FATAL & Friends 2020: 61 billion casualties

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > FATAL & Friends 2020: 61 billion casualties

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Servetus posted:

I like the some of the trappings of the Jedi: Weird science fantasy melee weapons, a fun space religion that seems open to a lot of different interpretations and arguments, some funky space opera hairstyles.

What I don't like is that all that stuff is only open to people who get the lucky force powers, and is really disconnected from the reality of everyone else in the setting. If you have the powers then your social role and destiny are laid out to you and if you don't then it's all beyond your ken, and you are just the rube who will never understand what's going on. At least in Fading Suns or Dune everyone is getting in sword or knife duels, not just the people with mystic powers.

One of the reasons why I like WEG Star Wars is that I think it handles this very well from both a narrative and mechanical perspective. The default Force using archetypes are a Padawan who survived the Clone Wars and is an aging drunk, a youth who's discovered that they have the Force, a weirdo who has some Force powers and play acts as a Jedi, and an alien with their own distinct Force tradition. The way character creation and advancement work makes Force skills a major investment and ensures that Force users don't outshine other characters. Also, while you can start as a Force user, you can also start without any Force skills and go on to learn them from a teacher.

# ¿ Nov 12, 2020 04:27

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 00:46

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Tibalt posted:

From what I understand, you've got French/Continental versus English/Welsh versions of the Arthurian legends, and then within that they were treated like the way public domain characters are today - sometimes Lancelot is tragic character who loves the wife of the man he's loyal to, sometimes his name is a pun on how much he, you know, loves Arthur's wife.

Yeah, the earlier stuff is Welsh and Gaelic and is mostly about the knights going on adventures for Arthur (whom some scholars consider a sort of comic or satirical figure because the knights do everything). The later stuff is French and adds in a lot of the high drama and romance along with characters like Lancelot.

# ¿ Nov 15, 2020 01:47

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Night10194 posted:

Also there are a shitload of percentile systems. I'm pretty sure if GW tried to get snippy about that for some insane reason I can't fathom they'd take a Norwegian-piloted steamboat to the skull, considering CoC was probably one of the major influences on WHFRP in the first place.

On top of that D&D already had a percentile resolution system with Thief skills. And furthermore, WHFP is so clearly derivative of D&D, GW suing WotC/TSR over resolution mechanics would be as absurd as TSR suing the Tolkien estate over Eants and Hobbits.

# ¿ Nov 19, 2020 01:16

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Empathy and Essence(?) exist in part to put a limit on how much cyberware a character can sport. So just take all the psychology out of it and say there's a physiological limit to how many robot parts a human body can support.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2020 04:51

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

SkyeAuroline posted:

There's also the HWI route that applies just fine here - sure, get cybered up! Can you afford the monthly payments to the corp that's got you in a "rent-to-own" program (these suck irl, by the way)? Can you find and afford antirejection drugs and the specialty diet that "fuels" them better, or the pile of batteries to do it without that method? What socioeconomic effects does it carry and how does that weigh on you?
But that isn't as workable if you don't hold an "all good cyberpunk is anticapitalist" mindset like I do, and I think Mike and the gang have left that behind partially.

Yeah, that's a good route too. I don't even think you need to have a particularly anticapitalist mindset to implement upkeep costs for cybeware.

megane posted:

Getting TRPG designers (or players) to accept a mechanic without providing (or having them make up) pages of breathless exposition on the lore implications is kind of a big ask.

Oh you can still write reams of fluff about how too many cybernetic implements leads to cascading super-AIDS or terminal techno-tumors or whatever. And I'm sure there are some odious implications of this that I'm not considering, but at least you're not making odious implications about mental health, prosthetics, and trans persons. (Granted, it seems that CP-R has explicitly rejected those last two.)

# ¿ Dec 3, 2020 19:31

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

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."

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.

Yeah, Pondsmith's source text isn't Neuromancer or Islands in the Net. It's Hard Wired, which is very much at the trashy end of the cyberpunk spectrum.

# ¿ Dec 4, 2020 21:29

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Tibalt posted:

I'm going to skip over the details around universal education and contract terms for now, and discuss the Injury rules first. Immediately Carbon 2185 makes several major mistakes. Let's start with the roll used, 2d6. Dungeon and Dragons, especially in 5th edition, isn't really codified or consistent in how it uses different die sizes. I'm sure you could find examples where 2d6 (or other dice combinations) are used in a similar way. But as a general rule, D&D uses a d20 for the core resolution mechanic, and uses a 2d6 for outcomes - damage, HP healed, number of demons summoned, and so on. The reason this is important is because the outcomes and distribution are very different.

They're using 2D6 here because they're being just as lazy here as they are with the rest of the game, except in this part, they're copying straight from Traveller instead of slightly tweaking 5E D&D.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2020 22:32

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Tibalt posted:

Lol, it's obvious when you point it out, but I just didn't make the connection. I figured they just liked the probability curve on a 2d6.

Hehe, it stood out to me right away because I just read the Traveller rules for the first time.

Now that I'm thinking about Carbon 2185 just lazily copying stuff, it occurs to me that the attributes might be a half-assed mishmash of D&D's and SWD6's.

# ¿ Dec 8, 2020 04:45

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Young Freud posted:

Yeah, it feels you might hear about these folks but, given that Cyberpunk is supposed to be somewhat low-level street action like Streets Of Fire, as Pondsmith intended

Every Cyberpunk adventure should end with a sledgehammer fight.

# ¿ Dec 9, 2020 18:30

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

If you want to read good Paranoia style fiction, read Stanislaw Lem's Memoirs Found in a Bathtub. I'm almost certain it's the primary inspiration for the game.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2021 16:18

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Battle Mad Ronin posted:

Soviet writers in general really had a knack for that whole �authoritarianism taken to the point of absurdity� genre of fiction.

Lem was Polish :colbert:

And yeah, but also Memoirs Found in a Bathtub takes place in an underground facility where the protagonist is essentially a troubleshooter dealing with the same sorts of confusing and contradictory orders that define Paranoia adventures.

Oh and it turns out Poland has declared 2021 the Year of Lem, so now we all have to read it to support international relations.

# ¿ Feb 2, 2021 20:34

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

mllaneza posted:

In Soviet-era Poland

A Soviet-era Pole would not appreciate being called a "Soviet."

:colbert:

# ¿ Feb 5, 2021 16:38

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Froghammer posted:

Because this is lore from the wargame

Also, these characters often get stats and figures to use on the table, and they're not that difficult to kill.

# ¿ May 11, 2021 19:46

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

I know it's a real thing involving hydrogen isotopes, but the term Heavy Water always sound to me like some made up sci-fi bullshit.

# ¿ Jun 15, 2021 17:20

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Cooked Auto posted:

The scale on that spaceship picture seems off, as if they oversized the ship by a factor of two.
Or it's manned by halflings.

Halflings steal a Trek shuttle to transport their brand name cocaine is a pretty excellent adventure hook.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2021 00:11

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Everyone posted:

But you want to do Cybernetic Elven Vampire Space Pirates, that's when you use GURPS.

Wouldn't it still be easier to use Rogue Trader and have everyone roll up Dark Eldar characters? :v:

# ¿ Jun 25, 2021 21:33

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Everyone posted:

Never played those. I do recall one of the jokes in my former gaming group was referring one fantasy-style game as Rolemaster: The Accounting.

The dudes I played with in the 90s called it either Rollmaster or Rulemaster.

JcDent posted:

Refer to

Good point. GURPS does try to be most things.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2021 17:39

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Josef bugman posted:

This does seem to be a continual theme. Has there ever been a fun WoD game?

When I was an edgy teenage goth just learning about leftist politics from punk rock, playing a Brujah in V:TM was fun as gently caress.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2021 20:08

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Josef bugman posted:

I came to RPG's late, so I missed out on this formative experience.

I do wish that there was some system that let you model the WoD without being either the White wolf "This system is all d10's and it isn't as fun or as smart as it thinks it is" or the Urban Shadows "made by a person who isn't very nice and the rules are a bit lacklustre" sort.

Yeah, that's getting to my point: even the most mechanically garbage games can be hells of fun when you play them at the right time with the right people.

If I were to try to capture what makes RPing in the WoD fun, I'd either look into "storygames" that are more about social conflict and interaction (Fiasco comes to mind) or just start a LARP group and find some empty local parking garage where we can hang out.

If I wanted to do something lite with dice pools, I'd look into SWD6 (which is my go-to lite dice pool game) or one of its successors.

# ¿ Jun 27, 2021 21:39

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Gatto Grigio posted:

Eh, his overall writing suggests a certain level of self-indulgent narcissism, so I'm ok with calling him a "jackass." (a mild insult, all things considered)

I don't think he should be cancelled or anything, but I can't respect his work.

Yeah, I'm a big FR fan and sympathetic to Greenwood, but calling him a "jackass" isn't beyond the pale. His twitter feed is full of the kind of minutiae that even I, a person who collects and reads FR sourcebooks for fun, find pedantic and insufferable. And he's definitely too handsy for most people's comfort.

# ¿ Sep 7, 2021 21:20

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Everyone posted:

IIRC that was in Book 2. I will say that a long time ago I ran this series of modules but made sure the PC levels were more in the 6-9 range because holy gently caress did you read the possible enemies and TPKs in that loving module?

Yeah, that happens in Tantras, the novel and the city.

That's another amusing thing about the Avatar trilogy. It has the most boring names: Shadowdale, Tantras, and Waterdeep. Just place names, no indication of the scope or substance of these stories. What's even more amusing is that Shadowdale and Waterdeep make sense as iconic locations steeped in Realms lore and setting significance. But Tantras is just some city in the Vast. It's not even the most significant (Raven's Bluff) or characterful (Procampur).

# ¿ Sep 8, 2021 17:12

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Halloween Jack posted:

Tantras is at least a name. Everything in fantasy now is Shadowdale, Waterdeep, Darkreach, Graveclasp, Doomhouse, Deathblight Edgelord, whatever.

That's a fair point, but they could've gone to Cormyr or Phlan or some other place with a decent fantasy name that also mattered.

Alien Rope Burn posted:

When he eats all the assassin souls, is that a way to explain why there aren't assassins in 2e?

Who's that on the cover? Is it the the sleepiest Zhentarim?

That's exactly what it is. Everything that happens in the Time of Troubles happens as an explanation for the rules differences between 1E and 2E. Mystra died to explain why some spells have been slightly revised. That's basically the entire point of this silly affair.

I'm not sure who that's supposed to be on the cover.

PurpleXVI posted:

It could be! And no, they're entirely dead. Also apparently it was later retconned to only be assassins that were also worshippers of Bhaal, which people amusingly enough seem to refer to as "the Entreri loophole," but which also helps with the issue of defining an assassin beyond "someone who kills stuff for money," which would generally leave the Forgotten Realms void of soldiers, cops, guardsmen, adventurers...

And the cover scene does not appear to feature anywhere in the actual module.

The "Entreri loophole" comes from Salvatore wanting to bring Entreri back for the Legacy of the Drow series. His argument to the editors was something like, "he's not an assassin, he's just a man who kills people for money."

# ¿ Sep 8, 2021 18:17

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Night10194 posted:

Have you ever once considered these things don't exist and that writers create all of these constructs, because they're fiction? In-universe explanations for things do not generally explain them, so to speak. When people are like 'why isn't Forgotten Realms just about the Gods, since most of the stories are', they are asking why it is constructed the way it is by the authors, something better explained by the post about Ed Greenwood and his weird sense of ownership of the setting than any 'well the high kinggod of the landwizards said-'. The discussion is about the construction of the setting and why it reads the way it does, and how it could potentially read better or make for a better story if something was changed, not about the in-universe explanations as they currently exist.

E: To put it further, and more clearly, this is why I say Forgotten Realms is accidentally maltheist. It is clear the writers do not intend for the Gods to be read as a bunch of tyrannical landlords, but accidentally create a situation where that reading is not only valid, but quite obvious. The Forgotten Realms is not interested in talking about the relationship of its Gods to the many pastiche states of the setting; as noted above, Greenwood is fundamentally incurious as an author and most of the Realms material doesn't care about this stuff, it just ends up coming up because the stories focus on the dozens of Gods and their stat-blocks so often that it pushes them front and center regardless of writer intent. And then makes them astonishingly unflattering. This isn't the authors' intent, I'm quite certain of it, so 'accidentally maltheist' is the way to put it. This thus represents a failure of the writing and its communication, and so the choice is to either embrace the reading that it generates or discuss how to rewrite things to return to the original intent and focus of the story.

And yes! The Time of Troubles represents, in effect, a situation tailor made to let players actually interact with one of the main portions of the Forgotten Realms on terms that matter to player characters...and then it's used like it is in the above adventure path.

I don't know if pop psychoanalysis of Ed Greenwood is the key to understanding stories he didn't write. He wasn't the driving force behind the Avatar Crisis and his writing credit on these adventures makes it look like he had a lot more input than he really did. Greenwood was just one of many people contributing to the setting at this point. Three different authors wrote the novel trilogy.

And Gatto Grigio's psychoanalysis isn't even that apt. Successful published novelist Ed Greenwood is a "Frustrated Novelist"? He sold the setting that he clearly obsesses over, worked collaboratively with multiple people from TSR and WotC over the years, and canonized his friends' characters as some of the most important people in the setting, but he "can't conceive of anyone else wanting to have agency in his created world"? This doesn't follow.

I'm not sure how you come away from reading stories focusing on divine malfeasance and conclude that the divine malfeasance wasn't intentional. I don't think your assertions about the setting and its stories here are correct. The Avatar trilogy is specifically about the relationship between FR's gods and peoples. The three men who came together to write it had conversations and consciously chose to make it so. I don't know how you can look at something like the Wall and think, "nah, the writers didn't intend for this clearly awful and hosed up thing to be so awful and hosed up." And I don't think Bob Salvatore writes Drizzt monologs about how hosed up the gods are by accident.

But yes! These modules are a terrible missed opportunity. The Time of Troubles is that situation. Adon, Cyric, Kelemvor, and Midnight are generic D&D cleric, thief, fighter, and magic-user. They're cut-outs ready to be replaced by your own PCs. It's a drat shame we get this terrible example of metaplot instead a great way to capstone your 1E AD&D Forgotten Realms campaign before switching over to the new edition. The campaign guides always tell you to make the Realms your own. How better to do so than have your own character off one of these fucks and take their place?

# ¿ Sep 10, 2021 02:25

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Night10194 posted:

For the Wall it would be the way it was written, mostly ignored after being written, and then quietly removed in an errata, actually. That's what says to me it was 'Oh, this was way more horrible than we intended it to be'.

But yes, I'm not as experienced in the Forgotten Realms as other settings; I haven't used them since I was in High School, and then I only did so really because I'd played Baldur's Gate. So I'm probably wrong on some things. But the Wall definitely hit me as 'we went too hard' considering how it was written out.

Ahh, I got you. It was only recently removed, and I don't think it was ignored so much as it was just something that didn't come up often. It's in stuff like the 3E campaign guide, so it wasn't being hidden. And I think if there was an editorial decision to write it out during 2E-4E's runs, there would have been a novel or three about it. :v:

# ¿ Sep 10, 2021 05:01

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Froghammer posted:

This is SUPER off-topic, but is there a particular English translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms? It's a text I've been meaning to dive into for a decade and a half.

If you're up for 2000+ pages, the Chinese Foreign Language Press has a 4-volume unabridged set. ISBN: 978-7119005904

# ¿ Sep 16, 2021 15:00

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Selachian posted:

Maybe because Through the Looking Glass is set on a chessboard, with the terrain Alice moves through divided into squares?

I figured it's just because the map is a grid. How much Carrol do you think this guy has actually read?

# ¿ Sep 27, 2021 20:15

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Ghost Leviathan posted:

Warhammer has always had surprisingly little focus on dragons. Hell, there's none in 40k still.

There are those CSM robot dragons.

# ¿ Dec 17, 2021 15:19

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Fivemarks posted:

Basically, "If you need glasses or prosthesis, you're less human" is a problematic and also core theme in Cyberpunk as a genre, unfortunately. Lost an arm in an industrial accident? That new robot arm makes you far less human, and so on and so forth.

It's really not a core theme of the genre. It doesn't come up in any of Stirling, Shirley, Shiner, Scott, Gibson, Effinger, or Cadigan's works. Molly isn't dehumanized by her implants. She's dehumanized by prostituting herself to get them. The people of the Schimastrix are emphatically people even after turning themselves into spaceships and lobster robots. The merger of humans and machines brings those machines to life in Synners. Even in Rucker's Hardware, where getting turned into a robot is a key worry for the protagonist, it doesn't seem to lead to any actual loss of humanity because the humanoid robots are indistinguishable from the biological humans they replace, and the Moon robots behave just like people. And GitS makes essentially the opposite point--that you're still human even when the only meat left is your brain.

It seems to arise as a core theme of games based on the genre as a way to limit and balance how much cyberware you can pack into your character.

# ¿ Feb 11, 2022 18:56

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Nessus posted:

A lot of cyberpunk wrestles with the question if augmentation like this makes you no longer human but it seems to be the typical conclusion of 'it absolutely doesn't (however it may let you dehumanize yourself)' as well as examining questions of the commodfication of people and bodies.

Notably, GURPS Cyberpunk had nothing resembling one, although I think there was some sidebar thing saying 'maybe if you're mostly cybernetics you will have trouble casting spells? But like a prosthetic hand like Luke Skywalker, nbd'

So yeah this is an artifact of RPGs/Shadowrun, and to be fair Shadowrun is probably in the top five most influential cyberpunk works at this point. It has no purpose other than RPG game balance and that weird hangup in the 90s of WHAT IF - Technology... vs... Magic?

Which is probably the result of hippies. Though now I'm thinking of the most obvious place I first encountered it: that old cartoon "Visionaries."

Yeah, the commodification of human life is a major theme of cyberpunk, but the direct connection between cyberware and loss of humanity is rooted more in cyberpunk game conceits than cyberpunk fiction conceits.

Siivola posted:

It's been ages since I read or watched the originals, but iirc it's not really that clear-cut. Sure, nobody goes around yelling "augs aren't people!!" but the Major and Batou both gaze into their cybernavels about how weird it is to be a cyborg, and whether being treated as a human is actually enough to feel human. Batou lifts weights for fun, despite being cybered up to the point he can't actually gain anything from the exercise. Maybe you've got a soul and that's what makes you a person, but here's a super-AI that's indistinguishable from a person so what does that say about souls?

The answer is, of course, that these are empty questions, just stop clinging to your body (you don't even own it) and go hang out in the infinite net.

For sure it's a lot more nuanced than just that, but fundamentally its point is that humanity isn't a matter of your meat/metal by mass ratio.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2022 00:51

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Siivola posted:

I guess this really depends on what we think when we say "humanity". When I think of the 1995 movie, it's largely driven by the Major's explicit experience of disconnect from humanity because all she has is her brain, and the movie never really resolves that. Instead of reconnecting with her humanity in some hokey way (looking at you, 2017 GitS ), the solution is to embrace a transhuman existence.

Obviously this doesn't map very well to the RPG humanity mechanics that make you flip out and kill people, but I think there's a clear connection between being a full-body cyborg and having cyber-depression in GitS '95.

Stand Alone Complex takes a different tack, because it's interested about social dynamics and how people decide to do things. It doesn't really care whether people are actually humans, the point is to watch them gently caress around and ruin/save lives.

I probably should've said "personhood" rather than "humanity" there. I think mainly of the manga where her ultimate merger with the Puppet Master is in no way a loss.

# ¿ Feb 12, 2022 21:40

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Halloween Jack posted:

Is there a term in tabletop lingo for "everyone dogpiles the person who's about to win, making the game drag on?" I don't take Munchkin too seriously but I saw it affect friendships like radioactive waste

I've heard it called "kingbreaking" as sort of the opposite play to "kingmaking", but I don't know if that's a common term for it or not.

# ¿ Mar 25, 2022 19:23

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Humbug Scoolbus posted:

Dark Conspiracy was GDW jumping onto the cyberpunk bandwagon but at least being extremely creative about it. All the supernatural stuff in it is closer to really hosed up body horror science-fiction because it involves an extraterrestrials exploration team investigating Earth back in the 1940s effectively discovering a gate to 'Hell' and becoming effectively possessed.

These are Bloodkin. The purple is a 'Troll' the green-gray is a 'Vampire'. They use projected mental images to appear human.

I was always intrigued by that game's cover art (I could say the same for a lot of GDW games); is it worth checking out?

# ¿ Apr 21, 2022 16:29

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Everyone posted:

The biggest problem with Kender, Krynn Gnomes and Gully Dwarves is that there was so much focus on them being "comic relief" that there was no room to take them seriously as characters/people.

One of the reasons why I love Taladas, Dragonlance's other continent introduced in the Time of the Dragon boxed set, is it had serious Kender and Tinker Gnomes.

Cythereal posted:

The story I've always heard is that the writers of Dragonlance wanted a thief character, but wanted the thief to be a good guy and obviously stealing is wrong. Enter the kender, a narrative justification for a heroic thief character who thought Robin Hood should have been in jail for his crimes.

I think that's part of it, but also they wanted to make Dragonlance a more distinct and standout setting and one way of going about that was getting rid of or replacing some of the Tolkien stuff that was so central to D&D. That's why there are no orcs in Dragonlance.

PeterWeller fucked around with this message at 18:29 on Sep 22, 2022

# ¿ Sep 22, 2022 18:27

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Dragonlance does have clerics (or at least Orders of the Stars or whatever they're called). Good clerics (aside from Goldmoon) are non-existent at the beginning of the War of the Lance, but after the PCs/Heroes of the Lance find the Disks of Mishakal, word of the good gods slowly returns to the peoples of Ansalon and more and more good clerics appear. The Dragonarmies have clerics of Takhisis and other evil gods all along. The first major human villain in the modules and novels is a human cleric of Takhisis.

This is another thing I like about Taladas. There good clerics never completely disappeared and instead became like mystery cults and very culturally specific orders.

# ¿ Sep 22, 2022 18:51

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Siivola posted:

The thing that makes Mind Flayers evil isn't the "eating people" part, it's all the evil poo poo they do. A wolf will eat people if it thinks it'll get away with it and most people wouldn't label that "evil" in tyool 2023.

But in general yeah it actually is kind of weird to invent a people that's okay to kill.

We don't hold animals to the same moral standards as sapient "people." Most people would label one person eating another person "evil" even in our present enlightened age.

# ¿ Jan 25, 2023 20:34

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Siivola posted:

It's the murder that's the problem, not the eating. :colbert;

Both are problems is my point.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2023 02:15

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Siivola posted:

I am undone by my training in anthropology because I can�t really relate. You might be right most people wouldobject.

But on that note people have been persecuted for alleged cannibalism, so there's kind of an awkward world building move being done here. If you make a fantasy world with brutal cannibals and literally soulless monsters and creatures whose existence is ruining the very land they walk on, you�re actually imagining a world where the conquistadors are the heroes.

Yeah, I see your point. I'm being myopic. I should say: from our contemporary Western Colonial perspective, most people would object.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2023 15:27

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

I remember two things about that show: 1) it was incredibly bad, even considering the low, low, low expectations I had for 90s TV based on an RPG property. 2) the main Brujah dude was also in X-Files and Enterprise.

# ¿ May 10, 2023 18:41

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Apr 19, 2024 00:46

PeterWeller: Apr 21, 2003; I told you that story so I could tell you this one.

Dawgstar posted:

The most irritating things I recall - being a huge WoD nerd - were Brujah being "Ventrue but evil" (and not like Lasombra) and Archon being a guy and not a title.

I kinda liked the Brujah being mobsters in suits. It felt more subversive and true to the Brujah spirit than having them dress up as punks and bikers, and I guess it also helped visually distinguish them from the Gangrels who were dressed up as punks and bikers.

# ¿ May 10, 2023 20:49

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Traditional Games > FATAL & Friends 2020: 61 billion casualties