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Zoro posted:City of Mist just came out. The new PbtA game. Giving the book a once-over, about 50 pages in the beginning is going over the base setting, and probably a grand total of about 50 pages of half or full-page art. If the table of contents is correct, the MC section is 160-ish pages. It's definitely a highly stylish book, too. I can't tell just by quickly looking over it whether the style helps make things easier or harder to read, but I can definitely say I'd be surprised if it doesn't do one of the two just given the amount of variation of the page layouts. It's full-color and they seem to try to use every single color they can. Also, to add to what EM said, your character is built out of 4 themebooks, which are some basic questions on how your stuff works, plus your crew has it's own themebook along with some more questions, so there's a lot of words just for character creation. I kickstarted this at the lowest level, and I'm kinda curious how it'll read and play, but it was definitely something I didn't think much of until they started sending out solid updates in the last week or two.
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Oct 30, 2017 05:06
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gradenko_2000 posted:It's largely powered by hateorade. Like, they get that 5e sucks, so they rail against it, and then they also rail on Pathfinder, but then they also rail(ed) on 4e. They hate 5th edition too? 4th edition and Pathfinder make sense, but now you've got my attention.
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Oct 30, 2017 05:34
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DalaranJ posted:They hate 5th edition too? 4th edition and Pathfinder make sense, but now you've got my attention. The view is that 5th Edition is largely an empty-suit of a game, with rules that don't exist and rules that don't work. I figure that this is a forum community that's really invested in trying to "fix" 3rd Edition, and they not only saw 5th Edition as a gigantic missed opportunity, but also as a lazy adoption of all of 3rd's worst mistakes. Wizards are still all-powerful, the CR system is still broken as poo poo, the skill system still doesn't make sense, and there are so many rules that are "missing" that you're going to mentally backfill the holes with stuff you knew from 3.5e anyway.
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Oct 30, 2017 05:48
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DalaranJ posted:They hate 5th edition too? 4th edition and Pathfinder make sense, but now you've got my attention. Frank Trollman and his posse hate games with ambiguous hand-wavey rules (whether those rules are actually ambiguous and hand-wavey or if they're simply too stupid to understand how they're meant to be used is a matter of debate depending on the game in question) so yeah, they probably aren't a fan of Next's "ask your GM" philosophy and overall mushy, halfassed mechanics. Remember, this is the place that coined the phrase "magical tea party." I'm not actually sure what, if any, games Trollman actually likes to be honest, I think they spend most of their time grudgingly trying to hammer 3.X into something less janky because of course they do, but I'm not actually aware of any game that TGD holds up as the gold standard for what an elfgame "should" be like.
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Oct 30, 2017 05:51
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Kai Tave posted:I'm not actually sure what, if any, games Trollman actually likes to be honest, I think they spend most of their time grudgingly trying to hammer 3.X into something less janky because of course they do, but I'm not actually aware of any game that TGD holds up as the gold standard for what an elfgame "should" be like. 1. This reminds me of how Trollman also doesn't like 13th Age because he can't stomach the idea that a level 1 adventurer is going to register as more than a blip to any of the Icons. 2. As far as I can tell, the one game that wouldn't be met with vehement objections would be playing D&D 3.5, but only up to about level 5 to 8.
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Oct 30, 2017 06:03
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Does Frank even hate After Sundown? His very own, hilarious World of Darkness heartbreaker?
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Oct 30, 2017 06:06
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Are we doing Secret Santa this year?
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Oct 30, 2017 06:13
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is this when i get to make a 64 Discrete Operations or whatever insane number Frank Trollman cooked up when trying to find a way to hate the ORE system joke i think it was 64 and then later bumped it up to 128 after "realizing" his math was wrong he actually argued that the only way to parse an ORE dice pool was to individually compare every die to every other die in the pool, one by one, in order to determine which dice match and which don't. Alaois fucked around with this message at 08:51 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 08:48
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Alaois posted:he actually argued that the only way to parse an ORE dice pool was to individually compare every die to every other die in the pool, one by one, in order to determine which dice match and which don't. I don't want to make a "D&D causes brain damage" joke, but, uh, does this guy actually have some sort of cognitive/executive disability that makes it difficult for him to parse dice pools? Does he have the same issue with other dice-pool games, or does he believe that "look for matches" is somehow harder than "look for high numbers?"
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Oct 30, 2017 08:59
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Zoro posted:What is New Werewolf, anyway? Being part of a bunch of gangbangers? It boils down to four things, and the conflict between them. 1) Werewolves are part human, and have to deal with your normal typical human bullshit. 2) Werewolves are part spirit, and their job is to be Spirit Parole Officers and make sure any spirits in this world don't go Too Far and start hurting people. 3) Neither of these things can be easily solved with sudden shows of absolute violence. 4) The wolf must hunt. Basically, the wolf origin story is that once, in Maybe Pangaea, the spirit world and material world coexisted in one metaphysical "place," and it loving ruled. Father Wolf did his job of making sure spirits and humans were cool with each other, and Luna was impressed by this and they had a bunch of werewolf kids. Father Wolf got old and lovely at his job, so a bunch of his kids nodded and figured they had to replace him to make sure the balance was kept, except this involved murdering him, and that split the worlds apart. Luna got pissed and cursed all his kids to be werewolves. The ones that killed Father Wolf were like "No no we can still fix this!" and went with their original plan of taking up Father Wolf's job and making sure the spirit world doesn't overwhelm the material world. Spirits kinda think they're bullshit for this, so they're called the Forsaken, and they are typically your PCs. The other werewolves, who were chicken poo poo, got mad about this and want their awesome paradise back, so their plan is to murder all of you and drag the spirit world back (which would be VERY BAD for humanity and, uh, everything, really), and called themselves the Pure. The catch to this is: the Pure outnumber the Forsaken, but the Forsaken make up for it by being, well, human. Your pack isn't just your local wolves - it's your friends, your family. Zoe down the street who tutors your cousin. Dan who works at the deli and always gets you the nice cuts. Christopher the elementary school teacher who's been just so helpful for one of your packmates' kid's. Spirits don't like Forsaken, and they have to deal with waaaaay more human bullshit then the Pure do, but in turn, Luna has held back on some of her curse (Forsaken can hold silver just fine) and given them a few blessings, and, well, having that human connection isn't exactly a bad thing. So, Spirit Parole Officers try to balance being human while also being a wolf spirit that needs to set territory and hunt and fight something, and also your (spiritually) removed cousins want to murder all of you. Most of your powers are AMAZING at KILLING, and also you really want to NOT kill things.
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Oct 30, 2017 09:04
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Antivehicular posted:I don't want to make a "D&D causes brain damage" joke, but, uh, does this guy actually have some sort of cognitive/executive disability that makes it difficult for him to parse dice pools? Does he have the same issue with other dice-pool games, or does he believe that "look for matches" is somehow harder than "look for high numbers?" there's a reason i chose the word "argued" instead of "believes" because I'm half convinced that even he knows what massive bullshit he was spewing but it was something he could hold against the game
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Oct 30, 2017 09:12
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100% that Trollman knows how to compare dice pools and he's deliberately restating the process as some kind of hugely onerous task (the way a computer might do it) so he can rabble-rouse Because it's that same kind of deliberate and disingenuous misreading that allows him to bang-on about "Bear World", too
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Oct 30, 2017 09:25
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mango sentinel posted:Are we doing Secret Santa this year? Leperflesh normally gets the ball rolling some time in November, if I remember correctly.
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Oct 30, 2017 09:25
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rumble in the bunghole posted:I think people recognise and like old vampire more but does anyone like the other old lines more than the new? Hunters being normalish humans rather than Proto-exalted guys with some magic benefactor, Changelings as survivors of evil fae realms instead of weird hippies, poo poo like that seems way stronger. Maybe Old Mage is more popular, but either line is impossible to gamify properly. Old Werewolf is still more popular than new, IIRC. Mostly because new Werewolf comes off as aggressively bland Exalted. Tuxedo Catfish posted:Wraith justifies the oWoD's existence even if everything else is of questionable value at best Wraith was such a cool idea, but I've never seen a game of it played that didn't come off badly. Anyone got a LP? Liquid Communism fucked around with this message at 10:51 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 10:44
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Alaois posted:there's a reason i chose the word "argued" instead of "believes" because I'm half convinced that even he knows what massive bullshit he was spewing but it was something he could hold against the game He'd have to know it's bullshit. ORE is very transparent about its probabilities, to the point that many ORE games include a very simple table breaking it down somewhere in the rules. Liquid Communism posted:Old Werewolf is still more popular than new, IIRC. Mostly because new Werewolf comes off as aggressively bland Exalted. That's not how Forsaken works at all, but granted the 1e version of the book was really terrible at actually conveying its premise.
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Oct 30, 2017 12:08
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Trollman's extremely incorrect and moronic opinion of Glorantha, that it's garbage solely because of the ducks, is all anyone should need to entirely dismiss his rancid mind grapes.Nuns with Guns posted:That's not how Forsaken works at all, but granted the 1e version of the book was really terrible at actually conveying its premise. I think this was a problem with all the NWoD games to varying degrees, even Vampire slightly, and later supplements did the job much better. How much better would have for example, NMage been received by the gaming community at large if people didn't think it was pretty much solely a game about RAD GUYS FROM ATLANTIS DOING ATLANTIS THINGS? Granted some of that was bad faith, but still. Lightning Lord fucked around with this message at 12:31 on Oct 30, 2017 |
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Oct 30, 2017 12:29
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Trollman is one of those cases where he's been doing this for so long and with such sincerity, it doesn't matter if he "really believes" his stupid idiot ideas. Tons of people recently have been "pretending" to be Nazis, and the upshot is they look a whole lot like for-real Nazis. If being too dense to grasp really obvious poo poo about nearly every non-D&D3 elfgame is a long con, it makes no difference from the outside. There are people out there who sincerely believe water has a memory that you can trick with poison into becoming medicine. Ray Kurzweil is a legitimate savant who also believes taking 200 bullshit pills every day will make him immortal enough to survive to see the coming of computer Jesus. Until Trollman gives you any reason to think he's putting on an act, don't afford him the dignity of presuming he's not that goddamn stupid.
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Oct 30, 2017 12:47
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Lightning Lord posted:I think this was a problem with all the NWoD games to varying degrees, even Vampire slightly, and later supplements did the job much better. How much better would have for example, NMage been received by the gaming community at large if people didn't think it was pretty much solely a game about RAD GUYS FROM ATLANTIS DOING ATLANTIS THINGS? Granted some of that was bad faith, but still. Yeah the 1e of nMage had an even worse time of it, really. And the nWoD books that do start out giving very clear hooks often leave me wondering how you're meant to run them as more than short/one-shot games without mixing splats. I don't see how you're supposed to run, say, a group of nMummies, or make nDemons team up long-term without cutting into the paranoia that makes them so intriguing.
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Oct 30, 2017 12:48
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I ran a group of nMummies for a while -- the key was spotlight rotation and a couple of common enemies, and one of the things I kind of rate nMummy for is that one of the common enemies which should unite modern players is 'the setting conceits'. Like, one of the few things Mummies have in common is that they're all cogs in this horrific mechanism that they should absolutely be trying to break -- so the big plot was just 'someone's found a way of ending the cycle, someone else wants to hijack that ritual to become God, you were all pawns of the latter in defeating the former last time he tried it, also none of you remember anything, do whatever comes naturally'. (What came naturally, it transpired, was explosions.)
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Oct 30, 2017 13:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:The view is that 5th Edition is largely an empty-suit of a game, with rules that don't exist and rules that don't work. Alaois posted:is this when i get to make a 64 Discrete Operations or whatever insane number Frank Trollman cooked up when trying to find a way to hate the ORE system joke 
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Oct 30, 2017 14:04
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dwarf74 posted:Isn't that largely indistinguishable from the SA view of 5e? It sounds basically about right to me, though I'd add in how regressive the mechanics are. dwarf74 posted:I remember someone here making the 7th Sea 2e dice pool system out to be an incredibly complex unsolved mathematical theorem, so that's kinda par for the course. It's my recollection that the criticism of the 7th Sea dice pool system is that the probability model for it is so difficult to plot-out that you can't know how much better you'll get at a thing with every added die, only that you theoretically should get some benefit. I don't know that this is a huge problem in actual play apart from making it difficult to gauge when to stop improving a stat/skill, but it's basically correct that it differs from the predictable models of a lot of other dice systems.
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Oct 30, 2017 14:11
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gradenko_2000 posted:It's my recollection that the criticism of the 7th Sea dice pool system is that the probability model for it is so difficult to plot-out that you can't know how much better you'll get at a thing with every added die, only that you theoretically should get some benefit. A play issue, not a probability issue.With that said, it wouldn't surprise me at all to find oodles of janky design decisions buried within 7th Sea 2e. It's not a finely-crafted system by any stretch.
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Oct 30, 2017 14:33
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That Old Tree posted:There are people out there who sincerely believe water has a memory that you can trick with poison into becoming medicine. Ray Kurzweil is a legitimate savant who also believes taking 200 bullshit pills every day will make him immortal enough to survive to see the coming of computer Jesus. Until Trollman gives you any reason to think he's putting on an act, don't afford him the dignity of presuming he's not that goddamn stupid. Once I learned that people can be convinced that food is optional, some to the point of utterly tragic self-starvation, there's pretty much no real endpoint to what convolutions the human brain can go through. Hanlon's razor is generally a good thing to keep at the ready when it comes to the TG community, in any case. gradenko_2000 posted:It's my recollection that the criticism of the 7th Sea dice pool system is that the probability model for it is so difficult to plot-out that you can't know how much better you'll get at a thing with every added die, only that you theoretically should get some benefit. Yeah, this is my one of my main issues with Marvel Heroic - the dice system seems designed to defy analysis, so it's very tough to puzzle out how to balance new traits or characters in general.
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Oct 30, 2017 15:02
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Werewolf 2e ducking rules and is one of my favorite games. I love playing a guy that has to balance his life and play by the rules when the easiest way he can accomplish things is by losing control and throwing out the book.
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Oct 30, 2017 15:10
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gradenko_2000 posted:It's my recollection that the criticism of the 7th Sea dice pool system is that the probability model for it is so difficult to plot-out that you can't know how much better you'll get at a thing with every added die, only that you theoretically should get some benefit.
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Oct 30, 2017 15:15
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Kai Tave posted:Frank Trollman and his posse hate games with ambiguous hand-wavey rules (whether those rules are actually ambiguous and hand-wavey or if they're simply too stupid to understand how they're meant to be used is a matter of debate depending on the game in question) so yeah, they probably aren't a fan of Next's "ask your GM" philosophy and overall mushy, halfassed mechanics. Remember, this is the place that coined the phrase "magical tea party." I'm not actually sure what, if any, games Trollman actually likes to be honest, I think they spend most of their time grudgingly trying to hammer 3.X into something less janky because of course they do, but I'm not actually aware of any game that TGD holds up as the gold standard for what an elfgame "should" be like. I understand now. They’re desperately looking for some sort of Platonic ideal of 3rd edition gameplay. And they’ll never get it because 5th edition went a different direction. (Plus the only person who might even remotely be interested in achieving that goal made 13th age instead.) It’s almost tragic.
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Oct 30, 2017 15:45
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's a problem I had with Shadowrun; it's hard to tell how much more effective you are with 15 dice rather than 14. That's mathematically solvable, but the bigger problem is that the answer is 'not very', despite that 14 to 15 dice jump likely being very expensive in character advancement terms.
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Oct 30, 2017 16:01
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's a problem I had with Shadowrun; it's hard to tell how much more effective you are with 15 dice rather than 14. Yeah, that’s one of my two gripes about dice pools. The other is that just straight die roll or die roll+modifier has much more controlled variability.
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Oct 30, 2017 16:19
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Evil Mastermind posted:Got some spare d6s and a Sharpie? The Deleter posted:Nobody remembers bronies with fondness. Instead of just, you know, hating girls RocknRollaAyatollah posted:Nothing in Mummy was balanced, not even the balance morality scheme.
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Oct 30, 2017 16:39
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Evil Mastermind posted:That's a problem I had with Shadowrun; it's hard to tell how much more effective you are with 15 dice rather than 14. Every die in a pool in Shadowrun is roughly 0.33etc of a success, so by going from 14 dice to 15 your average number of successes in that pool go from 4.66etc to 5.
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Oct 30, 2017 17:29
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dwarf74 posted:I remember someone here making the 7th Sea 2e dice pool system out to be an incredibly complex unsolved mathematical theorem, so that's kinda par for the course. I'll jump in here since he hasn't, but that's forum's user QuantumNinja and his discussion was on optimization, not use. Anyone could run the game and make 10s with the dice easily, but the real issue is it'd be impossible to know the value of adding dice or any other method of altering your dice pool. He also didn't like how it made a "mini-optimization" problem in every roll. Anyone could quickly make 10s, but did they make the best 10s they could? Are they loving themselves on a success or more because they sub-optimally made their 10s, basically? He just felt it was overly complicated and made things more of a hassle when it comes to optimization than it needed to be and didn't see the benefit it brought the game, other than novelty.
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Oct 30, 2017 17:39
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Evil Mastermind posted:But I'm just shocked that anyone posts there anymore. I thought everyone either knew Trollman didn't know poo poo about game design, or just forgot he existed.  interpretation of "player agency") that they are incapable of carrying on a conversation about gaming in any other forum. So it's self-perpetuating in that way.
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Oct 30, 2017 18:44
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Let me guess: Frank thinks "player agency" is that the players just get to say what happens and the GM can't counter it or anything, right?
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Oct 30, 2017 18:48
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posting to free the post stuck in radium limbo
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Oct 30, 2017 19:06
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Evil Mastermind posted:Let me guess: Frank thinks "player agency" is that the players just get to say what happens and the GM can't counter it or anything, right? Preeeeeety much, yes. I once to talked to someone who was a big fan of him. We talked to 3.5 D&D and he kept finding a way to just counter any kind of hypothetical scenario I threw at him, no matter how insane it got. I don't think people who like him actually want challenge in their games. I think they just want to be able to do whatever they want and bully the GM.
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Oct 30, 2017 19:11
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Evil Mastermind posted:Let me guess: Frank thinks "player agency" is that the players just get to say what happens and the GM can't counter it or anything, right? So it's wrong (even malicious) to, say, make 3e better by just banning time stop. That's destroying a bit of player agency. (Instead, you should fix a game by raising everyone else's power level because that will turn out so well.) It's also wrong to, say, have an NPC wizard just summon a gazebo, unless you write up a summon gazebo spell that the players can then read to backsolve the caster's level from the cubic footage of the gazebo. That's why magical tea party is bad: how can I metagame everything if you're just making poo poo up?!
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Oct 30, 2017 19:18
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:posting to free the post stuck in radium limbo Halloween Jack posted:It's also wrong to, say, have an NPC wizard just summon a gazebo, unless you write up a summon gazebo spell that the players can then read to backsolve the caster's level from the cubic footage of the gazebo. 
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Oct 30, 2017 19:26
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Halloween Jack posted:I've seen some TGD posters who are so wrapped up in TGD-specific jargon (like "Infinite Bears" and Frank's Board specific cant you say
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Oct 30, 2017 19:31
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Halloween Jack posted:To Frank, player agency is just a) how much power the PCs have, and b) how much the players can metagame everything by knowing the rules. What if the wizard deliberately made a smaller gazebo than he was capable of to throw them off the scent? And how would they account for an Amulet of Increased Gazebo he may or may not have to inflate it beyond his normal ability?
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Oct 30, 2017 19:59
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Zoro posted:Preeeeeety much, yes. I once to talked to someone who was a big fan of him. We talked to 3.5 D&D and he kept finding a way to just counter any kind of hypothetical scenario I threw at him, no matter how insane it got. I don't think people who like him actually want challenge in their games. I think they just want to be able to do whatever they want and bully the GM. So what happens to these people when they themselves have to GM?
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