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I am very sorry to inklesspen for loving up the part numbers in my x-risks posts. I didn't realise you did the archiving manually I thought you had a bot or something that jsut did them in sequential order. I will do it properly next time and remember to keep track.
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Sep 10, 2019 05:07
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wizard life hack: interested in that 500 orb book? get it with a lock on it instead, and get it for 150 orbs! edit: the wicked keys are a direct rip from a china mieville book, as i think most of the setting is juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 05:02 on Sep 16, 2019 |
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Sep 16, 2019 04:53
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yea i don't know how killing someone makes you less human. putting yourself in danger (and your own pilgrimage) to kill someone who is threatening a someone else's life is generally regarded as a very human virtue. if WW wasn't busy inserting artificial angst into everything then doing that should have finished the other promethean's pilgrimage too.
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Sep 18, 2019 04:23
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rodbeard posted:I don't know with how overwrought and angsty ever other WoD book is I'm glad there's one that's just gently caress it I'm going to eat this guy and call it an ironic punishment. I would love to be running around as a slasher movie villian while everyone else is trying out their Anne Rice rollplay. i'd like it if it was actually like that but the tone of beast the game ruins it. its not 'gleefully being a monster' like something like Black Crusade, its playing as the edgy anti-hero of some bad teenage fanfiction. you, the player, are supposed to buy that beasts are good guys somehow. it ruins the potential fun of being an actual monster. what the beasts actually are is also very poorly conveyed, so its not clear if you're a human who has special powers, a monster who looks like a human and can shed your human form for a bit to do monster things, or if other people can see you doing monster things. the fiction in the book seems to vary between 'you actually turn into a giant' or 'you have a jojo-style stand that nobody but you can see'
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Sep 19, 2019 00:12
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Zhyhyzak started out her life destroying a pussy, and resolved to spend the rest of her life destroying pussies. I think the fact that she wears weird dominatrix outfits but isnt even slightly interested in being seductive is a unique twist on the usual 'evil dominatrix' trope. Also, i would like to marry her.
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Sep 20, 2019 04:14
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Juggalo Baby Coffin's Invisible Sunquote:Few people know this, but the thermometer has not two directions, but four. In addition to Hot and Cold there are Rungus and Blode. Many vislae feel twitchy in a room that is too Rungus, or sleepy in a room too Blode. You can counter extreme Rungus by burning snook-rope, which burns Blode with a Noops (the secret colour between brown and green) coloured flame. Snook-rope can only be purchased from the Snook-man, who appears to Vislae in the room between the toilet and the kitchen. is this how you do game design?
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Aug 5, 2020 08:35
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JcDent posted:Chapter 8: Bazaar, pt. 5 i have to say this is one of the dumbest items i've ever seen. why would you attach a massive heavy grinder to your gun? they already had a gun that fires out a spray of scrap and gravel irl, it was called a blunderbuss and you just put the scrap and gravel in the front of it with some gunpowder
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Aug 9, 2020 12:41
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Nessus posted:There's a gun like that in Fallout and I'm gonna guess that will not be the last time this comparison could be drawn. i think the one in fallout at least uses the crank to charge a battery, rather than uh grind rocks into powder to make them into worse ammunition?
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Aug 9, 2020 21:25
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Nessus posted:True, I think there's a gun in Fallout that fires random garbage and there's another gun that you have some kind of a charger for. So this is clearly inspired by that without being exactly like that. it'd be really easy to make the grinder into something less stupid and more fun though. make it a shotgun instead of a handgun, put the grinder in the stock and give it some mechanical benefit. people love scavenging and crafting in post-apoc games, and I know in fallout I have a lot more fun using the junky weapons like the laser musket than I do with the production stuff. like if you could grind up different materials for different benefits to the gun, that would be cool. maybe the standard shot is metal debris and gravel from the floor, and you have an infinite supply of that, but if you grind up rocks or metal or fancier materials you get modifiers to your damage. maybe there's even different teeth you can get to put in the grinder to cut the metal into meaner shapes and make people bleed or suffer penalties from being full of little splinters. its very hard to tell what anything actually does in degenesis, but it seems like the grinder is just another gun with a different type of themeing rather than something interesting. i have had a look at the book myself and the entire thing seems to be arranged with pure contempt for the reader so i really respect JcDent processing it into something comprehensible. degenesis seems like it suffers from having a whole shitload of ideas that it does nothing with. theres really cool poo poo like the palers and a bunch of the backstory, but they're underdeveloped mechanically because they're sharing space with dogshit like the apocalyptics. I don't understand why. if it was focused on the palers you could have a really neat game that was a combo of fallout and paranoia with weird psychic alien fungus stuff to fight.
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Aug 10, 2020 06:25
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james raggi hates women because his surname is what scooby doo calls his best friend
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Oct 10, 2020 20:23
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i had to do a retrospective of Crossed for a writing gig, which involved me reading a great deal of Crossed, and i probably hate garth ennis more than any person alive because of it. there was a run of Crossed written by keiron gillen, who (at least to my awareness, idk if its changed) was/is a pretty progressive guy, which surprised me. i'd noticed that there was some sort of sexual violence in every issue of crossed, and there was in gillen's run too, but it was always some sort of weird scenario in his stuff (giant prehistoric chicken on man, for example). i ended up speculating that the publishers had some sort of rape quota for issues of crossed, and that gillen was trying to technically adhere to that quota, but didn't want to depict women being victimized. i was mostly joking. i later ended up talking to a comics writer who had submitted a script to avatar press (publishers of crossed and other garbage) and got sent back feedback saying that it was great, but could he add some rapes? they really do have a quota for it. Crossed did help me quantify the difference between something that is dark and horrible but has some sort of artistic merit, and something that is just dark and horrible for the sake of it and/or titillation. like "it's dark because that's realistic" actually means "it's realistic only as long that aids it being dark". in crossed the totally-not-zombies are just evil humans... until that would mean they'd die off quickly. they're just human, but they can still track the protagonist through the desert while naked, shoeless, and with third degree burns over one side of their body. because if the zombie died from that it would be good for the heroes. similarly in this weird porno-mirror module the bandits are rapey, because that's 'realistic', but you can't disable the trap like you'd realistically be able to, because that would make it less dark anything that would help make the situation less dark will always be arbitrarily prevented in some way. like in this mirror dungeon thing you'd think the book of uuuh courtroom snuff sketches would be a get out of jail free card for the PCs to not have to degrade themselves right? but no, the porno spirits get bored of that super fast. depraved snuff art is boring to them, what they actually want to see is 5 different PCs halfheartedly fondle themselves, because the writer is lazy and wants to force the option that makes the PCs (and their players) most miserable. i wont be surprised if at the end of this, as in every single crossed story, the PCs will end up being forced to make some sadistic choice at the end of this module. like to stop the mirrors spreading you have to leave hannah in porno hell forever. because the good guys triumphing without some kind of horrible cost is unrealistic.
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Oct 12, 2020 08:40
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Libertad! posted:TBF this sounds like something that would happen when two people get high at a wild sex party for new experiences, but they take the wrong drugs and end up doing something completely different than what's expected but have a good time nonetheless. last newyears i was at a party where a bunch of people dropped acid and they were like "heh yeah we're probably just gonna spend the evening freakin making out and doing sex stuff" then the next time i saw one of them she was tipping out a jar of expensive salt into the sink to use as a drinking vessel, then one of the others started weeping and feeding me chocolates. i feel like that scenario would fit on the table.
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Oct 13, 2020 06:14
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i hate to go back to Crossed but when i wrote my articles about it the biggest response i got was basically 'lol triggered'. i'd spent a fair amount of time articulating that i wasn't just offended or grossed out, but that the product itself was absolute dogshit. i'm a long time death metal and horror movie fan, i've seen lots and lots of over the top, gross stuff. but you can still make a distinction between something that is gross and has artistic or even just entertainment value, and something that is just greasy exploitation. i think with horror, like with comedy, there is kind of a punching up/punching down dichotomy. like what is happening to who, and is it being presented as horrific or funny. and i think this module in its portrayal of sexual violence (which i really don't like to see in anything at all) is definitely doing it for some combination of voyeuristic pleasure for some, and to intentionally cause discomfort to players. it's bad, and not just because it's 'offensive' but because it's designed for a GM to commit psychological battery on their players with
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Oct 15, 2020 04:29
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my favourite character i ever played as was a skeleton bard called Bone Rockin' Charles who played the xylophone on his own ribs and that game seems perfect for him. his backstory was his soul was bound into a skeleton by a lich because regular automaton skeletons are really lovely musicians, and the lich wanted lo-fi bardic beats to study and chill to
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Jun 18, 2022 19:24
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PurpleXVI posted:I can't really pin down what it is about Shattered, while many of the elevator pitches for these places should sound interesting, it feels like something just continually undermines them, but I can't put my finger on it. yeah i genuinely wish books would stop including backer characters. i guess they rely on big spenders to meet the goals but having every setting now feel like its 50% protagonists-by-weight. you want the NPCs in an area to be actual NPCs a GM might want to use in their game, what would a GM want to use any of these bounty hunters for? they seem designed to be some owod-rear end intrusive gm npcs, but i feel like if you're an intrusive-gm-npc-type-gm you'd probably have your own edgy OC to fill that role. i always like when the npcs are gross little freaks called like 'Sebacious Fluids, the Third' who runs a potion stall and abuses his own potions so much he turned into a blobby goo man. that's the type of side character you want to add some fun tone to a city, so you have like a deck of guys you can pull out instead of having to come up with absolutely everything on the fly when your players ask about an incidental guy you mentioned and had no plans for.
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Nov 15, 2022 18:01
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stuff that cites hills have eyes and texas chainsaw massacre as influences always miss the major themes of those movies. the cannibals aren't the way they are because they're innately evil, they're people who've become degraded by the actions of the world around them (nuclear testing and abandonment by the govt in hills have eyes, the decline of non-megascale farming & small rural towns in TCM). they're people whove been mistreated and abandoned by the wider world and have ended up depraved partially out of isolation and partially to survive. the major theme is the idea of the beneficiaries of a society (hippy teens in one case and a white picket fence suburbs family in the other) ironically falling prey to the rejects of that same society. its like the kid from Omelas breaking out and eating people. but the ogres here are just uhh evil i guess? because they're evil? and gross.
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Nov 17, 2022 07:48
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i love the d&d approach to player races. it's just the 'we have [x] at home / the [x] at home' meme. like monte cook would hear a player saying they want to be a rakshasa and go 'oh no but a rakshasa is a high level demon inappropriate for a player' and set about crafting something like: monte cook posted:poo poo Rakshasa and then he leans back and breathes a sigh of relief, knowing he's captured everything the player liked about a tiger demon, but maintained the sacred balance of the game. just the weird tension of like, for some reason trying to be simulationist in a lot of ways while also being very arbitrary and artificial about how the player interacts with that simulation. We insist on counting your character's armour suit and their natural armour seperately, so your robot can't wear armour because that would be unfair to everyone who isn't a robot. Never mind that part of the appeal of being a robot in a fantasy world is being able to wear goofy fantasy stuff as a robot. they create settings with a like star wars variety of creatures and intelligent beings but then only let you play as the star trek aliens of the setting. like the fun of a simulationist game is in applying the rules of that simulation to your advantage, but d&d's designers are terrified of the players doing that. I don't know if its a holdover from an older, more adversarial type of DMing where they're terrified of the players 'getting one over' on the game. Like fun is a zero sum game or something. I like fully understand that a level of balance is necessary for a game to be really satisfying to win at, but I don't understand why you would nail the fantasy of your world to the rules of your game while not really integrating the two properly. d&d has all these fabulous and creative ideas in the various settings and splatbooks but they're all behind a velvet rope. Like yeah there are good vampires in the setting, but you can't be one. There are good mind flayers, but you can't be one. Even a monster that's just basically 'a mean guy' like a bugbear is controversial. It jostles you out of the world of the game when you run into these obviously artificial parts, like finding an invisible wall in a videogame. I'm glad that games now are decoupling the fluff from the crunch a little more. Games like Lancer where the rules define the mechanics of your character, but you're free to justify why they have those abilities yourself. Like why could a level 1 warlock not just be a baby beholder or something? idk it's been a lifelong frustration of mine because i grew up in the 90s where all media was about heroic monsters and creatures of various types teaming up to fight evil, so it always seemed very weird to me that so many RPGs forbid that explicitly. I know DMs can (and have for me) let you refluff stuff, but the fact you can ignore the rules if you want isnt really a defense of a game. I liked that 5e advanced manual that someone wrote up a page or so back (i cant scroll enough in the post preview thing to see who it was sorry) seemed to be moving away from 'we must simulate your racial physiology' to 'hey you're a nonspecific race but maybe you worked at a factory and got skills' Nessus posted:Armor in D&D has always been weird because "armor" suggests that it's actively getting in the way of blows, but from the very beginning it always functioned as more a warding-off-damage field, by making it hard to "actually" hurt you. Presumably some of the misses on a guy with a high/low AC (depending on era) were actually "hits" (probably glancing blows) that just didn't accomplish anything but making a loud bonking sound. However, if you did get hit clean, you just took the same damage as always. For a war game this is probably a really good general abstraction rather than having to take four points off THIS damage and two points off THAT damage but Anti-Knight Steel Piercing Elf Shot goes straight through iron and steel (but not leather or bronze)... ive never really understood why armor wasnt just damage reduction in d&d. its a good enough abstraction of how armour works irl. juggalo baby coffin fucked around with this message at 16:04 on Dec 14, 2022 |
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Dec 14, 2022 15:59
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PurpleXVI posted:Heroic or anti-hero monsters rule and we need more of them, it always gets some love out of me when a bunch of weirdo creatures with not a single point of biological similarity nonetheless team up to handle something that's evil to all of them. that's actually a good point i hadn't thought of. i was also thinking like, it would be a bit weird for you to keep having blows that exceed your damage reduction (ie piercing it) without the armour falling apart. and then i thought 'well what if you had it so after successfully dealing damage, a subsequent attack roll of the same exact number ignored DR to represent hitting the same spot where a hole had been made' ...and then i thought 'this idea is turning into a loving nightmare'
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Dec 14, 2022 16:12
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one thing d&d exposes is that the way the games stat system works is incapable of portraying a multicultural world. charisma is a fine stat provided you're in a culture that is just 'various types of humans w different ears and hair', but like in real life a person who is considered very charismatic in one culture might be very annoying to another culture. all goblins get -cha so do they all just dislike each other? i mean i guess so for goblins but based on the simulation the rules create, any given monster will be more easily swayed / seduced / tricked by a member of another species as their own. especially since its a medieval-ish setting so mass, rapid transit isnt a thing yet, so its gonna be like it is in england where each town has its own accents and mannerisms and dislikes its neighbours for being too showy or too reserved or too slick or too stuffy. i know theres been retcons and various justifications for CHA as a stat. Like it's some kind of ephemeral 'force of personality' quantifier, unless the thing you're having force of personality about is like monkly ascetism in which case it's WIS. I guess it exposes a tension in d&d's design between 'being a simulation' and 'being a game'. like the stat adjustments for monster races are definitely just there to make them a more appropriate creature for players to fight, not to try and be authentic about fairly portraying them as an individual with as much depth as a PC. I guess I'm just saying kinda obvious stuff out loud, I just haven't really thought like that much about D&D beyond individual mechanics sucking.
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Dec 17, 2022 20:11
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an rpg with realistic plate armour would be interesting, since basically the only way to kill a guy in full plate without a high powered rifle is to grapple them and pry the plates apart or find a weakspot where you can stab them with a rondel or misericorde or something, daggers that are basically triangular in profile and more like a tempered railroad spike than a cutting weapon. or beat them enough that they get concussed from the impact alone i guess it would further widen the gap between fighters and mages since it would be easier to counter full plate if you can just like heat it up or shoot lightning or acid at it.
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Dec 23, 2022 13:15
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Halloween Jack posted:White Wolf notoriously put a Goth Kid faction in Mage. Yet when they did the splatbook, there was barely any understanding of the music or the scene or anything else connected to it. It was bizarre. its because while the white wolf audience might include goth kids, it was written by 40 year old men in the shape of a bean
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Jan 22, 2023 14:59
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Mage in all its incarnations has always been weird to me, because white wolf games are for like Darke Chyldren and stuff but Mage is always super bitchy about the idea you might want to be one of the evil mages. like isnt your whole company made of the idea of letting people play the normally evil stuff? why make cool super evil mages with unreality powers and then be like 'if you play one you become an NPC sorry'
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Aug 11, 2023 18:40
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The 'turn into an npc' punishment in white wolf games is also really weird. Usually that comes up in more like traditional games when you would become a vampire or illithid or like something opposed to the playstyle of a classic adventuring party. And also like, for a couple of those the transformation is more a 'killed and replaced' deal, where the original character's soul has departed and its just their body being driven around by someone else. but in white wolf poo poo you're like, already a monster. So instead the 'becoming an NPC' thing is 90% the time just a case of the character being insufficiently angsty about being a monster. There's no real change in life state, its just policing the players behavior. Which is not really needed, because most players are probably on board for the designers fantasy as-is, and the ones who want to do the other thing will just do the other thing, so it just makes the designers seem controlling. If a group thinks they can do something fun with an 'unintended' playstyle then let them, and if they don't think they can they won't do it. nwod mage does a bit more of a convincing job of turning players away from 'unintended' playstyles by extensively statting out the abyss mages and their process of becoming one, and just makes it abject poo poo nobody would ever want. which kind of uh raises more questions, like 'why would anyone ever do this?'. if you introduce dangerous, forbidden powers people are gonna want to play with them. regard it as a success that anyone wants to play with something you wrote, don't get mad. although as a writer who has done both fiction writing and rpg writing, i feel like a fair amount of people in the industry are people who would like to write a novel, but thats hard, so they write the outline of their idea as an rpg adventure so other people have to fill in the blanks. that way you get the praise of having cool ideas without having to do all the annoying unfun parts of fiction writing. i would never do anything like that myself though
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Aug 12, 2023 19:54
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Fish Heads posted:Albrecht is clearly Garou-Anon, Seventh Gen is being systematically arrested and brought before military tribunal, TRUE Silverfang patriots are in control. WWG1WGA (werewolf go one, wolf go all)
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Aug 13, 2023 12:18
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a smash bros rpg setting of just all the overpowered metaplot characters from different franchises. It probably already exists, but I would like to see adam smasher from cyberpunk goomba stomp samuel haight or caine or uh... elminster? I don't know if elminster counts, I remember him showing up to railroad sometimes but D&D npcs tend to have pretty lame stats.
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Aug 14, 2023 17:15
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