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What is the best version of El? This poll is closed. |
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| Elminster |
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20 | 6.45% |
| Elmara |
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20 | 6.45% |
| Entwine |
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13 | 4.19% |
| GURPS |
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99 | 31.94% |
| El Kabong |
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153 | 49.35% |
| Elves |
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5 | 1.61% |
| Total: | 310 votes | ||
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Why spend effort to get the same result? 'Tis better to save the good posts for when they are needed.
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Aug 9, 2014 16:51
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"good posts"
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Aug 9, 2014 16:57
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ProfessorCirno posted:So oWoD, rather then gothic vampire drama with politics and skulking and questions about humanity and, well, horror, became little more then supers with fangs and poetry. I've come to realize that this slipshod genre enforcement is why I like the WoD. When nobody was looking, it morphed into Marvel Horror/Vertigo Comics: the RPG. I'm much more interested in Blade and Dracula having a fist fight on the moon while John Constantine looks on than I am in the Anne Rice milieu it originally tried to present itself as. I think beyond simply the 90s being over, this is why Onyx Path has cut out the "If you play a White Howler, we'll kill you" attitude White Wolf used to have. I know it's not all the same people but they've pretty much realized people are gonna play what they want to play, and maybe it's not so bad. This is also why it confuses me how mad as hell it makes the Pundit... does he actually know anything about these games besides "lol, goths played them"? Reene posted:I guess it's maybe that my approach to a WoD game (new, specifically) is completely different from a D&D game. D&D of any edition feels to me more like a rush to get bigger numbers and cooler items with a thin veneer of Plot to steer the way while WoD has always felt the opposite. I'm aware WoD has all the tables of how many strength dots to lift a car and how many dots of Matter you need to affect X cubic feet of something but I've simply never had a storyteller that paid attention to any of that more than they did the setting and what was going on with the plot and the characters. People powergame the poo poo out of WoD stuff all the time. I'm not as familiar with New WoD, but there's a reason why White Wolf guys used to freak out about trenchcoat sunglasses katana after all. This is kind of the equivalent of "one time, my GM ran a D&D game set in the courts of Greyhawk and we, like totally politicked for hours, we barely touched the dice except to roll Charisma checks." There's nothing really wrong with that and it often works, but it doesn't transmogrify D&D into being a game about politics. Effectronica posted:This is a pretty clear difference. D&D has a broad range of playstyles associated with it due to the ambiguity of the original rulebooks and later ones making use of it, but World of Darkness has always presented itself as being about story first. Although the mechanics rarely have supported gothic horror, nobody has ever tried to run it not just as a dungeon crawl, but even as something analogous to a dungeon crawl (and the Prince has WoD games have their classic equivalents of a dungeon crawl though. For example, destroying a Black Spiral Dancer hive. Early material like Dark Alliance Vancouver feels like a guide to creating a sandbox campaign where vampires and werewolves wander around doing goofy poo poo. I'd actually say that WoD material presented a wide variety of playstyles, they just pretended they didn't and were jerks to anyone who picked up on it. Bigup DJ posted:i don't know much about this zak s thing, both sides look like shitheads to me and i'm staying out of it. i would totally love to hear how posting gossip about this incredibly marginal figure is fighting the good fight against the oppression of the downtrodden, though. Oh man, it's Matt Stone and Trey Parker! Do the Cartman voice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Ewen Cluney posted:I've come to think of early White Wolf as a period of adolescence for role-playing games. The execution wasn't really there (though I think there were a few nice touches to what was otherwise a pretty traditional system), but it had the gently caress you dad kick down the door brazenness to say, "Screw this hack and slash poo poo, we're making stories! With theme! THEMES! Yes, absolutely. Like a teenager, the WoD was at war with itself. Despite what it really was about, the designers profusely pretended otherwise and gave poo poo to their customers for badwrongfun. Super surly teenager behavior. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 17:24 on Aug 9, 2014 |
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Aug 9, 2014 17:11
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3 Appearance). 
" The hobby needed that, but it also needed to move on from that.
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Oh, and just in case anyone is interested (maybe Lemon Curdstodian) I went ahead and bought the Mad Science supplement for Warbirds RPG. Its alright I guess, but nothing amazing. 10 pages of talking about how mad science effects the setting, how to hire a mad scientist, a few sample mad scientists (good, evil, and tragic) you can toss into the setting, 10 pages of sample Mad Science Environments (Including an old Dreadnought converted into a flying Science cruiser), and some Mad Science related agencies (Including a tabloid) 10 pages of sample "Plausible" Mad Science things like 20mm Vulcan cannons, Helicopters, and Nuclear Weapons/Reactors 10 pages of Crazy Mad Science projects like Rayguns, Robots, Jetpacks, Forcefields, and Weather Control Machines. 10 pages of Mundane and weird monsters like Flying whales, Deer, Lizard Men, Dogs, Crocodiles, Sky Dragons and Living Islands. Then 4 pages of Fleet Battle mechanics. The Fleet Battle Mechanics were the biggest reason I bought it and they were kinda disappointing. They basically boil down to "add up points for each side based on numbers, quality, leadership, morale, misc advantages, etc etc, biggest number wins" with the players able to add a few points to their side in various ways. It struck me as kinda... meh, even for a game emphasizing face-paced rules.  Still at roughly 11 cents a page, I don't regret the purchase, but one could easily do without it.
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Aug 9, 2014 17:37
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Ewen Cluney posted:I've come to think of early White Wolf as a period of adolescence for role-playing games. The execution wasn't really there (though I think there were a few nice touches to what was otherwise a pretty traditional system), but it had the gently caress you dad kick down the door brazenness to say, "Screw this hack and slash poo poo, we're making stories! With theme! THEMES! I don't know what the hobby needs or needed, but actually the Theme and Tone was what actually kept games from becoming just supers-with-fangs. People who complained that their Vampire games devolved into that instead of what they wanted almost universally didn't do what the game said to do: tightly control character creation and the initial situation of the characters in such a way as to direct them towards the type of story you wanted to create. They just let people show up with their teddybear Malkavian and corporate raider Ventrue and without other motivations for the player characters, they would look at their sheets, see the action rules, and decide it's an action game. Even in 1994, if you told your group "in this game you are going to take down the Prince and replace her, do this and this with your characters", players would go along with it. The devolution into supers-with-fangs happened when GMs simply didn't tell players what the game was about enough, or didn't promptly take out-of-character action to bring things back into line. "Hey, how is this helping you take down the Prince exactly? Or is this just personal revenge, or...?" (Not to mention supers-with-fangs is real fun, but that's another story.)
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Aug 9, 2014 18:27
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JDCorley posted:(Not to mention supers-with-fangs is real fun, but that's another story.) Yeah, I agree with you re: the GM setting guidelines on characters and establishing a premise, but the "supers with fangs" comments always less seemed to be a case of people bemoaning unintended outcomes as it did simply an observation that when presented with Vampire that's what most groups wanted to do with it.
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Aug 9, 2014 19:38
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If that's what people wanted to do with it, then it's DEFINITELY a feature, and not a bug. 
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Aug 9, 2014 19:49
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Well, there were a lot of mechanics and extra material in Masquerade that revolved around supernatural powers that were less horrific and more just grab-bag incredible abilities. I don't think the writing always tended towards it, but the system gave it a good amount of mechanical weight. In general, a roleplaying system in play tends to follow the path set down by its mechanics. Old World of Darkness had very few of those in place to encourage dramatic/horrific things happening and a whole lot which were chiefly interested in how efficaciously a wereshark could wrestle a Pentex robot. You can't blame it heavily for that, of course. It was a real trailblazer of a system/setting in its time, and the modern notion of storygame mechanics probably owes some of its current bloom to the way that White Wolf set the table for games more interested in theme and narrative consequence than loot.
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Aug 9, 2014 19:50
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what doesn't wear shoes and goes "boooooo"
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Aug 9, 2014 19:52
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Tollymain posted:what doesn't wear shoes and goes "boooooo" You, at 9 am in the morning
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Aug 9, 2014 19:54
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you take that back i love my shoes 
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Aug 9, 2014 19:56
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what are youre favourite shoes toly.
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Aug 9, 2014 19:58
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i dunno nike something but the important part is that they fit good and sacrifice themselves daily on the cold hard ground to protect my feets
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Aug 9, 2014 20:00
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JDCorley posted:If that's what people wanted to do with it, then it's DEFINITELY a feature, and not a bug. I dunno if I'd entirely agree with that, not in the sense that supers-with-fangs is dumb and lame so much as if the only way for a game to enforce its themes and tones is for the GM to do it him/herself then I'm not convinced that game is really about those themes and tones any more than any other game. You could do a game of cutthroat politics in D&D with a GM riding herd on player choices and keeping things on track but that doesn't mean that politics is a theme that D&D lends itself well towards.
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Aug 9, 2014 20:01
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Android Blues posted:You can't blame it heavily for that, of course. It was a real trailblazer of a system/setting in its time, and the modern notion of storygame mechanics probably owes some of its current bloom to the way that White Wolf set the table for games more interested in theme and narrative consequence than loot. What's funny is that Ron Edwards and RPGPundit both probably hate WoD equally, if for different reasons. A huge part of Forge theory was a direct response to how broken/incoherent Edwards thought WoD was (for pretty much the reasons we're talking about here). White Wolf definitely did set the stage for storygames, but it was very much as 'everything we want to avoid being like'.
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Aug 9, 2014 20:05
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Kai Tave posted:I dunno if I'd entirely agree with that, not in the sense that supers-with-fangs is dumb and lame so much as if the only way for a game to enforce its themes and tones is for the GM to do it him/herself then I'm not convinced that game is really about those themes and tones any more than any other game. You could do a game of cutthroat politics in D&D with a GM riding herd on player choices and keeping things on track but that doesn't mean that politics is a theme that D&D lends itself well towards. I dunno, the strength of WoD is that it relies on the ST so hugely, and the weakness of WoD is that it relies on the ST so hugely. It definitely seems to be focused on interpersonal bullshit more than most systems, which is to say it's about cutthroat politics.
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Aug 9, 2014 20:56
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The thing about WoD is that it learns from its past. nWoD was more story-focused and better at it than oWoD, mechanically. The new editions they're working on for nWoD are significantly better at it than original nWoD, though, not least for having actual story-based mechanics as the core of most of the consequences characters will take besides damage. Conditions are probably the most story-focused mechanic White Wolf has ever used.
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Aug 9, 2014 20:58
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Nah, oWoD didn't set the stage for story games, the Bullwinkle and Rocky Roleplaying Party Game did.
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Aug 9, 2014 21:44
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Hey, nice, thanks for the mini-review. Sounds like something to grab on sale.
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Aug 9, 2014 22:01
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ProfessorCirno posted:So oWoD, rather then gothic vampire drama with politics and skulking and questions about humanity and, well, horror, became little more then supers with fangs and poetry. Yes, that is why 2nd Edition was the best edition of vampire, Professorcirno. Thanks for pointing it out. 
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Aug 9, 2014 23:48
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Mormon Star Wars posted:Yes, that is why 2nd Edition was the best edition of vampire, Professorcirno. Thanks for pointing it out. oWOD 2e: Dark Ages specifically. Edit: Vampire in particular.
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Aug 10, 2014 00:03
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Hey look what I found at the game store today.
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Aug 10, 2014 00:04
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:He has friends and family who love him and internet buddies, like myself.
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Aug 10, 2014 01:12
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Lightning Lord posted:I've come to realize that this slipshod genre enforcement is why I like the WoD. When nobody was looking, it morphed into Marvel Horror/Vertigo Comics: the RPG. I'm much more interested in Blade and Dracula having a fist fight on the moon while John Constantine looks on than I am in the Anne Rice milieu it originally tried to present itself as. I think beyond simply the 90s being over, this is why Onyx Path has cut out the "If you play a White Howler, we'll kill you" attitude White Wolf used to have. I know it's not all the same people but they've pretty much realized people are gonna play what they want to play, and maybe it's not so bad. This is also why it confuses me how mad as hell it makes the Pundit... does he actually know anything about these games besides "lol, goths played them"? On this very forum in ancient times there was a very well regarded thread, about a group of vampires in a cold northern land. And while I do not dispute that it was a game many enjoyed, I stand by the controversial opinion, that it would have been better if a certain player had been able to do what they wanted with a rocket launcher and a train. VTM has schlock action horror all over it. That's how it should be played, if you're playing that system! Or at the very best, a cross between vampires, the sopranos, and the wire. That would own, too. drat I wish we'd played that hunter game like the wire. DAYM that woulda been good A Catastrophe fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Aug 10, 2014 |
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Aug 10, 2014 01:21
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Evil Mastermind posted:Hey look what I found at the game store today. Did you pick it up? It is maybe my favorite RPG book ever. A Catastrophe posted:Wait, you're rollin with gau? drat you cover some real estate, what's next a guest blog on shotgaming I am weeping with joy
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Aug 10, 2014 01:24
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A Catastrophe posted:Wait, you're rollin with gau? drat you cover some real estate, what's next a guest blog on shotgaming Do not even joke about that.
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Aug 10, 2014 02:53
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:Do not even joke about that. So that's a yes?
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Aug 10, 2014 02:54
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Error 404 posted:So that's a yes? I'd rather smash a bottle on Axemaniac's head.
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Aug 10, 2014 03:15
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Winson_Paine posted:Did you pick it up? It is maybe my favorite RPG book ever. Yup. Haven't started reading it yet, though.
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Aug 10, 2014 03:21
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hey sacred bbq has been renamed Strike! and has it's own thread now: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3656713
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Aug 10, 2014 03:37
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This is a bit off topic, but I've been shopping around for fantasy games that aren't Pathfinder/D&D since realizing I hate D&D forever, and I was wondering: Is Fantasycraft as insanely overcomplicated and clunky as Spycraft 2.0?
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Aug 10, 2014 03:51
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Night10194 posted:This is a bit off topic, but I've been shopping around for fantasy games that aren't Pathfinder/D&D since realizing I hate D&D forever, and I was wondering: Is Fantasycraft as insanely overcomplicated and clunky as Spycraft 2.0? Honestly, yeah. It's made for people that enjoyed the massive pile of interlocking building blocks that 3.5 ended up being in actual play but don't want to play the imbalanced mess that 3.5 also ended up being. It's a big pile of crunchy bits that I really want to use in actual play, don't get me wrong, but it's still a big pile of crunchy bits. Don't play it if you don't want that.
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Aug 10, 2014 03:55
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Lightning Lord posted:People powergame the poo poo out of WoD stuff all the time. I'm not as familiar with New WoD, but there's a reason why White Wolf guys used to freak out about trenchcoat sunglasses katana after all. This is kind of the equivalent of "one time, my GM ran a D&D game set in the courts of Greyhawk and we, like totally politicked for hours, we barely touched the dice except to roll Charisma checks." There's nothing really wrong with that and it often works, but it doesn't transmogrify D&D into being a game about politics. Yeah, but where D&D has barely any support for politicking, WoD is filled to the brim with Blade II just all over. That's why so many people see it as a "failure." It really is just awful at doing what it was meant to do. Obviously that didn't matter too much since it became a close #2 in an industry so dominated by D&D. I think WoD's most important legacy is getting people to really go after story-first. It didn't invent the idea and it almost certainly would've happened some other way if not by WoD's grubby hands. But it helped catalyze that sea change by talking so much about themes. I wouldn't even level the charge that its near-total failure to live up to its own hype was that important; just the fact that it helped fire the conversation by being so blustery about it, regardless of its poo poo rules. And beside all that, it's fun to be Blade anyway.  Too bad it left us all with brain damage. 
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Aug 10, 2014 04:19
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TheLovablePlutonis posted:I'd rather smash a bottle on Axemaniac's head. Error 404 posted:So that's a yes?
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Aug 10, 2014 04:24
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Night10194 posted:This is a bit off topic, but I've been shopping around for fantasy games that aren't Pathfinder/D&D since realizing I hate D&D forever, and I was wondering: Is Fantasycraft as insanely overcomplicated and clunky as Spycraft 2.0? Honestly, no. The feats, classes, and skill system are all more streamlined mechanically, and it doesn't have the great-in-concept terrifying-in-execution Chase system that's used for every other conflict in Spycraft 2.0. It's still a big crunchy block as Lurks describes, but it's nowhere near the monolith of crunch that Spycraft 2.0 is. I've run both 3.5 and Fantasy Craft for long periods, so I'm quite familiar. I'd call it actually less complicated than something like Pathfinder, because the crunch is heavy... but purposefully done for things like damage type, unlike things such as Pathfinder's monster statblocks or terrain system or NPC classes. I'd say Fantasy Craft is a good game if you want something that feels like 3.5 / Pathfinder but is far better... well, crafted. If you're looking for something lighter, take a look at 13th Age. If you want to just burn everything to the ground and run a fantasy storygame, look up Dungeon World.
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Aug 10, 2014 04:57
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I don't think oWoD is a bad game, and certainly not to the Ron Edwards level. I think it is (to some degree) a poorly conceptualized game. You can accidentally be a good game after all. I think part of WoD's issue is that, well, it was made in the 90's. TTGs are an exceptionally young hobby ffor all grognards love to bluster about the good ol' days, and it's still in development. WoD came out when there hadn't been a move to narrative focuses in games; it went full setting simulation instead of genre simulation because that's what all games did. The good thing about the Storyteller system is that it stated "Hey, you can run this game specifically for the story and drama of the characters first and foremost." The bad thing about the Storyteller system is that it wasn't actually built for that.
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Aug 10, 2014 06:03
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The most damning thing about oWoD is if you treat the game like 'supers with fangs', you're still stuck with a really awful combat system that is both fiddly/time-consuming and vague and flavorless. Attack, dodge, damage and soak rolls for every turn of every round is just too tedious with no payoff in terms of story or tactics. Not like I'm saying anything new, though. I did really like coming up with characters and making them in WoD, moreso than in most games of the time. I don't know why.
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Aug 10, 2014 07:35
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Metafilter is talking about the controversy: http://www.metafilter.com/141806/Gender-inclusive-language-in-DandD-5e-raises-roleplaying-questions
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Aug 10, 2014 08:23
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Alien Rope Burn posted:
Cool, thanks. Means Fantasy Craft isn't for me, then. I think I have an old hack for Unisystem I can adapt as it is but looking for a new system to run 18th Century Alt Europe Is Invaded By The Literal Bullshit of D&D after Pathfinder failed around 8th level is a good excuse to finally take a look at 13th Age.
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Aug 10, 2014 08:30
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| # ? Jun 6, 2024 13:00 |
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clockworkjoe posted:Metafilter is talking about the controversy: http://www.metafilter.com/141806/Gender-inclusive-language-in-DandD-5e-raises-roleplaying-questions Isn't sebmojo a goon who's posted in TG? Looks like someone's an idiot.
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Aug 10, 2014 08:35
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