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Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Helical Nightmares posted:

So Technocracy winning = tumblr :911: gently caress

Also Something Awful I guess.

DEM KIDS WITH DER COMPUTERS

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Plutonis
Mar 25, 2011

That precludes the stupid rear end websites, it was the Patriots' S3 plan on MGS2 you dinguses

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Alien Rope Burn posted:

DEM KIDS WITH DER COMPUTERS
Well, to be fair TECHNOLOGY = UNIVERSALLY BAD has been built into the WoD since loving Werewolf 1e.

Toph Bei Fong
Feb 29, 2008



Evil Mastermind posted:

Well, to be fair TECHNOLOGY = UNIVERSALLY BAD has been built into the WoD since loving Werewolf 1e.

As the quest for peak irony strives further and further, a multi-million dollar company that made all its money on producing addictive and absorbing games that take hours to play and generally have no set victory conditions, and has purchased the IP from the producer of even more addictive MMOs, decries modern technology and advancements. "No, seriously, we're like the good guy hacker Tradition," the founder was quotes as he pushed his VR goggles up onto his forehead and hastily shoved a pile of money into a desk drawer, slamming it authoritatively.

Helical Nightmares
Apr 30, 2009

Toph Bei Fong posted:

As the quest for peak irony strives further and further, a multi-million dollar company that made all its money on producing addictive and absorbing games that take hours to play and generally have no set victory conditions, and has purchased the IP from the producer of even more addictive MMOs, decries modern technology and advancements. "No, seriously, we're like the good guy hacker Tradition," the founder was quotes as he pushed his VR goggles up onto his forehead and hastily shoved a pile of money into a desk drawer, slamming it authoritatively.

:golfclap:

Alien Rope Burn
Dec 5, 2004

I wanna be a saikyo HERO!

Evil Mastermind posted:

Well, to be fair TECHNOLOGY = UNIVERSALLY BAD has been built into the WoD since loving Werewolf 1e.

And it keeps getting funnier every single time I see it.

Lightning Lord
Feb 21, 2013

$200 a day, plus expenses

Us OWoD good guys were hoping they had nostalgia for Revised but it's looking more and more like 1e-2e only. :magical:

Plutonis
Mar 25, 2011

Toph Bei Fong posted:

As the quest for peak irony strives further and further, a multi-million dollar company that made all its money on producing addictive and absorbing games that take hours to play and generally have no set victory conditions, and has purchased the IP from the producer of even more addictive MMOs, decries modern technology and advancements. "No, seriously, we're like the good guy hacker Tradition," the founder was quotes as he pushed his VR goggles up onto his forehead and hastily shoved a pile of money into a desk drawer, slamming it authoritatively.

Daeren
Aug 18, 2009

YER MUSTACHE IS CROOKED

Toph Bei Fong posted:

As the quest for peak irony strives further and further, a multi-million dollar company that made all its money on producing addictive and absorbing games that take hours to play and generally have no set victory conditions, and has purchased the IP from the producer of even more addictive MMOs, decries modern technology and advancements. "No, seriously, we're like the good guy hacker Tradition," the founder was quotes as he pushed his VR goggles up onto his forehead and hastily shoved a pile of money into a desk drawer, slamming it authoritatively.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Toph Bei Fong posted:

As the quest for peak irony strives further and further, a multi-million dollar company that made all its money on producing addictive and absorbing games that take hours to play and generally have no set victory conditions, and has purchased the IP from the producer of even more addictive MMOs, decries modern technology and advancements. "No, seriously, we're like the good guy hacker Tradition," the founder was quotes as he pushed his VR goggles up onto his forehead and hastily shoved a pile of money into a desk drawer, slamming it authoritatively.

:perfect:

01011001
Dec 26, 2012

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

dwarf74 posted:

I am still trying to figure out how one plays this game.

It is not as bad as, say, McCracken's newest version of Synnibarr, but it's kinda up there. How do you make this much stuff while having no actual game rules?

What a coincidence, I just finished reading the new version of Synnibarr.

fool of sound
Oct 10, 2012
I was just pointed to The Strange, and I hope it's decent, because it's basically TORG minus the High Lords/metaplot.

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

fool_of_sound posted:

I was just pointed to The Strange, and I hope it's decent, because it's basically TORG minus the High Lords/metaplot.

Bad news.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

fool_of_sound posted:

I was just pointed to The Strange, and I hope it's decent, because it's basically TORG minus the High Lords/metaplot.
The Strange broke my heart. I wanted a Torg Heartbreaker so bad and I got...well, the Cypher system, which is so bad.

Helical Nightmares
Apr 30, 2009

Evil Mastermind posted:

The Strange broke my heart. I wanted a Torg Heartbreaker so bad and I got...well, the Cypher system, which is so bad.

but you went out and explored bad thus gained experience.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

fool_of_sound posted:

I was just pointed to The Strange, and I hope it's decent, because it's basically TORG minus the High Lords/metaplot.

The Strange is like TORG in the sense that the setting is great, except it's tied to bad mechanics

fool of sound
Oct 10, 2012
drat

fool of sound
Oct 10, 2012
For real though, I've only glanced and Numanera. What's bad about the system?

RocknRollaAyatollah
Nov 26, 2008

Lipstick Apathy
I don't remember seeing anything about it on here but does anyone have any strong opinions on Fragged Empire? It looks interesting, it at least has a solid art direction, but I'm leery about a 3d6 system.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib

fool_of_sound posted:

For real though, I've only glanced and Numanera. What's bad about the system?

The tl;dr version of Numenera is Monte Cook made another game of Fighters, Rogues, and Wizards where caster supremacy is totally a thing and fighters eat poo poo, exacerbated by the fact that your attribute points are also functionally your stamina meter and maybe your hitpoints too? Which means that as your fighter does fighter stuff they actually start to hamper themselves and it's generally just a big example of "had an idea that sounded great on paper, is dumb in execution." There's some stuff in there that's like Monte Cook trying to do something similar to *World's character relationships except instead of "so-and-so owes me a debt and I intend to collect" it's stuff like "pick another player's character and when you fumble an attack it hits them instead," and also the GM Intrusion system is like if someone took a look at Fate's compels and decided to reinvent them as shittily as possible.

Now I don't know how much of this applies to The Strange and how much is specific to Numenera, but Numenera makes a pretty convincing case that Monte Cook hasn't really advanced beyond "guy whose salad days were reinventing D&D with various caster buffs added and a great new idea called passive perception."

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
I wrote a short series about Cypher system in F&F

The short version is that it's Monte Cook's version of a "rules-lite indie game" if he never actually read any such things in the last half-decade.

It continues to use the d20 just because, and works off of this base mechanic of "any given task always has an objectively-correct difficulty level, and it's up to the players to justify reducing it to zero" which means its not actually all that rules light, especially when it has all these d20-isms like defining the maximum distance that an Athletics check can let you jump, or the difficulty scale just stopping short of superhuman capability.

A lot of the mechanics seems to be based upon houserules from his 3.5e home games, such as Cyphers as little one-shot bits of magic that you can constantly hand out to players, or allowing players to spend "effort" on rolls to guarantee success, and perhaps those things are fine in a vacuum, but when combined with a very D&D-esque class system, and an XP mechanic that both doesn't actually encourage exploration while also encouraging antagonistic GM-ing, the whole is less than the sum of its parts.

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
There's also a more extensive F&F writeup of Numenera itself that goes over its rough spots in greater detail.

That Old Tree
Jun 24, 2012

nah


Because my friend makes bad life choices, he traded real adult effort for a copy of Numenera, and then he got us to play the game. Two of the group were glaivesfighters, I played a jackspellsword because I thought we were lowballing things but I still wanted some cool magic powers without waiting on GM handouts, and then the guy who always winds up making characters right before the game made a nanowizard. It was a two-session poo poo-show, made all the worse by starting out at tier two and going up to tier three on the second session, so the wizard and I were throwing around telekinesis and mind-reading, and one of the warriors wanted to be "fast and wiry" so he went with a medium weapon, which mostly just meant that he deals less damage full stop.

But at least you get to ~make up your own skills~ and it's all about ~exploration~ because this is the $500k industry titan "indie storytelling" game.

What a loving terrible system.

potatocubed posted:

I listened to that, and as someone who knew exactly what every reference was to it was fantastic. Then I read this interview with the new White Wolf lead storyteller:

http://imagonem.org/2016/02/15/white-wolfs-lead-storyteller-there-will-be-a-release-in-2016/

The way one illuminates the other is magical.

:stare:

quote:

It’s useful to see the Classic and Anniversary books as highly subjective. The ultimate truth can’t be found in the books, but we can glimpse it through the multiplicity of perspectives presented. For instance Humanity is a mechanic presented from the Camarilla point of view, while Paths of Enlightenment give us the Sabbat perspective on the subject of morality. None of them are True. Both are models and simplifications.

quote:

Where did White Wolf “get it wrong” last time around? What are your least favorite parts of the IP?

Anything that smells of Fantasy. The attempt to create a deep mythology by linking the setting to Exalted was the worst choice ever. That was the last step in WoD’d death-march from being an artistic horror-IP to full on immature, escapist Urban Fantasy. The inability to deal with and integrate real-world events in the setting. If you can write about the Holocaust, you can write about 9/11. Fear is the death of creativity. The game was always best in the hands of storytellers who dared to place the story close to reality, often in their own cities, featuring real places and people.

Well, I guess it's not like I had high hopes anyway. :smith:

paradoxGentleman
Dec 10, 2013

wheres the jester, I could do with some pointless nonsense right about now

As long as they let OPP do their thing* the rest can crash and burn for all I care. If they produce something particularly terrible I might make a clever quip on it, and that's the extent I care about oWoD.

*and we assume that Beast was a one time fluke.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Kai Tave posted:

There's some stuff in there that's like Monte Cook trying to do something similar to *World's character relationships except instead of "so-and-so owes me a debt and I intend to collect" it's stuff like "pick another player's character and when you fumble an attack it hits them instead," and also the GM Intrusion system is like if someone took a look at Fate's compels and decided to reinvent them as shittily as possible.
I had a guy one say to me with complete belief that Numenera's character connections were "better than Fate's aspects" because they tell you how the characters are related. Fun fact: the connections in Cypher games have zero mechanical weight and are just fluff. Which is fine, but games like Fate and *World make those connections matter because of the mechanical weight.

I spent the 2-hour demo of Numenera I was in doing pretty much nothing because (among a host of other reasons) I was the fighty-guy and there was nothing to fight.

occamsnailfile
Nov 4, 2007



zamtrios so lonely
Grimey Drawer

Evil Mastermind posted:

I had a guy one say to me with complete belief that Numenera's character connections were "better than Fate's aspects" because they tell you how the characters are related. Fun fact: the connections in Cypher games have zero mechanical weight and are just fluff. Which is fine, but games like Fate and *World make those connections matter because of the mechanical weight.

I spent the 2-hour demo of Numenera I was in doing pretty much nothing because (among a host of other reasons) I was the fighty-guy and there was nothing to fight.

It doesn't help that Numenera combat is SO BORING to boot. A Glaive will usually be doing the same damage with the same maneuver (the one decent maneuver chosen from a list of six or so mostly-trap options) every round. There are a few choices that require spending some pool higher than your Edge so you can invest hit points directly towards trying to win rather than just having them lost by attrition but mostly it's just 'repeat what I did last round, verbatim'. Any extra description or attempts to do more interesting moves or use the environment to advantage will require the GM to make a ruling on the fly and probably accomplish nothing. If you're trying to conserve your hitpoints I mean Might pool against damage you definitely can't use any particularly risky moves, so if your native damage is below the armor threshold of an enemy, you're just going to be rolling over and over hoping for a 19 or 20.

Glaives of course are 'balanced' in being this dull by being able to wear heavier armor. Other classes can't do this/take more fatigue because ~reasons~. They'll just have to cry themselves to sleep on their piles of magical goodies while floating effortlessly out of reach of combat through mental power alone.

If I were trying to 'fix' the Cypher system for some reason, I'd ditch the classes entirely and just let people choose freely from the lists and carry equal numbers of cyphers. This would include dropping the armor fatigue rules because they're annoying bookkeeping at best. I'd give everyone the Numenera skill for free since it is the only skill that applies to almost all the puzzles in the game (and the puzzles are supposedly the main source of XP) and give a few more skill picks generally so you don't have one guy with 'can swim' as her only skill and another with 'understands ancient mysteries and languages' 'resists mental effects' and 'assessing danger, lies, quality, or function'. I'd also split XP from narrative points because that has been a solved problem for over a decade and probably want to divide some portion of the attribute pools away from being 'hitpoints'.

Of course my natural inclination would be just 'run it in Atomic Robo' of course, but if people insisted.

occamsnailfile fucked around with this message at 15:17 on Feb 16, 2016

Misandu
Feb 28, 2008

STOP.
Hammer Time.
Anyone have any decent TG Podcasts they could recommend? I got a little under halfway through the first episode of The Adventure Zone and it's really not working for me.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

Misandu posted:

Anyone have any decent TG Podcasts they could recommend? I got a little under halfway through the first episode of The Adventure Zone and it's really not working for me.

We have a thread dedicated just for that purpose!

I'm personally a big fan of Roleplaying Public Radio and Oneshot for Actual Plays, and then System Mastery and Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff for general TG-related shenanigans.

Misandu
Feb 28, 2008

STOP.
Hammer Time.

gradenko_2000 posted:

We have a thread dedicated just for that purpose!

I'm personally a big fan of Roleplaying Public Radio and Oneshot for Actual Plays, and then System Mastery and Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff for general TG-related shenanigans.

Thanks! I should have looked a little harder.

theironjef
Aug 11, 2009

The archmage of unexpected stinks.

gradenko_2000 posted:

We have a thread dedicated just for that purpose!

I'm personally a big fan of Roleplaying Public Radio and Oneshot for Actual Plays, and then System Mastery and Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff for general TG-related shenanigans.

drat that thread putting "actual play" in quotes. It's our kryptonite.

01011001
Dec 26, 2012

fool_of_sound posted:

For real though, I've only glanced and Numanera. What's bad about the system?

Balance reasons aside, it's boring and undeveloped.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

The Cypher System also has this weird-rear end thing where the difficulty classes range from 0 (no roll needed) to 10 ("impossible"), but you have to multiply the DC by three to get the actual target number you need to roll on a d20, because heaven loving forbid you don't use a d20.

Glazius
Jul 22, 2007

Hail all those who are able,
any mouse can,
any mouse will,
but the Guard prevail.

Clapping Larry

Kai Tave posted:

Now I don't know how much of this applies to The Strange and how much is specific to Numenera, but Numenera makes a pretty convincing case that Monte Cook hasn't really advanced beyond "guy whose salad days were reinventing D&D with various caster buffs added and a great new idea called passive perception."

Good news! The glaive Vector now no longer has to pick between "attacks at one step worse for bonus damage BUT ONLY WITH BLUNT WEAPONS" and "attacks at one step worse with identical bonus damage BUT ONLY FOR SHARP WEAPONS". It's all weapon agnostic and still compares unfavorably with just generically exerting yourself to do more damage.

The Vector is also described as being no mere street thug but a truly inspirational leader. Below the spoiler is how many Vector powers actually help lead people, but see if you can work it out before you peek.

One! It's level 2 and lets the Vector help someone else perform a physical action and ONLY a physical action without giving up their whole turn to do so.

Evil Mastermind
Apr 28, 2008

Glazius posted:

The Vector is also described as being no mere street thug but a truly inspirational leader. Below the spoiler is how many Vector powers actually help lead people, but see if you can work it out before you peek.

One! It's level 2 and lets the Vector help someone else perform a physical action and ONLY a physical action without giving up their whole turn to do so.
Well, I think the idea is that the "being able to lead" would be part of your class or whatever they call it, but said classes are so ridiculously narrow if you take one that makes you good at leading you're going to be poo poo at pretty much everything else.

Like, no matter how good you are at glaiving you can't really dual-wield effectively unless you're the guy "Who Wields Two Weapons", but taking that class means your only "trick" is that you dual wield. If you're the guy who uses guns ("Licenced to Carry") you never get a John Woo-esque equivalent.

Oh, and since I'm here there is a "Leads" class, and even then his only options for giving (mechanical) aid are at rank 1, where he can make another character "skilled" in a single task for one action (which is useless if said character is already skilled), and at rank 4, where he gives everyone who hears his rousing speech a free effective level.

Bedlamdan
Apr 25, 2008
This is why I'm making a space-wizard in Tides of Numenera :mrgw:

ProfessorCirno
Feb 17, 2011

The strongest! The smartest!
The rightest!

Bedlamdan posted:

This is why I'm making a space-wizard in Tides of Numenera :mrgw:

I cannot wait for that game to be loving awful.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy

ProfessorCirno posted:

I cannot wait for that game to be loving awful.

But but but my kickstarter pledge :( I backed that game on the basis of "I know nothing about tabletop D&D and Monte Cook's design cred, but Planescape Torment was pretty good, right?"

Kai Tave
Jul 2, 2012
Fallen Rib
To be fair, Planescape Torment's gameplay was also kinda lovely to "just there" but that's not why it's fondly remembered anyway, so.

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That Old Tree
Jun 24, 2012

nah


Kai Tave posted:

To be fair, Planescape Torment's gameplay was also kinda lovely to "just there" but that's not why it's fondly remembered anyway, so.

I guess it's appropriate Cook's lazy/cargo-cult RPG have a video game tie-in that's also lazy/cargo-cult.

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