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As somebody who is only superficially familiar with the setting, I wonder how it's treating the whole concept of the (second) inquisition and hunters? On the one hand I'd expect it to come down on it fairly harshly, since the setting and writers don't seem to be fans of the religious fanaticism inherent to movements. On the other hand... well, the inquisition kinda does have a point when there really are blood-drinking monsters preying on humanity, doesn't it?
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Jul 29, 2021 08:34
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Ferrosol posted:Then along came ilclan. Some potted backstory for people not familiar to the setting. 80 years ago in game there was a massive genocidal war where religious fanatics launched a jihad to destroy the galaxy. The religious fanatics are beaten by pretty much an alliance of everyone else and a charismatic strong man is allowed to build a democratic state on the ruins of their empire. Cut to 60 years later said charismatic strongman dies and the whole thing falls apart. Then the clans invade fascist genetically engineered supermen who are the bestest warriors ever and conquer earth by such clever naval tactics as what if we suicide bomb enemy warships. And such clever land tactics as what if we follow the authors risk strategy by landing all our armies in Australia. This seems doubly weird considering the Clan's whole deal initially was that they were way too used to their weirdo ritualized version of warfare and couldn't deal with the reality of actual total war that the Inner Sphere employed. Which at the time could be read as a commentary on how fascists' self-aggrandizing worldview would become ever more warped to the point where it completely falls apart when confronted with actual reality. Going from that to "actually the fascists are the cleverest and most effective at war" seems very  Anyhow, on the topic of sci-fi settings, it might be worth mentioning Eclipse Phase. It's set some centuries into the future, taking place largely within our partially colonized solar system. It's set in the immediate aftermath of an apocalyptic skynet-style event, where a rogue AI ended up killing/abducting more than 90% of the population before just leaving towards deep space, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces. The key conceit of the setting is the invention of the "cortical stack". This is a small device allows any person to essentially upload their entire consciousness and transfer it freely to another destination, like a new body, or even to just exist in a wholly digital state on a server somewhere. If you've read or watched Altered Carbon, it's pretty similar to that, including the aspect that it's fairly difficult to actually "kill" a person, since the stack carrying their consciousness can often be recovered and reactivated, or you could just activate a digital backup. This means that essentially the "ego" of a person is considered largely separate from their physical body, both in terms of the setting's fluff as well as how the rules treat it. This is a bit of a break with genre conventions, since many games often rely on physical attributes such as Strength or Endurance to mechanically describe a character. In EC on the other hand, your character is primarily described through the mental attributes of their Ego, whereas their physical body is treated as more of an interchangeable asset. Humans aren't the only people around, either. Various animal species such as ravens, apes, and octopi have been uplifted to human-level intelligence. Self-aware artificial intelligences exist as well, though they are intentionally limited to a roughly human ability to learn and self-improve, to avoid a repeat skynet incident. All these groups together with humans are collectively described as "Transhumanity" within the game. As mentioned, bodies are fairly interchangeable and not at all limited to a person's birth body. Somebody may have been born as an uplifted orangutan, but may prefer to live in a cloned avian body. A lot of people are stuck in lovely robotic bodies, as cloned biological bodies are still scarce and if you lose your birth body you may not be able to get anything else. The lore goes into quite a bit of detail how your ego interacts with your body and vice versa. Swarm bodies where your mind is spread across thousands of mite-sized flying drones will obviously influence your self-perception some, a biological body's adrenal system will influence your state of mind when it floods you with hormones, and so on. Switching from one body to another is disorientating at best, and potentially traumatizing if it goes badly. The book explicitly points out that gender dysphoria and trans people still exist, though of course the ability to outright switch bodies offers a new way for people to deal with that. In terms of the current society, the book offers something of a grab-bag of factions scattered across the solar system. You've got classic hypercorporations, luddite bio-essentialists, separatist uplifted species and AIs, anarcho-communists and -capitalists, and a whole slew of micro-societies built around space stations. Technology has advanced to a point where it could/should be functionally post-scarcity: Devices called nanofabricators (basically molecular 3D-printers) can manufacture very nearly anything from abundant base resources. However, the larger societies around the core of the solar system still use currency-based market economies by enforcing artificial scarcity. Ostensibly this is to ensure that everybody seeks employment and puts in work towards rebuilding, but of course it also allows those societies to retain their old hierarchies. Further outwards things tend to be more communal, with open access to nanofabricators and open-sourced software for them, and any trade is focused more around exchanged favours, services, and reputation. It's a fairly dense setting, we've only played one campaign in it so far and it feels like we've only just scratched the surface. There's a lot more you could dive into in greater depth Perestroika fucked around with this message at 19:09 on Oct 4, 2021 |
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Oct 4, 2021 12:35
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Captain Oblivious posted:Even in 2E, and 5E for that matter, one of the biggest problems is that in AD&D caster supremacy was still very real. In 5E it mostly isn't...mechanically. But in both systems, casters still have far more vectors to interact with the narrative due to the broad applicability of magic. Magic gives them more narrative agency. Yeah, that was/is really my main gripe with it. Not so much raw power, but just variety. When faced with an opponent, a magic user might trick them with an illusion, teleport past them, teleport them away, make themselves invisible to walk past, give themselves the ability to fly past, or one of a dozen other things. Meanwhile a fighter could... hit them with an axe. If they're a particularly powerful and experienced fighter, they might be able to hit them with an axe really hard, or perhaps even twice as often. Ideally, the mechanics of a game should support a character in establishing their role within the narrative, guiding them in how they approach obstacles and challenges. But the approach of old D&D mechanically pigeonholed most martials into the role of "is good(ish) at murder" and not much else, which of course can lead to them feeling useless when combat isn't regularly forthcoming. It kinda makes me wonder if/how much influence it had in establishing the murderhobo cliche. In my experience, systems that try and give all characters a similar degree of combat capability (thus avoiding the issue of some characters that do only combat and nothing else) tend to encourage players to be more creative when looking for solutions to challenges.
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Nov 7, 2021 23:57
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Xander77 posted:I mean, leaving aside how transactional you find the most immaterial good promised by Monotheistic faiths... yeah, that's how pantheons operate. You pray and sacrifice (now that the satanic panic is largely in the past, it would be neat to have some ritual \ sacrifice rules) in return for actual benefits. Having played two and a half modules, I'd say my main complaint is that they took out a bunch of stuff from 4e, but then just kinda didn't put anything in the void it left. Martials in particular don't really have much to do beyond "I move to flank and full attack" in every single round. Even if you take feats to open up more options, those often just work out to "get a +X to your roll in this situation". This means gameplay can feel a bit passive, in that if feels like you're supposed to stack bonuses on the one thing you always do and hope the dice go your way, rather than creatively finding new ways to approach an obstacle. Last but not least it shares the issue of just about all versions in that the out-of-combat rules are really rather sparse. Then again my group uses GURPS half the time, so perhaps we're just addicted to crunch  .Though not to be all negative, I will say in its favour that the overall presentation feels much better and more approachable. It's quite easy to get started and there's a decent number of ways to build a fun character without having to dive into a million splatbooks. Perestroika fucked around with this message at 12:57 on Nov 9, 2021 |
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Nov 9, 2021 11:35
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All this talk about Warmachine's page 5 had me morbidly curious enough to take a look, and oof that's something special alright: My guys, you're still pushing painted miniatures around pretending they're beating each other up. You're not gonna magically turn it into some cool macho thing no matter how hard you try.
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Dec 12, 2022 21:47
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