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That Old Tree posted:I mean, do you really think they didn't know what mycelium is? Maybe it bothers your particular sensibilities, but it's perfectly cromulent scifi bullshit to me. I think the whole thing has been assembled by a bot, because it reads like breathless nerd word salad.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2023 23:45 |
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Yeah, they're the kind of places you go because you need something, or need to go somewhere in there specifically. I think one of the first Planescape adventure modules (The Eternal Boundary?) has a section set in the City of Brass.
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I disliked the Elemental Chaos as a knee-jerk thing, but then I sat back and realised that it worked a lot better than separating your elemental peas from your corn.
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PurpleXVI posted:Which, honestly, feels kind of like a trend with a lot of the bad guys. Like... they can't ever succeed, the best they can do is to cause a lot of trouble for everyone else while doubling down on their failures. There's no real win state for them. I'm not sure why that bugs me. I guess it just makes them a bit less scary. Honestly to me, many of them just feel... sad, because of that. Libertad! posted:Mors, you reviewed a helluva lot of WoD books over the years. Of all the various whacked out monsters and weirdness you've seen, what's the most broken creature/option/etc you've encountered? Sam Haight, pre-ashtray.
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PurpleXVI posted:In practice the splats, while ostensibly in the same world, really aren't meant to get anywhere near each other for the most part. They aren't involved in each others' metaphysical conflicts(except vaguely, like how the Technocracy would probably love to snuff out Werewolves and Vampires only marginally less than they want to end/brainwash the Mages, and I think Werewolves see Vampires as being kind-of-sort-of related to the Wyrm) Vampires reeked of the Wyrm, and the 'lupines' would shred you if you left the safety of Chronicle City X. Unless you were Gangrel, maybe. Then Werewolf came out and it had city-dwelling tribes, which just made things even more awkward. I think vampires were considered to be very high Banality, due to their stasis. Except for Malkavians, because purple monkey cheese.
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I thought it was the mind-boggling supplement churn TSR had going on during its latter days. I remember seeing softcovers for multiple settings coming out like clockwork each month at one point, plus the 'un-branded' stuff that just seemed to be whatever mostly stuck to the wall that quarter. Edit: And whoever thought 'Radiation! That's such a fun mechanic to play with!' really needs a chatting with.
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I reached a point where I stopped buying Planescape and Dark Sun books because they were shrink-wrapped and I couldn't be certain they weren't just reprints of stuff I already had. I remember seeing ascending AC in a Gamma World book (4th edition?) and wondering why the gently caress they hadn't thought of doing that before. And god, there were some really awkward systems hung off the protruding bits of 2E by the end. I liked Council of Wyrms as a concept, and there are definite hints of a Feat system in its weird usage of proficiencies to unlock natural abilities, but the whole thing fell apart with the slightest amount of poking.
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Nessus posted:I think my uncle has a physical copy of one of the big collections of Every Spell They Ever Published where it is very clear that someone did a find-replace to turn "mage" into "wizard," because a lot of things deal dawizard to things. This remains one of my favourite RPG goofs.
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I'd toss the whole radiation thing completely. I've never met a game where it's remotely fun to deal with radioactivity. Just use it to flavour their Wastelands and Firestorms.
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That explains the video of the guy with the LED-lit replica I saw the other week. Kinda. And Dawn is just tragic.
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Young Freud posted:Rocket pistols and rifles are totally rocket launcher pistols, but there's a big catch that can be easily and totally exploited if you've ever played the SSI games! A catch in the tabletop game, or the SSI game? Because I played the unholy Hell out of Countdown.
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Classic Gold Box trick, right there.
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That is some DM bullshit, right there.
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Midjack posted:What kind of monster kills Buck Rogers over a gun??? The same kind of monster that sacrifices Alias and Dragonbait.
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I really, really like Mountain Maggie and Ms. Morgue. Something horrible sleeping under the Appalachians, with a big 'ol legend to go with? The God Machine's very own cleaner, who can be summoned with an adorable little urban legend ritual? Yes, please.
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"Okay. We go in, kill her, and--" "She's monologuing at that corpse." "...are we getting this on tape?"
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I'm amused that they used the name Rossum.
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poo poo, Niven did that with his Known Worlds monowire sword back in the day. Sure, his had a physical clown nose adhered to the tip, but the effect is the same.
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Do Deviant origins have any mechanical effect? Because... I dunno, that reads like someone just rattled off a list of basic superhero themes.
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Ah, thanks folks! And... yeah. "These are the terms that the conspiracies use for us. We hates them, they're shite."
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The big difference I remember from SR1 and SR2 was twiddling the combat math to make damage staging a two-success affair, rather than the mess of 4M4 and 8M1 and OMG.
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I'd love to know what the actual lore behind the bugs is, because I remember them mentioned in Earthdawn in passing, they were a loving pushover in Queen Euphoria, and then went on to become Challenging poo poo for your Advanced Runners. Also they're ten thousand years early, according to some immortal elf or another. Though possessing entities setting up a Scientology-alike cult was a cute gimmick.
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I was going to ask, 'whatever the gently caress happened to having a deck, having an interface plug, and not needing all of this other verisimilitudinous gear wank', but then I kept reading and realised that I just don't give a poo poo. What a joke.
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Wow, sounds like they nerfed the hell out of good ol' Killing Hands.
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Those critical glitches are downright unplayable.
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I remember as far back as 2E, there were books dedicated to alternative campaigns: Docwagon trauma teams, ecoteurs, things like that. At one point I really wanted to run a Ghostbusters inspired paranormal investigation campaign, because of the Awakenings sourcebook.
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Cooked Auto posted:Shadowrun has sorta run into the same problem as Neuromancer did. Technology and society as well has just managed to run away from the ideas it posit. Or taken it a wholly different direction and thusly has made them look out of place. A thing I feel is really common the Cyberpunk genre as a whole. This is my issue with cyberpunk games tossing the ball further down the timeline. Things get flat-out sillier, and you move further and further away from genre conceits. I see poo poo like 'the world is basically a corporate panopticon' in SR or Eclipse Phase and I sit back and ask, 'Why bother?' Why bother adventuring under this assumption? Why bother -making- it, for that matter? Mind you, I'm old.
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Yeah, Monsterhearts' basic premises are basically everything I utterly hated about high school, with an extra dash of skeeze from the sex moves. Yes, I realise that adolescents have a lot more sex than adults often give them credit for, but that doesn't mean I want to roleplay one, fade to black or no.
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AW reminded me of the trashy post-apocalyptic lit I read as a kid, stuff like Deathlands, loaded with goofy mutants and occasional bits of superscience. Sex was definitely a consideration in those sorts of pulps. MH... I appreciate that it exists, and I don't think it's a bad game, it's just one of the absolute last games I'd ever play. Absolutely not my jam. And I really wish they'd called them 'intimacy moves' in the first place, because my very first brush with AW was something about sex moves that made me write the whole thing off for ages.
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Okay, I really like the Queen.
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The Serpentine reminds me of that wretchedly overcomplicated not-Beast fangame, Leviathan. I'm sure it plays vastly better.
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The Gary Chronicle setup was one thing that's always impressed me about early Vampire.
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It's probably because of the collateral damage from the gods punching down.
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Leraika posted:Today I found out that more than one person in the world played hit video game Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure. I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending.
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Well yeah. Batman is a 1%er, and Spider-Man lives with his aunt.
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There were a couple of weird Dragonlance side-scrollish games, but the majority were running on the Gold Box engine developed for Pool of Radiance, yeah.
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Aquatic elves got a malus to Wisdom, because 'living underwater leads to two-dimensional thinking'. I'm pretty sure the author apologised for that book, years later.
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Have fun routing the living, Skeleton Warrior! Edit: I kind of wish I had my hands on the Time of the Dragon boxed set. It detailed the far side of Krynn, which was very much not Dragonlance. For one thing, the poo poo the gnomes built worked, very well. Bieeanshee fucked around with this message at 17:54 on Nov 30, 2019 |
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That's one of the reasons I always detested level drain: it was meant to scare the players, not the characters.
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# ¿ Mar 23, 2023 23:45 |
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Zereth posted:see also those worms that burrow into your brain if you try listening at a door loving Ear Seekers. THey actually statted those little ear-prophylactics in the 2E Thieves' Handbook. Gave something like a +5 to Hear Noise, because it was like holding a glass up to a door.
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