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Nuns with Guns posted:Someone made an online generator for REIGN if you want to try it out, too By 'over' do you mean that it is a well-realized etc rather than a mash-up? Or that it's both, with the well-realized etc layered on top of a lazy mash-up? I'd believe both, having just seen 'Simplified Imperial China, with dragon mutation' in the F&F on Glorantha.
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Sep 24, 2017 19:03
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Each nation on Heluso & Milonda* maps onto a recognizable nation in some way, but they're not "Fantasy Renaissance Italy, Fantasy Viking Age Scandinavia, etc." like the nations in WFRP or the Mystara Gazetteer series. Uldholm is is a bourgeois oligarchy that deposed its nobility in favour of guild representation, in which you will recognize American values of rugged individualism and free enterprise. (But everyone is black.) Dindavara resembles Edo-period Japan, with the huge difference that their religion is based on the belief that their strict social hierarchy should encompass the entire world. (Also, they're all black.) The Truil tribes resemble semi-nomadic Native American tribes. (But they're all white.) *Another similiarity to Glorantha, which I love, is that Reign operates on a premodern understanding of cosmology. The two continents on the world appear to be sleeping giants, the sun literally rises and sets, and so on.
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Sep 24, 2017 19:21
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Joe Slowboat posted:By 'over' do you mean that it is a well-realized etc rather than a mash-up? Or that it's both, with the well-realized etc layered on top of a lazy mash-up? Kralorela and East Isles are the most bizarre addition to Glorantha because they're such direct analogs to China and Japan. Reign's world (which may in fact be the bodies of two massive petrified giants) is smaller than Glorantha's and contained to one book, so there's not enough the space to trip over sudden orientalism while detailing hundreds of cultures and subcultures. Reign's stuff draws influences from earth (like the Ob-lobs sort of resembling vikings) without delving into stereotypes. For instance, the real world vikings didn't assign importance to things by the number of syllables in a thing's name like the Ob-lobs do. The name of god to the Ob-lobs is sixteen syllables long and never written in a straight line or shared with outsiders. They actually call themselves the "Obotilobitanolonikututano", which everyone else shortens to "Ob-lob". They're not very happy about that. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 19:38 on Sep 24, 2017 |
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Sep 24, 2017 19:27
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Thanks for the clarification! I'm interested, how does the thread feel about Exalted's setting? I'm speaking here of the human (and I guess demonic) societies, rather than specifically player-aligned organizations and factions, since I've always found the cultures of Creation (and Autochthonia) the high point of the writing.
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Sep 24, 2017 19:35
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It's pretty boss. If you want the best setting stuff for Exalted, you probably want mostly 1e, and the standout books are: Scavenger Sons: the basic setting book, very good. Houses of the Bull God: a vaguely African setting where five racial groups who really don't like each other much struggle together under the overarching boot of the Realm. Blood and Salt: a seaside, vaguely Indian nation, which serves largely as a pleasure resort for the nobles of the Realm, which is about ten minutes away from boiling over with rage and humiliation. The Outcaste: the book about Dragon-Blooded who aren't part of the Realm. Basically you just want the Forest Witches chapter, because they rule. Aspect Books: there's five of these, and they're all full of Dragon-Blooded characters and setting material and they all rock. The Solar Caste Books aren't nearly as good. Games of Divinity: the book on spirits. Good all round, but Jenna Moran's chapter on the Demon City is generally held to be in the top ten pieces of RPG writing ever. Masters of Jade: you could read Manacle and Coin instead, but this 2e book is, for once, more interesting than the 1e version. Compass of Celestial Directions: Autochthonia: the book on Autochthonia. It is really good, especially Jarish. Exalted's setting approach is kind of the bizarro-twin of Glorantha; Glorantha views everything through the lens of anthropology and Exalted looks at the same stuff through the lens of sociology/politics/economics.
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Sep 24, 2017 20:09
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Oh, I should be clear, I've read most of Exalted (particularly 2e but also Scavenger Sons, Games of Divinity, etc); I just wanted to know how people feel it holds up, given how Glorantha is often discussed as a certain pinnacle of textured RPG fantasy societies. Thank you for the rundown, though, since I consistently forget that the Aspect books exist and I should read them. I do need to get Houses of the Bull God, though, as the Harborhead sections in 2e were frankly insufficient to my needs. ...I do feel like I should point out, An-Teng (from Blood and Salt and basically repeated more or less word-for-word in 2e's region books) is more Southeast than South Asian, having a lot of cultural markers for Thailand, Indonesia, etc. It is also excellent. Also, I never quite got the appeal of the Forest Witches, but I'm reliably informed that's due to my bad taste, not the setting.
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Sep 24, 2017 21:26
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Forest Witches does suffer kind of badly from not having anything to really indicate what role they're supposed to play in a game. (I like them best as stylish villains who wander into a much-less-complicated setting and confuse everybody.)
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Sep 24, 2017 21:36
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I'm used to fantasy worlds not feeling very convincing or "real," living and breathing, but the bulk of Exalted's Creation as written feels more like a theme park than a world. Being divided into literal disneyland-esque theme-zones doesn't help. Stuff involving Yu-Shan and the gods are pretty good, though. I've only experienced Glorantha in the form of KoDP, but in that it's sick as hell. Runa fucked around with this message at 05:10 on Sep 25, 2017 |
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Sep 25, 2017 05:07
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Also I picked up a copy of the Reign core rules offa drivethrurpg on this thread's recommendation and now I remember why Greg Stolze's name was familiar. He was a contributing writer to WW's Adventure! Which for a single-book, self-contained little thing, manages to be my favorite White Wolf game. It's genuinely fascinating stuff, this. And just in the chargen chapter alone.
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Sep 25, 2017 05:16
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Xarbala posted:Also i picked up a copy of the Reign core rules offa drivethrurpg on this thread's recommendation and now I remember why Greg Stolze's name was familiar. He was a contributing writer to WW's Adventure! Which for a single-book, self-contained little thing, manages to be my favorite White Wolf game. Stolze actually has a pretty extensive history of contributions to various White Wolf games, and I think he even wrote some novels for the nVampire line. The story goes that the One-Roll Engine was born from him asking some of his fellow White Wolf writers "so what are the statistical differences between adding more dice to a pool and shifting the TN up and down?" (back when WoD games had shifting TNs instead of set ones) and he got a bunch of blank looks and shrugs in return.
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Sep 25, 2017 05:19
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Kai Tave posted:Stolze actually has a pretty extensive history of contributions to various White Wolf games, and I think he even wrote some novels for the nVampire line. The story goes that the One-Roll Engine was born from him asking some of his fellow White Wolf writers "so what are the statistical differences between adding more dice to a pool and shifting the TN up and down?" (back when WoD games had shifting TNs instead of set ones) and he got a bunch of blank looks and shrugs in return. Wahey! Also, having read and played many number of White Wolf games over the years, this anecdote all sounds entirely correct to me.
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Sep 25, 2017 05:23
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unseenlibrarian posted:Heluso and Milonda is also like Glorantha in that it has one or two setting elements that make people go absolutely bug-poo poo crazy. In Glorantha's case it's the ducks. In Reign's case, well: Oh, poo poo, I remember people freaking out about the cavalry thing back in the day. Why are so many men so loving fragile?
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Sep 25, 2017 05:32
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LogicNinja posted:Oh, poo poo, I remember people freaking out about the cavalry thing back in the day. Why are so many men so loving fragile? It's the balls.
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Sep 25, 2017 05:37
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Honestly as far as quasi-rational  go, that's a pretty drat funny one.
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Sep 25, 2017 05:39
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LogicNinja posted:Oh, poo poo, I remember people freaking out about the cavalry thing back in the day. Why are so many men so loving fragile? Besides cavalry/classic knight work being almost exclusively the role of women in REIGN, the book also takes time to discuss how everyone having equal ability to learn magic does a lot to remove any physical advantages men might have. Xarbala posted:Honestly as far as quasi-rational Riding astride really does cause impotence in Heluso and Milonda. It could be from widespread belief making a superstition real or some kind of psychosomatic thing. Guys ride side-saddle or don't ride at all. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 05:47 on Sep 25, 2017 |
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Sep 25, 2017 05:42
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Nuns with Guns posted:Riding astride really does cause impotence in Heluso and Milonda. It could be from widespread belief making a superstition real or some kind of psychosomatic thing. Guys ride side-saddle or don't ride at all. Yeah, it's great that Stolze never actually explains whether this is a quirk of fantasy physics or just peoples' beliefs resulting in a psychosomatic condition. Also murdering someone who's surrendered and begging for mercy has a strong chance of creating a vengeful ghost to torment you. What can these ghosts do? Nothing much. They can't fling things around, they can't possess people, they can't even make the air chilly. All they can do is vocalize. Constantly. Non-stop. They don't need to sleep after all, and they don't have anything else to do with their afterlives. So imagine being followed around by an intangible (but not invisible) spirit with nothing else to do but dick on you 24/7, screaming in your ears while you try to sleep, telling everyone in earshot how you like to gently caress goats, getting you kicked out of every establishment because nobody wants to deal with your ghostly companion singing obscene songs at the top of its nonexistent lungs, and on top of that the fact that a ghost is pestering you at all means that everyone knows that at some point you murdered an unarmed person who was begging for their life. There's no known cure for ghosts. No exorcism, no laying them to rest, no penance. There's one way out, and it's killing yourself. Consequently if a defeated foe throws themselves on your mercy it's considered a good idea to actually show them mercy, and this goes for players as well...if they find themselves in a tricky situation then throwing your sword down and surrendering means you aren't likely to be murdered out of hand. On the other hand, people in the setting have gotten rather creative when it comes to methods of handing out death sentences since indirect deaths don't create ghosts, such as leaving the condemned on top of giant stone pillars with no way down to the ground.
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Sep 25, 2017 06:32
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Holy poo poo, this is pretty baller.
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Sep 25, 2017 06:45
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Reign isn't, like, the perfect game or anything, but if you ever find yourself going "man why are all fantasy RPGs such boring D&D knockoff poo poo" then you really owe it to yourself to check it out.
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Sep 25, 2017 07:07
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Kai Tave posted:Reign isn't, like, the perfect game or anything, but if you ever find yourself going "man why are all fantasy RPGs such boring D&D knockoff poo poo" then you really owe it to yourself to check it out. So here's a question (not just to Kai Tave): I am by now well aware of RuneQuest's rather original (to say the least!) setting in the form of Glorantha, but would you consider RuneQuest to be mechanically distinct, if not "better", than D&D boring knockoff poo poo? If so, why?
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Sep 25, 2017 07:54
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gradenko_2000 posted:So here's a question (not just to Kai Tave): 1) It has a real combat system, designed by a couple of SCA dorks who were unhappy with D&D's abstract system. Percentile dice to hit, armor absorbs damage, hit locations, criticals and fumbles, you can parry or dodge. 2) No classes. Most skills and weapons can be learned by anyone, and most anyone can learn any of the basic pool of spells. 3) Magic is everywhere. Even Jo Peasant knows a couple of spells, armor makes it harder to cast spells (not impossible), the basic spells recharge freely, and you can cast spells while charging into combat. Plus rules for shamanism and spirit combat. 4) Monsters are statted like characters, which means that monsters are entirely playable as characters. 5) A real skill systems - each skill has a percentile value, and you advance in your skills (including combat skills like Sword and Dodge) organically, by using them. No levels. Plus, your stats give you bonuses and penalities to appropriate skills (a high DEX makes it easier to pick locks, a high SIZ makes it harder to hide in shadows, etc). Also has rules for social skills like Orate and Fast Talk which were wholly lacking from early versions of D&D. 6) Lots of weird fiddlly D&D details are absent. No alignments, no rules forbidding poison or flaming oil to certain characters, no cursed magic items that look exactly like real magic items, etc. Some of this stuff has gone on to become very common in other fantasy games, or even partially incorporated into later versions of D&D, so I'm not how sure how fresh and appealing it would seem to someone encountering it for the first time in 2017. But in the early days, yeah, it was the poo poo. One version of the RQ rules was released under a D20-like SRD, you can read it for yourself here: https://b5quest.pbworks.com/f/MRQ-SRD.pdf
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Sep 25, 2017 09:25
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Speaking only for myself I have no real interest in playing RuneQuest. Glorantha is pretty rad, but RuneQuest the game system is, well, what FMguru said. These days percentage roll-under systems with extensive skill lists and random weapon crit tables aren't my cup of tea (I don't think they ever have been, but having no nostalgic connection to RuneQuest I don't feel the urge to relive any nonexistent glory days). I like games that have some crunch but this particular sort of crunch doesn't do it for me. Reign has its faults but the actual system itself moves along briskly in execution and doesn't require any random crit tables to be suitably lethal if that's your goal.
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Sep 25, 2017 09:34
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TBF, Runequest doesn't have a crit chart either- criticals are just 'roll well enough and you ignore armor' and crits are automatically impales (slashes/smashes if you use that optional rule in Classic) It -does- have a fumble table if you roll badly enough, though, which is supposedly "This is all ridiculous poo poo some of the authors have had happen/seen happen when mock-fighting at the SCA"
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Sep 25, 2017 10:13
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Xarbala posted:Honestly as far as quasi-rational The extra funny thing is that it's also an old Roman superstition.
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Sep 25, 2017 12:58
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Hell, I grew up riding horses occasionally, and it was always said that if you rode without a saddle you'd go sterile.
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Sep 25, 2017 13:00
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unseenlibrarian posted:One of them is "It's a widely spread belief that riding a horse astride causes impotence in men so most cavalry soldiers are women" Oh hey, I just found my gimmick for my Only War Rough Riders regiment...
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Sep 25, 2017 13:34
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Thanks for the insight.
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Sep 25, 2017 15:03
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Serf posted:Hell, I grew up riding horses occasionally, and it was always said that if you rode without a saddle you'd go sterile. As far as I can tell, the research suggests it's more likely that it just reduces fertility and maybe potency if you ride extreme amounts or under rough conditions. Of course, doing so also increases the risk of actual injury, too. Part of it is just the less obvious effect of heat as well, depending on what you're wearing. It's not something most normal riders will have to worry about so much, in any case, but it's an issue if you spend a lot of hours doing hard riding. Of course, there are similar issues with riding anything, like bikes or motorcycles. (Just try not to bring it up with motorcycle outlaws.)
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Sep 25, 2017 15:09
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drat near every game from the first several years of the hobby has D&D's fingerprints all over it, either by virtue of being "D&D but..." or by virtue of being "This ain't D&D, buddy!" Runequest is the latter. I can't really say when this period of game design ended; I suppose it was a gradual thing as more and more popular games came out with more and more radical departures from D&D as a ruleset.
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Sep 25, 2017 19:18
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FMguru posted:RQ is from 1979, so it has a lot in common with D&D, but here are the things that make it mechanically distinct from D&D: They're a lot more forgivable in RQ since it was one of the first games to try out those ideas, when no one would have known whether they worked or not. But it definitely is in the group of early TTRPGs that ended up creating a huge amount of bookkeeping for relatively little benefit in play.
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Sep 25, 2017 19:28
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Serf posted:Hell, I grew up riding horses occasionally, and it was always said that if you rode without a saddle you'd go sterile. Strenuous horse or cycle riding listed as a cause of male infertility on the ol' Wikipedia and elsewhere.
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Sep 25, 2017 19:57
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Strenuous horse or cycle riding listed as a cause of male infertility on the ol' Wikipedia and elsewhere. Yeah I absolutely remember a Dateline or 20/20 episode about cycling causing impotence back when I was a kid. Something about it putting too much pressure on a blood vessel or something.
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Sep 25, 2017 21:36
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Comrade Gorbash posted:There's also the fact that a lot of these - 1, 4, and 5 in particular - have generally proven not to actually improve TTRPG play in practice. If anything, realistic combat and very granular skill systems tend to be even fiddlier and slower in play that the way D&D did things. Making NPC and PC creation the same tends to just make a lot of busy work for the GM. There's a reason modern games have increasingly moved away from them. Also on Reign: You Won't Believe What A Horse Did To This Man's Dingus!!!
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Sep 25, 2017 21:48
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Halloween Jack posted:Since we're talking about Reign, another thing I like about it is that ORE provides surprisingly nuanced, tactical, realistic, deadly combat without a ton of crunch. Weapons are dangerous and armor is very important. The base attack roll incorporates hit location seamlessly, and it's catch-as-catch-can in terms of where you hit your target. Another game that has an interesting and very different combat system without turning it into a linear algebra midterm is Spellbound Kingdoms. There's a lot of nuance and strategy in deciding how to navigate the combat sheets, trying to second guess what your opponent is going to do so you can counter or exploit. If anything, RQ vs ORE and SK demonstrates that slavishly trying to simulate every detail of the real world can actually create less realistic outcomes than a more abstract system that aims more for feel than "realism."
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Sep 25, 2017 23:24
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Is there an elegant way to differentiate crunch ala 4E or Spellbound Kingdoms' combat systems and crunch in the vein of something like Shadowrun or GURPS extensive skill lists and gear and numerical modifiers everywhere? Just saying "well it's crunchy but not like ten separate combat skills crunchy" is a bit of a mouthful.
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Sep 26, 2017 01:18
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Tactical combat vs. fiddly combat?
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Sep 26, 2017 01:20
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"Tactical"
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Sep 26, 2017 01:21
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Kai Tave posted:Is there an elegant way to differentiate crunch ala 4E or Spellbound Kingdoms' combat systems and crunch in the vein of something like Shadowrun or GURPS extensive skill lists and gear and numerical modifiers everywhere? Just saying "well it's crunchy but not like ten separate combat skills crunchy" is a bit of a mouthful. If your goal is to simply describe the former the correct answer is "Tactical Combat" because the combat is intended to point to the aesthetic of tactical challenge. The latter systems I could describe by a number of terms, "point buy" or "option themed" (or if I was feeling cheeky "Running in the 90's"), although I'm not quite sure what I would call just the combat.
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Sep 26, 2017 01:47
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Process vs Thematic?
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Sep 26, 2017 01:49
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Strategic vs Simulationist?
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Sep 26, 2017 01:59
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Yeah, the focus on combat isn't necessarily what I mean though it's true that in most RPGs the more robust mechanics are almost always going to be fighting people, but in a bigger picture I mean differentiating between crunch of the number-stacking modifier-memorizing variety and crunch of the "complex systems of moving parts" variety. You CAN number stack in 4E but even if you ignore that facet of things you still have a system that presents you with a robust mechanical conflict resolution system, meanwhile you can stack numbers in Shadowrun or 40K like it's tax season but almost everything in the game boils down to "use your biggest gun/best skill over and over." Maybe tactical is the right word, I dunno.
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Sep 26, 2017 02:14
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