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Comrades is definitely an interesting game! While I have some critiques about it, overall I think it’s a very interesting piece and am looking forward to this F&F of it!
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Nov 23, 2019 19:16
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Joe Slowboat posted:Well, there’s also Spire, which is good. The main point of ideological difference between Spire and Comrades is that Spire lacks a campaign framework for a successful revolution. Spire doesn’t imagine what the setting would look like if the drow actually pushed back against the aelfir, but Comrades does imagine what it’d look like if the eponymous group achieved victories.
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Nov 23, 2019 20:39
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Soth in Ravenloft was interesting as a sort of evil Fisher King, locked in eternal slumber while his realm became a sort of dark fairy tale land, in contrast to the Gothic/Hammer Horror of most of the core.
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Nov 28, 2019 20:09
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Jerik posted:You're describing his status as he appeared in the module where he escaped Ravenloft, and where he was inactive due to the apathy that eventually led the Dark Powers to let him go. But he only fit that description for the length of that single module; prior to that he was as active as any other darklord, and there was nothing particularly fairytailish about his realm. And it seems not to be the just-before-release slumbering Soth that appealed to most Ravenloft fans, but the original actively evil Soth who... I'm sorry, still doesn't strike me as particularly interesting, even in comparison to most of the other 2E darklords. I guess it's probably just that (due to his origins in Dragonlance fiction) he did have a more detailed backstory than any other early darklord aside from Strahd himself, but I still don't think that backstory made him into a compelling character. (Then again, I've never read the Dragonlance books in which he originally appeared; maybe he was a more compelling character there.) Weird! I like rose and thorn dark fairy tale stuff a lot more than “Strahd but can shoot a 20d6 fireball once per day.” Then again, I’ve always like Ravenloft a lot more for what it could have been than for what it was.
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Nov 28, 2019 20:32
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D&D is, by my understanding, a relatively decent understanding of ship-to-ship naval combat. As for the ubiquity of violence as a tool of conflict resolution, I think it’s a combination of D&D’s prominence and the general ouvre of violence in nerd media. Non action stuff is typically presented as indie or prestige media, but even then there is a tendency on violence, if only as a reflection of the darkness of the human condition.
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Nov 28, 2019 22:43
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PurpleXVI posted:Good luck finding a game that allows for physical violence, doesn't use some variation on Hit Points and isn't unplayable dogshit. ""some variant on hit points" is such a broad statement to be inherently meaningless. There are specific mechanical and thematic issues to the way that Hit Points are presented that are not ubiquitous to games that have some means of determining when a character can't fight anymore.
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Nov 29, 2019 19:21
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There’s also the sheer numbers involved, of hp vs damage dealt, and of the way that the game contextualizes that information. Blood Stress in Spire feels very different from hit points, despite kinda being hit points, because of how the game stresses the roles of violence and how fallout can happen at pretty much any point from any stress, but also it might not. It creates a different dynamic which effects how the game feels and plays and has the effect of making squishy characters feel squishy without actually being in a ton of danger of dying right away. Harm clocks function in a similar way, but they’re more predictable and in Apocalypse World, they’re linked to the idea of the doomsday clock, creating this thematic connection between a character’s death and the end of the world, while making both things as given possibilities within the setting and the rules. Yet, with a lot of armor, PCs can take a ton of punishment and a combat focused character can do a lot of damage, yielding a final result that feels far more cinematic than violence in Spire.
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Nov 30, 2019 00:57
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I think a core problem at work here is that D&D and games of its ilk are semi-modal. Combat and non-combat are mostly distinct, but there are some resources that effect both or either, and you have a limited selection of these resources. This results in situations where characters can over-invest in non-combat stuff and wind up with limited combat utility, which means that bypassing non-combat challenges via RP means that those resources are essentially wasted. The real options here are to go either fully modal or non-modal. The latter would be something like PbtA where everything is handled roughly the same (and there is also enough mechanical attention paid that even if you can RP around most problems you’re still going to wind up hitting mechanical triggers). The former is probably most closely achieved with D&D 4e, but even then you have the ability score problem which just muddles things.
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Dec 4, 2019 07:25
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A bit late to the party, but LessWrong is full of some genuinely evil people, and are particularly prone to sexually and emotionally abusing the women in their lives, in and least one case to the point of suicide. Then they send their followers after anyone who publicly calls them out for their bad behavior. So, can’t say that I’m particularly see them praised in elfgames books, tbh. Speaking of hyper-rationality, characters, even nonhuman character such as dragons, have emotional inner lives and making choices beyond the most logical and rational one because of their emotional investment is a thing that people do, and calling it a plot hole when these characters don’t behave like emotionless robots is really distressing and ubiquitous.
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Jan 1, 2020 04:04
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Nessus posted:Thri-kreen in Dark Sun have a pretty inhuman mindset with a couple of hard rules (though I do not believe they are Mandated for PCs) yet somehow despite literally being Zorak from Space Ghost, they don't have issues. This is in part because one of their things is that they treat the rest of the party like their family, which gives them all sorts of protections from aspects of Thri-Kreen psychology.
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Jan 15, 2020 07:16
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Tylana posted:Fenneko is great, I wish I could be more like her. Though without the Instagram and Twitter use probably. It was set during the time that the world was stolen, and was mostly about how the Dragon Overlords were loving poo poo up in a truly dramatic fashion. They gave the kender cultural PTSD!
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Jan 28, 2020 04:11
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The thing is, if you ignore the War of Souls novels, the actual SAGA Dragonlance game is actually pretty decent. It’s a lot more lightweight than D&D, but the system is also a lot more elegant than 2e. Moreso, the setting as presented in SAGA is an interesting one. The gods are gone, so it makes sense that its up to mortals to get poo poo done. The dragon overlords might just be MORE DRAGON but they leave a palpable impact on the setting and make for some great final bosses. Basically, as long as you ignore the metaplot, SAGA isn’t bad.
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Jan 29, 2020 01:19
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PurpleXVI posted:Do the Dragon Overlords need to be stabbed with Dragon Overlances? Nah the regular kind will do. You just need Overmuscles to do it.
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Jan 29, 2020 01:26
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So far, my primary disappointment with AoS is the absence of the rest of the human pantheon from WHF. Ranald and Vereena and Ulric really flesh out the world in a way that the pantheon presented in AoS just doesn’t. Still, I do like the points of light concept and could definitely see something run in the setting at some point.
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Jun 13, 2020 00:43
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MonsterEnvy posted:
Like, Sigmar is the only good human god as presented as a major god, so that means that humans are going to have very Sigmary aspects to their character. Like in 40k, how the mono-dominance of the Emperor makes everything have that imperial flavor for humanity. But adding in gods that are more about the other aspects of humanity besides building and war and death can help to, for lack of a better word, humanize the protagonists and the world they exist within. Ranald speaks to the idea that maybe the way to make things better is to break down the order of society, Verena suggests that justice does not lie within empire but within knowledge, Ulric presents a notion that strength can be enjoyable, rather than just a tool to dominate or defeat. Like, I can see that there are a lot of problems in the setting for players to solve, but I feel like the homes that they are protecting are less defined than they were in WHF, which could very well be a matter of longevity. One of the things that Night’s write-ups really brought to the forefront for me is that the Empire and Bretonnia and Kislev were living places with people who were flawed and magnificent but also ordinary in a way that people can relate to. The nature of AoS and Soulbound in focusing on these larger than life characters can make the real-to-life characters be pushed further into the background. Again, I’m saying this as someone who finds the concept quite compelling.
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Jun 13, 2020 03:40
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Yeah, can’t lie, this seems like a real cool dungeon generator.
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Aug 7, 2020 05:58
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I love the skink’s fake snake god a lot, because despite being very fake and made up, he is also strong and real, and he is my friend.
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Sep 6, 2020 09:07
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