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So Clever Bandit's Rook is basically just magically lying to people, but only if they are in a position to have believed a not-magical lie? Like you can tell a random stranger "hey man, I own this castle" and they'll be like "Oh dude nice," unless they knew who owned it already. Don't worry though, if they had an intimacy to "People I don't know can't own things I didn't know the owner of" that won't work during this charm. I do like the first one, it's subtle and interesting. Like assumedly if you're investing in mercantile Bureaucracy charms you're probably actually a master merchant, but it'd be nice to be able to wander into a town, plunk down at a bazaar cafe, and have strangers starting bring you free information phrased as requests for advice.
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May 23, 2014 20:53
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Clever Bandit's Rook is basically "Selling the Brooklyn Bridge: The Charm" for most applications I think, which can certainly be useful. And depending on how you interpret "directly contradicts what they know" it might be more useful. Like if, instead of a random person, you're trying to persuade a guard to let you in to see the king because as a long-lost bastard heir the castle (or another castle owned by one of his barons) is yours by right. The King probably knows you're totally full of it, but the random guard might not and he can't use plausible intimacies like "Loyalty to Dumbfuckville and the Dumbfuck monarchy" or "I like my high-status guard job" to resist your mental influence. Also seems pretty rad if you want to fence or trade the ridiculous gems and artifacts your Exalted thief/tomb raider steals without needing to go through an actual fence. IDK it doesn't seem totally terrible.
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May 23, 2014 21:16
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Roadie posted:All-Seeing Master Procurer makes me wonder "okay, but where's the Willpower cost to ignore/see through it?" There shouldn't be one, since you actually are a master merchant; You're a Solar with Bureaucracy 4 and multiple Bureaucracy charms, so even at Essence 1 you're a more serious merchant than virtually any human. I like the side effect that if you show up covered in dirt and blood and rags, you can activate the charm and everyone will realize you're actually a very significant merchant who is either very eccentric or who recently had some unfortunate inconvenience. LGD posted:Also seems pretty rad if you want to fence or trade the ridiculous gems and artifacts your Exalted thief/tomb raider steals without needing to go through an actual fence. It's also pretty great if you actually steal something and want to keep it. Convince bounty hunters or officers of the law that this one is actually yours, and it's actually that person you don't like who has the missing one. MiltonSlavemasta fucked around with this message at 21:59 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 21:55
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LGD posted:Clever Bandit's Rook is basically "Selling the Brooklyn Bridge: The Charm" for most applications I think, which can certainly be useful. And depending on how you interpret "directly contradicts what they know" it might be more useful. Like if, instead of a random person, you're trying to persuade a guard to let you in to see the king because as a long-lost bastard heir the castle (or another castle owned by one of his barons) is yours by right. The King probably knows you're totally full of it, but the random guard might not and he can't use plausible intimacies like "Loyalty to Dumbfuckville and the Dumbfuck monarchy" or "I like my high-status guard job" to resist your mental influence. I guess. My general litmus test for a charm is "Could you just do this with an ability roll and maybe an excellency?" and I think claiming false ownership of a thing is basically what Manipulation + Larceny is for. Hell in this case it's worse, since rolling Manipulation + Larceny to convince a guy you own his house is a legit thing you could do, but with the charm it isn't, since he knows better. I get the "can't spend willpower, intimacies don't work" thing, but I feel like that'd probably be a better 5th Excellency so that you can just take it for any charm you might try to use to exert mental influence. Like I dunno, Potent [Ability] Mastery: Spend 4 motes on this ability roll and people can't use their intimacies against it.
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May 23, 2014 22:03
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It took me a second to figure out what Subject-Hailing Ideology's actual effect was - I hope they do a better job of highlighting what game mechanics a given charm invokes. I'm assuming SHI has no limit on how far into a target's past it reaches and uses the maximum strength that the resurrected intimacy ever had, but it's not spelled out. I do like how the social charms are shaping up, though. The trend of them being a toolkit you have to apply intelligently based on context and your knowledge of the target looks to be upheld.
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May 23, 2014 22:04
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These charm previews don't mean a whole lot entirely devoid of rules context. I'd be a lot more interested in looking at what the actual systems being referenced actually are.
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May 23, 2014 22:20
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We don't know the actual percentages involved, but we DO know that (the devs think they've written a system in which) playing on an intimacy makes an enormous difference in one character's attempts to emotionally engage another. We've actually seen a number of charms whose only effect is "you can pretend an intimacy exists where it doesn't" or "you can ignore an intimacy that would normally impede you", which is consistent with the above. I assume the standard full-blast Solar social action involves A) buying a load of dice with an Excellency and B) simultaneously using other charms to ensure that an intimacy is there to give those dice real bite.
Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 22:56 on May 23, 2014 |
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May 23, 2014 22:30
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Alien Rope Burn posted:These charm previews don't mean a whole lot entirely devoid of rules context. I'd be a lot more interested in looking at what the actual systems being referenced actually are. I, too, like to know how the game mechanics even work when playing a game. Its like mapping all the buttons in the wrong order on a controller and then handing it to someone and telling them to play the video game. Only, its also unplugged. And the television is on the wrong channel. But by god they know they're playing the hottest release of 2014 because it says so right on the box!
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May 23, 2014 22:31
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Strength of Many posted:I, too, like to know how the game mechanics even work when playing a game. Playing Ex3 already, eh?
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May 23, 2014 22:49
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The surprisingly small possibility of Strength of Many or Stephenls playing Ex3 at this moment seems to be approximately equal, ironically enough.
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May 23, 2014 22:56
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I feel like Exalted needs some kind of plain language 'so what does this actually do' summary for charms where the mechanical effect is unclear or obscured by flowery prose, because the fact that people can read charms and be left wondering what, if anything, they actually do is a pretty bad tradition to keep up.
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May 23, 2014 23:17
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Subject Hailing Ideology is basically Make Darth Vader Throw Palpatine Into the Reactor Prana. Reactivate his Jedi intimacy.
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May 23, 2014 23:23
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Doc Aquatic posted:I feel like Exalted needs some kind of plain language 'so what does this actually do' summary for charms where the mechanical effect is unclear or obscured by flowery prose, because the fact that people can read charms and be left wondering what, if anything, they actually do is a pretty bad tradition to keep up. I agree. I would like to see the description and mechanics be more distinct, especially since the word from on high in Ex3 is that the way the mechanical effect plays out can differ dramatically from user to user.
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May 23, 2014 23:29
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theironjef posted:I guess. My general litmus test for a charm is "Could you just do this with an ability roll and maybe an excellency?" and I think claiming false ownership of a thing is basically what Manipulation + Larceny is for. Hell in this case it's worse, since rolling Manipulation + Larceny to convince a guy you own his house is a legit thing you could do, but with the charm it isn't, since he knows better. I get the "can't spend willpower, intimacies don't work" thing, but I feel like that'd probably be a better 5th Excellency so that you can just take it for any charm you might try to use to exert mental influence. Like I dunno, Potent [Ability] Mastery: Spend 4 motes on this ability roll and people can't use their intimacies against it. The wording of the charm implies it bolsters an existing dice roll by removing penalties that would normally apply from intimacies. Sounds like it's a charm for removing penalties to an action, not an action in itself. If so, this charm can't make things worse, since the baseline is the dicepool you would be rolling anyway.
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May 23, 2014 23:40
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Doc Aquatic posted:I feel like Exalted needs some kind of plain language 'so what does this actually do' summary for charms where the mechanical effect is unclear or obscured by flowery prose, because the fact that people can read charms and be left wondering what, if anything, they actually do is a pretty bad tradition to keep up. As I recall, this is something Weapons of the Gods did fairly early in its run - it used to have plain language descriptions of its powers, like "This style wreathes your fists or weapon in fire, adding +5 damage to your attacks". They got some complaints, and changed it to "This style wreathes your fists and weapons in fire. You get (line break) * +5 damage". Those sample charms aren't that bad - just a line break and some bolding could be all we need.
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May 23, 2014 23:50
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Ferrinus posted:As I recall, this is something Weapons of the Gods did fairly early in its run - it used to have plain language descriptions of its powers, like "This style wreathes your fists or weapon in fire, adding +5 damage to your attacks". They got some complaints, and changed it to "This style wreathes your fists and weapons in fire. You get (line break) * +5 damage". Yeah. Really, anything to set apart what the charm actually does from the pile of words would be a marked improvement in terms of picking powers in character generation and referencing them in play over anything Exalted's done before. Any chance this will be a priority, Stephenls?
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May 24, 2014 00:04
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Uh, sorta? In some cases I think the verbiage can probably be cleared up a bit or even a lot, and I'll have a hand in that. "Does this actually make sense; will the reader understand what's going on here?" is a priority. At the same time, we're not going to aggressively separate flavor text from mechanics, because we are consciously rejecting the idea that the two are distinct. Like, if a Sidereal Charm says it wreaths your hands in red light and adds five to damage, that red light is every bit as real, in the context of the game, as the damage bonus, and if you don't like that and want to reskin things, you're free to play a house-ruled version of the game where the red light can be something else if you want. If you want to see a Charm set where flavor and mechanics are rigorously separated, check out Lunars 2e. Like half the Charms in there go "Lunars are awesome in some way, like some kind of animal. [Mechanics go here.]" It is one of the blandest sets in the game. We don't want more sets looking like that.
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May 24, 2014 00:16
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I think flavor is important, and I definitely appreciate it, but given the choice between a charm that says "You are a master of the days and the hours, stepping between the seconds like wind between raindrops. When using your impeccable combat skills in a room with clocks, your movements synchronize perfectly and you are able to step between the moments, making your attacks unblockable, and your movements are impossible to track" And a charm that says: "You are a master of the days and the hours, stepping between the seconds like wind between raindrops. When using your impeccable combat skills in a room with clocks, your movements synchronize perfectly and: * You are able to step between the moments * Your attacks are unblockable * Your movements are impossible to track" I would absolutely pick the latter, because then I can look at a bulleted list and see the flavor and the mechanics that are important, rather than having to stop play and parse a paragraph to work out the most salient points of what a person is doing. Flavor is important, but clarity and ease of use are, too. Edit: Really, Apocalypse World is a game where flavor and mechanics are directly linked, and it doesn't have any of the 'So what am I actually doing? How is this meaningful?' problem, despite moves being very specific, entirely because of its formatting. And, without meaning to, I put my ideal Exalted formatting in something close to what Apocalypse World would do. If flavor and mechanics being equally important is a goal, and so is being comprehensible and having easy to reference mechanics, you could do a lot worse than taking a look at how Apocalypse World formats its rules. Edit 2: To give an example, I don't think that this charm would be diminished at all by formatting it like this: Clever Bandit’s Rook Cost: 2m; Mins: Larceny 3, Essence 1; Type: Supplemental Keywords: None Duration: Instant Prerequisite Charms: Seasoned Criminal Method A master of the sublime, the Lawgiver hooks a mark with her charisma and genuine seeming. When used, this Charm supplements an instill action to make a person believe an object or structure belongs to the Exalt. * This Charm cannot force an assertion on someone that directly contradicts what they know. * However, a character who does not know the truth cannot benefit from any Intimacies that would bolster their Resolve against the attempt. * A character may not spend Willpower to contradict this belief unless they see direct evidence to the contrary. It just focuses directly on when the charm is used, and then breaks down the exceptions, in a way that's easier to glance over than doing a full reading of a short paragraph. Doc Aquatic fucked around with this message at 00:51 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 00:28
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Stephenls posted:If you want to see a Charm set where flavor and mechanics are rigorously separated, check out Lunars 2e. Like half the Charms in there go "Lunars are awesome in some way, like some kind of animal. [Mechanics go here.]" It is one of the blandest sets in the game. We don't want more sets looking like that. Lunars were dull because their charms were bad. Their flavour was bad. The things they did were bad. Mixing or separating them did not change that their moves were bad.
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May 24, 2014 02:29
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Stephenls posted:Uh, sorta? In some cases I think the verbiage can probably be cleared up a bit or even a lot, and I'll have a hand in that. "Does this actually make sense; will the reader understand what's going on here?" is a priority. At the same time, we're not going to aggressively separate flavor text from mechanics, because we are consciously rejecting the idea that the two are distinct. Like, if a Sidereal Charm says it wreaths your hands in red light and adds five to damage, that red light is every bit as real, in the context of the game, as the damage bonus, and if you don't like that and want to reskin things, you're free to play a house-ruled version of the game where the red light can be something else if you want. Because if not, one part of that description is much more important than the other.
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May 24, 2014 02:32
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Zereth posted:Are you saying here that the red light is just as important in the context of the rules? Is there a combat subsystem where the color your fists glow is important here? I'm imaging some kind of Green Lantern weakness thing now for Sidereals, where each Caste is weak to some other spectrum of color.
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May 24, 2014 02:38
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Stephenls posted:
This is like correlation=/=causation 101 come on man you're better than that. Demonstrate the link don't just assert that two things coexisted then claim victory by default.
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May 24, 2014 03:04
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Zereth posted:Are you saying here that the red light is just as important in the context of the rules? Is there a combat subsystem where the color your fists glow is important here? I think the red fists thing here is a bad example because it's Combat and you can't even say Combat without a capital letter in most RPGs. If a Charm says that everybody in town knows you are the best horse buyer/seller and also allows you X bonus to Y Charms, those two ideas (might be? should be? I hope they are?) are equally important. It makes people know things and it also imposes X, Y and Z mechanical effects. At least, I hope that's what he means. I think the real problem is that (as you correctly point out in the red-fist example) so much of Exalted's fluff is just meaningless gobbledygook that there's no practical application for it. I "step between heartbeats", so what?
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May 24, 2014 04:10
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Mendrian posted:At least, I hope that's what he means. I think the real problem is that (as you correctly point out in the red-fist example) so much of Exalted's fluff is just meaningless gobbledygook that there's no practical application for it. I "step between heartbeats", so what? There's also the secondary problem of it training people to automatically filter out the fluff that doesn't matter, leading to problems with stuff like Sidereal Charms where people look at the Charm where you plant a Christmas tree, filter out the fluff about planting a Christmas tree, and then wonder what the poo poo it does because they don't realize it means literally planting a Christmas tree. Stephenls posted:If you want to see a Charm set where flavor and mechanics are rigorously separated, check out Lunars 2e. Like half the Charms in there go "Lunars are awesome in some way, like some kind of animal. [Mechanics go here.]" It is one of the blandest sets in the game. We don't want more sets looking like that. You know a bunch of the Infernals Charms do this, right? Roadie fucked around with this message at 04:36 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 04:31
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Mendrian posted:I think the red fists thing here is a bad example because it's Combat and you can't even say Combat without a capital letter in most RPGs. Yeah, that's a much better example than what I used.
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May 24, 2014 05:38
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That's a White Wolf trait more than anything else. With Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition you had the flavour text up too and the mechanics underneath. Other problems aside this made understanding and using the powers phenomenally easier to understand and apply to the game. With white wolf systems I sometimes find myself going cross eyed separating the mechanics from the flavour and can find it a huge pain.
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May 24, 2014 05:55
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Excelsiortothemax posted:That's a White Wolf trait more than anything else. With Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition you had the flavour text up too and the mechanics underneath. Other problems aside this made understanding and using the powers phenomenally easier to understand and apply to the game. 4th Edition was very simple in that way yes, but 4th Ed is a game that deliberately does not care about its own fluff. All the matters is the mechanics, and then you can backsolve for the fluff. There's a reason people tell you to reskin everything in 4th Ed; because the fluff is completely irrelevant. It's a jumping off point for your imagination, and an optional one at that. Mage, by contrast, is a game that freely mixes and matches 'fluff'. Many of Awakening's spells don't 'do' anything in a mechanical sense - they don't add to future rolls, or give +X dice or do Y Health Levels of damage. Many, of course, do interact with those subsystems, but some don't. Sometimes your character just knows things. Sometimes you can see things you shouldn't be able to, or you can force a coincidence to just sort of happen in your character's favor. Most of the time all of the text is significant, though admittedly it is occasionally superfluous. Exalted 2e didn't really know which one it wanted to be. A lot of the combat Charms read like wonky D&D 4e powers - fluff, fluff, fluff, and then the actual mechanics. Some Charms - particularly Sidereal Charms - didn't work that way, and read a little bit more like Awakening's spells. I'd prefer a system wherein most of the text is usable. If a Charm lights your hands on fire, you should be able to use that Charm to start a campfire or burn through a door. If Charm lets you step around the strands of Fate to avoid an attack, it sure as hell better let you interact with Fate in some other fashion too. I'm not asking for verisimilitude because that's dumb and I don't want to get on that ship. I'd prefer a set of tools that I can apply to a bunch of different situations, and not just when I need to add Y dice to <Pool> and other system cruft.
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May 24, 2014 07:35
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Heh. I'm reminded of Forum Arguments of Yore about Phantom-Conjuring Performance, which lets you summon sunlight hologram things for telling stories. "But what does it do?" "It lets you summon sunlight hologram things for illustrative purposes!" "So... it gives you a dice bonus, or what?" "It lets you summon sunlight holograms." "So it does... nothing?" "You could use them to stunt!" "So it gives me a stunt bonus?" "...no?" "So I could stunt just as well without it?" "It. Lets. You. Summon. Sunlight. Holograms. What the hell do you want?" Stephenls fucked around with this message at 09:14 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 09:11
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On the other hand, a charm that let you summon a sword into your hand would leave you feeling reaaally awkward if nowhere in the book were there rules for what a sword did. Intuitively, it's easier to impress or scare someone if I've got a host of shining angels behind me than if I've got some empty space behind me, but it's sort of the book's job to tell me how much easier, especially if it's asking me to pay 8 or 10 xp for the host of angels.
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May 24, 2014 09:14
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Yeah I suspect it should have mechanics of some sort, but we don't actually want a situation where it's a generic Performance buff fluffed as glowy illustrations. It's a power that lets you summon glowy illustrations! That's awesome! You can use it in a war room to project an illustrative map! You can use it to be super-effective when telling the Last Son of Krypton the story of the death of his home planet! You could use it to practice sketching while training up your illustration skills without using paper! You can use it for all sorts of things!
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May 24, 2014 09:18
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That itself is just a stunt based on, well, being a solar (or whatever) White Wolf has a terrible, decades long history of claiming that clear, concise rules and mechanics somehow ruin immersion (Because, by and large, they're goddamn terrible at writing rules and mechanics). I guess its nice to see they're at least persistent in that? Fluff followed by bullet points wouldn't hurt anything and would help greatly in rapidly understanding and applying the power. Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 09:27 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 09:25
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Stephenls posted:It's a power that lets you summon glowy illustrations! You could definitely get away with that if it was, like, a built-in Zenith anima power, or one of those 2xp mini-upgrades, rather than a whole charm in a charm tree. Like, I'm completely on board with the idea that a red glow around your fist is exactly as real as a +5 damage bonus to your fist from the perspective of the game world... buuuuut, it's just always going to be a fact that some things are crunchier than others and that crunch needs to be clear. Both heretofore existing Exalted corebooks have suspiciously listed weapons like this: Slashing Sword: Speed +3, Acc +2, Damage +5L, Rate 3 Sledgehammer: Speed -2, Acc -1, Damage +9L, Rate 2 And not like this: Slashing Sword: This long, sharp weapon is both fast and accurate, adding three to Speed and two to Accuracy when wielded. It adds five to its wielder's strength for the purpose of inflicting lethal damage, and- I mean, there is a little paragraph of prose explaining what a slashing sword is, but that's not where the weapon's stats are. The nice thing is that this presentation lets you write a power in which someone shapes a slashing sword out of pure light or w/e and you know the exact effects. This is actually a little off topic from the complaint I made up the page - I don't actually think that one "resurrect a dead Intimacy" charm needs any bullet points or specifically-set-apart Mechanics Sections, it just needs to make it more immediately obvious that that's what it does. I think Phantom-Conjuring-Performance's problem is that it's vague both about the game-mechanical effects of the holograms and about the actual property and nature of the holograms. You could've gone two ways to fix it: 1) The holograms add +5 to your performance roll or whatever, etc. etc. 2) The holograms cast this much light, they're this hard to see through, they can be of this size, etc - you give them concrete properties so that they're actually usable/abusable as holograms. It's dark? I tell an uplifting story to light up the cave! Archers are drawing a bead on us? I describe a wall of interposing sunlight that blocks line of sight!
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May 24, 2014 09:29
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Stephenls posted:Yeah I suspect it should have mechanics of some sort, but we don't actually want a situation where it's a generic Performance buff fluffed as glowy illustrations. It's a power that lets you summon glowy illustrations! That's awesome! You can use it in a war room to project an illustrative map! You can use it to be super-effective when telling the Last Son of Krypton the story of the death of his home planet! You could use it to practice sketching while training up your illustration skills without using paper! You can use it for all sorts of things! Y'know Stephen, I'm gonna be straight up-front with you, and I know you think I'm in this thread just to poo poo all over you but this is real and earnest feedback here. No, it's not actually that cool. It's not that cool in a game that has been sold by the people writing and selling it as the adventures of kung-fu Three Kingdoms Jesus surfing on a giant sword while the pillars of heaven crumble in the background to have the ability to make meaningless lightshows, that's not really what people tend to focus on when they sit down to play a game of Exalted, sorry. It's not that cool when the opportunity cost of "be a radder, more awesomest sword-dude" and "have glowy lightshows on-demand" are the same. And it's also not really that cool when every character in the game already comes with a built-in lightshow by default and express permission by the game designers to describe everything they do in the most over-the-top way possible anyhow. I could sit here and come up with a hundred and one theoretical ways that summoning pointless illusions might come in handy but in the context of Exalted, the game of kung-fu demigods doing epic stuff in Ancient Mythic Grecian China, that ability is an also-ran lost in a sea of more useful and applicable superpowers. So when you were telling people unsatisfied with that charm "What the hell do you want?" the answer was probably "more than a low-level D&D spell." edit; Like, do you get that the point of contention here isn't "glowy lightshows suck period" but "making people pay 8-10xp to unlock special effects for their character, while also padding out the charm tree with yet another speedbump" is? Putting on a light show may be neat or whatever but the point is that people apparently don't think it's neat enough to cost the same as a charm that makes you better at kung-fu or conning someone out of the key to the kingdom or hiding behind a single stalk of bamboo or whatever. Kai Tave fucked around with this message at 10:01 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 09:48
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I wasn't telling anyone anything, I was watching those conversations from the sidelines. That was like during 1e, dude. Decade ago. That said, there was one group of fans who were all "What bonus does it give?" and there was another group who were all "That's myopic." I'm firmly in the latter group. Keep in mind, I'd never try to sell Exalted as the adventures of kung-fu Three Kingdoms Jesus surfing on a giant sword while the pillars of heaven crumble in the background. I'm the guy who complains, loudly, when that sort of description dominates the discourse on What Exalted Is, and why tries to discourage people from introducing other people to the game via the 1d4chan essays. There are other designers who'll talk about the game in those terms, but SomethingAwful doesn't have them. Y'all get me.
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May 24, 2014 10:00
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Stephenls posted:I wasn't telling anyone anything, I was watching those conversations from the sidelines. That was like during 1e, dude. Decade ago. That said, there was one group of fans who were all "What bonus does it give?" and there was another group who were all "That's myopic." I'm firmly in the latter group. What Is Exalted, Stephenls?
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May 24, 2014 10:04
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Bigup DJ posted:What Is Exalted, Stephenls? A variety of things, mostly a pulp fantasy revival skinned as anime so kids'll like it combined with one man's attempt at a vituperative refutation of D&D combined with a bunch of stuff that's in there because gently caress you, that's why. Uh. That'd be the general you, not the specific you. EDIT: A shorter version might be "Contrarian fantasy." (Incidentally, for those who don't know me, I do this thing, habitually, where about 100% of everything I say is simultaneously serious and a joke. The statement "Exalted is contrarian fantasy" is very much meant to be read in that tone.) Stephenls fucked around with this message at 10:16 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 10:12
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Stephenls posted:I wasn't telling anyone anything, I was watching those conversations from the sidelines. That was like during 1e, dude. Decade ago. That said, there was one group of fans who were all "What bonus does it give?" and there was another group who were all "That's myopic." I'm firmly in the latter group. quote:White Wolf has a terrible, decades long history of claiming that clear, concise rules and mechanics somehow ruin immersion (Because, by and large, they're goddamn terrible at writing rules and mechanics). There needs to be an actual concrete game here, not just a whimsical artproject of "Wouldn't that be cool?" Why pay experience for something that does not have a mechanical effect when instead we could be buying a mechanical effect and just fluffing/stunting whatever the former does? Am I being a bad, myopic Exalted player here, Steve? Level with me. Ronwayne fucked around with this message at 10:20 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 10:16
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It's funny that you bring up how it's meant to be a refutation of D&D when 'spend a limited resource to be able to make light holograms that have no mechanical effect' is the kind of thing you see regularly there. I thought that was the domain of stunts and Obvious keywords? E: Like, seriously, that is a thing D&D does, constantly. It's practically a hallmark, if a terrible one. You do not get to play with your imagination freely unless you have X Spell or Spell-Like Item or Ability that lets you actually do that, because verisimilitude and rules adherence or some poo poo Chaotic Neutral fucked around with this message at 10:30 on May 24, 2014 |
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May 24, 2014 10:28
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I would probably phrase my argument this way: I have seen where "systemize everything" leads -- it leads to things like "We can't figure out how to effectively systemize this within our wordcount, so we're going to cut it" and, shortly afterwards, "We can't systemize Setting Element X as well as we can systemize Setting Element Y, so we should probably remove Setting Element X from the setting, because people are complaining that it's not up to the standards of quality representation the rest of the game holds itself to." And then you get, sometimes, Yozi Charmsets and people seeing Yozis as bots running a script, and other times D&D4e and its complete abandonment of things I genuinely enjoy like using weird combinations of wizard spells to flood the dungeon.
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May 24, 2014 10:32
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quote:"We can't systemize Setting Element X as well as we can systemize Setting Element Y, so we should probably remove Setting Element X from the setting, because people are complaining that it's not up to the standards of quality representation the rest of the game holds itself to." Yes, excellent ideas. Do that. If a part of the setting cannot be made immediately relevant to games played in that setting, it shouldn't exist. You guys are not Tolkien, you are not writing a literary classic that will shape the course of writing for years to come. The project will be lucky to get to publication without another Ruckus on Ghost-Rape Ridge.
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May 24, 2014 10:37
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