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WINNERSH TRIANGLE posted:Weren't dogs in nWoD unbelievably powerful combat monsters? Them and the Avatar Of Cops, yeah.
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Sep 18, 2019 12:50
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I mean, there are plenty of atheists who'd be thrilled with life after death, particularly one unconnected to any sort of divine being or deity or what have you. It's just...this one...sucks.
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Sep 22, 2019 02:01
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It seems like kind of a missed opportunity to have a clone turned into a promethean lose their memories. I mean, they were already an inhuman creation of azothic power made artificially by some rear end in a top hat, so it seems like it'd be more interesting to have them remember that than...not. Well, whatever.
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Sep 24, 2019 20:35
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Nessus posted:I think it's just something you, as a demon, can... do. Like sure, if you give a bunch of people Resources 5 out of a clear blue sky, it might attract the God-Machine's attention... but the important part there is "the God-Machine's attention," not "a bunch of people now have Resources 5." I think there was some changeling pact that was ruled completely legal where someone has to bake you cookies once a year as a show of affection and in return gets those Resources. I maintain that the extreme neutering of the Changeling pact system in 2e (in my opinion largely as a reaction to the Demon pact system pinching that bit of game design territory) was one of the edition's greatest mistakes, and hugely detrimental to the thematic underpinnings of the game line. Making a life-changing bargain you didn't understand with some weirdo you didn't understand is, like, at the heart of huge swathes of the "fairy tales" that Changeling draws upon as the base (and then expands upon enormously) of its concept as a game.
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Sep 27, 2019 20:00
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I Am Just a Box posted:I think the idea that Changeling 2e nerfed pledges because Demon had "claimed" that piece of game design is a bit paranoid. I don't think the developers are afraid to borrow game systems that fit across game lines (see Demon borrowing pledges in the first place, Werewolf spirit rules expanding to ghosts and angels in 2e, the shared organizational basis for the rules of Geist's krewes, Deviant's conspiracies, and the in-progress Mummy 2e's cults). I think it's more likely that the Demon writers were less concerned with mechanics being "overpowered" than Changeling 2e's writers were, so the decisions were made separately. For the record, I think Demon is a good game, and well deserving of the love people have for it. I don't think there's some conspiracy at work here, or that Demon "stole Pledges" from Changeling, but it does seem like there was some influence, subconscious or otherwise, in Demon having Pacts be so central to its cover mechanic, as well as its whole thematic of stealing lives by bribing people for them and the, uh, shall we say, "extreme overcorrection" of Pledges in 2e. I obviously can't read the minds of the developers/writers for CtL 2e, I'm just saying that it "seems" like suddenly Demon more or less had CtL 1e's Pledge system in its Pacts, and then 2e CtL's Pledges were a shadow of their former selves. It's entirely possible that it's a complete coincidence! It just kind of sucks, as a CtL fan, given how many great stories I heard people tell about when they played 1e and their use of the Pledge system was behind some of the most memorable moments in their games, and now it's basically gutted, "balance" or no. Given that Oneiromancy was hosed up as well, (whether accidentally, in an attempt at making it more granular (but at the same time literally just cutting and pasting the "hedge pursuit" rules over it rather than getting a system of its own) or otherwise), in the aftermath of Beast trying to make dream invasions one of their things too, McFarland's "borrowing" elements from Changeling is a good way to annoy me, at the very least, even if I'm not exactly out there writing huge conspiracy screeds about it all. Or maybe I am. Either way, I'll pipe down now, sorry. Aoi fucked around with this message at 22:21 on Sep 27, 2019 |
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Sep 27, 2019 22:18
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Mors Rattus posted:Again, I think the loss in Changeling has more to do with the thing being player-facing. Demon lets you arbitrarily hand massive amounts of merit and skill dots to NPCs. Pledges in 1e let you do the same to yourself and other PCs. It honestly never occurred to me to do things like this, as it seems unthematic and, well, munchkinny, but I suppose I've heard enough stories from other folks (still far less than the ones who had a great time with the pledge system without doing the above) that it was a thing that happened. It seems like something better resolved by, you know, players and STs talking and agreeing not to do that poo poo, rather than the scorched earth rules changes we got, instead, but...I'm not an OPP writer/developer.
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Sep 27, 2019 22:37
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Joe Slowboat posted:Mage and Demon are both the Matrix, but in vastly different ways, which is fun. Changeling is also The Matrix, of course. Like, in so many way.
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Oct 5, 2019 21:53
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Freaking Crumbum posted:that's extremely poorly designed This could literally be the entire 6th ed review, but that wouldn't be very fun.
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Oct 7, 2019 00:09
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Halloween Jack posted:
To be fair, if anyone's going to fit into the tiny number of cops that are also decent people, it's the ones that just needed a job, rather than the vast majority who get into it out of some sick pathology of being a bully or needing to get back at the bullies (by being a bully themselves), or needing to force people to "respect" them, or...
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Nov 14, 2019 19:11
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Given that Night10194's posts in this and the previous F&F thread account for at least 95% of my WHFRP knowledge, it felt only appropriate to posts this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-9-bQ3JoWY The long-awaited "If the Emperor had a Text-To-Speech Device" Fantasy Roleplay episode. Needless to say, said Night10194 thread posting is the only reason I wasn't completely lost in the mechanics and class/setting references therein.
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Nov 16, 2019 00:24
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Elves being enormous assholes dates right back to Tolkien. Galadriel's husband Teleporno literally exists to get her across the ocean without being tainted by Fëanor's bullshit. That's his purpose. He's a hot bit of rough with a boat. Was he in the movies, the kind of prominent guy in Lothlorien who also showed up to lead the Elvish contingent at the siege? That guy always seemed, like, almost as important 'round those parts as Galadriel, but I honestly can't remember if he even had a name.
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Nov 27, 2019 22:26
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wdarkk posted:I liked the book about Draconians postwar trying to make their own nation where they could live in peace. Literally one of two of the books I still own from the height of my full collection in my early adolescent years. The other is the one where Kitiara and Sturm fly to the moon in an airship with a bunch of gnomes and meet an Incel brass dragon. It's a comedy!
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Nov 27, 2019 22:32
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90s Cringe Rock posted:Yeah, he shows up (as Celeborn because Jackson was a coward and feared the name Teleporno), but I think you're thinking of someone else at Helm's Deep. Which didn't have elves helping out in the books. Ah, well, movie original character, then. I'd thought the guy leading the elves at the siege looked a lot like our man Teleporno (who will be the first LOTR non-main-character's name I will ever remember), but guess I'm an Elf Racist. They all look alike to me.
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Nov 28, 2019 00:56
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General Raistlin Caine, reporting for duty.
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Nov 28, 2019 00:58
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PurpleXVI posted:Dragonlance I barely restrained myself from posting way too much in response to this post, despite being a recovering lanceholic going on twenty-five years. The one thing that really stood out to me, though, of all that garbage (not your posting, but the content therein, mind) was that Riverwind was NPC-only, and yet Gilthanas, who literally shows up late and then disappears early and often, was not? The gently caress? Also, Flint was only 4th level, despite having literally trained all the other characters in how to fight, and adventuring off and on for almost a hundred years? Also, wouldn't Tika have had the most XP of all the characters, being a dual-classed 3/4 character, when her whole thing was being the youngest and least experienced person in the entire group? She's literally as good at fighting as Flint, despite never having picked up a sword in her life before things went to poo poo in Solace. Also, wtf, Raistlin has a str, but especially a con, higher than low single dig- insert sound of head slamming into desk to cease this madness before it goes any further
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Dec 1, 2019 22:11
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Huh. Even as a small child, I found gully dwarves extremely tedious, but miniature Baldricks...I...how did I never see that before? Suddenly, it's entirely different.
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Dec 4, 2019 08:58
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The heck? Verminaard gets merked in a cutscene? The whole Flamestrike vs whatsisname thing did happen in the books, too, and that's cool, hey, great, the dragons nullify each other, which left Ferminaard to fight the heroes. Given that he was a fairly high-level cleric with a magical mage and armor and all that jazz vs fairly low-level characters, he put up a good fight, but eventually went down in somewhat dramatic fashion. That seems, uh, way better than the cutscene death.
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Dec 6, 2019 23:10
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PurpleXVI posted:And then gets back up again once the PCs are at a safe distance. Don't forget that bit. Oh, I guess I did miss that. ...of course I did.
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Dec 6, 2019 23:17
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Seatox posted:For a setting with Dragon in the title, Dragonlance really doesn't use dragons very well as characters, does it? They're treated as giant, scaly flying horses, despite the average adult red dragon being a supergenius super-powered supervillain by the Monster Manual. "Let's just shove a pair of red dragons into a dungeon for fresh characters, I'm sure they can handle the TPK breath weapon dice." Dragonlance definitely doesn't make its dragons into super-beings beyond their size and flight and toughness and ability to breathe fire and be as smart as people would naturally make them. A lot of the 'dragons are all super geniuses and have class levels and multiple hundreds of hit points and immunity to most attacks and so forth' stuff really didn't exist before 3e, even with the Council of Wyrms (do I have that right?) campaign setting buffing them up. They're still super strong and scary, but, you know, comparatively to other high hit dice characters, rather than being on a whole other level than a really high level fighter or even a magic-user in 1e/2e. To be fair, this was kind of the case in most campaign settings, not just Dragonlance, but the fact that they're right in the name didn't make them an exception to this does stand out a bit. They're still super powerful (by mortal standards), thus making literal god-granted magical lances the only way to handle large numbers of them, but they aren't all supervillains, per se, just...villains (or heroic, such as the metallics go in DL).
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Dec 6, 2019 23:32
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Toede's novel was one of the better books in the line, as it was almost entirely a pure comedy with a villain antagonist, and culminated in a juggernaut (the kind with the huge steamroller pins) running wild in a city...as a good thing that happened.
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Dec 8, 2019 04:54
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Everyone posted:The final test has you having to fight a Drow Elf (and there aren't any Drow in Krynn because "Dark Elf" there means something completely different but what the gently caress ever). You need to uses spells to keep him off balance or he kills you. Really he kills you anyway because magic resistance/etc pretty well nerfs your spells anyway but if you last long enough, he launches a fireball at you. Ironically, I read Dragonlance stuff before I was exposed to D&D's Drow, so when he recalled having been wounded in his duel with a 'dark elf', 10 year old me took it as...a metaphor for this elf being a particularly evil dude, like, enough that he got kicked out of the other elvish societies. You know, like 'the dark lord' would tend to make you think of an evil guy, not someone with a lot of melanin. ...did they actually make this unnamed dark elf...an actual drow? Like, skin and hair and all that jazz? Because...like you said, there aren't any drow on Krynn. ...though I suppose they could've wound up there after Spelljamming or something, given that DL explicitly welcomed (if also dicked over) non-native characters from other mortal planes/crystal spheres/settings/whatevers. It just seems kind of... ...eh...
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Dec 10, 2019 15:04
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Libertad! posted:It's been discussed in other sourcebooks, but a lot of Dragonarmy officers are human, using the draconians and goblinoids as expendable shock troops. Minotaurs, thanoi, and the like are akin to foreign mercenary units. When running the Chronicles I played up this inequality, where a lot of the Dragonarmies while successful in uniting the monstrous races often took them for granted. But when the war started turning against them and the Dark Queen needed more troops to toss into the meat-grinder (or when infiltrating the Empire proper) the PCs saw and fought more human Dragonarmy soldiers. I noticed this even as a ten year old just reading the novels. Just about the only time human (or half-even, *wink wink* ever got mentioned as being members of the Dragonarmies, it was as officers, commanding goblin and draconian troops. It really stood out, the disparity and inequality there, even with a white Canadian child's understanding of colonialism, that the inhuman forces were taking all the risks and being used as cannon fodder, while the humans decked out in (largely imitation) dragonscale armor were bossing them around and getting much swanker living conditions while so doing. I almost want to think it was some kind of intentional commentary from Weis and Hickman, but...
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Dec 13, 2019 08:58
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Kaza42 posted:What was the source material and the more racist version? I'm going to take a guess that they might mean the intelligence penalties Orks and Trolls suffer from in SR. Which, when these are human beings with a mutation based in a real-world-foundation setting, gets a lot more real than fantasy imaginary critters. Though I suppose they might also mean the elvish nations being authoritarian secret fantasy fash. Or maybe the Native American Nations being formed out of a literal magic-based uprising when the US tried to literally put them all in camps and steal their land for strip-mining. Or it could be a half-dozen other less obvious bits, because SR has been around for, like, 30+ years, and it accumulated a lot of cruft in that time.
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Dec 16, 2019 04:48
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Ronwayne posted:Any one of these, but specifically orks going through puberty earlier and giving birth in "litters" Yeah, that double-whammy was, uh, always something I wasn't so thrilled about. They tried to back off from the latter in late 3rd and 4th, I think, claiming it was an 'early age of magic shift' thing, but only wound up leaning even harder into the former at the same time, so...uh. I mean, I kind of get what they were going for with the aging thing, particularly since Orks also had shorter maximum lifespans and they tried to tie the two together, the tragedy of having a shorter life and all that poo poo, but when a stirring speech (from an Ork character) about how the inequalities of human-centric society meant Orks were being discriminated against by not being able to legally gently caress younger and how unfair it was that they had to attend school until they were eighteen...ecchhh. I'd just handwave the changing mana ambience and give them, like, at least Troll lifespans, who, while they still die younger on average, it's explicitly due to socioeconomic factors, and it takes them just as long to mature as anybody else. That kind of poo poo always gets creepy fast, whether it's Kes from Voyager or Orks in SR.
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Dec 16, 2019 08:02
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The Lone Badger posted:So what was Evil about Raistlin Kill-The-Gods-And-Topple-Their-Thrones? I mean, it always seemed like kind of a bunch of bullshit that just killing these jerks meant the world got irrevocably hosed up in completely unrelated ways. It's not like the jerks had done dick all for...HOW many years since the Cataclysm, aside from Takhisis, who was actually ACTIVELY being a jerk and making the world a better place? The fact that Golddus-, I mean, Raistlin, didn't give a crap about the average person on Krynn put him at no worse a place than any of the old jerks, and it wasn't like he was actively blasting apart the world fighting them, it was just 'old gods die, world measurably gets worse, not because they aren't there to do their jobs, but like if when Lincoln was shot Nebraska blew up', and what you have there? A bad setting.
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Dec 17, 2019 11:45
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JcDent posted:I'm torn between the desire to chrome up and still being able to touch my girlfriend. Well, it's like Gouda said. To be willing to actively throw your life away over completely stupid nonsense, you absolutely have to be a virgin.
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Dec 24, 2019 20:43
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Pretty sure the whole 'Gil and Sil team-up' mystery of the eggs adventure was entirely off-screen, and only relayed second-hand once they got back to the Main Cast in the books.
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Dec 25, 2019 14:01
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No, just these ones. So, you know, just the emotional trauma of your kids being held hostage. Just because you can make more doesn't render that a bad threat (for normal people), and it's hard not to sympathize with them for backing off, even if the stakes are 'the whole world'.
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Dec 28, 2019 02:04
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MonsterEnvy posted:I have heard of Cyan Bloodbane. He's apparently a fairly iconic Green Dragon villain, and apparently helped set the mold for Green Dragon attitudes. However I hate is name what kind of Green Dragon is called Cyan. The kind with poison breath that was named by someone unimaginative.
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Jan 5, 2020 18:30
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I maintain that it's possible for someone to play a non-terrible Kender in a group with other people who won't hate your guts for your RP. But it would just be so loving exhausting, compared to so many other, less problematic, character options, that why would someone capable of doing that ever want to, other than as some sort of masochistic point-proving exercise?
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Jan 13, 2020 13:52
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Selachian posted:We actually had a kender in the group when I ran Dragonlance. But the player ignored the whole "stealing from everyone" aspect and played him as a halfling who just happened to have a lot of random tchotchkes in his pockets.("Wait, why do you have a ball of string?" "Oh ... *shrug* ... must have found it somewhere, I guess.") That's like 90% of my theoretical 'being a good Kender' plan, right there. Or, you know, go ahead and rifle through the other players' pockets...but remember that Kender have no sense of material value, so they'd be looking for interesting bits of string or shiny stones or a nice button or something, not, you know, money, or magical items, or even most gems (and if they did, they wouldn't try to hide that they had them, so if someone said 'hey, where's that x I had', they'd immediately pipe up with 'oh, I found that the other day, you must have dropped it, here' and give it back). The problem is that bad kender (again, probably almost all of them in the history of people playing Dragonlance tabletop) get played like they were still tiny annoying humans, out to get rich and rob the good poo poo from their friends like the most poo poo-lordiest of thieves past, so...
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Jan 14, 2020 22:26
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Man, the best thing the books did for Verminaard's character was kill him off very permanently in his 1vsFighters battle with the Heroes in the middle of the Pax Tharkas uprising at the end of the first novel. Every single thing he's done in the modules beyond that point has just been more and more embarrassing.
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Jan 22, 2020 03:27
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Never have I felt prouder of my instincts than the fact that I dropped Dragonlance as a whole like a hot potato when this SAGA poo poo started rolling out (and getting vaguely covered in Dragon Magazine). I was only in high school, but I learned the valuable lesson of 'if a series becomes terrible, you can just stop following/liking it'.
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Jan 28, 2020 09:25
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Meinberg posted:Nah the regular kind will do. You just need Overmuscles to do it. Wait, HOW old is Caramon by this point?
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Jan 29, 2020 01:31
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I've been enjoying the blast from my past that is Dragonlance, if only because it kind of got hilarious just how too many dragons it really did kind of turn out to be. I'm all for any additional setting reviews you're up for performing for us, Purple. Your service is appreciated.
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Jan 30, 2020 16:55
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Libertad! posted:
Alternately: "Hey, sis, long time no see, but...priorities?" (also, credit to this artist, this may be the only piece of art I've ever seen where Caramon and Raistlin actually look like twins)
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Feb 5, 2020 09:46
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Xiahou Dun posted:Also, Libertad!, I'm too lazy/busy/depressed to do full F&F's (hello my sad Torchbearer review), but I'm a pretty decent cook and would be happy to combine to do something on The Leaves of the Inn of the Last Home. I have the old one too so we could contrast. Although from what I remember the recipes are pretty drat sad. Like, Otik's famed "spiced potatoes" are basically just roasted potatoes with some rosemary or whatever. These amazing potatoes that the books will not shut up about are basically the most lame, white-bread attempts at doing something culinary where I wonder if the authors thought salt and black pepper were sinful. But it'd be short enough we could some kind of GWS/TG cross-over type dealy. I bought the original version of LOTIOFLH, and made Otik's famous spiced potatoes! Once. Once. I didn't make any mistakes! I did a pretty good job for an eleven year old! They just weren't...so good. It wasn't rosemary, it was some other slightly more obscure spice from the spice aisle that I can't remember off-hand (except that it was orange), but...that was literally the only spice involved in the recipe, I think. *Maybe* there was one or two more more really common ones. One of my larger early-life small-stuff disappointments. edit: Cayenne, that's what it was. I even went and bought some with my allowance just for this special occasion, since we didn't have any in the house at the time. Jeez. It was so lame.
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Feb 10, 2020 06:37
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Thank you very much for your hard work. I've been enjoying your Hams content for around a year now, but these 'personalized' adventure reviews have been incredibly above and beyond, and a bright light in these dark days.
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May 17, 2020 17:41
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Dallbun posted:A higher-level spell slot may be sacrificed in favor of How on *earth* was part 3 not the Thieves' Guild getting annoyed at the other two engaging in hired thievery without their getting a cut and getting involved for some fitting retribution on them by hiring the PCs to do it? What the heck, encounter cards.
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Aug 31, 2020 01:46
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Stephenls posted: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." 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. You really think Neuromancer is "less trashy" than Robocop? Or, to turn it around, that Robocop is "more trashy" than Neuromancer?
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Dec 5, 2020 05:22
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