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Der Waffle Mous posted:What is it with WoD/CoD where you always have people describing really awesome fun scenarios as if they're a bad thing? Often, the "awesome fun scenarios" are a complete mismatch of tone with the games. Which, if you're someone who values that tone, means the "awesome fun scenarios" are neither.
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Jan 7, 2018 05:36
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LatwPIAT posted:Often, the "awesome fun scenarios" are a complete mismatch of tone with the games. Which, if you're someone who values that tone, means the "awesome fun scenarios" are neither. There's "valuing a tone" and then there's the constant hissing at the idea that someone dare play vampire superheroes instead of grimdark rape metaphors.
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Jan 7, 2018 05:49
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Der Waffle Mous posted:There's "valuing a tone" and then there's the constant hissing at the idea that someone dare play vampire superheroes instead of grimdark rape metaphors. Except he's not saying that? It's more "The tone of the game is kind of poorly written to the point that parts start to spin off and turn into supernatural pissing contests while you're supposed to be engaging in your cults, even if punching an uratha in the junk is hilarious the game doesn't really tell you what happens and instead spends 100 pages talking about how awesome you are."
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Jan 7, 2018 06:08
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Some of it's intended tone, yeah. As well, a lot of the old WoD stuff had a lot of heavy metaplot the writers wanted to keep out of the hands of players. I think the biggest problem is they rarely break it down and tell players, "This is how we expect a game to go. We're keeping these things out because of X or Y." Instead they build up really stupid in-universe justifications for why you can't do X, or tell GMs to punish players for Y.
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Jan 7, 2018 06:20
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Believe me, I've played supernatural superheroes before. Repeatedly. I actually played a mummy in a mixed game, even, and that course of action is not far from something I did several times. The fact is that the game as it was written and intended to be read very clearly does not realize it's doing that. Kurieg posted:Except he's not saying that? It's more "The tone of the game is kind of poorly written to the point that parts start to spin off and turn into supernatural pissing contests while you're supposed to be engaging in your cults, even if punching an uratha in the junk is hilarious the game doesn't really tell you what happens and instead spends 100 pages talking about how awesome you are." JackMann posted:I think the biggest problem is they rarely break it down and tell players, "This is how we expect a game to go. We're keeping these things out because of X or Y." Instead they build up really stupid in-universe justifications for why you can't do X, or tell GMs to punish players for Y. Yeah it's these.
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Jan 7, 2018 06:24
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Also there's very few people on these forums who want Grimdark Rape-pires. Unfortunately Venn Diagram of "White Wolf Publishing Employees" exists almost entirely within the "Grimdark Rape-pire" circle.
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Jan 7, 2018 06:34
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Daeren posted:Mummies, as a rule, are not subtle to anyone but mortals, barely. Mummies in a mixed setting would pretty much inevitably kick down the door in approximately ten seconds and yell RETURN THE SLAB before choke-slamming somebody through the Spanish announcer's table. Tell me more, this sounds amazing.
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Jan 7, 2018 06:51
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Bongo Bill posted:Tell me more, this sounds amazing. The way Mummy works, mummies get woken up either once per 1400 years, when their tomb or stuff is disturbed, or when their cult really needs them and summons them up. Unlike most other supernaturals who start almost DnD-style at level 1 and get stronger over time, when a mummy wakes up they're at MAX LEVEL and they slowly degrade over time until they go to sleep again. So basically messing with a mummy would generally be considered a bad idea when you could leave them alone.
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Jan 7, 2018 07:16
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Bongo Bill posted:Tell me more, this sounds amazing. To elaborate a bit on what bewilderment said (while noting that the game itself is often garbage at explaining or making sure you understand several pieces of what I'm about to say), mummies have one overriding commandment hard wired into their very existence: get dat fukken As noted by Rand Brittain, a lot of the book seems written assuming mummies can make relics, while the rest of the book, including the primary rules, state they are uniquely occurring items, and the whole "tithing back to Duat" thing doesn't make much sense assuming they can be deliberately crafted anyway - though picking out inconsistencies and oddities in Mummy is rather like shooting fish in a barrel. Regardless, a bunch of ancient pre-Dynastic artifacts exist, and a bunch of similarly spooky cursed items exist, and mummies have a beyond-all-reason need to find and take them. They can be subtle about it, and plan long term, but they will not give up on the trail once they have it, and impatient mummies have many extremely loud options that immediately solve their problems. They can innately sense them from miles away, they can track its passage through time and space if they've ever interacted with it before (and know who's handled it), and they can just send out a magical sonar pulse to notice ones in the general neighborhood if they've seriously got no leads. In addition, once a mummy has claimed a relic as part of their personal hoard, if anybody except specially prepared cultists so much as touches it while they're asleep, they instantly spring up out of their deathless slumber in a fugue state where their only goal is killing the defiler(s). If I recall correctly, they also reflexively realize when someone steals their relics when they're awake too, but they dont go into a supernatural murder frenzy - though they are liable to go into a mundane one. Relic theft and possessiveness is noted to actually be one of the most common instigators of mummy-vs-mummy conflict, as two mummies who get it in their heads to own the same relic will not compromise barring exceptional circumstances, a trade, already being part of the same group (tithing it to their Guild or the meret's [PC group] hoard at large), or one mummy having their head screwed on tighter than usual. This can lead to back and forth thefts, constantly escalating grudges, cult vs cult blood feuds, and all sorts of fun poo poo that bored immortals with memory problems can get up to over a thousand years. Got all that? Good. Now imagine what happens when two mummies lock eyes on the same relic at a local museum exhibition that's secretly an excuse for a Mage to wave their dick around and show off their occult treasure. Or what happens when a hunter finds a weird blood-red dagger in the basement of some fundie cultist's house and wakes up the next day with a completely desiccated corpse Kool-Aid Man-ing clean through the outer wall of their prepper compound, glowing an impossible not-gold that simultaneously is processed as a crushing awareness of the inevitability of death and entropy, and also as "you hallucinate cobras, everywhere." Mummies would not exactly stay a low-key secret very long. Daeren fucked around with this message at 08:46 on Jan 7, 2018 |
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Jan 7, 2018 08:42
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I feel like we're talking past eachother but still in the same general vicinity. But still, fair enough. Mostly just, after having played in Mage for ages, I still have this conception of the *of Darkness games as the oppressively cynical no-fun-allowed zone where you basically required to be either miserable or a psycopath. Der Waffle Mous fucked around with this message at 08:54 on Jan 7, 2018 |
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Jan 7, 2018 08:51
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Der Waffle Mous posted:I feel like we're talking past eachother but still in the same general vicinity. Put it this way - I have absolutely no problem with beef jerky lookin' mummies smashing through a wall, grabbing a wizard by the throat, tying him into a pretzel, and peacing off into the night in the back of an escape vehicle that's covered in gold chrome and ankhs. I have an issue when that's an accident of writing rather than an intentionally supported and desired thing, as evidenced by the line developer being extremely tetchy about people Getting It Wrong. Like, the new vampire books have God-Machine cultists that can read the future backwards and worship the Angel of Death, comma, whose corpse was stolen from the moon by the Apollo missions and is currently held in the Pentagon. CofD is not afraid to get extremely weird and gonzo while still letting you play that content for either horror or goofery. Mummy was attempting to be a baroque oWoD style historical epoch with pulp elements that had its fumbling attempts at oWoD style horror writing pretty much entirely subsumed by the pulp nonsense, which I love, but that still leaves the game in a position where the intended content is the stuff that makes it bad.
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Jan 7, 2018 09:05
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The takeaway I'm getting from this is to kitbash the nWoD with WWWRPG.
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Jan 7, 2018 09:22
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How about a game of ACTION MUMMIES, 90s style, where you play as a group of mummies awoken to protect the last living member of your pharao’s ancient lineage. He or she is an 8 to 12 year old kid in the modern world. The group creates their kid-liege together, decide on setting, protagonists etc. Evil corporate overlords wants the secret powers of the child pharao for themselves, teaming up with ninja clans and supervillains to ruin your day, while on your side stand an assortment of mutated turtles and werewolfs and good wizards and whatever else you can think of. I want to write that game, then play it.
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Jan 7, 2018 09:22
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So a game based on Mummies Alive!, pretty much?
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Jan 7, 2018 09:27
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senrath posted:So a game based on Mummies Alive!, pretty much? That was the idea.
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Jan 7, 2018 09:37
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Der Waffle Mous posted:There's "valuing a tone" and then there's the constant hissing at the idea that someone dare play vampire superheroes instead of grimdark rape metaphors. Sometimes I play a very serious game about playing a vampire struggling with damnation and the inescapable nature of having to violating people to live, sometimes I play a vampire that dresses up in a French maid costume and hunts demons with a shotgun.
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Jan 7, 2018 10:09
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Daeren posted:To elaborate a bit on what bewilderment said (while noting that the game itself is often garbage at explaining or making sure you understand several pieces of what I'm about to say), mummies have one overriding commandment hard wired into their very existence: get dat fukken So what I'm getting here is that mummies are literally wingless dragons.
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Jan 7, 2018 16:48
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NinjaDebugger posted:So what I'm getting here is that mummies are literally wingless dragons. ...y'know I never really made that connection but, yeah, as far as relics go. They've got a fair amount of other stuff going on in their existence that doesn't quite fit that mold though, like their role as glorified divine middle managers, the memory issues, and such.
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Jan 7, 2018 21:07
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The thought, she has occurred that a Mummy game might be interesting for a solo game but what does a group of Mummies do? Like... if they're keyed to the same relic then they'd want to beat each other up and take it. If they don't wake up at the same time... then you've got just the one gadding about the night playing Paleolithic Repo Man and even if some were awake at the same time wouldn't they have barely anything to do with each other? I mean, I guess they could work out some kind of compromise to 'help me and I'll help you' but I've seldom read a summary of a game that did so little to tell me why the PCs are working together. Being a pack, I get. A group of newbie vamps trying to carve out a holding in the city, sure. Even Sin-Eaters probably hang around for reasons of... I dunno, probably like that movie Flatliners. Here? : :
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Jan 7, 2018 21:55
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I almost never draw maps beforehand because  Most of the time I just get my players to draw my maps for me unless I have something specific planned out. They generally make it more interesting than I would anyway.
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Jan 7, 2018 22:01
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Dawgstar posted:The thought, she has occurred that a Mummy game might be interesting for a solo game but what does a group of Mummies do? Like... if they're keyed to the same relic then they'd want to beat each other up and take it. If they don't wake up at the same time... then you've got just the one gadding about the night playing Paleolithic Repo Man and even if some were awake at the same time wouldn't they have barely anything to do with each other? I mean, I guess they could work out some kind of compromise to 'help me and I'll help you' but I've seldom read a summary of a game that did so little to tell me why the PCs are working together. Being a pack, I get. A group of newbie vamps trying to carve out a holding in the city, sure. Even Sin-Eaters probably hang around for reasons of... I dunno, probably like that movie Flatliners. Here? : You could make a game where each player plays a mummy in rotation once per session and the rest of them are cultists for that mummy. I dunno if actual Mummy works that way though.
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Jan 7, 2018 22:03
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Dawgstar posted:The thought, she has occurred that a Mummy game might be interesting for a solo game but what does a group of Mummies do? Like... if they're keyed to the same relic then they'd want to beat each other up and take it. If they don't wake up at the same time... then you've got just the one gadding about the night playing Paleolithic Repo Man and even if some were awake at the same time wouldn't they have barely anything to do with each other? I mean, I guess they could work out some kind of compromise to 'help me and I'll help you' but I've seldom read a summary of a game that did so little to tell me why the PCs are working together. Being a pack, I get. A group of newbie vamps trying to carve out a holding in the city, sure. Even Sin-Eaters probably hang around for reasons of... I dunno, probably like that movie Flatliners. Here? : Yeah no the book's foremost suggestion on how to play it in the ST advice section is Ars Magica style, except none of the rest of the text really supports that narratively and super doesn't mechanically. You can have all the other players be your cultists and goons and minions and allies but that still means only one guy is using the actual book and playing the actual game. There is vague support for reasons mummies would gang together, like they've all got one cult that deifies all of them, or they're all members of the same guild, or they're just political allies that are sufficiently established over literal centuries, or whatever, but the way that resurrection and your power ticking down works means the juggling act involved is going to be quite goofy the moment someone falls off the shared pace of power degradation. As said, I made Mummy work as a PC in a mixed game of other supernaturals, but that was a combination of me very deliberately pulling the punches of what I could do in the early sessions, building myself to be hyperfocused on one role ("not dying"), the ST not being afraid to give the other players crazy poo poo to even the playing field when necessary, and having my cult be my support network of NPC minions on the side. Daeren fucked around with this message at 22:07 on Jan 7, 2018 |
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Jan 7, 2018 22:05
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Dawgstar posted:The thought, she has occurred that a Mummy game might be interesting for a solo game but what does a group of Mummies do? Like... if they're keyed to the same relic then they'd want to beat each other up and take it. If they don't wake up at the same time... then you've got just the one gadding about the night playing Paleolithic Repo Man and even if some were awake at the same time wouldn't they have barely anything to do with each other? I mean, I guess they could work out some kind of compromise to 'help me and I'll help you' but I've seldom read a summary of a game that did so little to tell me why the PCs are working together. Being a pack, I get. A group of newbie vamps trying to carve out a holding in the city, sure. Even Sin-Eaters probably hang around for reasons of... I dunno, probably like that movie Flatliners. Here? : I've made it work by never keying any member of the Meret to the same relic at once, and taking advantage of both setting my campaign at the beginning of the Sothic Turn (a cosmological event that wakes all the mummies up at once, which when you think about it only drives home Daeren's point that the Masquerade is bound to shatter for the Arisen, no matter how few of them there are) and the surprisingly long length between Descent rolls. I pitched the game to my group as "What if you were the Karmic Retribution at the end of an EC horror comic?" and ran it and the team as heist games, acquiring Relics from heavily cursed people. It also helps that Fate is a weird, handwavy aspect of the Mummy cosmology that you can use to justify why the same Mummies keep finding each other over and over across Descents. I'm not going to pretend that the game had my back all the way when setting this stuff up. A lot of how an all-Mummy party worked for me was thanks to me and my players doing a lot of the heavy lifting. But it can work if you're prepared for over-the-top solutions to mundane problems (like just deciding to buy an airline to get somewhere) and disastrous consequences for mishaps (like losing the Empire State Building to a poorly aimed meteor). But again, that's me being an GM, not necessarily a point in the game's favor, even if I do like it quite a lot.
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Jan 7, 2018 23:52
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JR had the accent. You shoulda wrote:Kurieg posted:MAH GOD-KING!
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Jan 8, 2018 00:27
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Daeren posted:Yeah no the book's foremost suggestion on how to play it in the ST advice section is Ars Magica style, except none of the rest of the text really supports that narratively and super doesn't mechanically. You can have all the other players be your cultists and goons and minions and allies but that still means only one guy is using the actual book and playing the actual game. There is vague support for reasons mummies would gang together, like they've all got one cult that deifies all of them, or they're all members of the same guild, or they're just political allies that are sufficiently established over literal centuries, or whatever, but the way that resurrection and your power ticking down works means the juggling act involved is going to be quite goofy the moment someone falls off the shared pace of power degradation. I like the nMummy mechanic of starting out powerful and slowly losing juice as you get closer to passing back into a deathless sleep, but yeah I think I brought up before that I couldn't parse a way to have a long-term game of mummies without something major binding them together. Even nDemons would have more reasons for regular group team-ups, even if they're all side-eyeing each other throughout each mission. LatwPIAT posted:Sometimes I play a very serious game about playing a vampire struggling with damnation and the inescapable nature of having to violating people to live, sometimes I play a vampire that dresses up in a French maid costume and hunts demons with a shotgun. That is a very courageous French maidpire. Nuns with Guns fucked around with this message at 04:35 on Jan 8, 2018 |
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Jan 8, 2018 04:32
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Nuns with Guns posted:That is a very courageous French maidpire. The game ended before she got around to actually killing any demons, but she wanted to.
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Jan 8, 2018 07:51
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Free Cog posted:I'm not going to pretend that the game had my back all the way when setting this stuff up. A lot of how an all-Mummy party worked for me was thanks to me and my players doing a lot of the heavy lifting. But it can work if you're prepared for over-the-top solutions to mundane problems (like just deciding to buy an airline to get somewhere) and disastrous consequences for mishaps (like losing the Empire State Building to a poorly aimed meteor). But again, that's me being an GM, not necessarily a point in the game's favor, even if I do like it quite a lot. This was my experience of running Mummy for a group as well. I used the Sothic turn to have them all up and about and trying to work out what the gently caress they did last time they were up (attempt to break resurrection, it turned out) then staged flashbacks in previous periods to flesh out the story. The game wasn't a huge help in doing any of that, though.
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Jan 8, 2018 08:18
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gradenko_2000 posted:Harmonquest uses fuckin Pathfinder. Life finds a way. It is my personal experience that most people playing d20-derived RPGs only use a subset of the rules in that book, just like it's been for nearly every edition of D&D.
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Jan 9, 2018 00:22
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My impression is that Harmonquest is running their game the same way it ran it in Community, where the books and dice are effectively just props. It’s not so much “Harmonquest uses PF” so much as “They used paid advertising from Paizo.”
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Jan 9, 2018 01:04
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Simian_Prime posted:My impression is that Harmonquest is running their game the same way it ran it in Community, where the books and dice are effectively just props. This is due to the players' staggering alcoholism.
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Jan 9, 2018 01:06
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Golden Bee posted:This is due to the players' staggering alcoholism. Also because actually following PF rules would be pretty tough to improv around at a live recording speed, and also because they get guest stars that the last thing they need to do is spend hours explaining HP and stuff too.
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Jan 9, 2018 01:34
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They could roll their own dice at least.
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Jan 9, 2018 01:36
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Wrong thread.
LogicNinja fucked around with this message at 07:47 on Jan 9, 2018 |
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Jan 9, 2018 07:31
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I have an industry-related question: Dreamscarred Press, and I assume various other outfits as well (to greater and lesser degrees), release "playtest documents" of products that they are working on. How would you, as an interested customer but who is otherwise completely divorced from the company, go about playtesting this new class? I would expect that it would of course not be enough to simply read the thing and offer your feedback on what feels like it's too good or too bad (even though some things like mathematical mistakes can be uncovered simply with a readthrough, see also Starfinder), But on the other hand, I don't know if these playtests really run for long enough to support something like a campaign game that meets weekly, even if you play at an accelerated pace (or do they?) So what would you do? How would/should playtests be run? I'm envisioning something like a series of "arena battles" or context-less combats to look at how the class plays at various levels and against various types of enemies and with various other players. Would you get other people for this?
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Jan 9, 2018 07:47
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LogicNinja posted:
Nevertheless, have Sawtooth and Squarewave. 
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Jan 9, 2018 07:58
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gradenko_2000 posted:I have an industry-related question: Dreamscarred Press, and I assume various other outfits as well (to greater and lesser degrees), release "playtest documents" of products that they are working on. So I'll be honest, the only way an RPG publisher is going to get significant amounts of outside playtesting done is by: A) Being WotC, Paizo, White Wolf or similar. B) Putting out a quickstart that takes all the effort out of putting a game together. But don't discount how useful read-through feedback is. Chances are the writer's been using their home game to test the actual mechanics - your read through tells them whether the mechanics are actually interesting to people, what other things people might want to do that the mechanics don't quite allow for, and what bits of them are under-explained.
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Jan 9, 2018 09:20
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I'd say that for d20 stuff the maths is important, and getting someone to double-check your scaling is a good use of time. You mentioned Starfinger, but see also the truenamer, or the maths-fixing feats in 4e, or the day one patch to skill challenges after someone ran the numbers. It's also worth getting some d20 experts to give it a read-through to see if there are any obvious broken combos, either within the class or with other material. Other than that, yeah, I'd use arena battles or boss rushes to test out a new d20 class. You don't technically need other people for that but seeing how the class functions in a variety of party compositions and against a variety of opponents would be much easier with a variety of testers. Tangentially, I've seen a couple of Kickstarters which include playtesting time in the delivery estimates: the infamous Invisible Sun was KSed with the understanding that the playtesting would happen after funding but before final delivery, and so was Sigmata. Getting people hype for your game and then saying 'here it is, if it breaks please let us know' seems like a viable option for some products, at least.
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Jan 9, 2018 10:21
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potatocubed posted:Tangentially, I've seen a couple of Kickstarters which include playtesting time in the delivery estimates: the infamous Invisible Sun was KSed with the understanding that the playtesting would happen after funding but before final delivery, and so was Sigmata. Getting people hype for your game and then saying 'here it is, if it breaks please let us know' seems like a viable option for some products, at least. Blades In The Dark ran over its initial delivery estimates but a large part of that was John Harper revising the game more than anticipated due in part to a significant amount of post-funding playtesting.
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Jan 9, 2018 10:55
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potatocubed posted:Tangentially, I've seen a couple of Kickstarters which include playtesting time in the delivery estimates: the infamous Invisible Sun was KSed with the understanding that the playtesting would happen after funding but before final delivery, and so was Sigmata. Getting people hype for your game and then saying 'here it is, if it breaks please let us know' seems like a viable option for some products, at least. On the other hand, balanced and playtested rules were never a priority or part of the appeal to MCG fans
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Jan 9, 2018 13:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:So what would you do? How would/should playtests be run? I'm envisioning something like a series of "arena battles" or context-less combats to look at how the class plays at various levels and against various types of enemies and with various other players. Would you get other people for this? My group did a lot of 13A playtesting, and most of our problems and concerns were addressed so I feel like we did a good job. Our most important contributions came from actual play using only the materials provided. A read through or series of calculator battles might catch math problems, but a surprising amount of problems only become evident in an actual session. Use an outside group and be as hands-off as possible, logging difficulties as they arise. "We couldn't understand why the <stinky> keyword was on both monsters and weapons and what it does exactly" or "[class] completely stops being fun when you run out of resource" is more valuable feedback than fine tuning any particular combat balance or mechanic. This looks like subjective opinions or operator error, but your players will absolutely encounter the same problem unless you address it. For a negative example, the 4e PHB playtesters obviously knew what [W] meant from an outside source, or WotC would have caught one problem everyone had at launch: A core mechanic is only explained once in an unlikely place, but referenced everywhere. This was definitely a situation where the players knew what it meant because they were in house, or they asked someone (who then didn't log that nobody could find the rule. ) The 4e math was beautiful, but their tests missed core problems like skill challenges' barely working rules. This is something you'd miss worth arena testing or just plowing through combats.
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Jan 9, 2018 13:42
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