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I can't seem to find the Ravenous Movie Mastery episode on the podcast feed. It's one of my favorite movies.
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Oct 14, 2015 20:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:I can't seem to find the Ravenous Movie Mastery episode on the podcast feed. It's one of my favorite movies. Seems that one is part of the text-only Horrortoberfest, not the podcast-part.
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Oct 14, 2015 21:11
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Grnegsnspm posted:I think the split is definitely similar but different enough in the way it is approached to be distinct. You can have controlling DMs in any game but the quintessential "adversarial DM" is more aligned with the 80s simply because of the way the games were set up. It was designed much more as an evolution of the war game where there were clear sides and a winner and a loser. A DM that killed someone's character was seen less as killing off a fully realized person with a backstory and more like knocking someone out in a boardgame. It sucks but you'll just jump back in next time with a new Elf Wizard to replace the one that died. With the 90s trying to focus on story and character instead of fighting and looting, it became more of a dick move to kill off someone's character that they had poured so much into. So rather than trying to beat the players at the game, we get the problem of the DM trying to tell a story but the players won't go along with it so he has to railroad them onto it.
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Oct 14, 2015 21:21
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Doresh posted:Seems that one is part of the text-only Horrortoberfest, not the podcast-part. It is indeed one of the text only reviews. Also we are currently recording the next episode now and I'm risking my health being next to this slimy goo monster to bring you entertainment.
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Oct 14, 2015 21:38
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Grnegsnspm posted:It is indeed one of the text only reviews. Also we are currently recording the next episode now and I'm risking my health being next to this slimy goo monster to bring you entertainment.
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Oct 14, 2015 21:50
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Halloween Jack posted:Wow, Jeff really is a talking hot dog. Actually I'm the 10 year old girl. Hey guys, here's Episode 54 of System Mastery! It's Aberrant D20. We recorded it an hour ago so there may be some hastily muffled coughing in there. These may well be my last words. gradenko_2000 posted:I can't seem to find the Ravenous Movie Mastery episode on the podcast feed. It's one of my favorite movies. If I live to see tomorrow, we will have a new Movie Mastery Horrortoberfest episode tomorrow. If I don't live, we'll still have one, but it'll be even spookier.
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Oct 15, 2015 00:31
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theironjef posted:Actually I'm the 10 year old girl. Oh god. I've both run and played an Aberrant d20 campaign. You are in for SOME poo poo.
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Oct 15, 2015 01:41
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Night10194 posted:Oh god. I've both run and played an Aberrant d20 campaign. You are in for SOME poo poo. Really looking forward to this one too! I ran an Aberrant game using the original WoD/Exalted-derived system and there were some pretty serious issues. My players wanted to be cool four-color heroes who smashed stuff and saved the day, when the game seemed better suited towards a relationship-focused structure more akin to the drama of modern comics. That aspect isn't the game's fault, but for our beat-em-up adventures it had the same problem I've run into with most superhero games: the sheer variety of powers makes it next to impossible for a points system to properly balance things like super-strength and entropy-mastery against each other.
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Oct 15, 2015 02:16
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I meant to just play a simple Fighter type. I was an ex-SWAT guy with regeneration powers who put all his points into being tough and strong as hell. I turned out to be nearly invincible. We still played a whole campaign, though, and despite the system had a great time saving the world.
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Oct 15, 2015 02:22
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I always liked the overall setting stuff for the Aeon games, but man, Aberrant was just busted from the start and got more ridiculous with the Player's Guide that gives powers higher than level 3, starting with jumping between alternate realities and ending with the power to create an entirely new universe.
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Oct 15, 2015 02:52
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Divis Mal was the most White Wolf NPC of all. We never bothered with him and just rewrote the setting.
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Oct 15, 2015 02:54
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Oh man, Aberrant! I didn't bother with the d20 version, but I used to love it in college, despite its flaws, and now it's just late '90's kitsch as gently caress; with its pre-9/11 UN conspiracy paranoia and superhero boy bands. It also got insufferable with it's "this ISN'T a superhero RPG, it's edgy and in your face, DAD!!!" and some of the most railroady metaplot adventures ever. Duke Rollo was the self-insert of WW developer Justin Achilli living out his Hunter Thompson fantasies. They actually devoted an entire mini-book to his shenanigans called "Aberrant: Fear and Loathing."
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Oct 15, 2015 22:59
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They actually named the HST expy Duke? That's not even trying.
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Oct 15, 2015 23:08
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I didn't realize that that was a recurring thing with Justin Achilli. There are some touches of that "renegade intellectual" HST type in the authorial voice of the Clanbooks he worked on. (Although the POV character in Clanbook: Giovanni is conspicuously a weaselly Steve Buscemi type of gangster.) And ironically, the 1st edition Clanbook: Gangrel has a POV character named Dr. Raoul King who is blatantly a HST type of guy, but Achilli wasn't involved in that one at all. I played the poo poo out of Trinity but never even read Aberrant. I am willing to bet money that Justin Achilli's fantasy Hunter S. Thompson persona is far, far, far less annoying that John Wick's or John Tarnowski's. Edit: Christ on a spike, I was just flipping through the Giovanni clanbook and I had forgotten just how loving disgustingly edgelord the WoD got at it's worst. Yes, I want to play the pregen character who raped his sister. No, not that one, the one who raped his sister and his daughter! Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 01:53 on Oct 16, 2015 |
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Oct 16, 2015 01:43
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To be fair, HST pastiche was pretty popular in the late 90's. Thompson had become something of a Gen-X icon, and stuff like the Terry Gilliam movie and comics like Transmetropolitan only fueled that. Achilli and WW were just riding the wave. Ab: F&L did have some funny moments, like Duke getting kicked in the groin for creeping on an MTV VJ.
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Oct 16, 2015 03:23
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Simian_Prime posted:Oh man, Aberrant! I didn't bother with the d20 version, but I used to love it in college, despite its flaws, and now it's just late '90's kitsch as gently caress; with its pre-9/11 UN conspiracy paranoia and superhero boy bands. It also got insufferable with it's "this ISN'T a superhero RPG, it's edgy and in your face, DAD!!!" and some of the most railroady metaplot adventures ever. I remember running into Aberrant when my friends were trying to play it and it reminded me of a less futuristic Ray Winninger's Underground, with it's scientific cause for superpowers and it's "Watchmen"-like world changes. The only thing that was missing was the overemphasis on large-caliber firearms. The only thing I remembered from Aberrant was the stuff about the face masks being a fashion item and it took me at least two decades and coming across Underground again to realize that was from Aberrant. Simian_Prime posted:To be fair, HST pastiche was pretty popular in the late 90's. Thompson had become something of a Gen-X icon, and stuff like the Terry Gilliam movie and comics like Transmetropolitan only fueled that. Achilli and WW were just riding the wave. Almost all the '90s near-future games had a Thompson analog. Underground had Peter Argot, who was supposedly based off Peter Arnett but also HST. Cyberpunk 2013, 2020, and I think Cybergeneration (and carried over into V3.0) had a guy literally named Thompson who was a gun-toting, two-fisted journalist.
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Oct 16, 2015 04:00
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Did anyone ever F&F the Aeon/Trinity games? I keep hearing people moaning in erotic pleasure over memories of them but at the time they seemed lame to me and now I am curious (spandex).
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Oct 16, 2015 04:16
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Nessus posted:Did anyone ever F&F the Aeon/Trinity games? I keep hearing people moaning in erotic pleasure over memories of them but at the time they seemed lame to me and now I am curious (spandex). I never heard anyone ooh and aah about Trinity or Aberrant, both of which were very mixed bag, trying to mix the storyteller system and WoD's splats and metaplot setting with scifi and superheroes, and ending up a worst-of-both-worlds result in a lot of ways.
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Oct 16, 2015 04:21
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Like most WW games, Aberrant served as a great set of idea guidelines but if you tried to treat it as a real grown-up rule book you could easily find yourself quite hosed. Of course it was still full of dumb poo poo here or there, but they put enough good thought into various "Why?"s that make for a fine, enjoyable "gritty" modern supers game. Considering OPs recent track record with most of its lines and the people they've tapped for it, I expect the reboot to be entirely better both in rules and setting. I think, like oWoD, the thing with Aeon despite its warts and its frankly hilariously breakable system, is the clear passion that comes through in it. Adventure! is particularly good at feeling like some guys wanted to write a fun game and tell you about it. Nessus posted:Did anyone ever F&F the Aeon/Trinity games? I keep hearing people moaning in erotic pleasure over memories of them but at the time they seemed lame to me and now I am curious (spandex). I'm pretty sure someone did Adventure! not that long ago. The only thing in inklesspen's scraper/the wiki is the first two parts of a long-dead Aberrant F&F.
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Oct 16, 2015 04:25
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Did any of these HST pastiches/tributes ever reference poo poo outside Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? You'd think they'd at least read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 or Better than Sex.
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Oct 16, 2015 04:32
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Kavak posted:Did any of these HST pastiches/tributes ever reference poo poo outside Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? You'd think they'd at least read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 or Better than Sex. Ab: Fear & Loathing definitely had some elements of Campaign Trail '72 in it, what with Duke attending Project Utopia functions and commenting on it. ("Maybe I *am* a nova, if you consider the ability to smell bullshit a super-power.")
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Oct 16, 2015 04:41
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Kavak posted:Did any of these HST pastiches/tributes ever reference poo poo outside Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas? You'd think they'd at least read Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 or Better than Sex. Or something like The Hell's Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs, especially in regards to player groups. I just realized that Cyberpunk has two HST wannabes, the aforementioned R.A. Thompson, who appears in the short stories in all three of the base books, and C.J. O'Reilly, who appears in Solo of Fortune 2 and the Firestorm books at the end of the 2020 line, where he's presumably killed in action in the corporate wars.
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Oct 16, 2015 04:53
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Nessus posted:Did anyone ever F&F the Aeon/Trinity games? I keep hearing people moaning in erotic pleasure over memories of them but at the time they seemed lame to me and now I am curious (spandex). Doing a proper go-over of Trinity would almost require covering more than just the corebook because it went through something of an evolution in both tone and quality over the course of the line. The Trinity corebook is, to my recollection, kind of a weirdly disjointed mess...the opening fiction in particular I remember being a real headscratcher in the "what does this have to do with the game?" sense...but as later supplements were released the writers seemed to get more of a handle on things, aiming them in a vaguely space opera-ish direction that wasn't perhaps wildly original but at least worked to help focus the "what do I do with this?" issue.
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Oct 16, 2015 04:57
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Trinity definitely suffered a lot for being the first book of the line. It's been years and I didn't play it much, so maybe I'm misremembering, but didn't Trinity have Demon: The Fallen/Scion-levels of unbalanced powers that all cost the same amount? Like, you can pay 10xp or whatever for the first dot of Telekinsesis and lift anything up to 10 lbs. within 30 yards, or you can take Plant Control 1 and use any vines like arms if you happen across them like always happens in your typical technofutile space opera setting.
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Oct 16, 2015 05:26
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It also had that weird problem a couple of WW lines at the times had, where "oh, we just won't put Aggravated Damage in the Corebook, that'll keep things from turning into a meatgrinder!" was followed by every proceeding book getting a sidebar of "this attack does a new harder-to-take kind of damage called Aggravated Damage, here's the same explanation you've read dozens of times now:".
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Oct 16, 2015 06:37
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Plague of Hats posted:Trinity definitely suffered a lot for being the first book of the line. It's been years and I didn't play it much, so maybe I'm misremembering, but didn't Trinity have Demon: The Fallen/Scion-levels of unbalanced powers that all cost the same amount? Like, you can pay 10xp or whatever for the first dot of Telekinsesis and lift anything up to 10 lbs. within 30 yards, or you can take Plant Control 1 and use any vines like arms if you happen across them like always happens in your typical technofutile space opera setting. I can't remember but I'm sure that being a White Wolf game there were egregious power balance issues throughout the entire line. I know that Trinity presented the psions of the setting as taking the fight to the Aberrants and then when Aberrant actually came out it was apparent that the average combat specced Nova could wipe the floor with entire platoons of psions whose psychic combat abilities were woefully underpowered in comparison. I also remember that the Trinity Companion had alternate rules for a more freeform psi system reminiscent of Mage: the Ascension's spheres (which I want to say was written by Jenna Moran, then R. Sean Borgstrom) and I'm sure that was equally hilariously unbalanced for various reasons of its own.
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Oct 16, 2015 06:39
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Plague of Hats posted:Trinity definitely suffered a lot for being the first book of the line. It's been years and I didn't play it much, so maybe I'm misremembering, but didn't Trinity have Demon: The Fallen/Scion-levels of unbalanced powers that all cost the same amount? Like, you can pay 10xp or whatever for the first dot of Telekinsesis and lift anything up to 10 lbs. within 30 yards, or you can take Plant Control 1 and use any vines like arms if you happen across them like always happens in your typical technofutile space opera setting. You are probably thinking of Aberrant. There's no plant control in Trinity, and probably the most powerful one-dot ability outside of specific situations is being able to do lethal damage with your hands. The majority of the one-dot (and many of the two-dot) abilities can be replicated with some kind of technology like a first-aid kit, or a knife, or a flashlight. If anything, Psions seem kind of underpowered for what they're expected to fight against.
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Oct 16, 2015 06:43
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Trinity was actually really good, despite a few bumps in the road here and there, as was Adventure!. Aberrant is the odd one out, which makes sense considering it had a different team than the other two. Hence Trinity Psion being super underpowered compared to the Aberrants. Comparing the Trinity Adventures, which are pretty good and put the PCs at the center of important events and make them important and gives them important choices to make, to teh Aberrant adventures, which are garbage, is really sad.
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Oct 16, 2015 06:49
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Well, I'd love some Trinity/Aberrant/Aeon reviews, or whatever the hell they're all called. I've heard stories here and there, but never read any of the books myself, and it sounds like there's a decent bit of stuff to rip on, and also some good ideas to learn from.
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Oct 16, 2015 07:30
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Kai Tave posted:I also remember that the Trinity Companion had alternate rules for a more freeform psi system reminiscent of Mage: the Ascension's spheres (which I want to say was written by Jenna Moran, then R. Sean Borgstrom) and I'm sure that was equally hilariously unbalanced for various reasons of its own. Jenna did some power-building subsystem for the Aberrant supplement that talked about cranking your powers to 11 maximum overdrive. Considering the base game, it was doomed from the start, but I seem to recall there was some major blunder with editing or layout or printing, where some hunk of the book was useless or repeated or missing or something. I kind of want to say that was also the book where the developer stuck his screed at the end  ing all these four-color ~superhero~ jerks playing his edgy scifi commentary on the human condition.On the other hand, Quantum Manipulation level-9: Universe Creation will always have my love. Lynx Winters posted:You are probably thinking of Aberrant. There's no plant control in Trinity, and probably the most powerful one-dot ability outside of specific situations is being able to do lethal damage with your hands. The majority of the one-dot (and many of the two-dot) abilities can be replicated with some kind of technology like a first-aid kit, or a knife, or a flashlight. If anything, Psions seem kind of underpowered for what they're expected to fight against. I'm pretty familiar with Aberrant, so I know it's not what I was thinking of (it's got that and many bigger problems all over!), but I could've sworn one of the first things I did with Trinity was flip through the powers and find some awful comparisons. Nothing like Aberrant or (high-level) Scion, but something. Or not; it has been literally a decade or more. 
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Oct 16, 2015 08:04
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Kai Tave posted:Doing a proper go-over of Trinity would almost require covering more than just the corebook because it went through something of an evolution in both tone and quality over the course of the line. The Trinity corebook is, to my recollection, kind of a weirdly disjointed mess...the opening fiction in particular I remember being a real headscratcher in the "what does this have to do with the game?" sense...but as later supplements were released the writers seemed to get more of a handle on things, aiming them in a vaguely space opera-ish direction that wasn't perhaps wildly original but at least worked to help focus the "what do I do with this?" issue. Easy answer: "Holy poo poo we got George Alec Effinger." Also, the Darkness Revealed series of adventures are really good.
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Oct 16, 2015 10:22
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Nessus posted:Did anyone ever F&F the Aeon/Trinity games? I keep hearing people moaning in erotic pleasure over memories of them but at the time they seemed lame to me and now I am curious (spandex). I'm working on an F&F of Adventure! but I haven't posted an update in a while. I'll get on that. I had planned to do Aberrant and Trinity as well, but we'll see how that goes.
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Oct 16, 2015 12:58
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I really wish we'd gotten that Aliens book that was planned. The Qin and Chromatics were pretty cool alien races.
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Oct 16, 2015 14:52
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I haven't read any of them in a long time but I liked the fluff for all the Aeon/Trinity games--the Aberrants were iron-age kinda 'realistic supers' in the sense that they didn't follow superhero conventions but they weren't all tooth-gritted maniacs, they had pop culture cachet and there was maybe something really really wrong going on in the background possibly, I mean what could be sinister there? It wasn't all dark and awful. Trinity was post-superpowered apocalypse which was a new theme at the time and the psions themselves were interesting as being part of a large pseudo-military organization (I remember the psions having fairly different emphases) trying to pull the world up from disaster, with a number of unresolved questions from the past to deal with--what if the Aberrants come back? What about the aliens? How do we salvage the world? Etc. I sorta wish more games would do the 'part of a larger military/government org' thing (instead of defaulting to another loving high school theme) but I know that has its limitations. The systems for Aberrant and Trinity were a mess but it was late 90s WW, the lessons of the future had not been learned. Though, Aberrants being more powerful than psions was intended, they were supposed to be overpowered monstrosities--though I imagine the specific scale was probably off.
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Oct 16, 2015 21:01
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occamsnailfile posted:I haven't read any of them in a long time but I liked the fluff for all the Aeon/Trinity games--the Aberrants were iron-age kinda 'realistic supers' in the sense that they didn't follow superhero conventions but they weren't all tooth-gritted maniacs, they had pop culture cachet and there was maybe something really really wrong going on in the background possibly, I mean what could be sinister there? It wasn't all dark and awful. Trinity was post-superpowered apocalypse which was a new theme at the time and the psions themselves were interesting as being part of a large pseudo-military organization (I remember the psions having fairly different emphases) trying to pull the world up from disaster, with a number of unresolved questions from the past to deal with--what if the Aberrants come back? What about the aliens? How do we salvage the world? Etc. I sorta wish more games would do the 'part of a larger military/government org' thing (instead of defaulting to another loving high school theme) but I know that has its limitations. Trinity later retconned the reason for the power imbalance by saying that most of the Aberrants encountered in the future are just humans infected with Taint by the N-day era Aberrants to create disposable shock troops.
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Oct 16, 2015 21:07
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I enjoyed Trinity a great deal but I really don't remember anything of the metaplot about the alien species or where psi powers came from. Mostly we were focused on fighting the evil Tea Party America. Come to think of it, though, Trinity was probably the first game I played that encouraged the players not to play white American manly-men.
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Oct 16, 2015 21:37
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Halloween Jack posted:I enjoyed Trinity a great deal but I really don't remember anything of the metaplot about the alien species or where psi powers came from. Mostly we were focused on fighting the evil Tea Party America. The deal with the aliens (there were three groups) was that mankind thought it was alone, it's telepaths never heard a peep from them at the edge of the system and then two of them disappeared human explorers, one explicitly with the invasion of a colony, the other with no conclusive evidence. And then you have the Qin, who are playing some kind of game and the psions can't figure it out.
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Oct 16, 2015 22:45
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As it turned out, humans had always had psi powers to some small degree, and had the potential to eventually evolve into a psychic race, but the energy channeled by Novas cancels out (and is cancelled out) by the energy psychics channel. After the Novas blew up most of the planet, some psychic aliens called the Chromatics encountered Novas, panicked, and then decided to deliberately engineer humans with more advanced psychic powers both as living weapons to counter Novas/Aberrants, and also to increase ambient psychic energy levels in order to push humans away from Novahood and towards psychic-hood. In short, Aeon had a really, really detailed and convoluted metaplot, like most White Wolf games, and it got cut short when they killed off Trinity and the Ministry/Asia sourcebook got dropped before publishing. Jesus Christ how do I remember this nerdy poo poo.
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Oct 17, 2015 04:18
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No, that was the Doyen. The Chromatics were a race of primitive light-benders who got manipulated by a different faction of Doyens into attacking humanity (the Doyen agve them the technology to do this). One of the Alien Encounter adventures has the PC realize this and contact friendly Chromatics who don't trust their new overlords and, hopefully, stop the war.
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Oct 17, 2015 04:24
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MonsieurChoc posted:No, that was the Doyen. The Chromatics were a race of primitive light-benders who got manipulated by a different faction of Doyens into attacking humanity (the Doyen agve them the technology to do this). One of the Alien Encounter adventures has the PC realize this and contact friendly Chromatics who don't trust their new overlords and, hopefully, stop the war. poo poo, you're right. The Chromatics were from that really good series of Trinity adventures.
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Oct 17, 2015 04:30
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