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Is there anything Monte Cook doesn't ruin with wizards??? The answer is The Book of Vile Darkness because that was ruined by being printed
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Feb 8, 2019 17:30
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The BoVD was ruined with necrophilia and eeevil bondage. Random thought: I was flipping through old Cyberpunk sourcebooks and chuckling at them for the 80s chic, but in retrospect it's actually good. I'm glad cyberpunk is coming back in vogue, but the "athleisure gothninja" design has run its course. Give me a weirder vision of the terrible future.  Based on my searches for "80s jacket" there's gotta be neon green on here somewhere. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 17:57 on Feb 8, 2019 |
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Feb 8, 2019 17:52
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Gort posted:I've often thought that if you want to swiftly identify if a game is lovely or not, head straight to the healing rules. I've been calling this the Fighter Litmus Test for a few years now, and it generally holds true in my experience: if the game has a fighter-equivalent (a character class or set of options whose core gimmick is just engaging directly with the core resolution system instead of bypassing it with a limited-availability subsystem, whether that's "roll d20 to do HP damage" or something different), then if that fighter-equivalent is not both cool/engaging to play and mechanically powerful, the game is most likely badly designed. Lemon-Lime fucked around with this message at 18:55 on Feb 8, 2019 |
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Feb 8, 2019 17:55
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Lemon-Lime posted:I've been calling this the Fighter Litmus Test for a few years now, and it generally holds true in my experience: if the game has a fighter-equivalent (a character class or set of options whose core gimmick is just engaging directly with the core resolution system instead of bypassing it with a limited-availability subsystem, whether that's "roll d20 to do HP damage" or something different), then if that fighter-equivalent is both cool/engaging to play and mechanically powerful, the game is probably reasonably well-designed. This failed for me for dungeon crawl classics, where all the base classes are really cool but the game completely fails to understand the core features of old school dungeon crawling.
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Feb 8, 2019 17:58
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Halloween Jack posted:The BoVD was ruined with necrophilia and eeevil bondage.
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Feb 8, 2019 18:06
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The idea that when paladins get together, the leather harnesses and genital piercings come out, is not at all strange to me.
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Feb 8, 2019 18:12
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The funniest bit is they can't make those evil nipple clamps themselves due to the dump way 3.5 magic item crafting works, so all of it needs to be bought of stolen from evil aligned bondage enthusiasts.
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Feb 8, 2019 18:21
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The Black Hack 2e passes this test, by the way. If y'all are curious about OSR stuff without a lot of the baggage.Lemon-Lime posted:the Fighter Litmus Test
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Feb 8, 2019 18:25
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fool_of_sound posted:This failed for me for dungeon crawl classics, where all the base classes are really cool but the game completely fails to understand the core features of old school dungeon crawling. DCC isn't really meant to be a dungeon crawler though. It's OSR in the gonzo weird fantasy sense, and its power level and ideas are much higher octane than the usual retroclone. You start off with a funnel and then by like level 2 you're sorting out interplanar treaties for gods or whatever.
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Feb 8, 2019 18:50
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It doesn't help that conversation about the funnel takes up like 99% of talk about the game.
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Feb 8, 2019 18:53
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Arivia posted:DCC isn't really meant to be a dungeon crawler though. It's OSR in the gonzo weird fantasy sense, and its power level and ideas are much higher octane than the usual retroclone. You start off with a funnel and then by like level 2 you're sorting out interplanar treaties for gods or whatever. It 100% tries to lure you in as a classic dungeon crawler though, including in the very name.
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Feb 8, 2019 18:55
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Yeah, the name and the funnel references made me assume that DCC was a standard Fantasy loving Vietnam/"some idiots wander around and die" OSR game. Crazy fantasy that gets really nuts after the funnel sounds way more interesting. I'm willing to throw some level 0s into the meat grinder, but once one of them has a name and personality, they need something interesting to do.
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Feb 8, 2019 19:04
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The Deed mechanic seems neat, but I enjoy DCC's adventure design much more than I care for the actual core game. I'm not loving around with critical failure tables for spells.
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Feb 8, 2019 19:10
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Antivehicular posted:Yeah, the name and the funnel references made me assume that DCC was a standard Fantasy loving Vietnam/"some idiots wander around and die" OSR game. Crazy fantasy that gets really nuts after the funnel sounds way more interesting. I'm willing to throw some level 0s into the meat grinder, but once one of them has a name and personality, they need something interesting to do. 'the funnel' isn't really a feature of classic dungeon crawls, as such. like by virtue of old school d&d levels 1-2 are super swingy but you're not just useless garbage until you complete your first adventure, then are suddenly good and competent. Intentional meat grinder design was always considered the hallmark of a bad dungeon crawl. DCC also doesn't understand that part of the appeal of dungeon crawling is getting cool if randomized treasure, and instead makes magic items astoundingly rare and gives you penalties for having more than one. That plus the like four different ways it fucks with wizards makes me feel like the author really likes STDH stories about tomb of horrors and warhammer fantasy roleplay, without ever really engaging the material they were ostensibly working from.
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Feb 8, 2019 19:31
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remusclaw posted:Absolutely. What do we have in American film that takes the perspective of the colonized instead of the colonizer in that time frame? Tarantino's Django and Mel "shithead" Gibson's Apocalypto? We have had the occasional guilt film like Dances With Wolves, but that had to go with the White Savior thing. There are some exploitation films from the 60s and 70s that actually tell stories about Black outlaws, but they can hardly be called mainstream Hollywood. It's been 20 years since I saw it, but after skimming a plot summary, maybe throw Last of the Mohicans into the mix? It's a movie based on the novel by James Fennimore Cooper, so the datedness of that source has to be taken into account. The frontier in that film is New York, so it's much earlier on in the colonial american period than westerns are usually placed, but it does at least have nominally native american protagonists. The themes include the extirpation of the Mohican tribe; the exploitation of the natives by both the french and english in the conduct of their wars; recognition that intertribal warfare was a thing; a really good soundtrack. But also on the bad side... white or half-white women as the prizes and victims and just generally that damsel bullshit, interracial predestination sorta, in that Cooper maybe is saying Cora "naturally" should be with a dark-skinned person because she is half-black, and her tragic end is in part predetermined by the "tragedy" of her existence; and the villian is a Huron and not really the white people, and various other dumb movie poo poo and historical inaccuracy. Plus the stuff on this Themes page, a decent summary of what's going on. But I still sorta liked that the overall take of the movie and I assume the book it's based on is that the native americans were simultaneously horrifyingly abused victims, and active participants in the bloodshed. It doesn't try to portray them as either entirely victims or entirely the bad guys, and they're not marginalized in the film, they're critical to everythign that happens in the plot. Even the villian character Magua is understandable and not a one-dimensional evil guy. From a roleplaying perspective, I think that setting has some meat to it. Being a character from any of the groups involved doesn't automatically make you a good guy or a bad guy, you don't have to be a slaver or anything but also you don't have to make any apologies for people with slaves. You could be French or English or any other plausible immigrant, you could be a free or indentured or perhaps an escaped slave or the child of a slave and a white person, or you could be from any of the local tribes, and the conflicts available are plentiful given the frontier setting. Adventure hooks could involve anything from trying to find what happened to a lost scout patrol, to trying to negotiate a peace agreement or alliance between any two groups, or you could inject fantasy elements or something? I'm not sure who I'd trust to write this game, though. We've seen the extremely sorry history of uninformed white people trying to write fantasy games with native americans in them and it usually has turned out badly. You'd need some genuine history experts, and you'd have to be very sensitive to the still-living descendants of the native peoples of the colonial east.
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Feb 8, 2019 19:49
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I can't believe that I forgot Last of the Mohicans exists. Yeah that sound's like an interesting setting with multiple complex sides and motivations. I was always weirded out by Dragonlance dumping stereotypical plains Native Americans in the middle of post apocalyptic Medieval Europe. The mormon influence on the story was something I didn't know about until years later. Subtext always eluded me when I was younger. Happened with Narnia too. remusclaw fucked around with this message at 20:13 on Feb 8, 2019 |
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Feb 8, 2019 20:11
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There's a bundle of holding out there for Mutants and Masterminds. Is that any good, or should I just save my money? I checked F&F but didn't get much out of it
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Feb 8, 2019 20:34
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King of Solomon posted:There's a bundle of holding out there for Mutants and Masterminds. Is that any good, or should I just save my money? I checked F&F but didn't get much out of it It's an okay crunchy supers game, but nothing revolutionary. If you're more into narrative stuff, definitely give it a pass.
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Feb 8, 2019 20:40
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The two takes I have heard on it when looking at what I want to use for my own supers games are paraphrased as such; 1. It does 80% of what HERO system does at like 25% of the prep. 2. Combat is boring because the efficient way to fight does not line up with any of the interesting ways to fight.
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Feb 8, 2019 20:45
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Liquid Communism posted:110%. It reminds me so much of so many editions of D&D where the "solution" to "the rules don't work" ends up always becoming "well, let's just add more rules them! Can't break things more if we just keep adding more of 'em!" And case in point to Shadowrun trying to be too smart in their hacking, you got all that poo poo with demiGODs and RFID hacks and whatnot, and meanwhile in the real world, people are literally just yelling into mailslots to activate other peoples' Alexas, giving them control over the house.
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Feb 8, 2019 20:45
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remusclaw posted:The two takes I have heard on it when looking at what I want to use for my own supers games are paraphrased as such; Bathroom psychics are definitely a thing in M&M, unfortunately. It's a very big 'gentlemen's agreement' game.
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Feb 8, 2019 21:15
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Terrible Opinions posted:It also accidentally insentivized paladins and other people of the good aligned persuasion to keep evil bondage clubs because all the evil bondage gear items didn't take up normal magic items slots and the Book of Exalted Deeds had rules for turning them into good guy items without changing what they actually did at all. Keeping things Safe, Sane, & Consensual is in line with Celestial ethos.
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Feb 8, 2019 21:15
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fool_of_sound posted:'the funnel' isn't really a feature of classic dungeon crawls, as such. like by virtue of old school d&d levels 1-2 are super swingy but you're not just useless garbage until you complete your first adventure, then are suddenly good and competent. Intentional meat grinder design was always considered the hallmark of a bad dungeon crawl. DCC also doesn't understand that part of the appeal of dungeon crawling is getting cool if randomized treasure, and instead makes magic items astoundingly rare and gives you penalties for having more than one. That plus the like four different ways it fucks with wizards makes me feel like the author really likes STDH stories about tomb of horrors and warhammer fantasy roleplay, without ever really engaging the material they were ostensibly working from. And the wizard stuff? In play, wizards are pretty crazy strong. There's a small potential for misfires and corruption, but most of the misfires are just funny rather than deadly, and you can always skip the corruption by burning luck. Basically, I don't know what game you're looking at, here.
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Feb 8, 2019 21:48
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dwarf74 posted:Nah, the 'meat grinder' dungeon only started getting pooh-poohed in the, like, late 80's or 90's. Back in the day, hard dungeons were fine, and starting characters were pretty disposable. (When running it, the feel is a lot more Paranoia-like, though, which is also fun. With the added bonus that surviving characters can level up and get actually competent.) I agree there's a bit of 'nostalgia for a game that never was' woven into the design, but that's intentional. Instead of attempting to balance wizards like they did with every other class, they gave them a bunch of obnoxious side-effects on their stuff that's ripped directly out of WHFR and similar games, not old school D&D and derivatives. Similarly, starting as a shitfarmer who's bad at everything isn't a old school D&Dism, it's a WHFR thing, and specifically one that is greatly exaggerated in nerd folklore. Most old-school modules weren't horrific meat grinders where you were expected to lose 5 characters, again that's folklore about a handful of Gygaxian modules that people mistake for the entire genre. I wouldn't mind these design decision as much if the book wasn't actively pretending it was harkening back to old school dungeon crawling.
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Feb 8, 2019 22:01
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Did anyone play PerplexCity back in the day? I'd be interested in talking to anyone who still has a copy of Viard's "The Silver City". I went to play it for my wife while telling her about the game, and the disc has been scratched beyond recognition. EDIT: Thanks Remusclaw for the help finding used copies that aren't $1000+! TheSoundNinja fucked around with this message at 22:53 on Feb 8, 2019 |
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Feb 8, 2019 22:45
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Feb 8, 2019 23:09
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It's not supposed to be a re-do of old school D&D. Or WFRP for that matter. There's plenty of games for that. It's a modern game in the spirit of old-school fantasy pulp and old-school gaming as a whole, but even moreso nostalgic memories of a game that never actually existed. With a hefty helping of "stuff we're doing because we like it."
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Feb 8, 2019 23:13
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dwarf74 posted:It's not supposed to be a re-do of old school D&D. Or WFRP for that matter. That's kinda rich when you call your game 'Dungeon Crawl Classics'
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Feb 8, 2019 23:16
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Well hey you gotta put in a little effort if you wanna sell RPGs to rubes that make purchase decisions based on nebulous internet communities.
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Feb 8, 2019 23:29
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fool_of_sound posted:That's kinda rich when you call your game 'Dungeon Crawl Classics' That was their adventure line, and they made a game to go along with it.
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Feb 8, 2019 23:30
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dwarf74 posted:Why? Because it is not in fact very similar to classic dungeon crawls
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Feb 8, 2019 23:32
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fool_of_sound posted:Because it is not in fact very similar to classic dungeon crawls This is like grogs arguing that D&D 4e would be fine, if only they didn't call it D&D.
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Feb 8, 2019 23:36
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dwarf74 posted:No, but it was an outgrowth of their popular adventure line, also called Dungeon Crawl Classics. Did those happen to be similar to classic dungeon crawls?
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Feb 8, 2019 23:46
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fool_of_sound posted:Did those happen to be similar to classic dungeon crawls? It was one of the most popular sets of third party adventures - if not the most popular.
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Feb 8, 2019 23:52
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dwarf74 posted:Moreso than most that came out for 3.x, yep. Fair enough then. I was super irritated when I looked into it hoping for old school dungeon crawling and got something radically different though.
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Feb 8, 2019 23:55
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dwarf74 posted:No, but it was an outgrowth of their popular adventure line, also called Dungeon Crawl Classics. D&D 4e would be fine if only they didn’t include an “e”.
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Feb 9, 2019 00:06
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Lemon-Lime posted:I've been calling this the Fighter Litmus Test for a few years now, and it generally holds true in my experience: if the game has a fighter-equivalent (a character class or set of options whose core gimmick is just engaging directly with the core resolution system instead of bypassing it with a limited-availability subsystem, whether that's "roll d20 to do HP damage" or something different), then if that fighter-equivalent is not both cool/engaging to play and mechanically powerful, the game is most likely badly designed. Well I'd say The Nightmares Underneath definitely passes that litmus test, it's version of the Fighter is incredibly strong Also all this talk about the Western genre is a big part of the reason why my idea is to do it in Space, it let's us keep a lot of the aesthetics and tropes of the Western but let's us also toss out most of the unpleasant realities that kinda taint the genre nowadays
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Feb 9, 2019 00:07
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Nightmares underneath feels like a massive pile of overlapping systems that would get confusing fast, but drat if their classes aren't cool. Fighter doing damage on a miss and double damage on a hit is great, "cultist" makes way more sense than "cleric", and the paladin equivalent is pretty interesting as well. Anyone read the follow-up, The Nameless Grimoire? But yeah, every imaginable resolution system. From Patrick Stuart's review: quote:- A * in 6 d6 roll for chance events.
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Feb 9, 2019 07:56
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Are those all in just one game? Because I think it's missing a few if it wants to cover all the bases.
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Feb 9, 2019 08:38
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They missed a chance for a 3d6 roll under versus ability scores
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Feb 9, 2019 08:47
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