Zereth posted:

catch a Goofy Magic Train With A Silly Trait That Would Make It Annoying To Use and go from Death Town back to where you live and then get a Cab But It Only Lets You Pay With Teeth Or Something to your house? Like, is dying just "poo poo, now I need to get a ride home"

RocknRollaAyatollah posted:

It was so crazy that you omitted Trotsky of all people from faction 1. This feels like something generated by machine learning.

KirbyKhan posted:

I won't be able to pay my share of rent this month, the orbs from the last adventure were just too dope to send to the mobile park office. I'm thinking bout using my Mana coin to conjure up a kickin rager, just all the booze my supreme hosting powers can provide. So if you know anybody who's down, we could charge orbs and make rent that way. I'm just gonna need a little time to make some change for the copier. Money is so easy I just fill out surveys and it's like change in the mail magic.

Ithle01 posted:

Promethean in nWoD seems interesting, but hard for me to work with because I'm not really good at telling stories about personal growth and discovering what it means to be human. Promethean in oWoD seems like I would take to it like a fish to water because angsty sexy nuclear super- powered Frankensteins fighting spider monsters is the sort of stuff I do well with. So, how feasible is it for me to run a game of Promethean using it just to get into ridiculous pulp adventures? Out of the core book it does not seem like this would work, but this review makes me think otherwise.

Also, what the gently caress is going on with these cloning labs? Are these things all over the place or something because the book is just casually tossing out that 'yes, cloning labs exist and they're all over the place' and just not focusing on that like it's no big deal? I have to assume that they're run by a combination of shady government alphabet types and the Umbrella corporation.

Night10194 posted:

That's also kind of funny for them when they're happily palling it up with and building stuff for a 'no I swear I'm not a TITAN, promise' super-AI.

PurpleXVI posted:

I think they actually thought, in their heads, that these were all cool adventure locations, since they wrote up two PLOT HOOKS for each of them at the end of the book. But it's kind of like the Inner Planes in D&D. Neat locations, give some atmosphere, explain some of the setting's cosmology... but like 1% of 1% of all 20th level parties get bored enough to go there or have a GM high enough on drugs to create an adventure for the place.

megane posted:

Now that you mention it, how do you have any form of economy on the elemental plane of fire? The only thing there is is fire, and presumably there's plenty to go around.

Ratoslov posted:

On the other hand, backstabbing and self-destruction are supremely human.

Halloween Jack posted:

That's something I really wanted to talk about, particularly with regard to Vampire. A problem with writing legends and rumours into your setting is that if something is rumoured to exist, it exists. What are you gonna do, say "Nah, that's bullshit" and not take your fans' money to publish a sourcebook about it?

The impending End Times in all of the classic WoD games was a great parallel to the looming sense of dread at the end of the millennium. But having all the legends turn out to be true really messes with the theme. The Vampire developers could certainly have said "Yes, Caine and the Antediluvians are dead. The Jyhad is just paranoia feeding paranoia, a cycle of violence that no one knows how to stop." But that was never going to happen.

StratGoatCom posted:

The trick, therefore, is switch hits and go terrorize the other horrors that go bump in the night on regular occasions regularly.

That Old Tree posted:

Yeah Masks can be impressive but ultimately an Ochema can just like banish them to an extradimensional oubliette or outright unmake them backwards in time with a wave of whatever appendage it happens to have.

PurpleXVI posted:

Jason Vorhees bursts through the floor of the UN general assembly, pulls himself up as diplomats scream and cramble to get out of the way, then just stands in front of the doors, menacingly, until everyone agrees that world peace would be a good idea. Every time a general or dictator starts pondering a territorial grab or border violation he hears a faint "ch ch ch ch, ha ha ha ha" in the background and decides that he doesn't want more land quite that badly.

Jerik posted:

I'm kind of reluctant to admit this, but there is actually exactly one thing I like about Beast. Lairs. I like the idea of Lairs, and how they fit together, and how they can be customized and how they can be temporarily overlaid on the real world. I wish Lairs had been in a better game. It's a pity that absolutely everything else about Beast is complete and utter garbage.

Halloween Jack posted:

Didn't the Mage book also have an "asteroids are falling and there's nothing you can do about it" one?

Halloween Jack posted:

Zyzyzrk is so weird. Like a powerlifter in dominatrix gear with a bullwhip who lives in a giant yonic kaiju shows up and you're like "Mommy" but she just wants to scream and kill people.

Halloween Jack posted:

Halloween Jack posted:

"Banality" was an extremely childish concept in the first place, and if you weren't a Changeling, it was almost entirely to your benefit to be treated as if you had Banality 10. In Old Changeling, the most important part of NPC Banality was that it makes it harder to cast spells on them.

Changeling's cantrip system is extremely hosed. It was meant to be flexible without being as universal as Mage, but in practice having both Arts (your spells) and Realms (what you can cast spells on) means more stuff you have to spend XP on before you can do anything.

Getting a spell to work typically cost a fuckton of Glamour. The system treated Glamour like Blood Points, but a vampire getting blood is way, way easier than a Changeling getting a few points of Glamour.

Kurieg posted:

Also Saulot was a special snowflake holy vampire who could do no wrong and was sacred and pure and his bloodline is also sacred and pure and has magic holy powers so he's always going to show up in something plot significant.

Kurieg posted:

In first edition they stated that you could make vampires out of all the were creatures. Second edition walked that back a bit, specifically for the Sun based were-beasties. Corax self immolate in a pillar of sunlight, killing themselves and the vampire who tries to embrace them. Mokole don't work most of the time and when it does they just go into permanent frenzy in their godzilla form.

So when Kitsune were introduced late in the line they stated in no uncertain terms that no, they cannot be embraced, they literally burst into flames if you try because WHO THE gently caress KNOWS BUT STOP loving TRYING.

PurpleXVI posted:

Classic sci-fi stuff has a lot of cool stuff.

I think what fascinates me the most is a protagonist who signs a peace accord with the antagonist, rather than just blowing them to smithereens. Like, it's rare you see that in a story, of any genre. It strikes me a really cool.

Libertad! posted:

The Kindle Edition is $15.99 and it's 309 pages long.

lofi posted:

Chuck tingle would be a great gm, as long as you're OK with a very specific style of play.

PurpleXVI posted:

Maybe I just hang out with the wrong people, but I've yet to hear a single, well, story, or positive comment about nVamp. Like, that's not to say that I hear bad stories about it. Just no one mentions it. Ever.

Geist comes up, nWolfs, nMage, nDemon, nPromethean, sure. But Vampire? Might as well just not exist. Which suggests that even if it's, say, mechanically better or story-wise more solid than oVamp, there's gotta be some sort of magic lacking if no one ever talks about it. Like maybe in tightening it up they also lost some of the goofy poo poo that gave oVamp character and let people have fun with it. Or something.

Or maybe I should get off my rear end and do a review of it as someone who, despite recognizing all the terrible things about oVamp, can get completely lost in reading a ton of its dumb supplements for hours at a time.

Halloween Jack posted:

Why does everyone think every game is JoJo's Bizarrely Named Anime

edit: or Persona

Gantolandon posted:

Werewolf is the worst about proper nouns, because every loving single one of them is in a foreign, made-up tongue (some have English counterparts, which the authors sometimes use). So you have to learn that Uratha are split between Urdaga (the Forsaken) and Anshega (the Pure), that when you enter kuruth you spend some time in basu-im before entering wasu-im, that Hunters in Darkness are also called Meninna and when the text mentions an Iminir, it means a Storm Lord. If you like, you can even learn each Tribe's ban in Klingon the First Tongue.

Halloween Jack posted:

TSR hit the supplement treadmill hard, to the point that gaming magazines like InQuest regularly ragged on them for publishing generic sourcebooks full of reprinted material.

Another problem was that rule-wise, every developer was going off in their own direction and they were all just stacking cruft onto AD&D2e, which didn't go nearly far enough in evolving from 1e in the first place. Like, Zeb Cook wanted to replace THAC0 with ascending to-hit and AC, but they were afraid it would make Baby cry. Reading the AD&D2e Player's Handbook depresses and angers me in equal measure.

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

What was the -phobia in Persona?

PoontifexMacksimus posted:

I mean, the game is still part dating sim, right, with all the baggage that entails? Where, like in P4, stringing along a harem of every available partner at the same time is mechanically optimal play?

Maxwell Lord posted:

Yeah, Transhumanism was still a pretty niche concept at the time, but that's basically what this is. What I also like is that it's also very space opera- you've got your lizard people, warrior cultures, small fuzzy critters, and outright Bug Eyed Monsters.

PurpleXVI posted:

I mean, no, honestly, no. EP is nowhere near anything I'd consider to be "hard" sci-fi, everything that's treated as "hard" sci-fi is mostly only to make it something the players won't interact with(physical interplanetary travel, for instance). The only thing that prevents it from being as laughable as Hc Svnt Dracones is that the political statements are slightly less laughable and that the setting actually has some things to do.

JcDent posted:

I wondet how convincing a demon must be to be able to buy abstract concepts like that.

Or are people just humoring a weirdo and then suddenly finding out that its all true?

That Old Tree posted:

Demons can grant basically any Merit, but "external" stuff like Resources is harder and requires at least two separate pacts to get really crazy, unless the person is already doing pretty well.

As an aside, there's an off-hand mention of being able to boost Attributes, but the only core traits there are mechanics for are Merits and Skills.

JcDent posted:

How do you replenish your supply of "a lot"?

Joe Slowboat posted:

Wait someone called Jenna Moran an idiot dumbfuck, what the hell, she's great. Do not blaspheme the name, etc.

Jerik posted:

Hey now, let's not put the blame on the concept of immersion. I like immersion. It's one of the main things I play RPGs for. I just don't see how constantly heaping misery on the PCs is supposed to be a "recipe for immersion". If anything, having a GM who's so clearly out to get the PCs is antithetical to immersion, unless it's a feature of the setting that fate is supposed to be actively working against the characters.

lofi posted:

gently caress the rules, it's the density of proper nouns I struggle with.

The thing I dislike about the God Machine concept (aside from the initials being the GM ffs) is that it's so unreal that I don't know how players would know what bits to poke. In a real-world setting, you can figure out a reasonable plan to stop The Evil Plot, but in Demon do players just do something like a "And then they [science]" from star trek? Roll dice to get told by the GM what might work?

Night10194 posted:

The lack of interest in that is the bigger problem, yes. It's something I notice in a lot of games, not just CoD: There's not much consideration of what victory would look like or what people could be working towards.

PurpleXVI posted:

See part of the problem I have with this approach to Modern Occult stuff is that it requires rewriting human nature. Because by this reading, a lot of what we consider to be ills that are simply the consequence of normal human behavior and idiocy, are suddenly the works of an extra-human conspiracy or force. This means that, in theory, WoD humanity is considerably nicer and more sensible than real world humanity, because the world would be less lovely if they were just left to do things on their own, apparently. Giving the responsibility for real-world ills to supernaturals or their conspiracies just... doesn't work.