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The other reason Apopcalypse World has sex moves is because - and I can't remember where I read this - the genre AW is emulating isn't Mad Max, it's "what if Mad Max was a HBO prestige drama". Messy, emotional, character-focused dynamics and dysfunctional relationships and deeply personal power struggles and people making decisions out of petty hatred or horniness or ambition. AW is a great fit for "standard" post-apocalypse because you only need to tone down the intensity of one half of the genre concept. But equivalently, to get from AW to get from AW to Monsterhearts you only need to swap out the other half.
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Oct 30, 2019 04:26
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:23 |
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As far as I can tell, Demonologist is in the book almost entirely because Spire (at least when my group played it) is often a game about the PCs willingly doing Extremely Dumb poo poo when presented with the opportunity to because they're in over their head /ambitious / have deep-seated issues. One of the Spire published adventures that lots of groups will start with, Eidolon Sky, features eidolons and demonology (as should be obvious from the name) in a fairly prominent role and it's pretty likely that PCs will end up getting their hands on the opportunity to become demonologists. And if you plop a group of Spire PCs down in front of a discordant voice emanating from a sphere of twisted metal that says it will grant them POWER beyond imagining at least one of them will be saying yes before the GM can blink. And so it's nice to have some sort of rules for it, optimally ones that remain faithful to the fact that getting into Demonology is a really dumb idea and causes more problems than it solves because it solves 0 problems that aren't "I need to do a suicide bombing" Given all of that, the rules are pretty good for their purpose because unlike Chaos, you can still walk away at basically any stage. taking demonologist advances never forces you to do demonology, it's not a poison pill corruption mechanic where once you take it it will slowly drag your character further in, it's just access to a catalogue of bad deals. And it's pretty black and white that doing it is a lovely idea, but... well, you knew that out of character when you said yes, you're here because you wanted your character to be unable to resist poking the bear. a computing pun fucked around with this message at 01:23 on Nov 23, 2019 |
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Nov 23, 2019 01:19
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Night10194 posted:Unless, of course, you roll the 'Becomes a Traitor' result on the Mind table, which is part of why I'm not fond of the Mind Fallout table. I agree the two sample Mind fallouts are probably the harshest of the listed examples, but "Becomes a traitor" is actually a severe fallout available under both Silver and Shadow as well as Mind. And pretty much every Severe fallout is very seriously not a thing you want - when I played Spire, at least, we treated it as "this will 100% kill you, unless maybe..." in the same way that running out of hit points generally kills you; whether you die of "you bled to death" or you die of "you went crazy from the stress and now you're helping the aelfir, you're basically an NPC, make a new character" is kind of equivalent. (then we got like 4 severe fallouts over the course of the campaign and none of them actually killed us, just changed us in interesting and occasionally horrible ways, but we didn't stop thinking of it as death.) Also it has a whole deal about how you should feel free to create your own fallout and all of the listed ones are just suggestions, it's not a table one rolls on, you'll never get "now you become a traitor" unless the GM specifically chooses to give it to you, etc.
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Nov 24, 2019 02:03
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wiegieman posted:Fate does social combat quite well. You have a social stress track just like anything else and when it fills up you get arrested. Yeah, but Fate doesn't do social combat with any degree of gameplay depth. It does narratively compelling social combat, but that's not the same thing as mechanically deep or tactically interesting. And the reason it can do it so well is precisely because it doesn't try to mechanically represent anything about the unique nature of communication and debate as a medium of conflict.
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Nov 29, 2019 02:32
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wiegieman posted:Well, it treats a social conflict the same way it treats any other conflict. You can cause Social stress or consequences by having your stealth person sneak into the bad guy's mansion and steal his secret plans to destroy the community center so you can distribute them to various news outlets, and you can tag him with negative aspects by using your own social skills to show him up at that same party in front of the movers and shakers. He can fire back at you by using his own social abilities (probably augmented by stunts representing large amounts of money and lawyers) to mess with your life and get you foreclosed on or something. Yeah, I know; I much prefer the way Fate handles it. I'm just saying that that particular way doesn't have much *mechanical* depth. In terms of mechanics, a social conflict goes basically like a physical conflict in that you make a few Create an Aspect actions to build yourself some aspects with free invokes and then burn those off to hit with a couple of hard Attack actions to force the other guy to give or be taken out and there's not much more to it. Which is fine! Fate's not a tactics game, the interesting stuff is mostly in the fiction, not the mechanics. i'm just saying, it's able to do social conflict well because it does it without actually mechanicising any simulation of what one does to win a debate or run a newspaper smear campaign or whatever; it leaves its mechanics very abstract. While, like, say, Shadowrun, with an equally simple core mechanic of "make an opposed die roll based on skill, compare results" has a few hundred pages of rules on suppressing fire and recoil compensation and flanking and damage from explosions in confined spaces vs. open spaces, and it does all this in service of trying to make the mechanics non-abstractly simulate sci-fi gunfights. (Which it partially succeeds at, at the cost of being a billion pages long and incredibly fiddly) and to my knowledge literally every game that has ever tried to provide simulationist mechanical backing that's specific to social conflict has either made something that feels nothing like actual social conflict does (i.,e, fails at simulation) and is also lovely to play.
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Nov 29, 2019 07:27
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I mean, that's an issue if firearms aren't the primary instrument of violence also. In real life not many people can get stabbed with a dagger and remain alive for long, even though the rules say they only do 1d4 damage. The problem is that people are fine with a fantasy game abandoning realistic and (for most purposes) punishing and unfun wound simulation but seem to expect otherwise from a science-fiction game. Possibly because people are more familiar with the actual real-world lethality of guns than they are with swords.
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Apr 24, 2020 11:59
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Pakxos posted:I agree, big scary god-AI isn't important to Lancer, but the fact is the the backbone of the setting rests on exploited sapient beings, utterly controlled by the Union, as per the Corebook, NHPs literally allow the Union to exist: So I agree that NHPs are (probably intentionally) a somewhat fraught issue as presented in the book, but I also think the actual nature and mechanics of them are (also probably intentionally) vaguely-defined enough in the book that there are a bunch of valid readings and 'the Union are the Space Confederacy and the NHPs are slaves' is one that requires a bunch of supposition and outright construction of facts that aren't in the text (at least, not where I can find them; i'm not the greatest Lancer lore guy). Which isn't at all to say it's an unreasonable read, either. Every reading requires a bunch of supposition and outright construction, that's my point. I don't think it's incoherent, for example, to assume that unshackled NHPs are fundamentally non-conscious and non-sapient and there's no greater moral duty towards them than there is towards random proteins and organic compounds that could be used to create life but aren't alive. The text outright states that unshackled NHPs don't meet any of the conditions of consciousness as understood by humans. I don't think its a super unreasonable read to take that as true, and from there to assume that shackled NHPs are not in fact exploited - the text certainly doesn't say anything much about them being coerced in any way into providing labor, and all the language about shackling talks about restricting them to think in terms of causality and human logic, not, like, forcing them to obey all instructions. (Again, I don't think it's unreasonable to take the reading that it's false or insufficient and that Union society is basically hypocritical, i'm just saying its not the only coherent reading).
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Jul 14, 2021 07:13
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| # ¿ Apr 25, 2024 20:23 |
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I feel like some of people are kind of saying "Hey, it's kind of lame that Lancer has X, which, if interpreted as Y, an interesting science-fiction concept, should have a bunch of moral / social / political implications that aren't present in the setting, making the setting feel incoherent and full of holes." and then, upon learning that X is not intended to be interpreted as Y, are saying "Hey, it's kind of lame that Lancer doesn't really explore science-fiction Y in a particularly significant way, it only has X, a much simpler form that doesn't have deep setting implications or the potential for moral / social / political stories to be told about it!" see for example the discussion on homunculi where, following the creator showing up and saying "they're not in any way conscious or capable of sentience, they're the equivalent of an encylopedia entry that's capable of speaking in the person's voice, they're not intended to be real AIs", some people were... annoyed that this was the case? it's like they they'd already decided it mishandled the issue of AI copies of people and interpreted finding out that it actually didn't feature the issue at all as: a cop-out to escape from mishandling the issue. I don't mean to say that the game's writing couldn't be a lot better at clarifying exactly what it means in terms of all these concepts it's dancing around and a very legitimate criticism is that it's unclear enough that it's really easy to come to the conclusion it's either incoherent or has a bunch of unfortunate implications, and I don't mean to say that it does actually always put its foot in the right place, I just think that it's not being read entirely fairly here. (also, if homunculi were in any way sentient this would 100% violate the First Contact Accords also and bring RA down on the heads of anyone who tried to make one, since it would literally be 'an AI version of a human intelligence,' the exact thing RA doesn't want people to do.)
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Jul 16, 2021 12:44
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