them. And I crash back down to earth! I can assure you that all the information about experience points is in the Character Growth section.
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Jan 14, 2019 22:47
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Night10194 posted:Until the chainsaws. If you get to hand to hand combat range with someone with a chainsaw, you've earned it.
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Jan 15, 2019 01:50
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Just Dan Again posted:I joined the "bought Myriad Song because of this review" club a few days ago, and I'm similarly conflicted about advancement being tied to Gifts so tightly. My eyebrows went up pretty high when I saw that the Host was instructed to give the PCs a gift of the Host's choice, but to be ready for them to sell it back for XP. It just seemed like such an odd bit of rigmarole to me. I've definitely had players who would have never ever cashed those [random Independent planet] insider gifts in, just in case they needed to interact with those NPCs again at some point in the future. We've heard this criticism, now and before, and we take it seriously. Our game design philosophy is that our customers should not have to invoke 'rule zero' to work around broken mechanics or sloppy writing - you pay us money for a product and we intend to deliver you a complete product you can use with confidence. That said, you still can and should invoke 'rule zero' to adjust the game to the taste of your table. Myriad Song's advancement mechanics should be especially low-risk to gently caress around with. The Goal mechanic is useful for helping players keep track of their objectives, whether those objectives are chosen by the player or granted by the Host, but if your game table finds the constraints on Goal rewards chafing, nothing will break if you loosen them. If you want to loosen them a little, the Host could let players choose from a selection of Gifts. A step further, and the Host could let players choose any Gift that the table agrees makes sense in the context of their adventures. A step further, and the players could be trusted to pick whatever Gift they like. RiotGearEpsilon fucked around with this message at 05:59 on Jan 16, 2019 |
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Jan 16, 2019 05:52
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By popular demand posted:Who wants to keep tally on a stock of ship components? Night10194 posted:I generally don't track capacitors.
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Jan 17, 2019 18:21
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Night10194 posted:I should also mention, I've been unsure where to put this, but one of the weaknesses of this book in general is the art just isn't very good. This has long been a problem with Sanguine's games; it doesn't bother me that much, outside of really egregious examples like IC1e, but there's just no real sense of tone to the art. Most of it is blandly cartoony, and there isn't a huge amount of it anyway, but it's just not a major strength of the book.  This is a deep cut. We invested enormous effort and funds in to the art direction for Myriad Song, and hired a long list of pretty storied artists, so hearing that it fell flat completely is taking me aback. Can you elaborate on this criticism a bit?
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Jan 18, 2019 17:28
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Thank you. That's a much more specific and actionable piece of feedback - I can do things with that.
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Jan 18, 2019 17:40
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Night10194 posted:Like, what was the goal of the art direction, exactly? What were they trying to achieve as an aesthetic? I'll let our art director speak for himself on that front if he chooses. It would be inappropriate for me to risk misrepresenting him on a topic like this. RiotGearEpsilon fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Jan 18, 2019 |
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Jan 18, 2019 17:50
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Night10194 posted:Though I'm going to need to tweak the crafting system, or else I've definitely misunderstood something about it, because so far a competent engineer can make almost anything in the game in one or two intervals. That's intentional! We want people to be able to make their own gear, without having to jump through a billion hoops to do it. Myriad Song isn't like Dungeons and Dragons, or Exalted, or even Shadowrun - your equipment isn't expected to just keep getting better and better forever. You can start the game with The Best Possible Gun or close to it. Because of that, there's no reason to make equipment crafting require extreme investment in personal abilities, as in Exalted, or cost of irreplaceable personal resources, like DnD. It's meant to be doable. If you make an engineer, you can build things. poo poo should work.
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Jan 18, 2019 17:59
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Night10194 posted:Also the Trait/Aim/whatever systems mean almost everyone can still do something in combat or non-combat situations even when they aren't specialized for them, which is good. The big party merc being able to say 'I'm using Body+Athletics to help lift heavy stuff and help with the engine repair' is a small thing, but nice to have. We want people playing the game to be in a position to ask themselves, "What can I do here to help?" and have an answer at hand. We want to encourage players to collaborate and cooperate, not to silo completely in to their own specializations. I'm glad the rules are helping on that front!
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Jan 18, 2019 18:32
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Night10194 posted:The talk of highly restricted brewing is goddamn hilarious after someone working on another game just popped in to go 'Oh, no, we want our crafting rules to be pretty easy to achieve. You're a heroic engineer. Go build a minigun in your garage and some power armor.' Do you want your minigun to shoot vodka or gin?
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Jan 18, 2019 20:09
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PurpleXVI posted:Late to the party, but: Almost all of the art is very good by itself, but I feel like it would probably have benefited from having only a short list of artists, like two or three, so everything would have a unified style and mood. This is good feedback, and I'll take it seriously, but there's a reason we haven't tried to solve the problem of consistency this way in the past. We took this approach with one of our other products, FarFlung, which is illustrated by only two (very talented) artists - but it also had very few illustrations. Fewer artists necessarily means either less art, or a much longer production time. Artists are humans - they can only produce art so quickly, and they can misjudge their own capacity to deliver, so putting a big burden on a small group of artists puts more eggs in fewer basked. I'm aware of how powerful a unified illustrative mood can be. I remember when I first popped open Castles & Crusades, I was impressed by the effect that limiting their illustrations to one artist had. But I also noticed how little art there was. RiotGearEpsilon fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Jan 18, 2019 |
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Jan 18, 2019 21:12
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Night10194 posted:I love how RPGs make it clear that like, every source of temptation or dealing with the supernatural is just extremely stupid and players should never try to engage with it. I'm interested in your thoughts on Necromancy in Ironclaw 2e, on that note.
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Jan 23, 2019 04:59
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Night10194 posted:Also, just a quick update to the Urban Jungle review, I've now gotten a chance to use the new Soaks system in play (not exactly in what it was intended for, but I did still use it as written) and it does about what I hoped it does for combat in the Cardinal system. just as planned
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Feb 3, 2019 01:44
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Night10194 posted:I do have a significant question, though: The two descriptions of ammo dice seem to conflict. Do you include them with attack rolls, or just roll them separately like a Decay dice in MS? You include Decay dice like that with attack rolls, in both Myriad Song and Urban Jungle. But you do need to keep track of which is the Decay die.
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Feb 3, 2019 18:25
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Mors Rattus posted:... I've not seen the show - is that not the pronoun that Lizardman generally uses?
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Mar 15, 2019 23:47
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