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Plague of Hats posted:I think you mean Charnel Houses? The Great War is WWI, which as a Wraith supplement/alt-core I seem to recall was fairly "meh". I recall Charnel Houses being in that zone of 'this is quite a good RPG book and is treating the material surprisingly well. Do we really need a book on the holocaust though?' I thought the most interesting part was some of the metaplot stuff, including how the Ferrymen were intimating that if Stygia didn't do something about the Holocaust dead, the Ferrymen were entirely prepared to replace them with someone who would.
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Dec 4, 2014 06:44
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moths posted:The problem is that "the Communists" were only a threat when Alpha Complex was created. Switching focus to "the Terrorists" misses that Alpha Complex was birthed at the height of Cold War, er, paranoia. Trading Communists for Terrorists doesn't work because we never built underground survival bunkers to resist terrorists - we just traded our privacy for "security." You mean jingoistic hyper-patriotism like what led up to much of our current War on Terror? Again, the Cold War was still going when Paranoia was first birthed. This was less than a year after Able Archer. Reagan was hyping our battle with an Evil Empire and making jokes about bombing them on an open mic. The idea that you can't explore anything that's happened geopolitically in the interim just does not make sense for me. And again, Communists are still in the game. What the Terror stuff means for the new edition, what precisely it does to the setting, has yet to be defined. It certainly wouldn't be the first time we were given secret societies that can actually be dangerous (PURGE is basically a terror group, and the Straight advice in XP talks about how Communists in a darker toned game might go around blowing up buildings full of innocent civilians, instead of just arguing over party literature.) I think the setting is flexible enough to accommodate some reference to our culture's current fears and shibboleths.
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Dec 4, 2014 06:47
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The problem is that we didn't know who The Communists were. Is it a handsome Hollywood up-and-comer? Is it that leggy starlet with the maybe-too-pouty lips? We "know" who the terrorists are. They're brown people that don't speak American. Let's go beat up an innocent guy who drives a cab. HAHA it's funny because it's ironic-ish.
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Dec 4, 2014 06:50
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moths posted:The problem is that we didn't know who The Communists were. Is it a handsome Hollywood up-and-comer? Is it that leggy starlet with the maybe-too-pouty lips? But we didn't know who the traitors supporting terrorism by not supporting our troops were! Again it feels like we're leaping to conclusions based on the sketchiest of info. "Terrorism" being emphasized more does not necessarily mean we'll be getting ironic racism and people wearing turbans. It could just mean emphasizing that the secret societies don't just hold meetings and argue with each other. There is just as much evidence for the latter as the former, i.e. not a lot since the developers have not laid out the specifics. And again, Communists will still be an element in the game. It's like assuming a movie will suck based on a few lines in an interview with a screenwriter.
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Dec 4, 2014 07:12
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I think it's more like assuming it will suck because they didn't put even the most basic of production values into the art, made sweeping changes to the source material, and didn't involve any of the original production team. It's double-plus fifth edition! e: Guys, why are you knocking these 'other ghost-busters' they have a gorilla! moths fucked around with this message at 07:19 on Dec 4, 2014 |
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Dec 4, 2014 07:15
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On the other hand it's not really unfair to suggest that Communism, as a boogeyman, probably isn't something that's going to resonate with the sorts of people playing Paranoia outside of recursive Paranoia in-jokes. No matter how many times Call of Duty wants people to buy the idea that no really, radical Russian neo-Communists going to war with America is totally gripping storytelling, nobody really gives a poo poo about the Red Scare anymore outside of fringe punditry. "Communists" in Paranoia are such a cypher that you could just search/replace the instances of "Commie" with "Terrorist" and it would have virtually no real effect on things, because I'm highly doubtful that most people playing Paranoia really stop to consider the McCarthian satire over "another successful mission briefing, everybody died twice." edit; also I'm confused, didn't Paranoia XP introduce "terrorism" into Paranoia as another thing to be concerned with? I swear I remember that but the way people are talking it's new to this upcoming version, and XP seemed like it was pretty well regarded.
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Dec 4, 2014 07:17
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moths posted:I think it's more like assuming it will suck because they didn't put even the most basic of production values into the art, made sweeping changes to the source material, and didn't involve any of the original production team. It's double-plus fifth edition! What "sweeping" changes? What specifically are they doing to the setting? All they've talked about is vaguely playing up the terrorism connection more. Fifth edition wasn't bad because it changed things. Or even necessarily the art (though it was a huge part of it.) It was bad because it didn't support anything but Zappy play. The setting information was threadbare compared to prior books and without that info it's hard to do much beyond short violent wackiness. XP remedied this by beefing up the setting info and adding elements to support longer campaigns. Maxwell Lord fucked around with this message at 07:28 on Dec 4, 2014 |
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Dec 4, 2014 07:24
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Nessus posted:I recall Great War actually being better than core Wraith in a lot of ways, mostly because they simplified some of the details into more compact form in order to have more room for the Great War stuff. I really love Wraith, though, so I might be biased. Oh, definitely GW benefited from having to pare down the word count, and also basically being a new edition. But it didn't significantly improve the frame work of the rule set, which is honestly pretty poo poo even by cWoD standards, and for me the rest of the book just didn't grab me. quote:I recall Charnel Houses being in that zone of 'this is quite a good RPG book and is treating the material surprisingly well. Do we really need a book on the holocaust though?' I thought the most interesting part was some of the metaplot stuff, including how the Ferrymen were intimating that if Stygia didn't do something about the Holocaust dead, the Ferrymen were entirely prepared to replace them with someone who would. Yeah. Bruce Baugh (I think?) posted a short essay on G+ pretty much in response to some posts about this subject on RPG.net. He had some good advice about actually trying to game in the Holocaust. And I think it should totally be a thing out there, if it can be done well, and that's what Charnel Houses and Bruce Baugh's essay do. I still, personally, wouldn't want to do it.
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Dec 4, 2014 07:25
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Fifth ed was basically a soulless cargo cult that went full-bore troper on the setting without stopping to consider context. Paranoia? That's got lazers, clones, and zany art! And communists, but those are gone so terrorists! The end.
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Dec 4, 2014 07:54
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How many new Paranoia fans are they really likely to get in this Kickstarter? Seems like their entire potential audience is existing fans who want commie mutant traitors.
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Dec 4, 2014 08:01
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moths posted:Fifth ed was basically a soulless cargo cult that went full-bore troper on the setting without stopping to consider context. Again, Communists are still in the game according to the designers. You're not only leaping to conclusions you're leaping to them from inaccurate facts. This is what grognardism is.
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Dec 4, 2014 08:02
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I've never really liked any edition of Paranoia, the rules have always been garbage that doesn't support what it says it does. This latest version looks worse than usual and like it doesn't bring anything interesting or new to the table, even without the poor art and bad writing on their kickstarter page.
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Dec 4, 2014 08:36
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Getting away from... yeah, Underground Lasers has a third kickstarter up and going. It's really nice stuff, his designs keep getting better, and the only reason his second project was late for some backers was because one guy backed at $100 and then ordered about $1000 worth of add ons, which blew his burn time off the charts.
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Dec 4, 2014 08:46
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moths posted:The problem is that we didn't know who The Communists were. Is it a handsome Hollywood up-and-comer? Is it that leggy starlet with the maybe-too-pouty lips? You're coming at this from an American point of view, but remember that the writers for the game are mainly British. Even discounting that for most of the past 50 years terrorists in pop culture were Irish rather than Middle Eastern, a big difference between our pop culture terrorists in Spooks or whatever and American ones is that ours are home-grown, and almost never foreigners. They're pretty often white, too. I'm not saying there's an element of Xenophobia to it still, but the popular perception of terrorists is much more about a fear that multiculturalism has failed and there are people in the country unwilling to play by the rules of civil society and kill for bizarre reasons.
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Dec 4, 2014 08:49
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Flavivirus posted:the popular perception of terrorists is much more about a fear that multiculturalism has failed and there are people in the country unwilling to play by the rules of civil society and kill for bizarre reasons. Can't speak for the UK, but down here in Australia it is strictly xenophobia
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Dec 4, 2014 08:51
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Flavivirus posted:You're coming at this from an American point of view, but remember that the writers for the game are mainly British. Even discounting that for most of the past 50 years terrorists in pop culture were Irish rather than Middle Eastern, a big difference between our pop culture terrorists in Spooks or whatever and American ones is that ours are home-grown, and almost never foreigners. They're pretty often white, too. I'm not saying there's an element of Xenophobia to it still, but the popular perception of terrorists is much more about a fear that multiculturalism has failed and there are people in the country unwilling to play by the rules of civil society and kill for bizarre reasons. No, that's not really true at all. See also: the EDL and BNP talking about those evil Muslims, the hysteria around the Lee Rigby murder and the fear of British Muslims becoming radicalised and going to the Middle-East to fight (said British Muslims are almost never white when reported on, and this is always used as proof that immigration is bad and wrong by some people). The British fear of multiculturalism is about 80% Islamophobia. Yes, for a long while "terrorist" meant "Irish." That hasn't been the case for about ten years. Now, "terrorist" is just as much synonymous with "brown person" here as it is in the US - probably the only difference is that Sikhs are high enough profile here that we don't mistakenly associate turbans with Muslims. Maxwell Lord posted:Again, Communists are still in the game according to the designers. You're not only leaping to conclusions you're leaping to them from inaccurate facts. It doesn't matter that "communists are still around" in the game. The problem with using "terrorists" instead of "communists" is that terrorism is a real, present-day issue wrapped up in a ton of xenophobia and racism which it is impossible to deal with in a manner befitting the seriousness of the issue in a jokey slapstick RPG. The second Red Scare is inherently silly and stupid and pathetic with 35-65 years' hindsight, so we can laugh at it and make it into a joke for a joke RPG. Terrorism is none of those things. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 13:59 on Dec 4, 2014 |
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Dec 4, 2014 10:13
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Flavivirus posted:You're coming at this from an American point of view, but remember that the writers for the game are mainly British. Even discounting that for most of the past 50 years terrorists in pop culture were Irish rather than Middle Eastern, a big difference between our pop culture terrorists in Spooks or whatever and American ones is that ours are home-grown, and almost never foreigners. They're pretty often white, too. I'm not saying there's an element of Xenophobia to it still, but the popular perception of terrorists is much more about a fear that multiculturalism has failed and there are people in the country unwilling to play by the rules of civil society and kill for bizarre reasons. This is not my experience at all. Over the past 5-10, popular perception of terrorists has become "Home-grown muslim jihadis", encouraged by successive governments pandering to racist knobheads to try to stop them voting for one of the fascist mobs (BNP, EDL, UKIP...). Our "terrorists" are still home-grown, but they're sure not white, and fear of them sure is based in good old-fashioned racism.
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Dec 4, 2014 10:13
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Yeah, I stand corrected. I hadn't thought about the harm it could cause, which I really should have. Also I guess my mental picture of what terrorists look like in UK TV drama is waaaaay off the mark. Not to mention that the fact they're also trying to introduce an Edward Snowden reference implies they're only thinking very shallowly about which new elements to add in, and are likely not going to be using much in the way of finesse.
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Dec 4, 2014 10:39
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Thinking shallowly implies they put even half the amount of thought into it that this page of the thread has. The publisher has a pretty proven track record of thought-free content. (And, perhaps more pertinently, several other kickstarters under different accounts that remain unfulfilled or which have massive problems.)
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Dec 4, 2014 13:27
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Really, the main thing stopping me backing Paranoia is that James Wallis has a bad track record with deadlines, Paul Dean is a great writer but an incredibly groggy rpg designer, and as for Grant Howitt... well, Goblin Quest works perfectly for paranoia already, with like 5 minutes of hacking. Not to mention the bizarrely low price of the box set they're putting out - corners are clearly being cut.
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Dec 4, 2014 14:18
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Flavivirus posted:Paul Dean is a great writer but an incredibly groggy rpg designer I'm glad I'm not the only one who couldn't bear to read his SU&SD design diaries because they're an exercise in "man who has never read anything outside of terrible 80s/90s RPG design attempts to make a game." 
Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 15:33 on Dec 4, 2014 |
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Dec 4, 2014 15:06
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Maxwell Lord posted:Fifth edition wasn't bad because it changed things. Or even necessarily the art (though it was a huge part of it.) It was bad because it didn't support anything but Zappy play. The setting information was threadbare compared to prior books and without that info it's hard to do much beyond short violent wackiness. XP remedied this by beefing up the setting info and adding elements to support longer campaigns. Not only was the tone all Zap, it was all terrible Zap and yet had complex chargen like you were going to run extended campaigns. Another major problem was that, at the time, West End didn't have a single person who could write comedy. Where older editions made fun of RPG tropes or pop culture by viewing them the the lens of the setting, 5th edition had the "Epic Movie" style humor, where "satire" and "parody" mean "hey, see this? It's like that thing you know, only we tweaked the name! Hilarious!" By way of example, the one 5e adventure that was published had a scene where the PCs fight the characters from Mortal Kombat. Their names are tweaked to fit the Name-color-sector format, and some of the physical attributes are exaggerated, but the whole scene still just boils down to "hey, it's the characters from Mortal Kombat!" That's the joke. They're the Mortal Kombat characters.
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Dec 4, 2014 15:21
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As someone who's £45 down the hole on this, I've spent way too long poring through everything available about the new edition, including the three hours long recording of a playtest session and loads of interviews, and I feel what they're doing to the systems, the cutting down on the number of stats and adding the Ghost Die mechanic from Ghostbusters, and using the cards as a way to conceal the players' actions, all that seems, I don't wanna say good because until there's more details out there I can't really speak on it, but at least going in a good direction. What's really gonna make or break it is the nuts and bolts and how well they do the setting, neither of which they've really spoken at length on? The playtest PDF is out in like, two weeks, that's when we'll find out how it turns out.
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Dec 4, 2014 15:47
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That's the thing - rules tidbits I've seen like the character gen system have promise, but I have no idea whether it'll hold up. When their campaign is essentially "this old thing but different!" and they fail to provide details of how exactly it's different I have nothing to go on. Basically, always show people as much of your system ad you can.
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Dec 4, 2014 16:05
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I don't understand why designers nowadays are so coy with showing off mechanics for their kickstarters. Yeah, there are some established names I trust, but after so many horror stories and people getting burned you'd think these guys would be like "here's what we have so far".
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Dec 4, 2014 16:13
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Designers being paranoid or not having the actual mechanics written up yet.
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Dec 4, 2014 16:29
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Enough people to seriously impact revenue will print off a shittily formatted 120-page Word .doc of just rules, and then cancel their $1 pledge. This is definitely a thing that will happen.
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Dec 4, 2014 16:31
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Why, it almost sounds like you've had that sort of discussion before, PoH.
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Dec 4, 2014 17:14
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And others wobt back without that 120 page word document (though I'd settle for less) so damned if you do, dsmbed if you don't. If I don't have something concrete so I can look at to see work is well underway and looking promising, I'm not backing. I'll wait till it releases and see what word of mouth opinions are. Nearly all the RPGs I've backed have had rules drafts available. Haven't actually cancelled on one yet. But I would if I hated what I saw.
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Dec 4, 2014 17:29
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Terrorists as "turban wearing Browns" hasn't been a thing since the early days of the war on terror. Considering how few Americans have been affected by the war on terror beyond longer airport lines I would say it's not even a fear for most anymore. And when it is it's more the homegrown possibility. Ie Boston marathon.
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Dec 4, 2014 18:04
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FastestGunAlive posted:Terrorists as "turban wearing Browns" hasn't been a thing since the early days of the war on terror. Considering how few Americans have been affected by the war on terror beyond longer airport lines I would say it's not even a fear for most anymore. And when it is it's more the homegrown possibility. Ie Boston marathon. I think you're giving John Q. Public a bit too much credit, but I do spend a fair amount of time reading the political cartoons thread.
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Dec 4, 2014 18:27
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Yeah uh, there's still a fair number of ignorant idiots out there, hell I just found out my coworker is a birther who calls Obama the "secret muslim". Seems like a pretty normal guy, and then something like that reveals his craziness.
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Dec 4, 2014 18:34
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FastestGunAlive posted:Terrorists as "turban wearing Browns" hasn't been a thing since the early days of the war on terror. Considering how few Americans have been affected by the war on terror beyond longer airport lines I would say it's not even a fear for most anymore. And when it is it's more the homegrown possibility. Ie Boston marathon. They still are in the eyes of the media, ergo the eyes of the public. The first question is always "Muslim?" when stories of domestic terrorism surface. While that doesn't denote skin color, there isn't any difference to the American media.
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Dec 4, 2014 18:42
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Lemon Curdistan posted:No, that's not really true at all. See also: the EDL and BNP talking about those evil Muslims, the hysteria around the Lee Rigby murder and the fear of British Muslims becoming radicalised and going to the Middle-East to fight (said British Muslims are almost never white when reported on, and this is always used as proof that immigration is bad and wrong by some people). The British fear of multiculturalism is about 80% Islamophobia. Again, the Cold War was also a real and present day issue in 1984, less than a year after WWIII very nearly happened because the Russians mistook NATO wargames for a legit buildup. The Commies were real. The idea that satire should confine itself to things that are over and done is a curious one. Reading Paranoia as solely about the McCarthy years does it a disservice IMO. Concerns based on the designers' track records and such are legit, insisting that mentioning terrorism means "they're ruining the setting" is silliness. Maxwell Lord fucked around with this message at 18:52 on Dec 4, 2014 |
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Dec 4, 2014 18:50
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Yeah it's basically a catch-all reason why Johnny Racist is stockpiling ten thousand rounds in his basement. It was almost quaint when he was waiting for T-54s to roll on Main Street. That's where some of the game's of humor comes from: This cold war paranoid, absurd scenario that never happened. But is it still a bucket of chuckles when he's stalking the neighborhood mosque? I've liked one of the mechanics: that co-op character generation sounded really fun but ultimately impractical. If all the characters need to be made at once, picking up new players is going to be rough. The production values we've seen are comically bad - And they should be showcasing the best they've got. It's safe to assume what we haven't seen is worse. Some cards don't do anything, the setting and tone have already been done better elsewhere, and we already just got Troubleshooters, which you can't buy for under $300 (on Amazon anyway). It seems like they're using "well nobody uses Paranoia's rules" to justify half-assing the rules. Keeping them secret isn't doing them favors. Why not just kickstart a second printing of Troubleshooters and High Programmers? E, Tl;dr: it's a tone-deaf, Schrodinger's boxed set that "fixes" what ain't broke. moths fucked around with this message at 18:58 on Dec 4, 2014 |
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Dec 4, 2014 18:51
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I've found most the gun nuts fear the police and federal government more than outsiders. Have had to avoid plenty of awkward conversations at gun stores and ranges. Definitely agree that most media outlets paint Muslim = terrorist and terrorist = Muslim though.
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Dec 4, 2014 19:22
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There's also that whole fundamental irony of Alpha Complex operating essentially the same way as a communist country, only the autocrat in charge is a computer instead of Stalin. It's a literal commune, in which all the ideals of communism have been corrupted (in similar ways to actual communist countries): instead of egalitarianism, you have ridiculous stratification. Instead of workers owning the means of production, workers own essentially nothing. The This makes the paranoia about communists amusingly ironic. So I suppose if you wanted to really shift the game to the modern parallel (fear of terrorists?), you'd first have to re-imagine Alpha Complex as a new caliphate (only not the caliphate that IS dreams of, but rather, its corrupted and ironically dysfunctional mirror image)? It just doesn't work. It keeps reminding me of those interviews with George Lucas where he's talking Steven Spielburg into re-imagining Indiana Jones in the new nuclear age, with commie russians as the bad guys, and because movies in the 40s were different from the adventure movies of the 20s, we're going to film Crystal Skull that way too, and we're going to include those elements like flying saucers and aliens and testing nuclear bombs and etc. etc. and you wind up with a film that has many of the ingredients of what ought to be a good film - it's got Indy, and he has his whip, and there's a big car chase scene, and something spooky, and gross parodies of jungle-dwelling natives who set murderous traps and die in droves for no reason! It'll be great! Except it's not, and the entire premise was fundamentally flawed, because an Indiana Jones movie that isn't about religious artifacts and nazis and the last era in the early 20th century that there were still regions of the world that had not been explored and domesticated by Western society, and the early days of archeology when robbing third world countries of their history to fill museums in the West was still the thing you did, and the world had not yet been scarred and traumatized by world war 2, and also maybe something about the purity of religious faith and how it triumphs over evil/greed/exploitation by dark powers seeking to use it to dark ends. Indiana Jones was about an era and a feel as much as it was about Harrison Ford's character, and I think Paranoia is the same. It's not terrible that they want to do something new, but I think we're going to get a Crystal Skull out of the project and it's going to be excruciating not only for just not being very good, but also retroactively making the whole franchise feel worse. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:48 on Dec 4, 2014 |
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Dec 4, 2014 19:46
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moths posted:Yeah it's basically a catch-all reason why Johnny Racist is stockpiling ten thousand rounds in his basement. It was almost quaint when he was waiting for T-54s to roll on Main Street. That's where some of the game's of humor comes from: This cold war paranoid, absurd scenario that never happened. But still could have happened in 1984. Seriously, nuclear brinksmanship was very much a thing. It's like you keep ignoring that. And again the assumption that it'll be race or religion baiting based on absolutely nothing. Or have the developers made anti-Muslim statements?
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Dec 4, 2014 19:50
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I'm still just boggling at the idea that the world needs a 6th edition of Paranoia. I mean, what have the past five editions not managed to do previously that they are now proposing to do?
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Dec 4, 2014 19:52
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One attempt at updating a franchise didn't work therefore it must never be done.
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Dec 4, 2014 19:52
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