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since being a full progression caster was already a blank check to break the system over your knee, i always felt underwhelmed with the epic spell stuff. it's just the same spells you can already cast, but now you have to roll several hundred d6s because that's a totally plausible thing to have to do in the middle of a real-time game session. ironically the idea that they're trying to formalize how spells are cast would have been a much cooler attempt at reigning in caster supremacy if those rules had been implemented out the gate at level 1. give clearly defined guidelines with extremely tight math behind them and then show how a couple iconic D&D spells "should" be built using the new system i am going to guess this also runs afoul of every other game system that encourages players to make up their own powers, i.e. the only material sanity check is the patience of the DM at the table you're playing, and otherwise it's trivial for an enterprising person to cook up crazy horse poo poo like "this spell turns off the sun nearest to the current planet"
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Sep 16, 2019 06:08
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i've seen snippets of geist lore pop up as people have done other write ups, but i was really bummed that there's not an entry for them in the archive. without having to trawl through a bunch of wiki pages, can somebody provide the gist of what geists are, what they do and how their lore is supposed to interact with the rest of the splats?
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Sep 19, 2019 17:50
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cool and timely! i am super excited to see how you present everything, because i did do some digging through wikis yesterday anyway and without greater context, it basically just read like a list of arbitrary powers and abilities
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Sep 20, 2019 13:52
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Bieeanshee posted:Vampires reeked of the Wyrm, and the 'lupines' would shred you if you left the safety of Chronicle City X. Unless you were Gangrel, maybe. Then Werewolf came out and it had city-dwelling tribes, which just made things even more awkward. i don't know if it was canon but my high school group explained it like "woofs don't go into cities because of the wyrm, and woofs will straight clown on your average blood sucker, so the blood suckers learned to stay in cities as a natural defense against having to deal with woofs." also it seemed like the city dwelling tribes tended to be the ones that were maybe the bad guys, or at least not as opposed to working with the wyrm, so they're traitors anyway and you're totally justified tearing them apart
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Sep 20, 2019 16:30
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Night10194 posted:That seems like a very counterproductive thing for Vampire Jesus to give people the ability to do. IIRC he didn't create the baali intentionally, it was like back in the day (like the BCE) some vampires that knew how important he was wanted to show him how cool and powerful they were and invited him to a feast in his honor and then when he got there it was a bunch of gruesome hosed up stuff and vampire jesus is all "gently caress, you guys are twisted, imma drop the roof on your heads and then find something else to do" and he killed them all and peaced out. but he didn't make ultra-double sure that they were dead and their evil vampire blood somehow re-congealed in their bodies and they came back twice as evil and depraved and started actively trying to summon the devil as a gently caress you to vampire jesus. meanwhile vampire jesus goes off to explore asia and then get diablerized and the baali are making progress on their whole "be as transparently cartoonishly evil as possible" action items so they just kinda go with the inertia they've already built up. i don't recall whether or not any of the baali even knew what happened to saulot (or if they would even care at this point)
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Sep 20, 2019 20:40
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PurpleXVI posted:Having an angel that just shows up and plays music(or maybe blows a vuvuzela) at the players any time they're about to do something incredibly stupid and/or dangerous would be a GM'ing power move. the power move is having a vuvuzela sound clip queued up on your phone/laptop/tablet and playing it at max volume any time the players are about to deviate from your expertly crafted narrative, but never telling them why and expecting them to figure it out pavlov's dog style Night10194 posted:At the risk of being the pigeonholed guy in general, too...if you're playing D&D But Early Modern and with more of a focus on mundane life, why the hell are you using D&D for it instead of WHFRP? he seems like the kind of dude that would get mad at a tv show that has an obvious premise and then creates stories based on that premise for being too straightforward and pedestrian, but would absolutely love some "The Real World" style reality show where there's no concrete overarching plot because all of the actors were filmed live 24/7 and the editors randomly mashed together scenes out of sequence in post to create the appearance of a plot because it's organic storytelling or whatever bullshit
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Sep 23, 2019 17:31
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That Old Tree posted:
so geist is basically jojo with stands et al i could get extremely into this
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Sep 24, 2019 17:50
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QUIP.
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Nessus posted:Both of them also invest the characters' supernatural powers in a secondary character/representation connected symbolically to them, which is probably the go-to factor here. for me, it's mostly this. it feels like the ghost is what's giving you all of your powers, and the in-setting fiction where the two different characters had their ghosts kind of squaring off and growling at each other could be a literal battle scene from any of the later jojo series the first 2 (or 3?) seasons were about using special breathing techniques to punch vampires to shreds (said vampires may/may not be aliens from another planet, but it also might be a magical curse that can be transferred via enchanted objects) which is probably closer to what you can do just playing requiem
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Sep 25, 2019 18:40
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so can demons realistically have more than one completely deep cover at a time? like if you completely soul swap with some hot poo poo lawyer and take that as your main cover, you can't also have soul swapped with a high school senior captain of the golf team two states away right? what would the non-occupied shell be doing when you're playing as the other person? do they go through basic routine stuff like eating and bathing and etc or are they actually like a robot that's been turned off and it just sits there collecting dust? it would seem like a demon couldn't have multiple completely purchased covers at once unless most of the covers were like transients or itinerants that nobody would notice if they didn't move for 2 weeks at a time.
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Sep 30, 2019 15:56
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Mors Rattus posted:You can have both, but maintaining them would be hellish. When you're one of your Covers, the others just don't exist. They exist in a quantum superposition with your body, see. So no, if someone goes to your second Cover's home while you're your first Cover, they don't find anyone there at all. so what happens to everyone that presumable knew the second cover? like does the second cover objectively vanish from their memories for as long as you're not occupying the shell? or is it like, everybody just politely "forgets" about the second cover, but if for some reason they were forced to acknowledge it, the whole thing violently unravels?
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Sep 30, 2019 17:44
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the godmachine seems like it's a tailor-made antagonist for demons, but the fiction around it also makes it seem like every other group of supernaturals should have some amount of knowledge about it. does the godmachine care about other supernaturals (as much as it "cares" about anything) and they're just an acceptable part of the status quo in chronicles, or are they actually aberrations that need to be expunged from the system, or is the answer just "whatever your ST decides for their specific campaign"? it feels like mages should definitely be all up in the godmachine's business, or that woofs should be real keen on hunting down angels, but everything i've seen re: the fallen makes it sound like only demons know about the godmachine and it is otherwise uninterested in any other kind of supernatural. which is weird, because it feels like the main reason a demon needs cover and can't be a 10 foot biomechanical monstrosity walking down mainstreet is because "oh poo poo the godmachine will see you and send an angel after you" but that same logic seems like it should be applied across chronicles lines, so a woof going warform should be at the same risk (in theory)? i feel like i need to play a demon that realizes other supernaturals exist and then goes "wait a loving minute, why don't their magic powers evoke the godmachine's wrath?" and then decides demon's only need covers because they believe they need covers and the answer to their cipher is "if everyone is special, nobody is" and their personal quest becomes elevating the visibility of other supernaturals at a global level such that being an inhuman monster is no longer a threat to the status quo so the can schlep around in demon form and not have to hassle with covers any more. edit: that, or they pay a vampire to "sire" their cover so that they can then use super powers with the impunity every other supernatural seems to enjoy, because now the simulations sees them using powers, checks for "Is a vampire?", and then goes back to ignoring them the same way it ignores every other supernatural. it really feels like the whole reason demon's aren't supposed to use their powers is because they're supposed to be a human person and human people can't use magic powers. but if the status quo gets updated, there's no longer a compelling reason they need to keep hiding. Freaking Crumbum fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Sep 30, 2019 |
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Sep 30, 2019 18:51
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does a demon have to know that it's a demon? they fall from being angels and lose almost all of their memory about their old powers and resources and about the god machine, but does the resulting being always 100% know that it's a demon? the fiction makes it sound like every single demon has a perfect idea of why it fell and when, but it seems like you could reasonably play a character that believes, for all intents and purposes, that they are suddenly beginning to manifest hones-to-god super powers following whatever freak accident caused them to fall, but completely misattributing the source of their powers and their very existence to the wrong thing. like they realize that by sleeping in this specific abandoned factory, in the morning their powers have recharged, and assume that must be their fortress of solitude instead of understanding "oh no there's just some hidden leaky infrastructure here that bleeds out magic juice and i'm latently absorbing said juice when i spend the night here". then the angels that get sent after them start to look like super villains with even weirder powers and it becomes sort of a self fulfilling prophecy. i guess a lot of the intentional mechanics like covers and bargains have to either be ignored or completely reflavored in this theoretical context.
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Oct 1, 2019 01:15
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i think the issue is more obvious with demon because the entire reason your character exists is because the GM exists and made you for some specific task until you jumped the rails. but demons can't really do any of their schticks without constantly interacting with the GM, one of the possible core motivations for demon characters is "find a way to reintegrate myself with the GM" etc. and it's like this extremely central component of the setting, but the most the books seem to give in terms of direction is "it can't even acknowledge that individual beings exist, it doesn't have feelings or emotions that drive it, nobody even knows why it's there or what it intends to do, it's existed for millions of years and as far as anyone can tell you can't meaningfully interrupt its plans or purpose, even though we also aren't going to come up with a plan or purpose for it"
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Oct 2, 2019 20:15
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hyphz posted:There are eight attributes: Body, Agility, Reaction, Strength, Willpower, Logic, Intuition, and Charisma. so does the book also just completely skip intuition in the explanation section, or was that an accident on your part? also the example combat description provided felt kind of rushed and haphazard; it throws a lot of terms out that aren't explained up until the second they're used, and seems to just glance over a lot of key ideas. is that intentional to show how useless the book is at explaining the same thing (i.e. was that c/p straight from the text)? it sounds like, from your example, that weapons and armor have attack and defense ratings that function separately from their ability to actually prevent / deal damage, like you compare the attack rating of a weapon against your target's defense rating and that adjusts their dice pool up/down for the initial roll, but then if the attack is successful, the damage dealt appears to be based on the outcome of the attacker's dice and not a separate damage roll. is that right? so armor makes you harder to hit in the sense that it can reduce a potential attacker's dice pool to zero, but if you're not wearing enough armor to accomplish that, then it doesn't provide any additional ablative benefit?
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Oct 6, 2019 23:20
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hyphz posted:But armor doesn't make you easier to hit in the sense that it does anything to the attacker's dice pool. It gives you a point of Edge if you have 4 points more Defense Rating than the weapon's Attack Rating, and that's it. The Attack Rating isn't what you roll to attack and the Defense Rating isn't what you roll to defend. Clear as mud, right? Maybe I'll edit that in, too. so defense rating does NOTHING except determine whether or not you get a point of edge? that's extremely poorly designed since, as in your example, having a point of edge doesn't even guarantee that anything beneficial will necessarily happen did they keep the damage grades for weapons from earlier editions? it's been forever since i played TTRPG shadowrun, but i kind of recall that in 2E or 3E weapons had damage grades and having a high armor could actually lower the grade of the damage, so it served a very important function
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Oct 7, 2019 00:05
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the main thing i always have to decide is: am i writing this for my personal enjoyment or am i writing this explicitly for engagement with other people? if you're writing something up for yourself then go hog wild and review whatever you want to review, whenever you want to review it. if other people like what you're doing, that's a cool bonus! but don't let other people bog you down in this case, if you can confirm to yourself that you're doing this for your own reward. if you're writing something up because you hope other people will engage with it, then yeah you kinda have to read your audience. FWIW i don't think there's anything wrong with reviewing something that's in KS or a beta or whatever, but if your intended audience is giving you pushback, you might want to reconsider what you're doing/how you're doing it, because whether or not there's some objective measure of what should and should be kosher to review, the people you're trying to engage are telling you directly they don't enjoy what you're doing. rodbeard posted:So what version of Shadowrun is actually playable? if you don't mind that the "future" setting is anachronistic to the late 80's early 90's vision of what the future would be like, or you really like that particular aesthetic, 2E would be my pick. the bigger issue is that "playable" is a very subjective thing, and all of the editions still try to kludge small scale group combat and matrix hacking and drone rigging and three different, mutually exclusive magic systems into one coherent whole and none of them have ever managed to pull it off elegantly. most of my experiences with successful SR adventures is talking with the players ahead of time and trying to get the group to agree to one or two areas of focus (i.e. we're all different kinds of spell casters, or different flavours of hacker, or different types of combat samurai) and then allowing hirelings to fill in the rest of the gaps. the game definitely wants you to be able to put a group together where each player has a distinct role, but that basically devolves into the GM playing 4 separate 1-shot adventures in sequential order while everyone who isn't currently involved plays with their smart phone.
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Oct 7, 2019 15:08
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wdarkk posted:Isn't a certain level of desire for this required to play Shadowrun at all? i would have thought so, but apparently each edition after 2E attempted to modernize the setting or move it forward in time, to account for the fact that very common technological things we have now didn't exist in the older editions. like, eventually they added wireless matrix access and being able to be a hacker without carrying around a "portable" deck that was the size of a bass guitar, tried to explain why genetic engineering did / did not appear to advance in any meaningful way, etc. it felt like there were people that were actually more interested in closing perceived setting loopholes and using that to justify a new edition, rather than making serious attempts to streamline the underlying rules or merge all of the disparate systems into something more group friendly.
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Oct 7, 2019 15:57
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Nessus posted:What's the issue with insect shamans in Shadowrun? Bugs seem like a robust choice for spiritual connection in general. aside from everything else, insect spirits want to consume the soul of their shaman and then pilot the empty shell around like a meat puppet. they then use said meat puppet to capture other magically sensitive people and hollow them out and stuff more insect spirits into them, ad infinitum they're completely uninterested in using metahumans as anything other than food or breeding stock. they can't be reasoned with or negotiated with and they have no interest in diplomacy or learning to live within the rules of our society. they're basically an alien life form that realized it can hide itself inside humans to avoid a worse fate in their home dimension, like someone had 'the thing' explained to them in really broad strokes and then tried to take that rough idea and turn it into an antagonist faction in-universe they managed to consume the souls of so many people in chicago that the UCAS dropped several magical nukes on the city, writing it off as an acceptable loss to contain the problem. the only reason they haven't completely scoured human life from the globe is that each variety of insect spirit (ants, wasps, mantis, beetles, etc.) hate each other only slightly more than they desire to enslave humanity, so they're just as likely to drop whatever nefarious plans they were working on to declare total war against an enemy insect colony they discovered in the next zip code. to clarify the earlier statement: if you have any magical powers at all, the very last thing you ever want to do is use them to do anything that even has a whiff of insect possession. summoning a swarm of insects just for funsies is likely to get everyone in the room to immediately turn their weapons on you, even if you aren't being particularly threatening Freaking Crumbum fucked around with this message at 03:11 on Oct 9, 2019 |
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Oct 9, 2019 03:09
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 hooray i look forward to your halloween updates every year!
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Oct 9, 2019 13:16
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Halloween Jack posted:The irony of building a "fighter" character in Shadowrun is that you can spend hours modding and tweaking every piece of gear...but your entire character revolves around having Wired Reflexes. wired reflexes are so good (at least in 2E and 3E) that unless you expect your character to use magic, you should make room to get those built in. since the initiative system works off "passes" and wired reflexes gives you more passes, it's literally giving you more turns to play than characters without them.
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Oct 9, 2019 21:36
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Servetus posted:Was there ever a standard rationale for where SINless nobodies were getting the cash to get all the hot cyberware, or decks or drones? I mean you can't fight your way to getting your wired reflexes if you need the wired reflexes to be relevant in a fight. Looking through Shadowrun it seems like you either play one of the Magical 1% or the financial top 10%. But then you get character backstories about growing up on the street. Something doesn't add up. if you're talking about fresh characters, it's assumed that their backstory includes an explanation for why they have the things they have. of course there's no mechanical interaction with this, so if someone takes Resources as their best trait and spends a million nuyen turning their character into the terminator and then doesn't put effort into explaining how they got that way, there's no punishment outside GM fiat. if everyone is playing in good faith, that character's backstory should be rife with adventure hooks because it's extremely unlikely that whatever organization chromed them out is totally cool with them loving off to be a shadowrunner. if you're talking about characters in play, there's all kinds of shady back-alley cyber docs that'll charge you exorbitant fees to install whatever poo poo you want. part of the reason cyberware had quality grades was to gatekeep how easily players could get really OP gear, meaning something like an omega-grade wired reflexes 3 system would only be available in some heavily fortified corporate R&D lab or in the underground bunker of some military black-ops site, so getting in there and jacking the gear would be several adventures on its own, plus then you've still got some very pissed off and powerful agency that wants their poo poo back and wants your head on a plate.
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Oct 10, 2019 15:52
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i think both Dragonfall and Hong Kong were excellent examples of what you can do with a SR story that's more detailed and elaborate than just "HAIL ADVENTURERS I AM MR JOHNSON PLEASE ACCEPT MY QUEST" but gently caress if either of those kinds of ideas are relayed to GMs from the source material. IIRC the 2E and 3E versions of SR had a plethora of world building and lore-heavy books for every conceivable geographic location on earth, but i don't recall that any of it was usefully framed for a GM to jump off of and use as an adventure prompt; it was more like really flavorful toilet literature with all of the 90's metaplot that got crammed in. some of the set piece battles in the harebrained games are pretty great though, and an example of how the tabletop game could be run. breaking into an off-the-books military hardware fabrication plant that's run by a nascent, experimental AI and the runners trip the internal security systems and they have to stage a desperate holdout battle against the automated defense machines the AI starts activating while the group's decker feverishly attempts to bypass the myriad lethal ice security systems protecting the AI's friend or foe subroutine so that they can trick the AI into treating them like allies. having to infiltrate the SR version of comicon and navigate through all the various booths and displays in order to find the one lone nerd that recalls how to unlock the specific memory lock that's been placed on the group's decker, but you can't go loud because it's a public venue in broad daylight and the person that's normally the face gets stuck outside for reasons and they have to try and navigate another person through a variety of conversations over voice com but the other person is socially illiterate and the com keeps cutting out and it's a dice roll whether or not the social remedial can come up with plausible explanations on their own without turning all of the hired security violet
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Oct 18, 2019 18:04
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Halloween Jack posted:The trends created by Pennywise and Annabelle have taught me that when you try to make ordinary things scary, it's a hit-or-miss prospect. 
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Nov 19, 2019 21:40
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PurpleXVI posted:So I think it's less of a cultural matter, more just that there are some very simple forces that make violence easier to work with both mechanically and presentation-wise than arguments or investigation. i think some of the issue also comes down to having to model what a character can do vs what the player can do, and having to be able to mechanically differentiate between those two things. players want to be able to play a character smarter or more clever than themselves, but how do you model someone being able to solve a fictional problem that the actual player might not be able to solve in real life? "i dunno jeff, your priestess has 18 INT, i guess roll an ability check and if you succeed then we'll just assume she can come up with the answer" is a lot easier than having the game drag to a standstill because nobody at the table can solve the totally-not-illogical riddle the DM came up with this time. then you extrapolate that problem across the entire spectrum of people that might be playing your game, and having a mechanically simple (albeit narratively unsatisfying) solution is better than potentially putting players into a situation where they can't complete some objective because they can't figure out the correct Mother May I phrasing to satisfy their jackass DM.
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Dec 3, 2019 20:25
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Everyone posted:I tend to do both. If a player is bright/intuitive/whatever enough to figure the problem out in real life, that's cool and she maybe gets some minor bennie/reward for pulling that off. But if she or no one else can, than I fall back on "Okay, roll your Intelligence/Riddles/Evidence Analysis/Figure poo poo Out ability." even that is kinda weird to me though, because the inverse is rarely true - i.e. if i am capable of overcoming my DM in a contest of physical exertion (arm wrestling or lap running or knife fighting or whatever) i still have never been allowed to substitute my own physical prowess as a solution to an in-game problem. "well, i feel like i could pretty easily defeat the goblins in melee combat because i'm bigger than you in real life and confident that i could wrestle you to the ground against your will. can we just try that instead, and if i'm right then we accept that my fighter slew all of the goblins in the cave?" or even "look, i know for a fact I can run a 5 minute mile. let's break out the stopwatch app and if i can do that successfully, we just assume my barbarian manages to overcome and catch the fleeing bandits, even though he's on foot and they have horses." edit: it just feels like another example where martial characters have to navigate incredibly complex mechanical systems just to perform the main function they should already be competent at, whereas a wizard's player can just go "oh i know the answer, it's xyz" and the game just moves on
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Dec 3, 2019 22:00
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Night10194 posted:The real issue is mostly that 'I talk my way through' is usually accepted as 'good roleplaying' (regardless of a character's ability to do it) while 'I describe how awesome I am with a halberd' usually won't get you through a combat encounter. When both should be recognized as a matter of what someone put character resources towards, but since combat is traditionally the main point of mechanical complexity in RPGs, the combat system tends to be adhered to while the much looser non-combat systems are more handwavey. yeah "i hit the goblin with my battle axe, doing a totally badass flourish that sends his head flying the opposite direction of his body" "no you didn't, he dodged you and stabbed you in the leg with his shiv" "nuh uh, i am totally a badass barbarian and i would not let a puny goblin avoid my mighty blows" etc. etc. and everyone decided "okay fine lets come up with incredibly granular rules to determine whether or not steve actually killed the goblin". but then "i'm a charming rogue, so i simply tell the soldiers a very plausible lie to explain why the crown jewels happened to be in my backpack during this random search" "uhhhh . . . i don't know if they'll just believe that" and best case scenario, someone said "hey at least role a single d20 but just give it a binary pass/fail outcome, we don't want to spend too much time figuring out the finer details of how jeremy persuaded the captain not to arrest him"
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Dec 4, 2019 05:52
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Everyone posted:It's pretty much the other generic AD&D setting aside from Greyhawk. It exists to give Drizzt do'urden a place to stand while he kills stuff and looks cool. forgotten realms is so generic fantasy that for a good portion of my adolescence, i thought FR was AD&D and that any other setting was a completely different game. like, it didn't make sense that any of those other settings were AD&D because FR was the most bland tolkien fantasy and that's obviously what AD&D was so they were clearly the same thing. mostly i'm bitter as an adult that i never got to play dark sun or ravenloft or anything else cool when i was young and had a dedicated gaming group and near limitless freetime
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Dec 5, 2019 23:06
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