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If the argument here is that TTRPGs shouldn't have stuff like "Knife that can cut through anything, even abstract concepts like 'beauty'," because despite their presence and successful implementation in many works of fiction, the interactive nature of TTRPGs and the almost-invariably semi-competitive nature of the player-GM relationship makes them inevitable sources of strife during play, I feel like the only answer is "But what about people who like that sort of thing in fiction and want it in their games?" It's in the source material. It's hard to make work in play, but it's in the source material; some players and some games are going to prioritize putting-in-the-poo poo-from-the-source-material-we-like over eliminating potential player/GM strife points. Not every game has to be written for every audience.
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Nov 9, 2019 23:59
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Also, in the context of Exalted 2nd Edition, animals only have po souls; also also, the Exaltation seems to root itself in the po, rather than the hun as might be expected and the hungry ghost left behind by a dead Exalt can be massively bloated with power. Earlier editions of Exalted had Autochthon eating hun souls; in Compass: Autochthonia, this was changed to him eating po souls, mostly because the developer figured the readers would recoil from treating Autochthonian reverence for their patron seriously if he's just regularly eating the part of the souls of his followers that the readers are likely to identify with. I don't particularly agree with that creative decision -- I always found it more "interesting" than "repulsive" that Autochthon has to eat the souls of his followers to survive but is otherwise relatively non-hostile -- but enh. (Hi, I edited/proofread Compass: Autochthonia, so if you spot typos they're my fault.)
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May 31, 2020 20:39
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"Heroic ghost eternally hunting a monster through the afterlife and the pair of them are the hun and po soul of some past great hero" is a popular trick.
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May 31, 2020 20:48
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Joe Slowboat posted:The problem with the Ewer of Souls, btw, is that it eats the po soul and, due to this misjudgment, can’t recycle the hun soul. This isn’t a problem in Creation even though the po remains in the body, because in Creation po souls are produced anew with each reincarnation, and as the population grows more hun souls can be created as well. If this seems like an inconsistency created by shifting Autochthon from eating hun souls to eating po souls ("Why are po souls created anew whenever someone's born in Creation but not Autochthonia, also, if Autochthonia can't produce new po souls for people, what's with all the rats? They have po souls only, right?"), well, it is.
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May 31, 2020 20:51
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Anyway yeah the soul thing is kind of a mess, and can be instantly fixed if you just go back to "Po souls spontaneously generate with the creation of new life but Autochthon has finite hun souls and occasionally has to eat them," but then the reader might not be able to like the Great Maker I guess!
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May 31, 2020 20:52
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Joe Slowboat posted:I mean I think the giant soulsteel hell tank full of ghosts with no po soul is a good addition to the setting that makes it clear Autochthon didn’t understand humans as well as he thought he did on a metaphysical level. I don’t think it was really a ‘fix Autochthon’ button for it to exist. The giant hell tank is pretty cool, yeah. The general assumption at the time of writing and development was that making sure all of this is 100% internally consistent wasn't that important because it's some deep in the weeds metaphysical poo poo and most readers are just gonna understand it on the level of "Something something souls shortage, got it."
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May 31, 2020 20:58
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Falconier111 posted:
I'll mostly stay quiet; I'm more interested in seeing what other people have to say about the book than bloviating about my contributions to it. I will mention that I shaved off about 10k words from the draft during editing, which brought us down to our absolutely-no-going-over-this maximum 100k wordcount limit, and then wrote a glossary which we couldn't include because I couldn't shave another 900 words out to make space for it. It was going to describe sodalities as "Crosses between trade guilds and mystery cults," which I think would have been helpful? EDIT: Also, I have to admit, stuff like whether this group or that group has a separate uniform is the sort of thing I can't remember to save my life, unless it's in the context of complaining about artists not following the art notes. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 21:34 on May 31, 2020 |
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May 31, 2020 21:23
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Ithle01 posted:You're welcome. And yeah Stephen said a lot of stuff that helps fill in why stuff is important in Exalted. Like the great funerals that were held after the Usurpation to placate the angry hungry ghosts of the murdered elder exalts. And that the developer thought that making Authocthon only eat lower souls would make him more likeable or some poo poo. Which is dumb as gently caress because it's obvious from even a cursory reading of ghosts and the Underworld that no, you do need a po soul to be a complete human being and a lot of emotion and feeling comes from the lower soul. I don't even know why they added the soul-eating at all, the Authochtonian environment is more than capable of causing a shortage of souls over time due to rampaging gods or accidents or lost soul gems and Gremlin-syndrome corruption so this is a really weird thing to add for no reason beyond stating that god needs blood to live. Which I guess works from a techno-Aztec point of things and that is definitely a facet of Autochtonia, but eh, it feels contrived. The soul-eating thing has been present with Autochthonia since Autochthon's first appearance in the very early 1e supplement Time of Tumult, much predating the details of life in Autochthonia. We didn't add it; it came pre-included.
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May 31, 2020 21:25
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Falconier111 posted:
It turned out later that at the point in time that MoEP Infernals was published, John Chambers was developing Exalted unpaid in what free time he could scavenge while doing full-time work on the WoD MMO. I honestly feel super bad in retrospect for all the poo poo I gave him at the time. Also, funfact: That picture above that's censored? The art note did not instruct the artist to draw the middle priest topless. That was a surprise when the art came back.
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Jun 1, 2020 05:33
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What the gently caress kind of way is that to run a company?
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Falconier111 posted:E: I wish this book had more illustrations because goddamn that’s a wall of text. I think I’ll just be stealing spare ones from the last book. Compass: Autochthonia is 140 pages long and all the other Compasses are 160, even though they all have the same wordcount of 100k words -- the extra pages in the first five compasses account for space dedicated to illustrations that Autochthonia doesn't have because of reduced budget. It was a fun project to work on, and I don't mean that ironically -- difficult, rewarding work, given the conditions.
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Jun 1, 2020 05:40
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LatwPIAT posted:Everything I hear about getting art done for RPGs has left me horrified. A long time ago there was an article about the experience of art-directing this-or-that Magic: The Gathering expansion. I haven't been able to find it for years, but it made an impression when I first read it. Something like a decade ago. If anyone can find it, please post a link. Female characters drawn in pinup poses even though the art notes specifically said not to, pointy ears on characters described as human, "Give this one a darker skin tone" resulting in a character's skin being turned blue.... A good artist who will follow art notes is worth her or his weight in gold. At least the naked priestess pic done on a short turnaround time for a book with a reduced art budget (for the first installment of a project being released serially, so it's not like there was time to send it back) is otherwise appropriate for a picture of the Autochthonian priesthood. Stephenls fucked around with this message at 05:58 on Jun 1, 2020 |
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Jun 1, 2020 05:53
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Cooked Auto posted:Same reason I stay away from history video recommendations on YT, especially when its also military history related. I find it's useful to periodically go through my viewing history and remove everything that I don't want the algorithm to use when recommending me future videos. Mostly this is just cute animal videos, because I think YouTube weighs high-engagement videos more than low-engagement ones when determining what to base future recommendations on, so that e.g. if you watch one mini painting video and one cute video of an adopted squirrel, the recommendation algorithm will go "More people watch cute animal videos than painting videos, so recommendations based on this person's view of the squirrel video are more likely to generate further engagement than recommendations based on the painting tutorial." And, like, sometimes I want to watch a video of a cute baby squirrel, but I don't then want my entire recommendation feed to turn into The Dodo Little But Fierce. But it's also useful after watching videos about history.
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Jun 1, 2020 16:29
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Falconier111 posted:Can I edit this into that post? Shrug
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Jun 1, 2020 17:43
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Mors Rattus posted:I should correct myself. "Hate" may be the wrong word.
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Jun 1, 2020 23:21
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When Compass Autochthonia was first released, it was as four separate parts released one after the other; it was released as one complete book once all four parts were out. Each part got one comic (that art budget again), which explains why some chapters have comics and some don’t. The need to keep all four parts of roughly equal length explains the weird-rear end chapter breakdown it has and why not every nation of the Octet got its own chapter. I do think we made something of a virtue out of necessity, though—breaking the Eight Nations up into themed groups helped pinpoint ways that authors could differentiate them both within and between those groups, and probably, in the end, made for more interesting nation write ups than if they’d just been broken up into eight different chapters.
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Jun 2, 2020 07:05
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The creative goal for Nurad was basically "Make a place players want to invest in, even though they know it's going to be totally hosed very soon," based on observation of audience response to other places in Exalted with a looming doom, of which there are many -- unless a place with a hanging dark fate is super-compelling, most players seem to react to it with "Pfft, why should I let myself care about this? I'll just go somewhere else."
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Jun 3, 2020 02:45
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Jarish also features the piece of art where the art notes did ask for nudity. You can tell it was on purpose because it went to Melissa Uran and focues mostly on a pair of hot men.
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Jun 7, 2020 05:53
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For 3e I pitched remixing Ride; Sail; and Survival as Pilot; Travel (or maybe “Wayfare”); and Oh Please Somebody Think Of A Better Name For This Skill Than “Husbandry” as, respectively, the skills for operating vehicles; the the skill for navigating and surviving on journeys, and the skill for interacting with and training animals, but ultimately was rejected, I think mostly because the game is better if there’s just one skill you can hang most of the being-a-pirate Charms on.
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Jun 9, 2020 07:38
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So I didn't write or even name Xexas and Loran, but I did pitch them; when we were talking about how to make the Eight Nations more differentiated, I said that it was a god drat waste of potential that there weren't bubble-cities and submarine fleets suspended in the Pole of Oil, or stalactite-cities and airship fleets hanging from the ceiling of the Pole of Smoke. I think my intent at the time was to move a pair of the Eight Nations there and out of the Pole of Metal, but having them be two unique cities works better, really.
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Jun 11, 2020 03:23
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Falconier111 posted:Now we move on to the final chapter of the book. Or, we would. For you see, in a book otherwise empty of typos, spelling mistakes, and even grammatical errors, I have discovered a linguistic abomination. Behold! God drat it.
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Jun 11, 2020 23:01
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MuscaDomestica posted:If I remember correctly the Viator of Nullspace's stats worked well in second edition. Its charms prevented it from one being one shotted and had a lot more tricks then generic perfect defenses. Mechanical design by Michael "Nephilpal" Goodwin, after he had written the Infernal Charms. The man knew the system's problems.
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Jun 11, 2020 23:50
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Falconier111 posted:Also, a special shout out to StephenIs for editing and proofreading on the second book (and doing a fine job, too Thanks for doing this. I'm really happy to see that even for someone not familiar with Exalted, we achieved our goal of making Autochthonia a realized, engaging place. I think Compass: Autochthonia is one of the pieces of work I'm most proud of having contributed to. I do have a suggestion. If you want to do an appendix to this, check out the Exalted 1st Edition supplement Time of Tumult -- published in 2002, a decade before we did Compass: Autochthonia -- and do one of these for, specifically, Chapter 4: Crusaders of the Machine God. Time of Tumult is a series of adventures -- Chapters 1 and 2 are a linked pair involving a trip to and then exploration of the setting's equivalent of the Tomb of Horrors, Chapter 3 is kind of a neat thing involving an ocean voyage to an island of exile gods, but Chapter 4 is an open-ended scenario involving Yugash and the Patrolopis of Ot breaking into Creation and the subsequent conflict between the Alchemicals and the peoples of the Southeast. It's 37 pages long and was the first time Autochthonia was mentioned in an Exalted supplement, and in addition to the adventure it has an overview of Autochthonian society, very brief descriptions of the other seven of the Eight Nations, and rules for creating Alchemical characters including five whole Charms, which were intended to serve as inspiration for people to write their own custom Charmsets (until the Alchemicals got their own hardcover three years later, which is okay but I don't recommend checking out). It's the foundational text for the Autochthonian setting, and pretty much everyone who worked on Compass: Autochthonia derived most of their enthusiasm for the project from having read Crusaders a decade earlier and wanting to finally do justice to the setting that had seemed so cool in sketch form years earlier. (Also, given how much time the book spends on Project Razor and the possibility of the various other Nations doing their own versions of it, you might find it interesting to see its original proposed outcome.) Stephenls fucked around with this message at 04:52 on Jun 13, 2020 |
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Jun 13, 2020 04:47
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). If nothing else, I’m glad I wrote this review because I learned quite a bit from you I never would’ve discovered otherwise. If you have any further commentary you’d like to add now that we’re wrapping things up, I’d love to hear it.
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By popular demand posted:Orks are are arguably the sanest, most well adjusted faction in the galaxy. As some Eldar wag put it in some book or other, the orks have already won. They live in paradise.
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Nov 9, 2020 21:07
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So original flavor Marneus is totally going to have survived and be one of the shadowy figures leading the chaos forces, right? Like, we can all see that coming? There's gonna be a fight where Original Marneus is like "You stole my name and left me for dead!" and Tacitus Marneus is going to be all "You were dead and I took your name to honor you!"
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Nov 12, 2020 22:30
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JcDent posted:Didn't Helbrecht or someone lose his arms to a Necron Lord? Just one hand, I think.
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Nov 13, 2020 06:53
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I think Mike Pondsmith is against turning his game into a version of itself that doesn't include the bits from Bubblegum Crisis where gangers randomly hulk out into giant borg monsters and rampage down Main Street murdering passerbies and entire police battalions sent to stop them. It's pretty clear that BGC is one of his favorite influences. (I've found a solution to this, but it involves asserting that in a future where people can buy laser eyes and chainsaw hands, the dude who shoots up a college campus because his girlfriend broke up with him does it with laser eyes and chainsaw hands instead of an assault rifle... but then you have to acknowledge it as a depressing political statement instead of a wicked-cool cyberfuture setting gimmick. AD Police vs. the Incel Shooter Rampage is less appealing to the target audience than AD Police vs. the Cyberpsycho.) Stephenls fucked around with this message at 02:35 on Dec 4, 2020 |
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Dec 4, 2020 02:30
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Zereth posted:Or you could go full Bubblegum Crisis and have it be AD Police vs the malfunctioning robot that's not a human Why does the BGC setting have a plague of expensive corporate-produced androids that are prone to going berserk and hulking out into tank-destroying monsters just kinda hanging out as gang members wearing leather and swinging chains around, anyway?
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Dec 4, 2020 18:35
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Young Freud posted:Most of the time, "faulty robot rampage" is the cover story of the big bad corporation GENOM 'accidentally' assassinating some undercover journalist or creating a diversion for some corporate espionage, with the AD Police and Knight Sabers destroying the evidence stopping the rampage. If I recall correctly, that's about right. The first episode has a gang with the classic "Fist of the North Star mooks in leather jackets with the sleeves ripped off, carrying chains and knives and maybe baseball bats or something" character design who turns out to be killer robots who go berserk but then it turns out they were a corporate op, and then later the show has lots of other gangers with the exact same character designs but they're not robots, and the killer robots in later episodes are either, like, malfunctioning construction droids or just minions of the show's corporate supervillain. Except for the one episode where they're the replicant cast of Blade Runner except lady vampires who've escaped the offworld colonies and are just trying to survive on earth (but they need human blood to keep their robot bodies running). Pondsmith seems to have been more inspired by the visuals and aesthetics of the show, which is not surprising considering that he probably watched it initially out of order on third-generation pirated fansub VHS tapes, so the Cyberpunk setting doesn't have killer robots but needs the visual of "80s gangers exploding into robot rampage" to be a setting staple. And absent killer robots, you need a reason for human gangers to explode into berserk terminators, hence cyberpsychosis.
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Dec 4, 2020 19:41
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Xiahou Dun posted:This is a hell of a sentence. BGC is a hell of an anime.
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Dec 4, 2020 19:52
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Xiahou Dun posted:I never got around to watching it, but that being the summary of just a single episode sure is an elevator pitch. So... I think the thing about Mike Pondsmith's R.Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2017/2020/RED or whatever is that you are going to misunderstand its creative goals if you go into it thinking it is trying to be a cyberpunk game that emulates non-trashy cyberpunk. It's not trying to be Neuromancer. It's trying to be Robocop and any number of other trashy 80s cyberpunk B-movies and also gonzo 80s cyberpunk anime, and especially "Bubblegum Crisis, as misunderstood by someone who watched it out of order on third-generation bootleg fansub VHSs in a world where the only available Internet was mailing lists and USENET." There are any number of reasons why cyberpsychosis is in poor taste or ableist. All those criticisms are valid. It should be fixed. But it very much exists as it does for a reason related directly to the writers' creative goals.
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Dec 4, 2020 20:07
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Xiahou Dun posted:I wasn't criticizing and if anything you made me want to get around to checking out Bubblegum Crisis. I didn't take your comments as criticizing it! And you should definitely check it out, if you're in the mood for very impressively animated 80s OAVs that have all the problems of wicked-cool media created during that era. I think it's aged better than most of it, honestly. Hell, just check out the first episode; it's reasonably self-contained. (The remake, Bubblegum Crisis Tokyo 2040, not so much. Catch the original eight OAVs, not the 26-episode TV series reboot.) Xiahou Dun posted:(Although I have some problems with Cyberpunk as a person who's struggled with a disability even if it's not meant or merited. My hackles just raise up and I go, "So what the was the Humanity cost for my cane you jerk." It's just flippant and half-baked so it's easy for my rage-brain to start up before my thinking brain.) Very fair. Cyberpsychosis when viewed through that set of priorities (which are, I think, a significantly more important set of priorities than "How can I emulate the bits of this wicked-cool anime I half-remember without importing all the context from that anime?"), is A Problem.
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Dec 4, 2020 20:43
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Nessus posted:You know this would even be a way in a like skirmish minis game that you could distinguish between the Freedom Boomer Oorahs and the AD Police-but-probably-not-police. The good guys run on batteries (reliable but low density) or possibly Mr. Fusion (incredibly good, presumably rare) while the Freedoomers get gas tanks, which are much larger capacity than the batteries but also have numerous side effects, including the risk of fire and explosion. I think in the original, the assimilation tech was just the one boomer in the first episode and then maybe a few specific boomers later who'd been kitted out with safer versions of it? Ironically in the remake it really is a feature of all boomer tech.
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Dec 5, 2020 00:20
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EimiYoshikawa posted:While I don't disagree with your last paragraph, and have made the same "joking" description of Cyberpunk and Mike Pondsmith's clear old-school weeaboo inspirations, I would question one point. For some definitions of those terms, yeah. To be clear, I'm not saying Neuromancer is better. I love all those works. But between Robocop and Neuromancer, only one of them has a Adam-West-can't-get-rid-of-the-bomb running gag involving a dude who's fallen into toxic waste and gets increasingly melty every time he stumbles back on screen before ultimately exploding like an overripe tomato upon getting hit by a car. (Which is great and I love it.) Stephenls fucked around with this message at 07:00 on Dec 5, 2020 |
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Dec 5, 2020 06:54
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