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PurpleXVI posted:But the fact that humanity needed outside interference to set up those systems rather than setting them up for themselves, as part of their own failings... you can't claim this doesn't distinctly change the character of humanity. Because if it doesn't, we'll arrange the exact same structures with the God Machine gone, and the whole battle is somewhat pointless. Humanity isn't necessarily intrinsically wicked or bad or evil, but definitely capable of some horrendously lovely things, which I think is kind of part of what makes it exceptional and wonderful when humans don't do those things, and stand up, and say "gently caress you" to evil things, because being a selfish rear end in a top hat is often an easier path to start down. In WW20, if you wolf out and take down one of the Wyrm commanders, you don't remove the problem they represent, but you do de-escalate that problem a lot. For instance if you took down the Paranoia one, people would still be paranoids, but there would be fewer, and paranoid thinking would fade as a major motivator for human society. I presume that if you did not fundamentally reorder reality to the point where you are just playing a totally different ball game, something similar would happen if you torpedoed an Exarch. For the God-Machine though it's more about "this would mean that nobody's sacrificing abused cheerleaders to the oil pit in the woods any more." Which even if it does not objectively change the nature of humanity, improves society somewhat PurpleXVI posted:I am positing a humanity that is universally capable of being both assholes and not assholes. I'm not sure what's so staggering about that.
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# ¿ May 20, 2025 20:38 |
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Kaza42 posted:I've looked through it. It seems... surprisingly competent at least from a quick read. There are a few issues though:
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The Lone Badger posted:You mean IRL, right? Purchase a meal from Wendy's and your character gets to enjoy it too!
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That Old Tree posted:While I certainly would like CoD to be much lighter in general, I think Demon contrasts to most of the other game lines in that it has more of an Exalted-style problem. Its powers are mostly a giant laundry list of highly idiosyncratic tricks with insufficient siloing. It suffers from "widget paralysis" in a way most of the other CoD games don't. This is a hurdle that plenty of people are willing to overcome who don't even like that they have to, but it's not all that fun unless it is specifically your jam, and it's a hard roadblock for a lot of other people. Despite my ridiculous 50-page Mage cheat "sheet" I just don't have the patience I once did to extensively coach someone through the weeds to get them into an especially complex game, and in all the CoD games I've run Demon is the one that stumbled the most because of this problem. (Mage has a similar but distinct problem that I find less onerous, though that has at least somewhat to do with my Mage bias.) I don't know about y'all but very rarely have I been a renegade piece of unthinkably powerful computer equipment or whatever, piecing together things out of stuff I half-stole half-cribbed from others - ah, poo poo, there it is, I figured out the sadbrains analogy at the root of Demon, god dammit. Anyway, Demon doesn't really have many pop-culture things to use as touchstones, even approximately or vaguely.
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:You joke, but as a high-functioning autistic person who's uncomfortably familiar with masking, Demon is surprisingly relatable. On the second, totally-- but the big thing is like, when I hear "Demon," I don't think "techno-gnostic crime thriller," I think "I am some kind of creature from Hell who works for the Devil." It would be like if Vampire had like four or five different sub-splats all trying to withdraw Essence and only one of the sub-splats was particularly focused on drinking blood and the others were like Changeling ravagers, psychic vampires that stole Willpower points, and shitposters who are required to force mundanes to share their emotional state. It would make sense but it would be a major divergence from the folk idiom at its core, not the construction of additional space branching out from that. e: In a sense the metaphor would probably be stronger if you didn't have "going loud" at all and just had Matrix Agent powers. To be clear this might not make for a better game, but you'd have less of an involved on-ramping.
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Dawgstar posted:I wonder how well The Invisibles holds up under that lens today.
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Halloween Jack posted:They're loving stupid from first principles. Why do a bunch of cults and corporations and spookshows have a common loving vocabulary? Why is it always broken Greco-Latin? Throw it the gently caress out. Like the one big exception was nWolf and look how that went. You also have the advantage nowadays that you're not drawing your slang words from a living language, which reduces your odds of accidentally naming one of your main splat groups a Cantonese ethnic slur, etc.
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SunAndSpring posted:can I just post about the loving book instead of having dipshits tell me "no" ![]() I think folks, including the line developer, are kind of signalling "Hey, please do not do a FATAL and Friends of the kickstarter preview rules while the kickstarter is ongoing." Whether this is thread law I do not know, though it kind of makes sense if it were.
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Asimo posted:I reviewed a game that was never even actually released a few years back, but that's a different sort of precedent? Personally I don't think shutting reviews down is a good idea, at least as long as it's clear that it's more of a preview of a WIP than a real proper criticism/review.
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SunAndSpring posted:I just wanted to do a bigger game people might actually be interested in and unfortunately Signs of Sorcery is Mage so it’s full of confusing poo poo that I’d get nagged about for misunderstanding it, and apparently I’m “rewriting” the book by giving the bare basics so gently caress it, guess I’ll just leave to, uh, the pros since I can’t seem to please people. Not like my last F&F stuff even made it to the archives for some reason. As for the archive thing I believe inklesspen does updates in waves, if they missed one poke 'em. I imagine they'll see this in time.
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I support Goat Simulator: World of Darkness.
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I don't think you CAN be allergic to gold. It's like titanium, biology just kind of frowns at it and either leaves it there or throws it in the colon. I mean biologically, obviously, you can definitely get a magic allergy to gold. What's the issue with insect shamans in Shadowrun? Bugs seem like a robust choice for spiritual connection in general.
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:Insect spirits are uniquely horrifying and monstrous in a way that no other spirit is for Reasons.
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Perhaps the same could be said of all religions!
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Terrible Opinions posted:The English being less actively evil in this zombie world version of the Great Famine than they were in the real world version of it is kinda weird. If it were true to life they'd be forcing them to work those zombie blighted fields regardless of casualties. They didn't particularly try to stop emigration during the Famine, or at least if they did I never heard of it. They just didn't help particularly, either.
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Freaking Crumbum posted: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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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.
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Midjack posted:Can't really do that in tabletop very well though.
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Those sure are a bunch of war crimes. I suppose the point was probably more like 'Nobilises can fulfill their various purposes and goals in a horrible way that is not contrary to the underlying principles of reality.' Nevertheless, dang!
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Rand Brittain posted:3e, in recognition of the blandness of this, would eventually replace Spirit with Persona, so that "control over your Estate" wound up split into two powers, one that lets you control your Estate itself, and one that lets you manipulate the properties of the Estate, so that Domain (Fire) commands fire and Persona (Fire) lets you make things more or less fiery.
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Rand Brittain posted:Domain lets you set someone on fire; Persona lets you give them a fiery temper. ![]()
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:I can understand why people like it, but I would never play it either. It hits everything I can't stand in game design and setting (I despised High School, why the gently caress would I ever want to even simulate going back?).
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a computing pun posted:The other reason Apopcalypse World has sex moves is because - and I can't remember where I read this - the genre AW is emulating isn't Mad Max, it's "what if Mad Max was a HBO prestige drama". Messy, emotional, character-focused dynamics and dysfunctional relationships and deeply personal power struggles and people making decisions out of petty hatred or horniness or ambition. AW is a great fit for "standard" post-apocalypse because you only need to tone down the intensity of one half of the genre concept. But equivalently, to get from AW to get from AW to Monsterhearts you only need to swap out the other half. The sex move means that every PBTA game is tainted by association in my own main gaming group. Probably not intentional!
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Halloween Jack posted:I keep managing to play AW and MH without experiencing any of the nightmarish scenarios people predict. Not that they don't happen, and resources devoted to consent (Safe Hearts, learning Lines and Veils, etc.) are vital. But if someone in your group wants to violate consent and has the GM's support, well, these stories are far older than PbtA.
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Joe Slowboat posted:But can you discretely divide the entirety of high school social life into Girls and Gamers and don’t answer that because I’m pretty sure some nerds would with like an argument about jocks not counting idk
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Doctor Zaius posted:Is anybody interested in doing a review of/know where I might find a copy of Palladium's Macross II game? I came across it wikipedia diving, and he concept of a mid 90s Macross game made by Palladium sounds absolutely wild.
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Carados posted:Speaking of Riverdale, I've been kind of interested in running a Monsterhearts campaign with that tone. The characters aren't monsters, more metaphorical monsters. The reality it takes place is super grounded, and any supernatural elements required can be explained with either narrative convience or some technology.
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Mors Rattus posted:The one thing that's always confused me about the Sasquatch is like...is smelling that big a part of Sasquatch lore? Is that a thing? I thought that was just the skunk ape. As for the pack dynamics thing, it made some sense for Garou in Apocalypse since Garou couldn't really do the "a pack is basically an extended genetic family" thing, due to the low odds on any individual Kinfolk having the first change. However, most of the growling sex werewolf literature seems to make being a werewolf a straight up family condition. The conception of an "alpha" in the space of romance/erotic literature is even more detached from the old wolf studies!
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So what the gently caress is the point of that list of 0-aspect things? Is it meant to suggest that once you get one shiny point of Aspect you can do all of those things?
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Rand Brittain posted:I'm not really sure what you're saying. How would a "dictionary full of adjectives" help? While this is probably less of an issue in narrative-style games than it would be if you gave someone in a D&D setting a drawback-less, chargeless tool that lets them kill or destroy any item they see, it doesn't necessarily INSPIRE anything either. It also creates an environment where the GM has to operate in the free-wheeling improvisational style, which is a limitation because some people can do that OK, some people do it wonderfully, and some people don't do it well at all. In this context, having established limitations on the Cut Anything power, even if they are merely practical ones, gives the GM space to plan and present meaningful choices and challenges which don't boil down to "nuh uh, this guy can't be cut" (which you might be able to get away with for one signature bad guy without it feeling cheap) or "aha but uh when you try to use your ability, SOME BULLSHIT HAPPENS and now A BAD THING!" e: To more directly address the adjective thing, this is like saying "your power is to Cut Anything you can define," at which point you can use this power for everything. "I cut away his addiction to shitposting." "I cut away the bonds that hold her back." "I cut away the chemical bonds between the HFC atoms in the Antarctic atmosphere, allowing Sodium Lad's power to create atomic sodium at will to create harmless salt while healing the ozone layer!" Nessus fucked around with this message at 23:32 on Nov 9, 2019 |
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Stephenls posted:If the argument here is that TTRPGs shouldn't have stuff like "Knife that can cut through anything, even abstract concepts like 'beauty'," because despite their presence and successful implementation in many works of fiction, the interactive nature of TTRPGs and the almost-invariably semi-competitive nature of the player-GM relationship makes them inevitable sources of strife during play, I feel like the only answer is "But what about people who like that sort of thing in fiction and want it in their games?" I think it's absolutely fine to include supernal/absolute powers in your games. In this case, the rules are kind of mooshed up with the broad setting pronouncements. Like as I read this I'm comparing it to Chuubo's, and Chuubo's was way easier to get my head around. I know the two are not identical games, but there was an evolution here, and I remember hearing people say "Chuubo's is basically Nobilis with a different power level," or similar things... I ain't seeing it here. I do think a game in which your characters are all basically Superman is gonna have unique narrative challenges and it would be worthwhile to dig into these, and from the sound of it this version of Nobilis didn't do that so much. (To clarify, this is structuring a story or concepting challenges beyond 'the guys who want to make everything suck! go hit them. or don't?' which is not really very good DMing advice) Nessus fucked around with this message at 00:24 on Nov 10, 2019 |
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean, he absolutely could have done that with his power, as "defined." He could cut the "danger" out of a situation, he could cut their enemies out of existence, he could cut wounds out of himself, he could cut the distanceb between the plane and its destination, he could cut the momentum out of the plane and its passengers so they come to a perfect halt with no problems on the runway.
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EthanSteele posted:All the other ones seem pretty reasonable to pull off and describe how it works, but this one? I think it highlights the limitations of the power, you can solve problems when removing things or splitting things very easily, but adding things is impossible. Going "I cut the lack of choreography" definitely gets the "how?" question and if the player can't say how it works then it doesn't work.
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Snorb posted:You also get a Lowlander as a temporary party member; unfortunately for you stat-wise, he's a literal baby. Hilariously, in the Genesis version, he still has equipment slots for a weapon and armor, so you can give the baby Lowlander a laser pistol and heavy battle armor, and he can hold his own frighteningly well. He even has his own unique species portrait on his character sheet (I guess so the game doesn't freak out when you look at his stats and it tries to load nothing; for game purposes he's a level 1 Lowlander Warrior.)
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theironjef posted:Vampires all look like they're currently loaded with some chaw. I dunno if it's the art style or the rules of 2nd edition VTM.
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PurpleXVI posted:I mean, if that's literally the only thing about them that recalls Roma stereotypes, is it really? The rest of it doesn't feel particularly Roma.
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PurpleXVI posted:I like how you say "the" hangup about Kender like there's just one thing wrong with them rather than everything. Generally they were characterized as basically being of goofy child-like intellect and stealing everything not nailed down "JUST BCUZ!!!! LOL!!!!!" essentially as a compulsive hoarding/gathering behavior rather than anything else, and also a guaranteed way to get you murdered at any game table where you declared you were going to roll up a Kender.
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Zereth posted:... This seems counterproductive. This is why my thumbnail notes for a D&D-esque campaign setting put the religious action in a vaguely Buddhist situation, where the gods are real but religion isn't just "heed the booming commands of Odin"
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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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# ¿ May 20, 2025 20:38 |
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Leraika posted:Today I found out that more than one person in the world played hit video game Rhapsody: A Musical Adventure. But it is like even if Cornet was commanding the little bastards from Puppet Master, they are not supernally creepy just because they are little wooden men! The Achewood comic nails it, as it so often does.
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