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Kwyndig posted:That's pretty dystopic to have the PCs try to turn common memories into more valuable ones by murder. I mean, that's a pretty cool hook for a serial killer who wants to become rich.
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# ? Nov 1, 2018 23:08 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:31 |
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sexpig by night posted:this is so dumb, what is even the point of this, how did they sit down and brainstorm up 'so yea there's four moneys and one is cursed and one is demon stuff no one wants and another is magic money that you have to use only for magic and the main one is orbs of memory' and no one went 'shut the gently caress up'? Sounds like a riff on any of a million phone games that have multiple currencies so you're constantly grinding. It doesn't translate well to ttrpg but I bet it had something to do with it.
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# ? Nov 1, 2018 23:18 |
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starkebn posted:Sounds like a riff on any of a million phone games that have multiple currencies so you're constantly grinding. It doesn't translate well to ttrpg but I bet it had something to do with it. A gacha TRPG is a satanic idea and I wonder if anyone deemed to make one
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# ? Nov 1, 2018 23:38 |
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starkebn posted:
As someone else already mentioned, it's a whole lot like Fallen London, a browser game that has a lot of weird little sub-currencies for different functions and subcultures (and is, in a shocking and surely fully accidental coincidence, also a surreal fantasy game set in an anachronistic city steeped in weird factions and secrets, although IS is more pseudo-American-1920's than FL's mutant Victoriana). The difference there is that the vast majority of Fallen London's currencies were all readily inter-convertible and none of them were nebulously cursed.
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# ? Nov 1, 2018 23:40 |
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Antivehicular posted:As someone else already mentioned, it's a whole lot like Fallen London, a browser game that has a lot of weird little sub-currencies for different functions and subcultures (and is, in a shocking and surely fully accidental coincidence, also a surreal fantasy game set in an anachronistic city steeped in weird factions and secrets, although IS is more pseudo-American-1920's than FL's mutant Victoriana). The difference there is that the vast majority of Fallen London's currencies were all readily inter-convertible and none of them were nebulously cursed. I’m not so sure about that last bit.
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# ? Nov 1, 2018 23:44 |
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fool_of_sound posted:I’m not so sure about that last bit. Well, none of the ones in common circulation were nebulously cursed. ... I think? It's been a while since I played FL. Obviously there were options with, say, some really troubling metaphysical implications and the like.
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# ? Nov 1, 2018 23:47 |
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fool_of_sound posted:I’m not so sure about that last bit. It's true! They're all properly cursed with nicely flagged random event chains that can spawn depending on the amount you have. You know, that thing Monte Cook is allergic to, follow-through.
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# ? Nov 1, 2018 23:48 |
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Antivehicular posted:Well, none of the ones in common circulation were nebulously cursed. ... I think? It's been a while since I played FL. Obviously there were options with, say, some really troubling metaphysical implications and the like. Hey now, the Dread Surmise only burns your hair if you follow through!
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 00:24 |
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starkebn posted:Sounds like a riff on any of a million phone games that have multiple currencies so you're constantly grinding. It doesn't translate well to ttrpg but I bet it had something to do with it. You're giving Monte Cook way too much credit. Plutonis posted:A gacha TRPG is a satanic idea and I wonder if anyone deemed to make one FFG are making gacha card games now so don't worry, we'll get there in a couple of years.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 00:41 |
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Capfalcon posted:So, skipping straight to the Key (which appears to be 1/3 of the rules text, considering how everything else it keeps telling you to look it up what the words actually mean in The Path and the Way), it takes about 10 pages of bad WoD style intro fiction to get to a section titled "What do you do?" Answer: "You're all weird magic specialists who hid in another reality (i.e. Earth) where you had new lives while a big war broke everything. Now, the war's over, and you and other weird wizards are coming back to your home reality. Everything's broken and sucks due to the aftermath of the war, so sometimes you want to go back to your mundane life because it's familiar and safe. However, it's up to you and your buddies to fix things in the city, and things here are much more fantastic than Earth." See, yeah, but as usual with this kind of game there's a difference between what the game says the game is about and what the game is actually about. For example: Last week, we did a character creation session for my buddy's IS campaign. There's a few things you do all together- PC Bonds (see previous post), neighborhood creation, where all of the other players suggest stuff that exists in the neighborhood of your house*, like nosy neighbors or shops or whatnot, and picking out your group's 'Desideratum', which is just the reason all you assholes are working together on stuff rather than running off and pursuing your plot arcs seperately. We were going to use a campaign that came with the books. So our group's plot arcs were as follows:
*I may talk about house bullshit later. As a player with only access to The Key, I have no idea if there is any reason to bother having a house at all.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 01:23 |
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Lemon-Lime posted:FFG are making gacha card games now so don't worry, we'll get there in a couple of years. RPGs that come blind-packed with random special dice which affect gameplay in different ways, all with different rarities. Hire me FFG.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 02:17 |
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So the new L5R is up: is it any good?
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 03:24 |
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NutritiousSnack posted:So the new L5R is up: is it any good? People talking about it in the L5R thread seem to think of it favorably enough.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 03:31 |
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sexpig by night posted:hey those guys who wrote that get that The answer to this question with almost anything proceeding it is, unfortunately, "no." Also, all similarities to Fallen London are, I assure everyone, entirely coincidental. Monte Cook doesn't really "do" research or inspiration.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 03:59 |
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sexpig by night posted:hey those guys who wrote that get that when you have fairy tales of poo poo like some ancient fae king bargaining for the emotions of a mortal or memories of some mundane thing is meant to be a sign of how alien and detached from the mortal world the fae are where 'you enjoy cheese, just cheese? Tell me what that's like' is a novel concept to some inhuman being who can get energy from an orgy or whatever the gently caress, right? It's not like, meant to be an actual economy. Everything potentially cool and alien must be documented, spelled out, given explicit rules, and commoditized until it's neither. hyphz posted:Yea, does making a trueorb mean the maker forgets the secret it holds? If so, these super serious rebuilding wizards are throwing away important truths for a quick buck and a quick buff. A better designer could take the idea of pissing away Important Truths and eroding the past in favor of the present and roll with it but I'm going to wager it's probably not nearly that exciting here.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 04:04 |
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ProfessorCirno posted:The answer to this question with almost anything proceeding it is, unfortunately, "no." What about that time he clearly read about TORG and make a remake of it?
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 04:48 |
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ProfessorCirno posted:Also, all similarities to Fallen London are, I assure everyone, entirely coincidental. Monte Cook doesn't really "do" research or inspiration. I think he does try to research and explore stuff, but when he implements things in his own games he's stuck in this habit of jamming it into a D&D framework for narrative framing/rules structures. So he ends up only managing a superficial imitation of what he was inspired by. Like, there's no way he didn't at least hear someone describe how Fate Points work once before going "That sounds awesome!" and farting out the concept of GM Intrusions. What I can't figure out is how much of it is something deliberately done that way because he assumes that he has to include some familiar things for fans that followed him since his work on 3e D&D, and how much of it is him being unwilling to stray too far away from his comfort zone.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 05:06 |
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I think my favorite Monte Cook jam was his take on the World of Darkness, which managed to be the exact opposite of everything that defined the WoD (both old and new). You know how the WoD is our world, only with monsters lurking in the shadows and subtly controlling the levers of power? Well, Monte's WoD was our world, only after a giant magical apocalypse open a hell rift, and now packs of monsters wander openly in the blasted ruins.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 05:12 |
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I'm reasonably sure that Cyphers were taken from Monte Cook's home games of D&D 3e, where he said he'd hand out scrolls of random magic effects or spells like Jump and Spider Climb for his players to use as single-use abilities
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 07:54 |
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sexpig by night posted:hey those guys who wrote that get that when you have fairy tales of poo poo like some ancient fae king bargaining for the emotions of a mortal or memories of some mundane thing is meant to be a sign of how alien and detached from the mortal world the fae are where 'you enjoy cheese, just cheese? Tell me what that's like' is a novel concept to some inhuman being who can get energy from an orgy or whatever the gently caress, right? It's not like, meant to be an actual economy. It is exactly intended to be an actual economy. Orbs aren't just wizard money, they're used by literally everyone in The Actuality, non-wizards included. A 'quick and greasy' meal costs 50 glass orbs, a night in a flophouse costs 150 glass orbs, and a taxi fare costs 50 glass orbs. The given reason why they use thought money is 'In this game, we value ideas! We value ideas so much, our money is made out of ideas!'
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 08:37 |
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Ratoslov posted:It is exactly intended to be an actual economy. Orbs aren't just wizard money, they're used by literally everyone in The Actuality, non-wizards included. A 'quick and greasy' meal costs 50 glass orbs, a night in a flophouse costs 150 glass orbs, and a taxi fare costs 50 glass orbs. The given reason why they use thought money is 'In this game, we value ideas! We value ideas so much, our money is made out of ideas!' God this is so dumb, it's something like five seconds of actual thought would be enough to go "so wait, if I want a Big Mac I have to hand someone 50 marbles? This is how every financial transaction in the game takes place?"
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 08:42 |
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My Invisible Sun character is going to invent paper money and make a pile of orbs so big it can't be stacked because they're spherical, so they roll all over the floor of his gargantuan wizard house and he slips on them and breaks his neck.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 10:06 |
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Kai Tave posted:God this is so dumb, it's something like five seconds of actual thought would be enough to go "so wait, if I want a Big Mac I have to hand someone 50 marbles? This is how every financial transaction in the game takes place?" One of the nice things about being rich is that you can instead do all your money transfers by cheque or by magical internet rather than having to fish out marbles from behind the fryolator.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 10:06 |
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What's funny is that John Wick, itself another entry into the secret-world-beneath-the-modern-world club, just uses gold coins, actual Gold Pieces, as its super special currency of choice, but the incongruity of all these slick and stylish assassins using gold coins to pay for goods and services in the modern day is so incongruous that it wraps back around to actually feeling suitably evocative and mysterious, so ironically maybe if Monte had stuck with literal D&D currencies for Invisible Sun it would be cooler than the magic memory ball standard he pulled out of his hat.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 10:16 |
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Took me a while to realise which John wick you were discussing
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 10:18 |
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The John Wick movie was exactly what I thought of with 'secret assassin currency', and yeah, basically that. The whole hotel kinda comes off as like a MMO hub.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 11:03 |
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I main John Wick on Fortnite and I don't remember there being a hotel.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 13:24 |
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So in other news, one of the guys from Eden Studios (Unisystem games, All Flesh Must Be Eaten) is starting work on his own OSR-ish system. Something along the lines of not wanting to keep licensing systems from people, but having a system of their own creation. I did see one of the classes was Hoplite, so it very easily could have more of a Greco-Roman bent than the usual D&D setting, but that's all I've seen so far. Source: He also owns one of the bigger FLGS in my area, and we got to talking about that and other stuff last night after the weekly Pokemon TCG league.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 16:01 |
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Ratoslov posted:So we have to pick out a group motivation from a list. The list is: Money, Power, Information, Allies, Travel, or Altruism. So looking at everyone's plot arcs we decided that the least worst fit for what we all wanted was Information. Then the GM checked the campaign book and it turned out that the first thing we had apparently all decided to do was to hunt down some mythological beastie with all sorts of Sekrit Deep Lore written on it's hide. So yeah, the game turns out to be very D&D and not very 're-building the world after World War 1 + 2.' That's the part that's stuck out the most to me. Both players and the group have to select an arc for themselves by buying them with one of the four(ish?) kinds of experience. And the arcs are very, VERY specific about the steps you have to complete in order to resolve them, because that's one of the main ways you get experience. It's comes across as "This is a serious game about ROLEplaying, so please play your characters the way I envision them." Almost as if, you know, Monty Cook doesn't know about games other than D&D.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 16:44 |
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Plutonis posted:I main John Wick on Fortnite and I don't remember there being a hotel. it's to the north on the map, not a named location
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 16:45 |
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Coolness Averted posted:it's to the north on the map, not a named location That's a motel, and John Wick wouldn't sleep at a motel. Even though they show it in the movies, I'm not convinced Wick even sleeps. I think it's a performative gesture learned from his wife and dog.
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 17:05 |
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Aniodia posted:Source: He also owns one of the bigger FLGS in my area, and we got to talking about that and other stuff last night after the weekly Pokemon TCG league. Is there a shop bigger than ZP in the area?
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# ? Nov 2, 2018 21:04 |
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I've been trying to dig through Monte Cook's earlier writings to back up my earlier claim that Numenera/Cypher was just trimmings from his old 3e / d20 designs: https://web.archive.org/web/20120308035105/http://www.montecook.com/diary26.html quote:Like those subsystems, much of the material offered in Chaositech is a self-contained subsystem. Chaositech devices provide the ability to do magiclike things, such as flying, disguising your identity or blasting energy, but they are not affected by dispel magic, spell resistance, or antimagic. Because they're not magic. They are the result of the manipulation of chaotic energies which, in turn, can change the laws of physics. Chaositech can make the impossible happen. They're all the devices that just shouldn't work, but do. https://web.archive.org/web/20120308044725/http://www.montecook.com/diary27.html quote:Likewise, it would be weird to be running a fairly traditional fantasy campaign and suddenly throw in laser guns and force fields. So that means that Chaositech isn't designed for traditional fantasy campaigns, right? https://web.archive.org/web/20080516063351/http://www.montecook.com/arch_dmonly32.html quote:I like one-use items. I always have. I like the idea of potions, scrolls, oils, or things like the detonations from Monte Cook's Arcana Unearthed. They give a character an interesting power to use, but only once, so the player has to be careful with them. Using the cards makes me like one-use items even more. In this particular session, they kept finding one-use stuff and using it (and others they'd found) just as quickly. In this particular scenario, a lot of the NPCs carry pills with them, as described in my steamtech mini-supplement, "Harnessing the Natural Laws," so there was a lot of "pill popping" as they PCs came across these -- particularly since these guys conveniently scratch a clue as to the function right into the pills themselves. Since the rule is that, when a one-use item is used, the card gets passed back to me, the cards were flying. It added a really fun element to the session. http://www.enworld.org/forum/content.php?1236-EN-World-Interview-Monte-Cook-and-Numenera quote:When it came to creating Numenera and his vision for it, he had several options. He could have produced a simple source book and hung it on another rules system instead of going the route of the complete core book.
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# ? Nov 3, 2018 03:00 |
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LongDarkNight posted:Is there a shop bigger than ZP in the area? If by "in the area" you mean less than an hour's drive, there's Kirwan's Game Store down in Catskill, which has run a nearly 300-person yugioh tournament, the local 40k guys, and still the merchandise side of the store have room to spare.
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# ? Nov 4, 2018 21:06 |
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# ? Nov 5, 2018 17:39 |
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I have read that comic. Despite being an ad for D&D and Rick and Morty, it has a couple good gags and seems to really revel in how ridiculous it would be for everyone in a school to be obsessed with a weird nerd game from the 70s. Absolute trash overall but I laughed out loud after their old-school AD&D session.
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# ? Nov 5, 2018 17:44 |
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I don't get it. Some people liked The Adventure Zone and this is funny or a problem because?????
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# ? Nov 5, 2018 17:46 |
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Can anyone estimate what system has the best trade off of system simplicity to gear porn potential? Having finally burned out on the PF 2e Playtest, our host suggested something cyber and I know gear porn is his big deal, but because of the burnout another complex system would be a bit awkward. Note the gear does need to be codified, so a Fate system with gear aspects wouldn’t swing it.
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# ? Nov 5, 2018 17:46 |
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what kind of monster fantasizes about Travis?
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# ? Nov 5, 2018 17:47 |
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# ? May 25, 2024 13:31 |
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Xiahou Dun posted:I don't get it. the thrust of the issue is that Morty knows nothing about D&D and feels left out, because obviously people who don't play D&D are ostracized outsiders
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# ? Nov 5, 2018 17:49 |